Mad Maoism

"Mao's war against nature" is a book about environmental destruction and other man-made disasters in China during the rule of Mao Zedong. The book deals with four specific events during the Maoist period: the Anti-Rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Third Front and the campaign to learn from Dazhai.

The Anti-Rightist campaign silenced scientists and intellectuals who tried to warn the Communist authorities about the impending population explosion and the dangers of the Sanmenxia Dam. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao's artificial attempt to catch up with Britain and the United States in terms of steel production, led to large-scale deforestation and a famine killing about 30 million people. The campaign to learn from Dazhai was an attempt to increase grain production by terracing mountains and turn wetlands into farmlands. It, too, was a spectacular failure. The military preparations during the Third Front did lead to some successes in industrializing previously barren areas, but they also displaced millions of "educated youth" and caused the usual large scale deforestation, destruction of lakes, etc.

Sometimes, the expectations were almost comically silly, as when the Maoists claimed that more seeds on the same field would lead to an increased harvest, when in reality the seeds simply competed against each other, leading (at best) to the same harvest. Or when party commissars instructed the peasants to dug deeper into the fields, hoping that this would enable the extra seeds to sprout. Actually, it just destroyed the soil. During the campaign to learn from Dazhai, insane attempts to make grain grow on almost barren hills seem to have been the rule rather than the exception.

The propaganda was equally silly. During the Great Leap Forward, claims reached the fantastic. Genetic manipulation invented by ordinary peasants, sometimes children, were said to have made roosters bear chicks. Pear trees yielded apples, pigs were bred with cows, and crossing cotton and tomato plants were said to have created red cotton! Unsurprisingly, the propaganda was later exposed. Thus, the "self sufficient" village of Dazhai, which supposedly managed to raise its agricultural output without outside support, was actually heavily assisted by funds and manpower from the People's Liberation Army.

What caused this insane orgy in environmental destruction? Mao's "socialist utopianism", to use the author's expression, was the prime culprit. Maoism was characterized by a strong voluntarism. Mao believed that one could transform both human nature and material conditions by unleashing mass mobilizations. He seems to have interpreted this quite literally, as if the laws of nature could somehow be nullified by sheer will power and force. Mao wanted to modernize and industrialize China, somehow assuming that this could be done in a relatively short time by sheer exertion. The relatively swift industrialization of the Soviet Union may have loomed large in Mao's mind. When China became internationally isolated, Mao feared an attack from both the United States and the USSR, which (to his mind) made a speedy creation of a military-industrial complex necessary. Another factor is the usual Marxist emphasis on the need for socialism to expand the productive forces even beyond those of capitalism.

Despite everything, Mao eventually did accomplish some kind of economic growth, but the real spurt didn't began until the post-Mao era, which the author (who seems to be ultra-Green) opposes as well. But that's another show!