Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People shows how soil and water conservation transformed landscape, society, and people in Gansu Province from the 1940s to the 1960s. Micah S. Muscolino builds his monograph on years of research, including fieldwork, oral history with local eyewitnesses, and an impressive number of documents from county archives. That the author was able to do this kind of research in the era of Xi Jinping and increasing restrictions is very remarkable. His local history takes place in Tianshui Prefecture, a poor and mountainous area in the southeast of Gansu, a remote province in China’s periphery. The village Dengjiabao in Wushan County became a national model for water and soil conservation in 1958, during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). To “learn from Dengjiabao” was part of a large nationwide campaign of the Maoist state to increase agricultural production by mobilizing the rural population, including women. The book includes many historical photographs, propaganda materials, and pictures taken by the author during his field research. His more recent photographs show the ruins of a dam and reservoir built during the Mao era.

Muscolino argues that this project of water conservation caused many conflicts in villages. Villagers and higher levels of government disagreed about which of many tasks—working the fields, planting trees, building irrigation—should take priority. While everybody hoped to “tame nature” for the common good, local cadres and peasants complained about exhaustion due to additional working hours in irrigation and conservation projects. During the winter, this kind of labor threatened people’s well-being and health. In particular, women feared miscarriages and worried about badly organized childcare. Moreover, villagers considered the heavy work of carrying water to be a duty of women and children in the villages. Furthermore, peasants were concerned that dams would break, costing human lives.

During the Great Leap Forward, overambitious conservation campaigns contributed to the disruption of agricultural production. In the post-famine years after 1961, the government emphasized that agriculture should come first, so that the economy and society could recover. While the conservation projects in the Mao era led to the exhausting of the people, by the late 1990s, the central government saw mass mobilization for expanding the amount of land under cultivation as “unproductive,” writes Muscolino (p. 210). When the author visited Dengjiabao in 2017 and 2019, he saw a dry landscape; the water conservancy infrastructure of the Mao era had disappeared. In recent years, Gansu has had a higher level of sensitivity and exposure to climate change than any other province in Western China, suffering droughts and flood-inducing rainstorms. In contrast to strict restrictions on rural–rural migration in the 1960s and 1970s, in the era of “Reform and Opening,” peasants are allowed to migrate to more promising regions of China.

Muscolino’s research is well-grounded and a very welcome contribution to the local and social history of Maoist China. Regarding the impact of gender relations and mass mobilization in the era of collectivization, the author confirms and further develops findings of Gail Hershatter (Gender of Memory, 2011) and Kimberley Manning (The Party Family, 2023). “Women’s liberation” had a mixed impact in the countryside, because mothers, especially, had to bear many burdens, including child care, weaving at night, agricultural work in the fields, and participation in irrigation projects.

Judith Shapiro’s book (Mao’s War against Nature, 2001) portrayed the failure of irrigation projects as a result of the Chairman’s megalomania. Mao apparently believed that “men can conquer heaven” and paid little attention to environmental conditions. Muscolino takes a more nuanced approach by starting with the challenging local conditions in southeastern Gansu, and shows how actors including peasants, local cadres, and various levels of government personnel interacted. But the balance sheet of exhausting human efforts versus poor economic results is still depressing. It reminds me of the judgment that an old peasant in Henan told me in the early 2000s regarding mass mobilization for raising production in the era of the People’s Commune: “laomin shangcai” (a waste of labor power and resources). However, more local studies are needed to understand the impact of soil and water conservation campaigns of the Mao era in comparison with the case of Gansu.