by Ling Zhang
54 Given richer historical sources, studies on southern parts of China and in later time periods provide more cases and more systematic analyses of local responses and local strategies to environmental disasters and socio-economic hardships. For instance, Keith R. Schoppa (1989) studies the interactions between the changes in the Xiang Lake and the hydraulic and socio-economic activities of the local population; Peter Perdue (1987) reveals the shrinkage and enlargement of the Dongting Lake and the local population's coping strategies; Robert Marks (1998) examines how the migration and expansion of a northern population dealt with harsh environmental conditions in the Lingnan area to create a more livable, economically productive land; Lillian M. Li (2007) studies how the population in Qing-period Hebei constantly suffered from and dealt with environmental disasters and famines; Jiayan Zhang (2015) explores the marshy environment in the Jianghan Plain in central Hubei and the local population's socio-economic adaptation to the environment; and Micah Muscolino (2015) tells various “stories of survival” in which refugees responded to the 1938 Yellow River flood through mass migration and ecological adaptation.
The local strategies observed in our Northern Song case studies resonate with much of what these scholarships on late-imperial and modern China have investigated. By consulting these late-imperial and modern histories, readers may be able to visualize a fuller image of local strategies around the individual, fragmentary cases that the Northern Song sources reveal to us.
55 “The Epitaph of Tang Jie,” QSW, 1679: 119–124.
56 QSW, 2241: 824.
57 Edgerton-Tarpley (2008: 42).
58 “The Epitaph of Linghu Duanfu,” QSW, 2404: 138.
59 “The Epitaph of Liang Yantong,” QSW, 2743: 101–103.
60 “The Epitaph of Liu Yu,” QSW, 2334: 63.
61 Some local strategies came into conflict with the interests of the state and were considered illegal. Based on rich regional and local sources, scholars of hydraulic histories in late-imperial China have extensively discussed this issue, for instance, see Will (1985: 295–347) on central Hubei, Perdue (1987) on the Hunan area, and Zhang (2015) on the Jiang-Han Plain.
62 Chen Cisheng, “Shang Huizong qi wei hexi ruanyan [Memorial to Emperor Huizong pleading for the construction of the soft dyke on the western side of the Yellow River],” QSW, 2241: 393–394.
63 Scott (1976: 33).
64 Such state control was far more tight in terms of hydraulic management than what the late-imperial states could achieve, as seen in studies like Will (1985), Perdue (1987), and Zhang (2015). It is in these later-period cases that Will's (1985: 346) assertion, “hydraulic society was stronger than the hydraulic state,” holds much truth.
65 Scott (1985).
66 Chow (1992: 111).
67 Elvin (2004: 116).
7
Agriculture
A Subsistence-Oriented Economy
As men and women, old and young, abandoned their homes and communities and took flight to search for safe havens, a substantial section of Hebei appeared desolate. Some areas were frequently inundated with Yellow River's floods, while other areas lay fallow and covered with wild grass. The recovery and growth of agricultural production that Hebei had achieved in the first eighty years of the Song period underwent serious damage during the following eighty years. The reduction in the overall size of farming population and arable land, as well as the decrease of land productivity, indicate the decline of this economic form, a situation that contrasts sharply to the spectacular growth of agriculture in southern China at the time.
I will compare three staple crops – millet, winter wheat, and wetland rice – and suggest that certain technological innovations that transformed agricultural production in other regions of China did not bring about dramatic changes to the land of Hebei. Under mounting environmental and socio-economic pressures, Hebei people took a “subsistence-first” attitude toward their economic life.1 What modern historians consider as indicators of a revolutionary economic growth, such as new species of crops, might not have been regarded as secure and profitable by these people. The disaster-ravaged population had little capital to experiment with new, expensive technology, and did not pursue optimal gains; rather, they simply strove to maintain a stable subsistence at low costs.
