by Ling Zhang
This regional history of Hebei addresses two issues only inadequately addressed in previous scholarship. The first is the issue of what north China was like after China's economic, social, and cultural centers moved southward into the Yangzi valley, a developmental trajectory that scholars advocating the Tang–Song transition theory have largely agreed on.14 The second is the question of why Chinese scholarship of the past few decades has followed such trajectory to shift its attention to China's geographical south and to tell stories of growth associated with the rise of south China and the expansion of the empire.15 Although contemporary scholars have enthusiastically responded to calls from G. William Skinner and Robert M. Hartwell to study histories from regional and macro-regional perspectives, the existing scholarship tells us very little about north China, where most of the political competition, economic innovation, and social development took place in the first millennium. Is this scholarly emphasis truly about the historical insignificance of north China or simply a reflection of modern historians’ preference to study growth and successes?16 By telling the untold stories of death, suffering, and degradation, this history of Hebei complicates the empire-wide political, economic, and environmental landscape and illuminates the widening regional disparities in middle-period China. It unveils a long-neglected, dark side of the rosy image of growth that scholars of the Tang–Song transition have ardently portrayed. Without considering the history of impoverishment and deprivation in northern regions like Hebei, the stories of growth and prosperity often associated with south China should be regarded as merely regional specificity.17
The second history takes place on a more macro level. The book presents an illuminating account of the imperial history of the Northern Song state. State building in the Song period has been studied repeatedly from political, military, institutional, socio-economic, cultural, and technological perspectives.18 What distinguishes this book is that it grounds this state-building process within – rather than keeping it apart from – the state's everyday encounters and lived experiences with environmental realities. It explores how the state's existential anxiety derived from its environmental experiences, not only from war, politics, and financial stress – various human issues that previous scholarship has focused on. Such anxiety influenced every step of the state's decision-making in handling the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex and, by extension, the ways in which the state ran its empire and managed its everyday political and financial life. This book examines the discrepancy between the state's intentions in its environmental management and the unexpected results of its hydraulic practices. It reveals the state's inherent struggles between its desires and its limitations.19
Such struggles of the state evolved into two historical ironies, which form the book's arguments about this peculiar version of the Song's imperial history. The first irony occurred in the relationship between the state and hydraulics. According to Karl Wittfogel and most hydraulic historians of China who have adopted Wittfogel's productive mode of theoretical reasoning – although denouncing his reductive conclusion in terms of its empirical applicability – the more a state attended to and invested in hydraulic management, the more likely environmental conditions became sound, and the more likely the human society reliant on the hydraulics prospered, and it felt content about and thus better served the state. A hydraulically negligent state would see not only the dysfunction of hydraulic systems but also, by extension, the decline of the society and the rise of social resentment and disturbance toward the state.20 Contradicting such Wittfogelian logic of a mutually constitutive relationship between hydraulic management and state power, this book unveils an irony that arose from the Song state's unbreakable and exhausting commitment to environmental management. Not only did the Song's increasing investments in water control not bring along environmental and social stability, but bounded by its hydraulic commitment, the state's political, strategic, and economic life became conditioned, oriented, and even overburdened by its environmental life. What happened to the Yellow River and inside Hebei determined how the state extracted and distributed labor and wealth from different parts of the empire, and how the state established institutions and negotiated with its contentious politicians and bureaucrats. Trapped in a “hydraulic mode of consumption,” the state saw its power being continuously worn down by its environmental commitment.21
The second irony is, as aforementioned, the unexpected inversion between geopolitical, socio-economic core and periphery. The Song pursued state building and power centralization by establishing a core–periphery structure within the empire. In territorial and geopolitical terms, this structure sought to strengthen a core region where the empire's political, economic, and military weight congregated and resided – this went along with a paralleling process that sought to produce an array of peripheral regions that each reinforced certain regional functions but downplayed others in order to best serve the needs of the state. As for Hebei, the state painstakingly undertook a multi-dimensional project to appropriate Hebei into a militarily oriented, economically dependent, and environmentally cooperative region. However, the intrusion of the Yellow River and the emergence of the River–Hebei environmental complex in 1048 turned this region into a land of massive social destruction, heavy military burdens, and tremendous environmental turbulence – all of these fueled the hydraulic mode of consumption, through which the state and the empire had no choice but to funnel tremendous wealth and material resources into Hebei in order to sustain the region's existence. The core and the periphery swapped, against the Song's state-building intentions. Hebei became a destination of the flow of resources and the center where such resources gathered to be consumed, while the state was trapped in not a dominant, managerial but a serving role.
