Burning the Black Dragon, Creating Dongbei: Fire Social Ecological History in Northeastern China, 1945–2005

Abstract

ABSTRACT Modern China’s understanding of wildfires is primarily applied science aimed at resolving issues related to fire management. Dominant conceptions of fire focus on physical processes and interactions – a physical paradigm. This was not always the case and this historical survey and analysis of fires in northeast China (Dongbei) seeks to unpack a more biological and cultural wildfire paradigm based on key policy evolutions and wildfire events. Northeast China was transformed over the course of the twentieth century from mixed and boreal forest-grassland-wetland interface into one of the major ‘breadbaskets’ of China through migration, infrastructure and agricultural development, and extensive fire use and wildfire outbreaks. China’s understanding of fire, firefighting and fire policy evolved in tandem with this transformation, and increasing experience with major wildfire disasters in the region, leading to a more applied science and professionalised wildfire management approach. Based on historical analysis of settlement and landscape management trends, use of fire in land reclamation, together with evolving wildfire suppression and firefighting administrations in northeastern China, fostered a range of fire policy frameworks – from limited colonial regulation to socialist revolution and collectivisation approaches – and, overall, a total war on wildfire with varying success, through current wildfire management models.