Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network
Episode: Micah S. Muscolino, Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (U Washington Press, 2025)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Micah S. Muscolino
Date: November 25, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode delves into Dr. Micah Muscolino’s new book, which explores the on-the-ground realities of state-led soil and water conservation in rural China from the 1940s through the Mao era. Dr. Muscolino traces the evolution, implementation, and consequences—environmental, political, social, and economic—of conservation policies. Central to the discussion is how these initiatives, conceived by central authorities, affected local communities differently, and how the burden of conservation was distributed among China's rural population.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Book Origins & Author’s Perspective

[03:38]

• Dr. Muscolino’s interest began while researching his earlier book on the ecology of war in China, which examined refugee migration and soil erosion during WWII.
• He discovered continuities between Nationalist and Communist soil and water conservation programs from the 1940s into the 1950s, with policies and personnel bridging both regimes.
• Quote:
  “One of the central questions that I'm asking is who had a choice in the decision to conserve what and how? … I look at the distribution of the costs and benefits of both environmental degradation and conservation.”
  —Dr. Micah Muscolino [06:38]

2. Research Methods & Sources

[08:50]

• Pre-COVID fieldwork enabled Dr. Muscolino to conduct oral histories with villagers who experienced conservation campaigns firsthand, as well as to access archives with government reports, newspapers, and meeting minutes.
• He highlights the richness that came from engaging with both documentary sources and lived memories, sometimes even locating individuals named in archival documents.

3. Historical Background & Early Conservation Efforts

[12:14]

• The first major state-led conservation campaign originated in 1942 during WWII, as part of China’s efforts to harness the northwest’s resources after losing coastal regions to Japanese occupation.
• International influences, especially the global response to the Dust Bowl and the involvement of U.S. soil scientist Walter C. Lowdermilk, played a significant role.
• Local wartime conditions and the need to sustain agriculture drove domestic policy.
• Quote:
  “From the very beginning, this project has a transnational dimension … but it also has specific domestic origins that relate to what is going on in China during wartime.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [13:50]

4. Successes and Failures—Local Realities

[16:18]

• Results were mixed; large-scale plans often failed due to local socioeconomic and environmental constraints.
• However, programs promoting tree and grass planting aligned with local needs (fuel, fodder, fertilizer), receiving enthusiastic endorsement and achieving genuine success.
• The contrast between national ambition and local needs is recurrent.

5. Local Responses: Continuities and Transformations

[21:34]

• Villagers’ reactions ranged from enthusiasm to passive resistance and even open hostility.
• Core concerns included skepticism over unproven techniques, fear of labor demands interfering with farming, and doubts about the effectiveness of conservation strategies.
• After the Communist takeover, land reform weakened local elites who might resist, while CCP grassroots cadres became pivotal for mobilization.
• Quote:
  “The big difference is that the PRC has the kind of organizational apparatus that extends to local society and is able to mobilize the rural populace ... in a way the Nationalists simply never could.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [22:17]

6. Collectivization and Its Contradictions

[27:20]

• The 1950s introduced collectivization, fundamentally altering benefit distribution.
• State procurement of grain meant any improved yields from conservation went to the state rather than local households, deepening rural resentment.
• Conservation campaigns thus increasingly felt like uncompensated burdens on villagers.

7. The Model Village—Deng Jiabao’s Rise and Symbolism

[35:07]

• In the early 1950s, the village of Deng Jiabao was selected as a model for conservation, gaining nationwide fame through state propaganda and official visits.
• While model status brought local prestige and some pride, actual enthusiasm for conservation efforts within the village was mixed, with persistent undercurrents of resistance.
• During the Great Leap Forward, Deng Jiabao became a symbol of militarized mass mobilization and its excesses.
• Quote:
  “With guidance from those state agents ... Deng Jiabao is promoted as a model, and it gains nationwide renown over the next decade as an exemplar for water and soil conservation work.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [35:36]

8. Escalation to Famine

[44:47]

• Conservation increasingly required grueling labor, often at the cost of farming.
• Ambitious landscape transformation diverted resources from subsistence, contributing to famine, especially during the Great Leap Forward.
• Quote:
  “By the late 1950s, conserving water and soil comes to require arduous physical labor that endangered the health and well being of rural people and had lasting effects on their bodies.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [45:04]

9. Gendered Burdens and Social Impacts

[49:16]

• Conservation programs reshaped gender relations; women bore the brunt as resource shortages made their daily burdens heavier.
• Initial improvements (e.g., more fuel, water) briefly made life easier, but as campaigns intensified, women were expected to participate in heavy labor without reprieve from domestic duties, exacerbating hardship.
• Official narratives often used the “success” of conservation to tout social progress (e.g., women more willing to marry into resource-rich villages), but reality was often harsher.
• Quote:
  “There are old women who say that their legs hurt all the time … one woman in particular … gave birth right in the middle of the Great Leap Forward and wasn't able to rest for a month, as would have been customary, [yet] had to go back out and engage in agricultural work [and] conservation projects and also try to find food when grain was scarce.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [53:14]

