Search

China's Great Leap Forward of 1958–60, an attempt to increase agricultural production through increased labor inputs, resulted in the greatest famine in world history from 1959 to 1961. Most histories emphasize the political mistakes of this period, which were disastrous. But to understand how the political mistakes led to the famine, here I concentrate on the ecosystem mismanagement that led to drastic drops in food production. To explain these effects, I use the concept of the "Four Horsemen of the Ecopocalypse:" over-emphasis on single variables, cross-scale mismatches, top-down panaceas, and ignorance of system feedbacks, all of which eliminated the resilience of agro-ecosystems to both internal contradictions and external disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context of modern China is particularly revealing of the effects of centralized management on ecosystem resilience, inasmuch as the overall scale of human population and its effect on environment(s) is amplified, management is intense, and centralized political control is effective. At the same time, social-ecological systems become dependent on these big projects; they create rigidity traps (Holling I et al. i [3]: 95) that limit adaptive capacity and increase vulnerability to large-scale or unanticipated disturbances. The articles in this topical cluster evolved out of a regional symposium centered on the theme of socio-ecological resilience in modern China, held in April 2019 at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. [Extracted from the article]

This study tests the evolutionary hypothesis that maternal nutritional condition can influence offspring sex ratio at birth in humans. Using the 1959-1961 Chinese Great Leap Forward famine as a natural experiment, this study combines two large-scale national data sources and difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of famine-induced acute malnutrition on sex ratio at birth. The results show a significant famine-induced decrease in the proportion of male births in the 1958, 1961, and 1964 in the urban population but not in the rural population. Given that both the urban and rural populations suffered from the famine-induced malnutrition, and that the rural population experienced a drastic famine-induced mortality increase and fertility reduction, these results suggest the presence of a short-term famine effect, a long-term famine effect, and a selection effect. The timing of the estimated famine effects suggests that famine influences sex ratio at birth by differential implantation and differential fetal loss by fetal sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]