From Nature Protection to Environmental Protection: Chinese Environmentalism in the Long 1970s

Kyuhyun Han, University of Rhode Island

This paper examines the critical turn from Nature Protection (ziran baohu) to Environmental Protection (huanjing baohu). Instead of seeing 1978 as a rupture, or focusing on the promulgation of environmental protection laws during the early reform era, the paper examines the rise of environmental protection ideology and the transition from Maoist Nature Protection to Environmental Protection in the long 1970s by focusing on zoology and wildlife conservation. Maoist Nature Protection emerged in the mid-1950s, mostly through interactions among socialist scientists, as an idea that considered extinction and the ecological connections of flora and fauna, called for national surveys of faunal ecology, and proposed measures to preserve animals in their natural settings. The idea largely considered wildlife through the relationship between individual species and their hunters. A different understanding, one linking species extinction to habitat destruction, began to emerge in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. This paper explores how such visions of wildlife conservation changed through the enhanced understanding of pollution, ecological balance, and habitat destruction. By connecting Maoist and Post-Mao China through wildlife conservation science, the paper investigates the Maoist legacy and the reform-era transitions of PRC environmentalism that led to the promulgation of environmental protection laws, which began with China's first Environmental Protection Law in 1979. In doing so, this paper aims to shed light on the crucial events of the environmental turn between Mao and Reform-era China.

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 Presented in Session 198. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (IV): Remaking Modernities