Redefining the Beidahuang (‘Great Northern Wilderness’) campaigns

The history and ongoing legacies of the Beidahuang communist-era campaigns to transform the northeast borderland ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland have been highly contested. On one side of the debate are scholars, mostly based in the PRC, who have regarded Beidahuang as a positive model that has succeeded in transforming ‘wasteland’ into productive agricultural land (Liu Reference Liu2014; Huang Reference Huang2017; Xue at al. Reference Xue2020). For this cohort of scholars, Beidahuang has come to symbolize China’s dramatic modernization since the founding of the PRC. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on New Energy and Renewable Resources, for instance, Luyu Huang refers to the ‘half a century of hard work’ of reclaiming the ‘ancient deserted wasteland’ as building ‘the country’s largest-scale farmland, the highest degree of mechanization’, to ‘become an important commodity grain base and strategic grain reserve base’ (Huang Reference Huang2017, 77). Other scientists have taken a more measured approach, balancing their positive assessment of the region’s transformation from ‘wasteland’ into ‘granary’ with cautionary statements about the need for the ‘coordinated development of economy and environmental protection’ (Xue et al. Reference Xue2020, 2–3). Still others have admiringly observed a new phase of large-scale, state-sponsored resettlement in Heilongjiang as a modern enhancement of the Mao-era mass mobilization campaigns (Liu Reference Liu2014).

In contrast to these largely positive evaluations of the Beidahuang reclamation campaigns, scholars outside the PRC, especially those situated in the humanities and social sciences, have tended to paint a bleak picture of Beidahuang’s history, highlighting the human suffering resulting from massive social mobilization and ecological destruction from indiscriminate clearing of forests. A prominent theme in these studies has been the trials and tribulations of ‘sent-down’ educated youth and intellectuals whose stories of physical and political persecution mirror the harshness of the remote borderland landscape (Kang Reference Kang2014; Wang Reference Ning2016; Yang Reference Yang2016; Zhu Reference Zhu2019). At best, according to these narratives, Beidahuang was an economic success but an ecological disaster in which humans fought a destructive war against nature (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017; Tong Reference Tong and Chang2019; Wang Reference Hongyan, Shiming and Gliessman2018). Rather than a glorious struggle for China’s future prosperity, these scholars observe a sharp contradiction between the state’s advertisement of abundance and the settlers’ harsh lived realities.

This article suggests that the meanings and legacies of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ have loomed large in regional elites’ efforts to adapt to the state’s recent turn towards environmental preservation as a political priority. Situated as they are within the Chinese discursive framework that tends to paint a positive picture of the Beidahuang experience as one of regional and national progress and modernization, local scientists and officials generally refrain from debating the socialist campaigns’ legacies or significance. Instead, regardless of their differing attitudes towards economic development and environmental preservation, they tend to refer to Beidahuang as a positive model. This unifying framework has informed the rhetorical options available for local reformers to articulate what nature conservation means for the region and its border with Russia. For local officials eyeing profits from cross-border trade and agriculture and industrial production, the celebrated status of the Beidahuang experiment in transforming ‘wasteland’ into productive land has provided an inspiring justification for continuing down the road of ever-intensifying industrialization and exploitation of nature. Forestry managers have shared this disposition, envisioning a new advanced phase of Beidahuang intervention in the wilderness that transforms the forest into a marketable commodity for ‘green’ exports across the border. Scientists have harmonized their voices with this trend, reinterpreting the preservation of biodiversity as an outcome of systematic human analysis and classification of nature in the service of economic development. Conservationists who oppose these exploitative practices are nevertheless careful not to directly criticize the legacies of Beidahuang. Instead, they draw on nationalist meanings of border security associated with the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ campaigns to lend political palatability to their environmental agenda.

Sources and methods

Through an examination of the ways in which the legacies and memories of socialist land reclamation campaigns shaped local and regional articulations of environmental protection and ecological conservation at the turn of the twenty-first century, this article engages with studies and methodologies across the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology. My investigation into the twenty-first century legacies of socialist land reclamation and migration builds on historical studies that have shed light on the ecological ramifications of frontier expansion projects sponsored by imperial and national projects from the Qing to PRC periods. At the same time, my examination of the ways in which local and regional elites appropriated and reframed national-level environmental policies and ideologies to accommodate their own economic and social contexts and agendas addresses ethnographic concerns with layers of agency, manipulation, and negotiation that inform environmental politics across different levels of society and geography. Finally, through highlighting the localized permutations and interpretations of nationalism, market reform policies, and state control and mobilization of resources, this article engages with political science studies on the interplay of local, regional, and national stakeholders in articulating and reacting to policies on environmental protection and economic development.

The interdisciplinary analysis in this study began with interviews that I conducted in 2015 in the northeast border town of Raohe with the environmental activist, local gazetteer editor, and former forestry official Yao Zhongyin. These interviews first alerted me to the intersections of environmental conservation discourse with nationalism and border security in the region, issues that became clearer to me as I examined the environmental texts that he produced and published at the start of the twenty-first century. Building on this foundation, I extended my analysis to a variety of other textual sources, including county-level official reports, forestry reformers’ manifestos about sustainable development, county and provincial-level gazetteers, and scientists’ discussions about biodiversity. Engaging with these sources enabled me to identify continuities with the Beidahuang campaigns in the conceptual frameworks used by these local stakeholders to articulate ecological conservation and environmental sustainability, and to situate Yao’s nationalist interpretations of forest conservation within the wider regional and borderland contexts of environmental politics. To connect this emergent twenty-first century environmental politics with the experiences and environmental sensibilities of former participants in the Beidahuang land reclamation campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, I also examined the memoirs of former sent-down youth and political exiles as well as scholarship on state propaganda efforts and the experiences of demobilized veterans and female migrants. Engaging with these sources helped me to appreciate the complexity of Beidahuang views on nature and how the contrasting, yet entangled, perspectives used to mobilize land reclamation were later adapted and appropriated at the turn of the twenty-first century in the politics of environmentalism.

