Sheer Force of Will
JOHN MERRICK: Your 2001 book, Mao’s War Against Nature, is the classic account of the Chinese state’s attempt during the Maoist period to “conquer” nature. What factors produced this policy under Mao, and what effect did it have on the environment in China?[1]
JUDITH SHAPIRO: During the Mao period, nature was constructed as an enemy to be overcome through sheer force of will. Some people trace that way of thinking back to Mao’s background as a military man: the idea that with more people strength is greater, and you always want more people. But it was also, of course, because in a developing country like China, people regularly suffered at the hands of nature. Throughout its history, the country has experienced many devastating floods and droughts.
One problem with the construction of nature as an enemy was that it was in violation of many of China’s deep philosophical traditions. Confucianism, for instance, talks about the harmony between people and the heavens, while Daoism talks about flowing with the way of nature and Buddhism about having reverence for all life.
The book you mentioned, Mao’s War Against Nature, came into being because I had done a lot of work on memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, and through these I’d heard stories about things like the killing of the sparrows—part of the “Four Pests” campaign during the Great Leap Forward[2]—and cutting down forests in order to fuel backyard furnaces so the country could overtake England in industrial production. And I’d also heard the stories about the so-called educated youth being sent to the borderlands to prepare for war with America in south-west China and with Russia along the northern border. These educated youths, at the same time, were told that they were going t conquer nature and conquer themselves. Through all of this, I became interested in this idea of “conquering nature”. These were times of terrible suffering for the Chinese people, and the suffering of nature and of people during the Mao period is clearly linked in an obvious discursive manner.
Some people say that the environmental problems of China became far worse after China adopted capitalism. That is true, certainly during the modernization period after the death of Mao, when China became in essence the manufacturing hub for the entire world. At the time, it enjoyed enormous economic growth and prosperity, but it also suffered great harms, not only environmental but in terms of public health, too. I think what started this, though, was the construction of nature as an enemy to be conquered. Some of these themes in the Mao period carried over into the post-Mao period and had ongoing effects.
To return to the Mao period: the transformations here involved a top-down, James C Scott-type administrative reordering of the state.[3] There was forcible relocation, political repression and a lack of free speech, particularly during the Anti-Rightist campaign [1957–1959]. Then of course the Cultural Revolution made it impossible for scientists and farmers to speak out against policies that were destructive of nature. Nor were they able to achieve the goals that the state set out to achieve.
One of the slogans of this period was “encircling the lakes in order to create farmland”. This was based on the idea that China lacked enough arable land to feed the population. So the government set entire cities to work—everyone had to stop school or come off work to go to lakes and basically throw rocks into them in order to make them smaller and therefore create more land on which to plant. This didn’t work, of course. But it was attempted at Lake Dianchi, near Kunming, for example, and I had a chance to interview people who participated in this.
Similarly with the sparrow-killing campaign, which was intended to be part of the sweeping away of the four pests. They killed the sparrows because sparrows were eating the grain—another symptom of the anxiety about whether China would have enough grain to stave off future famine—but the sparrows also ate the bugs. So, the following year, there were more bugs, more locusts, but now there were no sparrows to eat them. The people I spoke to often said that it was fun to go out and bang on pots and pans and try to kill all the sparrows, with all the little children involved, but that they felt bad for the sparrows, too.
The Mao period in this way set the stage for the later developments. And, by the time the development of capitalism happened in the country, during the period of reform and opening up, the relationship with nature had already been set.
JM: You said that the Mao-era idea of “conquering nature” contradicted some of the previously reigning philosophical tra-ditions in China—Daoism, Confucianism and others. Did any of those prior traditions have later effects in how nature was conceived? Is there any trace of them today?
JS: When I was interviewing people for Mao’s War, many of them said that this idea of Rén dìng shèng tiān, that “man must conquer nature”, was wrong. The correct slogan, they said, should have been Tiān rén héyī, which means the heavens and people coming together in harmony. And so it was very active in the unconscious, if you will, of the Chinese people that this notion of conquest was not correct. If you were to go back to an earlier period, the emperor would have conducted all kinds of rituals to bring the human world into harmony with the non-human world. So, for many, that was still in the back of their mind.
Now, though, what we’re seeing is not the Communist Party talking about the heavens and the people coming together in harmony, but a whole new philosophical tradition—or what they claim is a whole new philosophical tradition—called “ecological civilization”.
JM: What does this idea of ecological civilization, which is now written into the Chinese constitution, actually mean?
