Based on local archival documents and fieldwork conducted in Shaanxi Province’s Baishui County, this article examines how large-scale water and soil conservation campaigns launched in Northwest China’s Loess Plateau region during the Mao era (1949–76) affected agrarian environments and how rural communities experienced and responded to these transformations. By mobilizing rural communities to combat water and soil loss, China’s leaders expected conservation to limit sedimentation along the Yellow River’s lower reaches and increase agricultural yields to support their vigorous program of industrialization. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, local opposition to these efforts to alter human interactions with the land centered on contradictions between the long-term objectives of conservation campaigns and the priority that the rural populace placed on ensuring subsistence. With residents called on to attend to conservation work instead of other production activities, divergent imperatives translated into intense competition over how to use the land and allocate labor power. Even if conservation programs in Baishui, as in other parts of China, drew on lay knowledge and practice, these environmental management policies consistently privileged the state’s developmentalist agenda over the welfare of rural communities. In this manner, Mao-era water and soil conservation supported, and was inseparable from, an extractive political economy that intensified contradictions between the rural and urban, agriculture and industry. Rather than giving voice to vulnerable populations and equitably distributing costs and benefits, Mao-era water and soil conservation exacerbated the burdens placed on marginalized rural communities.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Cheng Li;
Yanjun Liu;
(2020)
Selling Forestry Revolution: The Rhetoric of Afforestation in Socialist China, 1949–61
Book
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg;
Matthew Kelly;
Claudia Leal;
Emily Wakild;
(2017)
The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation
Article
Sampsa Saikkonen;
Esa Väliverronen;
(2022)
The trickle-down of political and economic control: On the organizational suppression of environmental scientists in government science
Book
Jack Stauder;
(2016)
The Blue and the Green: A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community
Book
Sayre, Robert F;
(2013)
Fire Island Past, Present, and Future: The Environmental History of a Barrier Beach
Article
Amate, Juan Infante;
González de Molina, Manuel;
Vanwalleghem, Tom;
Fernández, David Soto;
Gómez, José Alfonso;
(2013)
Erosion in the Mediterranean: The Case of Olive Groves in the South of Spain (1752--2000)
Article
Chew, Matthew K.;
(2009)
The Monstering of Tamarisk: How Scientists Made a Plant into a Problem
Article
James Beattie;
(2003)
Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840-1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservation
Article
Fu, Jia-Chen;
(September 2019)
Practice and the History of Science in the PRC: A Historiographic Reflection
Article
Xu, Chuan;
(September 2019)
From Sonic Models to Sonic Hooligans: Magnetic Tape and the Unraveling of the Mao-Era Sound Regime, 1958–1983
Book
Gross, Miriam;
(2016)
Farewell to the god of plague: Chairman Mao's campaign to deworm China
Book
Wei, Chunjuan Nancy;
Brock, Darryl E.;
(2013)
Mr. Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution: Science and Technology in Modern China
Article
Nicholas Amthony Autiello;
(2021)
Taming the Wild Dragon: John F. Kennedy and the Republic of China, 1961–63
Book
Brian DeMare;
(2019)
Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution
Article
Xiao, Shao;
Zhang, Xiaoming;
(2019)
Reassessment of Beijing’s economic and military aid to Hanoi’s War, 1964–75
Book
Jason M. Kelly;
(2021)
Market Maoists: the communist origins of China's capitalist ascent
Book
Liz P. Y. Chee;
(2021)
Mao's Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China
Book
Michael Camp;
(2019)
Unnatural resources: Energy and environmental politics in Appalachia after the 1973 oil embargo
Book
Alice Beban;
(2021)
Unwritten rule : State-making through land reform in Cambodia
Article
Wen-Ji Wang;
(2022)
“Hotbeds of Psychopathology”: Psy Sciences and the Critique of the Family in Republican China
Be the first to comment!