The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  First, Taizu contrasted the hydraulic techniques of blocking water by erecting dykes, as was often done in history, to Yu's method of diverting water to the sea through various channels. To Emperor Taizu, the former used human forces to go against the natural tendency of the river, and had led to repeated failures. The latter was deemed natural, since it respected the geophysical features of the land. The naturalness of the latter technique led to Yu's success. Hence, the Song state should use the latter as the principle for its hydraulic works.

  Second, Hebei was deemed a natural lowland. Only by directing the Yellow River into the so-called “Nine Rivers” through Hebei did the sage king succeed in his hydraulic works. Yu's victory seemed the only recorded and “proven” (albeit mythological according to our modern views) one in the history of Yellow River flood control. With such understanding, the emperor hinted that a successful hydraulic plan should follow the tracks of the Nine Rivers and let the river flow northward to Hebei, rather than southward to Henan, the Song state's political core region. Hebei, therefore, was discursively constructed as a naturally, technically, and historically legitimate bearer of the disastrous river.

  Third, although being a legitimate bearer of the river, Hebei would unavoidably be harmed by a shifting river, and such potential harm must be addressed by the state. The emperor implied that allowing the river to flood Hebei would not terribly damage the land and people there, because Hebei's harm was minor in comparison with the greater good it could bring about to the imperial state. Here, the emperor rationalized his political philosophy on the state-society relationship, advocating a “state first and society second” ideology. He employed the legend of Yu as an ideological tool to justify the state's demand for Hebei's sacrifice in political and moral terms. The emperor used the territorial separation and political unrest of early China as a historical analogy to signify the social, political, and environmental uncertainty of his own time. The political decentralization that hurt state interests caused the failure of any holistic, systematic treatment of the river; conversely, the dysfunction of the river system deepened the breakdown of political unity and centrality of a state. Hence, political conditions and the river's hydraulic works were not only entwined but also mutually constitutive. Only by integrating political and moral correctness with technical soundness did Yu achieve both the hydraulic success and the state's centrality. Without such integration, not only would any hydraulic work be doomed to fail, but the state itself would also face demise.

  For Emperor Taizu, the river hydraulics bore extraordinary political significance precisely because hydraulics was politically productive – a tamed environment would not only strengthen the state but also, through and only through the growth of the state, protect and promote the well-being of the people. Given such understanding, the emperor called on his subjects to surrender their private interests to the common interests and the greater good for the imperial state, and to conduct hydraulic works in ways to prioritize the state's interests. Only by doing so, he implied, the state would legitimately trump private and regional interests, consolidate itself, and ultimately deliver equal care to its society. Given all this, the emperor called for Hebei's sacrifice and justified the river's harm to Hebei.22

  Fourth, built on the previous point, the emperor hinted that none of the Song state's previous hydraulic efforts were able to bring to north China permanent environmental peace. Even Yu did not achieve a total success in taming the river. Yu had to sacrifice Hebei in the north as the river's flooding ground in order to preserve the greater good. Based on this understanding, the emperor implied that a “limited state” like the early Northern Song should admit its constraints and abandon its hope for a complete, permanent success.23 Instead, it should aim at a partial success by producing a pragmatic, compromised environment, in which not everyone would equally benefit from the state's hydraulic care; rather, the political core area would receive better protection, and the imperial state as a whole would survive its troubled youth. Given this logic, sacrifices had to be made; the state had to rationalize its decision and choose its victim. Obviously, Yu's legend helped Emperor Taizu to justify the sacrifice of Hebei, the land in the north.

  Last, in a somewhat buried message, the edict sought to strengthen the legitimacy of the Song state. In the late tenth century, anyone who had concerns about the legitimacy of their ruler must have wondered why Emperor Taizu and his Song state were chosen to receive the Mandate of Heaven and, if they were virtuous enough to keep it, why their rule over north China was so frequently and severely challenged by river disasters. The early Song state could not ignore the cosmological link between river disasters as messages from Heaven and its ruler's insecurity in his role as the monarch. After all, by 972 the Song had just entered its second decade; memories of the frequent failures and dynastic successions of its predecessors remained fresh among the ruling members and in the society. There was no evidence that the Song would last any longer than the previous regimes. Furthermore, Emperor Taizu's usurpation of the throne from the Late Zhou Dynasty through a mutiny did not lend him much moral power.

