Kyuhyun Han’s book challenges the conventional wisdom that the Maoist state neglected environmental protection in favor of harnessing the environment for socialist construction. It historicizes how Chinese conservation policy developed in the context of international environmental consciousness in Maoist and post-Mao China. Despite these efforts, Northeast China witnessed massive deforestation and species extinction. Han investigates how seemingly well-intentioned state environmental policy aimed at protecting nature failed throughout both the Maoist and post-Mao periods. Rather than simply asking whether PRC environmental consciousness followed Euro-American models or pointing to PRC environmental protection’s limitations, Han offers a new analytical framework: the concept of baohu, meaning both conservation and protection in Chinese, which reflects the complexity of PRC environmentalism. By examining how baohu ideology was developed in a uniquely Chinese setting as a collection of multiple, seemingly contradictory values and interpreted by state and local agents, Han demonstrates that environmental destruction was not the result of an absence of state regulations but rather a product of bureaucratic compromises, the local economy, and the government’s relationship to local foresters, foragers, hunters, and ethnic minorities. Local struggles over the implementation of the state’s environmental policy reveals that current issues of Chinese state-initiated conservation had deep historical roots dating back to Maoist China. These include lenient regulation of human utilization of natural resources and insufficient state control of the illegal trade in animals, a practice blamed for enabling the coronavirus outbreak.