For decades, tree planting has been at the heart of Chinese environmental endeavors, and forestry is pivotal to its environmentalism and green image more generally. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the "Greening the Motherland" campaign also promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Based on two chapters of his forthcoming book Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, 2025), this talk probes the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation in the Mao era.
About the Speaker:
Cheng Li is an assistant professor of Chinese studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his PhD from Yale University in 2022, focusing on modern Chinese environmental literature, film, and history. His work has appeared in leading journals, and his forthcoming book, Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, 2025), received the Marston Anderson Prize for best dissertation at Yale.