A declining Hebei spread hardship and instability toward southern parts of China. It also brought down the imperial state by consuming its wealth and eroding its power, because to maintain the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex and keep both the environment and the society from a total collapse, the state kept extracting resources from other parts of the empire and exhausted the state finances. Such resources were mobilized by the “hydraulic mode of consumption,” and channeled toward and depleted inside Hebei. The center-periphery structure that the state endeavored to build for its imperial system flipped: from the perspective of resource flows and consumption, disaster-ridden Hebei became the de facto center of the empire, the “root of All-Under-Heaven,” which demanded continuous and burdensome services from the state.
7.1 Harvests, Labor, and Land
A survey of Hebei's harvest and famine records suggests that Hebei's agricultural growth before the 1040s was undone to a great extent by the frequent occurrence of disasters after 1048. On the surface, historical records report good harvests in three years of the 1040s, three years of the 1050s, two years of the 1060s, three years of the 1070s, four years of the 1080s, and two years of the 1090s.2 Among them, those in 1050, 1054, 1057, 1069, 1083, and 1098 were considered bumper harvests. The two in 1069 and 1083, particularly, were said to have yielded twice as much as normal.
None of these harvests, however, were common throughout the whole of Hebei. For instance, the 1050 harvest occurred somewhere in eastern Hebei, the 1069 harvest happened in a small area in southern Hebei, and the 1083 harvest was somewhere in the northern frontier area. Good harvests in some areas were always accompanied by poor harvests in other parts of Hebei, so only those in a limited geographical area could enjoy abundant food supplies. Furthermore, good harvests did not occur consecutively; they were often followed and interrupted by bad harvests in intermittent years.
Consider the year 1050. While some places enjoyed a bumper harvest, prefectures like Zhenzhou 鎮州 and Dingzhou in the northwest were struck by floods, which destroyed their autumn crops.3 Central Hebei was in a dire situation as well. The Yellow River's flooding in 1048 and the subsequent drought through 1049 left many fields covered in stagnant water or left barren. The harvest failure over the next couple of years forced the government to ship two million dan of grain from southeast China in disaster relief. Meanwhile, the government recruited some refugees into its armies, because military supplies were relatively adequate.4 When military supplies ran short, and southeast China itself suffered disasters and famine in 1051 and failed to export grain, the relief to Hebei was reduced.5 As a result, in the years of 1051–1053 Hebei saw famine and famine-induced emigration. One bad harvest in Dingzhou in 1051, for example, was said to have caused the deaths of one million people.6 Amid the lingering and widespread misery, a single bumper harvest in 1050 was not sufficient to alleviate the overall suffering.
Hebei welcomed a good harvest in 1054, but this was followed by a series of severe droughts in 1055, a time when, as Ouyang Xiu observed, “Winter wheat [sown in the autumn of 1054] did not sprout and millet had not yet been sown by the end of the spring.”7 The droughts led to a bad harvest that affected not only 1055 but also 1056, when the Yellow River provoked a giant flood in the summer and damaged crops in southern Hebei. Once again, the government had to distribute relief to refugees – a fixed amount of five dou (33.5 liters) of grain to each adult and a certain amount of cash to the families of those who were killed in the flood.8 Similarly, during 1067–1069, the outbreaks of drought, locusts, earthquakes, and Yellow River floods caused a series of harvest failures. According to Sima Guang, in many places of Hebei, standing crops were inundated by flood waters, and
grain stored in official granaries rotted. The entire food reserve in Hebei was so small that even its frontier troops could not get adequate supplies.9
The 1070s and 1080s saw the intensification of the migration to other regions of north China. Although good harvests were reported sporadically in various places, the overall size of the population and the land dedicated to agricultural production shrank significantly. The situation worsened in the 1090s. Despite good harvests in some parts of Hebei in 1097 and 1098, food shortages and famine were more frequently reported in that decade. When heavy rains caused the Yellow River to soar and inundate southern Hebei in 1094, several hundred square li of buildings and graveyards, together with crops, were destroyed.10 In the most catastrophic years of 1099 and 1100, a large swath of Hebei was waterlogged. Few crops could be planted, so the overall harvest was said to have reached merely 10 or 20 percent of the usual level.11 The situation was aggravated when the rest of north China reported similar agricultural failure and could not provide relief to Hebei. Across north China, the price for one dou (6.7 liters) of millet soared to a thousand copper coins, fourteen to seventeen times its normal price of sixty to one hundred cash.12
