Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China

Natural History, Sept, 2001 by Vaclav Smil

Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China, by Judith Shapiro (Cambridge University Press, 2001; $18.95)

How Mao Zedong's grandiose and coercive policies wrecked China's environment

Exactly twenty years ago, I began writing an appraisal of China's environment. The project became possible as the country abandoned the worst Maoist orthodoxies and turned, under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, to economic and social reforms. Statistics began appearing regularly again in 1978; old scientific journals were restarted and many new ones launched. Journalistic accounts boldly probed topics whose discussion had been either strictly forbidden or dishonestly couched in Maoist cliches during the long and painful reign of the Great Helmsman. Published in 1983, my book The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China was met not only with a great deal of attention but also with disbelief, stemming from the persistence of a naive Western image of China as a civilization living in harmony with its environment, or perhaps from some American and European intellectuals' residual infatuation with Maoism (or from a combination of the two). Some readers were unwilling to accept the fact that the country's environmental problems were widespread, acute, and intractable.

Since then, more than a dozen English-language books have detailed the worrisome state of China's environment. Western periodicals and TV programs have repeatedly reported on the consequences of the pollution and ecosystemic degradation that affect not only the country's population and economy but also the so-called global commons. Informed students of the world's environment are now aware of China's enormous problems (China is the world's top producer of airborne sulfur dioxide and particulate matter from coal combustion, and less than one-fifth of all the country's wastewater is treated before discharge). Environmentalists are alarmed by prospects of the country's continuing desertification, massive soil erosion, and loss of mature forests, not to mention the consequences of damming the Yangtze River for the planet's largest hydroelectric project. (Surprisingly, however, greenhouse gas emissions have been falling in China, due to carbon absorption by forests planted in the 1970s.)

Most acute are the widespread shortages of water in the semiarid-to-arid region of northern China that includes Beijing and supports two-fifths of the nation's industrial and agricultural production (while relying on less than one-tenth of the country's total runoff). These shortages, intensified by the cessation of the Huang He's (Yellow River's) flow for up to five months a year during the past decade, are supposed to be solved by a vast interbasin water transfer from the Yangtze, another megaproject with worrisome environmental consequences.

In her new book about the history of China's environmental degradation during the Mao era (1949-76), Judith Shapiro--a professor of environmental politics at American University in Washington, D.C., and coauthor, with Liang Heng, of several books on China's Cultural Revolution and its aftermath--is no longer facing naive readers. But critics who question her personification of the past in the book's title--Mao's War Against Nature--would be wrong. Assigning the guilt to Mao is historically correct. During his emperor-like reign, decisions were not the result of careful, collective deliberations of the Communist Party leadership; rather, they were a direct reflection of the chairman's ignorance, biases, and disdain for the suffering of others. For more than a quarter century, his decisions affected every aspect of life in China and were responsible for not only massive environmental degradation but also the political persecution and death of millions. The most monstrous consequence, however, was the worst famine in world history, with a death toll of 30 million people between 1959 and 1961.

Shapiro's historical account of these devastating decades follows, sensibly, a topical rather than chronological sequence. Her earlier publications on China deal with the country's modern history, politics, and intellectual life (her field of expertise), and she uses these filters to look at the enormous environmental changes experienced by the country during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Shapiro argues her case by combining published information (from Mao's writings, newspaper and magazine accounts, biographies, and memoirs) with vivid personal descriptions and the recollections of numerous people she interviewed while teaching and traveling in China. This combination works to illustrate the madness of Maoist policies--the irrational designs that caused such suffering and such destruction of nature.

The travails of two notable Chinese intellectuals who dared disagree with Mao, and who paid a high price for their boldness, are discussed first. Economist and demographer Ma Yinchu called for population control at a time when Mao was extolling unlimited population growth. And China's leading hydroengineer, Huang Wanli, questioned the building of the Soviet-designed Sanmenxia, the first dam on the Huang He, whose reservoir began rapidly silting soon after the project's completion. Both men were lucky. Although their professional careers ended in 1958, they survived.