Chairman Mao and the Mountain

When Mao Zedong took command of the Chinese Communist party and then defeated the Kuomintang, in 1949, he gained intimate, aggressive control over at least half a billion people -- a population where social inequity and hierarchical institutions were the norm, with a strong propensity for powerful authoritarian rule. Chinese traditions, both political and personal, had created a society susceptible to control on a massive scale. Also, China had suffered embarassing defeats to the British and devastating losses to invading Japanese armies within the previous century, and capitalist hostility toward communist revolutions was a tangible threat. Mao's feeling that his policies were equally threatened from within, either through lack of fervor or because of rightist sympathies, led irrevocably toward disaster as crops were left untended or tremendous energy was exerted toward unfavorable changes, many of which were eventually expressed as environmental disasters, leading to famine between 1959 and 1961, and a legacy of all but unregulated heavy industry to the present day.

In Judith Shapiro's Mao's War Against Nature, four main ideas emerge to explain how China was persuaded to rise in unprecedented unanimity, and what it took to orchestrate such movement.

First, the environment became a political enemy. Maosim coerced the human population into attacking unproductive lands, as though to punish the environment for disloyalty. Favoring political theory over agricultural tradition and accepted standards of husbandry. rhetoric over practical knowledge, agricultural production became a massive experiment with little hope of success. Fields, forests and streams were naively expected to fulfill political duties; to become re-educated along Marxist-Leninist lines.

Second, the practical needs of a utopian world required mass social action in well-intended projects with what would prove to be dire consequences. Whether the massacre of sparrows or the reduction of orchards and sacred forests to firewood was called for. the Chinese masses were quick to respond. Environmental damage that will haunt China for generations, from steel mills irrationally situated, to failed dams or wasted forests, was done by an aroused population who, thanks to Mao, saw itself as engaged in a protracted heroic action: the creation of paradise. A schoolteacher who worked on a project to turn part of a lake into farmland remembered the mood of the time: "We all thought it was a good thing, to create more land to resolve the grain problem. We were in high spirits, often singing as we worked...Only later did we understand that the

wetlands purify water and provide a haven for migrating birds."

Third, Maoism simplified the collective wisdom of the rural population and sought to apply the successes of one region to all others without respect to local conditions. This perverted what could have been a strength of the revolution by applying political management to agricultural policy. By insisting that the land could be made to produce grain where it couldn't, and demanding unreasonable quotas from productive lands, Mao transformed China into a fantasy world of socialist glory, at least on paper. Managers as well as farmers knew it was safer to report record yields than to be honest.

Fourth, people were moved from areas where they were productive and acclimated to remote locations where they were compelled to undertake mass projects unsuited to those environments. This served political goals both by training or intimidation, and was meant also to provide a permanently mobilized defense force. But attempts to grow grain or strategically important crops like rubber on marginal or reclaimed land more often than not failed, while political hierarchies issued deceptive reports because the truth would have been a liability.

The political repression of Maoism facilitated environmental disaster by ignoring and removing dissenting opinion, with grave consequences for future policy decisions. After silencing the full diversity of opinion, Mao attempted to find ideological answers to questions of biology, hydrology and metallurgy. As Shapiro writes, "China deprived itself of authoritative voices that might have cautioned against foolhardy schemes that ultimately destroyed the natural environment."

When Mao launched a political attack on demographer Ma Yinchu, whose scientific views on population were seen not to be in accord with socialism's presumed ability to provide for all, he precipitated an event that Shapiro considers most important in its impact on the environment: the doubling of China's population in a 30-year period. Shapiro quotes environmental activist Dai Qing, who blames "The policy of 'larger population, greater labor force, and increased working morale''" for accelerated population growth. Attempts to convert land to agricultural uses were made as a provision for this growing population, but these experiments tended to result in a net decrease in capacity, and natural systems of production were degraded. Productive workers were removed from valuable farmland to make way for water projects, and those within the society who might have been able to properly analyze the effects of projects were forced to rethink their opinions while expending themselves in hard labor and military and political training. All this only compounded the effect of evaluating science through a political lens.

