The People’s West Lake: Propaganda, Nature, and Agency in Mao’s China, 1949–1976

Qiliang He

Published by University of Hawaii Press 2023

The People’s West Lake

Propaganda, Nature, and Agency in Mao’s China, 1949–1976

Qiliang He

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824896904

Overview
Contents

About this book

The People’s West Lake examines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to reconfigure Hangzhou’s urban space, alter the natural environment in West Lake (Xihu), and refashion the city’s culture in post-1949 China. It pieces together five initiatives between the 1950s and the 1970s: the dredging of the lake, the construction of the public park of Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor (Huagang guanyu), the afforestation movement, the development of collectivized pig farming around West Lake, and the two campaigns to remove lakeside tombs. These projects were intended to generate visible and tangible results—a lake with a good depth, a scenic public garden, greener hills surrounding the lake, a growing swine population and rising productivity of fertilizer, and a tourist site cleansed of burial grounds—while also being readily subject to the Party’s propaganda. These initiatives were designed both to achieve economic, cultural, and ecological utilities and to forge and popularize a sense of socialist nationhood.

The CCP’s endeavor to fundamentally transform the West Lake area also opened up possibilities for both human and nonhuman actors to variously benefit from, get along with, and undermine the political authorities’ planning. This book thus emphatically foregrounds and unifies the agency of both humans and nonhuman entities that are not necessarily tied to intentionality, bringing into question the legitimacy of the human/nonhuman binary. Author Qiliang He explores the agency of both humans and nonhumans (including water, microbes, aquatic plants, the park, pigs, trees, pests, and tombs) to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP’s sociopolitical programs, thereby diminishing the efficacy of state propaganda. Highlighting the nonpurposive agency of both actors problematizes the long-held resistance-accommodation paradigm, which presumes the resisters’ a priori subjectivities independent of the socialist system, in studying the state-society relationship in the People’s Republic of China. Using a project-based approach, The People’s West Lake gives the nature-human relationship in Mao’s China (best known as Mao’s “war against nature”) historical and cultural specificities to reexamine the PRC regime’s central planning and the issues related to it.

Author / Editor information

He Qiliang :

Qiliang He is professor of history at Hong Kong Shue Yan University.Qiliang He is professor of history at Hong Kong Shue Yan University.

Reviews

Tim Oakes, University of Colorado, Boulder:
Too often in the humanities and social sciences, “nature” is conceived as the inert or passive object of human action, or a platform upon which human events unfold. This has particularly been the case in the interdisciplinary field of China area studies. He’s book is long overdue and welcome. The People’s West Lake develops a framework of what Jane Bennett has called the “distributive agency” of the non-human. He uses this to explore the history of the Mao-era party-state’s contradictory and fitful efforts to transform Hangzhou’s West Lake through a series of propaganda-campaign projects.

Ban Wang, Stanford University:
With the focus on political ecology, The People’s West Lake addresses the policy, remapping, and engineering of the environment in the Mao era. The author explores the fraught notion and practice of “nature” in biosphere, landscapes, and human nature in production. An excellent historian, He Qiliang has drawn from historical archives and assembled rich empirical evidence in picturing the schemes of political ecology and the discontents. This book offers a refreshing perspective on China’s urbanization and modernization under socialism.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter One. Water, Labor, and Microbes The Campaign of Dredging West Lake in the 1950s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
Chapter Two. “Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor” Landscape, Space, and the Everydayness in Mao’s China Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
Chapter Three. Forests, Propaganda, and Agency The Afforestation Movement in Hangzhou, 1950–1976 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
Chapter Four. Socialist Pigs Fertilizer, Collectivization, and Cultural Heritage in Mao- Era Hangzhou Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
Chapter Five. “Ghosts as Neighbors” The Campaigns of Removing Tombs in the West Lake Region, 1956–1965 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199

Language: English
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 216
Illustrations
- Other: 22 b&w illustrations
Keywords: Nature-Human Relationships; Nature; Social Science; China

eBook

Published: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780824896904