The forests of Northeast China, 1600--1953: Environment, politics, and society

This is the first English-language study of Northeast China's (Manchuria's) forest history, and the first in any language to compare the way Manchuria's forests fared from the predawn of the Qing dynasty through the first years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The fate of Manchuria's forests largely depended on policies determined by the vital state interests of the Manchu, Russian, Japanese, and various Chinese regimes through whose hands the region passed. As state interests changed, so did the policies which affected forests, resulting not only in deforestation and forest transformation, but also in conservation, afforestation, and progress toward sustainable forestry.; Variations in policies depended not only on the interests regimes pursued, but also on their strength and stability. The Qing turned from the closure to the development of northern and eastern Manchuria's forests in the face of excess population pressure on resources, fiscal crises, and looming Russian invasion; later, the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo turned from sustainable forestry in its confident first years, to the drawdown of Manchuria's forest resources when Manchukuo was destabilized by Japan's start of the Pacific War in 1941. Nevertheless, the Japanese nurtured forests to a far greater extent than the ROC had, because the ROC lacked the strength to implement its own forestry program. Russian colonizers, by contrast, carried out very limited afforestation efforts, taking no steps to ensure future forest productivity. The early PRC's modest goals of reducing deforestation and ameliorating its effects were undercut by reliance on local officials and undercompensated peasants whose interests lay with agriculture rather than forestry.; The state-building leaders of the ROC, Japanese, and PRC regimes sought not only the continuing provision of forest products and the ecological services such as flood control which forests provide, but also the heightened popular support moving towards such goals can elicit. Just as the utilitarian impulses which led them toward ecologically and economically sound policies were founded upon knowledge of the past consequences of forest degradation, so too are historical insights essential to our own efforts to adopt ecologically sustainable resource management practices.