Anthropogenic Driving Forces of Land-Use Change in China

Heilig, G.K. (1996). Anthropogenic Driving Forces of Land-Use Change in China. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-96-011

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Abstract

There are few places in the world where people have changed the land so intensely and for such a long time as in China. Much of the country's habitated land had been transformed by human intervention already several hundred years ago. The Loess Plateau of northern China, for instance, was completely deforested in pre-industrial times. During the early Han Dynasty, in the fourth and third century BC, the Chinese started systematic land reclamation and irrigation schemes, converting large areas of natural land into rice paddies. The process, which was scientifically planned and coordinated by subsequent dynastic bureaucracies, reached a first climax in the eleventh and twelfth century. In the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century another period of massive land modification followed.

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