The People's West Lake

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This work examines the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) efforts to reshape Hangzhou's urban landscape, transform the West Lake environment, and redefine the city's culture after 1949. It details five key initiatives from the 1950s to the 1970s: dredging West Lake, creating the Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor park, initiating an afforestation movement, developing collectivized pig farming, and removing lakeside tombs. These projects aimed to produce visible outcomes—a deeper lake, a scenic garden, greener hills, increased pig farming, and a tourist-friendly area devoid of burial sites—while serving the Party's propaganda goals. The initiatives sought to achieve economic, cultural, and ecological benefits while fostering a sense of socialist identity. The CCP's transformation efforts opened avenues for both human and nonhuman actors to influence, coexist with, and challenge the Party's plans. The author emphasizes the agency of various entities, including water, plants, and animals, in shaping the sociopolitical landscape, questioning the traditional human/nonhuman divide. This analysis critiques the resistance-accommodation paradigm, which assumes independent subjectivities in the state-society relationship, and offers a project-based perspective to explore the complexities of nature-human interactions during Mao's era.