Situating Beidahuang in the regional and national logics and politics of environmentalism

The environmental politics associated with Beidahuang along China’s northeast borderland has broader implications for understanding the ways in which nature, and concepts of nature, have been mobilized by various regional, national, and transnational stakeholders in China for the goals of economic development, modernization, and the negotiation of state-society relations. As Jennifer Hubbert observes in her discussion of the Green Expo in Shanghai in 2010, by the first decade of the twenty-first century the Chinese state had adopted a discourse of ‘ecological modernization’ and ‘green progress’ that ‘positively correlates environmentalism and economic benefit’ and has become ‘an important component of official definitions of modernization within China’ (Hubbert Reference Hubbert2015, 29–30). As Zhang and Barr relate, since the 1950s this logic of economic development has been a continuous thread running through official campaigns to address environmental issues, ranging from industrial waste and deforestation to the more recent goal of ‘transforming the energy structure’ (Zhang and Barr Reference Zhang and Barr2013, 6–8). Indeed, in the rich forest biodiversity context of the northeast, local environmentalist critics of government policy have opposed the tendency of state-sponsored afforestation projects to replace wild forests with homogenous tree monocultures that grow fast but lack species diversity (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1992] Reference Zhongyin2005, 454–456).

This economic logic underlying environmental governance in China has also found resonance and support in post-socialist cosmopolitan Chinese elites’ revival of the Confucian concept of ‘unity of heaven and humanity’ (tianren heyi) to articulate a distinctive Chinese approach to balancing and integrating economic and environmental concerns, one which implicitly contradicts the earlier rhetoric of waging war against nature that occasionally (but not always) punctuated socialist campaigns to mobilize and transform nature in the service of agricultural productivity (Weiming Reference Weiming2001; Zhang and Barr Reference Zhang and Barr2013, 6–7; Shapiro Reference Shapiro2001). Even in contexts such as Yunnan, where the legacies of colonial fantasies of a natural paradise and the influence of transnational environmental NGOs have informed the official banning of logging in favour of preserving the region’s ecological and cultural diversity, the economic logic of mobilizing natural and human resources for development—in this case through eco-tourism projects—has underpinned conservation initiatives (Litzinger Reference Litzinger2004, 489–490).

The emerging environmental concepts of modernization that have accompanied these developments have, according to Hubbert, become an integral part of a national governance strategy for redefining the relationship between the modern subject and the state along the lines of docility and conformity to the state’s modernization agenda (Hubbert Reference Hubbert2015, 30–31). At the same time, as Zhang and Barr and others have shown, these top-down subject-moulding agendas of the state are complicated and appropriated at the local and regional levels by the innovative mobilization strategies of various stakeholders to enhance communication methods, adjust their narratives, and ‘develop new ways to engage with diverse audiences, mobilize social resources, and compete for political influence’ (Zhang and Barr Reference Zhang and Barr2013, 4).

This article suggests that local elites in China’s northeast borderland appropriated the national state ideology of ‘ecological modernization’, along with the tendencies of global neoliberal capitalism to absorb environmentalism into its logic of consumption-driven economics, for their own regional and transborder development schemes. If, as Timothy Choy suggests, the credibility of truth claims about the environment has come down to a combination of claims to universality and particularity/local appropriateness, with the different scales of meaning that these entail, local stakeholders in the northeast articulated their views through mediating local particularity (species, forests, and industries specific to the region) and universality (biodiversity and forest conservation) through national frameworks of development (market reforms and modernization) and nationalism (Choy Reference Choy2011, 79–88). Beidahuang was an important reference point as it connected the local and regional to the national through socialist resettlement, development, and border security.

Overlapping networks of local officials, forestry managers, scientific professionals, and environmental activists pursued their agendas by participating in a shared narrative framework that interpreted environmentalism through the lenses of economic development and nationalism. They did not invoke cosmopolitan elites’ Confucian concept of ‘unity of heaven and humanity’, but instead sought different ways to mobilize nature for regional development and security. They viewed biodiversity itself as a product of human intervention or an instrument of international competition, rather than as a force to be balanced equally with human needs.

While national-level officials in Beijing agonized over the intensifying storm of ‘wind-sand’ that both resulted from and threatened to unhinge the state’s economic development strategy, local stakeholders in the northeast shared their concern about the impact of tree cutting on biodiversity and highlighted the potential economic benefits that this endangered biodiversity could provide. This growing consensus about the need to address an impending crisis of diminishing natural resources informed a shift from the socialist-era focus on transforming wilderness into ‘granary’ to an emerging view of the wilderness itself, and its vast repository of flora and fauna, as the site and source of post-Mao market reform productivity. Local elites now turned their attention to ways to harness this wilderness-turned-marketable commodity to sustain their economic development plans, with both sides of the debate on conservation and exploitation sharing a new regard for the survival of the wilderness as a critical criterion for the region’s economic and political sustainability. If, as Jerry Zee suggests, the phenomenon of ‘wind-sand’ and the state’s response to its onset highlight the dynamic ‘permutational’ interactions between politics and the environment, we see here that the concepts of ‘wilderness’ and ‘ecological preservation’ were in constant flux at the interface between nature and politics (Zee Reference Zee2022, 13–21).