JS: Well, what’s fascinating about the concept is that, first of all, nobody knows exactly what it means. Many people in Communist Party schools and in workplaces, or in the many Communist Party think tanks, spend their time talking about what ecological civilization is and producing books about ecological civilization and framing ecological civilization as Xi Jinping’s great contribution to Marxist thought. Many even frame ecological civilization as the last great stage of Marxism, as Xi Jinping’s gift to all human beings.
But what actually is ecological civilization? Well, there are some slogans that go with it that are important to keep in mind. I think the most important is that “clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver mountains.” That means that there is no contradiction, according to the Chinese state, between prosperity and environmental protection. We environmentalists could debate that, of course. Often it is the case that environmental harm is displaced from a country or region that is able to enjoy environmental protection while the environmental harm flows downstream to weaker, more vulnerable locations. So, you could say that the West for a long time displaced its environmental harms on to China, particularly in the period after Mao died, and that China suffered for it before finally saying, “No more, we’re not taking your filthy manufacturing.” This is what’s called “dirty migration”, where you move a particularly polluting activity or factory elsewhere. Today, in the case of China, they are moving industries and extraction to Africa or to South-East Asia or to Latin America. Now China gets to enjoy the clear waters and green mountains because the environmental damage is displaced from it.
From the 1980s through to the 2000s, when pollution became really severe in China, the Chinese people began to ask questions. Not so much “Where are the sparrows now?”, but things like: “How come I’m dying of lung cancer?” Or, why is the life expectancy in northern China five years lower than in southern China, because of the increased use of coal for heating? These sorts of questions began to be raised in the zeitgeist of the Chinese people. They were asking: what is development for? And is this kind of development really worth it? I may now have a high-rise apartment and a car, but I don’t know my neighbours and I’m dying of cancer.
That posed a challenge for the Communist Party. The Mao period was such a disaster for so many people in China. So, when Deng Xiaoping came to power, he made a tacit deal with the Chinese people: let us stay in power and we will let you get rich and become prosperous; don’t question the basis for the Communist Party’s power, and you will be able to enjoy a nice life. You’re going to have shopping malls. You’re going to have pop music. We’re not going to bother you so much in your personal life. And you’re going to have all kinds of personal freedoms. All as long as you don’t traverse certain key boundaries having to do with the primacy of the Communist Party, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the socialist road, and the principles of Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought—what they call “The Four Upholds”. You don’t cross those red lines, and you don’t talk about Tibet or Xinjiang or Taiwan. Everybody knows you don’t go there. But as long as you don’t go there, you’re “free”, within the bubble.
So, I think that one of the reasons that there’s been such a huge emphasis on cleaning up the environment and nature protection in recent years is that it was necessary in order to keep the support of the Chinese people.
JM: Many of the essays in this issue mine this central contradiction, as you note, between environmentalism or en-vironmental protection and the kind of rapid modernization that has taken place over recent decades in China. There’s this huge build-out of green tech, this huge glut of renewable tech-nology with the potential to fuel the energy transition on a global level. But, at the same time, we’ve got essays on associat-ed harms, for instance to nomadic herders in Inner Mongolia.
JS: Exactly. There’s another element to this, too, which I wrote about in my book with the Chinese scholar Yifei Li, called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet, which is that some of these green initiatives actually serve to increase the power of the state over the individual, particularly in ethnic minority areas where a lot of these nature reserves or national parks have been created. There’s been a sort of fortress conservation model, where nomadic people are forced to settle down, for instance. As James C Scott noted, the state hates nomads because you can’t tax them, you can’t deliver the mail to them, they’re always moving around and so on. That’s not just in China; states all over the world don’t like nomads. Now, though, in the name of environmental protection, they’re able to finally clamp down on these nomadic people.
The other one is the big hydropower plants, the big dams. It’s harder for a community to resist a dam if it’s being built in the name of renewable energy. Then the claim is, “oh, this is something that the state needs, this is a public good.” But in fact, oftentimes, where the electricity is generated is not even close to the end user. There’s also a fair amount of corruption involved in some of these big dam projects. There’s one now being built in the Himalayas, for instance, that’s damming the Brahmaputra. This is terrifying for India and Bangladesh, because it will control the headwaters of one of their key waterways, and this could be manipulated for geopolitical reasons.
JM: I was going to ask you about the issue of dams. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s, we often heard in the West about these dam projects like the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Obviously, this in part reflects the preoccu-pations of—and the kinds of things that get into—the Western media. But there did seem to be real grassroots resistance to some of these mega-projects. Is this sort of resistance still hap-pening? Or has it been dampened in recent years?
