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China on the losing side
CRISPIN TICKELL
Crispin Tickell is at Ablington Old Barn, Ablington, Cirencester GL7 5NU, UK.
Mao's drive to conquer nature had shocking consequences for his country.
Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
by Judith Shapiro
Cambridge University Press: 2001. 306 pp. £35, $59.95 (hbk), £12.95, $18.95 (pbk)
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A cultural call to arms: Mao's conquest of nature was treated as a military campaign.
Between 1949 and 1976, Mao Zedong enjoyed supreme political power in China, and applied what he called Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought to the environment and the people. One of his most potent slogans was "Man must conquer Nature", and throughout the land, to varying degrees, a kind of conquest took place. But as the economist Fritz Schumacher once wrote, "man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side". In this case, China was certainly the loser.
There are three broad philosophical traditions in China. One springs from Taoism, which seeks accommodation with nature and is best encapsulated in the slogan 'harmony between the heavens and humankind'; a second springs from Buddhism and its reverence for all living creatures; and the third springs from Confucianism with its respect for authority, including control and mastery of the natural environment. Although Mao was most influenced by the Soviet experience — its forced industrialization, collectivization of agriculture and overturning of established hierarchies — he falls well within the Confucian tradition and relied upon it crucially when applying his ideas and policies.
Judith Shapiro has had a long experience of China. She was a teacher there in the period following Mao's death, and has returned from time to time, most recently last year. Her book is the product of discussions with many kinds of Chinese people, including some of the surviving victims of the Mao years. Her thesis has three main aspects.
The first relates to Mao's policy framework. Like others at the time, Mao associated the recovery of China as a world power with an increase in human population. Then, whatever might happen in terms of war or other disasters, the Chinese people would survive. Families were given every encouragement to reproduce. With greater stability in China, numbers rose dramatically from around 600 million in 1923, and 1 billion when Mao died in 1976, to about 1.3 billion today.
As in the Soviet Union, industrialization was pursued at all levels. Every town and village was encouraged to have its own industrial activity. More drastic still was the development of agriculture, in particular the production of grain. Mountains were to be moved, forests cut, dams built, lakes filled up, rivers diverted, wastelands planted and errant species eliminated (hence the slogan "Wipe out the four pests" — these were sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes). A central example was given for universal application: no matter that this model — the so-called Dazhai model — was in many ways fraudulent.
Shapiro also looks at the effects on the environment. They were soon evident, but Mao would not change course. The Chinese environment has long been fragile and vulnerable, and the policies of the 1950s made it more so. But Mao believed that what had worked for other industrial countries should also work for China. He ignored the consequences of over-extraction of resources, pollution of air, land and water, erosion of hillsides, flooding and salinization of irrigated areas, reclamation that led to desertification, and all the other ills of unsustainable human activity. A 1994 paper by Qu Geping, one of China's leading environmentalists, and Li Jinchang produced a telling statistic: "from 1957 to 1980 the annual net loss of cultivated land averaged 545,000 hectares."
Finally come the effects on the people. Mao's programme allowed no argument or opposition. It was ruthlessly directed from the centre with little or no regard for local or even regional interpretation. It involved repression not only of other leaders of all kinds, including scientists, but also of peasant communities. People were forcibly resettled and communities disrupted. The conquest of nature was treated as a military campaign, where leaders were given army rank and powers of command.
Two phases will survive in Chinese history: the Great Leap Forward, which led to one of the greatest of human famines, with deaths calculated at between 36 and 50 million from 1959 to 1961; and the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and overturned Chinese society, causing the loss of a whole generation of leaders.
Mao's attempt to conquer nature is an extreme example of what has been tried by other societies at other times and under other ideologies. The changes he brought about in a society ravaged by civil war but deeply conservative in character may not all have been bad, and some of them, driven by population pressures, might have happened anyway. But it is still a model of what not to do. Subsequent Chinese governments have been trying to pick up the pieces, and put rational policies together again. In doing so they have had to cope with public cynicism, and with vested interests that rely on inertia and the mythology that survives from the Mao years.
There is now another danger, for the shift from a centralized to a market economy could all too easily increase the environmental damage. But this has produced an opportunity, so far barely recognized elsewhere, to establish true environmental costs and thus regulate the economy in the public interest. In 1992 the Chinese government created a China Council for International Cooperation in Environment and Development. It consisted of both Chinese and foreign participants, and had direct access to the leadership. It is already having effects on the formulation of a policy that might this time make China the pioneer.
Shapiro's well-written book could be misinterpreted as a polemic. It tells a shocking story that needs to be told, but ends on a note of hope. The Chinese people now have the chance to re-establish the traditional harmony with nature that was once their ideal. They deserve to succeed. |
