Following the first part of Prof. Judith Shapiro’s oral history exploring her experiences in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in this piece, we dive into her academic life as a scholar of environmental politics.
Prof. Shapiro is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Environment, Development, & Health at Washington D.C.’s American University. Her research focuses on environmental politics and Chinese politics under Mao. As stellar as her academic credentials and publications are, she had an equally mesmerising life before entering academia. She taught English in Changsha in 1979, as China began to open up to the world. She became the first American to marry a Chinese person in the People’s Republic, a marriage that required the personal approval of Deng Xiaoping and was ultimately instrumental in the pro-democracy movement in Hunan in 1981. Prof. Shapiro and her then-husband Liang Heng became a high-flying writer couple in the ‘80s, publishing multiple best-sellers on life inside China that earned them great fame. In the ‘90s, she oversaw projects on China at the National Endowment for Democracy to help build China’s nascent civil society. Since the late ‘90s, she has immersed herself in the study of Asia’s environmental politics with a focus on China, which we discuss today.
Xi is often contrasted with Mao in political authority, ideology, style, and policy. As a student of China’s environment from Mao to now, Prof. Shapiro is the perfect person to address their similarities and distinctions, and guide us in understanding the mysterious party politics behind China’s environmental policies, as well as the civil society activism that erupted in the past three decades in the environment space. We will traverse China’s environment through her personal experience as a scholar and China watcher.
Enjoy!
Leo
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A vegetarian’s journey into Mao’s war against nature
Last time we spoke about your early career, from becoming a teacher in China in the ‘70s and ‘80s and how that turned into writing several books about China, until joining the National Endowment for Democracy. After that, you made a switch to focusing on the environment, and China’s environment in particular. Could you talk about that?
When I left the NED I hoped to work on the environment. I’d applied for jobs at some environmental groups, but didn’t have the experience and the background. I went back to the idea of getting a PhD, as some people had urged me to. I’d been more or less in the academic world, teaching at Penn, Villanova, or the New School. People always assumed I had a PhD.
my intellectual and emotional interest is primarily in the non-human world. I could watch another non-human creature for hours.
And so, getting the PhD was less a question of getting a qualification and more for me an opportunity to do a career shift, to train myself in a different field. But also because I knew that the dissertation would force me to do a single-authored book. Not everybody’s dissertation gets published, but I knew that I had this fear of the blank screen and that I’d always collaborated with other people. I was trying to outsmart myself and do that single-authored thing that I was going to have to do with a dissertation.
What made you decide, “I want to focus on China’s environment”?
I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 21. And I’ve always been an animal lover. So it comes out of this reverence for life, if you will. A lot of environmentalists are environmentalists because they’re worried about climate change and the effect on future generations, and I care about those things as well. But my intellectual and emotional interest is primarily in the non-human world. I could watch another non-human creature for hours.
We actually carried Liang Sicheng’s drawings of Chinese architecture that he was trying to save back to the U.S., where Wilma was able to turn them into a book. Later, as I started to do environmental work, and Liang Congjie started Ziran Zhiyou (Friends of Nature), he and I continued to see each other.
When I learned that American University had good scholars of environmental politics and that they would be eager for me to do a fast PhD there, I decided finally to do it.
Who were your mentors on your journey of studying the environment in China?
There was nobody who knew about the environment and China. In fact, that’s why Mao’s War Against Nature, my PhD dissertation, is considered a seminal work. A few people had written about China’s environment before, but there was nothing that systematically looked at the Mao period with the environmental lens.
How about on the Chinese side? Did you know Liang Congjie, the founder of the Friends of Nature and grandson of Liang Qichao?
Yes, very well. That’s why I went back to China in ‘83. Back in high school, I became friends with the daughter of John King Fairbank and Wilma Fairbank. She and I were both dancers. We went to dance camp together.
