Anthropogenic Factors in Land-Use Change in China

There are few places in the world where people have changed the land so intensely and for such a long time as in China (Perkins 1969). Much of the country's inhabited land had been transformed by human intervention several hundred years ago. The Loess Plateau of northern China, for instance, was completely deforested in preindustrial times (Fang and Xie 1994). During the early Han Dynasty, in the fourth and third centuries BC, the Chinese started systematic land reclamation and irrigation schemes, converting large areas of natural land into rice paddies. The process, which was scientifically planned and coordinated by subsequent dynastic bureaucracies, reached a first climax in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Braudel 1990: 159). In the second half of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, another period of land modification followed.