This panel addresses industrial and infrastructural expansion and its environmental consequences in both city and countryside during Mao-era China. We welcome a broad audience interested in industrialization, socialist China, the built environment, and the intricate relationship between state developmentalism and environmental change.

Focusing on raw material flows, energy infrastructure, construction innovation, and urbanization, we examine how these ambitious projects of environmental transformation embodied the socialist version of developmentalism – the overarching conception that, as both Steven Harrell and Kenneth Pomeranz argue, accelerated economic growth and environmental extraction in China after 1949 and in modern human societies more broadly. Particularly, we demonstrate how the mass mobilization and the urban-rural divide that characterized Mao’s China had shaped its developmentalist projects of industrial growth. On one hand, relying on its weapon of mass mobilization, the socialist regime was thrifty and agile, apt at gathering scraps of resources and devising mass-based, expedient strategies to achieve small-scale industrialization quickly. On the other, it fell short in distributing industrial and infrastructural resources equitably to rural areas or ensuring long-term sustainability in hyper-industrialized urban settings. Collectively, this panel shows that the social and environmental consequences of China’s development mirror the inherent strengths and constraints of the socialist model and Mao’s revolution, and thereby contributes to the scholarship on the environmental history of socialist regimes with Chinese experiences.

Chad Westra and Ruohan Zhou first examine the adaptability of the socialist regime, which was grounded in its capacity for mass mobilization. Westra analyzes the recovery of Shanghai’s paper industry from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s and how the new regime met the challenges of global paper “famines.” He explores how the government expanded its centralized control over pulp supply while remaining connected to the preexisting urban recycling networks of paper pickers at the street level. Zhou investigates the use of tufa (local methods) in industrial production and infrastructure construction in China from the Great Leap Forward onward. He argues that tufa was not an anti-intellectual rejection of modern technology, but a pragmatic, long-standing strategy to simplify industrial processes and expand production under conditions of technological and resource scarcity.

Hongyun Lyu and Jane Weng then discuss the deficiencies of the socialist regime in engineering the built environment, highlighting the urban-rural divide in the allocation of resources for industrialization. Lyu examines rural electrification in Maoist China and shows how electrical infrastructure depended on unpaid or underpaid communal labor within the planned economy. The undervalued peasant labor, as he demonstrates, had made electricity less a commodity than public welfare and a symbol of communism, resulting in the dissipation of electricity and humans into nature. Weng explores the concept and institution of “basic construction” from the Great Leap Forward to the early 1970s. She examines how the “basic construction” regime prioritized and celebrated heavy industry in cities while downplaying urban environmental crises.