The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Yet, as history moved on to a new stage, we confront different questions: did this “hydraulic mode of production” yield a good dinner as Emperor Taizu and Li Chui desired, or as Wittfogel promised? Did the formation of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex bring about environmental stability to north China and, by extension, both a sense and a reality of the state's political security? To everyone's disappointment, as soon as the river shifted into Hebei, the state realized that the new delta landscape was not as beneficial as Emperor Taizu, Li Chui, and others envisaged. The Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex engendered a series of unexpected disasters, and threatened the state with a different kind of uncertainty and anxiety. Ironically, during the next eight decades of its rule, the Song state and its ruling members were busy debating whether or not to undo the “dinner” by reversing the efforts the state had painstakingly made before 1048, and rerouting the river out of Hebei to return it to its pre-1048 or even its pre-1034 course. Two hydraulic leaderships emerged in the government: one focusing on taming and rerouting the Yellow River at high costs and the other prioritizing Hebei's strategic qualities and socio-economic well-being. They competed for resources and the state attention in order to dominate the environmental management inside Hebei. The new Yellow River delta thereby became both a target and a site of intense contestations not only between humans and hydrological forces but also among the state's various political forces.

  The present chapter explores the continuous unfolding of the environmental drama by focusing on the state's management of two waterbodies in the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex – the Yellow River and Hebei's frontier ponds, which were not in any way connected in the past, but became geographically overlapping and physically colliding and conflicting after 1048 as the river's northerly courses overran the ponds. Dealing with the new environmental conditions troubled the imperial state and demanded unending contributions of human lives and resources. Unexpectedly, the state was entrapped by a “hydraulic mode of consumption” that, over the course of the next eighty years, had made the state the supplier and servant of the needs of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex – rather than the other way around – and gradually wore down the state power. It is through this consumptive mode that we investigate how the state's environmental management (a pre-modern case for the kind of state-sponsored “schemes to improve the human condition” as James C. Scott studies) failed and also failed its main actor, the imperial state itself.

  5.1 Eight Decades of the “Northern Flows”

  When the news about the river's bank rupture and course shift arrived at the court in 1048, Emperor Renzong and his ministers were perhaps taken aback, but they did not panic. This result had been carefully contemplated and secretly hoped for over the previous decades. Their sentiment might have been discerned by fourteenth-century historians who, in The Standard History of the Song Dynasty they compiled, interpreted this environmental change in such cheerful tones – “The tracks of Yu the Great are now restored!”3

  As the flood spread farther into central and northern Hebei, however, its disastrous impact began to worry the government. Reports from Hebei told of villages and buildings being swept away, people losing their families and belongings, and crops being ruined. Famine and infectious diseases started to take over the land. More alarming to the state, the environmental changes might have a catastrophic impact on Hebei's strategic landscape, altering several key components in the Song's frontier strategic system. First, the Yuhe Canal was so damaged that it lost its navigational function; this jeopardized the transportation of military supplies and threatened Hebei's military entity. Second, the frontier ponds built and maintained at great expenses as a defense system for the flat land of northern Hebei were endangered by the torrents of the Yellow River. Third, the Yellow River used to function (or at least was hoped to) as a second natural barrier, after the Juma River, to prevent a northern enemy from marching farther into Song territory. Now the river had merged in the Juma, and the double barriers had been reduced to a single one. Not only that, but the Yellow-Juma combination would possibly lend its open watery surface to the Khitan, who could easily enter Hebei and the rest of China by sailing across the water or walking over the ice cover in winter.

  The early advocates of a northward-flowing Yellow River like Emperor Taizu and Li Chui did not anticipate any harmful consequences of a northward shift of the river. But Emperor Renzong and his ministers faced a cruel prospect: this newly generated Yellow River delta in the land of Hebei would potentially induce invasions from the Khitan. Hence, after 1048, the Yellow River continued to be seen as a national-security issue, so critical that it could cause the downfall of the state itself.

  As this prospect loomed large, opinions on hydraulic solutions at the court were divided. They fell into three main camps: returning the river to its original course between Hebei and Henan; dividing the river into several small divergent channels to reduce its hydrological power; and leaving the river alone as it was in Hebei. For instance, Jia Changchao, a former Grand Councilor and now prefect of Daming in southern Hebei, worried that the river would destroy his district and, by extension, all of Hebei. So he urged the government to repair the bank rupture immediately, and to turn the river back to its pre-1034 course that it had followed for the previous nine centuries. Sharing Jia's concerns, most hydrocrats (shuiguan 水官), who usually served in the Ministry of Water Conservancy (dushuijian 都水監), considered a large-scale project to shift the river back to an old course both technologically and financial challenging. They became the leading voice for the second hydraulic idea: dividing the river. The third group, including statesmen like Ouyang Xiu and Liu Chang, believed that the first two solutions were both unviable, because the costs would be too high for the state to bear. Meanwhile, since “[w]ater flows toward the lowland,” Ouyang claimed, the Yellow River had chosen Hebei as its destination. The state should not violate the river's natural tendency by turning it back to the southern highland.4

  These three ideas persisted through the next eighty years to define the political discourse on the Yellow River hydraulics.5 In 1049, they simply caused confusion to Emperor Renzong. Without comprehending the whole situation, he hastened to launch a giant hydraulic project, seeking to reroute the river out of Hebei. This decision put forth an urgent conscription of a labor force up to 300,000 men and all sorts of raw materials (like wood, bamboo, grass, and stone) up to 18,000,000 (of various units).6 Both Hebei and its neighboring provinces were mobilized to prepare for the project.