  Bringing the sage king Yu into the Song's politico-hydraulic discourse helped mediate the Song's cosmological and legitimacy crisis. The edict reminded people – or at the very least comforted Emperor Taizu's own heart – that even under the rule of Yu, the river flooded terribly and people suffered.24 Disasters and suffering did not prevent Yu from becoming one of the most virtuous and successful rulers in history. River disasters might not be Heaven's punishment for poor governance; rather, they were tests Heaven issued to evaluate and train its chosen candidate. The Mandate of Heaven was not a static object given to a ruler without testing or challenging him. Rather, it was something to be acquired through efforts; it was gained and secured through reflections on and corrections of wrong deeds. Emperor Taizu faced exactly the same test Yu faced; therefore, he had the potential to become another sage ruler as great as Yu. By following Yu's methods of managing the river, the emperor would be able to extract moral strength, curb the river disasters, and consolidate his cosmological connection with the supreme power of Heaven.

  Using Yu the Great to construct a hydraulic, political, and moral discourse, Emperor Taizu politicized and moralized Yellow River hydraulics, and pinpointed the ultimate goal of hydraulics as the preservation of the imperial state. This discourse conceptualized a new landscape of north China, a revival of the legendary landscape created by Yu in which the river was channeled through the “Nine Rivers” inside Hebei.25 This ideal landscape enacted Hebei as its key element; only through Hebei's sacrifice would Yu's landscape be actualized, the Yellow River tamed, and the imperial state consolidated. The state, the river, and the plain of Hebei trialectically interacted with each other. Hence, to a ruler like himself, the emperor must adopt Yu's politico-hydraulic-moral model by designating Hebei as the river's future victim. To his subjects and ministers, they should follow the state's perception and conception (instead of seeing the situation like individuals) and comply with the state's hydraulic decisions, even if the decisions demanded that they sacrifice themselves.

  But, even if Emperor Taizu's idea was legitimate and technically viable how could the state anticipate that Hebei would comply and sacrifice its land and people willingly? The Hebei of Yu's legendary time was most likely a marshland without many human inhabitants, but the Hebei of the tenth and many previous centuries was one of the strongest regional powers that resisted state control. This question reminds us that we must read the state's politico-hydraulic discourse against the changing relationship between the state and Hebei that we have examined in Chapters 2 and 3. We have already observed that, while struggling with the turbulent Yellow River, the Song state simultaneously carried out a multi-dimensional project that, gradually, appropriated Hebei into the empire's political, military, and socio-economic periphery, a state-serving and self-sacrificing entity. Hebei's incorporation into the state apparatus and its increasing dependenc
e on the state made possible the state's transformation of the region into an environmental periphery. From the late tenth century through the mid-eleventh century, three paralleling processes – the descendence of Hebei's status within the empire's core-periphery power structure, the growth of a centralized imperial state, and the rise of Yellow River hydraulics as a “national security”-level state affair – proceeded side by side and mutually reinforced one another. It is this river–plain–state trialectic complexity that produced the political, moral, ideological, and technical conditions for Emperor Taizu and his followers to create a dependent, submissive, and weak Hebei and to designate it as the river's future flooding ground.

