Green criminology has long proposed a political economy approach towards the study of environmental harm. This paper engages with that emerging scholarship by examining how land reclamation and organizational state deviance contributed to severe desertification from 1986 to 2005 in Minqin County, China. Specifically, the study examines how macro-level tax reforms in post-socialist China provided the motive, opportunities, and operationality of social control that enabled the under-enforcement of conservation regulations in the Minqin oasis. The findings demonstrate that organizational state deviance was structured in an interwoven web of fiscal obligations and patronage relationships generated by the incessant tax burden imposed on grassroots state actors and local farmers. The data comes from 110 in-depth interviews of local farmers and grassroots actors as well as 7237 pages of policy reports gathered from regional and local archives in northwestern China.