10. Long-Term Legacies and Structural Inequalities

[55:41]

• By the 2010s, the infrastructure built during conservation campaigns had virtually disappeared from model villages like Deng Jiabao, and their status had faded.
• The extractive model of state-led development left rural areas impoverished, while the gains of industrialization benefited urban centers.
• China’s present-day rural–urban inequality is in part a legacy of these policies. Modern climate change exacerbates these issues, with rural poor most at risk.
• Quote:
  “The campaigns to conserve water and soil … imposed heavier workloads on rural people, while those state grain procurements deprived them of control over the harvest and reduced the benefits that they got … And this cycle exacerbated the marginalization of China's countryside vis a vis its cities that persists to the present day.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [57:01]

11. Reflections and Looking Forward

[62:19]

• Dr. Muscolino is currently finishing an edited volume on grassroots environmental histories in Mao-era China, emphasizing struggle, adaptation, and agency.
• While the tone of his latest work is sobering, he suggests that understanding these histories might help guide more equitable and sustainable policies in the future.
• Quote:
  “Rather than a single narrative of environmental destruction ... it also tries to find some ways in which the legacies of the Mao era can be drawn upon to pursue a more sustainable and, hopefully, also more equitable future.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [63:13]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the central question:
  “Who had a choice in the decision to conserve what and how?”
  —Dr. Muscolino [06:38]

• On gender impacts:
  “By making fuel and water more available, the conservation initiatives ... genuinely improve the lives of rural women. … But as campaigns intensified, women's lives became more and more difficult.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [51:10]

• On enduring hardship:
  “There are old women who say that their legs hurt all the time … traumatic experiences that she still feels the effect of in a sort of corporeal, embodied way.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [53:40]

• On policy disconnect:
  “Local cadres and officials are mobilizing rural people to make the landscape conform to an aesthetic ideal … crop production became a secondary concern as a result.”
  —Dr. Muscolino [47:13]

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Timeline of Major Segments

• [03:38] – Author’s background and book origins
• [08:50] – Research methods: oral histories & archives
• [12:14] – Origins of state conservation, WWII/Nationalist period
• [16:18] – Outcomes: successes/failures, local versus national priorities
• [21:34] – Local responses; comparison of Nationalist and CCP policies
• [27:20] – Collectivization and its impact on incentive structures
• [35:07] – The rise of Deng Jiabao as a model village and its consequences
• [44:47] – The escalation of conservation efforts into famine during the Great Leap Forward
• [49:16] – Social and gender dynamics in conservation labor
• [55:41] – Disappearance of model villages, enduring rural poverty, and inequality
• [62:19] – The future: ongoing projects and lessons for sustainability