Her father wrote a review of Son of the Revolution in The New York Review of Books. Holly — the daughter, my friend — had never been to China. Her parents sent her and me together to China so I could help her. And because of the Fairbanks’ relationship to Liang Sicheng, we met Liang Congjie for the first time. We actually carried Liang Sicheng’s drawings of Chinese architecture that he was trying to save back to the U.S., where Wilma was able to turn them into a book.
Later, as I started to do environmental work, and Liang Congjie started Ziran Zhiyou (Friends of Nature), he and I continued to see each other. The book reflects some things that I learned from him.
I enjoyed reading your framework of the Maoist environmental approach in terms of the four pillars: political repression, utopian urgency, dogmatic uniformity, and state-ordered relocations. How did you develop this framework?
That’s why I say that this book was the hardest book I’ve ever written. It took so long to work out this framework. But it was a neat framework. Whether it’s the Great Leap Forward, the Educated Youth Campaign, the Third Front Campaign, or the Grain First Campaign, I was able to work through the chronology of the Mao period while foregrounding one of these core dynamics. Coming up with that structure took months and months.
A writing trick that I tell my students is that sometimes when you know you have a big project, and you’re daunted by the big project, it doesn’t hurt to start with something that you understand well and you know it’s going to go in there somewhere.
The idea was not so much to say, “Oh, the environment was so terrible during the Mao period” — even though a lot of bad things happened to the environment during the Mao period — but more this conceptualization of humans and nature being in opposition to one another, and somehow by conquering nature, you could improve yourself and conquer any reactionary tendencies you might have. Of course, the environmental degradation became much worse under the reform and opening period in objective, descriptive terms. But during the Mao period, this social construction of nature as an enemy was really interesting.
I really didn’t set out to write a book about Mao. The fashionable thread in historiography now is to focus on the experience of the grassroots. But at each turn of the period, I found Mao was the one who said something. So often, you really do have to assign quite a lot of responsibility to Mao for what happened here.
How do you make sense of this system? You do have a supreme leader and key decisions go through him, and he’s often the one that drives initiatives. But you also have a system that complies, that puts decisions into practice, sometimes even in more extreme forms than what the leader initially set out.
That’s the Chinese system, right? Because the top may be rather vague. They just give you some guidance, guidelines, core principles, but actually how you interpret them and implement them, that depends on the lower-ranking officials.
In many cases, they want to overachieve. That’s what happened with the Great Famine, where each tiny village is competing with the other to claim that they’re producing more grain. Then the center doesn’t know, actually, how much grain is being produced, and they’re taking it all, even exporting it overseas. Meanwhile, the people are starving.
What was your process for writing Mao’s War Against Nature?
A writing trick that I tell my students is that sometimes when you know you have a big project, and you’re daunted by the big project, it doesn’t hurt to start with something that you understand well and you know it’s going to go in there somewhere.
I knew that I had some nice newspaper articles — I think I got them in a bookstore in Kunming — about this weihu zaotian (围湖造田, “encircling lakes to create fields”) campaign to conquer Dianchi Lake. In 1970, they stopped the factories and the schools, everybody went to Dianchi, and they took these enormous boulders from one side of the lake, put them into boats, carried them over to the other side of the lake, and tried to kill the lake and make more grain fields. It was insane. From an ecological point of view, it was doomed to failure. It was a huge waste of effort.
I don’t think of myself so much as a researcher as I do as a storyteller.
You could talk to anybody in Kunming who was alive then, and they remember doing it. And then there were these news articles with some pictures. So I started there, even though it’s probably two-thirds of the way into the book, just to get something done that I could understand.
I must have been in China often enough during this period to also just be able to talk to a lot of people about a lot of different things. I had a chance to talk to some scholars who knew that these campaigns, from an ecological point of view, were a disaster, but didn’t dare to speak out because they were undergoing thought reform in these May 7th cadre schools during that time.
So it’s a real mix — mixed methods, as they say. But I was never in an archive. I don’t know how to find an archive. I don’t know what an archive looks like.
