In an interview on China's Environmental Crisis

Is this the same period of time that Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem covers?

It is. Or rather, Wolf Totem doesn’t actually cover the Great Leap Forward. It’s set in the period following the Great Leap Forward. But it is still Mao’s time.

If you read Wolf Totem and another wonderful book – Julia Lovell’s The Great Wall: China Against the World – if you read those two together they provide an interesting illustration of what’s happened to the environment. Because that border – the border that has moved over history between the nomadic herders and the settled farmers – is also an environmental line.

When the central state in China was weak, the barbarians, as the Chinese Han would call them, were able to reclaim their territories which went down to just north of Beijing, and it would sort of green-up again. But when the central state grew stronger and the Han moved north they essentially degraded the environment and created desert.

So, for instance, when the Manchu held Manchuria and no Han were allowed to live there it was forested and fertile, but there is no forest left now. In 100 years they have deforested Manchuria.

Why do you think Wolf Totem has become so popular? Does it not confront quite an unpleasant truth?

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It was a very controversial book in many ways. But Jiang Rong was saying things that, had a Mongolian said them, would have aroused nationalistic indignation, but which probably needed to be said.

Wolf Totem contains certain things that have universal romantic appeal: wolves, tribesmen, and so on. But the message that central Chinese policies have been catastrophic for the people who were China’s neighbours – and who are now incorporated into China – very much needed to be said. And it was a way of criticising the party without it being about Han China. But it spoke for a lot of what had happened in Han China too.

The problem is that they go on repeating this: they’re doing it now in Tibet and in Qinghai, all those western provinces which are now being subjected to mass Han migration and to intensive agriculture. They’re trying to monetise the nomadic herders – or rather, they did try to monetise them, now they’re trying to settle them into cities. It’s really a policy of misguided colonialism with catastrophic environmental outcomes.  They’ve always believed that they knew best.