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Tone & Language

Dr. Muscolino and Dr. Melcher maintain a measured, academic tone, blending empirical rigor with empathetic storytelling. The discussion is detailed yet accessible, critically dissecting both state narratives and the lived experiences of rural Chinese communities.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a compelling account of the complexities and contradictions inherent in modern China’s conservation efforts. By intertwining environmental, social, and political history, Dr. Muscolino’s research foregrounds the voices and struggles of those most affected by top-down environmental campaigns—demonstrating how local realities both shape and are shaped by national and global forces. The work ultimately raises enduring questions about environmental justice, rural inequality, and the long-term costs of development.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Micah Muscalino, who is here to tell about his book titled Remaking the Earth Exhausting the People the Burden of Conservation in Modern China, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Helping us understand what it means on the ground. When, for instance, the large top down Chinese state tells a particular part of the rural countryside that they need to do a whole bunch of things in order to conserve the environment, in order to do well, whole bunch of things to the environment that are pretty labor intensive and have a lot of economic, political, social impacts and what that actually means for the environments, for the villages, for households, for gender relations, for all sorts of things and really helping us understand how kind of one piece of paper that might be issued in a central government actually plays out on the ground. So we're going to be talking about rural China, but I think there's a lot of ways in which this could probably be applied more broadly than that. So, Maika, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I've never actually done a podcast like this before, so I'm very excited to be here and looking forward to talking about the book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I'm excited to have you as well, but before we get too far into the book's detail, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us what why you decided to write this book? What questions are you grappling with in this project?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. Well, I am Maika Muscalino and I am the Pikovitz Endowed Chair and Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego. The interest that I developed in the history of soil and water conservation actually came into existence while I was working on a previous book called the Ecology of War in China. And in that book I looked at how the migration of refugees to northwest China's ecologically fragile lowest plateau region after Japan's invasion of China in 1937 Accelerated soil erosion in those regions. While I was working on that book, I also found that during the anti Japanese War of Resistance, which is what World War II is called in China, the Chinese Nationalist regime launched China's earliest state led programs to limit erosion and conserve water and soil. This was important in the wartime context because the Nationalist regime had lost its primary economic regions due to the Japanese occupation of the southeast coast, and as a result, it had to rely on the resources of China's interior to support the war effort. And so making sure that agriculture would be productive as possible required making sure that erosion was not out of control and that the soil and the water stayed in the fields. So it emerges in the wartime context, which was the topic of that earlier book. But I also found that these initiatives, which began under the Nationalist regime in the early 1940s, continued after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, when communist authorities mobilized farmers to build terraces, plant trees, and implement various other soil and water conservation measures. So there's actually a continuity between the wartime period, which I worked on previously, and the first decade of the PRC after 1949. So in remaking the Earth Exhausting the People, I've combined environmental and social history to look at what conservation meant for men and women in China's countryside, as well as how it changed the ways they lived and and worked. So I've looked at environmental change and environmental policy making from the perspective of local society in order to ask who gained and who lost when conservation programs transformed interactions between people and nature. One of the central questions that I'm asking is who had a choice in the decision to conserve what and how? And in addressing that question, I look at the distribution of the costs and benefits of both environmental degradation and conservation. By considering how those local histories of conservation intersected with planetary, transnational and national trends, the book gets at interactions between the forces of nature, state directed environmental management policies, and the experiences of China's rural populace. So the approach that I've taken is a multiscaler, one that looks at how large scale processes played out at the local level and and then also how local history had implications that then reverberated outward to have larger scale effects. So that is how the project originated and some of the questions that I've tried to grapple with in writing the book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a very helpful foundation for our conversation, lays out a whole bunch of things for us to go to in more detail. So thank you for starting us off with that. I think the key thing though that we want to add to that foundation is a bit about how you've gone about answering those questions. So can you tell us about sources?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Sure. So most of the research that I did for this book was conducted prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, when access to fieldwork sites and archives in China was a little bit easier than it is right now. Between 2017 and 2019, I had the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews with elderly villagers who participated in the conservation campaigns of the Mao era that I write about in the book. During those interviews, elderly people talked about the origins and development of conservation campaigns, the and socio economic impact of them, and how the work of remaking the land transformed their everyday lives. So a good part of the research for the book involved going to particular places that I read about in written sources and trying to make contact with people who lived through those conservation campaigns and asking them about their experiences and the consequences of those campaigns for their everyday lives. In addition, I visited at least half a dozen Chinese archives where I gathered a whole array of sources that include investigations, work reports, meeting minutes and rare local newspapers, among other kinds of materials. And I kind of engaged in a dialogue between the archival sources and the oral history interviews, because in the process of doing research for this book, I was able to find some of the people who appeared in the printed sources and then talk to them or in some cases their descendants. And so the back and forth between the archival work and the oral histories really enriched the final product of the research. And I was really fortunate and honored to be able to talk to people who were directly affected by these conservation campaigns.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that must have been really interesting and powerful to be in the room with those people. And I'm so pleased that you're here to tell us a bit about what they told you. Before we can understand though their experiences, we kind of need to know about what the impetus was for what they experienced. So can we talk about when and why the state led programs that focused on water and soil in the lowest plateau? When are we starting that? You mentioned kind of the pre communist period. But when are these particular campaigns beginning?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. So as I said before, they started in 1942 during the anti Japanese War of Resistance, as the Second World War is known in China. And during that time, Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist regime selected inclined land near the city of Tianshui in northwest China's Gansu Province as the site of China's earliest state led soil and water conservation project. So there's an experiment area that is established in Chian Shui during that time. That is the beginning of the history that I trace in the book. On the one hand, this conservation initiative was inspired by transnationally circulating anxieties about the role of soil erosion, which some people have called the first global environmental problem, in causing the Dust bowl of the 1930s on the Great Plains of North America. So there is a whole discourse surrounding soil erosion and its consequences that emerges during the 1930s in the wake of the Dust Bowl. And China is very much part of that global discourse. In fact, a renowned American soil conservation expert named Walter C. Lowdermilk oversaw the founding of this water and soil conservation experiment area in Tianshui on behalf of the Chinese Nationalist regime, working in tandem with Chinese conservation experts. So from the very beginning, this project has a transnational dimension. On the other hand, in addition to that agrotechnical internationalism of the 1930s and early 1940s, those conservation programs grew out of conditions that were specific to wartime China. Right. So it's not just transnational, it also has specific domestic origins that relate to what is going on in China during wartime. Specifically, the Japanese seizure of China's main economic centers after the outbreak of full scale military hostilities in 1937 deepened the Nationalist regime's need to manage and develop the resources of China's unoccupied western interior to support economic mobilization. As I said before, so what that means is that for Chinese conservation specialists, those interlocking imperatives of harnessing scarce resources to resist Japanese invasion, developing China's northwestern frontier and and strengthening the nation state required limiting water and soil loss. So this is a conservation initiative that originates during China's war against Japan, and it's informed by both transnational currents and the specific wartime priorities of the Nationalist state.