The imperial history told in this book is not about the growth of a strong state that subdued and incorporated both nature and a regional society. Neither is it a history of scientific and technological progress, for it does not celebrate human triumph over nature.22 Nor does it confine its argument to a simplistic condemnation of the policies and activities of the imperial state that inflicted environmental damage and human suffering. Rather, this book observes and analyzes the state's efforts and failures in seizing power from both the society and the environmental world that the state itself inhabited as one environmental entity. This book urges readers not only to ask with James C. Scott “how certain schemes [centrally planned by the state] to improve the human condition have failed.”23 It also asks a further question – how did the state's engagement in such schemes, like environmental management and appropriation of Hebei, lead to the failure of the imperial state itself?
The third history lays the foundation to both the regional history of Hebei and the imperial history of the state – both could only take place within the environmental history of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. Every shift of the river, every increase in the sedimentary cover over the land surface, and every felling of a tree did not merely provide a stage for humans and their institutions to perform, act on, and interact; they were not merely objects that were manipulated by the state and the human society. Rather, these environmental entities actively participated in creating the eighty-year environmental drama. Insomuch as these entities played roles in different versions of human histories, they inducted individual human beings, their communities, and the imperial state into a grand environmental world, in which the river hydrology, geological movements of the earth, climatic changes, and exchanges between non-organic entities and organisms laid the structure and offered possibilities for human struggles and creativity.24
In a seminal collection of scholarship, Ordering the World, scholars of Song China have pondered different Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China.25 They have examined how the imperial state and its prominent individuals conceived of and performed various kinds of statecraft to order the world in which they were situated. The present book critically redefines the notion, “the wor
ld”: the state and the society and individual humans were deeply embedded in an “environmental world,” in which they acted as environmental entities.26 Their entanglement and interactions with other, non-human entities form and transform the world. This complex environmental world compelled humans and their institutions to experience the torrential waters and the desertifying earth in material and tangible ways and to negotiate with the non-human environmental entities on a daily basis. The human intentions and activities to order the world involved their painstaking, costly, and nevertheless often failing ordering of the physical environment. Equally inevitably, these human efforts to “order the world” were inextricably bound with their inescapable experiences of “being ordered by” their environmental world. The unfolding environmental drama during 1048–1128 governed how local people pursued their farming, fishing, and salt-making livelihoods; it shaped the ways in which the state and its ruling members played politics, managed finances, and consumed resources.
The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex at the core of the particular environmental world, whose formation and evolution are at question in this book, composed its own imperial history. Its environmental powers penetrated the human society to affect the everyday life of many Hebei people or expanded toward remote distances to enfold people or things there into its environmental processes. Such environmental powers demonstrated stronger permeability than that of the state power. They broke down manmade political, social, and economic boundaries, both to disturb and regulate spatial and economic relationships within its environmental domain, and to command its subjects – humans and their institutions – to integrate, comply, and provide.
Spatially, this imperial history of the environment did not observe the orderly and stable structure of autonomous region/macroregion that G. William Skinner conceptualized for Chinese society.27 Environmental spaces and the exchanges happening within them stretched and shrank in a far more chaotic and elastic fashion. To be shown in various chapters, multi-spatialities were in play: flooding disasters taking place at certain downstream locales found hidden causes from the Loess Plateau situated more than a thousand kilometers away; hydraulic activities to control the disasters inside Hebei not only implicated the central government in Henan but also, through the managerial role of the state, fueled the trans-regional mobilization and circulation of refugees, labor, wealth, and various kinds of material resources across the empire. Through a butterflyeffect mechanism, what occurred at minute locales were both products and producers of transregional and even empire-wide exchanges and movements. Driving these multi-spatial interactions and fluxes were not only human activities and human institutions but also the flourishing, contingent liveliness of non-human environmental entities.
Temporally, this environmental history did not ebb and flow according to the rise and fall of a dynasty, a human community, or individual life spans; rather, it followed its own timelines. In addition to the instantaneous creation or destruction of a landscape as in 1048 and 1128, as well as the decade-long surge and recession of floods and course changes of the river that led to the rapid shifts of governmental hydraulic policies, this environmental history unfolded through centuries of slow transformations of soil, water, and forests long before 1048 and long after 1128. Multiple temporalities interacted to bring humans, the state, and various non-human environmental entities along into the history's environmental times and cycles.