Once I had the contract with Cambridge University Press, I stopped trying to be academic and went on to write a more narrative, story-based book. When writing about, say, the Great Leap Forward and the sparrow-killing campaign, I would travel around China, and every time I saw an old person, I would ask them, “Hey, did you ever participate in the sparrow-killing campaign?” It was unscientific. And they, of course, all had participated and had memories of it. What surprised me about the reviews was that people would use the phrase, “meticulously researched.” I’m like, “Really?”
That’s very modest of you.
I don’t think of myself so much as a researcher as I do as a storyteller.
What’s your process of writing in general?
I love to work on a text once it’s out there, even a little bit. I love playing with words, I love editing, I love polishing, I love reading it again and again to make it beautiful. I hate the blank screen. I hate the first draft, which is why I like collaborating so much.
How many times do you normally edit before something is finished?
50, 100. Yeah, never stop.
“You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?”
Just around when you began working on China’s environment, there was a blossoming of the environmental NGO and civil society space in China. Could you talk about that period of environmental activism?
It was exciting. After I finished Mao’s War Against Nature, and American University figured out a way to keep me at the school, I started teaching environment courses. I was approached by a publisher to write a textbook about China’s environmental challenges.
I had already been thinking about how to teach environmental challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective. When I teach my course Environment and Politics, I teach political science, environmental law, sociology, anthropology, environmental philosophy, and all of these different strands. To then think about, “How then would we understand China’s environmental issues through all these different strands?”, that made for a natural textbook.
Civil society is, of course, one big strand. The textbook is organized also around core ideas of governance, civil society, national identity, environmental justice. The latest version also has extraction and extractivism in it.
It was, as you say, an exciting time in the ‘90s. Activists in China were able to do all this naming and shaming, symbolic politics, accountability politics, information politics, and all these different ways of exerting power...Unfortunately, by the time the third edition of my textbook needed to be published, the whole civil society chapter had to become very pessimistic.
Between the first and the second editions of this book, my thinking on Chinese civil society evolved a lot. Within international relations, there’s a debate about whether civil society matters or whether only the state matters. And if civil society matters, how does it matter? How does it shape public behavior? I’d read a bunch of those theoretical things, and I then created a typology of my own that included some of theirs but added some based on what the Chinese civil society groups were doing.
It was, as you say, an exciting time in the ‘90s. Activists in China were able to do all this naming and shaming, symbolic politics, accountability politics, information politics, and all these different ways of exerting power, including not necessarily influencing the state, but maybe through the internet going directly to consumers across borders.
Unfortunately, by the time the third edition of my textbook needed to be published, the whole civil society chapter had to become very pessimistic.
From my understanding, in the early days of civil society activism, there were individuals but no major organizations. Yes, Ziran Ziyou and foreign NGOs and foundations were there. Soon, the Chinese space prospered, and people like Xi Zhinong and Liang Congjie became the leaders in the field. There are others, who…
Yeah, like Ma Jun, for example.
The environmental space was the “okay” space. It became a home for many people who were smart and wanted to do something. It’s a terrible shame that the Chinese state feels that they can’t trust their own people. That’s the bottom line.
But after the Foreign NGO Law, foreign NGOs either left or shifted focus. Greenpeace began doing corporate campaigns rather than public shaming campaigns against companies and government officials. That’s quite a different approach. How do you make sense of this whole history, of the early days, the booming, the gradual die-down, and whatever is left of environmental space?
That change in the law in some ways simplified things for some Chinese groups, because even though the foreign groups had a much more difficult time registering and giving money in China and often had to just close down and leave, the Chinese groups no longer had to have a Chinese mother-in-law. They could register directly with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, I believe…
Only for a year or two.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, and then they had the Chinese version of the NGO law — the charity law.
Alright, then you’re more up on it than I am. But for a long time, the civil society space for environmental activism was much bigger than for human rights, democracy, religion, or even women’s rights or gay rights. The environmental space was the “okay” space. It became a home for many people who were smart and wanted to do something.