To maximize the mobilization of nature, self-proclaimed advocates of environmental sustainability called for a parallel mobilization of different sectors of state and society to either exploit or preserve biodiversity in more far-reaching and comprehensive ways. In line with the rhetoric of ‘green progress’, regional forestry officials utilized the concept of ‘green’ to conjure up new and expanded scales of modernization and economic development that legitimized the power of the state, as well as large-scale private and state-owned enterprises, as engines of ‘green progress’ that further displaced and marginalized traditional and indigenous livelihoods and practices.

Unlike the southwest borderlands, where Tibetan and other indigenous ethnic groups have played a significant role in shaping local articulations and practices of environmental conservation, eco-tourism, and restrictions on logging, regional elites in the demographically Han-dominant northeast have largely viewed nature as a realm of exploitation and conservation that is divorced from and absent of consideration for indigenous populations and livelihoods (Litzinger Reference Litzinger2004, 502–504). Local officials’ investment in the preservation of Hezhe traditional villages for the promotion of cultural heritage tourism runs parallel to, but is removed from, the projects of mobilizing nature for the region’s economic development.

Forestry officials eager to profit from market reforms embraced the change from the crude socialist-era deforestation campaigns to a new era of transforming and commoditizing nature into efficiently produced and sleekly packaged ‘green products’ ready for export across the border to Russia. Those who opposed these schemes, while pointing out the potentially devastating environmental impacts of these projects, redefined ‘greenness’ in starkly oppositional terms of border security nationalism as a zero-sum game of international competition for resources. Both views offered regional interpretations of national and international ideologies of nationalism, modernization, and development that reflected the historical contexts of migration and colonialism in the northeast. Forestry officials’ and scientists’ vision of biodiversity as a field of limitless development and exploitation harked back to a series of mass migrations, of which Beidahuang was only the latest, which involved the dissemination of popular and official slogans depicting the northeast as a vast frontier of land and resource abundance. On the pro-conservation side, meanwhile, the crisis of diminishing biodiversity was viewed not as a new problem, but rather as the latest permutation in the ongoing historical drama and legacies of colonialism and inter-imperial struggles for domination of the northeast borderland region. In this way, ‘greenness’ became a space for proposing divergent concepts of international borders—in this case the border with Russia—as either porous avenues for regional economic expansion or as a more impermeable barrier containing the flow of resources within national boundaries. Both visions resonated with the regional historical context of the Beidahuang campaigns and their simultaneous agendas of securing the northeast border and expanding economic productivity on a vast scale.

‘Defend our nation and cultivate the barren lands’: Popular and official imaginations of Beidahuang

From the start of massive land reclamation in the alluvial plains of eastern Heilongjiang in the mid-1950s, Party functionaries and the state media have used a mixture of conflicting images and ideas about the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ to promote the transformation of wilderness into farmland and to facilitate the social and political transformation of the various groups sent to the northeast. Together, divergent representations of the Beidahuang natural landscape as a remote, harsh ‘living hell’, as a battlefield for waging war against the earth, and as pure, boundless beauty inspiring spiritual rejuvenation and redemption operated as an ideological canvas for demanding thought reform through suffering from political exiles, inspiring impressionable urban youth to voluntarily give up their dreams of education and career ambitions, and convincing demobilized veterans to rechannel their energies into a new war against nature.

The trope of ‘waging war against the earth’, as Guo Moruo put it in his poem that became a rallying cry for the campaigns, captured the imagination of many young people who ‘responded to the propaganda campaign, writing to newspapers, military farms…to express their aspirations to join the land reclamation efforts’ (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 258–259). More than 200 war veterans contributed their poems about Beidahuang to War against the Earth—an Anthology of Beidahuang Poetry published in 1958, in which they accentuated their heroic efforts to eradicate the wilderness and reclaim it as productive agricultural land (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 259). These efforts involved veterans organized as ‘land opening squads’ ‘clear[ing] the land with battle cries…charg[ing] into the wilderness, [while] singing the ‘Military Anthem of the Eighth-Route Army’. They also launched ‘burning wilderness battles’ in which they set fire to vegetation to clear the land (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 265–266).

Many young women joined the assault as a way to assert gender equality and prove their ability to engage equally in socialist production. By 1960, 33.1 per cent of the workforce on Farm 852 were women, who were praised for their ‘heroism in the shock harvesting of wheat’, as exemplified by Dong Xueqin, a young woman who led a guniang platoon that ‘set the record of soya bean sowing per person per day on Farm 852—a record that was unrivaled by men’ (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 263).

By the 1960s, this military-like assault on nature became an integral part of garrison operations to secure the border as tensions escalated with the Soviet Union. In this context, veterans in these agricultural reclamation farms were reorganized into the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps that became directly involved in border conflicts (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 259–60).

Many sent-down youth envisioned their mission in land reclamation as inextricably tied to national security and protecting the border. One such former youth, Zhang Xiuying, recounts that she enthusiastically volunteered to go to a military farm in Heilongjiang at the end of high school in 1968 as ‘our revolutionary mission…to defend our nation and cultivate the barren lands there’ (Kang Reference Kang2014, ‘Seven Souls Lost in the Heilong River’). In her recollections of her determination and ‘revolutionary spirit’ she tells of her and her sister’s proud announcement of their decision to their parents, whose ‘hearts ached at the thought of their two daughters living in a desolate wasteland and enduring a bitter climate’. The sisters were assigned to Division Number One along the Heilong River, which formed the border with the Soviet Union in 1969 at the height of border tensions. Tragically, Zhang’s sister, while on a mission to repair fishing nets for a fishing unit on the Heilong River, drowned with others on a boat in high waves and wind, an incident that she describes as ‘the Heilong River, an angry black dragon’ ‘swallow[ing] all of them…’. Compounding the tragedy of her drowning, after their deaths she and her comrades were temporarily accused of having attempted to defect to the Soviet side until six months later when the verdict was reversed and she was hailed instead as a martyr (Kang Reference Kang2014).

