<i>The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950</i>. By Micah S. Muscolino (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015) 294 pp. $85.00

The Ecology of War in China is an ambitious book that delivers an intense vision of the tremendous hardships faced by the people and environment of the central Chinese province of Henan throughout a dozen years of Anti-Japanese Resistance, widespread famine, civil war, and, finally, recovery. Central to this history is the 1938 decision of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), the Republic of China’s leader, to breech the dikes of the Yellow River, popularly known as China’s Sorrow even before this barbarism, thus perpetrating “perhaps the most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history” (2). Muscolino shows how Jiang’s devastating wartime “strategy” and Japanese responses to it were distinctive forces of environmental change that were paralleled by the environment’s own impact on subsequent war and famine. In seven compelling chapters, Muscolino guides readers through his methodological approach before examining the Yellow River flood, various armies’ rapacious quest for energy that exhausted and overwhelmed communities, and the enormous environmental consequences. Detailed and well-placed maps help to clarify what happened and where.Although Muscolino situates his study within several fields of scholarly work (including environment, gender, and war), his main theoretical approach centers on energy—measuring energy transfers between the environment, social groups, and military forces (7). This analytical framework, based on the notion of social metabolism, proves particularly conducive to revealing the deeply rooted connections between war and the environment, as well as the ways in which militaries acquired energy with significant human and environmental ramifications. Muscolino “argues that the metabolism of militaries and societies shapes the choices of commanders, the fates of communities, and the course of environmental change” (5). His commodity-chain analysis demonstrates how energy that might have been devoted to Henan’s socioeconomic health or environmental sustenance was diverted for military purposes and catastrophically depleted, often with unanticipated results.Throughout World War II, Chinese and Japanese military leaders sought to manipulate nature’s energy and deploy its power against their adversaries (11). Long before those years, the Yellow River had already become as much a human-engineered technology as a “natural” environmental feature, and it proved a lethal weapon in war (23). For centuries, dikes had been constructed to contain the river; their efficacy was seen as a reflection of a ruler’s degree of virtue. Jiang’s decision signified a grave deficiency: Breeching the dikes killed more than 800,000 people in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu; death tolls in some areas surpassed those of battle zones (31). In Henan alone, floods displaced more than 1 million of Jiang’s fellow citizens. From 1937 to 1945, about 43 percent of the province’s pre-war population lived as refugees for a while at least (4). After the flooding, the area became one of the war’s most important frontlines.To compound the devastation, famine killed between 1.5 and 2 million people in 1942 and 1943, forcing an additional 2 to 3 million to flee (87). By 1945, the damage was so broad and deep that the relationship between the civilian population and the military was, not surprisingly, “utterly hollow” (113). The Republican government’s record of failures and lack of empathy for Hunan’s rural population grew so weighty in the devastated region that the communist victory in 1949 was all but inevitable.Muscolino’s social-metabolism approach is especially effective at demonstrating that “social processes can never be divided from natural ones” in his analysis of how the region’s energy sources were harnessed (88). Human and nonhuman elements combined during the war in ways that precipitated devastating famines, underlining the necessity for historians to “focus on the interactions between human actors and a dynamic environment that changes in unpredictable ways even as anthropogenic forces act upon it” (89). Muscolino shows that the Nationalist and Japanese ecological policies were similar, despite their diametrically opposed political and military aspirations.One of the most effective sections of the book is “Disaster and Gender,” which details the plight of a subaltern woman and her family trying to survive insurmountable hardship in an environment where wild dogs fed on dead children’s bodies (149–155). Such countless individual experiences meld with larger environmental, social, and military forces to demonstrate the savagery and devastation of the wars. Yet even as human populations were decimated, the book demonstrates that vegetation and animals were able to make comebacks in areas left abandoned and forsaken. In fact, Muscolino continues his examination past the beginnings of communist rule to demonstrate the capacity of the environment to recover from human-induced tragedies via the redirection of energy.Muscolino does a masterful job of demonstrating the pivotal role that the Yellow River and the larger environment played in Chinese history, in this case Henan’s anti-Japanese resistance and civil war. Yet although adversaries sought to control the river and deploy it against their opponents, “they never bent the river to their will” (141). Their efforts did, however, tear the province’s social and environmental fabric apart. Using sources from China, Taiwan, the United Nations, and the United States, Muscolino delivers a timely reminder of the importance of historians’ access to information; the book underlines the dangers inherent in the ever-constricting availability of relevant sources in China today. The Ecology of War in China is one of the most powerful studies in recent years to demonstrate why, in the aftermath of such monumental disorder, the Chinese might seek to avoid any turmoil that could possibly revert to the inhumane traumas that lie only a few generations back.

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