The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  An exemplary case comes from the prefecture of Daming in southern Hebei, where the northern courses of the Yellow River entered the plain. By the end of the eleventh century, we witness a complicated landscape co-inhabited by the river, dykes, and people. As illustrated in the image below, the Yellow River flowed northward. Flanking the river to the west was the tall Golden Dyke, and between the dyke and the river's natural bank was a vast area of shore, whose surface was level with the river's water. From time to time, the river overflowed onto this land and then retreated to free it. Our conventional understanding is that land differentiates itself from a river, but this shore land was part of the river's extensive body. From a technological point of view, as the Water Conservancy saw it, the state had given the land to the river, so that the river would have a vast space in which it moved around, acted aggressively, adjusted, and finally calmed itself. The locals, however, wanted to reclaim the land from the river. They gathered materials and labor, and built up a “soft dyke (ruanyan 軟郾)” that was not very strong and less than a meter high and wide. The dyke stood in the middle of the shore land, splitting it into eastern and western halves. The eastern half still belonged to the river, while the western half was now used for human settlements and farming.62

  This situation worried the state's hydrocrats. Modern hydrologists may very likely agree with them: straight jacketing the river's course and reducing the river's area to flow in would boost its hydrological power. As that power built, it would eventually explode into bigger and more harmful floods than its previous moderate overflows. As a consequence, the river would not only crush the soft dyke and destroy the human settlements behind the dyke, it would also flow farther westward against the state-maintained Golden Dyke and perhaps cause a rupture to it. If that was the case, the broader Hebei society, the hydraulic schemes the state's hydrocrats tried to maintain, and by extension the well-being of the state would all be threatened. The state-society contestation was thus manifested through the concrete struggle over the existence or removal of the soft dyke.

  Illustration 12. The Struggle for the Yellow River Shore in Daming

  The Water Conservancy pressed locals to remove the soft dyke and leave the land. The people, of course, resisted and refused to evacuate: the area had already been their home for years. Meanwhile, some anti-Water Conservancy, less technically driven but more politically minded officials, like Chen Cisheng 陳次升, stepped in to argue on behalf of the people. To Chen, the local people did not intend to do harm; they had not encroached on state property, the Golden Dyke. The soft dyke was a result of their personal efforts enabled by their own investments. Most importantly, the shore land was an open, unclaimed space. Whoever had means to access the common land should have the right to profit from it, and they would be responsible for any consequences of their acts. Let the people stay, Chen suggested. If the river flooded over the soft dyke and harmed the people, it would be their own loss. He advocated that they wait for nature's final judgment, and that the state should do nothing but strengthen the Golden Dyke, the only thing the state had control over.

  Did the Water Conservancy insist on the removal of the soft dyke? Did nature's judgment arrive with a gigantic flood? With the lack of extant historical sources, we cannot answer these questions; neither do we know who settled on the land and why they chose to do so. The shore land was certainly productive, but the agricultural gain from it did not come without risk, as a random flood could easily destroy an entire year's crops. It is hard to imagine that families who made a stable living and who owned land outside of the Golden Dyke would risk their lives and livelihoods to move into the disaster-prone shore area. The risk was high; the profit was unpredictable, and perhaps low too. Very likely, this swath of land became a haven for the poor, the landless, absconders, tax-avoiders, and outlaws – in other words, people who had little to lose. Such socio-economic complications remained hidden and unnoticed to technologically minded hydrocrats. Technologically, the Water Conservancy's assessment was reasonable. The settlements on the shore would cause trouble in the long run and potentially harm the bigger, privileged, and protected lawful world outside the Golden Dyke. Indeed, the settlers were being shortsighted.