Mao's emphasis on politics resulted in attempts at ideological purification and what Shapiro calls "efforts to replace the traditional family with the Communist state". China's national identity could be likened to its personal identity and, "the Confucian emphasis on the extended family or clan as the building block of social order" provided a natural and easily exploited network of relationships through which to enforce conformity and discourage dissent. Ultimately, "the decisive deterrent [to sound demographic planning] was Mao's view of people as a great resource."

His belief in socialist theory took on a nearly mystical importance, as he showed in a 1949 speech: " Under the leadership of the Communist Party, as long as there are people, every kind of miracle can be performed."

While that may have been true, under Mao China proved the opposite.

His physician, Li Zhisui, found him indifferent to the human suffering he caused by treating this vast population (600 million in 1954) as an endlessly resilient resource. "Mao knew that people were dying by the millions. He did not care."

Through the combination of willing belief and active elimination of dissent, the nation was powerfully influenced. Mao worked hard to make sure statistics indicating a dangerously expanding population were viewed as positive, directing mass thought with slogans like "With Many People, Strength is Great." A former census official recollecting the 1964 census, complained "If he had adopted the opinions of intellectuals like Ma Yinchu, the population wouldn't have grown so, and the environment wouldn't have been so damaged."

Mao also expected technology to respond to his combination of strong-arm enforcement and ideological zeal, paying little heed to the physical demands of heavy industry, or the forecasts of expert engineers and other scientists who at times struggled to maintain their original due diligence. Those who did, like hydrologist Huang Wanli, were relentlessly ostracized, transported to obscurity at remote projects, and forced to endure public humiliation in highly visible demonstrations designed to promote uniformity and discourage any critical evaluation. Mao's blend of a Soviet-style command economy and an old-fashioned Chinese willingness to join massive public works projects ensured the power of the bureaucracy. This force was magnified by zealous citizens encouraged by pervasive propaganda, from public art and loudspeakers, as well as Mao's own writing.

The environment can appear to be indestructible. In the case of China's massive rivers, it becomes a legendary foe to be battled. Thus Mao's vision of flood control and regulated irrigation could be heartily endorsed, and, as in the case of the Sanmenxia dam, matters of whether or not things would work as expected were secondary to the political expediency of completing projects. Huang Wanli was an experienced hydrologist with training and fieldwork in both China and the U.S., and he understood that the Yellow River's silt-load presented a unique challenge to efforts to control its ancient pattern of destructive flooding. He knew that no design could succeed without accounting for that perpetual cargo of soil, and submitted his objections to a faulty design through official channels with no effect on the dam's construction. But it was his artistic expression, criticizing the political system rather than the dam itself, that first directed the power of the state at his insubordination.

Construction went forward while Huang Wanli was systematically persecuted with loss of professional status and income, labeled as a rightist and subjected to criticism meetings, imprisoned and forced to work at hard labor. Despite this abuse, Huang outlived Mao, and events vindicated his objections to the dam. At age 88, he wrote, "...it was clear that I was right as early as 1964, two years after the dam was completed. A town was completely flooded because of all the silt. Now they've apologized."

The assault on truth was as ferocious as the assault on the earth. Any criticism of Maoist policy was enough to invite scrutiny from the thought critics and could easily lead to punishment, which could affect generations of a dissident's descendants.

Those who remained loyal to truth faced almost certain persecution, and many, like Huang's own grown children, began to doubt themselves after years of constant pressure to conform. Shapiro equates the abuses against people to those against nature, and accuses Mao of the fatal mistake of dictators: hubris. He acted as if he believed he could control events beyond human control, while humanity was little more than a tool at his disposal: "Mao and the Party thought little more of wrenching millions from their homes and families in mass relocations than they did of violating the face of nature beyond its ability to adjust."

That the earth would, even if the people would not, strike back with the deadly Great Famine. polluted streams, erosion, ruined cropland and insect infestation was inevitable, and certainly predictable. However those who might have sounded the alarm were occupied with defending themselves against charges of disloyalty, or entirely in the hands of the political apparatus, and forced to participate.

That so many required no oppression to become energetically complicit in Maoist restructuring of the landscape every bit as revolutionary as his reorganization of society testifies to the persuasive power of his personal magnetism as well as to the Party machine that supported him.