Sent-down educated youth and exiled students and intellectuals, in their recollections of their experiences in the northeast, frequently depicted Beidahuang as a remote, barren, and unforgiving landscape that needed to be overcome through heroic struggle and physical hardship as a test of one’s revolutionary spirit and resolve, and in the case of the exiles as a painful rite of passage for political self-redemption. Like the young women who joined the demobilized veterans in guniang divisions, many female sent-down youth embraced the struggle to endure and overcome the harsh elements and the daunting task of ‘glorious labor’ as an opportunity to prove their mettle as ‘iron girls’ (Kang Reference Kang2014, ‘Unloading Boats’).

For other former sent-down youth, memories of Beidahuang crystallize in images of howling winds and frigid ice that defined their ‘iron will’ and made them appreciative of their subsequent opportunities to leave the northeast behind and pursue their educational and career ambitions. One former sent-down youth, Xu Zhenkang, recalled naming his daughter, born in Beidahuang, Yunfan (cloud sail) in the hope that she ‘would one day sail with the clouds and go to a better place, although we, her parents, were stuck in Beidahuang’. Thirty-four years later, having migrated abroad to the United States and Canada, he wonders ‘who would believe that [his daughter] had been born on a brick kang in a small clay house in the forbidding land of Beidahuang?’ (Kang Reference Kang2014, ‘Our Daughter Born in the Great Northern Wilderness’).

Many of those intellectuals and students labelled as rightists and counter-revolutionaries who were exiled to the northeast wrote of their distress at being sent to the harsh wilderness, appealed to stay in Beijing, and saw themselves in a similar light to the exiles banished to remote areas in the imperial past (Wang Reference Ning2016, 62). Upon their arrival at the military farms and labour reform camps, they mournfully described the primitive conditions comprising lack of roads, swamps and ‘boggy grasslands’, a cold climate, and various manual labour activities they were expected to perform, from tilling and reclaiming the land to logging, which became especially intensive during the Great Leap Forward years (1958–1962) (Wang Reference Ning2016, 68–69). Some went so far as to decry this experience as a ‘living hell’ and Beidahuang as a prison (Wang Reference Ning2016, 76).

In some cases, those ‘rightists’ who had not been condemned to the ‘first and second categories of punishment’ had the option of staying in their place of residence and retaining their positions (albeit with a demoted status). Yet some volunteered to make the journey as a response to Party authorities’ promise they could achieve self-redemption through hard manual labour and physical suffering in the wilderness. The essayist Nie Gannu, for instance, sought self-banishment as an opportunity to ‘lead the real life of the rightists…’ (Wang Reference Ning2016, 63).

Alongside these depictions of Beidahuang as a harsh battleground for testing the limits of human suffering and determination, the state media also played a part in luring idealistic young people to land reclamation in the northeast with their portrayals of romanticized images of boundless natural beauty and purity that promised spiritual rejuvenation and redemption at a time when political strife and ideological pressures in the cities could seem overwhelming. These positive associations were among the self-proclaimed reasons that numerous ‘rightists’ gave for their voluntary self-exile which, in the case of the writer Ding Ling and journalist Cong Weixi, offered the opportunity to enliven and transform their writing through ‘living close to the earth’ (Wang Reference Ning2016, 62–63). Politically maligned intellectuals viewed Beidahuang as a potential refuge from social ostracism, imagining a situation where ‘everybody would be equal, there would be no discrimination, and the smell of the black earth would bring hope’ (Wang Reference Ning2016, 62–63). Looking back at their youthful experiences in the northeast, some former sent-down youth nostalgically associated the natural landscape of Beidahuang with the refreshing euphoria of a bygone youth. Zeng Jianjun, recalling the times she used to swim and bathe in the Songhua River, waxed poetic: ‘Oh, Songhua River, the river at the highest latitude I have ever swum in! It still flows in my heart’ (Kang Reference Kang2014, ‘Bathing in the River’). Writers of state propaganda conjured up romanticized scenes of land reclamation, describing participants’ love for nature, to lure young people to the northeast. In his poetic contribution to the recruitment of young women to the northeast, the poet Chen Di described their passionate commitment to the point of being engaged to ‘gorgeous Beidahuang’ (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 260–262). Their work included seed selection and building roads, and they were recruited partly to stabilize the settlement of the borders by marrying veterans and changing ‘guangun’ (bare branches) into economically as well as socially reproductive families (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 260–262).

These contrasting yet entangled representations of Beidahuang as both harsh battleground and a place of alluring beauty have endured in the popular imagination into the twenty-first century in Beidahuang literature, woodblock prints, museums commemorating the reclamation campaigns, and new marketing campaigns following on the heels of post-Mao economic reforms (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 254). This is clearly illustrated in the Beidahuang Museum; established in Harbin in 2005, it was designated as a patriotic education site and hosts frequent student tours. Here, as Sun Xiaoping describes, ‘five of the six chambers of the museum display and document the CCP-led human efforts to conquer nature’ while the first hall displays images and sound effects of wild geese and wolves from the Naoli River National Nature Reserve to form ‘a beautiful picture of the harmony between human and nature’ as the backdrop for the land reclamation farms (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 265).

Since the 1990s, the ‘Beidahuang spirit’ has resurfaced in state propaganda as a way to remind people of previous generations’ heroic struggles so as to accelerate ongoing agricultural modernization and economic development in the region (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 270). At the same time, the romanticized depictions of natural beauty and purity have been commoditized in the market reform era through the marketing of Beidahuang as a ‘popular brand’ whose name ‘conveys pure nature—green, organic, and uncontaminated’ and is now the ‘subject of corporate celebration, courtesy of the Beidahuang Group’ (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 268).

