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

Natural History, Sept, 2001 by Vaclav Smil

The book then turns to the Great Leap Forward, meant to elevate China to a new economic level in a matter of years. But the Maoist regime's criminally naive schemes for instant industrialization--involving massive deforestation to produce charcoal for inefficient, primitive iron furnaces--brought on the neglect of farming as well as the aforementioned horrific famine.

Almost as soon as the country recovered, Mao plunged it into a new round of social convulsions in 1966, known--most inappropriately--as the Cultural Revolution. "Learning From Dazhai" was a key slogan of that period, imploring people to copy the achievements (vastly exaggerated or even entirely fictitious) of a formerly impoverished village. Widespread destruction of lakes and wetlands for the purpose of creating new cropland was one of the most unfortunate aspects of Mao's campaigns, and a detailed description of the disastrous results takes up the book's third chapter. The fourth deals with preparations for war with the USSR and the forcible relocation of industries (and urban youth) to the country's interior during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The environmental consequences of these programs included the destruction of large areas of tropical forest in southern China to make way for rubber plantations and the conversion of grasslands in the north into erosion-prone cropland.

"Maoist coercive, state-sponsored experiments for social improvement came at a dangerously high price," Shapiro writes. "The issues raised by the Mao years thus remain deeply relevant." Both for readers interested in China's past and for those concerned about its future, the story Shapiro tells is a valuable account of Mao's regime--one of the last century's most tragic episodes.

Vaclav Smil teaches in the University of Manitoba's geography department. His most recent books, both published by MIT Press, are Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000) and Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (2001).