The River, the Plain, and the State
Page 25
Second, labor. Manpower was another major resource the hydraulic works demanded. After 1048, hydraulic laborers came not only from Hebei, but also from all over north China. The government's conscription policy demanded that every household contribute labor at a rate of one out of every two or three male adults.84 In emergencies, or for large projects such as in 1088, tens of thousands of laborers were drafted even from the Huai River valley in the south. These men traveled over a distance of hundreds of kilometers to serve in Hebei.85 During Wang Anshi's reforms, non-Hebei laborers either went to Hebei to perform their duties in person, or they offset their labor with cash so that the government could use the money to hire workers in their stead. In either case, laborers, their livelihoods, and their family activities outside Hebei were conditioned by the hydraulic works, even though a great portion of them lived far away from Hebei and were physically disconnected from the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex.
During and after Wang Anshi's reforms, the Song government experienced several rounds of policy change in terms of how to recruit labor services.86 Irrespective of how the administration varied, what remained real and constant was Hebei's and the Yellow River's demand for tremendous numbers of human bodies and their labor force. The hydraulic mode of consumption continued to take the lives of adult men of north China. Originally farmers, urbanites, and soldiers, they were sent to Hebei to conduct manual labor next to the turbulent Yellow River. Many drowned and were flushed away by torrents; a great number suffered from epidemic diseases, which plagued their work sites during the hot and humid summer months. While many died on the trip between their homes and work sites, many also escaped their duties and absconded as disaster refugees or outlaws.87 From the 1070s on, after years of attempting to reroute the river into an eastern course, the government noticed a sharp increase in bandits in both Hebei and Henan. Those men looted cities and towns, killed officials, and attracted followers among the commoners. Many were said to be former hydraulic workers. Toward the end of the eleventh century, the situation worsened further, as several thousand runaways dispersed and hid in the hills and forests of Henan, where no government offices had been established to control the area.88 Clearly, the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex not only consumed manpower and deprived the society of a productive force that was traditionally dedicated to human reproduction and economic activities. It also turned a substantial part of that manpower into a destructive social force – in the form of bandits and rebels – that challenged the stability of the society and shook the state's control.
Third, a similar story with other resources. The hydraulic works demanded tremendous amounts of construction materials. As Chapter 8 will discuss in greater detail, Hebei ran out of such resources, so a great portion of the materials had to be imported from elsewhere. Lumber often came from southern Shanxi and Shaanxi more than a thousand kilometers west of Hebei, where mountainous areas were once covered with dense forests. Throughout the eleventh century, trees were felled in order to supply hydraulic construction in Hebei. Local people in these western regions knew nothing about what was happening far away in Hebei; they never saw a single Yellow River flood and would not relate their tree-felling business to the environmental complex in Hebei. Yet, each year they had to go deep into mountains to cut trees as additional corvée service for their local governments. Their governments, meantime, received enormous pressure from the central government that issued them annual lumber quotas. To meet the quotas, local officials developed various strategies to motivate people to provide service, either coercing them or paying them to gather wood.89 Shipping large amounts of wood through the turbulent Yellow River downstream to Hebei was not easy. Every year, many men involved in shipping were killed by the river's torrents; many households undertaking the job went into bankruptcy.90 Local governments found it increasingly difficult to recruit sailors for the job. The central government had to set up offices along the Yellow River to monitor the transportation and to make sure that sailors would not decamp. Here, we observe the operation of a whole institution along the course of the Yellow River to link up the empire's wood-rich northwestern regions in the southern part of the Loess Plateau and wood-deficient Hebei – the wood producer and the consumer – in order to sustain the state-organized hydraulic works.
Regions like Henan and Shandong did not produce large trees, but thanks to successful agriculture, their extensive farmland yielded a large amount of grass and straw every year, which could be used as construction materials as well. The financial authorities in those regions, the Fiscal Commission, were obligated to submit an annual “wood-grass fee (shaocao qian 梢草錢)” to the Water Conservancy, and the latter used this money to purchase hydraulic materials. Sometimes, the regional authorities were unable to meet their quotas, or experienced it as a serious financial burden, because they often struggled to satisfy other financial obligations, such as paying for their own military and bureaucratic teams.91 Clearly, the financial competition discussed earlier between the Water Conservancy and Hebei's regional authorities also took place between the state's hydraulic leadership and the authorities in other regions across north China.
Hence, the environmental drama taking place within Hebei not only led to the transformation of the land and society of Hebei itself, but it also shaped the socio-economic and environmental relationships among various regions across north China. On certain occasions, such as the “returning the river” project in 1088, the central government ordered the collection of construction materials from as far away as Zhejiang 浙江 in the lower Yangzi valley and Jiangxi 江西 in the middle Yangzi valley.92 These regions in south China, located nearly a thousand kilometers away from Hebei, were maneuvered by the state to join their northern neighbors in providing goods and services to the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. Correspondingly, their socio-economic lives also became conditioned by the unstoppable hydraulic mode of consumption. What happened at specific locales extended to involve and implicate vast regions; multiple spaces co-occurred, allied, merged, and operated in concert.