  Understanding the socio-economic and political complications, politician Chen Cisheng pointed out that the poor on the margins of society needed some kind of livelihood. These people were deprived of means of living and could not afford any long-sighted plan. Yet, they not only “have the social right to subsistence” as anthropologist James C. Scott proclaims, but they also demanded such right for subsistence.63 Where did the state and its privileged bureaucratics expect them to go if driven off this shore land? They would perhaps have no choice but to turn into beggars, thieves, and robbers, or worse, anti-state rebels. We should certainly not overestimate Chen's interest in the cause of social justice. Rather, from a point of political pragmatism, he recommended that the state allow the existence of the settlements and settlers in order to contain them and minimize any future socio-economic complications. Indeed, by the early twelfth century when Chen presented his opinion to Emperor Huizong, Hebei was already a wild land, deeply ravaged by the unruly river, chaotic environmental elements, and a bankrupt society.

  The above cases are too fragmentary to produce a complete portrait of the Hebei society, but they do offer some important insights into many lives lived in tremendous hardship. Although victimized by the overwhelming environmental conditions as well as by the state's self-protecting and self-promoting environmental management, ordinary people did not always remain passive or powerless. When their personal interests were at stake – under threat from the physical environment, the state, or other local social groups and individuals – they strove to protect and preserve their interests using a variety of strategies. The continuous unraveling of the environmental drama not only staged catastrophic events like the river's course shift in 1048 and the massive scale of deaths in 1099, but it also brought to bear numerous nameless individuals who tried to survive and, to a small scale, reshaped the hostile environment and confronted the imposing state power.

  Given such activism and spontaneity of individuals, Karl Wittforgel's idealistic thesis about the state's despotic power over a submissive hydraulic society seems less than comprehensive; his “hydraulic mode of production” did not operate to yield such a society. The Song state, despite its strict environmental and social control in Hebei, which best represented the Wittfogelian premise for an engaging hydraulic leader, could not guarantee the absolute cooperation of the local people.64 The resilient and sometimes sly or disobedient people swiftly adapted to the environmental changes; they also negotiated the complex socio-economic and political systems to eke out a livelihood. They did not always rely on a hydraulic leader – either an all-powerful regime or regional authorities – to protect them from environmental pressures.

  The Nanpi–Leshou case, in particular, demythologizes the idea of an all-powerful state. Even in situations where the state asserted its tightest control, ordinary citizens voiced their opinions, as shown in the people of Leshou's public meeting and report. Their voices might not have been seen or heard by the top leadership of the state; in this case, they were only documented in Liu Yu's tomb epitaph, and Liu did not rise to political prominence in his career. Nevertheless, their voices and desires had a material effect upon the local environment, and even forced the state's hydraulic apparatus – through its representatives and executors, the hydrocrats of the Water Conservancy – to change its environmental policy. Conservative officials at the Song court gave us the impression that the bullying hydrocrats and a too-powerful Water Conservancy took full control of the hydraulic works and cared nothing about Hebei's local situations. In reality, as the hydraulic tentacle of state power, the hydrocrats not only directly encountered ordinary people but also experienced their resistance. They could not act in a totalitarian manner, but had to open up a space to correspond, discuss, and negotiate with the local pe
ople. When the state and the society met each other on the very material level of the environmental world, in which both the state and the society had a great deal at stake, their relationship became a mixture of intense conflicts and negotiation.

  We should not, however, overestimate the strength of ordinary people to combat the environment or to resist the state's impositions. Certainly we should not overstate their successes. Had they been successful often or on a large scale, we would not need to discuss the high mortality, mass migration, and severe displacement that these men and women suffered, nor show how the Hebei society headed toward socio-economic bankruptcy. All of the cases we have seen involve contingent, individual solutions, which addressed the needs of only certain groups of people. Even if they were successful, as seen in the case of urban vs. rural interests, that success sometimes led to a cost paid by others. For the greater Hebei society, the small-scale local solutions could not relieve the suffering of the majority of the population. They were no more than some “weapons of the weak,”65 which did not directly confront overwhelming powers like the environment and the imperial state. Instead, they searched for the latter's fractures, exploited their negligence, and adapted to them. These everyday forms of resistance helped the disaster-plagued people handle immediate environmental crises and provided them with some kind of subsistence livelihood, but nothing more.

