In this wondrous little book, Micah Muscolino uses the story of a very small place – Dengjiabao village in Wushan County, Tianshui Prefecture, Gansu – to illustrate everything that was right and wrong about agricultural and hydrological policy all over China in the 1950s and early 1960s. But not just that. Dengjiabao’s experience also exemplifies the contradictions of Maoist developmentalism well beyond agriculture and the environment, and it presents lessons that speak to the vicissitudes of rural development worldwide. The book is also a model of local historiographic methodology and a shining example of how to write a complex story in clear, non-technical prose.
After an efficient introduction that places the story of Dengjiabao in its geographic, historical, comparative and theoretical context, Muscolino analyses the history of soil and water conservation in seven chronological chapters. Chapter one, a kind of prelude, deals with the Kuomintang’s experimental soil conservation efforts in the 1940s, emphasizing “Tianshui’s Three Treasures”: levelling and ditching terraces, planting black locust trees, and planting sweet clover, all designed to stop soil erosion. But, as with so many Kuomintang initiatives, this effort was small-scale and ineffectual.
Each of the following six chapters then narrates the partial successes and complex contradictions of conservation across the stages in the Communist history of rural economic transformation culminating in the People’s Communes of 1958–1961. In chapter two the Communists, having consolidated their local power through land reform and organizing mutual aid teams, establish Dengjiabao as a model village, mobilize the local people to implement the same Three Treasures, and spread the experience of the model throughout the County and the Prefecture. In chapter three, true collectivization begins with the formation of semi-socialist “beginning level agricultural producers’ cooperatives,” along with the “unified purchase and sale” policy, a euphemism for state requisition of surplus (and sometimes not so surplus) grain. Chapter four brings full collectivization with the “high-level cooperatives,” alongside a mass campaign to double China’s irrigated land area. Chapter five deals with the large-scale labour mobilization that would lead to the Great Leap Forward. The Leap itself arrives in full force in chapter six, which concentrates on the differential effects of the Leap’s reorganization of conservation and agricultural labour on women and men. Chapter seven, while continuing the emphasis on gender differentials, tells the sad but inevitable tale of the near demise of conservation as the Great Leap disintegrates into famine. A brief epilogue dashes any hopes we might have had that Dengjiabao’s soil and water might have recovered, either with the socialist agriculture of the late Maoist period or with the momentous changes of the Reforms.
The lessons of Remaking the Earth reach well beyond its specific history of Dengjiabao or indeed Gansu, or even China. First and foremost, Muscolino reminds us that throughout its history, the Communist-led state has exploited the countryside and its people for the benefit of urban elites, and Dengjiabao illustrates this clearly. From initially mobilizing peasants to construct terraces and plant trees and grasses, to recruiting them to build local flood-control dams, to sending them far afield to work on irrigation and larger-scale flood-control projects, the state subjected the peasants to a double squeeze. The time they spent on conservation labour was time they didn’t have for growing their own crops, and even when the conservation measures sometimes helped them increase their crop yields – 1956, for example, produced a bumper harvest – unified sale and purchase deprived them of the results of that increased production. All that extra work, all that sacrifice of time and product, went to feed and enrich China’s cities, support its Party elites, and contribute to the militarization and industrialization of the nation. Muscolino sees this as parallel to practices in North America, Australia and other outposts of settler colonialism, but we might consider whether settler colonialism is too narrow (and perhaps too trendy) a framework through which to understand this exploitative squeeze. All modern regimes, colonial or not, have done the same thing, often in the interests of “development,” forcing rural people to make local-scale sacrifices to fund national-scale projects.
Each time they expanded the goals of conservation or upped demands for local peasant labour, planners and cadres encountered resistance. At every stage, cadres attempted to mobilize peasants by explaining the benefits of conservation, which were potentially real in a place where deforestation had degraded the once-green environment to a bleak landscape of eroded hills crisscrossed by a maze of eroded gullies. Peasants understood the collective benefits of conservation, but they had more immediate concerns – they needed enough time to grow their own crops, especially after the government began skimming a portion of their harvest. Their resistance, however, was sporadic and situation dependent, and the local archives and publications that Muscolino uses to construct his story give vivid and remarkably candid accounts of who resisted or complied, how, and why. But Muscolino might have taken this analysis even further if he had considered either Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of collective action in common-pool resource systems or James Scott’s ideas about the moral economy of the peasant.
Remaking the Earth also illustrates the CCP’s “from point to plane” (you dian dao mian) strategy of trying policies (in this case soil and water conservation) in one place and then, if they worked, expanding their use. After Dengjiabao was proclaimed a success, it morphed from experiment to example, and the Great Leap Forward featured campaigns to build hundreds, or even thousands, of Dengjiabaos throughout the Northwest. Predictably, things that worked in the original did not necessarily work in the copies, providing an example of what Judith Shapiro, in Mao’s War Against Nature, has dubbed “dogmatic uniformity,” or what Ostrom, in other contexts, called “panacea solutions.”
As Muscolino also points out, however, the very existence of conservation campaigns questions Shapiro’s earlier contention that Maoist development constituted a “war against nature.” It is crystal clear from Muscolino’s material that soil and water conservation, even reforestation, were integral parts of early Chinese Communist ecological thinking. Many of these conservation programmes went haywire, as we know from Dengjiabao and other places. But CCP policy makers were clearly aware of the need to conserve resources.
Muscolino’s work also reinforces the notion that the state socialism of the early People’s Republic was not a successor to capitalism, as orthodox Marxist theory maintains, but a return to a pre-capitalist economic formation. In pre-socialist times, Chinese peasants could supplement their agricultural production with paid labour. But first the grain requisition system and then the household registration system implemented in the wake of the Great Leap re-feudalized the Chinese countryside, turning the peasants into a feudal stratum resembling in some ways the serfs of medieval Europe or the castes of early modern India. This re-feudalization compounded the squeeze put on the peasants by conflicts over whether to spend their time on conservation or on growing food.
It is remarkable that such a short book about such a small place can stimulate a reader to think about so many large, important, universal issues from environment to gender to local governance, and do it in such clear and plain language. Even pointing out that Muscolino left something out or missed an opportunity is only possible because his material is so rich and his exposition so clear. In a growing, glowing constellation of good books about local environmental history in China, Remaking the Earth shines brightly.