The environmental history told in The River, the Plain, and the State demonstrates a different way to conceptualize the history of middle-period China. It suggests new methodologies to approach not only the human history but also the more-than-human history. Previous scholarship of middle-period China has paid limited attention to the physical environment, treating it as a static platform or a collection of still objects that passively bear human activities and are subject to human appropriations and representations. The environment and environmental entities, at best, carry symbolic meanings and human interpretations. They do not seem to hold material substances that exert force on every aspect of human life and, hence, make history. When mentioning environmental events, like the shifts of the Yellow River's course in 1048 and 1128, previous historical studies have too often treated them as random incidents or “natural” disasters, which seem to have neither derived from lengthy historical processes nor borne any widespread, long-lasting implications.28 These views toward the environment have determined the ways in which scholars use historical records. They have privileged records about human activities and deemed information about other-than-human events insignificant in their own right.
This book foregrounds environmental events and processes and regards both humans and non-humans implicated in these events and processes as environmental entities. It rejects “a compartmentalized perspective” (to borrow Andre Gunder Frank's words) toward history that brackets off non-human historical actors.29 Instead, it calls for an all-encompassing approach that respects non-human environmental entities as fellow players in the historical making of a complex, fluid environmental world. By doing so, the book seeks to push the boundaries of historical inquiries beyond anthropocentric concerns that have dominated studies of Tang–Song China. Methodologically, by using a great variety of material – not only conventional textual sources like official histories and private writings, but also archaeological materials, geographical studies, earth science, and hydrological studies – this book demonstrates that an all-encompassing, interdisciplinary approach to the study of middle-period China is both possible and fruitful.30
It is beyond question that human histories, like that of the Song state or of the Hebei people, cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the environmental conditions in which they took place. But this book advocates a further point: such human histories could not be made in the first place without being bound up with non-human actors in a complex, chaotic, and entangled environment world. The making of history was never only a human affair. Let's “bring the society back in” and “bring the state back in” to their everyday environmental life, where the river, the plain, and the state reciprocated with each other to make a history for China together.31
1 Liu Chang, “Yonggu [Verses on antiquity]” (No. 8) and “Kuyu [Suffering the rain],” GSJ, 4: 6b, pp. 1095–1430 and 4: 12b, pp. 1095–1433.
2 Fu Bi, “Dingzhou Yuegutang xu [Prose on the Hall of Yuegu in Dingzhou],” Dingzhou zhi, 21: 26a–b, pp. 1823–1824.
3 Ouyang Xiu, “Lun xiuhe diyizhuang [The first memorial on repairing the Yellow River],” OYXQJ, 108: 5b–7b.
4 XCB, 3: 125.
5 XCB, 166: 3985.
6 XCB, 164: 3957 and 166: 3985.
7 XCB, 165: 3974–3975.
8 XCB, 165: 3968. Also Han Qi, “The epitaph of Han Gongyan,” QSW, 856: 73.
9 XCB, 171: 4119. Ouyang Xiu, “Zailun shuizai zhuang [The second discussion on the flood],” QSW, 687: 244.
10 XCB, 165: 3976–3978.
11 The concept “trialectics” originates from studies on space and spatiality. Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre critiqued binarism-rooted dialectic thinking by conceptualizing space and spatiality as the complexity of three types of space (perceived, conceived, and lived). Postmodernist geographer Edward W. Soja (1996: 60–82) developed the concept of trialectics to highlight the instability and blurred boundaries of these spaces and conceptualize a “Thirdspace” that not only encompasses all spaces but also is “radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge.” Although Lefebvre and Soja elaborated the concept specifically to understand space and spatiality, trialectic thinking carries broad theoretical implications. It challenges conventional binary epistemologies (e.g., reality and representation, natural and cultural, subject and object); it destabilizes dialectical modes of understanding of any relationship or historical process as a predictable, orderly progression toward a teleological synthesis. “Thirding” pays attention to otherness to capture the uncertaint
y, destruction, and complexity in a relationship or process. Not focusing on its “logico-epistemological” aspect of the concept as Lefebvre did but attending to the ontological trialectic as Soja theorized (Soja, 1996: 62 and 70), I use the concept to denote simultaneous material existence, continuous reciprocations, and various interactions among a multitude of environmental entities in an open-ending process that makes and remakes a flourishing, unruly, and unpredictable environmental world.
12 As Soja (1996: 61) insightfully maintained, in the trialectic, “The ‘third’ term – and Thirdspace as a concept – is not satisfied in and of itself. The critique is not meant to stop at three, to construct a holy trinity, but to build further, to move on, to continuously expand the production of knowledge beyond what is known.”