  Yet a few months later, the emperor had become increasingly suspicious of a full-scale return of the river. He was convinced that his disaster-struck subjects in Hebei were too weak to participate in the giant project; overexploitation of the refugees might trigger social and political tumult. In the light of these concerns, he found the less radical solution suggested by the second group more reasonable. Impetuously, the emperor dropped the early decision, ordering a stop to the conscription and the dismissal of the laborers. Instead, he instructed his hydrocrats to open small divergent channels inside Hebei.

  This abrupt change to the hydraulic policy incurred sharp criticism from the third group of officials. They saw the court swinging between panic and hesitation. Its vacillating policies suggested that the court had no self-confidence in making the right decision, and it also distrusted that its advisory bodies were knowledgeable, transparent, and loyal. To officials like Ouyang Xiu, given an ignorant and soft-minded leader like Emperor Renzong, the state would be exploited by ill-intentioned hydrocrats, who cared about nothing but their own political and economic gains.

  These political disputes were volleyed back and forth for eight years. All the while, the river was left to run a meandering course and to spread stagnant water across central Hebei. Eventually, a hydraulic project to open a divergent channel was carried out, led by hydrocrats including Li Zhongchang 李仲昌, son of Li Chui who advocated for the river's n
orthern flow in the 1010s. On the first day of the fourth lunar month in 1056, Li's team blocked up the 1048 bank rupture, and forced a portion of the river water into a channel they had dredged. Unfortunately, the channel was too narrow and shallow to accommodate the torrents, so the very same night, the river crashed through the newly repaired dykes and exploded in a massive flood. Tens of thousands of workers drowned, and countless tools and construction materials were swept away. The project was an unmitigated disaster, and southern Hebei was once again swallowed by violent water. This time, the disaster was clearly caused by the mismanagement of the government's hydraulic project.

  The court threw Li Zhongchang into exile and punished other hydrocrats accordingly. Frightened and defeated, the hydrocrats, other officials, and even the emperor himself avoided touching upon the river's hydraulic issues for years. Although the river continued to inflict floods, the court simply approved the construction of lengthy “set-back dykes (yaodi 遙堤)” in central Hebei. These dykes stood tens of kilometers away from the river and its natural banks, flanking the river from afar.7 The court had essentially conceded the battle against the river, giving the latter an enormous territory over which the river wandered, meandered, overflowed, and eventually placated its rage.

  In 1060, the river burst through its eastern banks at some point in southern Hebei, and carved out a channel that headed toward eastern Hebei, effectively splitting into two streams – a new eastern course and the old northern course. For a while, it seemed that what Li Zhongchang tried but failed to do in 1056 – to divide the river into multiple channels – had come into being naturally. But soon, nature proved that the “divide the river” strategy did not solve the river problems. Once the river was divided into several small streams, each carrying less hydrological force, its silt deposited more easily. Over the next seven years, the riverbeds were quickly silted up to cause both courses to be dysfunctional; hence, floods continued to take place in central Hebei.

  The year of 1068 was particularly catastrophic. It was when young Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (1048–1085) just ascended to the throne. After many years of cool, gloomy weather and extensive rainfall, north China observed an intense explosion of sunspots, which might suggest a decrease in temperature and humidity on the earth. In the 1060s, north China also experienced severe dryness. In the worst situation, “there is no rain within a distance of a thousand li…the wild teems with locusts and various pests.”8 Once again, as in the 1040s, earthquakes broke out throughout north China. In the summer of 1068, central Hebei was shaken by strong earthquakes that some modern research rates at a magnitude of 6° or 6.5°.9

  By now, both courses of the river were heavily silted. When the rainy season arrived and bought about heavy downpours, the river could not contain the excessive water; the torrents burst through its banks. In the sixth and seventh months, first in Enzhou, then in Jizhou, and then in Yingzhou 瀛州, and then all over central Hebei, the river crushed its banks and flooded. Even worse, it was not only the Yellow River that overflowed its banks; Hebei's local rivers also became turbulent with the excess of water. These rivers were caught up by the northern flow of the Yellow River. Their waters either joined the Yellow River to create immense floods in central Hebei, or were jammed by the Yellow River and forced back toward their upper streams to inundate the land and people there. Western Hebei, a relative highland area that rarely saw flooding issues, turned into swampy land as well. Its people joined the rush of refugees from the central plain out of Hebei.