  The local solutions were not only dispersive, but also contingent and temporary. Environmental conditions and state policies were constantly changing, often forcing locals to give up previous solutions. In the case of the frontier ponds, although Tang Jie led local people to build a dyke to stop the expansion of the ponds, other officials and military officers responded by expanding the ponds all the more forcefully. The Water Conservancy's plan to remove the soft dyke in Daming was a governmental response to the local solution. Given our knowledge of the primacy of the Water Conservancy during the Song period, it is very likely that it won the argument.

  If it is inaccurate to view the Hebei people solely as agency-deprived victims or to overestimate the efficacy of their solutions, we should also not reify their resistance or romanticize their relationship with their environment, just as Rey Chow rightly urges us to “find a resistance to the liberal illusion of the autonomy and independence we can ‘give’ the other” –in our case, the suffering and battling Hebei people.66 The mounting environmental pressure and social competition divided people into smaller interest groups, each guarding its own position. Their survival strategies often harmed others in one way or another. As Elvin correctly sees it, “River water meant quarrels.”67 The urban citizens of Mingzhou protected themselves by sacrificing their rural cousins; the Nanpi magistrate chose to guard his fellow people against the people next door. By principle, the Hebei people pursued their solutions in a way similar to the way in which the imperial state rationalized its hydraulic strategies about the Yellow River, such as protecting-Henan-by-sacrificing-Hebei. Both, based on their experiences of environmental and social crises, pursued self-protecting, even self-profiting strategies. Just as Chapter 5 shows how the formation of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex deepened the division of state institutions and the competition among different political factions, the present chapter reveals the intensification of social and economic struggles among various societal forces inside Hebei.

  1 Hartwell (1982: 365–442) and Kuhn (2009). McDermott and Shibu offer an overall assessment of Song population and its regional variations, in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015: 326–335). For detailed studies about population growth in south China during the Tang-Song period, see Dong (2002) and Wu (2000).

  2 For Hebei population's reduced growth rate and density, see Wu (2000: 432–438).

  3 “Lun Hebei caichan shang shixiang shu,” OYXQJ, 118: 1825–1828.

  4 For separate registrations for military households, see Wu (2000: 93–94).

  5 Wu (2000: 155).

  6 Songchao shishi, 2: 29.

  7 “Shang Renzong lun xiu Shanghukou,” GSJ, 31: 375–376.

  8 “Lun xiuhe diyizhuang,” OYXQJ, 108: 1642–1644.

  9 “Dingzhou Yuegutang xu,” Dingzhou zhi, 21: 26a–26b, 1823–1824.

  10 XCB, 3:125.

  11 Songchao shishi leiyuan, 8: 82. XCB, 166: 3985.

  12 XCB, 166: 3985. “The Epitaph of Jia Changchao,” QSW, 1160: 286–287.

  13 “The Epitaph of Chen Anding,” QSW, 1091: 245.

  14 XCB, 166: 3984–3985. Songchao shishi leiyuan, 8: 82.

  15 “Lun xiuhe diyizhuang,” OYXQJ, 108: 5b–7b.

  16 “The Epitaph of Zhang Duanshu,” QSW, 2699: 95.

  17 “The Epitaph of Li Qingchen,” QSW, 2741: 60–61.

  18 “The Epitaph of Ren Jue,” QSW, 2637: 219. Also QSW, 2154: 27 and 2030: 249.

  19 “The Epitaph of Zhang Cun,” QSW, 1227: 293–295 and “The Epitaph of Zhang Baosun,” QSW, 2150: 671.

  20 QSW, 656: 17.

  21 XCBSB, 3xia: 141.

  22 XCB, 256: 6249 and 262: 6413.

  23 QSW, 2027: 212, 2459: 89, and 2460: 108.

  24 XCB, 255: 6243 and 256: 6251.

  25 “Liumin tan [A sigh for refugees],” Huang Tingjian quanji, waiji 6: 998.

