by Ling Zhang
Between 1048 and 1128, these two hydraulic leaderships competed ferociously. The External Executive dominated most of human and material resources and refused to share with Hebei's regional authorities. In one instance when the Zhang River flooded terribly in western Hebei, local authorities desperately needed laborers, cash, and materials to fix the riverbanks. While their districts were impoverished and their treasuries were empty, they found enormous corvée laborers situated nearby, and some storage areas were stuffed with construction materials. Yet, they could not touch on those resources, because they belonged exclusively to the External Executive for the Yellow River hydraulics, prohibited for local access. In another case, in the 1070s when Cheng Fang, a powerful hydrocrat of the External Executive, sought to maneuver a great number of local corvée laborers from the local government to engage in a hydraulic project that he managed, a local official and famous Confucian scholar Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) refused to release the laborers. The imperial court had to step in to mediate the dispute. It ordered both sides to compromise: Cheng Hao had to hand over 800 local laborers to the External Executive, a number lower than Cheng Fang's original request.72 Clearly, the struggles with environmental problems were not merely a human-vs.-nature struggle, but one between different human needs and political preferences.
The conflicts between the two leaderships extended from practical matters to abstract political ideas, and even to vicious personal attacks. The pro-Yellow River leadership usually criticized the pro-Hebei group for being blind toward the destruction caused by the river and toward the large picture of the state's interests. Pushing back equally hard, the pro-Hebei group accused the hydrocrats of not caring about human lives, of abusing resources, and of undermining the state's human and economic foundation. Leading hydrocrats like Li Zhongchang in the 1050s, Cheng Fang in the 1070s, Wu Anchi in the 1080s–1090s, and Meng Changling in the late 1110s, were all eyed as “petty men” (xiaoren 小人) by Confucian scholar-officials, such as Ouyang Xiu, Sima Guang, Fan Chunren, and Su Zhe who considered themselves upright “gentlemen” (junzi 君子).73 The environmental and hydraulic management served as both a perfect arena and an active medium – in addition to conventional political, philosophical, or intellectual debates that Song historians have focused their studies on – for both the production and manifestation of the Song's factional differences and conflicts. This certainly complicates our conventional understanding of the distinction between a conservative and a reformist faction in this period; during the politico-hydraulic contestation, the factional differentiation was complex and fluid.
During Wang Anshi's reforms, the state activism that the reformists advocated energized both the Yellow River leadership and Hebei's indigenous hydraulic leadership. Be it a petty men or a gentlemen, everyone in Hebei passionately engaged in hydraulic works and got their hands dirty with water and mud.74 The External Executive of the Water Conservancy expanded its business beyond the Yellow River hydraulics to intervene in the environmental management of Hebei's local rivers, which traditionally were overseen by Hebei's regional authorities. For instance, because the Yellow River had messed up the water system of the Zhang River in western Hebei, the External Executive saw managing the Zhang River as a natural extension of the hydraulic agenda for the Yellow River. By taking over the control of managing the Zhang River from the local authorities, the External Executive spread its power spatially to places originally not affected by the Yellow River.
Hebei's regional authorities resisted such encroachment. Led by the Fiscal Commission, they fought back. In the late 1080s, for instance, the Vice Commissioner Du Chun 杜純 (1032–1095) specified the transfer of the duties and authorities of Hebei's water management from his office to the External Executive of the Water Conservancy. He claimed: “When the water management was overseen by our office, flooding events were no more than today. Since it has been managed by the External Executive, flooding events have not become less than before.”75 Du indicated that such transfer of power and resources did not improve Hebei's environmental conditions; the intrusion of the External Executive in Hebei's regional business was considered unnecessary. To Du, the division of environmental agendas and institutions prevented any holistic management of environmental issues and certainly harmed the efficiency of any hydraulic work. “Let them [the two institutions] return to a combination as one institution,” he recommended. This “one institution” meant Hebei's Fiscal Commission which, to Du and his colleagues, should monopolize institutional and financial powers in dealing with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex.
Underlying Du Chun's criticism of the Yellow River hydraulic leadership was an issue of environmental ownership and the ownership of political power entailed and manifested by environmental struggles. Who owned Hebei's environment and environmental management? Who controlled resources and claimed economic and political powers in Hebei? By extension, who was the best representative of the state as the hydraulic leader to wield state power on the ground? After the river provoked a catastrophic flood in 1098–1099, more people joined Du Chun in attacking the External Executive of the Water Conservancy. Cai Dao 蔡蹈, in his memorial to Emperor Zhezong, condemned the External Executive for poor preparation and for causing the catastrophe.76 Zeng Xiaoguang 曾孝廣 (1040–1100) capitalized on the disaster, pleading with the court to strip the External Executive of its duties and institutional power, and to subject the latter to the leadership of Hebei's Fiscal Commission.77 So agitated by the environmental reality and its incapable officials, the imperial court came to the same conclusion: the expansion of the External Executive in Hebei failed to quell the violent river or bring to the land environmental tranquility. The court abolished this hydraulic institution in 1099. For the next fifteen years, the environmental management of the Yellow River–Hebei complex fell into the hands of the Fiscal Commission, Hebei's regional authorities, until the mid-1110s when Emperor Huizong restored the External Executive and had it carry out his monumental project – channeling the river through the the Dapi mountain.
