The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  What made the 1128 event different from the 1938 event, and what caused its environmental effects to be more profound, was that in addition to the gigantic flood, the Yellow River's lower reaches burst out of its northern course and poured southward to join various waterbodies in Henan. With this change, the river's course turned 90 degrees clockwise to converge with the Bian Canal, the Si 泗 River, and the Qing 清 River. Through these southward channels, the Yellow River's flow surged into the drainage basin of the Huai River. In 1194, the Yellow River fully took over the Huai's lower reaches, and through them discharged into the Yellow Sea 黃海. As a result, the river's mouth relocated from the coast near modern Tianjin at latitude 39° southward to somewhere close to modern Nanjing 南京 at 32°.3 All this brought an end to the era of the river's northern flows inside Hebei, and the era of the river's southern flows began. The new era lasted until 1855, when a bank rupture drove the river toward Shandong, and established an eastern course that resembled the river's pre-1048 course. Since then until today, the Yellow River has been disconnected from the Huai River basin. Its lower reaches have remained between Hebei and Henan-Shandong to serve as Hebei's southern border, similar to the situation before 1048.

  Just as abruptly as it shifted northward and established a river delta inside the Hebei Plain in 1048, the Yellow River departed from Hebei within a day or two in 1128. Suddenly the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, which had deeply plagued Hebei and the Northern Song state, dissolved, and the river's delta landscape in Hebei vanished. The environmental drama was over, and the river has never entered the heart of Hebei again.

  Illustration 14. Southern Courses of the Yellow River after 1128

  Compared to the Yellow River's millennia-long history, the eighty-year environmental drama questioned in this book is indeed a very brief episode. It is no wonder that people who lived in north China during the following nine hundred years have forgotten what happened between 1048 and 1128. Even historians have paid little attention to those years. Nevertheless, this brief episode in history left behind a heavy legacy, profoundly affecting Hebei of later periods in many ways. Chapter 8 elaborates how its impacts lingered and continued to shape the environmental conditions and human lives in Hebei up to the present day. Socio-economically, Hebei did not seem to have regained economic and social vitality after the Yellow River departed from the region. It not only failed to catch the economic train of a revolutionary growth that southern parts of China had ridden through the late thirteenth century (or over several more centuries, as some Ming-Qing scholars would like to argue). But the environmentally ravaged Hebei continued to experience periodic warfare, political and social turmoil, and economic exploitation and downturn during the Song-Jin transition (a great portion of the twelfth century), Jin-Yuan transition (much of the thirteenth century), and Yuan-Ming transition (the second half of the fourteenth century).

  Hebei seems to have had little to do with the highly applauded economic growth in the Ming-Qing period, for which modern historians consider China a leading force of the global economy before the “Great Divergence” took place in the nineteenth century and certain parts of China (such as the lower Yangzi delta) became the breeding bed of “buds of capitalism.”4 In fact, as Lillian M. Li's study on Hebei during the Qing period has sufficiently shown, this region fell to become a “land of famine,” which constantly suffered from various disasters and overall environmental degradation. People in this region became heavily reliant on the state for famine relief after the 1690s.5 The longue durée of the regional history of Hebei from the twelfth through the seventeenth century is beyond the scope of this book; we await the emergence of future studies that will fill in this huge gap of knowledge. Nevertheless, our focus on the 1048–1128 environmental drama provides a solid, multi-dimensional historical context for future studies of the continuous deterioration of this region during the later periods.

  Let us recall a point made at the beginning of this book (Prologue). After seeing the profound environmental, political, and socio-economic sacrifice the land of Hebei had made, how can we again view the history of middle-period China through a conventional rosy lens without feeling a sense of heaviness or bitterness? How can we continue to take for granted the grandeur of south China and celebrate the illusion of a “medieval economic revolution,” which was at best a regional phenomenon? While growth seemed a historical constant and certainly a favored theme of scholarly interests, degradation, destruction, and suffering – the stories of those who lost in the game of history – were the hidden companion of growth. Dead bodies, hungry refugees, salinized earth, disappeared streams, and vanished trees – they had participated in the making of history long before we were willing to address their existence. Do they not deserve more scholarly passion and compassion? I shall leave these inquiries to my readers and future studies.

  Bring the State Back In; Bring the Society Back In – To Their Environmental World

  The 1048–1128 environmental drama offers a valuable point of comparison to the environmental and socio-economic history of other regions in later periods. Geologically, between 1048 and 1128, the river discharged its muddy water into the Bohai Gulf, and its silt built up a substantial swath of land around where modern Tianjin is located, pushing the pre-1048 coastal line farther into the ocean.6 It took the plain of Hebei as its delta and valley. From 1128 to 1855, due to its southward shift, the river discharged its silt through the mouth of the Huai River. Its silt was carried south by ocean tides to the coastal area of the Yangzi River, and continued to build landmass there.7 During those centuries, the river's lower reaches acquired a new valley, which covered a vast area stretching from eastern Henan to Huaibei and Huainan (both sides of the Huai River), and to the northern edge of the lower Yangzi valley. This area replaced Hebei to become the new bearer and flooding ground of the Yellow River. It became the new “Hebei.”

  Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, this new river valley had experienced environmental changes and disasters similar to what Hebei experienced between 1048 and 1128. Studies of this lengthy period of the river's history, for instance, by historical geographer Han Zhaoqing, suggest that this new valley area became subjected not only to the Yellow River's frequent floods, but also to long-term environmental issues like disturbance to local water systems, sedimentation, salinization, and deforestation.8 Socio-economically, this new river valley was so damaged that it suffered an economic decline. It has gradually become the most unstable, poor, underdeveloped region along China's eastern coast. Focusing respectively on its southern and northern parts, Ma Juya and Kenneth Pomeranz have elaborated on this river valley's environmental and socio-economic downturn during the Ming, Qing, and Republican periods.9 Clearly, the environmental drama, which had ravaged Hebei during the Northern Song period, had to a large degree replicated itself in the new valley area in the south. Rather than considering that the brief environmental drama ended in 1128, it seems more appropriate for us to contemplate that the drama spatially migrated from Hebei to the Henan-Huaibei region and took a new stage there. The intricate environmental relationship between the Yellow River and the land that hosted it, as this book has presented, persisted through the following centuries.

  Without diving into the geographical migration of the environmental drama too deeply, I would like to further this simplistic regional comparison by bringing forth a hypothesis. Throughout this book I have argued for the mechanism of the “hydraulic mode of consumption,” through which a kind of gangrenous disease emanated from the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex across the broad environmental world. It implicated and affected other regions environmentally and socio-economically during 1048–1128: for instance, through the endless requests for timber from Shaanxi, and the tremendous demands for grain, cash, and manpower from Henan, Shandong, and all the way down to the south in the lower Yangzi valley. Much of the empire had geared up to serve and sustain the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. The study of the 104
8–1128 environmental drama, therefore, not only tells a regional history of Hebei, but constructs a history of interregional relationships of the empire. It was likely that such mechanism and disease occurred during the Yuan-Ming-Qing period as well. The river's new valley in the Henan-Huaibei region, on the one hand, became the most environmentally and socio-economically compromised area, as Pomeranz and Ma have argued. But on the other hand, it also became a center of consumption that took heavy tolls on its neighboring regions and imperial states.

  Ma Junya's study of the southern part of the river valley, the Huaibei region, during the Ming-Qing period focuses on the former issue: that is, how the region's entanglement with the Yellow River led to its multi-dimensional (even cultural) degradation. Readers may like to engage with Ma's work in the light of my study on the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, and question how a sacrificed, declining Huaibei had also imposed enormous environmental and socio-economic costs on other parts of the Ming and Qing empires and entrapped various regions in extended hardship, even though they were not geophysically involved with the Yellow River. Different from Ma's work, Kenneth Pomeranz investigates the Qing state's “withdrawal” from hydraulics in the valley's northern part, the Huang-Yun (Yellow River-Grand Canal) region, in the dynasty's later years. This suggests the breakdown of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” through the state's intentional disassociation and the rest of the empire's consequential disentanglement from the valley of the Yellow River. Such statist decisions and efforts to disinvest in and abandon the Huang-Yun region show that previously, hydraulic engagement with the region had imposed a huge burden on both the imperial state and other parts of China. Rethinking Pomeranz's study through the lens of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” and comparing it with our case study, readers may contemplate questions such as why the Northern Song state was incapable to break out of its entrapment within the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, whether or not the Qing's disinvestment in and abandonment of the Huang-Yun was as successful as it was intended, and what the implications of the disruption of the hydraulic mode of consumption were to both the Huang-Yun and other parts of the Qing empire. Comparing these historical cases, we see that their similarities and differences are both striking. It is beyond the scope of this book to pursue such comparative research. Nevertheless, our exploration of the environmental drama during 1048–1128 helps pave the ground for future studies of those long-term, interregional histories or comparative regional histories.

  In the last few pages of the book, let me elaborate on another significant implication that, I hope, the 1048–1128 environmental drama offers to the studies of other regions and later historical periods. That is, how the trialectic complications among various environmental entities and the desires and efforts of a state continued to define the environmental relationships among equivalent historical actors in the following centuries.

