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Which made it all the more incredible when Mao Zedong ordered more land clearing in the Loess Plateau. Most of the region was already deforested, but the steepest slopes—land too steep to farm—were still covered by low, scrubby growth that held back erosion. Exactly this land was targeted in the 1960s and 1970s for conversion, Dazhai style, into terraces. The terrace walls, made of nothing but packed earth, constantly fell apart; in one Loess Plateau village that I visited after a rainfall, half the population seemed to be shoring up crumbling terraces by pounding the walls flat with shovels. Even when the terraces didn’t crumble, rains sluiced away the nutrients and organic matter in the soil. Zuitou, the village, is nestled into steep hills along the Huang He. Walking along the steep paths between yaodong, I could almost watch the terraces sliding into the water.

Because erosion removed nutrients, harvests in the newly planted land dropped quickly. To maintain yields, farmers cleared and terraced new land, which washed away in turn—a perfect example of a “vicious circle,” according to Vaclav Smil, a University of Manitoba geographer who has long studied China’s environment (his first book on the subject, The Bad Earth, appeared in 1984). Erosion into the Huang He went up by about a third during the Dazhai era, Chinese researchers reported in 2006.

The consequences were dire and everywhere apparent. Declining harvests on worsening soil forced huge numbers of farmers to become migrants. Zuitou lost half of its population. “It must be one of the greatest wastes of human labor in history,” Smil told me. “Tens of millions of people being forced to work night and day, most of it on projects that a child could have seen were a terrible stupidity. Cutting down trees and planting grain on steep slopes—how could that be a good idea?”

Beginning in the 1960s, farmers throughout China’s Loess Plateau stripped the forest and carved earthen terraces out of the hills. (Photo credit 5.1)

Because the loess erodes easily, every rain caused terraces to erode maintenance was a constant issue. (Photo credit 5.6)

Eventually the terraces on the steepest slopes collapsed completely, and farmers found themselves trying to eke out a living on hills almost too steep to stand on.

In the most marginal areas farmers planted maize. North of Zuitou, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, I walked around plots of maize growing in almost pure sand. Until the 1960s the region had been covered with thorny forest scrub. Then Mao ordered aggressive planting. It was like forcing people to farm a beach. Astounding to me, the locals had actually coaxed some maize from the sand—drying cobs made little yellow heaps on rooftops and barren yards. On carts hauled by tiny Chinese motorbikes men were driving around piles of maize stalks tall as two-story buildings. In the light wind the air was intensely gritty. The Loess Plateau, which once caught dust from the desert, was now producing it.

The People’s Republic had initiated plans to halt deforestation. In 1981 Beijing ordered every able-bodied citizen older than eleven to “plant 3–5 trees per year” wherever possible. Three years before, Beijing had initiated what may be the planet’s biggest ecological program, the “Three Norths” project: a 2,800-mile band of trees running like a vast screen across China’s north, northeast, and northwest, including the frontier of the Loess Plateau. Scheduled to be completed in 2050, this Green Wall of China will, in theory, slow down the winds that drive desertification and dust storms.

Despite their ambitious scope, these efforts did not directly address the soil degradation that was the legacy of Dazhai. Confronting the destruction was politically difficult, though: it had to be done without admitting that Mao had made mistakes. (When I asked local officials if the Great Helmsman had erred, they politely changed the subject.) Only in the last decade did Beijing chart a new course.

Today many of the terraces Zuitou’s farmers