Elaborating on his famous thesis on China's “Medieval Economic Revolution,” Mark Elvin states: “Political pressure acted as a pumping mechanism to create a circulation of goods of which economic demand by itself was incapable.”93 Our study shows that such “political pressure” derived substantially from the environmental pressure that the Yellow River–Hebei complex imposed upon the state. Managing the environmental crisis drove the transregional goods and resources, while the state functioned as both a manager and a medium. Asking “How Big” the Song's economy was, Peter Golas estimates that the Song state levied 15.6 percent of total national income as revenue, at a rate much higher than that in any Chinese state of a later period. Such understanding suggests that the Song was blessed with strong state power and had enormous wealth to spend.94 Assuming both Elvin and Golas are right, we need to ask: what was the end goal of this circulation of goods and abundant wealth and who benefited? Did the circulation of goods and a large revenue collection invariably fuel revolutional economic growth as Elvin and Golas optimistically suggest, or signify the formation of a despotic state power as Wittfogel idealistically envisioned?
Clearly not. Between 1048 and 1128, Hebei, as the new delta of the Yellow River's northern courses, became the site of environmental, political, and financial contestations among state-level and regional-level powers. The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex sat at the center of consumption, spreading its disastrous influence and demanding political attention, human capital, and material resources. Like a black hole, it absorbed everything the state and its various institutions provided, without returning the environmental stability that the state desperately pursued. Rather than the environment to be regulated by an all-powerful state as Wittfogel envisioned, the converse was true: the particular environmental world centered on the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex organized the state's daily political and financial practices, and dema
nded the state's service. The core-periphery structure that the state laid down for its empire – for the maximization of state interests at the cost of its various peripheries – saw a gradual inversion that led to the exhaustion of state power. We shall discuss this core-periphery inversion in greater detail in Chapter 7. Consequentially, the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex governed the Song state within its own “environmental regime,” enrolling the state in an environmental drama that it was then unable to end. In its peculiar environmental-political-economic equation, the “hydraulic mode of consumption” placed the imperial state not in the position of a beneficiary who would profit from both the pacification of water and the appropriation of the human society, as Wittfogel has suggested, but rather on the opposite end of being entrapped by the constantly changing environment.
In his seminal work on landscape and power, W. J. T. Mitchell views landscape as the “dreamwork of imperialism,” not only the target but also the medium of power production and expansion.95 What happened in Northern Song China prior to 1048 seems to have perfectly materialized this idea. The imperial state's political desires and ambitious actions sought to appropriate not only a peripheral region like Hebei and its people, but also the waters and land that molded the people for the preservation and empowerment of the state itself. Yet, despite its best efforts to dream up a tame, profitable landscape, the state unexpectedly slipped into a nightmare: the year to year management of the mounting environmental problems disturbed the state, haunted it, and wore it down. It seems this history of the Song state's interactions with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex offers us a chance not just to ask the question political scientist James C. Scott seeks to tackle: how certain, and in particular state sponsored, schemes to improve the human condition failed. It inspires a further inquiry about how by engaging in such schemes, the state, as the conductor of these schemes and presumably their prime beneficiary, got itself entrapped in a failing process.
1 Wittfogel (1957: 3). See a thorough critique of this theory in Chapter 5.3.
2 Worster (1985: 39).
3 SS, 91: 2256.
4 “Lun xiuhe di'erzhuang,” OYXQJ, 109: 1646–1648. “Shang Renzong lun xiu Shanghukou,” GSJ, 31: 12b-13b, pp. 1095–1668.
5 For a chronological survey of the hydraulic debates at the Song court, see Lamouroux (1998: 545–584).
6 “Lun xiuhe diyizhuang,” OYXQJ, 108: 5b–7b.
7 SS, 91: 2273–2274.
8 XCBSB, 1: 33.
9 Institute of Geophysics (1990: 125–126).
10 SS, 91: 2275.
11 For Sima Guang and his influence on the conservative faction, see Ji (2005).
12 SS, 91: 2277.
13 This analysis complements Paul J. Smith's (1993: 84–88) opinion that Wang Anshi's ideology obliterated barriers between public and private sectors and collapsed distinctions between state and society.
14 For studies on Wang Anshi, his relationship with Emperor Shenzong and conservative statesmen like Sima Guang, and Wang Anshi's reforms, see Liu (1959), Higashi (1970, 1982), Bol (1992: 212–253), Deng (1997), Li Jinshui (2007), Ji (2005), and Levine (2008). Focusing on the tea-horse trade in the Sichuan area and the government's Green Sprouts Loan policy, Paul J. Smith (1993: 96–127) provides an in-depth discussion on state activism during the reform era.