  Not limited to just bringing up an abstract conception, Emperor Taizu meant to materialize the conception by actual hydraulic practices. To reproduce Yu's landscape, Emperor Taizu urged his subjects to contribute hydraulic knowledge that introduced Yu's “method of diverting and channeling the river.”26 His call solicited the submission of a twelve-chapter-long text, entitled “The Original Canon of Yu,” compiled by a commoner named Tian Gao 田告. The Emperor met Tian in person, consulted him, and honored him. Most importantly, he delivered Tian's text to hydraulic managers who worked at various hydraulic sites on the river, treating it as the emperor's instructions to “personally supervise laborers.” By applying this “Original Canon of Yu” to actual hydraulic practices, the hydraulic works were said to have “fixed all the bank ruptures very soon.” This implies that the flooding problems in 972 were resolved by diverting and channeling the river's water toward the north. Unfortunately, because the “Canon” was not preserved, we have no idea what sort of technological counsel it offered, how exactly it was applied to the hydraulic sites, or whether or not it was truly read by officials and workers on the river.

  From conceptualizing certain hydraulic ideas to practicing hydraulic activities accordingly, what Emperor Taizu provided in 972 was not merely some political rhetoric, which criticized the existing situation and advocated symbolic values of land and water as well as Yu's legend. Rather, his edict and ensuing practices initiated a politico-hydraulic enterprise that set the basic guideline for future hydraulic policies and practices throughout the Northern Song period. This enterprise envisioned an imaginary landscape that through its verbal invocation and material substantiation, step by step, exerted material power to transform the existing geophysical environment into a beneficial, state-serving one. Such an imaginary landscape, as literature theorist and art historian W. J. T. Mitchell sees it, “is woven into the fabric of real places and symbolic spaces.”27 Through interweaving the real (Hebei and the river in the Song period) and the symbolic (the Nine Rivers inside Hebei and their political significance that Yu endowed), the emperor discursively constructed a landscape that would eventually lead to both the transformation of the physical land of north China and the remaking of the land's symbolic meaning during the Song.

  Li Chui's Proposals to Shift the River Northward

  The politico-hydraulic enterprise that Emperor Taizu initiated was further developed by Song officials in later times. Their concrete hydraulic proposals substantiated the imaginary landscape the emperor conceptualized, and detailed technical measures to move the Yellow River out of Henan and into Hebei. Li Chui 李垂 (965–1033), an eighth-rank assistant staff writer and revising editor of the Institutes and Archives, was a major advocate of such plans.

  In 1015, the Yellow River broke its bank and flooded multiple locations in Henan. As the imperial court was troubled by the dreadful situation, Li Chui handed in a lengthy memorial, “Essay on the Geographic Advantages of a Diversion of the Yellow River.”28 Li claimed that the river “inundates Yan and Qi [generally referring to Henan and Shandong], and spreads its damage over the Central Kingdom.” Thinking geopolitically, the river “leaves out the flat, fertile land over thousands of li in Hebei, and allows the frontier gangsters [the Khitan] to plunder it.” Building upon Emperor Taizu's conception, Li argued that the river's damage to Henan harmed the state as a whole and provided the Khitan with real socio-political advantages. Such harm could be reversed if the state diverted the river to the north to let the river harm Hebei instead. A northward-flowing river would both “benefit the common people” in the south, and turn the river into a defensive barrier within Hebei to prevent any invasion from the Khitan.29

  According to this cost-benefit rationale, Li proposed channeling the river northward into western Hebei. In that case, the river would first converge with various local rivers, then run through the central plain of Hebei, and finally enter the Bohai Gulf. That was precisely the route, Li specified, that Yu the Great constructed. Along with his textual specification, Li also presented pictorial illustrations to demonstrate his plan. His textual description and images, by naming and depicting mountains, streams, and administrative territorial realms, attributed concrete, material substances to the abstract, moralistic landscape Emperor Taizu conceptualized.

