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Readings for Unit 4: MODERNITY, DEVELOPMENT, REVOLUTION
If there was an uneasy conflict between sustainability and resilience, embodied however imperfectly in the ethnoecology of traditional local communities, and the aims of the imperial state, the conflict became much sharper and unequal, and the interval of sustainability much less, when the Communists took over. This section first looks at the ideals of the Communist Party-State and then shows the effects on local communities of policies derived from these ideals.
Thursday, February 7: Socialism, Modernity, and Environmental Havoc
Whatever the Chinese Communists were thinking, they were, in James Scott's words, "Seeing Like a State." So start out reading his chapter from that book on Authoritarian High Modernism, and then, with this in mind, start reading your required text, Judith Shapiro's Mao's War Against Nature as an example of high modernism. Read as much as you can for today, but finish the book before you start on the paper for this unit.
In class, we will discuss the relationship of socialism to other types of High Modernism, and try to figure out if what happened in China is significantly different from what happened in capitalist countries when they trashed their own environments as they industrialized.
Tuesday, Feburary 12: Han Farmers Now
As soon as the Communists took over China in 1949, they began trying various top-down ways of increasing food supply, particularly grain production. Here we will look at the effects on, and reaction by, local communities.
For a little background, read the "Food" chapter of your required text, Vaclav Smil's China's Past, China's Future, paying particular attention to pages 109-120. Then look at some local case studies:
- We can begin with a local account of the Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine that you have been reading about in Shapiro's book: A Life and Death Struggle from Edward Friedman, Mark Selden, and Paul Pickowicz's Chinese Village, Socialist State.
- Then, for an experiential picture of what rice farming was like with a few major changes in the first part of the 21st century, read What does the material village world look like? from Goncalo Duro dos Santos's dissertation about a north Guangdong village.
- Finally, an account of the way local people sometimes react to externally imposed changes in village ecology, read Jing Jun's Environmental Protests in Rural China.
On the basis of this and other material, we will talk about many facets of the changes in the ecology of Chinese rural communities.
Thursday, February 14: Pastoralists Now
There seems to be a particularly sharp conflict, as James Scott would predict, between pastoralism, with its fluid movements of people and animals across the landscape, and the High Modernist projects of classifying and boxing in. Dee Williams has written provocatively about this conflict in Inner Mongolia; read his Representations of Nature on the Mongolian Steppe.
In addition, we have a special guest speaker today, Astrid Cerny, who is finishing her doctorate in geography at the UW with a study of Kazak nomadic pastoralists in Xinjiang as they face various aspects of modernization, globalization, etc. She asks that you read a chapter of her dissertation concerned with One Family's Decisions in the Face of Change, and also suggests that, if you are intensely interested in this, you also have a look at The Grassland Law of the PRC. She will come in, give a beautiful slide show, and answer your questions.
Tuesday, February 19: Upland Minorities Now
Back to the Akha and the Nuosu. Read the rest of Border Landscapes, and listen to me talk about the Ecohistory of the Baiwu Valley in terms relating explicitly to sustainability and resilience. I will also talk about opportunities for cooperative research in Sichuan.
And finally, a very different local case from the Han Chinese, as Huang Yu discusses her research on the intensification of commercial shrimp farming and its relation to globalization, the Chinese economy, and the Chinese environment.
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