So the physical environment and the human politics had became intimately entangled. The environmental drama during 1048–1128 not only opened up a contested physical landscape, in which the river and Hebei's indigenous environmental entities competed to occupy the space and provoked a variety of environmental problems. It also opened up a political, human landscape, where different hydraulic leaderships and political individuals flocked in to assert their preferences, compete for political dominance, and demand the state's attention. The convergence of the Yellow River and the Hebei Plain into a gigantic environmental complex did not give rise to a single hydraulic agenda or a single political authority. Quite the opposite, it intensified the contradiction among various (at least two) agendas, the divergence between their goals, and the competition among different leaderships within the imperial state. It caused differentiation and division of state power rather than its centralization and reinforcement.
This environmental-political history of the second half of the Northern Song period urges us to complicate the chicken-egg metaphor for Karl Wittfogel's productive mode of relationship between political power and hydraulic works, which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Regardless of what the chicken or the egg stands for, either power or hydraulics, the history of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex did not see a monolithic, integral state as a conceptual whole chicken, but saw a liver, two claws, tips of wings, and a handful of scattered feathers. Neither did it hold a singular, lucidly defined environmental agenda analogous to an intact egg. Lying in front of the master chef – history – was a deformed yolk and liquid white that splashed over hundreds of cracks in the eggshell. How would these ingredients – a multiplicity of historical actors of competing interests – produce a decent dinner, as Wittfogel idealistically envisioned, a neatly tamed environment and the despotic state power of a hydraulic regime?
The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex became t
oo complicated and costly a meal for the Song state to swallow. The pro-Yellow River group rarely cared about the lives in Hebei, while the pro-Hebei group failed to grasp the state's anxiety about the river problems and their impact on “national security.” Rejecting each other, they shared a partisan attitude like “It's your misfortune but not my own” (to paraphrase Richard White's book title).78 The state, however, could not think in such a partisan way. Whatever happened inside Hebei would in one way or another affect the survival and prosperity of the state. Whoever's misfortune, either Hebei's, or Henan's, or the Yellow River's, would eventually develop to become the state's misfortune. The state had to continue its investments in the river hydraulics to prevent the river from running wild, and in the meantime tended to Hebei's environment, such as protecting the frontier ponds, to prevent a total devastation of the frontier region.
This is why the imperial state was entrapped in the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, why its emperors, without exception, felt torn by and vacillated between contradicting policies, and why none of its frequently swinging, polarized decisions brought about environmental stability and political consensus. The state was unable to make a right decision, yet also unable not to make any decision or not to do anything. The game that the state played with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex was not a zero-sum one; rather, it fell in a zone of ambiguity and uncertainty. However calculating and rational the court and its officials tried to be, they were unable to uncover all the blind spots, accommodate all the conflicting interests, or prevent potential backlash from both its politicians and the environment. Between 1048 and 1128, the state's engagement with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex followed this cycle: tackling uncertainty – making a decision – taking actions – panicking at the failure – flipping policies – tackling another round of uncertainty. This cycle trapped the state at the table for an unending unpleasant dinner, from which the state could neither withdraw, nor start anew with a package of different ingredients.
The Hydraulic Mode of Consumption
The above analysis compels us to challenge Karl Wittfogel's logic of conceptualization, the “hydraulic mode of production,” which has informed most of the scholarship of Chinese hydraulic history and historical relationships between political power and hydraulic management.79 This mode of production operates through three mutually constitutive processes. First, a hydraulic leader utilizes societal forces to manage water and thereby produces a sound environment for the society. Second, although being exploited by the hydraulic leader of growing political power, the society enjoys a certain level of well-being by benefiting from the hydraulic leadership and the tamed environment. Third, through the successful management of water, the regime extracts resources from the society, delivers care to it, and asserts control over it; by so doing the state establishes itself as a despotic regime over the society.
