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Abstract
Professor Arnold Berleant has visited China academically several times since the early 1990s, becoming more and more popular in Chinese academia. Almost all of his books have been translated into Chinese, which produced a significant impact on Chinese scholars, especially on the development of Chinese ecological aesthetics, or ecoaesthetics. They generated a hot topic on the similarities and differences between Western environmental aesthetics and Chinese ecological aesthetics, in view of which this paper first outlines Berleant’s academic activities in China, then focuses on the impact of his environmental aesthetics on the ecological aesthetics mainly advanced by the Chinese scholars Zeng Fanren and Cheng Xiangzhan. With these discussions, the paper primarily aims at analyzing the relationship between Western environmental aesthetics and Chinese ecological aesthetics, determining that Berleant’s environmental aesthetics is viewed generally as a part of the whole picture of ecological aesthetics because it fits so well with the definition of ecology.