From 1040 to 1100,13 Hebei's good harvests were again offset by frequent harvest failures, and the failures and constant food shortages reflected deep, structural problems in Hebei's agricultural system, in particular the reduction of resources allocated to agriculture and the deterioration of production factors like labor and arable land. As the previous chapter concluded, not only did the overall agricultural population decrease, but the remaining population was unsettled. In the new demographic structure, the society's main sources of labor turned into disaster refugees, emigrants, outlaws, or adapted to other modes of production. After the 1040s, immense labor was absorbed into the military and kept from working on the land, thus living off government subsidies instead. After 1048, much of the state-sponsored hydraulic works took place inside Hebei, and a substantial portion of Hebei's labor forces became hydraulic workers. Those people relocated to the river's flooding sites away from their homes and agriculture production, and depended on government support as well. According to Liang Tao 梁燾 (1033–1097), a statesman who served Emperor Zhezong in 1090, regular hydraulic works started on the twelfth day of the second lunar month, so hydraulic laborers left home earlier that month to work on the river and did not return home until late in the third lunar month. The two-month absence from home caused those male laborers to miss the most important agricultural season in Hebei, the period for sowing millet seeds.14
Historical records do not reveal the decrease in arable land. Around 1080, Hebei reportedly had 27,906,656 mu 畝 of arable fields, including 26,956,008 mu of private fields and 950,649 mu of official fields. This number was the second largest among all the provinces in north China, after Shaanxi where an enormous area of land supported a very small population and the agricultural production remained lowest among all north China regions.15 This means that the number of registered fields in the government's accounting books, although seemingly very large, did not necessarily generate an equally large agricultural output.16 The number for Hebei, more likely, reflected the fields that the government expected to levy taxes from, not necessary the actual fields in cultivation. It certainly did not indicate the percentage of fields that were struck by disasters, covered by stagnant waters, and abandoned by fleeing landowners and tenants.
Shortly before the Yellow River entered Hebei, Ouyang Xiu commented on the shrinkage of arable land and its low production in Hebei:
The entire land of Hebei is no longer and no wider than a thousand li. Along the northern frontier, in Guangxin 廣信, Ansu 安肅, Shun'an Commanderies, Xiongzhou, and Bazhou, the land is covered completely by ponds. Eighty to ninety percent of it is uncultivable by commoners. In Chanzhou, Weizhou 衛州, Dezhou, Binzhou 濱州, Cangzhou, Tongli Commandery, and the land east and south to Daming, the Yellow River's disasters strike every year, and fifty to sixty percent of the land is uncultivable. Even granted a good harvest this year, [the government] nevertheless had to exempt a million dan of grain from the tax quota [set for those places]. West and north to Daming, the land is very saline and teems with large and small saline pools, so thirty to forty percent of its land is uncultivable. Furthermore, there is an immeasurable expanse of lakes and ponds, barren lands, pasturelands, and fields abandoned by emigrants. From the mountains and the sea, [the Hebei people] cannot procure profits, and the plain produces limited wealth.17
Ouyang's comment might have exaggerated the negative situation around 1045. Yet, the situation was undoubtedly exacerbated after the Yellow River crashed into Hebei and began its eighty-year-long occupation of the plain. The river's multiple northern courses inundated a large area in southern, central, and northeastern Hebei. Prefectures in central Hebei, such as Enzhou, Jizhou, Shenzhou, and Yingzhou that were not mentioned by Ouyang Xiu, had been fairly productive in the past. After 1048, these areas became frequent victims of Yellow River floods. Even worse, the widespread floods, subsequent waterlogging, and their negative impact on Hebei's local rivers magnified the disastrous aftermath spatially, spreading it to other areas to ruin an even larger number of fields that were not directly touched by the Yellow River.
