- Historical patterns
The way nation-states address problems of biodiversity loss is likely to be
strongly influenced by the political, economic, and social challenges they have
encountered historically. These challenges may create opportunities to
improve national security, stability, and development, but they may also cause
environmental crises. In this chapter we focus on some of the patterns
characterizing major eras of human-environmental interactions in China and
Taiwan.
The chapter begins with a presentation of traditional orientations to nature
and conservation, exploring elite, popular religious, and cultural minority
perspectives. Then the chapter briefly considers the style and approach toward
the environment of the imperial, dynastic system, beginning in 221 BC with
the unification of China under the Qin Dynasty. The core of the chapter is a
brief introduction to the environmental history of China and Taiwan in the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The periodization is conventional:
first, a discussion of Republican and increasingly capitalist China from the end
of the Qing Dynasty to the establishment of communist power on mainland
China in 1949; second, socialist and autarkic China under Mao Zedong, from
1949 to 1976; third, the economic, marketizing reforms initiated by Deng
Hsiaoping in China beginning in 1978 and continuing to the present; and
finally, change in Taiwan as it underwent rapid economic development,
political liberalization, and then democratization. The chapter concludes with
an examination of public opinion about environmental conservation in China
and Taiwan.
TRADITIONAL ORIENTATIONS TOWARD NATURE
AND CONSERVATION
Elite Orientations
Over several millennia, Chinese intellectuals developed and revised an
extraordinarily rich skein of theories and ethics of state and human behavior.
Typically, scholars classify the major philosophical schools as Confucian,
Taoist, and Legalist, and indeed plentiful evidence of each – and their
interconnections – can be found in dynastic history.^1 The persistence of
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