The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  The Hebei society headed toward bankruptcy, due largely to the destruction of the existing demographic structure, the collapse of communities, and the fall of individuals out of their established status and relationships. Historical sources show a great variety of displacement in addition to a geographical one: the bottom part of the society fell apart given the repeated disasters and hardship; landless tenants lost their access to arable land; small landowners lost property and descended the socio-economic ladder. Large landowners and elite families relocated and invested their fortunes in places outside Hebei. As various social groups broke their ties with each other and with Hebei's “bad earth” (to paraphrase Vaclav Smil's book title), the traditional moral economy went bankrupt.46 Previously law-abiding citizens fled into the neighboring Liao empire, becoming traitors and potential spies.47 More migrants fell in the grey zone between refugees and criminals. After the late 1060s, historical records document how homeless and impoverished people formed gangs of various sizes, living like thieves, robbers, or rebels. They “raided households” in cities and towns, “harmed and killed ordinary people,” and even “murdered government officials.”48 Starving refugees broke into military granaries, stole grain, and set fire to government storage sites.49 In the 1070s the criminal refugees gathered and dispersed randomly, without serious organization. Gradually, as the environmental and socio-economic conditions deteriorated and as individual suffering congealed into collective resentment, more and more people joined the groups and led to larger and more organized social unrest. Not only did these groups protest their hardship and material losses, they also challenged the socio-economic and political system that exploited them and failed to rescue them from their misery. As the imperial state addressed various kinds of rebellion in the form of organized crime, “fomenting trouble (zuoluan 作亂)” and “change/upheaval (bian 變)” took place more and more often, especially in the first quarter of the twelfth century, during the reign of Emperor Huizong.

  As the imperial state saw it, Hebei was losing the ability to regulate itself. Social mechanisms such as economic relationship, kinship, culture, and ethics fell apart under the mounting environmental pressure. They became less and less capable of containing men and women within the traditional socio-economic structure. This understanding drove the state to engage more with Hebei's environmental management and Yellow River hydraulics in order to reduce the harm done to the Hebei society. Unfortunately, the state efforts, as shown in the previous two chapters, were not only unsuccessful and costly, but often caused additional damage.

  The destabilized and weakening society in Hebei certainly opened up space for interventions by a relatively strong, assertive state. State control of this frontier region had always been tight, and now it became even tighter. After the 1070s, the state strengthened its control by policing and militarizing Hebei. One solution was the aforementioned baojia system, which sought to establish – on top of traditional social networks – a quasi-police/military network, in which households formed homogeneous units, practiced martial arts, and performed mutual surveillance and protection. The other solution was to absorb the “floating” – homeless and crime prone – male population into armies. By recruiting those men into the military, the state enmeshed them in professional, legal, and financial bonds with the state. By providing food and clothing to meet their basic needs, the state hoped to prevent these men from becoming anti-state criminals. This solution inflated the size of different military organizations in Hebei, including professional troops like the Imperial Armies, militias like the Righteousness and Brave and the Strongmen, and various corvée service armies, including the “River Cleaning” corvée army (heqing jun 河清軍) that was committed solely to the Yellow River hydraulics.

  The militarization of the society, in effect, went against the state's early demilitarization policy in Hebei. As Chapters 1 and 2 analyzed, the state endeavored to separate the civilian society and the professional military in order to suppress Hebei's military autonomy and Hebei people's martial tradition. During the second half of the Song period, however, the state resorted to quasi-militarization as a means to rescue and regulate the dissolving civilian society. Such state intervention, unfortunately, did not keep the society intact or prevent its population from collapsing. Even supplying refugees with military stipends and giving them legal recognition did not assuage their resentment. Instead, the militarization resulted in what the state always feared, a revival of Hebei's military, anti-state tradition among its civilians. It also returned weapons to the martial and independence-inclined people. A considerable number of sources suggest that beginning in the 1070s, members of the baojia units carried weapons and used their martial skills to intimidate people and commit crimes. Soldiers deserted their regiments.50 The “River Cleaning” soldiers complained about the inadequacy of food, clothing, and medication, and many fled from their hydraulic corvée duties.51 Mutinies took place from time to time.52

  While the civilian refugees presented the state with humanitarian, financial, and logistical problems, the military outlaws threatened the state's stability and existence. Hence, as Hebei's civilian society at all economic levels was collapsing, the imperial state was losing control of Hebei's swollen military. Various sectors of Hebei's population fell one after another, despite the state's efforts to stop them. Here, we observe how not only environmental disasters but also the “hydraulic mode of consumption” driven by the state's unbreakable environmental engagement operated to take a heavy toll on Hebei's human population, demographic structure, and social stability. The continuous, increasing state efforts in the environmental management that we read in the previous chapter saw a paralleling process of Hebei's social destruction.

