the 1953 census, that China’s rapid population growth would jeopardize
development if not checked. For his forthright views, which contradicted state
policy and Mao’s belief that China’s strength lay in her huge and growing
population, Ma Yinchu was silenced, forced to resign from the university, and
stripped of his academic and government posts. Hydraulic engineer Huang
Wanli opposed construction of the Sanmenxia dam on the main channel of the
Yellow River, predicting correctly that siltation would clog the dam, damage
the ecosystem, and harm the local population. Huang too was subject to
unrelenting criticism as a rightist; losing his position, he was forced to do hard
labor. Both cases illustrate the linkage between political repression and
environmental degradation.
The induced sense of ‘utopian urgency’ explains the impact of the Great
Leap Forward (1958–60) on China’s environment. The mass mobilization
campaign to overtake Britain in steel production within 15 years, among other
goals, led peasants to cut down trees to fuel steel furnaces; deforestation
resulted in erosion, sedimentation, desertification, and changes of micro-
climates. The campaign to eradicate the four pests nearly eliminated sparrows,
with deadly consequences for the ecological balance in the countryside.
Although it was inattention to sound agricultural practice and production
values that brought on China’s greatest famine, Shapiro contends that Mao’s
utopian visions as well as the elite’s urgency to modernize (continuing to the
present) have had devastating environmental consequences.
The Cultural Revolution enforced dogmatic uniformity across China. For
example, the national campaign to ‘Learn from Dazhai’, applied uncritically
throughout China in the Cultural Revolution, led to environmental ruin. The
Dazhai model was artificially constructed to be an example of Mao’s favorite
parable of ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’, in order to
demonstrate that humans could conquer nature and bend it to their will.
Among the most egregious applications of the Dazhai model were attempts to
plant wheat on Mongolian grasslands, despoilation of wetlands, and
encroaching on lakes and rivers to expand cultivation. To purge the lakes,
Shapiro notes, was to purge and rebuild the mind: ‘The battlefield of the lake
was an arena for urgent struggle: against nature, against political enemies, and
against the limits of human will’.^29
Two large state-ordered relocations affected the environment in China’s
frontier regions. The first, occurring from 1964–71 and prompted by the
Vietnam War, established a ‘Third Front’ in the western and southwest China
hinterland. The irrational distribution of strategic industrial plants and
facilities caused severe air, water, and soil pollution and deforestation. A
second movement to forcibly relocate ‘educated youth’ had equally horren-
dous environmental results. Their reclamation work damaged wetlands
and forests, destroyed the ecology of steppes, and led to desertification.
Historical patterns 27