It’s a terrible shame that the Chinese state feels that they can’t trust their own people. That’s the bottom line. The Chinese state says, “Don’t worry, we’re doing the environment. Don’t think about it. Just trust us. And when we do a new recycling law, just do what we say.” But they don’t understand that they need the support of the people and the so-called supervision of the people. It’s the mass line, right? They’ve lost track of this mass line. In some ways, the Chinese state has failed to ally itself with its really best partners.
Back to what we were talking about before, about “You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?” — often these people have nothing but good intentions for China. They love China.
There was a fantasy from some Westerners, who thought that if the environmental movement can blossom, it will mean that democracy will come to China. That’s ridiculous. That’s not what these people were trying to do.
There was a fantasy from some Westerners, who thought that if the environmental movement can blossom, it will mean that democracy will come to China. That’s ridiculous. That’s not what these people were trying to do. They were not trying to overthrow the Communist Party of China at all. They were trying to support a better, more transparent governance system so that they could clean up the air and the water and save the animals and make China a great place to be.
When I was teaching at Tsinghua University, at Schwarzman College, there was a little birdwatching group. I went one day — there was some rare bird by one of the lakes. And all of a sudden, the security bureau came, and they wouldn’t even let this group of innocent birdwatchers come together to look at a bird. What’s wrong with that? It’s such a pity.
That’s pretty extreme. And to use all that public resource to stop people from watching a bird.
It’s not as if they’re short of plainclothes policemen in China.
At Ziran Zhiyou, there were four founders: Liang Congjie, Liang Xiaoyan, Yang Dongping, and Wang Lixiong. Did you know them?
No. I recognize the name Yang Dongping because of their green yearbook, but I don’t think I’ve ever met. I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman even. Yeah. No.
Because Wang Lixiong is the last known figure as the founder of Ziran Zhiyou. He later wrote pretty influential books about Tibet. He’s a banned writer in China now.
No, I don’t know.
Did you work with Greenpeace or WWF?
Greenpeace I know well because I know the Greenpeace here in Washington very well. And I knew people who worked at Greenpeace in China also. They were doing great work in China for a long time. A lot of people really admired their work. They were courageous, and still have a nice office. I was there this summer. A former student works there.
Who were the key individuals back then, when it was most prosperous?
There’s Li Shuo. Li Shuo is here in Washington now for the Asia Society. He was a good spokesperson on climate and energy issues.
I don’t see that history written very well anywhere, except on what’s now Dialogue Earth, which used to be China Dialogue. They had some interesting pieces from the 2000s and the early 2010s. Otherwise, there is so much censorship around the topic of environmentalism and foreign supported activism that I feel like this is a history that’s just been actively suppressed before it ever saw the light of day.
Greenpeace is a very decentralized organization. Greenpeace East Asia would have been raising their own money. Maybe they would get some money from headquarters in the Netherlands, but, basically, each of the Greenpeaces decides which issues to focus on and which campaigns to run.
And they have a Hong Kong office?
They have a Hong Kong office. So there was always the idea that if they couldn’t continue to work out of Beijing, they could retreat to Hong Kong.
And did you connect with Liang Congjie later in your studies?
I used to see him pretty regularly. If I was in Beijing, I would go see him and his wife, Liang Fang. I saw Liang Fang once, even after he died. I think she’s dead now. And they have a daughter who works in publishing.
Did you ever witness any environment-related street activism?
I never really saw it. There are many wonderful films that show different kinds of street activism. But I think it’s not really appropriate for a foreigner to be there.
It gives the party an excuse to say, “This is foreign orchestrated.”
Foreign influence, yeah. I have seen lots of images of demonstrations. When I do public speaking about civil society, I have images of the PX demonstrations in Dalian. There are demonstrations about the incinerators in Guangzhou. I was never personally a witness to any, and I wouldn’t want to be.
Were you surprised to learn that there was street activism in China?
No, because I know that there is this kind of tendency to go into a mob mentality from the Mao era.
Xi vs. Mao, ver. environment
What was the global environmental impact of China when you first started working on the environment?
