Seeing the Forest Like a State: Forest Management, Wildlife Conservation, and Center-Periphery Relations in Northeast China, 1949–1988

Kyuhyun Han
History
UC Santa Cruz

My research explores the roots of China’s environmental consciousness through the lens of Northeast Chinese (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) forestry conservation and wildlife protection. It is conventional wisdom that the Maoist state neglected environmental protection in favor of a drive to harness the environment for socialist construction. Only after Mao’s death, scholars assert, were laws promulgated to protect the environment, and it was not until the 1980s that China began to concern itself with environmental consciousness. My dissertation contests the prevalent idea that China in the 1950s and the 1960s was environmentally unfriendly and ignorant by showing that the discussion of environmental protection in China has long historical roots dating back to the 1950s and the 1960s. It places exceptional emphasis on the role of scientists—who actively participated in national and international discussions on environmental sciences—and the process of conservation policy-making. Moreover, my dissertation suggests that diverse and complicated factors such as bureaucratic compromises, the local economy, and the government’s relationship to Indigenous Northeast peoples were behind the environmental degradation of the People’s Republic.