>New book, could be illuminating,"Mao's War Against Nature
>Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China, "
>by Shapiro, Judith
>
> Maoist China provides an example of extreme human
>interference in the natural world in an era in which human relationships
>were also unusually distorted.
>Judith Shapiro teaches environmental politics at American University in
>Washington, DC. She is co-author, with Liang Heng, of several well known
>books on China, including Son of the Revolution (Random House, 1984) and
>After the Nightmare (Knopf, 1986). She was one of the first Americans to
>work in China after the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979.
Sounds like just the kind of Cold War propaganda that should go down well in the Bush era.
>From another perspective Arghiri Emmanuel (Appropriate technology or
under-development) cited the great leap forward as an example of the
destructive impact of under- not over-development.
* In 1958 in China Mao Ze Dong inaugurated a 'Great Leap Forward', in which the desperate need for capital inputs into agricultural was side- stepped by a leap of faith - in fact by the squandering of peasant labour. Communist Party veteran Peng Shu-tse recalled: 'what the plan amounted to was production of steel in backyard furnaces. The effort lasted for about a year, mobilizing around 100 million people. Students, professors, workers, peasants and even housewives made steel in their backyards. Over three million tons of steel were produced in this manner, and not one pound of it usable. This tremendous waste of labour and materials demonstrated Mao's utter ignorance in the field of technology' (The Chinese Communist Party in Power, p397). -- James Heartfield