Do your own research on a certain issue mentioned in the textbook and post on the discussion board. Prompt: What’s the issue that interests you the most in Chapter 9? Ho

309

Historic Strains on China’s Environment
Ma Rong discussed human problems in Chapter 8; in this chapter, I discuss
the environment in which humans live and their interactions with it. De-
spite improvements in some areas in recent years, the overall quality of
China’s environment has deteriorated considerably since the founding of
the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The PRC’s current population of
over 1.4 billion may already have exceeded the number that the country can
hope to support at a good standard of living by relying on its own resources
and has led to a massive growth in food imports (Xie Gaodi et al., 2012).
Moreover, rapid unequal economic growth has led to environmental social
unrest, which has increased significantly since 2000 (Steinhardt and Wu,
2016). Judith Shapiro (2012) identifies five intertwined drivers of recent
change in China’s environmental policy: globalization, national identity
(the views of what China should be), governance (reach of the state), civil
society, and a desire for environmental justice. The political system is
changing slowly, with the many local decisions that affect the environment
often remaining beyond central government control. Even the most positive
observers continue to see the combination of a huge population and eco-
nomic activity within a framework lacking political transparency placing
serious strains on China’s environment.

Modification of China’s environment goes back a long way, as Rhoads
Murphey explained in Chapter 3. When humans first settled on the Loess
Plateau in north central China (see Map 2.5), the area was probably covered
with a mixture of forests and grasslands. Intensive use of some of these
lands led to a reduction in vegetation and serious erosion on the plateau
centuries ago. Similar problems occurred elsewhere as the proto-Chinese

9
China’s

Environmental Problems
Richard Louis Edmonds

people proliferated, spread out, and incorporated other groups over the past
2,000 years (Edmonds, 1994:28–35). The Han Chinese evolved some eco-
logically sound agricultural practices that improved the quality of the soil,
but they stripped the land of forests as they spread southward (Vermeer,
1998:247–259). As they spread more slowly to the north and west, they
began to farm virgin land and substantially degraded many fragile areas
(Elvin, 2004; Marks, 2011).

During the 1950s, the Chinese focused on reconstructing a war-torn
country and devising means to promote rapid economic growth. Although
these efforts led to better attempts at hygiene and health care, the govern-
ment generally viewed natural resources as a commodity to be exploited to
create wealth. During the years of the so-called Great Leap Forward
(1958–1961), large numbers of trees were felled for fuel to produce low-
quality steel in small, highly polluting home furnaces. From 1960 to 1962,
China was