An Ecological History of Modern China, with Stevan Harrell — Part 2

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Sinica, Part 2 of the interview with anthropologist Stevan Harrell, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, about his magnum opus, An Ecological History of China. Be sure to listen to Part 1 first, as many important framing concepts are discussed in that episode!

1:44 “– The Four Horsemen of Ecopocalypse” and ecological disasters during the Mao period, and the story of the double-wheel, double-bladed plow

11:00 – The effect of the introduction of water systems and fertilizers on agricultural production

21:03 – “The replumbing of China:” The South-North Water Transfer Project and the National Water Network

27:32 – Areas of progress: Air pollution and the energy mix

32:48 – Areas lacking appreciable improvement: Soil contamination, water pollution, and flood vulnerability

36:04 – Ecological civilization and breaking the binary between development and environmental protection

47:00 – Steve’s cognitive style: A fox of the two cultures

53:23 – nSteve’s views on authoritarian environmentalism

58:46 – The Environmental Kuznets curve

1:05:54 – A preview of Steve’s current book project about the Yangjuan Primary School in Liangshan

Recommendations:

Steve: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook; and the 2023 film The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche

Kaiser: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China.
0:13.4	In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends
0:19.2	that can help us better understand what's
0:21.3	happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for
0:27.3	in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about
0:32.7	China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from Dalian in Liaoning.
0:42.6	Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
0:45.7	a national resource center for the study of East Asia.
0:51.5	The Cynica podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing,
0:54.3	or if you're an individual with the means to help, please consider lending your support. You can get me at Cynicapod at gmail.com. And listeners, please
1:00.7	support my work on Substack at Cynica.substack.com. I really mean it. I really need your help.
1:08.5	So please take the time. Ten bucks a month, 100 bucks a year. You'll
1:12.9	really, really be helping me to continue to be able to do this work. This week on Cynica,
1:18.3	we've got part two of my interview with Stephen Harrell. If you didn't get a chance to listen
1:22.6	to part one, you really should do that before embarking on part two here because we really lay out a lot of the framing concepts that he uses to discuss China's ecological history.
1:34.1	And it's really important that you get your head around some of those ideas before plunging into this next part.
1:39.1	Steve is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
1:44.4	I want to point out, in case anyone has gotten the wrong idea, that your book is not just
1:48.6	a litany of indictments about the fecklessness and folly of these technocratic priests of high
1:53.8	modernism.
1:54.4	I mean, you have quite a bit of empathy with the situations they find themselves in, the means
2:00.1	available to them, the exigencies that they face, you know, feeding an enormous population.
	...

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