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Book Reviews : Judith SHAPIRO, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 287 pp. ISBN: 0-521-78150-7 (hc). Price: $60.00

Judith Shapiro has published extensively on Chinese intellectuals and especially on how Mao treated them. In the present book she intends to demonstrate that there is a parallel between the way Mao dealt with people and nature, leading to great suffering in both cases. Much has been written on the intellectuals’ agony but no systematic study has been done so far on the impact of Mao’s policy with respect to nature. Today, ecological issues receive increasing attention, the ongoing Three Gorges Dam Project being a prominent example. In this context, a better understanding of Mao’s legacy in terms of environmental policy is more than welcome. The book is divided into five sections focusing on certain disastrous consequences of Mao’s war against nature. Placed against that background, the two well-known figures of Ma Yinchu, who tried to alert Mao against the dangers of overpopulation, and Huang Wanli, who objected to the construction of Sanmen-