Our exploration of the Song history has so far demonstrated that the first productive process – the Song state's environmental management – often failed. Even though the state served as a proactive hydraulic leader and was capable of amassing enormous human and material resources from the society, and even though the state had benign intentions to undertake environmental agendas “to improve the human condition” for the majority of the society (as James C. Scott phrases it), it did not pacify the hostile environment – the end result of its efforts was not productive. In fact, the more it tried, the more environmental complications it provoked, and the more environmental disasters ravaged north China. The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex was too lively, unpredictable, and overwhelming for even a most environmentally engaged state like the Northern Song to handle.80
The second productive process did not go through either. As the next two chapters will show, the more the state maneuvered the society to manage the environment, the more human costs the state-society joint force engendered. Given all the resources the society inside and outside Hebei poured into the hydraulic works, not much positive outcome was produced; the hydraulic mode of production did not function well. People in Hebei and, by extension, many in north China suffered increasing damage. The following pages will show that it was not the state's negligence that led to hydraulic destruction, the society's socio-economic decline, and the rise of societal resentment toward the state, as prescribed by the model of “hydraulic cycle” that historian Pierre-Etienne Will coins and many hydraulic historians of late imperial China have adopted. In our case, it was the state's enthusiastic, diligent, and unstoppable engagement with the hydraulics that generated environmental instability, social destruction, and, as to be shown in the final few pages of this chapter, societal upheavals and rebellions.81
The third productive process obviously pointed to an opposite direction. The transition from the pre-1048 environmental situation to the post-1048 situation did not produce an all-powerful state as Wittfogel's “hydraulic mode of production” logically promised. Rather, every episode of the eighty-year environmental drama reinforced an anxiety-ridden, undetermined, often defeated state; at every stage of its life, the Song state was forced to face some new environment-related crisis. As the state endeavored to gain more power in other aspects of its rule (political, military, financial, demographical, intellectual, etc. as Song historians have lavishly shown), its state power was continuously translated into human and material resources that were channeled toward and depleted in Hebei. Such consumption of the state power was necessitated by the overwhelming environmental power of the Yellow River–Hebei complex as well as by the state's unbreakable entrenchment with the complex and its inescapable commitment to the often failed efforts of environmental management. For example, after the flood in 1056, the river's abrupt southward shift in 1077–1078, and the catastrophe in 1099, the state was so exhausted by river problems that it wanted to end its environmental involvement with the Yellow River–Hebei complex altogether. Nevertheless, it was unable to break from such entanglement; its hydraulic practices and its investment of resources had to continue until the fall of the dynasty. It was not the destruction of hydraulics that led to the social and political breakdown of the state as the notion “hydraulic cycle” observes. Quite the opposite, it was the destruction of the state in the early twelfth century that released the state and the society from their enslavement by their environmental commitment. Through its engagement with the Yellow River, the state sank deeper and deeper into various crises: not only did environmental disasters continue to occur, but also more and more human labor and resources were drained away, factional politics and political conflicts were intensified, the military became harder to control, and the civilian society suffered increasing disasters and hardship.
The history of the Song state's interactions with the Yellow River and Hebei demonstrates the invalidity of Wittfogel's productive mode of theorization. Here, I propose a new theoretical formula that more faithfully conceptualizes the historical reality in our case, which with adjustment may be applicable to many other historical circumstances. This formula – the “hydraulic mode of consumption” – postulates that while the state, the society, and the environment intertwined with each other to produce an eighty-year environmental drama, they were simultaneously burdened, consumed, and even exhausted by their activities and interactions. Most evidently, the state's desire and efforts to tame the river and to create a benign environment for both the state and the majority of the society led to unexpected consequences, including the continuous degradation of environmental systems, catastrophic experiences to the human society, and even the dissolution and depletion of state power.
The consumptive formula provides a general argument for both this chapter and the three forthcoming chapters. What happened in north China from 1048 to 1128 took a heavy toll on its historical players: politically, financially, and mentally on the imperial state; demographically and socio-economically on the people in Hebei; and environmentally and even ecologically on the land and water in north
China. None of this was anticipated by the imperial state (the “hydraulic leader” to use Wittfogel's term), when it worked to transform north China's physical landscape and tame the Yellow River. In Chapters 6 and 7, I will analyze how the environmental drama damaged Hebei's population and caused its dominant form of economy, namely agriculture, to decline. In Chapter 8, I will reveal how the environmental drama and state-led hydraulic activities had a long-term negative impact on Hebei's landscape, waterscape, soil, and vegetation.
The following few pages will only briefly discuss three aspects in which, by committing to environmental management, the imperial state was entrapped in a hydraulic mode of consumption and worn down by it. First, the state finances. Modern historians applauded the Song for developing a fiscal administration that “surpassed in sophistication and effectiveness anything previously seen in China,” and that efficiently collected wealth from the society.82 Based on some estimates, the state might have extracted 15% of the national income as its revenue, far higher than estimates for states in later historical periods and in Europe up to the nineteenth century.83 Despite such impressive revenue income, the state was constantly troubled by heavy deficits due to its uncontrollable expending. In the late eleventh century, the state spent its revenues mainly on three things: its military, its bureaucratic apparatus, and its hydraulic works on the Yellow River. To a substantial extent, after 1048, the state finances operated around the hydraulic demands in Hebei. The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex consumed such a large chunk of the state's wealth that its financial ministers often complained about the exhaustion of state finances. In the late 1080s, for instance, the state project to “return the river” to southern Hebei consumed enormous resources, and statesmen at Emperor Zhezong's court declared that the wealth Emperor Shenzong and his reformist government had painstakingly accumulated over the previous two decades had been depleted. Consequently, the state could not rely solely on its central reserves to sustain the large-scale hydraulic works. It demanded contributions from various regional governments in southern parts of China. This means regions that previously had no obligation toward either the Yellow River or Hebei were now expected to contribute their own reserves to the ongoing projects inside Hebei.