  During the Jurchen's Jin Dynasty, the state perceived its geopolitical relationship with the Yellow River in a similar way to that of the Northern Song state, except that the environmental structure of north China was reversed: in the Jin Dynasty, the Yellow River flowed southward to join the Jin-Southern Song boundary river – the Huai River, while in the Northern Song Dynasty, it flowed northward to join the Northern Song-Liao boundary river, namely the Juma River. The Jin state adopted the Song state's politico-hydraulic rationales, its hydraulic institutions (e.g., the Water Conservancy and its extensional branches), and its hydraulic technology. Inheriting the Song's hydraulic apparatus, the Jin endeavored to keep the river flowing toward the south, at the expense of the land and people in Henan and Huaibei, in order to prevent the river from shifting back to and damaging Hebei, now a region of higher political significance. As I have examined elsewhere, this adoption of political rationales and hydraulic strategies in one imperial state by another led to opposite environmental constructions in the two consecutive historical periods: the geopolitical core-periphery structure between Henan and Hebei in the Northern Song reversed completely in the Jin period.10

  The next few centuries saw similar environmental efforts from late imperial states, which followed the footsteps of the Jin Dynasty and continued to restrain the disastrous Yellow River within the geopolitically secondary regions along the river's southern courses. As Ma Junya has pointed out, in order to defend their core political areas in the north (including Hebei), the Ming and the Qing dynasties were both committed to confining the river water within its southern courses and to sacrificing the Huaibei region as the river's flooding ground.11 The land northwestern of Huaibei, the Huang-Yun region, was socio-economically and environmentally downgraded to a lesser region in the empire system in the later years of the Qing state; the latter decided to cut short its hydraulic investments in the disaster-ridden region and to reallocate its limited resources to foster the development of a modern economy in other prioritized regions. As Pomeranz has analyzed, the state's abandonment of the Huang-Yun region through deinvesting in its hydraulic works made the region a socio-economic and environmental hinterland.12

  These later regimes adopted and refined the kind of state-prioritizing environmental rationales that the Song state crafted, and inherited the hydraulic apparatus that the Song state installed. For many centuries they had used and perfected the hydraulic technology that Song hydrocrats and workers invented, and relied on the same kind of construction materials that Song hydrocrats employed and exploited. As the Yellow River's lower reaches moved southward, more and more forests, bushes, and bamboo groves in the southern parts of China were depleted for hydraulic purposes. The states and the societies continuously fed immense human and material resources into their often-defeated environmental management. The burdensome issues that plagued the Song state and Song people continued to manifest in the following centuries: regional disparities, the state's hierarchical treatment of various regions, competition between environmental management and other obligations of the state, political factions and conflicts among various levels of the state's governing body, limited resources and financial strain, momentary crisis and long-term degradation, local resistance to both environmental disasters and the state's mismanagement, and widespread hardship. These issues shaped the daily life of the state, society, and the physical environment, just as they had between 1048 and 1128. The hydraulic mode of consumption, the theoretical formula that I have proposed in this book, ran through the making of China's history during the second millennium. In this sense, the eighty-year environmental drama in middle-period China supplied both the beginning of and the model for a peculiar version of Chinese history throughout the second millennium. This version was not about the historical progress and production that most previous scholarship is concerned with, but about costs, losses, and suffering that the making of history induced and demanded. One effective way to see these costs, losses, and suffering is to bring our conventional discourses about the state and the society – various humanist discourses – back into their environmental worlds that both enable and condition them.

  Such trialectic complexity among various environmental entities did not happen only to the Yellow River, a north-China region, or an imperial state in historical times. The 1048–1128 environmental drama resonates with many issues inherent in China's political, socio-economic, and environmental present. These include issues like environmental degradation and resource depletion, the political system's desires and often failures to manage both the environment and human society, the unequal development among different regions, the economic-environmental impoverishment of certain parts of China, and the prevalent, long-lasting suffering of the people there. Once troubling Song China and late-imperial China, these issues are sadly reoccurring in contemporary China.

  Think about the developmental strategies that modern China adopts: since the 1950s, it has favored a resource-depleting mode of state building at the expense of environmental sustainability; since 1978, it has prioritized the speedy rise of regions along t
he eastern coast at the cost of the drastic impoverishment of its western interiors.13 Certainly think about mega-projects like the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Transfer. In order to achieve the state-level energy and resource security and to fulfill the resource consumption in socio-economically advanced regions, these projects have not only caused the displacement of millions of people, but also brought profound transformations to the landscape and waterscape across various parts of the Yangzi River valley. Both projects are the congealments and manifestations of the ongoing contestations among the present Chinese state, a titanic hydrological system (or several systems), and contradictory regional realities and interests.14 Other than some negative consequences we have already witnessed, what else the mechanism of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” has devoured and will continue to devour through the everyday operation of the dam and the water transfer is yet known and awaits our future investigation.

  All these modern developments of the trialectic complexity are nothing new. They find a historical analogy or even a historical foundation back in the eleventh century. The politico-environmental decisions made for these cases came from careful deliberations and rational choices, very similar to the reasoning and strategies that the Song state employed to conduct its environmental governance. Surprisingly, the difference between pre-modern eras and the modern era does not seem as significant as we tend to believe. Modernity has obviously not changed the fundamental ways that we – our state and society – interact with non-human environmental entities; it has certainly not changed our wishful perceptions and assumptions that the environment, as a categorical sum of objects, is ready for human appropriation and manipulation for the profit of some social groups (certainly not to everyone).