Governing Urbanites Through Green Reality TV: The Rise of Eco-Lifestyle Formats in China

This chapter critically examines sustainability-oriented reality TV in China, a subgenre that has grown since the early 2010s. Once dominated by commercially driven formats, Chinese reality TV increasingly features programmes promoting low-carbon lifestyles and green consumption (Hill and Liao, The Routledge companion to media audiences, 2025, 461–470). Aimed at urban millennials negotiating high-pressure city lives, these shows range from escapist rural cooking shows and eco-tourism to back-to-nature competitive reality shows. Focussing on two popular reality shows, Become a Farmer (2023) and Back to the Field (2017), in this chapter, we examine the ways they model ethical selfhood and citizenship. Whilst drawing on familiar reality TV elements such as celebrity participation, both shows reframe rural life as a site of moral transformation and civic duty. Building on Ong’s theories of neoliberal governance (2008), Pow’s work on ‘green governance’ (2018), and Lewis’s research on eco-TV (2008), we argue these programmes act as soft pedagogical tools, encouraging ecological responsibility and self-sufficiency. Despite their differences—Back to the Field invoking pastoral nostalgia, Become a Farmer framing agricultural labour as a means of masculine transformation—both align with state priorities around rural revitalisation and ecological civilisation (Shengtai wenming, 生态文明), positioning popular reality shows as discursive actors in the project of environmental nation-building.