As scientists have become more aware of the damage caused to the ecosystem by land reclamation, including erosion and salinization of the fertile alluvial soil, degradation of the drought and flood-resistant wetlands, and endangerment of the diverse habitats and species that these wetlands sustain, these powerful associations of Beidahuang with transformational human and political will have shaped regional articulations of ecological conservation and environmental sustainability (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 267–268). At the juncture of the party-state’s turn towards environmentalism in the early twenty-first century, scientists, forestry reformers, local officials, and environmental activists, while differing in their actual stances on conservation and development, shared a vision of nature as a critical site of mobilization to carry on the glorious tasks of expanding economic productivity, tapping into a boundless expanse of beauty and purity, and securing the border.

Temporal frameworks of nation building and biodiversity

The ongoing presence of the Beidahuang mass mobilization campaigns as a central feature of environmental discourse in northeast China informed the temporal frameworks that regional elites used at the turn of the twenty-first century to articulate their environmental concerns. Referring back to the massive deforestation that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and forestry management experts highlighted continuities over change in their assessment of PRC history. They tended to articulate environmental preservation and forestry reform in terms of an uninterrupted historical trajectory of reclaiming and securing the northeast borderland’s vast natural resources for the nation. Through their environmental lens they erased the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao reform, conveying an unbroken linear narrative of development across the entire PRC period. This emphasis on linear progress across political divides imbues their vision of sustainability reform with a borderland-centred nationalist tone, framing nature conservation as an ongoing and integral part of nation building along the northeast frontier.

Environmental historians have located the longue durée processes of degradation and simplification of nature as an integral part and outcome of the imperial and national states’ projects of territorial expansion and consolidation of control over their borderlands (Marks Reference Marks2017, 6–7, 396–397; Bello Reference Bello2015, 220–258). Regional elites in northeast China, in their references to continuities going back to the 1950s, have also favoured relatively long-term narratives of the nation-state’s ongoing project of expansion and consolidation. Their perspective, however, along with the reaffirmation of the Mao-era Beidahuang reclamation campaigns as a positive feature of Chinese development and progress, tend to enfold these processes of environmental degradation and homogenization in terms of patriotic spirit, heroic determination, and regional and national progress rather than as a problematic dimension of internal colonization and assimilation.

In his preface to a gazetteer on plant resources in Heilongjiang published in 2003, the botanist Zhou Yiliang frames his research on the region’s biodiversity as the culmination of decades of continuous work and study that he traces back to the start of the PRC in 1949, with no mention of any changes or breaks caused by political events. He writes:

He continues that ‘as a botanist worker, I felt I should edit [a book like this] to guide Heilongjiang’s development use of its plant resources’. But to do this, he writes, he had to ‘start by doing research examining plant varieties. To this end, in the 1950s and 1960s my colleagues and I carried out the foundation of collecting [plant varieties] in the wilderness and investigating (diaocha) them’, forming what he considered to be a ‘solid foundation for the writing of this book’. He concludes by declaring how ‘thrilled he is that four decades of continuous hard work on economic plants has culminated in this book’, and expresses his hope that it ‘will offer guidance for Heilongjiang’s economic development, particularly the province’s reasonable utilization and protection of its plant resources and transformation of resource advantage into economic advantage’ (Zhou Reference Yiliang2003, ‘Preface’).

Rather than making reference to changes in economic and political policies, Zhou Yiliang portrays his early work, and by extension the early phase of the PRC, as a cumulative foundation for the nation’s development of its natural resources. His initial romantic description of Heilongjiang’s ‘vastness of land’ and its ‘abundant variety of organisms’ inhabiting its ‘great forests, grasslands, and wetlands’ alludes to even earlier descriptions of the northeast frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This ‘bursting through the pass’ (chuang guandong) literature put forward dramatic imagery of a limitless wilderness frontier that was ripe for the hard-working Han Chinese immigrant’s settlement, utilization, and transformation into productive industry and agriculture (Fromm Reference Fromm2019, 146). Zhou Yiliang’s view of and investigation into the region’s biodiversity forms an uninterrupted vision of the nation’s penetration into its northeast frontier and borderland.

This focus on unbroken continuity in the conservation, development, and opening up of the northeast wilderness has also informed discourses on forestry reform. In a book investigating theoretical and practical approaches to the sustainable development of nationally owned forest districts in the northeast, the author Tian Xijun calls for fundamental reforms of unsustainable practices that led to decades of deforestation. Yet Tian opens the study by celebrating the historical legacy of the Beidahuang campaigns which involved massive clearing of forests in Heilongjiang. He situates forestry reform as part of a continuous path of Chinese socialist development that hinges on the control of the northeast borderland landscape.

Tian dedicates the book to the ‘old generation of forestry workers who opened up and developed the national forest district, to the new generation of people in this occupation, and also to all friends in every sector of society who support forestry reform and development. When forestry flourishes, the nation prospers’ (Tian Reference Xijun2002, ‘Foreword’). This statement implies that reforming forestry practices along more environmentally conscious lines does not fundamentally alter the broader nation-building agenda that had informed previous Maoist campaigns to transform the borderland environment into an engine for the nation’s economic development.

