Most environmental histories concern the land and “changes in the land.” On the one hand, that focus seems natural because human beings are land creatures, and environmental history examines the mutual interactions between changes in human society and anthropogenic and natural changes in the environment. On the other hand, from a global perspective, landmasses occupy but one-third of the Earth's surface; the majority is composed of the Earth's oceans. Combining the best of these perspectives, this fine book takes the maturing field of Chinese environmental history from the mainland into the East China Sea.
Micah S. Muscolino examines the fisheries centered on the Zhoushan archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. First exploited when the Southern Song established its capital in Hangzhou, the Zhoushan fisheries saw increasing numbers of fishermen (they were all men) from the mid-eighteenth century into the first half of the twentieth century. Muscolino takes the story into the 1970s, showing that stocks of the most important (to fishermen) fish species had collapsed by then, perhaps never to return. The bulk of his book, though, concerns the period from the late Qing to the Republican era, with much new material on environmental issues during the years 1911–37, a period sorely overlooked by China's environmental historians.
Muscolino's main argument—that in order to understand contemporary environmental problems and challenges, we need to probe the ways in which people have exploited and understood their environment—makes a strong case for both the relevance of environmental history and its urgency. But the details of case studies matter, and Fishing Wars makes for interesting reading. Muscolino argues that the demographic, commercial, and political forces underlying late Qing competition and conflict over land not only pushed households to migrate so as to exploit upland resources, but also increased the numbers seeking their livelihood as fishermen. “Large numbers of fishermen as well as shed people came from the densely populated north Fujian and southern Zhejiang regions,” Muscolino observes, “as inland bodies of water disappeared” (p. 22). Here Muscolino links the diking of lakes and the filling in of swamps and other “wasteland” to the creation of ever more densely settled and intensely farmed land.
As the numbers of fishermen in the Zhoushan archipelago increased, so, too, did the competition for the large and small yellow croaker, hairtail, and cuttlefish. Fishermen participated in native-place organizations held together by local origins and religious temples, and leaders of these “fishing lodges” periodically met to delineate which grounds would be fished by which group. Muscolino argues that, while these local organizations “promoted human welfare by allocating access to scarce [fishery] resources,” they nonetheless “did nothing at all to . . . keep catches at sustainable levels” (p. 62).
After the 1911 Revolution, but especially with the Guomindang's attempts to forge a strong state from the early 1920s through 1937 and the outbreak of war, pressures on the fishing grounds intensified as a result of a combination of a modernizing state that needed increased tax revenues and the modernist belief propounded by Western-educated technocrats that “modern science and technology could maximize production and meet the rising market demand for fish while averting overexploitation” (p. 65). These modernist pretensions floundered on the inability of the Republican state to create the administrative capacity to implement its visions.
Meanwhile, another state that did have both the administrative and technological know-how to exploit the East China Sea fisheries motored into view: Japan, with its mechanized steel-bodied trawling fleet. The Japanese fleets caught so many mature fish that the yellow croakers got smaller and smaller in size, conflicts between the Republican government and Japan intensified (with Japan prevailing), and Chinese fishermen sought new fishing grounds further offshore. “By the mid-1930s, the combined demands of Chinese and Japanese fishing activities had led to a clear decline in the productivity of Zhoushan's yellow croaker fisheries” (p. 122).
Simultaneously, “fishing wars” broke out among Chinese over the less desirable cuttlefish (chapter 5), and between the Zhejiang and Jiangsu provincial governments over which could collect taxes from fishermen who followed the yellow croakers when they migrated from Zhejiang waters northward into waters claimed by Jiangsu (chapter 6). As evidence mounted that the fisheries were collapsing, in 1937 “the outbreak of full-scale war between China and Japan brought nearly all fishing in the Zhoushan region to a halt during the 1940s” (p. 151), and fish populations recovered. After 1949, the Chinese Communist state followed the same modernist development project as the Guomindang. The difference was that the Communists had the ability to implement their vision. That was bad for the croakers, hairtail, and cuttlefish, which were depleted by the 1970s. Smaller creatures such as crabs and shrimp, whose populations then increased, were also soon depleted (pp. 182–86).
Among its other virtues, this meticulously researched and well-written environmental history of China's Zhoushan fisheries argues that the strong continuities from the late Qing through the Republican era and into the People's Republic raise questions about the utility of the standard politically informed periodization of Chinese history for understanding what may be the single most important question of our time—the nature of humanity's relationship with nature.
