Speaker: Micah Muscolino, Professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History, University of California San Diego

From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures remade both the arid, erosion-prone landscape of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Drawing from his recent book, Micah Muscolino discusses how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and they navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews, Muscolino’s multitiered investigation uncovers relationships between the forces of nature, Chinese state policies, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. This approach highlights the contestations and compromises that the state’s environmental interventions triggered in rural society. Because modern China’s revolutionary transformations altered human relationships with the natural world, as Muscolino demonstrates, understanding that history from the perspectives of China’s common people requires sustained attention to their everyday interactions with the environment.

Micah Muscolino is Professor and Pickowicz Endowed Chair in modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025) and the forthcoming edited volume Revolutionary Natures: Grassroots Environmental Histories of China’s Mao Era (University of Washington Press, 2026).