JS: In recent years, the space for environmental NGOs has radically shrunk. Some of the groups that became known for resisting dams have been essentially silenced. In some cases, their leaders have been imprisoned or forced overseas. A number of wonderful activists no longer live in China. They simply can’t work there. It’s particularly sad because a lot of these environmental activists would describe themselves as being motivated by their love for China. They love nature. Some of these NGOs were even gently critical of, and thereby helpful for, the overseas reception of Chinese projects on the Belt and Road Initiative, even helping the Chinese government and Chinese corporations to do a better job of working with local communities. Yet many were accused of being spies. So that’s been really unfortunate. I would say that in general, resistance to big dams has been tamped down.
JM: On the point of NGOs: one of our contributors, Michelle Chen, writes about the 2012 legislation introduced by the Chinese state, which restricted what NGOs could do. I know you were friends with Liang Congjie, for instance, who founded the environmental group Friends of Nature. What kind of work did these NGOs do in their heyday in the early 1990s? And what effect did they have?
JS: My friendship with Liang Congjie was very precious to me. He passed away in 2010. He had a very interesting background, in that he was the grandson of Liang Qichao, who, as any Chinese reader would know, was one of the country’s great revolutionaries. He was like a god in China. Liang Congjie’s father, meanwhile, was Liang Sicheng, who was a great architect who tried to save some of the wonderful features like the city wall in Beijing and some of the pagodas during the Cultural Revolution, and for that he was persecuted to death. Later he was sort of resurrected, and he’s now one of the most honoured intellectuals in China. Today, there’s a whole wing of the Tsinghua University Museum dedicated to his drawings and his models. So Liang Congjie had this kind of legacy protection, and for that reason he was able to start that first NGO.
I spoke to him a lot in the early 1990s. He would say that Friends of Nature was always treading a careful line because its members—it wasn’t like in the West, it’s not just writing a cheque and then you get a free calendar or something—actually wanted to do something. So, he had to gauge: tree planting was okay, say, or picking up garbage was okay. But they had to be very careful not to traverse the line that would lead to their being closed down.
Later, Friends of Nature became a very well-established NGO, and it evolved into doing a fair amount of litigation. There are a lot of very strong environmental lawsuits that it led. The group also has what’s called the Green China Yearbook, where it publishes what the year looks like from an environmental point of view. So Liang Congjie’s background in large part explains the longevity and the prestige of Friends of Nature.
What’s happened since these new laws, unfortunately, is that the NGOs that have survived have essentially been forced to have, or have been given, high-level Communist Party members as directors, or they’ll have a Communist Party branch office inside of their facilities. It used to be that you’d have to have tea with the Public Security Bureau every month or so and just tell them what’s going on, being as transparent as possible just to reassure them. Now it’s much more of an internal takeover, if you will.
JM: What would you say is the state of the conversation on climate and nature in China today?
JS: There has been a lot of news coverage of some of the recent large environmental accidents and disasters. So, for instance, the flooding in subway stations has produced plenty of news reports, as have the earthquakes and typhoons. But that’s missing the interesting question of climate change and how the Chinese Communist Party treats the issue.
Historically, when the NGOs enjoyed more freedom, even then they tended to be more focused on biodiversity issues or trash cleanup or environmental education, those kinds of issues. Not so much on climate change. Then again, the Chinese Communist Party has always said, “Climate change is real. We’re worried about it. Don’t worry. We’re taking care of it.” Whereas with some of these other issues, they’ve welcomed community groups who come and educate people about some endangered species or protecting this particular wetland or whatever else.
For climate change, I think it’s fair to say that the Chinese state understands it to be a security issue. It’s a national security issue. So, when you think about sea level rise and the way that it’s affecting Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin—major coastal cities with millions of inhabitants—they’re already building a seawall around Shanghai and trying to create what they call “sponge cities”, with more porous infrastructure to help mitigate the impacts of some of these heavy rains. There’s also, of course, the issue of infectious disease, particularly in southern China.
And then there’s the melting glaciers, which will have a big role in China. It is the Himalayan glaciers that feed the country’s main rivers, like the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. When glaciers melt, in the initial phases, you get floods, but this soon changes. Eventually you stop being able to replenish the rivers, so you get falling aquifers. In turn, when the water tables go down, as is happening in the North China Plain, farmers are forced to dig deeper and deeper to get at water. Ultimately these aquifers also provide drinking water for big cities, like Beijing. All of this, then, is a long-term national planning issue, and they’re looking at 10, 20, 50 years in the future: when these glaciers are gone, what will that mean from a Chinese security standpoint?
