The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  To deal with the severe shortage of draft animals in post-war Hebei, the government explored other technological solutions. It became a big advocate for a farming tool called the “stepping plow” (tali 踏犁).45 Already popular in the Huai River valley in central China, this plow was a long, curved wooden beam, one end of which was a handle, and the other equipped with an iron blade and a foot-board just behind it. By hoeing into the soil with the blade, then stepping on the foot-board to help pull the top of blade back out, the farmer was able to use the leverage created by his body weight to break hard earth. With this tool, a farmer could till his fields, albeit slowly, even without animal power. Considering this a must-have for poor Hebei farmers, the government sent a group of Henan farmers to Hebei to introduce the tool and its manufacture.46 Furthermore, agricultural tools were generally scant in post-war Hebei, as iron was hard to come by. In 1005, the government issued a policy to allow the importation of cast and wrought iron from Henan into Hebei, tax free.47 In 1013, a further exemption of the “tax on agricultural implements” was granted specifically to Hebei farmers, which allowed them to purchase tools at lower prices.48

  After these incentivizing policies were put in place to help people reconnect with their land and to boost their interest and ability in farm, the Song state carefully designed a set of economic institutions, which were both to inspire a long-term, sustainable growth of the economy and to regulate its performances within a stable, balanced economic order. To this end, the state granted the Hebei people substantial economic freedom and restrained government institutions from intervening too much in regional economic activities. It reduced corvée services that were previously imposed upon commoners, so people could spend more time tending to their own livelihoods. Civil construction projects like building city walls and bridges now fell almost exclusively to conscripted corvée soldiers and laborers. Local governments and military organizations were prohibited from disturbing ordinary citizens’ daily lives and encroaching on their private property. They could no longer “borrow” (i.e., extort) money from citizens in the name of purchasing military supplies, a common practice in the warring tenth century.49 All financial means for governmental organizations and projects now had to come straight from government revenue, which was carefully budgeted, regulated, and monitored by the central government. Previously, people paid multiple taxes under dozens of titles, which not only was confusing but also created opportunities for corruption among local governments, military organizations, and individual officials. The taxation system became significantly simplified in the early eleventh century; farmers paid mainly summer and autumn taxes associated with harvests from their land.50

  While giving people considerable economic freedom, the state also acted as a paternal authority, protecting the economy from external shocks while diagnosing and correcting its internal problems. Agriculture was a fragile endeavor; it was subject to many variables. A few months of bad weather or a sudden outbreak of natural disasters, for instance, would destroy crops for an entire season and put farmers under extreme duress. During the first four decades of the eleventh century, seventeen years reported heavy rainfall in the summer, which led to flooding from many of Hebei's local rivers that damaged summer crops. A few years saw very warm winters, and the lack of snow hurt crops like winter wheat. Nineteen years reported unusual summer heat, dryness, and droughts.51 The 1030s was a particularly dry decade. All of north China suffered from extensive drought and locust infestation. In the worst circumstances, harvests failed completely. Hungry people dug locust eggs out of the dry earth and handed them to officials. As a means of government-sponsored famine relief, refugees exchanged each sheng 升 (0.67 liter) of locust eggs for five dou 斗 (33.5 liters) of grain and beans or, in another case, for twenty copper coins from government granaries.52 When such external disturbances happened, the government would step in to provide the distressed people some means of subsistence living.53

  How did the state deal with the inherent and increasing inequality of Hebei's economic structure? Some people ascended the social ladder to become officials and local elites, while others acquired property and fortunes to become large landowners. The economic freedom that the state granted boosted the free trade of various products, including land and labor forces. Such trade, over time, led to the concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. Ordinary peasants, however, easily lost out in the intense socio-economic competition. When natural disasters occurred, they did not harm everybody equally; the poor took the brunt of it. If harvests failed over a few successive years, the poor had to uproot themselves from the land, abandon their homes, and take a flight. The well-to-do were not only more likely to survive the hardship, they could also take advantage of the situation by seizing land and property from the displaced poor. The economic inequality and social stratification were so stark that the state had to acknowledge the differences among its subjects and divided its taxpayers into five tiers. It asserted a state-level scheme of moral economy, in which the upper tiers of the population were supposed to carry more socio-economic responsibilities in serving both the state and the society, while the poor were exempted from some of tax burden and corvée service.

  In a region as strategically significant as Hebei, it was essential for the imperial state to maintain a certain level of economic justice in order to ensure social stability. Every year, the state demanded that local governments update the registrations of their male populations in order to have a clear sense of labor forces available for government uses. Every three years, the state conducted a census to register population and household property and to remake its books, so it could track vertical movements of the population within the socio-economic strata.54 It issued laws to protect the ownership of land and private property of poorer citizens to soothe social competition and prevent excessive concentration of wealth. In executing these laws, local governments acted as the justice keeper as well as a mediator among various social groups. When a dispute on land ownership, trade, or mortgaging occurred, government officials tended to issue legal rulings that, at least theoretically, favored the original, poor owner of the property.55 When wealthy families engaged in usury and seized property from the poor, local governments would step in to intervene, providing the poor with some modicum of protection.

