Tianshui’s three treasures: water and soil conservation in wartime northwest China

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn addition to examining how wartime imperatives shaped the agricultural research, demonstration, and extension programs undertaken by the Nationalist government’s Tianshui Water and Soil Conservation Experiment Area (the Experiment Area) after its founding in 1942, this article assesses the rural populace’s responses to these conservation measures. While the Experiment Area’s plans to construct terraces and ditches were not well suited to the socioeconomic and environmental conditions that existed in rural Gansu during the 1940s, its introduction of non-native tree and grass species to check water and soil loss met with an enthusiastic response from Tianshui’s populace. Water and soil conservation specialists aspired to rationalize human interactions with the environment as part of wartime efforts to develop the northwest, but to realize these goals they had to take socioecological realities in the region and the needs of rural residents into account. Wartime conservation’s environmental legacies, the article also shows, extended into the period after 1949.