Robert Marks's book is a superb synthesis of the English-language literature on Chinese environmental history. In eight succinct but fact-filled chapters, Marks covers the entire period from ancient China to the present in a fluently written, balanced, and accessible manner. For the first time, general readers can gain a sophisticated overview of Chinese interactions with their landscapes, their manipulation of natural resources, and their exploitation and destruction of both. Anyone seeking to understand how the long course of China's history has produced the current environmental crises must consult this book.
Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004) is an outstanding complement to Marks's work. Elvin's study contains original insights and innovative translations from fascinating Chinese sources, but it is more a collection of topics than a single synthesis, and it ends around 1800 CE. Marks devotes three of his eight chapters to the last two centuries, embracing the entire period of industrialization, revolution, and devastation. No one has covered the modern period in such insightful detail. Since the majority of environmental historians have focused on the Qing Empire, Marks pays close attention to each of its regions.
By “China” Marks primarily refers to the Han Chinese settled agrarian population, which since ancient times depended on two specialized ecosystems: the north China plain complex of wheat, millet, and sorghum, supported by well irrigation, and the southern rice paddy region. Both of these systems originated about seven to eight thousand years ago, and each expanded from its core regions to cover a large part of the territory of modern China. This Han juggernaut drove other forms of production—nomadic pastoralism, swidden hill agriculture, fishing, forestry, and hunting—to the margins. The peoples, animals, and forests of the border regions, despite their best efforts at resistance, suffered displacement, extermination, assimilation, and impoverishment.
Far from living harmoniously with their environment, Chinese peasant farmers and ruling elites have relentlessly exploited all natural products in the pursuit of improved human welfare. Warfare has driven Chinese transformation of the environment for more than two thousand years. The earliest Chinese states targeted three enemies: unwanted plants, enemy peoples, and trees and wild animals. They cleared fields in the north China plain in order to support farmers, soldiers, and city populations. They campaigned against rival states in the plain and against other peoples of the hills and pastures. They tore down forests to fuel their military machines and to fuel the casting of giant bronzes that celebrated their victories. The once heavily wooded north China plain was stripped bare, and large animals were deprived of their habitat.
The fundamental basis of this exploitation of nature was the independent family farm, which supported with its taxes and labor a remarkably durable and systematically organized bureaucratic state. Although large landowners frequently threatened his subsistence, each major Chinese dynasty restored the farmer's security with tax subsidies for land clearance and crop production.
The agrarian system was not a “natural” product: only constant human effort kept it going. Dike repairs; replenishment of the soil; and clearance of marshes, lakes, and forests required incessant effort. Few farmers did this voluntarily. State policies, using both carrots and sticks, induced them to intensify cultivation, and the agrarian population increased as a result. From 1000 to 1500, nomadic invasions of the north forced fleeing farmers into the insalubrious malarial swamps of southern deltas. Heavy capital investments from officials, Buddhist monasteries, and landlords helped these farmers to create the world's most productive agriculture—the rice paddy—and the world's densest population, at the cost of intensified labor and exposure to tropical diseases.
Although natural processes play an active role in Marks's story—climatic change, soils, animals, diseases—the central driving force of change is human action. Since scientific understanding of natural processes in China is still rather underdeveloped, we might object that his story puts too much weight on human action. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Chinese sources show a striking concern for manipulating nature in the interests of human welfare.
Marks's overall picture is not encouraging. Repeatedly, the agrarian system reduced biodiversity in the interests of increased production, undermining the system's own resiliency for short-term benefit. Then major crises struck, causing disasters on a massive scale, with terrible losses of population, land, and productive capacity, until the farmers began the process all over again, often no wiser than before. The repeated floods of the Yellow River, induced by deforestation of upstream areas, heavy silt loads, and failure to maintain dikes downstream, are the most conspicuous example. But other examples proliferate: the elimination of diverse forest resources, the contamination of water supplies, and the degradation of soils and loss of nutrients.
How then, did China's millions survive for so long? At certain critical points, the productive system ran up against severe ecological limits, but it also made new technological leaps forward. The great shift to southern agriculture radically changed productive possibilities, allowing the population to double, from fifty to one hundred million from the Tang to the Song. The Qing fostered further growth, up to 300 million by 1800, by taking over all the borderlands. But by the nineteenth century the system had hit another barrier. Marks makes a strong case that environmental exhaustion caused China's catastrophes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By 1949, “the Chinese Communists inherited a seriously degraded natural environment” (p. 263).
What then allowed the population to burst through to the unprecedented level of over one billion, while living standards rose and industry boomed? Two words: chemical fertilizer. By the 1950s, the soils of China simply lacked the nutrients to support both increasing rural and urban populations. The desperate Great Leap policy and the ensuing famine were the consequences. Surprisingly, Marks gives no detailed treatment of the “avoidable and disastrous” post-Leap famine (p. 329). Recent research on this long-suppressed topic has demonstrated clearly, however, that the state inflicted the famine on farmers because it was determined to maintain food supplies for the urban population at their expense. Only ten years after their victory, party leaders permanently lost their legitimacy in the countryside, which had been based on the claim that only the Communist Party could guarantee food to the Chinese people. China's dramatic turn away from socialism toward private agriculture and engagement with the outside world was a direct consequence of this failure. As Marks incisively remarks, the first major contracts signed by Mao after Nixon's visit in 1972 were for thirteen ammonium nitrate fertilizer plants. Chemical fertilizer allowed further urban growth, including the huge rural to urban migration of up to 200 million people that has created the globalized China we know today. Once again China broke through an ecological barrier. But at what terrible cost to the future?
Marks's final chapter is a dismal catalogue of official callousness and of popular suffering caused by environmental degradation. New problems like desertification, air and water pollution, and rapid extermination of species have joined with drought and floods. Although environmental consciousness is rising, the party-state will allow no significant environmental movement to challenge its power. China may once again reach its ecological limits, this time with a global impact, ransacking the rest of the world in search of oil, timber, rare foods, and anything else that will meet the rapacious demands of consumers and industrialists driven by a monomaniacal commitment to economic growth.
In sum, an environmental perspective on China demonstrates strong long-term continuities. The dynamic alliance between the Han farmer and the state has over several millennia driven demographic and territorial expansion, increasing state power, and popular welfare, heedless of wider ecological consequences. It is a dismal picture, but has the rest of the industrializing world really done any better? China has been no better or worse than most of the rest of humankind, but its continuous story of intensified environmental pressure, as documented in this brilliant analysis, carries disturbing lessons for all of us.
