The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Hydraulic Practices between 972 and 1048

  Despite the dismissal of Li Chui's proposals, the landscape envisioned by Emperor Taizu and Li Chui – the revival of Yu's landscape – was not dismissed; rather, it was quietly under production. The state, following Li's approach, took better care of the river's southern banks while directing small portions of the river water northward into Hebei. These two techniques of river hydraulics – treating both sides of the river differently – were not declared officially. But they were undertaken in reality. A scrutiny of hydraulic policies and practices in the next few decades shows how the state applied different attitudes and technical solutions to the two sides of the river; as as a result, Hebei continued to fall into an environmentally inferior situation and became more and more susceptible to the Yellow River's attacks. The politico-hydraulic enterprise Emperor Taizu initiated continued to rule the ways in which the state dealt with the river and the Hebei Plain.

  In the years of 982, 983, 984, 1000, 1004, 1019–1021, and 1027 when the river threatened its southern banks and Henan, the court promptly acted to repair bank ruptures and build new dykes.40 Twice it ordered its ministers to perform the highest level of state rituals at the sites of the bank ruptures, offering the Tailao 太牢 sacrifice and jade plates to the river god. These actions, imitating the ritual that Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty dedicated to the Yellow River at the end of the second century BCE, aimed not only to pacify the floods but also to consolidate the newly built embankments. 41 The treatment of the river's northern banks was the opposite. We do not see the extensive construction of dykes to protect the northern banks; there was no sacrifice dedicated to any northerly flood. Instead, hydraulic efforts focused on opening diversionary channels: the first one in 993, the second in 994, the third in 1012, the fourth in 1015, and several more during 1019–1021. These channels directed some of the river water to the north.

  Blocking water from spreading south and diverting water toward the north were referred as two opposite techniques. The term sai (塞, to block) was frequently used to describe the works on the river's southern banks, while terms like fen (分, to divert) or kai (開, to open) dominated the works on the northern banks. The latter was considered as the techniques Yu innovated, the “method of diverting and channeling” that Emperor Taizu advocated in 972. Rooted in the state's politico-hydraulic enterprise to prioritize Henan and sacrifice Hebei, these opposite techniques complemented each other and formed a systematic treatment of the Yellow River.

  As a result of these political decisions and hydraulic practices, “the river's flow gradually turned toward its northern bank,” as one contemporary observed after the completion of a northerly diversionary channel in 1021.42 It is understandable that the concentration of hydrological force pressed upon the river's northern banks; without adequate infrastructure construction and maintenance, the vulnerable northern banks were subject to future ruptures. When summer storms brought excess water and raised the water level in the river, a flood surging northward could be anticipated.

  In 1034, the river breached its northern banks, surging into southern Hebei.43 Drowning much of the southeastern corner of the Hebei Plain, the water formed several meandering streams. In contrast to its prompt reactions to previous southerly floods, the government did not rush to fix this northerly bank rupture. Instead, from 1034 to 1041, the imperial court held extensive, repeated debates on whether or not to fix it.44 The political and technical language the debates employed did not favor the welfare of Hebei and its people. Although a few voices advocated routing the river out of southern Hebei to relieve the locals’ suffering, in the end the court decided not to repair the banks.45

  There were many reasons for the decision. Geographically, the river's old course in northern Henan was heavily silted up and could no longer accommodate the river. More important reasons were provided in 1041 by Yao Zhongsun 姚仲孫, who had just completed his tenure as Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner-in-Chief and returned to the court.46 With more knowledge of Hebei's geography and the river situation than his colleagues in the capital, Yao recommended against repairing the bank rupture. He pleaded with the court to construct set-back dykes, widen old dykes, and straightjacket some meandering sections of the river's course in southern Hebei. These steps would give the river a considerable swath of land in southern Hebei, in which the river's unbridled body could move around freely. As a result, Yao expected to contain the river within southern Hebei rather than to bring it back to northern Henan.

  Yao's proposal promised many advantages, three of which were particularly attractive to the state. First, although the river ran through southern Hebei, it was Yao's optimistic belief and cost-benefit rationale that the river would not impose much negative impact on Hebei. This echoed Emperor Taizu and Li Chui's opinions that the river's harm was lighter on Hebei than on Henan. Second, the proposal would lessen the financial and labor burdens on the state. This point was particularly important in the early 1040s, when the midlife Song state was sunk in a deep fiscal crisis. As we have seen in Chapter 3, financial troubles forced the emperor and his officials to consider all actions in light of financial constraints; any economical solution was appealing to the state. Third and most importantly, as the river was relocated, Kaifeng and the entire Henan area – the core region of the state – would be forever set free from disasters.

  With no intention to over-interpret the minds of the Song officials, I would like to raise a hypothesis: the Song state must have been pleased to see the river and its floods move northward after 1034. By approving Yao Zhongsun's proposal, the imperial court surely recognized the environmental and political implications of Yao's ideas. In 1041, the court once again confirmed the decision not to repair the bank rupture created in 1034. To encourage the river to remain in southern Hebei, the state ordered hydraulic workers to open an additional diversionary channel, which shared the hydrological force from the mainstream and channeled more water further to the interior of Hebei.47 The landscape that Emperor Taizu conceptualized on the basis of the legend of Yu and Li Chui envisioned was steadily taking shape.