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And does this all work? I mean, to what extent does this whole big plan actually achieve what they wanted?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. Well, that's a very good question. I think that it's fair to say that the outcomes were mixed and that the priorities of the conservation expert and the farmer didn't always coincide. The reason is that the socioeconomic and the environmental constraints that prevailed in gansu during the 1940s hampered these ambitious plans to construct terraces and other infrastructure to limit water and soil loss. So many of the plans didn't pan out. But that's not completely the case. When the experiment area's personnel promoted tree and grass species for conservation purposes, they actually received an enthusiastic response from local people, because this is a part of China in which long term deforestation had destroyed vegetation cover. And not only did that lead to accelerated erosion when the sort of early summer rains fell every year, but it also led to acute shortages of fuel, fodder and fertilizer in the region. And when the experiment area is promoting the planting of certain kinds of trees and also grant species, grass species, as part of its conservation programs, local people really embrace those particular endeavors and they do in fact, enjoy a remarkable degree of success. So if we try to come to sort of a conclusion about the success or failure of these projects, we can say that even though these conservation specialists aspired to rationalize human interactions with the land as part of this large scale wartime drive to develop northwest China, the success or failure of the measures that they advocated depended a great deal on the extent to which they fit with the sociological conditions that existed on the ground in that particular region and spoke to the quotidian needs of the rural populace. So the scale of these projects is national. Right. It's about developing the nation and resisting the Japanese. But the extent to which they succeeded or fail, and the factors that determine those outcomes are local in character. And again, this is about the intersection of multiple scales in the analysis. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely key. To continue to emphasize, what was the response then of the locals to this? Did, for example, it matter, the ideology that these sorts of policies were wrapped up in? Like, for example, you mentioned sort of the fact that it's not the CCP doesn't come in and kind of go, oh, by the way, there's this area we need to focus on. Like, this isn't necessarily a new thing for the people living there. Does it matter to the locals kind of what politics are there? Or is it sort of like whoever the government is, they're coming in and they're telling us what to do and it causes problems?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Well, there is an element of that, but you see many of the same kinds of responses from local people both during the 1940s under the nationalists and during the 1950s under the PRC. The big difference is that the PRC has the kind of organizational apparatus that extends to local society and is able to mobilize the rural populace to carry out these projects in a way that the Nationalists simply never could. Right. And that is in many ways the Fundamental difference. But if we're talking about the similarities right in the responses of local people, one of the things that might account for that continuity is a continuity in personnel. Because many of the same Chinese technical experts who were involved in conservation initiatives in the 1940s on behalf of the Nationalist regime spearheaded the conservation efforts that were undertaken in the 1950s on behalf of the PRC. So you have basically the same people who worked for the Qian Shui experiment area under the Nationalists continuing to carry out those efforts on behalf of the People's Republic of China after 1949. The difference is that in the early 1950s, the scope of those conservation activities expanded from the sort of small scale experimental projects that were carried out under the wartime Nationalist government to far more ambitious demonstration and extension programs that aim to show villagers the importance of preserving water and soil by limiting erosion and encourage them to implement conservation measures. And as I said before, the ccp, unlike the Nationalists, had the capacity to carry out those kinds of conservation campaigns. So even if the personnel remained largely the same, the context in China's countryside had profoundly changed. One factor is the CCP's land reform campaigns, which were undertaken between 1945 and 1940, excuse me, 1952, and which fatally weakened the pre revolutionary local elites, who, as I found in my examination of the conservation projects during the 1940s, presented pretty strong resistance to any measures that would jeopardize their land holdings and were able to stand up pretty firmly to the Nationalist regime. Land reform got rid of those elites, and so the resistance becomes considerably weaker as a result. At the same time, rural cadres who were deeply enmeshed in local societies and at the same time had interests and identities closely tied to the new PRC regime, unlike those pre revolutionary elites, could be counted on to undertake tasks that were assigned to them by their party state superiors. So the CCP had a proven repertoire of mobilization strategies as well as agents on the ground that it could depend upon to put those conservation policies into effect. So there are some continuities in policy and personnel, as well as some local perceptions of these conservation programs. But there are also some fundamental changes in the Chinese countryside that give the Chinese Communist Party the capacity to mobilize people and put those conservation measures into effect.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's very helpful to understand both the continuity and change aspects. Obviously, as you've mentioned, land reform is a really key part of this. If we move further into the 1950s, we get a whole bunch of other big deal CCP programs like of course, collectivization. What does that do to all of this? I mean, does it make it worse? How does it kind of make sense to go together to say, on the one hand, we want to do all these conservation efforts, but also there's these national programs going on that may not go together that well?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. So I. Before we address that very important question, I wanted to say a little bit more about the responses of local people and how they engaged with these campaigns, because you have a kind of mix of responses that I've found in my research. So there are some villagers who enthusiastically join in these conservation campaigns. Right. This mobilization is not unsuccessful by any means. Right. People do, in fact, take part, and some do so quite enthusiastically. There are many more people who simply went along with them. But there are also people who engaged in various forms of passive or active resistance that involved everything from doing work in a kind of perfunctory manner to verbally attacking and even sometimes physically attacking local cadres. So one of the more colorful parts of the book relates to the various things that local people said and the things that they did as a way of talking back to the state agents on the ground who are trying to get them to participate in those conservation programs. Why did people have that kind of response? Well, there were many people who had an aversion to adopting unproven techniques that might not yield favorable results. The people in the countryside are primarily concerned with alleviating resource shortages and ensuring their own household subsistence. There are also people who are doubtful about conservation's effectiveness. They are uneasy about the amount of labor required, and many suspect that it would disrupt farming activities, because if you're moving dirt, you're not tilling the land and planting crops. And so there can be a kind of contradiction there. As they're engaging in this kind of resistance, Villagers deployed multiple vocabularies to articulate their views of these water and soil conservation campaigns. There are some who criticize conservation in terms of religious and geomantic beliefs that question the human ability to transform the environment. So feng shui beliefs have a real significance here. But others couch those concerns about conservation interfering with farming and decreasing crop output in the CCP's approved language of increasing production. So you have multiple vocabularies of opposition that are used by people who are not entirely willing to buy into this mobilization. And so that's one thing that I talk about in some detail in the book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, the kind of mixed responses I think is really interesting, and especially when we get into kind of some of the specific places that are at the focus of these campaigns and the way in which the CCP really wants people to be reacting versus kind of what's actually happening on the ground.