  26 “The Epitaph of Gong Dingchen,” QSW, 1680: 145.

  27 Su Zhe's comment in 1094, Longchuan luezhi, 9: 58–59.

  28 QSW, 2023: 135–136.

  29 Han Zongwu, “Shang Huizong dazhao lun rishi [Response to Emperor Huizong's edict on the sun eclipse],” SMCZY, 44: 23b–27b.

  30 QSW, 2784: 78.

  31 “Shuowen [Questioning on a shuo day (first day of a lunar month)],” SSWJ, 2: 26b–27a.

  32 SHY, “Shihuo,” 68: 115a. Chao Shuozhi, “Yuanfu sannian yingzhao fengshi [Responding to the edict on affairs in the third year of Yuanfu (1100)],” SSWJ, 1: 18a.

  33 QSW, 2342: 232.

  34 QSW, 2784: 80.

  35 QSW, 2200: 76 and 2831: 166–167.

  36 QSW, 2738: 3.

  37 “Zongcheng xiuxin miaoxue ji [On the newly renovated Confucius shrine and school in Zongcheng],” QSW, 3119: 75. Also, Wang Zudao's memorial, QSW, 1839: 282.

  38 QSW, 1076: 319.

  39 XCB, 507: 12081, 213: 5180, and 405: 9871. Chao Buzhi, “Qingpingxian xinxiu Kongzimiao ji [On the new Confucius shrine in Qingping County],” Jilei ji, 29: 3b–4b. “Xin Zongchengxian Sanqingdian ji [On the Three-Purity Hall in the new Zongcheng County]” and “Daming fu Zongchengxian xinxiu miaoxue ji [On the new Confucius shrine and school in Zongcheng County in Daming Prefecture],” Weixian zhi, 18: 1b–2a and 5a–6b.

  40 In the early 1070s, Wang Anshi's government conducted censuses across the empire, abolished redundant administrative offices, and demoted their bureaucrats, in order to reduce the government's financial costs. This policy took place in other parts of China, not necessarily because of any change to their populations. In Hebei, however, it took place precisely because of the drastic reduction in Hebei's population. For the changes to jurisdictions in the reform era, see Mostern (2011: 182–209).

  41 Ren Boyu, “Shang Huizong lun yueyun wei Maobi [Memorial to Emperor Huizong on discussing that the moon halo obscures the Mao and Bi constellations],” SMCZY, 45: 3a–8b.

  42 In his study on the Nationalist government's destruction of Yellow River dykes for military purposes in 1938, Muscolino (2015) vividly reconstructs the disastrous impact the resultant flooding inflicted on the society of Henan and how refugees coped with the flood, ensuing famine, and war damage. Due to the limitation of medieval sources, the present study cannot offer the similar kind of historical nuances and precision. But readers may draw analogies from Muscolino's work to help visualize what a terrible flooding disaster of the Yellow River looked alike and how it devastated the human society back a thousand years ago.

  43 Liang Song mingxian xiaoji, 121.

  44 Scheper-Hughes (1992).

  45 Due to the shortage of historical sources, our discussion of the social and human consequences of disasters and
famines cannot be as systematic and in-depth as the existing scholarship on late-imperial China, see Will (1990, 1991), Lillian M. Li (2007), Edgerton-Tarpley (2008), and Muscolino (2015). Yet, the studies on later time periods help us envision the general pattern of disasters and human suffering back in the eleventh century.

  46 Smil (1984).

  47 QSW, 2629: 94.

  48 QSW, 2519: 98; 1578: 285; and 2471: 308.

  49 QSW, 2242: 834.

  50 QSW, 2439: 56.

  51 QSW, 2471: 308 and 3234: 181.

  52 “The Epitaph of Gao Dan,” QSW, 2742: 79.

  53 Cosgrove (1998: 269).