Abstract
China’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–60, an attempt to increase agricultural production through increased labor inputs, resulted in the greatest famine in world history from 1959 to 1961. Most histories emphasize the political mistakes of this period, which were disastrous. But to understand how the political mistakes led to the famine, here I concentrate on the ecosystem mismanagement that led to drastic drops in food production. To explain these effects, I use the concept of the “Four Horsemen of the Ecopocalypse:” over-emphasis on single variables, cross-scale mismatches, top-down panaceas, and ignorance of system feedbacks, all of which eliminated the resilience of agro-ecosystems to both internal contradictions and external disturbances.
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Notes
Ben Fitzhugh reminds me that I am not the first to use the “four horsemen” motif to describe ecosystem disasters; William Ruddiman (2005) uses this figure to describe the role of the original biblical horsemen—war, pestilence, famine, and death—in the probable decline of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide in the early Middle Ages.
This article deals only with “China Proper,” the area mostly in the east and south of the People’s Republic, inhabited mostly by Han Chinese and possessing a millennia-long history of intensive agrarian cultivation centered around cereal grains. The Great Leap also affected the ecologies of pastoral areas in China’s north and northwest and of upland extensive agro-silvio-pastoralism in the southwest and south, but they are outside the scope of this analysis.
The Great Leap, however, involved more than just a “high modernist” ambition to control and regulate the natural environment. The Chinese Communists had this sort of ambition, but they pursued it from the beginning of their regime in 1949 and continue to pursue it today. The Great Leap involved a paradoxical combination of this high modernist scientific control agenda with extreme voluntarism and reliance on folk wisdom, combined with extreme political radicalism. Mere high modernism was literally not the half of it—more like a third.
Systems theorists have conventionally called these “negative feedback” in the sense that a stimulus provokes a response in the opposite (negative) direction from the original stimulus. However, “negative feedback” in our popular discourse has come to mean “adverse criticism,” so I adopt the term “balancing feedback” as more intuitive. Similarly, the systems term “positive feedback” does not mean “praise,” but rather a response in the same (positive) direction of the stimulus, leading to a vicious (or sometimes “virtuous”) circle. So I adopt Meadows’s corresponding term, “reinforcing feedback” (2008: 27–34).
If the 25 billion m3 is accurate, the road would indeed stretch to the moon. If there were in fact 100 million people working, they would have had to move 250 m3 of earth each. From personal experience, I found it possible at age 70 to move 3–5 m3 of earth in a day (albeit for no more than two days in a row). If most workers were well under 70, and they worked 60 days apiece at this pace, I guess they could have done it. Or this may be one of the first instances of “rocket” statistics that culminated in reported grain yields of 10,000 jin per mu, as reported in 1958. See below.
In earlier stages of collectivization, a small percentage of land was left to individual households to farm independently. In Chinese these were called ziliu di, or “land left to [families] themselves,” but the English-language literature on Chinese collective agriculture developed a conventional translation as “private plots.”
Women’s work in collective settings—such as canteens or childcare centers—as opposed to housework, was awarded a few points, but not nearly as many as would be awarded for agricultural work (Brown 2017: 45–46).
The terms shen geng深耕 and shen fan 深翻 are conventionally translated as “deep plowing.” However, it is clear from local accounts that a lot of this deep turning over (深翻) was done with shovels and hoes as well as plows, so it seems that “deep tilling” is a better translation, because one can turn the soil over with either a plow or a shovel.
There is a parallel to the classical horsemen of the apocalypse here: war, famine, and pestilence lead to death, in the same way that maximizing single variables, cross-scale mismatches, and panacea solutions led to disruption of ecosystem feedbacks, which of course was the proximate cause of famine and death in the Great Leap.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Ben Fitzhugh, Denise Glover, Jack Hayes, and two anonymous reviewers for incisive comments on drafts of this article.
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Harrell, S. The Four Horsemen of the Ecopocalypse: the Agricultural Ecology of the Great Leap Forward. Hum Ecol 49, 7–18 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-020-00179-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-020-00179-9