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

So the thing that I found in looking at those responses at the local level is that villagers are expressing persistent dissatisfaction with the pressure that conservation placed on work time. They also voiced ongoing concerns that conservation work would interfere with farming. And they also had lingering doubts about conservation's effectiveness. Right. This is a persistent theme that one sees throughout the 1950s, even as some local people did in fact take part in these conservation campaigns with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The difference is that after 1953, the PRC party states Unified Purchase and Supply System set procurement quotas for grain and other agricultural products, thereby depriving households of control over the crops that they produced. Right. What that meant was that even though conservation may have increased crop yields, the state's grain extraction system cut into rural people's share of the harvest and reduced the benefits they received for their labor. Right. And that means that loss of control over distribution of the harvest added a new layer to the suspicions, fears and resentments that many people harbored toward the party states calls to remake the land in the name of conserving water and soil. So the process of collectivization leads to a marked change in which the benefits of conservation were distributed due to the imposition of this system of state grain extraction. So people are doing all this work. Right. There's all this uncertainty about whether those labor investments are are going to yield the intended results. And after 1953, even if they are successful, the increases in agricultural output aren't accruing to the local producers because the state is taking control of the surplus and directing it to its own ends.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So that doesn't sound like a great situation for people on the ground, despite the CCP kind of wanting perhaps to claim otherwise. And that seems to be kind of a theme that goes throughout. You talk about, for example, particular place in the book that is used very explicitly as an example village by the government, Deng Jiaobao. But what does that mean actually for the people who live there? And why this village? And how did people in other villages think about this? I mean, that's kind of an odd thing in a way to sort of say, given what you've told us about the nuances and the tension of all of this, to say, actually, no, wait, it's perfect. Look here.

