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Stevan Harrell’s systems approach contributes a revelatory metaphor for our understanding of modern Chinese ecological history, upending traditional periodization and geographic conventions. There are risks to this approach, however, in that we lose some of the centrality of the state as an environmental actor. By moving the analysis up a level of abstraction as Harrell does, we risk depoliticizing the environmental history of the Mao Zedong years and beyond.
Judith Shapiro (Sun,) studied this question.