An Ecological History of Modern China

This intellectually adventurous, wide-ranging, and boldly integrative study examines the ecological impact of China’s post-1949 agricultural, dam-building, industrial, and urbanization policies, which propelled the country “from impoverished giant to wealthy superpower” at the cost, Harrell says, of sacrificing “whatever resilience its ecosystems once possessed.” One developmental initiative after another, of which the late 1950s Great Leap Forward was the most damaging, destroyed the institutional, cultural, and other buffers that in premodern times helped China’s environment and Chinese society recover from disruptions. As problems mounted, the characteristic technocratic response of applying “a fix to fix the fix” only made matters worse by failing to encourage the flexibility and adaptation so evident in premodern times. Harrell blames these results not on authoritarianism but on “scientific modernism,” of which the Chinese version of Marxism-Leninism is but one type. Because it is impossible to predict how natural and social systems will interact, he remains open-minded about whether China’s more recent emphasis on “ecological civilization” might yet help the country avoid ever-greater disasters.