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right, so this has to do with a CCP policy making mechanism that involves promoting model experiences and then calling on other locales to emulate those model locales. And so with specific reference to Deng Jiabao beginning In the early 1950s, specifically in 1952, there are technical personnel from Tianshui who had worked previously for the Nationalist regime, who worked with local cadres in Gansu's Wushang county, where the village of Deng Jiabao is located, to make it into a model for China's battle against soil erosion. There are different reasons given for why Deng Xiabao was selected. Part of it is that it's not too far from the county seat. It's also a place where the land is steeply inclined, so erosion is a real problem, so it has the relevant conditions. And it's also close enough to the county seat that, as the sources say, leadership would be convenient. At any rate, with guidance from those state agents, namely the technical personnel and the local cadres, Deng Jiabao is promoted as a model, and it gains nationwide renown over the next decade as an exemplar for water and soil conservation work. And there are articles about Deng Jiabao that frequently appear in the People's Daily and other government publications. So in that regard, as I said before, Deng Jiabao's model experience resembled those of other locales that the PRC party state valorized and promoted to advance its policy making priorities. So if we look at what is said about Deng Jiabao in these state sources, the official propaganda promised that conservation would bring environmental improvement and future economic prosperity. And that was a message that resonated with many villagers. Right? Deng Xiabao's accomplishments, which are published via, or excuse me, which are publicized via firsthand observation visits and state sponsored publications, demonstrated conservation methods to cadres and villagers from other locales. They offered tangible proof of their results and they convinced people elsewhere to undertake similar efforts. Eventually, in 1957 and 1958, eight party state authorities launched what's called a Deng Jabao campaign to encourage emulation of the villages experience conserving water and soil throughout Gansu Province and indeed throughout China as a whole, which broadened its influence even more. So for local people in Deng Xiabao, specifically the local cadres, the attainment of this model status gave them a considerable amount of prestige. They became very important people as a result of these campaigns. And indeed, the elderly folk I interviewed in Deng Jiabao spoke nostalgically about the days when cadres from their village had the honor of attending conferences in Beijing. They shook hands with Jo En Lai and they saw Chairman Mao in person. Right? This is something that the people who live in this village, which is currently not an important place, and not a particularly prosperous one. Look back upon with fond memories. But if we look at the evidence from the 1950s, right, and even if we ask people more specific questions about what was going on in the 1950s within the village, it's clear that although some villagers enthusiastically joined in these conservation campaigns, and there are some who just went along with them, there are others that are engaging in passive and active forms of resistance that local cadres have to find ways to deal with. So there is this sort of undercurrent of resistance that exists even when this campaign to emulate Deng Xiabao and conserve water and soil is at its height. The apex comes during the Great leap forward from 1958 to 1961, when Deng Jiabao came to symbolize reliance on militarized ideals and organizational structures to alter the environment. So everybody is put into these production brigades. And there is this sort of militarized language that is used to talk about fighting soil erosion and fighting floods and droughts and natural disasters that becomes intensified in an unprecedented way during the Great Leap Forward. Furthermore, by urging these different administrative units and collectives to compete with one another, the campaign to learn from Deng Jiabao amplified the scale and intensity of conservation in many other locales, with armies of workers compelled to labor over vast areas with scarcely any rest. So you have a local model, right? Deng Jiabao is just this one small village. But the repercussions of promoting Deng Jabal as a model for water and soil conservation spread to many, many other locales that are emulating what is put forth as Deng Xiabao's model experience for fighting soil erosion. And at the same time, as Deng Xiaobao gains importance during the Great Leap Forward, people from other areas are sent to Deng Xiabao to assist in further campaigns to to remake Deng Xiaobao's landscape. So this is another instance where you have local history getting scaled up to the regional or the national level.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's really quite intense in a lot of ways, especially kind of amongst everything else going on. Such a spotlight being put there and with such consequences for local people. I mean, the number of times you just said the word sent, right? People are sent from one place to the other. Like there's not a lot of choice necessarily going on here, at least kind of beyond the individual act of resistance, active or passive. How does all of this escalate further though and end up in a situation of famine?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right, so as I said before, initially, you can see that conservation did bring some environmental improvements to places like Deng Jabao. But the full scale collection collectivization of agriculture, particularly with the formation of these really big communes during the Great Leap Forward, meant that these conservation campaigns weighed more heavily on rural people. So even under the best of circumstances, doing water and soil conservation was extremely hard work. Right? But by the late 1950s, conserving water and soil comes to require arduous physical labor that that endangered the health and well being of rural people and had lasting effects on their bodies. So if you talk to elderly people in the countryside, they'll talk about how they had to work so hard during the Great Leap Forward that they're still feeling the effects, right? Physically, their legs hurt, their backs hurt, what have you. So this is a manifestation of the fact that for the rural populace, conservation came to go hand in hand with intensified labor demands, diversion of time and energy away from other forms of production, and heightened exploitation. So remember, there is this grain procurement system that is siphoning the surplus out of the countryside and devoting it to the PRC states industrial development plans. So if we look at what's going on at the local level in places like Deng Jiabao during the Great Meat Forward, you have the mobilization of the entire workforce of Deng Xiaobao, along with commune members from nearby areas for water and soil conservation campaigns that are carried out at the expense of farming. So there are sources that talk about people digging up plots of potatoes in order to level the land and make it look good for higher ups who are coming to inspect. And obviously, that has extremely harmful repercussions in terms of food security, as local cadres and officials are mobilizing rural people to make the landscape conform to an aesthetic ideal that would earn praise and recognition from outside observers. Crop production became a secondary concern as a result. The diversion of labor from farming to conservation projects, the prioritization of the esthetic experience. Excuse me, the aesthetic appearance of the land, basically how it looks over the practicalities of agriculture and heavy state grain procurements come together to lead to famine. And in Wushan county, where Deng Xiabao is located, this subsistence crisis took a particularly heavy toll. And part of that has to do with this emphasis on. On making the land look a certain way through conservation campaigns at the expense of attending to grain production.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a very. I mean, in some ways, convoluted chain of events, but you've laid out kind of how we get to that result. What does this mean, then, for kind of everyday relations for actual people? What does this mean for kind of how. How households are supposed to relate to each other? In the book, for example, you talk about gender relations and the role of women and the impacts of that.