There was not much of that, as the focus was on domestic problems — stopping a dam or trying to conserve the Tibetan antelope or dealing with air pollution.
The first international focus was on trying to help the Chinese state understand why some of their international investments were not being welcomed. Groups like the Global Environmental Institute had close relationships with the government to help them see why some of the dams they were building in Southeast Asia were meeting resistance. It was all within this patriotic framing.
When you carve up a landscape with a high-speed rail or a superhighway, or build a deep-water port or an airport, ultimately you’re promoting fragmentation of landscape and biodiversity collapse. I don’t think the Chinese state has any understanding of that science.
Unfortunately, the Belt and Road investments are often in big infrastructure projects with huge biodiversity implications. When you carve up a landscape with a high-speed rail or a superhighway, or build a deep-water port or an airport, ultimately you’re promoting fragmentation of landscape and biodiversity collapse. I don’t think the Chinese state has any understanding of that science.
There’s a belief in these conventions of neoclassical economics that, if everybody trades, everybody’s going to get rich. But a political ecology framework would argue against that and say, “The Earth’s resources are limited. And when you extract resources, there are always going to be winners and losers.” So this notion that we can all just grow our way out of this environmental crisis is a myth.
Unfortunately, that’s part and parcel of what ecological civilization is all about. This notion of “blue waters and green mountains are silver waters and gold mountains” — whatever Xi Jinping says about that — unfortunately, that’s a fantasy in environmental terms and ecological terms, because you can’t really have that degree of wealth and at the same time that degree of environmental protection. It’s postponing the inevitable reckoning. We’re at a stage already with climate change. We’re not dealing with it.
For Mao, nature was something to be conquered because he was leading a poor country. Nature was something to be feared.
When did the paradigm of climate change take over as the main orienting theme of environmental research?
It’s intertwined with these other issues, but it’s not the only issue, and I think you make a great point here. Some people have said that we do need to pay attention to the fact that we have a biodiversity crisis even without respect to climate change. We’re in a sixth extinction, the Anthropocene, the age of the human impact on the Earth that is driving enormous extinction rates.
It’s unfortunate, in a way, that the only focus for some people ends up being climate change, because we still have these other issues to deal with. We would still have localized pollution, toxic waste, and questions about what to do with nuclear waste. But unless you deal with climate change all the rest of the issues are gone anyway.
As a scholar of Mao living in the period of Xi and observing their environmental practices, could you compare Maoist environmentalism to Xi-ist environmentalism?
They’re really different. For Mao, nature was something to be conquered because he was leading a poor country. Nature was something to be feared. People were still feeling cold at night. As China became much wealthier and there were more shields between people and nature, nature became less feared.
But Xi’s version of environmentalism is still very much tied in with prosperity and China’s greatness. I think it’s not going to be possible to keep globalization humming at the rate it’s going because there are so many people in the world who are still poor, who are still aspiring to have their basic needs met. So if everybody wants to live like Shanghai, that’s not realistic and it’s not ecologically wise.
The academic field of China’s environment was tiny when you first began, but now it’s such a substantial field with people from all over the world. Could you talk a bit about the development of the field of Chinese environmental studies?
In part, it is the Belt and Road Initiative that has focused the world more on China, because China really matters if you live in Latin America or Africa in a way that it didn’t 20 years ago. China is everywhere in the development field, and those developments have environmental impacts. But whether it means more people are focusing on China’s domestic issues… Maybe it’s mostly in terms of climate change, right? This idea that if China doesn’t really reduce its emissions, then this whole goal of keeping the planet from warming past a certain amount is going to be doomed.
Often the Chinese state dresses itself in a cloak of ecological civilization in order to, say, force nomads into settlements.
In terms of scholarship, I know that environmental history has become a field within China. It’s mostly done at Renmin University. There are people who are working on Chinese history as environmental history that never did that before, understanding how climate change might’ve played a role in the rise and fall of dynasties and this kind of thing.