‘Green’ modernization and the commodification of biodiversity

The legacies of Beidahuang are also evident in the tendency of local elites to define nature preservation in terms of mobilizing resources for the region’s modernization and development. This entails reframing environmental sustainability as a new and expanded phase of Beidahuang intervention in and exploitation of natural resources. As David Bello and Robert Marks have observed, Manchu and Chinese projects of empire and nation building involved ecological simplification and homogenization through the spread of Han Chinese agricultural practices that denuded forests and simultaneously threatened ethnic diversity and natural biodiversity (Bello Reference Bello2015, 220–258; Marks Reference Marks2017, 6–7, 396–397). This pattern has been amplified more recently along China’s northwest borderlands as resource extraction privileging Han livelihoods has threatened indigenous natural and human ecologies, contributing to ethnic conflicts in the region (Kinzley Reference Kinzley2018, 181–185; Salimjan Reference Salimjan2012; Economy Reference Economy2011, 224–228).

In the northeast, the Beidahuang campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were the latest and most powerfully state-driven phase in a series of waves of (largely) Han immigration from China’s inland provinces going back to the second half of the nineteenth century. The cumulative inundation of the region with Han immigrants, far outnumbering indigenous ethnic groups such as the Elunchun and Hezhe, has made the project of incorporating this region into the Chinese nation more complete. Instead of representing a threat to Chinese control, ethnic minority culture is highlighted and showcased by local officials as an innocuous and positive feature contributing to the region’s unique diversity (Fromm Reference Fromm2019, 104–109). This official attitude towards ethnic diversity is mirrored in regional elites’ interest in promoting biodiversity as a distinctive advantage for the region compared to the ‘dried-up yellow earth’ of inland China (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1980] Reference Zhongyin2005, 430). In this context, scientists and forestry reformers in the northeast, in reconciling their celebration of natural diversity with exploitative economic practices, tend to reframe biodiversity itself as a product of human scientific and economic intervention in nature for the purposes of modernization and development.

Scientists investigating the diversity of plant life in the northeast have envisioned a continuous and increasingly urgent struggle to identify, protect, and exploit the region’s natural biodiversity for economic development. In the course of this ongoing struggle, they present biodiversity itself as a product of scientific approaches to classifying and mobilizing natural resources. In his prefatory comments for a gazetteer describing economic plants in Heilongjiang, the botanist Nie Shaoquan describes earlier research conducted in the 1960s as ‘far from sufficient for meeting the needs of developing and utilizing the province’s economic plants’. ‘To give this task more scientific support,’ he writes:

He then ties these scientific methods and achievements to the ‘great number of varieties of plants that are recorded in this book’ (Nie Reference Shaoquan and Shaoquan2003, ‘Foreword’). In these comments, Nie Shaoquan describes biodiversity not as something that is under threat of extinction due to human activities and intrusion, but as a phenomenon that becomes significant only through active human intervention in the form of scientific observation, investigation, and classification. Moreover, he incorporates this scientific ‘production’ of biodiversity along China’s northeast borderland as a key dimension of broader regional and national programmes of scientific and technological development that have been critical to the Chinese post-Mao and post-socialist nation-state building projects.

Scientists explain their mission of biodiversity knowledge production as integral to maximizing the economic utilization and development of nature. In his gazetteer on plant diversity, the botanist Zhou Yiliang refers to the region’s repositories of biodiversity as ‘economic plants’ ‘with obvious resource benefits’ and ‘having vast development utilization future’. His stated reason for examining biodiversity more closely is to meet ‘the urgent need’ of ‘guiding Heilongjiang’s development use of its plant resources’ and he ties the ‘protection of its plant resources’ to the ‘transformation of resource advantage into economic advantage’ (Zhou Reference Yiliang2003, ‘Preface’).

Experts on forest management have elaborated on this economic interpretation of biodiversity, presenting market forces as critical to implementing sustainable development practices. In their view, contractual market relations provide a mechanism for transforming the wilderness from a low-quality to a high-quality economic resource. Criticizing the forestry sector for lagging behind in structural reforms along the lines of market-driven efficiency and quality of production, writers on the subject criticize the destructive and inefficient legacies of the state command structure and envision a system of contractual market transactions that would lead to the production of high-quality forest products. According to this line of reasoning, sustainability reform of forestry practices entails reimagining the forest as a marketable commodity.

Visualizing this approach, at the front of his book Exploring and Theorizing Sustainable Development of National State-Owned Forest Districts, Tian Xijun includes a photo of people planting tree seedlings. The caption notes that these seedlings were the product of ‘contract forestry’ (dingdan linye) in which seedling production underwent market reform management. According to the caption, the Forestry Bureau purchased quality seedlings, then resold them to people specializing in forestation (zaolin zhuanye hu), guaranteeing the quality of seedlings and thus raising the quality of forestation overall (Tian Reference Xijun2002, prefatory captions).

In line with this vision of opening up nature as a modernized Beidahuang project, the authors of the Heilongjiang Provincial Gazetteer’s special volume on environmental protection likewise idealize nature in the northeast as a vast and unbroken source of regional and national integration and development. In addition, they describe environmental conservation itself in terms of expanding economic development and as an enterprise that is ‘opening up’.

In their introduction framing the contents of the volume, they define nature as a set of resources that uniquely equips the region to contribute to the nation’s economic and industrial development. The mountains ‘stretch in unbroken chains for hundreds of li, yielding timber amounts that are first in the country’. They point to the province’s four large natural gas areas of Jixi, Hegang, Qitaihe, and Shuangyashan, along with oil production in Daqing, to lay claim to this region’s status as an ‘important national source of energy’. The authors link these natural resources to industrial productivity, noting that ‘since the founding of the PRC some of the nation’s key construction projects have been in Heilongjiang, with the cities of Harbin, Qiqihar, Mudanjiang, Jiamusi, Daqing, and Jixi as key sites, making [the province] a developed industrial base in the areas of machinery, metallurgy, coal, oil refining, electrical power, paper manufacturing, sugar production, textiles, lumber, and food processing’ (Heilongjiang sheng 2003, 3).