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Yeah, so that is something that is a thread that extends throughout, particularly the later chapters of the book. One thing that I have argued is that conservation campaigns were deeply interconnected with changing gender relations and shifting conceptions of women's work, both inside and outside of the household. So in Gansu and other parts of north and northwest China, the gender division of labor dictated that women, females, sometimes young girls, did the daily work of gathering fuel and fetching water. And what that meant was that the costs associated with the depletion of those resources due to the destruction of vegetation cover and also erosion and runoff fell disproportionately on rural women, since scarcity of biofuel and water forced them to spend more time and effort fulfilling those basic needs. Right. So if there is no fuel, you have to travel really far to find something to burn. If the water just rushes off the land in these deluges that happen when there's no vegetation to hold it in place and the land becomes very arid, water is difficult to find. That means that women's lives were more difficult as a result. It also means that by making fuel and water more available, the conservation initiatives that were carried out in the early 1950s in particular, genuinely improve the lives of rural women. So if you're planting trees, planting grasses, that makes it easier to get fuel. If you have ponds and reservoirs to catch the rainwater and keep it from running off, that means it's easier to fetch water and women have to do less work as a result. So to the extent that these conservation measures were beneficial, they were especially helpful to rural women. Also. One thing that is particularly noteworthy is that the state publications praising Deng Xiabao's achievements also presented conservation in gendered terms. Right? They emphasized that the amelioration of environmental conditions reconfigured gender relations by enabling unmarried men to, in poor resource starved villages like Deng Jiabao, to find wives. Right? So what is said is that previously women didn't want to get married to men in Deng Xiaobao because finding water was so difficult. They'd have to go down the hillside to get water and then carry the water back up. And that is just a lot of hardship. But one of the indicators of conservation's success, according to these state sources, is that there were forms of infrastructure that kept the water in place and prevented it from running off. So women didn't have to travel as far and their lives got better as a result. On the other hand, there is a dissonance that existed between, between this propaganda and the experience of conservation for rural women, especially after the 19, the late night, excuse me, especially after the mid-1950s when they had to balance the heavy physical work of transforming the environment with their household responsibilities. So women have to take part in conservation campaigns at the same time. They have to attend to childcare, they have to cook for their families, they have all of these other activities related to social reproduction that don't go away, even when there are these increasingly intense and large scale conservation campaigns going on. And that just means that women's lives become more and more difficult, right? If they have to go out and help with building terraces, who's going to take care of the children, who's going to cook? All of these are dilemmas that have to be resolved. Ultimately, the conservation campaigns of the Great Leap Forward and the subsistence crisis to which they contributed affected women's domestic lives, threatened the subsistence of their families, and as I said before, had enduring physical effects on their bodies. There are old women who say that their legs hurt all the time. Like one woman in particular who I talked to said that her legs hurt all the time because she gave birth right in the middle of the Great Leap Forward and wasn't able to rest for a month, as would have been Customary, she had to go back out and engage in agricultural work conservation projects and also try to find food when grain was scarce. And, you know, she talks about this in terms of these traumatic experiences that she still feels the effect of in a sort of corporeal, embodied way.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. The impacts of this for the much longer term are really clear in what you've told us so far and of course, in the book, in even more detail. I wonder if you can tell us more about any of the legacies of this project. I mean, obviously for the individual people, as you've just described, but this part of China is still really pretty poor compared to others. Is that also a legacy of these efforts?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. So when I visited Deng Jabao Between 2017 and 2019, I found that the water conservancy infrastructure that local people had devoted so much time and effort to building and maintaining in the 1950s, like Deng Xiabao's renown as a model in the PRC's battle to preserve water and soil, had disappeared. So in the late 1950s, there are articles about Deng Xiabao in People's Daily. It's a place that state sources say that people should emulate. And now nobody has heard of Deng Xiabao. Right. It has completely fallen from prominence. And the water conservancy infrastructure, the conservation infrastructure that people expended so much labor to put in place in the 1950s has largely disappeared as well. So one of the things that the state sources talk a lot about in the 1950s, and they mention frequently, is that Deng Xiaobao was able to make ponds and reservoirs, and as a result, they had ducks. Right. Because ducks live in water. And in order to keep water there for the ducks to swim in, you have to have ponds and other things. And so the fact that people in Deng Jabao could raise ducks was seen as this great accomplishment. Right, because they had the water for the ducks to live in. But if you go to Deng Jiabao now, there are no ducks. It is an arid village that does not have any standing pools of water or anything like that. And when I did my field work, I was directed to the places that used to have ponds and reservoirs, and they're just piles of dirt now or arid hillsides. So this is another indication of how there has been an erasure or a disappearance of Deng Xiabao's past achievements. When you think about how the legacies of these projects relate to why it's such a poor part of China today, you can say that the campaigns to conserve water and Soil that were undertaken during the collective era imposed heavier workloads on rural people, while those state grain procurements deprived them of control over the harvest and reduced the benefits that they got in return for their work. So people are working harder, they're getting less. And this is part of the structure of the PRC's political economy during the collective era. Right? It's a feature, not a bug. For the party state to extract surplus from the countryside, members of agricultural collectives had to grow crops and extract surplus from the land. And then to contend with the accelerated erosion of this fragile, lowest soil that came about. As a result, rural communities had to devote even more of their time and energy to conservation work. And this cycle exacerbated the marginalization of China's countryside vis a vis its cities that persists to the present day. And as I. As we've said already, the rural communities that labored to conserve water and soil in earlier periods remain far poorer than the residents of China's cities, whose industrial development those rural people facilitated via state accumulation. And what's worse, the CO2 emissions that are derived from that industrialization have in turn contributed directly to anthropogenic climate change, which makes life even harder for marginalized rural people in northwest China, where air temperature has risen, annual precipitation has decreased, and droughts have started to occur more frequently. And the rural people in those poor and ecologically vulnerable areas have fewer resources to cope with climatic changes that exacerbate environmental hazards, such as uneven rainfall and unstable soils, than their downstream urban counterparts. So in China, as elsewhere, it's not the economically and socially disadvantaged who disproportionately bear the costs of climate change and environmental destruction. And that's a recognition that kind of impelled the research that I did for this book. The thing that I wanted to emphasize is that the history of water and soil conservation in modern China can't be understood in. In isolation from patterns of state accumulation, uneven development, and rural urban inequality that persist all the way up until the present day. So if the cost of China's industrialization, as many scholars have argued, fell mostly on China's rural population, the cost of conservation did as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, and this goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning about the kind of different scales of this analysis and how interlinked they very much are. And you've taken us now from the past to the present and painted a pretty bleak picture of the future, at least for rural China. But I wonder if we can end on that theme of the future, though perhaps somewhat more optimistically. With your future, particularly because you mentioned that this book grew out of your previous one. Has this spurred on a next project for you? Is there anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