  In 1042, the government contemplated taking a further step, when Guo Zi 郭諮, a commissioner in charge of inspecting various Yellow River embankments, proposed channeling the entire river course into the central part of Hebei. To Guo, the river was already inside southern Hebei, so why not push it to move a little further northward to materialize Emperor Taizu and Li Chui's vision? As a military officer, Guo elaborated on various military advantages a northerly flowing river would provide.48 Guo's proposal appeared timely, as in that year a territorial dispute between the Song and the Khitan's Liao was growing into serious military tensions. The talk of the Yellow River's strategic value, as a natural barrier to halt any advancement of the Khitan armies, sounded attractive to the court. Later, when the Song and the Liao settled the territorial dispute through diplomatic means and the military tensions eased, Guo's proposal was set aside. Nevertheless, the imperial court indeed once approved the proposal, going so far as to “store up materials to carry out the project.”

  Clearly, from the early 970s to the early 1040s, a current of ideas had continued to develop and inform several generations of the state leadership in their ways of handling the river. Building on top of each other and elaborating and strengthening each other, these ideas formulated specific hydraulic policies and practices. These ideas and practices altogether enhanced the possibility of transforming Hebei into a potential flooding ground. Both discursively and materially, the state's politico-hydraulic enterprise encouraged the river to tend northward.

  4.3 State Building through Landscape Transformation

  The river's situation remains unclear between 1042 and 1047, due to the lack of historical records. Only a few flooding events were reported, all on a small scale. This seeming decrease in flooding was due partly to climate changes; the reduce in rainfall kept the river's water level low. As Chapter 3 discussed, both northern and sout
hern China suffered from extensive droughts along with periodic earthquakes and outbreaks of locusts. The lower reaches of the Yellow River in the realm of southern Hebei were said to contain little water, and by 1043 the water had become so shallow in some places that people could cross the river on foot. The remaining water moved about on the land surface; it did not carry a hydrological force strong enough to cut through the ground and to form a deep, stable channel.

  The Song state might have congratulated itself on the absence of floods during these years. It might even have attributed such absence to its wise application of different hydraulic techniques to the two sides of the river, as well as to the resultant shift of the river's course into southern Hebei in 1034. The absence of serious floods might also have helped to justify the state's decision not to repair the 1034 bank rupture. In hindsight it seemed a correct decision to allow the river to remain in southern Hebei, instead of bringing it back to northern Henan.

  This absence of disasters, however, did not mark the end of the calamitous history of the Yellow River in the Song period. Rather, it offered six years for the river to keep silting up its riverbed, building up its hydrological force, and waiting for the right moment to explode. This moment came with a heavy rainfall in the summer of 1048. After years of drought, the rain poured down in a sudden deluge on the thirsty Loess Plateau and washed down enormous silt and mud from the middle range of the Yellow River. Water and silt quickly filled up the shallow riverbed in the lower reaches, where sediments deposited in the riverbed over the past several years were thick and deep. The combination of the massive volume of water and the elevated riverbed forced the torrents up against the riverbanks.

  Without scientific data and scientific measures to assess the literary descriptions of our sources, we cannot quantify to what extent non-human factors and state-organized hydraulic works each impacted the river's movement. What remains certain to us is that both joined hands to destabilize the river. This time, thanks to the better protection of the southern banks, the flow did not surge toward the south as it did many times in the early Song period. Instead, it targeted the less protected northern banks and surged into the multiple northerly diversionary channels that the state's hydraulic projects opened in the previous decades. Hence, the majority of the river's hydrological force amassed on the northern banks, in particular in fragile sections where the river course bent and twisted, such as the site of Shanghu. As a result, the roaring torrents destroyed the bank on the northern side of Shanghu; they surged toward the north to cause a complete shift of the river course in 1048.

  This dramatic event reversed the river's long-term tendency toward the south, and relocated most of the river water and flooding problems to the heart of Hebei. As the two giant environmental entities – the river and the plain – collided and merged into each other, the Hebei Plain turned instantly into a delta of the river's lower reaches. This transformation of geographical composition of north China and the appearance of the land coincidentally matched Emperor Taizu's vision of a beneficial landscape and the hydraulic designs that Li Chui and Guo Zi proposed. All of a sudden, the legendary landscape Yu the Great created came to life in north China. “The tracks of Yu the Great are restored!” – so cheered the ministers and historians of the Yuan Dynasty in the early fourteenth century. These compilers of The Standard History of the Song Dynasty examined the history of the Northern Song state's Yellow River management and interpreted the 1048 event as a landmark to this history. They, as officials of the Yuan Dynasty who witnessed the Yellow River's frequent disasters in their own time and their government's repeated failures in controlling the monstrous river, seem to have perfectly understood the difficulties the Song rulers faced and resonated with their anxiety and desires. Hence, they grasped the significance of the 1048 landscape transformation and celebrated it as a major achievement of the Song's environmental management.49

