Call for contributions – ISSUE #4: China
“China is the climate crisis and its solution”.
As we have Issue #3: Airborne at the printers – more on which next week! – we’re delighted to be able to announce that our fourth issue, due for publication later this year, will be on China. We’ve already got a few excellent essays and features lined up for it, but if you’d like to submit your work for consideration, or have suggestions for who we should be approaching, then see below for the full details.
And, as ever, we’ll be publishing more original writing and research on our website over the coming months. To get full access, you can subscribe for as little as £15 a year. Every subscription we get helps us to continue publishing the kind of work we do.
ICYMI, we recently ran two symposiums, one on the ongoing oil crisis caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran, and one on the politics of oil and gas nationalism in the North Sea. You can read all that and more on our website now.
Issue #4: China
Over the past 70 years, China has experienced a dramatic and unprecedented period of growth and urbanisation, fuelled in no small part by a huge and still accelerating burning of fossil fuels. And yet, the country’s incredible development and mastery of renewable technology has also made it a green-industrial behemoth. As Adam Tooze has pithily said, “China is the climate crisis and its solution”.
For Issue #4 of The BREAK–DOWN’s print journal, we are looking for pitches that examine the complexity of China’s role in climate and ecological crisis. How has the Chinese state managed to hold these contradictory positions together? What effect has this had on Chinese society and its economy? What role has the rise of Chinese renewable technology had in decentering hubristic assumptions about Western leadership or in accelerating the rise of a new eco-ideological Cold War? How does China’s current role in global environmental politics relate to its historical and developmental trajectory? And how does Chinese environmental politics and power play out on the ground, whether in China itself or through its extended network of debt and investment?
We are interested in argumentative essays, works of geopolitical or political economic analysis, reportage and memoir, photojournalism or dispatches from around the world that troubles the received wisdom and that can tell us something new and unexpected about the Chinese position in global climate politics. We especially welcome pitches from new writers and writers based outside the centres of the Global North, particularly those with personal experience of Chinese politics.
To be considered, pitches must include a 2-4 paragraph summary of the essay’s argument and a brief author bio. An idea of what we publish and why we publish it is essential.
When drafting your pitch, make sure to tell us what is going to happen in your story, not just what it is about. For photojournalism we require either samples of the photos you want to submit or previous work you have done, and a clear outline of the proposed story.
Pieces are paid at £650 for around 3,000 words, although in certain circumstances we can offer more for on-the-ground reporting where costs are higher.
The deadline for pitches is the 27th April, and we aim to respond to all pitches by the end of the following week. Please send pitches to pitching@break-down.org including ‘ISSUE 4’ in the subject line.
For more details, see the pitching page on our website.