  Another approach that the state took to mediate economic competition was to directly participate in Hebei's economic life. Multiple state-owned enterprises were set up inside Hebei to compete with wealthy private entities, to the benefit of the poor. For instance, a fair amount of land was designated as “government fields,” which the government rented to peasant households at lower rates than what private landlords charged.56 Knowing that wealthy families loaned out money to the poor at high interest rates and that some families went bankrupt because of their heavy debts, the government also established itself as a creditor that lent money with much lower interests. A related policy, the “Advanced purchase of silk” (yumaijuan 預買絹), was applied widely to Hebei. The poor often experienced hardship in spring, when they had exhausted food supplies through the winter and their summer crops had not yet ripened. This was when peasants were forced to turn to the rich, pawning their property and borrowing cash to buy food for survival and seeds for spring cultivation. This was how the poor often ended up deep in debt. Understanding this seasonal economic cycle, the government stepped in and released funds to purchase silk in advance from those who required capital to carry out silk production in the spring time. With the help of this money, the poor could feed themselves as well as gather the capital and labor to produce silk and cultivate their fields through the spring and early summer. When summer arrived, as agricultural harvests brought food to fill their stomachs, the poor were also able to pay back to the government by handing in their silk products.57

  By carrying out these various incentivizing policies and by asserting its institutional role in protecting and regulating economic activities, the state helped restore a stabl
e agricultural society and economy in Hebei. From the 980s to 1045, Hebei's population recovered slowly yet steadily; its registered households increased by 23 percent, from 574,502 to 705,700.58 As the people gained confidence in the Song state and the peaceful political and social environment the state brought about, agricultural production began to rebound. Bumper crops were reported in the fall of 1006 and 1007; in 1008, all of the Hebei Plain enjoyed an excellent harvest. Thanks to the resulting abundance, the prices of various goods dropped immediately. In comparison with the price in the late tenth century of 100 copper coins per duo (6.7 liter) of millet, the price for millet was now only seven or eight coins per dou (about 4.5 cash per dou for unhusked millet); straw and grass, which were used as forage and building materials, cost a mere 1.5 cash per bundle.59 During the next two decades, climate conditions were rather benign, and there were few natural disasters. Good harvests were reported every year through 1013. The years from 1020 to 1025 also saw decent harvests, which generated a large surplus of agricultural products that quickly filled up Hebei's military granaries in the frontier area. A 1012 report stated that Baozhou's granaries were so full that the grain had begun to rot. Granary managers had to get rid of the old grain by selling it cheap to local markets. In another report, troops complained about the lack of storage space for supplies, because while granaries were full enough to feed the troops for three years, new grain kept flowing in every year.60

  To be sure, good harvests did not take place throughout Hebei equally. While some parts of Hebei were blessed by repeated good harvests, other areas suffered setbacks and poor yield. From time to time, natural disasters destroyed crops, and state protection and economic interventions offered limited help. An explosion of locusts in 1006 and a sandstorm in 1007, for instance, hit southern Hebei hard. From 1026 to 1030, continuous heavy rains raised the water level in various rivers and caused flooding in southern, western, and central Hebei.61 By the early 1030s, droughts, most likely caused by climatic dryness, dominated central and southern Hebei. Even the whole of northern China became a breeding ground for locusts, leaving behind complete desolation. Song contemporaries remembered how dreadful the situation was in 1032 and 1033, when hunger killed many and drove many others into flight.62 As Hebei ran out of food, the central government had to issue multiple tax exemption orders and delivered grain into Hebei as famine relief. Military supplies to Hebei's gigantic armies also ran short. In the 1030s, 70 percent of the military supplies had to be imported, mostly from south China via the long-distance water transportation system.63

  Northern Hebei, however, was a different story. There, disasters were always associated with excessive water. The ponds and ditches that the state took great pain to maintain inflicted many floods, often ruining the land around them. Water-borne diseases transmitted among domestic animals (perhaps among humans as well) and reduced the number of cattle, the draft animal that the government had painstakingly helped Hebei farmers acquire.64 It is obvious that where resources were limited, such as in northern Hebei, state interests in military security conflicted with private interests in pursuing a normal livelihood and economic gains. As time passed, these competing interests loomed large and evolved into frequent conflicts between Hebei's military authorities who reinforced their control of the land by expanding the flood-prone ponds and the commoners who protected their livelihood by illegally damaging the state-owned ponds. We shall investigate the increasing clashes between the state and Hebei's local communities in Chapters 5 and 6.

