• China pursues large-scale ecological engineering via afforestation. • With no nature-culture binary, China’s worldview sees cosmos as unified. • Far from romantic, this view favors active transformation, not passive harmony. • Western categories (preservation vs. intervention) fail to capture China’s approach. • In the Anthropocene, China’s worldview reveals the limits of this binary. “Sino-forming” is a neologism that has been deployed to raise the specter of a world remade in the image of China. Here we reinscribe the term—without leaving behind the geopolitical anxieties it connotes—to analyze China’s unprecedented ecological engineering efforts in response to climate change. China is the world leader in reforestation, planting more trees than any other nation and altering its territory at scale. This article examines Chinese efforts to ecologically engineer the planet out of climate catastrophe and their unique philosophical underpinnings as compared to those in the US and Europe. Drawing on the history of the concept of terraforming in the Western imaginary as shaped by science and speculative fiction, we trace how Euro-American debates over planetary transformation are largely constrained by a foundational opposition between nature and culture. This binary generates a spectrum from preservationism to interventionism that typically structures Western environmental thought. Chinese classical philosophy, by contrast, posits no such ontological divide: the natural and the artificial, the human and the cosmic, are understood as continuous rather than opposed. This philosophical continuum, we argue, illuminates China’s contemporary approach to combating climate change through massive re-greening initiatives, as well as its future ambitions to terraform Mars. Both planetary and extraplanetary initiatives reveal an environmental imaginary that operates outside Western categories—challenging not only how we engineer worlds, but how we imagine them.
Zhu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.