This talk examines the emergence of Maoist environmentalism in the People's Republic of China during the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and amid the worldwide awakening to environmental issues of the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1970s, Chinese leaders, scientists, and citizens engaged with a rapidly expanding global discourse about industrial pollution and environmental issues. They adapted circulating concepts from environmental science as well as new vocabularies like “environmental protection” (huanjing baohu), while also drawing on Chinese discourses and experiences to contribute their own ideas to the global conversation. Grounded in an anthropocentricism that valued human welfare, social liberation, industrial democracy, and socialist industrial development, this self-described revolutionary environmentalism focused predominantly on problems of waste, pollution, production, and public health. In particular, CCP leaders like Zhou Enlai, Li Xiannian, and Hua Guofeng revived a circular waste reuse philosophy from the mid-1950s called “comprehensive utilization” (zonghe liyong), positioning the total elimination of waste as the essential, authentically socialist solution to the new dilemma of environmental degradation. The talk also discusses how awareness of environmental issues opened up industrial pollution and the state of the environment as a new arena for factional struggle and ideological campaigns, shaping both how environmental problems were conceived and how political conflicts unfolded in this period.

About the Speaker

Brian Spivey is a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in modern Chinese history and an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University. His current book project is about the history of industrial pollution and responses to it during the Mao period (1949–1976). He also researches and writes about ethnopolitics during the PRC period, especially as it pertains to the Uyghurs and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He is co-editor of China content for the Los Angeles Review of Books and has lived variously in Taiwan and China for over 5 years.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.