15 SS, 91: 2278.
16 SS, 91: 2282.
17 SS, 91: 2284.
18 SS, 91: 2885.
19 SS, 91: 2884.
20 QSW, 2114: 131.
21 SS, 91: 2286.
22 SS, 91: 2288–2289.
23 As Ari Daniel Levine (2008: 12) correctly points out that the political factions in the Northern Song were not monolithic blocks, but rather fluid and complex entities.
24 SS, 91: 2291.
25 SS, 91: 2290.
26 SS, 91: 2291.
27 SS, 91: 2307.
28 Some hydrocrats knew that the dykes they constructed were unstable and that if the dykes were destroyed by the river, they would have to face punishment from the court. To avoid any bank failure and consequential punishment, they would secretly breach the dykes to discharge some of the water to release the river's hydrological power. See “The Epitaph of Wang Shuo,” QSW, 2845: 41.
29 XCB, 511: 12170–12171 and 512: 12182.
30 XCB, 505: 12046 and 514: 12211.
31 Shuofu, 18a.
32 SS, 91: 2309.
33 SS, 91: 2312.
34 Ebrey and Bickford (2006) and Ebrey (2014).
35 Liu (1959: 88–90).
36 SS, 91: 2312.
37 SS, 91: 2313.
38 SS, 91: 2314.
39 SS, 91: 2315.
40 SS, 91: 2315.
41 An early version of this section appears in The Medieval History Journal, see Zhang (2011: 21–43).
42 XCB, 248: 6053; 396: 9661; and 399: 9733. SS, 95: 2362.
43 XCB, 240: 5834 and 280: 6852.
44 XCB, 235: 7207. Sushui jiwen, 4: 73–74.
45 SS, 95: 2359.
46 SS, 95: 2359.
47 XCB, 156: 3792.
48 XCB, 191: 4622 and 194; 4690. XCBSB, 9: 381.
49 SHY, “Shihuo,” 63: 46a.
50 XCB, 223: 5421; 245: 5951; 248: 6053; 249: 6073–6074; 254: 6221; and 262: 6400.
51 XCB, 260: 6349–6350.
52 XCB, 260: 6350. SHY, “Shihuo,” 63: 46a.
53 XCB, 267: 6542.
54 Wu Chuhou, “Dingwu jun shuitian ji [On the rice paddies in Dingzhou],” Dingzhou zhi, 19: 9a–10a.
55 XCB, 333: 8022.
56 XCB, 494: 11748.
57 Although soldiers were assigned to maintain the ponds, there was a constant shortage of labor in Hebei's Ministry of Military Colonies. In 1100, the court approved an increase in the number of soldiers to perform this particular service (SHY, “Shihuo,” 63: 50a).
58 MXBT, 13: 145.
59 Wenchang zalu, 4: 45.
60 MXBT, 23: 229.
61 XCB, 150: 3658. “Lun Hebei caichan shang shixiang shu,” OYXQJ, 118: 1825–1828.
62 XCB, 117: 2761. Han Qi, “Tuntiansi yu Hebei zengzhan tangbo weihai zou [Report about the Ministry of Military Colonies' occupation of Hebei's ponds and its harm],” Anyangji biannian jianzhu, 1655–1656. Sima Guang in Sushui jiwen, 4: 73–74.
63 XCB, 136: 3269.
64 “The Spirit Path Stele for Tang Zhisu,” QSW, 1679: 120.
65 XCB, 117: 2761.
66 Liu Chang, “Chucheng [Exiting the city],” GSJ, 4: 15, pp. 1095–1434.
67 Ouyang Xiu's comment, XCB, 159: 3853.
68 XCB, 34: 747; 106: 2481; and 155: 3772.
69 XCB, 159: 3858; 283: 6928–6929; and 360: 8612.
70 “Sanya zhen [The Sanya township],” Yijian zhi, vol. 2, 682.
71 Hydraulic-induced competition for political power and resources is certainly not a Northern Song monopoly; it is seen in other historical times. For instance, Jane Kate Leonard (1996) gives a detailed account on the negotiations between the court of the Qing Dynasty and its provincial and regional officials on water management.
72 “The Epitaph of Cheng Hao,” QSW, 1071: 245.
73 QSW, 2218: 371; 2023: 140; and 2023: 146–147. These “petty men” were called “malicious ministers (jianchen 奸臣)” by historians in the Yuan Dynasty who compiled The Standard History of the Song Dynasty (SS, 91: 2256). For the discourse on political factions during the Northern Song period, see Levine (2008).