From the start, therefore, the contributors to the Heilongjiang Provincial Gazetteer present industrialization not as a threat to nature, but as a natural product of the region’s natural landscape. Put another way, they define nature as significant only in its relation to and utilization for economic development. However, this does not blind them to the environmental problems that have resulted from unregulated development. Indeed, they fully acknowledge these limitations, though they do so in a way that reinforces the focus on economic productivity. ‘As Heilongjiang’s economy developed and land, forest, and oil resources have been developed and utilized along with urbanization and population growth,’ they write, ‘environmental pollution and degradation of the natural environment has resulted. This pollution and degradation likewise restricts economic development and improvement in living standards’ (Heilongjiang sheng 2003, 3). The authors turn the narrative around to refocus on economic development as the justification for why environmental protection is such an urgent matter.

Their reconceptualization of nature in materialistic economic terms, in line with the post-Mao focus on economic growth in the service of the nation’s modernization, rebrands environmental protection as an urgent task and integral part of the nation’s economic and industrial development. The Heilongjiang Provincial Gazetteer authors take this rebranding even further as they reapply the vocabulary of economic enterprise and market reform to the concept of environmental protection. ‘Environmental protection,’ they write, ‘steadily develops into a new dynamic enterprise in the process of economic development.’ They then proceed to divide this enterprise’s development into ‘three phases of birth [1949–1965], establishment [1966–1977], and opening up [1978–1985]’ (Heilongjiang sheng 2003, 3–4). According to this narrative, environmental protection itself becomes a ‘dynamic enterprise’ for economic development that follows a trajectory of opening up that runs parallel to the post-Mao path of economic liberalization of opening up to market forces and allowing outside investment for modernization reforms. This discursive strategy allows for a legitimization of the preservation of nature in line with post-Mao ideology rather than in opposition to it, re-presenting environmental protection as an integral part of regional and national modernization projects.

Scientists, local government officials, and forestry reformers have reinterpreted the very concept of nature and nature conservation as synonymous with modernization, economic development, industrialization, and urbanization. The use of the term ‘greenification’ is central to this reinterpretation, repackaging connotations of pristine natural space to describe a sleek, modernized ethos of urbanization and economic development. Following a series of photos (described below) that depict the opening up of natural resources in the forests of the northeast, the forestry reformer Tian Xijun adds a photo of a garden, with the caption noting the ‘greenification’ of small towns in the forest district. Next in the series is a photo of a new, clean-looking building with shops below, with the note at the bottom informing the reader that small towns like the one shown are developing quickly, accelerating the development of private enterprise, with the number of private businesses having expanded from 260 to 1,500 since market reforms began (Tian Reference Xijun2002, prefatory captions). The sequence and thematic connections between these images and how they are framed in the captions draw a clear connection between nature conservation, the sustainable practices of forestry development, and the expansion of economic development and urbanization penetrating deep into the heart of the forests that are allegedly being protected.

Competing visions of the border with Russia

The legacies of Beidahuang also inform the ways in which regional elites have defined the northeast border with Russia in economic, ecological, and national security terms. In their varying views of the border’s role as inhibitor of and facilitator for transnational processes of extracting, processing, and consuming natural resources, local officials, forestry managers, and conservationists have carried forward into the twenty-first century Beidahuang’s intertwined goals of expanding economic productivity and securing the national border—but now reframed in terms of environmental sustainability.

The PRC state’s campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s sought to make the land and natural resources of the northeast ‘legible’, to use James Scott’s term, through transforming ‘illegible’ wilderness into ‘legible’ state-owned farmland that would generate an orderly supply of grain for the nation (Scott Reference Scott1999, 1–3). This project involved the simplification and reduction of natural diversity that went hand-in-hand with the elimination of social and cultural diversity through the mass mobilization of Han settlement. This was an intensification of long-term trends in social and ecological simplification that had involved using Han migration and agricultural practices to expand state control along China’s borderlands. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Qing state adopted an official policy of encouraging Chinese immigration to Manchuria to expand its base of agricultural revenue while securing the borders against Russian encroachment. But the legibility of the border was always in flux. The Qing state tried, often unsuccessfully, to control the movements of migrants across its borders, resulting in frequent conflicts with the Russian state over territorial sovereignty and resource extraction privileges (Zatsepine Reference Zatsepine2017, 34–35).

During the early PRC period, the militarized border situation, combined with more comprehensive measures of state control and social mobilization, meant that the Maoist state was able to achieve its goal of legibility with much greater success, albeit at the cost of ecological destruction (Sun Reference Xiaoping and Smith2017, 264–270). This legibility can be viewed in multiple, perhaps mutually reinforcing, ways. While clashing with the Soviet Union in its attempts to define and enforce clearly demarcated territorial boundaries, the Chinese state’s propaganda sold sent-down youth a vision of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ as a seemingly boundless space for expanding the socialist enterprise (Tin and Wang Reference Tin and Yang2016, 37).

Following post-Mao reforms, economic liberalization and thawing Sino-Soviet relations galvanized regional officials to re-envision towns and cities along the Chinese side of the border as ‘dragon wings’ extending their commercial influence across the border (Christoffersen Reference Christoffersen and Fitzgerald2002, 221–246). This confident and euphoric image of ‘dragon wings’ rendered the border as a conduit for, rather than barrier to, Chinese regional expansion. As environmental protection became a more pronounced political priority in the early part of the twenty-first century, regional elites used these different dimensions of border and borderland legibility to articulate new ideas about ecological sustainability.