There’s a debate that I got involved with through one of my books, called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet, which I wrote together with Yifei Li from NYU Shanghai. We were trying to understand how China’s ecological civilization actually translates into the lives of ordinary people. We found it has very authoritarian kinds of impacts, and that often the Chinese state dresses itself in a cloak of ecological civilization in order to, say, force nomads into settlements or to create great big national parks but exclude people from those parks, etc. That is part of a debate around “environmental authoritarianism.” There’s an environmental authoritarianism debate out there, and there are a number of scholars who are working on that, not only with respect to China but with respect to other parts of the world — Vietnam particularly.
Now that lots of scholars find their access to China increasingly restricted, do you have advice for people who are doing that sort of research?
It depends on what kinds of questions people are asking. There’s a lot of focus on what they call environmental governance, on officials and how they implement directives, and on corruption and the failure to implement or achieve targets. That kind of research is not banned by the Chinese government. If anything, they might want to understand how they can implement their laws and regulations better.
The Convention on Biological Diversity was supposed to meet in Kunming and then it kept getting postponed because of COVID, and then it got held in Montreal. But China’s name is on the framework. It’s the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. So the effort for the world to achieve a certain level of biodiversity protection is something that China’s reputation is on the line with. That should be a space where people should be able to work.
The Chinese have sent pandas back to the U.S. They don’t just deliver the pandas and leave. It requires ongoing scientific cooperation, and that’s always a good sign. There’s also, between California and China, a lot of cooperation around climate change. There are spaces for doing this kind of thing. It’s just that the space for NGOs has gotten smaller.
A new development for the past ten years, one that’s hard to ignore, is the rise of Xi Jinping and his new leadership and new way of doing things. Did the fact that Xi became the leader impact your research at all?
It didn’t impact my research other than, say, when I write about China, I have to talk about the changes in intellectual freedom and space for Chinese people and intellectuals, both regular people and academics.
I think this closing of intellectual space means that you have to question whether the improvement in material conditions is actually worth it.
Since Xi Jinping has been in power, I taught in Schwarzman College three times. This past summer, I went back after the pandemic. I have to say that I was shocked because at one point, I was in an academic meeting, and some PhD students were presenting, and some of their work was about the glorious theoretical contribution of Xi Jinping. To me, that’s just terrifying. It’s almost brainwashing, that in order to get ahead in China, this is what you have to do. That was the first time I really felt the chill in academic life.
Did you see it coming?
I just couldn’t believe myself. “Really? You’re going to get a PhD on the glorious theoretical contribution of Xi Jinping?” That’s horrible.
Yeah. Did you have expectations for Xi Jinping when he first came to power?
When he first came to power, at least he seemed young and bright and vigorous, and I didn’t think anything bad necessarily when he came in. It seemed he wasn’t like Li Peng or something.
Did China turn out quite how you expected when you began studying and visiting the country?
No. It’s amazing what China has done. It’s not the transformation I would have sought for the Chinese people. For a foreigner to visit China in the ‘80s was really interesting. For a foreigner to visit China now — not so interesting. But the Chinese people definitely enjoy a better standard of living than they did in the ‘80s. The question is not what’s good for me; the question is what’s good for them. And, unfortunately, I think this closing of intellectual space means that you have to question whether the improvement in material conditions is actually worth it, if you have to give up that much freedom.
It was pretty clear, maybe even before Xi Jinping got quite so autocratic, that they were going to be able to clean up the pollution a bit and have a good standard of living and have greater personal freedoms. But now, they’ve lost all that farmland, they’ve lost their personal freedoms. It’s not a beautiful place to explore anymore — so ugly compared to what it was. I don’t want to generalize about the whole country, but it used to be so interesting to walk in the little streets and see the little shops. But what was interesting for me is not the same as what was good for the Chinese people.
Recommended readings
Judith Shapiro, 2001, Mao’s War Against Nature, Cambridge University Press
Yifei Li and Judish Shapiro, 2020, China Goes Green, Polity
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
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