  The shift of the river's course was by no means an incidental revival of the legendary landscape, as the Yuan historians celebrated. It was a result of the Song state's sense of environmental crisis, of Emperor Taizu's politicization of river hydraulics, of the development of his conception through the technical designs by Li Chun, Yao Zhongsun, and Guo Zi, and of the state's deliberate hydraulic policies and practices. At the core of all this lay the history of Hebei being downgraded into an environmental periphery. Focusing on the court's dismissal of Li Chui's proposals, Christian Lamouroux holds that the Song government insisted on maintaining the status quo of the river's hydraulic conditions by not letting the river run northward. It was not until 1048 that “nature had decided and imposed its choice on the authorities,” and it was nature that made the river shift its course.50 My analysis of the state's perceptions, conceptions, and conducts toward both river hydraulics and Hebei has pointed to the opposite conclusion.

  The encounter and clash between the river and the plain – two only marginally related entities in the past – and their entangled co-inhabitance in the next eighty years was not a random, natural event. Surely, the imperial state was not the only actor behind the environmental change; as Chapters 1 and 3 suggested, river hydrology, the geology of north China, and climatic conditions all played roles in the changing situation of the river. Yet, the state's forceful interventions in both the river and the plain supplied significant “probabilistic causation” that had, slowly and over a long time, diminished the river's southward-flooding tendency and increased favorable technical and environmental conditions that brought the disastrous river to the Hebei Plain. The decades-long process of the state's management of the river was the operation of the state's politico-hydraulic enterprise. It was a process of Hebei being reduced to a peripheral region and singled out to become a potential flooding ground of the river; it was also the process of the state's soaring desire and painstaking pursuit of empowerment and centralization. In the trialectic negotiations and struggles among the river, the plain, and the imperial state, Hebei – the land and its people – was not simply unfortunate when it was attacked by the river in 1048. It was not the river's instantaneous violence – as a force of nature in Lamouroux's belief – that crushed this land. Rather, it was the state orchestrated “slow violence” (in Rob Nixon's words) through a series of rationalization, policy-making, hydraulic practices, and appropriation of Hebei that caused harm to Hebei.51 This is what Hebei's flood refugees never knew, as they desperately asked themselves: “Why did this happen?” and “Why did this happen to us?” in the summer of 1048. If we had to answer for them, the answer would be: “Because your state, your emperor and his imperial court located hundreds of kilometers away in Kaifeng, needed you to bear the brunt of this disaster for the greater good!”

  At the end of the chapter, let us briefly analyze some political implications of the state's hydraulic efforts and the environmental change in 1048. The state and its ruling members highly politicized the river hydraulics – not only to interpret existing hydraulic practices in political terms but also to design its hydraulic policies and practices in order to promote political gains. As this chapter analyzed earlier, the Yellow River wreaked havoc right at the state's political core and threatened the state's stability or even survival as a “national security” issue. Hence, the state building for power consolidation and expansion had to derive from the state's successful management of river problems. At least in the state's and its ruling members’ wishful conception, such state's “hydraulic mode of production” (in line with Karl Wittfogel's productive logic) would not only lead to a benign environment but, ultimately, strong state power. In other words, the Song's state building resulted from its deliberate management of the environment.

  To a young imperial state like the Northern Song, the process of state formation and building was by necessity multi-dimensional. As previous Song scholarship has demonstrated, this process involved the choice and establishment of the state's political core; the organization and promotion of the civil bureaucracy; the centralization of mil
itary power and institutions; the systematic exploitation of social wealth and various resources; the advocacy of Neo-Confucianism that reshaped political culture, ethics, and social and cultural practices. All these dimensions were simultaneously pursued by the state, each tackling certain political, strategic, socio-economic, and cultural issues the young state inherited. With regard to Hebei, Chapter 2 discussed how state building proceeded through the state's political, military, and socio-economic appropriations of this region.

  What historians have consistently overlooked, however, is the environmental crisis that the state faced and struggled to overcome. From the state's point of view, the environmental crisis was just as serious and destructive as the political decentralization and a broken economy. Without handling the Yellow River properly, the young state would not have gone as far as it did; thus, the river and various environmental problems were a crucial part of the state building agenda. Thinking with philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, to whom states “attempt at once to homogenize, to hierarchize, and to fragment social spaces” and there is “the state mode of production” of social spaces, this chapter has demonstrated that the Song state operated a state mode of production of natural space and environmental relationships.52 More than space, this state mode of production created a new kind of physicality for environment entities like the river and the land of Hebei; it endowed the environment of north China with both new geophysical attributes and new political and symbolic meanings. Both the Yellow River and the Hebei Plain became the state's environmental-political property that, granted certain appropriations, would serve the state's interests. Hence, the land of north China was hierarchized into some indispensable parts and some dispensable parts, into a strengthening core where the state's power resided in opposite to a downgrading periphery like the river-plagued Hebei.