From the 1940s to the 1960s, state-led soil and water conservation campaigns remade both the arid, erosion-prone landscape of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Drawing from his recent book, Micah Muscolino discusses how the Chinese state imposed the cost of these conservation measures on rural communities and how they navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews, Muscolino’s multitiered investigation uncovers relationships between the forces of nature, Chinese state policies, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. Because modern China’s revolutionary transformations fundamentally altered human relationships with the natural world, as his work demonstrates, reconstructing that history from the perspectives of China’s common people requires attentiveness to their everyday interactions with the biophysical environment.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. 

About the speaker:
Micah Muscolino is Professor and Pickowicz Endowed Chair in modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Harvard Asia Center, 2009) and The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His recent publications include Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025) and the edited volume Revolutionary Natures: Grassroots Environmental Histories of China’s Mao Era (University of Washington Press, 2026).