  This same period, the early decades of the eleventh century, was also when the Yellow River became turbulent. The river's marginal relationship with Hebei began to evolve into repeated small-scale flooding events, which increasingly struck certain areas in southern Hebei and caused problems to the people there. Chapters 3 and 4 will demonstrate how the river and the plain became more and more physically involved with each other and how the river began to have a negative impact on southern Hebei's social and economic life. Before 1048, the negative impact of the river floods was similar to the troubles caused by the ponds in northern Hebei: it was limited in terms of both scale and severity; it created local, individual problems not yet remarkable enough to reverse the recovery and upward growth of Hebei's population and agricultural economy in the early eleventh century.

  The arrival of the Northern Song state to the historical arena brought phenomenal changes to the lives in Hebei, the region's long-term autonomous tradition, and its relationship with the rest of China as well as the imperial state. First, during the early decades of the Song's rule, Hebei evolved from a warzone to a peaceful region where the civilian population engaged in steady human reproduction and robust economic activities. The region experienced an evident socio-economic recovery and growth, which helped its people transcend the devastation and suffering from the previous two centuries. Despite localized setbacks like occasional natural disasters, such recovery and growth, granted more time and continuous efforts and investments from both local sources and state institutions, could have been sustained for a long time and leapt to an even higher level. However, we should certainly not overestimate the economic achievements the state and Hebei had made by the 1040s. The overall agricultural production of Hebei was rather small, just enough for the civilian society and the regional governing body to live a slightly more comfortable lifestyle than what they had had during the previous warring era. Hebei's giant military relied very little on the wealth created by its own land; much of its supplies came from Henan and Shandong, or from as far away as the lower Yangtzi valley, the grain basket of the Song empire. In the meantime, environmental pressure had begun to build in north China; the overwhelming intrusion of the Yellow River in 1048 damaged Hebei and its society profoundly, and crippled – if not completely reversed – Hebei's upward economic development.

  Second, during the first eight decades of Song rule, the state poured its efforts into turning the war-oriented, autonomy-seeking Hebei into a settled, agricultural stronghold where people had a stake in maintaining its intimate ties with the imperial state. As a result, Hebei found itself more and more distanced from its traditional self-reliance, martial spirit, and autonomous inclination. By merging into the state's empire-wide military apparatus as a frontier military entity, by transforming its land, water, and people into strategic components constituting that entity, by relying on the imperial state as its military leader, financial patron, and socio-economic sponsor and regulator, Hebei had become a subordinate servant who not only hinged on but also guarded the imperial state from the empire's political and socio-economic periphery. Once the biggest troublemaker to many previous regimes, Hebei's decline of political status within the imperial system contributed to the centralization of power into the hands of the state. It gave rise to a core-periphery structure over the empire, which laid the weight of political, military, and socio-economic powers in the Henan region, the land south to Hebei through the division by the Yellow River, where the imperial court dwelled. Assessing the Song's state building efforts, Charles Hartman maintains: “Never again would regionalism gain enough traction to outpace centralism as a major organizational force in the Chinese mentality.”65

  But, before “the ‘new’ empire was here to stay,” the state had to deal with an increasing destructive, life-threatening physical environment, especially the challenges from the soaring Yellow River. Luckily, the downgrading of Hebei as a political, military, and socio-economic periphery provided a possibility for the state to appropriate the region into an environmental periphery as well – meaning, a region less significant, state-serving, and even self-sacrificing in environmental terms. Such transformation in Hebei's environmental status was evident in the state's small-scaled modification of Hebei's indigenous land and water for strategic purposes, such as the dredging of local canals and the opening of frontier ponds. However, the transformation was significantly actualized when the state searched for viable solutions to quell the flooding of the Yellow River, w
hen the state singled out Hebei as a suitable substitute for the core region Henan as the bearer of flooding disasters. The next two chapters will examine the intensified interactions among the state, Hebei, and the Yellow River, which led toward Hebei's environmental peripheralization and eventual victimization.

  1 See Chaffee and Twitchett's (2015: 7–9) discussion on “the pragmatic character of Sung institution building.”

  2 Many Song historians endorse the Naitō hypothesis on a unique Tang–Song transition era, whose successful experience was not replicable in later periods. Two seminal works in English language are Elvin (1973) and Hartwell (1982). An increasing number of scholars have begun to challenge this view by arguing for historical continuation from the Song through the Yuan and the Ming period. They suggest that the remarkable growth during the Tang–Song transition sustained and transformed in various ways during an extended Song–Yuan–Ming transition. See Smith and von Glahn (2003). Yet, these two periods and their historiographies are not equally studied. The lack of large-scale economic, social, and demographic assessments for the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and certainly the shortage of studies about north China make it hard to challenge the distinct status of the Tang–Song transition or to bridge the disjuncture between the Tang–Song scholarship and another rather developed field, the scholarship for late imperial China.