  Illustration 11. Changing Courses of the Yellow River, 1048–1128

  The new emperor “was worried about the situation.” Once again, the court was thrown back to the situation its predecessor faced in 1048. Opinions split into three factions, following the similar hydraulic ideas as in 1048. The “let the river be” group suggested accepting the reality and accentuating the positive side of the misery. They argued that by discharging straight into the frontier river and the ocean, the Yellow River expanded the overall surface area of water in northern Hebei. Nobody, including the Khitan, could overcome such a treacherous landscape. Although the river killed civilians and damaged Hebei's economy, its presence in the northeastern frontier was indeed “Heaven's way to constrain the Khitan!”10

  The opponents, however, reminded the court of the twenty-year history between 1048 and 1068, suggesting that the “let the river be” solution would only induce more disasters. Rather than yielding to the river, they advocated that the government should invest more human efforts to fight it. A hydraulic project should channel as much of the river's water as possible eastward, to eventually close up the 1048 northern course. By doing so they wished to free much of Hebei from the river's impact and restore the region back to the environmental situation before 1048. But, how to do this? Questions of when to start the project, how long the work would need to continue, and how much it would cost were causes for contention. There was also the question of who would bear the brunt of the costs in terms of financial and labor provisions – the people of central and western Hebei, or those in southeastern Hebei?

  As these issues came to a fore, there emerged a group of officials who supported a conservative approach and demanded caution to any hydraulic project. Famous statesmen like Sima Guang, for instance, doubted that the state and its people were ready for any massive hydraulic work.11 The land of north China was so ravaged, its people were so exhausted, and the government was so financially strained that the costs for a gigantic hydraulic project could be ruinous. Sima suggested postponing the project for two or three years until such an ambitious project could be reasonably undertaken. He also reminded the emperor that people in central Hebei and southeastern Hebei were both subjects of His Majesty; one should not be sacrificed for the other. Any hydraulic solution to release central Hebei from the disasters should not impose the danger on southeastern Hebei. The state should guard everybody's interests equally.

  The activist group of officials saw things differently. To their mind, without quelling the disasters, any effort toward social or economic recovery or any talk about political and strategic solidarity would end in vain. In contrast to the egalitarian humanists like Sima Guang, the pragmatic hydrocrats believed that “wherever the Yellow River arrived, it invariably cast damage in the past as it does in the present days.”12 No hydraulic project could protect everyone equally. The court had to “compare costs and benefits, and weigh the importance” of various solutions, and decide on prioritizing some areas over others, in order to preserve the greater good. This was the same rationale that Emperor Taizu used in 972 to argue for moving the river northward. But, given the changed political and environmental circumstances, this rationale was now applied to justify an opposite hydraulic idea – shifting the river out of Hebei, back to its old, eastward course.

  By 1069, the political atmosphere had changed at the Song court. At the tender age of twenty-one and still quite new to the throne, Emperor Shenzong was young, energetic, and ambitious, and he held control over an empire of nearly one hundred million subjects. Yet the empire he inherited was rife with challenges, both internal and external. His subjects were plagued with disasters, diseases, and hunger, and the increasingly impoverished populace could not refill his depleted state coffers. Moreover, his government was largely dysfunctional, filled with professional politicians who appeared old, conservative, and inefficient. They arrogantly lectured the young emperor on how things were done in the past, pushed their interpretations of what the Confucian classics dictated, and urged him to tread carefully so as to not upset either Heaven or his subjects. Their internal conflicts meant that they could not come to consensus on nearly anything, including on how to deal with the Yellow River.

  Seeking to gain control over his empire, Emperor Shenzong was attracted to the radical, idealistic political thinker Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), who at the time was already a rising star in the political scene. Unlike his opponents like Sima Guang, who perceived the state and soci
ety to be two dichotomous and competing sides, Wang Anshi saw the two as intertwined and interdependent strings of a developmental spiral leading toward a common goal, with the state as the leading force of its movement. A strong state would not cause damage to or a suppression of the society; rather, if the state were assertive of its own rights and interests, it would be able to address the needs of the society and would eventually guide and contribute to the society's growth.13 According to this view, even if a state-run hydraulic project caused harm to some people temporarily, the peace and security it brought would benefit the entire society permanently. Wang called for putting faith in the state and letting it take the lead, in order to achieve a win-win situation for both the state and its people.

  Above all, the activist state Wang envisioned depended upon a courageous, foresighted, and equally idealistic monarch, who was determined to lead the fight against the status quo. In 1069, Wang's powerful call for change spoke directly to the frustrated, anxious young emperor, and Shenzong enthusiastically responded to it. He ousted conservatives like Sima Guang, and cleared the way for Wang Anshi and his followers to organize a new government. Soon, Wang's “New Policies” spread across the empire, provoking reforms at every level of the government and changing the economic and social situation of those even at the bottom level of the society.