On the side of aggressive trans-border expansion, many forestry reformers have tied the rhetoric of ‘quality’ commodities to a concept of ‘opening up’ that harks back to the earlier Beidahuang rhetoric of ‘opening up the Great Northern Wilderness’. Even prior to the PRC period, as mentioned above, the chuang guandong (bursting east of the pass) slogan of migration to the northeast in the early twentieth century had associated Han settlement of this region with securing the border and exploiting a limitless abundance of natural resources. The most recent iteration of opening up has had as its objective the transformation of the wilderness frontier into packaged, processed commodities, with Russia across the border as the new destination for China’s ‘dragon wing’ economic expansion.

To illustrate this, in his study the forestry reformer Tian Xijun features an image of people cultivating northern medicine (beiyao) on wooden trestles, referring to this as the ‘opening up of northern medicine’. Tian writes that this industry has become a key part of the economic development of forest districts in the northeast, citing the Qinghe Forestry Bureau as having ‘protected and cultivated Chinese medicine herbs (zhongyaocao) reaching an area of 61,800 mu’. Numerous other photos included in Tian’s study depict these plants being cultivated, followed by scenes of packaging, processing, and, finally, the displays of the packaged goods for sale. Similar scenes are shown for other types of plants/herbs, honey, animals, and wood products. Photos also depict fields of onions with the caption indicating that these are now being exported to Russia (Tian Reference Xijun2002, ‘Foreword’).

This narrative of ‘opening up the wilderness’ through a market-oriented restructuring of the forestry industry conveys the promise of a comprehensive, diversified, and sustainable exploitation of nature in China’s northeast borderland. Its vision of preserving the diversity of plant and animal wildlife points towards a new and ‘improved’ Beidahuang mission of using the natural landscape of the northeast as a launching pad for expanding China’s economic wings northward and eastward across the border into Russia.

Local officials have also used the term ‘greenness’ to characterize the transformation of agriculture from small-scale farming to large-scale, high-tech industry with the capacity to extend beyond the border and capture the Russian market through the sale and export of ‘green’ products. In their 2005 work report, Raohe County officials describe their vision for expanding the scale of mechanized, industrialized agriculture:

In describing these ambitious plans, the drafters of this report endow ‘greenness’ with economic growth and expansion. This expansion was to take place on several levels: expansion of land devoted to agriculture (which would be likely to involve encroaching on forests and wetlands); expansion of the economic and social scale of production through mechanization and cooperativization; and expansion beyond the border, extending and penetrating into the Russian market. This interpretation of ‘greenness’ redefines nature as a product of technological innovation, economic productivity, and social mobilization. Its value lies not in the preservation of natural biodiversity in its pristine form, but rather in the transformation of nature into a ‘high-quality’ product and engine of regional and national economic and industrial power.

Securing and demarcating the border, the other dimension of borderland legibility, has provided an alternative way to frame criticism of ecologically exploitative development practices. In his essays on nature preservation in the border county of Raohe, forestry manager and gazetteer writer Yao Zhongyin makes indirect reference to the history of Russian colonialism in northern Manchuria. He characterizes the protection of natural resources in the northeast as a mission to protect the nation from foreign invasion, to defend national territory, and to secure the border. Yao condemns overdevelopment as a crime of selling out the nation to its foreign neighbours by causing the transfer of valuable land into foreign hands and placing China on the losing side in the competition with foreign countries for resources.

In one of his essays, he wastes no time in making clear to his audience what the stakes are and how central this borderland region is to the territorial integrity of the nation. Referring to Russian expansion that had redrawn the map and reduced Qing territorial claims in 1860, he writes that ‘ever since Russia invaded the region north of the Heilong River and east of the Ussuri River, the three-river plain and Wanda mountain area has become our country’s northeast frontier fortress (biansai)’ (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1980] Reference Zhongyin2005, 421).

He then proceeds to tie border security to environmental protection by portraying overdevelopment as a literal loss of territory. ‘In inland china,’ he argues, ‘the loss of wetlands does not result in the loss of national territory, but here along the river border, the wetlands are lost and sent outside the country’s gates as a gift, something that is a happy affair for foreigners’ (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1980] Reference Zhongyin2005, 424). To illustrate this, he compares the loss of soil from the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, where national territory is not being compromised, to rerouting a river along the border which he criticizes not only for destroying good cropland but also for sending large amounts of fertile soil to the Russian side. ‘In this case,’ he writes, ‘national territory is being given away, so shouldn’t the national government give this long-term thought?’ (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1992] Reference Zhongyin2005, 454–455).

In addition to lost territory, Yao also frames deforestation and overclearing of land as a losing strategy in the international competition for natural resources. ‘If we continue down this path,’ he asserts, ‘in a few decades we will be looking across the river at the Russian side where forests are still preserved fully while here in our country there is nothing we can do because the forests and grasslands will have been destroyed.’ He adds that when the national government ‘blindly’ allows this to happen, while claiming its policies are scientifically based: ‘how will this not make our foreign neighbor laugh at us?’ (Yao [Reference Zhongyin1980] Reference Zhongyin2005, 427). Using this line of reasoning, Yao re-envisions the preservation of pristine forests as a kind of arms struggle between nations, with the nation that is more committed to preservation winning the struggle for resources. In this way he ups the political ante of environmental protection as not only a question of ecological sustainability and balance but also as a crisis of national territorial integrity and competitive viability that resonates deeply with the post-Mao nationalist historical narrative of national humiliation. In so doing, he also places the northeast borderland region at the centre of national priorities, challenging the perception of places like Raohe as remote backwaters that are regarded by the national government as insignificant and therefore ignored.