My dissertation explores the roots of China’s environmental consciousness through the lens of Northeast Chinese (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) forestry conservation and wildlife protection. It is conventional wisdom that the Maoist state neglected environmental protection in favor of a drive to harness the environment for socialist construction. Only after Mao’s death, scholars assert, were laws promulgated to protect the environment, and it was not until the 1980s that China began to concern itself with environmental consciousness. My dissertation contests the prevalent idea that China in the 1950s and the 1960s was environmentally unfriendly and ignorant by showing that the discussion of environmental protection in could be dated back to the 1950s and the 1960s.

It places an exceptional emphasis on the role of scientists, who actively participated in national and international discussions on environmental science, in the process of conservation policy-making. Moreover, my dissertation suggests that diverse and complicated factors such as bureaucratic compromises, the local economy, and the government’s relationship to indigenous Northeast peoples were behind the environmental degradation of the People’s Republic. Local struggles over the implementation of the state’s environmental policy in Northeast China suggest that current issues of Chinese state-initiated conservation have long historical roots dating back to Maoist China. These include lenient regulation of human utilization of natural resources and insufficient state control of the illegal trade in animals, a practice that was blamed for enabling the recent coronavirus outbreak.