The Chinese state takes climate change very seriously. At the same time, they’ve learned that there’s a lot of money to be made with electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels and wind turbines. There’s a lot of money in green technology.
JM: Has this focus on green tech been part of a broader plan, or has it been an accidental outgrowth from other areas? Has it just been, say, a bunch of provinces or cities that have had very specific reasons to invest in EVs or solar panels, or has this been a broader and more joined-up strategy?
JS: I think both are true. On the one hand, there’s a famous saying that Deng Xiaoping made popular: “groping for stepping stones while crossing the river”. Despite the five-year plans and master plans, there’s always been this muddy sort of feeling of finding the way forward, too.
On the global climate change front, China has obviously seen an opportunity, particularly because of the withdrawal of the US and the damage that the US is doing. But they’re also saying, “We’re still a developing country; it’s not fair to ask us not to use our fossil fuels when you all use fossil fuels.” I think they have even seen this as some kind of conspiracy to keep China from developing. China sits on a lot of coal at the same time that a lot of poverty remains in the country—is it fair, they’d ask, to ask us not to use those energy sources?
But there’s also an opportunity to become a leader in climate change. It’s there for the taking. Go to China today and all the cars are electric. I mean, it’s so quiet. It’s so nice. There are solar panels everywhere. If you take a train in China, you just see solar panels on every roof. Is that enough, though? No, of course it’s not enough.
JM: Has there been an appreciable change in the way that the Chinese people have understood nature in recent years.
JS: It’s important to say, firstly, that I don’t want to generalize about the whole of the Chinese people and how they feel about nature. I’m a very serious lover of animals, and to my mind the dominant ethos still seems to be quite instrumental in this respect. They still see other living beings as things you can use. But there are other strands too, many of which are very strong. There’s a strong vegetarian strand, for instance, and there are lots of vegans that I know in the country. There’s also a lack of trust in the food safety system, so there’s been a return to the idea of doing your own farming, even what they call “balcony farming”, where you grow food on your balcony because at least then you know what’s gone into it—a reaction to the many food safety scandals in China.
But there are tensions there. There are competing strands. There’s no overarching position or dogma or rule that governs this issue. A quarter of the people in the world live in China; we can’t generalize, even if it’s tempting to.
When I was writing Mao’s War Against Nature, I interviewed many older people in the country to try to capture their memories of the period. But after I’d finished most of the manuscript, I had the chance to do a kind of lecture tour where I spoke to many younger Chinese people. And I was moved by how they expressed their opinions about how we’re hurting Mother Earth. It was a really sweet, very ecocentric kind of expression. There was quite a lot of knowledge, too, about the sources of environmental harm and how to fix them. Just a real passion among young people. So, there’s a lot of hope there, whether from the state and its ecological civilization, or from ordinary people who are questioning how to live better in a more harmonious way with non-humans.
JM: What would you say is the single most persistent myth in the Western commentary on China’s environmental record?
JS: I think it’s the tendency to treat China as a monolith. It’s a really complex society and country, and the people are very diverse. There are a lot of different things going on. There’s extreme wealth and there’s extreme poverty. There’s ecocentrism as well as anthropocentrism and nature conquest. There’s this idea of there being money in everything versus this kind of “I want to go off to the temple and live a life of poverty” ethos. I would not want to generalize about China or the Chinese people. One of the things I try to do when I’m teaching is to assign memoirs to my students to try to give them a sense of that complexity.
But we also need to highlight something we haven’t spoken about so far, and that is the technocratic approach that the Chinese state tends to adopt. That can be scary, because technology is not always the solution. And often technology is unleashed and it’s poorly understood. So, you know, the idea that you can somehow fix the melting of the glaciers in Tibet by putting blankets over them and shooting silver iodide into the air to make it rain. I mean, that’s a little scary. On the other hand, they’re doing things with nuclear fusion and finding helium three on the far side of the moon. And maybe they are going to come up with some new thing to save the planet.
Judith Shapiro is professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC, and the author of Mao's War against Nature and China’s Environmental Challenges, and co-author with Yifei Li of China Goes Green.
- This interview was recorded remotely on 3 August 2026 between London and Washington, DC. It has been edited for length and clarity.
- The “Four Pests” campaign focused on eradicating flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows from China as part of the Great Leap Forward’s effort to transform the country from an agrarian to an industrialized society. The results were catastrophic: in the case of sparrows, the mass killing of an estimated two billion birds led to severe pest infes-tations in crops in several regions.
- James C Scott was a political scientist whose work on the state, notably in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT 1998), critiqued efforts by states to control, for instance, natural and social systems, according to rigid scientific principle.