Not only was the size of arable land reduced, but the soil also lost much of its fertility. The floodwaters deposited a layer of silt that covered the cultivable soil with coarse, sandy earth. In Chapter 8, I will scrutinize the changes to Hebei's water systems, and the destructive impact on the composition, texture, and arability of the earth. I will explain in greater detail how the excessive water and inferior soil harmed Hebei's agricultural economy and long-term environmental conditions. Affected by those dramatic environmental changes, the same swath of land, even if still used for agricultural purposes, would most likely generate a smaller yield.
Economic historian Cheng Minsheng studies tax quotas that the central government set up shortly before 1080. Hebei was issued the highest tax quota (9,152,000) among all provinces in the empire – more than twice the amount for the metropolitan area of Kaifeng (4,055,087) and equal to the combination for Huainan 淮南 (4,223,784) and Liangzhe 兩浙 (4,799,122) in the Yangtze valley. Based on these figures, Cheng believes that Hebei enjoyed a steady and solid growth in agriculture; its agricultural production not only satisfied its own troops but also surpassed the level in south China. Hebei, as Cheng maintains, was one of the richest regions, perhaps even the richest region, in the Song empire.18 I argue that this opinion pays no attention to the massive number of historical sources that I use in this book, which all indicate bad harvests, frequent famines, and high demands for government relief in Hebei. It certainly ignores the prevailing environmental challenges and socio-economic problems that prevented Hebei and its people from conducting normal agricultural activities. Furthermore, Cheng's opinion relies overly on the surface value of the tax figures and ignores the fact that those figures were only quotas, not actual tax payments. As Ouyang Xiu commented in the middle of the eleventh century, “Even given a good harvest this year, [the government] nevertheless had to exempt a million dan of grain from the tax quota [set for those places].”19 Obviously, the government had to exempt more when bad harvests and disasters took place. It seems to be a normal occurrence for Hebei's actual production to be far below its tax quota.
Instead of indicating regional production, the figures of tax quotas reflect the government's demand for supplies; more reasonably, they are actually government budgets for regional expenditures. The highest number for Hebei indicates the highest government budget in order to satisfy tremendous consumption occurring inside Hebei.20 In this sense, Hebei, rather than being a production center as Cheng Minsheng believes, was actually a consumption center within the empire. As the final pages of the present chapter will show, after 1048, Hebei became even more reliant on the state finances and the importation of goods from southern China in order to satisfy the consumption of its disaster-ri
dden population, its swollen military, and the gigantic hydraulic entity the state maintained in that region. Before we discuss this further, let's take a close look at the production of three staple crops: millet and winter wheat in the next section, and paddy rice in the third section. These studies reveal what Hebei farmers produced to feed themselves in a subsistence-oriented economy, a situation that was different from that of their counterparts in south China.
7.2 Millet and Winter Wheat: Production without Revolution
A predominant discourse in the study of Song history is the thesis of a multi-dimensional Tang–Song transition. In the economic realm, this transition was manifested in a revolutionary growth of various economic sectors, in terms of both an explosion of overall production and a drastic enhancement of productivity. The foundation of this revolutionary growth lay in agriculture, which generated abundant surpluses that supported an enlarging population, boosted trade and market activities, and released enormous amounts of labor from agriculture to engage in non-agricultural modes of production. At the core of this economic thesis is the identification of various revolutionary factors: new agricultural tools, new ways of improving the microenvironment for production, new systems of labor utilization and management, new land tenure systems, and new government institutions and economic policies.21
Given all of this, an essential factor that helped to found China's medieval agricultural revolution was the wide adoption of high-yield crops. In south China, this was a species of early-ripening paddy rice.22 In the next section, I will examine the government's experiments in cultivating paddy rice in Hebei. In north China, the high-yield crop was winter wheat. Here, the question I am about to tackle is whether or not winter wheat was widely planted in Hebei during the eleventh century, in particular after 1048, so as to bring about a revolutionary improvement in land productivity, as well as in Hebei's overall output of staple food. This question is crucial, because its answer implies whether or not the Hebei people could produce enough food to survive the hardship in an extremely challenging environmental era. The answer – that winter wheat was not widely cultivated – will reinforce my argument that there was a de facto decline in Hebei's agricultural production that contrasted starkly to the stunning growth in south China.
