ABSTRACT
Throughout history, nearly every nation-state has carried out some form of deforestation during their phase of development. However authoritarian regimes, such as the one in China after 1949, are often depicted as having employed a deforestation process with such abandon as to leave their nation nearly depleted of vegetation. Deforestation is an environmental problem that affects much more than just the trees themselves. Denuding a nation of its forestland has deleterious effects on the fauna that call the forest home, on the aridity of the surrounding environs, as well as the livelihoods of local villages that have relied on a healthy forest ecosystem for millennia. Under Mao Zedong, and his Great Leap Forward initiative, the general historiography records that a ruthless Chinese Communist Party issued directives to local cadres and village peasants, mandating a ceaseless cutting of forests to accommodate much needed agricultural lands and rampant industrialization. This essay argues, that in the case of China, state decisions were not necessarily always in opposition to environmental care; it further suggests that looking at old sources through a new lens allows historians the freedom to wonder to what depths there was a “war against nature” in Mao’s China.