  The court did not accept Li's proposal, technically citing its complexity and immense cost. Despite rejecting the proposal, the court nevertheless agreed with the essence of Li's idea and approved an alternative, small-scaled hydraulic plan, that is, to open a diversionary “small river” to channel some of the river's water to the north.30 Li had proven that he aligned himself with Emperor Taizu. When another huge flood occurred in 1019, he took the advantage of the event and presented his proposal again. An unprecedented catastrophe, the 1019 flood wrought havoc on thirty-two districts south of the river.31 It was said at the time that a dragon, the divine creature that controlled the river and caused floods, had emerged from the Yellow River.32 The city of Xuzhou 徐州, about 300 kilometers south to the river, was said to be fully submerged by water.33 The flood took over many local streams to its south, including the Bian Canal, and extended all the way southward to affect the Huai River. To handle the catastrophe and repair the bank rupture, the imperial state would have to use sixteen million units of raw materials and 90,000 laborers. The crisis forced Emperor Zhenzong to compose an essay to memorialize the occurrence of the disaster.34 It also urged the court to recall Li's hydraulic proposal in 1015. Li himself, now promoted to a lower sixth-rank court official, was recognized by the court for his hydraulic talent and granted the opportunity to travel to Hebei, where he would inspect the physical landscape and discuss his proposal with Hebei's regional officials.

  After his Hebei trip, Li Chui submitted a report, in which he pointed out the brutal reality: “Now the river has burst and gone southward, and it has done great harm”; due to various technical reasons, all hydraulic work to block the river from surging farther south was unsuccessful.35 To him, the only solution the state could take was to reroute the river's course to the north. But Hebei's regional officials opposed Li's idea, for a changed river course would surely endanger Hebei's military landscape. Hebei authorities certainly did not want to sacrifice their districts as the river's flooding ground. The conflicting interests between the state and the regional powers of Hebei, just as Emperor Taizu implied in his 972 edict, were evident. Realizing that his original proposal was too bold and unacceptable to many, Li offered a less ambitious proposal. No longer advocating shifting the entire river to Hebei, he proposed relocating only a short section of the river's course into Hebei, so the river would avoid going through some vulnerable places where many serious bank ruptures had occurred.36

  Just as four years before, Li's second proposal was declined. Referring to the proposal as “troublesome,” the imperial court did not leave behind an explicit explanation on the dismissal. Christian Lamouroux considers the rejection of Li's proposal as a result of the state's pursuit for stability (anjing 安靜, lit. quiet), a status quo in which people preferred not to stir things up.37 As sound as it is, this explanation reveals only part of the truth. Indeed, the Song state and its officials talked about the stability principle rhetorically from time to time. Yet, in their everyday political life, they constantly put forth
new policies and proactively launched new projects, certainly including enormous hydraulic projects at very high costs on the southern side of the Yellow River. To the Song officials, “stability” was a relative matter; its significance shifted depending on circumstances. Officials used this notion often as political rhetoric during their factional competition, not to guard the principle itself but to silence the opposite party. My own explanation for the court's rejection of Li's proposals is that the proposals met resistance from Hebei's regional authorities.

  Let us look at an instance in 1015. When the river flooded toward the south, the Fiscal Commissioner of Henan in the south proposed opening a channel to divert some of the floodwater northward. This proposal was strongly opposed by the Fiscal Commissioner of Hebei in the north, who feared that a northerly channel would spread the river's flooding damage to his districts.38 The imperial court intervened to carry forth the proposal, which resulted in the opening of a northerly channel. From this instance, we can tell that the Song state was an extremely activist state; everyday, mundane political practices took place in a busy and fuzzy fashion through subtle negotiations between the state and regional authorities; various powers constantly interplayed to make things happen. “The state's pursuit for stability” by not initiating things – a lofty political philosophy that Song politicians rhetorically cited as Lamouroux observes – did not dictate actual political practices.

  The court rejected Li Chui's proposals because Hebei's regional authorities rallied support from its sympathizers at the court and won the debate. We must remember that, in the first few decades of the Song period, Hebei natives dominated high-ranking official positions at the imperial court, including the position of Grand Councilor.39 They might have boycotted any plan to divert the Yellow River into their homeland where their families and property were located. These people very likely represented the group who, as Emperor Taizu criticized in his 972 edict, prioritized their private, small interests over the state's public, greater interests.