  8.2 Corvée de L'eau: Local Solutions and Resistance

  Living on the Yellow River's delta and facing both the overwhelming environmental pressure and the state's active but often unsuccessful management, did the people of Hebei just give in? If we follow geographer Denis Cosgrove and consider landscape as “a way of seeing projected on land and having its own techniques and compositional forms,” both the state and the Yellow River had projected their “seeing” of the land and transformed the land by their peculiar means – the former by hydraulic works and the latter by its hydrological dynamics. Was there also a space in the overwhelming Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex in which ordinary people could assert their “alternative modes of experiencing [their] relations with nature?”53

  Historical records for north China from the tenth through the twelfth centuries do not give ordinary people many opportunities to speak for themselves or about their environmental experiences.54 Yet a few fragments extracted from the plethora of official discourse about Hebei provide us a few glimpses into their lives. Between people's traditional, rather peaceful livelihoods, and their radical responses to the environmental changes in the forms of death, emigration, and social displacement, we observe a rather wide space. Within that space, Hebei people negotiated with both the environmental pressure and political impositions on a daily basis. They sought all kinds of possibilities and experimented with a variety of survival strategies. Many of them decided to remain in their hometowns, trying to adapt to and live with the intrusive river, the expanding frontier ponds, and the heavy hydraulic works imposed by the government. They searched for their own solutions for self-protection. Localized, small-scale, and aiming at individual, practical problems, their solutions sometimes coexisted with the state's lofty, grand, and futuristic hydraulic schemes. In other cases, they were in conflict with the state's schemes and even secretly undermined them. Hebei people's “corvée de l'eau” – a contemporary notion that refers to ordinary people's daily efforts to handle water, like fetching water in places that suffer from aridity – contrasted with the state's top-down hydraulic agendas. Such daily efforts were both the Hebei people's survival strategies and their small, yet persistent resistance to the environmental and political violence. In this sense, t
hese men and women were more than mere victims of environmental and political powers, they were tough survivors as well.

  Many of these local solutions were pursued collectively under the leadership of local elites, especially local government officials. For instance, in Renqiu County in northern Hebei, the frontier ponds covered a large area, and from time to time they overflowed and inundated arable fields. Most local officials did not dare to confront the problem, because the ponds were the state's property and under the control of military authorities. It took the initiative of a daring magistrate, Tang Jie, who stood up to his colleagues and superiors, and utilized the voluntary collaboration of local citizens to construct a dyke. Stretching over ten li and surrounding the domain of the county, the dyke stopped the encroachment of the waters and shielded the local civilian area from the inadvertent incursions of the state-owned property.55

  Sometimes, local interests contradicted the state's interests, and ordinary people protested state solutions to environmental problems because, although well intended, they might not suit local circumstances. In 1082, for instance, Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner put forth a proposal to the imperial court. It proposed that since Qianning Commandery in northeastern Hebei had experienced many floods from the Yellow River, its jurisdictional center should be moved to a different location and it should be reduced to the status of a county-level district. Qianning's residents, however, protested strongly against the proposal, considering it “inconvenient.”56 Their voice was expressed to the court via local officials. To these people, having the jurisdictional status of their hometown taken away, and having their homes and property relocated to a less valuable location seemed even worse than to have to confront problems caused by the turbulent river.

  I am certainly not trying to paint an overly simplistic picture of a monolithic society struggling against a monolithic state. As the previous chapter made clear, the state carried a variety of hydraulic agendas, which were sometimes internally contradictory. Likewise, within Hebei's complex society, the overwhelming environmental pressure entailed a broad “hierarchy of suffering”57 and provoked a wide variety of human reactions. Various social groups had different or conflicting interests and environmental pursuits; sometimes, individual interests conflicted with larger societal solutions. One case came from central Hebei. Linghu Duanfu 令狐端夫 was the magistrate of Quzhou 曲周 County in Mingzhou 洺州 Prefecture in the 1060s and 1070s. At that time, the Yellow River had destroyed Hebei's indigenous water systems, causing local rivers like the Zhang River to become unmanageable. The Zhang's torrents often pressed upon the county seat. Linhu proposed building dykes to protect the town, but his superiors in Mingzhou rejected the proposal. Indeed, protecting Quzhou County alone would not protect all of Mingzhou Prefecture, which included several other counties. The dykes intended to shield Quzhou would perhaps push the waters toward other counties, thus causing additional environmental and social issues that the prefecture government did not want to deal with.

