1 Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China by Judith Shapiro

Author:Judith Shapiro [Shapiro, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, General, China, Modern, 20th Century, Juvenile Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Earth Sciences, Geography, Nature, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Radicalism, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Science, Environmental Science
ISBN: 9780521786805
Google: k7FdM07QfMoC
Amazon: 0521786800
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

According to an elderly former worker interviewed in Haigeng Park, a military officer surnamed Liang ordered local people to encircle a bay between Chengong and Kunyang counties to try to fill it in. County Revolutionary Committees invested 4 million yuan in materials and wages and set villagers to carting earth. “It was a bottomless abyss,” recalled the old man angrily. “It was too deep. Everything disappeared into endless mud. It was impossible to encircle it.”

No matter how the economic and human costs are calculated, it is clear that they were huge. More damaging, and more difficult to rem-edy still, are the environmental costs still being tabulated. Both monographs argue that filling in the lake in 1970 affected Kunming’s legendary microclimate, although they are unsure to what degree.

The Dianchi District authors explain that “the reason Kunming’s climate is not too hot in summer or severely cold in winter, and the four seasons are more or less the same, is that Dianchi regulates evaporation by storing [energy] in the water.”80 The Yunnan Plateau authors state unequivocally that “weihai zaotian is a major reason for the ecological deterioration of Dianchi,” causing an “astonishing” [ jingren] decrease in water volume due both to a shrinkage of surface area and to a shallower lake basin. They write that the lake shrank from 330 to 305 square kilometers and decreased in average depth from 6 meters to 5.7 meters, changes attributed to two years of relent-less weihu zaotian activity, with millions of people daily moving stones, earth, and gravel onto embankments, thus causing siltation of the river bottom and a gradual rise in the riverbed. When the authors consider the additional factor of erosion from 1957 to 1982 due to deforestation of surrounding hillsides and mountains, they estimate that between 37,160,000 and 63,500,000 tons of silt entered the lake.81 With the decrease in area and depth of the lake, and the con-comitant decrease in water evaporation and energy retention, they argue, temperatures have become more like those in the rest of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, hotter in summer and colder in winter.82

Although other scholars told me that they believe the evidence of microclimate change is inconclusive, it is undeniable that the in-filling holds a powerful place in people’s imaginations as the starting point for the region’s environmental ills.

If environmental impacts on microclimate are difficult to evaluate, that is less the case with impacts on avian and aquatic life. Disruption of Dianchi’s ecological balance severely damaged its biodiversity. Soon after the in-filling, it became apparent that the wetlands had provided valuable habitat for birds and fish. A large percentage of native fish had spawned in the lake’s gravel areas and wetlands, but these natural features were destroyed, forcing fish to seek other spawning grounds in areas that later became heavily polluted. “The harm brought to aquatic organisms by weihu zaotian was such that it caused those fish that spawn in grasses to lose their spawning and rearing grounds,” write the authors of Yunnan Plateau. 83 Even ordinary people

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