Modern China’s environmental history is often summed up in book titles like Mao’s War Against Nature and The River Runs Black. In these works, forests are used as a leading indicator of environmental degradation accompanying the mass campaigns of the Maoist and post-Maoist period, known as the “three great cuttings” (san dafa). Environmentalism, it would seem, was a minor concern in China relative to the needs of nation building and class struggle, at least until the late 1990s, when China began to crest the peak of the Kuznet’s curve.
Missing from this narrative, however, are the continuous debates over environmentalism in 20th-century China, a series of contests that often let conservation fall by the wayside as other priorities took precedence. This is the primary contention of Cheng Li’s Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China. Using forests – and especially the act of planting trees – as his central pivot, Li explores how Chinese environmentalism has been contested from the first Chinese Arbor Day in 1916 to the launch of Alibaba’s Ant Forest app a hundred years later. Nationalists and Communists, foresters and hydrologists, central planners and Indigenous peoples each understood the object of environmentalism differently, Li argues, and “different knowledge systems relating to the natural environment make certain types of environmental politics possible” (p. 19). These contests therefore speak to both the flexibility of China’s authoritarian project and its frequent environmental failures.
Contested Environmentalisms proceeds through five body chapters highlighting different eras and different conflicts over the means and ends of environmentalism. Chapter one, “Arbor Day,” starts with the arrival and adaptation of Arbor Day in Republican-era China. Using forestry textbooks and policy documents, Li shows that to foresters like Yale-trained Ling Daoyang, Arbor Day was the perfect vehicle to promote tree-planting, which would help resolve resource scarcities. To leaders like Sun Yat-sen, it was an ideal vehicle for promoting national consciousness. Ultimately, Li argues, the use of Arbor Day as an annual political spectacle, performed under successive and rival governments, came into conflict with its function in promoting real afforestation.
Chapter two, “Selling the Forestry Revolution,” moves to the early Socialist era (1949–1961). Where existing scholarship highlights the “war against nature” in Mao’s mass campaigns, Li argues that other leading voices promoted environmental science as a means to address environmental disasters. However, fault lines appeared within the scientific community over how to understand the appropriate locus of policy. Whereas hydrologic engineers focused narrowly on hydrology to promote dam building, foresters promoted a more syncretic picture of ecology, to which afforestation was the preferred solution. This took shape in Mao’s Greening the Motherland campaign to promote tree planting as a way to build both ecological and socialist resilience.
The next three chapters turn to film and literature to highlight three additional dimensions in the struggle to shape environmentalism in the Maoist period. Chapter three, “Greening the desert” contrasts triumphalist visions of transforming the northwest by planting trees with Indigenous perspectives that saw these terraforming projects as a “green Trojan horse” ushering in central control and the Han way of life to arid regions with herding traditions. This conflict, seen in films such as The Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song (Junken zhange) and Spring in the Desert (Shamo de chuntian) anticipated both the vision and critique of later desert afforestation projects such as the Three North Shelter Forest Programme, commonly known as the Green Great Wall.
Chapter four, “Deweaponizing forests and engineering nature,” turns to the military mindset regarding forests, seen at once as a romanticized setting and a haven for armed threats. In a series of novels, the authors showed a desire to purify forests of military threat to claim them as resources for the nation. Conversely, depictions of Communist soldiers showed confusion over whether the forests that sheltered them were a haven or a danger.
Throughout the Mao period, forest conservation remained an instrumental aim in service of national construction or resource sufficiency. Chapter five, “Great green awakening,” shows how the 1980s brought a self-conscious genre of conservation literature. However, this awakening remained contested, in this case between what Li calls “green nativism” and “green Occidentalism.” In works like Ah Cheng’s novella The King of Trees (Shuwang), green nativism turned to native craft knowledge as a basis of environmental awareness. On the other hand, reportage such as Xu Gang’s Woodcutter, Wake Up! (Famuzhe, xinglai!) turned to Western environmentalism including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as inspiration for a more global conservation mindset.
Finally, the fascinating Coda, “Arbor Day is Every Day!” looks at more recent consumerist environmentalism in the form of Alibaba’s Ant Forest, an app where users accrue points that can be cashed in to contribute to tree planting efforts. Following this, Li returns to his overarching points about the contested nature of environmentalism in modern China.
This is a timely and useful book, showing the deeper and multiple roots of China’s modern environmentalism. By combining scientific texts, policy documents, films and literature, Li brings multiple perspectives on China’s modern environmental voices. This helps fill in key gaps and explain the paradoxes that have made China both the world’s leading polluter and a leading agent for environmental protection. This analysis could be improved by closer attention to how these voices filtered into policy and public opinion, without which I am left unsure of how to account for otherwise incommensurate positions seen in, say, a film and a forestry manual. Nonetheless, the book offers an original perspective – indeed, multiple perspectives – on China’s unique field of environmental discourse. It is highly recommended for students and scholars of Chinese environmental history, modern history and comparative environmentalism.