Right. So at the moment I am not entirely sure what my next single authored book is going to be about. But in addition to teaching and doing a lot of committee work, I'm currently putting the finishing touches on an edited volume that's titled Revolutionary Grassroots Environmental Histories of China's Mao Era, which is also going to be published by University of Washington Press in. Well, it's scheduled for March 2026. And this is an edited volume that brings together case studies by various scholars at different stages of their careers that show how policies of rapid industrialization collided with material scarcity, grassroots resistance, and the unruly agency of of nature itself. So in many ways, the approach that's employed in the edited volume aligns with the one that I adopted in my single authored book. But to end on a slightly more optimistic note, rather than a single narrative of environmental destruction or even one of exploitation or, you know, sort of grassroots hardships, the book is one that outlines overlapping histories of struggle, sacrifice and adaptation. And rather than having a single narrative of environmental destruction, it also tries to find some ways in which the legacies of the Mao era can be drawn upon to pursue a more sustainable and hopefully also more equitable future. So the book is, I hope, one that'll give insights into the legacies of revolution, the politics of scarcity, and also the enduring entanglement of the human and natural worlds.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that does do what I asked and end us on a somewhat more optimistic note. And of course, while you are finishing off that next project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Remaking the Exhausting the the Burden of Conservation in Modern China, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. So, Maika, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Micah Muscalino]

No, thank you so much, Miranda. I've really enjoyed the conversation. It's been a pleasure.

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