REMAKING THE EARTH, EXHAUSTING THE PEOPLE

State led conservation transformed Gansu s landscape rural communities bore the costs From the 1940s to the 1960s soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid erosion prone environment of China s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people Remaking the Earth Exhausting the People explores how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and how the communities navigated those demands Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews Micah S Muscolino demonstrates that for the inhabitants of China s countryside conservation programs became part of an extractive mode of accumulation that intensified labor demands and entailed loss of control over resources Muscolino recounts how changes to the physical environment played out in villages on farms and within households His multitiered investigation uncovers the relationship between the forces of nature Chinese state policies and the embodied experiences of rural men and women The book also highlights the contestations and compromises that the state s environmental interventions triggered in rural society By illustrating how state building and revolution in modern China altered human relationships with the natural world Muscolino shows that examini