China’s first national conference of environmental protection

Held in Beijing in August 1973, China’s First National Conference of Environmental Protection took place at an unlikely moment: the final years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Rather than treating the conference as the straightforward beginning of modern environmental policy in China, this talk examines the conference as an attempt to theorize a revolutionary Maoist answer to the environmental problems of industrial society. Conference participants confronted pollution as a threat to production, public health, agriculture, and the socialist future, but they also insisted that such problems could be solved through the strengths of Maoist politics like mass mobilization, self-reliance, class analysis, worker and peasant knowledge, and the remaking of social consciousness. By reconstructing what participants articulated at the conference, the talk shows how environmental issues belatedly became part of the Cultural Revolution’s broader ambition to transform society.

Image: “Wide angle photo of a meeting with people standing and applauding PHOTOPRINT Hsinhua News Agency (新華通訊社), 1973-8-30” Paul T. K. Lin’s Hsinhua Photo Collection, HKUST Library, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Used without modification.