  Gaining no support from his superiors for a governmental approach, Linhu turned to local elites. But powerful local families also opposed his idea, because they saw it as a potential hardship and feared that they would have to contribute a great deal to the construction. A flood might not necessarily do much harm to the rich and powerful, who most likely had means to save their lives and property. Against all these obstacles, Linhu obtained support from the ordinary people in the county, whose livelihoods were tied up with the security of their physical environment. They gathered local resources to build a lengthy dyke. Year after year, even after Linhsu left the job and the county, local people spontaneously invested labor and resources to maintain the dyke, strengthening it whenever the Zhang River appeared violent. They convinced themselves and younger generations that “without this dyke, there will be no Quzhou County.”58 We do not know, however, if the rich and powerful families felt they also benefited from the dyke, and if they regretted their previous objection and decided to participate in the dyke's maintenance.

  The division between the upper and lower classes affected how people responded to environmental problems. Lateral social divisions, such as between rural and urban, also played a role in people's decision-making processes, as an event in Mingzhou Prefecture demonstrates. In the early 1080s, the turbulent Zhang River was about to break into the prefectural seat, confronting the citizens there with a dilemma.59 If the water surged northward it would destroy the walled city; if it surged southward it would sweep through the countryside. Apparently, history had placed the people of Mingzhou in a dilemma similar to that which the imperial state had faced with the Yellow River from the late tenth century on: they could not stop the river from flooding, but they could direct the river in a direction that would cause what they perceived to be less harm. In the state's case, encouraging the Yellow River to shift into Hebei instead of Henan more effectively protected its interests. Liang Yantong 梁彥通 (1030–1098), then the prefect of Mingzhou, evaluated the circumstances and made a judgment similar to the one Emperor Taizu made in 972: “We must prioritize the more critical issue.” By critical issue, he meant the potential damage to the walled city, along with its urban citizens, governmental institutions, and concentrated dwellings and wealth. Accordingly, his government organized workers to dig a southward channel to direct the river into the countryside. If rural citizens protested against this hydraulic solution, our sources have no evidence of it. The city and its citizens were protected at the expense of their rural cousins.

  The competing interests seen above also appeared evident in a vicious clash between two equal districts: Leshou 樂壽 and Nanpi 南皮 counties. As the Yellow River ran through both counties, the External Executive of the Water Conservancy intervened and designed dykes to restrain the floods. The Conservancy's hydrocrats had no local interests and were only concerned with controlling the flood. Ignorant of the social context and relations between these two counties, they drew up a technical design that would benefit Nanpi and harm Leshou. Hoping to have the favorable design implemented, Nanpi's county magistrate secretly tricked some of Leshou's elite into drafting a petition to the hydrocrats and stating their support for the design. The letter implied that even Leshou's own people agreed to construct the dykes in a way that would eventually harm themselves. Leshou's magistrate, Liu Yu 劉禹, called for a public meeting at the riverside, and revealed the secret petition to his fellow citizens. Burning the petition, he declared: “The Magistrate of Nanpi wants to benefit his people, so he does not make a fair plan. We shall respond to him by showing our virtue.”60 The public meeting generated a report to the External Executive, which clarified the Leshou people's disapproval of the unfavorable hydraulic design. What did the hydrocrats do after receiving the report? Did they change their design so as to treat both counties equally? Unfortunately, the historical record does not provide the answer.

  All of the above cases show that local officials represented their people and organized collective actions to combat the hostile environment and sometimes the capricious state. But the people did not always wait for officials to respond to the environmental threats. Throughout their everyday lives, Hebei people were sensitive to the changes in their immediate environmental and living conditions. They understood how much additional water in the earth would destroy the roots of their crops and leave them hungry, or how a sudden drop in temperature would drive the price of firewood up and endanger the weaker members of their family in winter. They trusted what their bodies told them, and acted spontaneously to protect themselves or to exploit the environment for their own benefit, even without the help of collective leadership. Their efforts to survive and maintain a livelihood were dispersive, non-organizational, and contingent upon the constantly changing situation. As soon as the immediate environment changed, they modified their strategies.

  Multiple government reports show how people colonized the abandoned, dried-up riverbeds of the Yellow River and carried out farming in the sandy soil. T
he occupation of and competition for that newly created land even led to lawsuits among the colonizers. In places where floods caused soil to become salinized, people had to give up farming. This, however, did not mean that they gave up life or their homeland altogether; many made a living from producing salt from the briny water and salinized soil. Some Hebeiese illegally cut trees from the banks and dykes of the Yellow River, which had been planted there by government-employed corvée workers to protect and strengthen the dykes. They burned the trees as firewood, or sold them for profit. Farmers living near the frontier ponds often drilled holes through the dykes and broke the banks illegally, sometimes in order to obtain the state-owned water for their own use, and sometimes in order to release the water in directions away from their own fields. In many cases, the acts were illegal and perhaps caused damage to others or to the existing hydraulic infrastructure that the state had painstakingly put in place.61 Nevertheless, those acts provided the Hebei people some kind of subsistence livelihood and helped them survive the widespread hardship.