The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Before 1048, the state expected that despite its limited gross production, Hebei would first satisfy the basic needs of its people, and then submit the excess to the government. The taxes the Hebei people paid were not shipped to the capital Kaifeng to be stored at state treasuries as other southern, wealthy regions were supposed to do. Rather, they remained inside Hebei at the disposal of local governments and troops. Hence, Hebei's production did not contribute much to the state's central reserve. In fact, as the previous chapters have made clear, the state had to channel a certain portion of its revenue, which was collected from central and southern China, to support Hebei's military even before 1048. Therefore, alongside the economic self-sufficiency of Hebei's civilian society, the state assumed the major responsibility for sustaining Hebei's military.

  After 1048, the state's financial responsibilities for Hebei multiplied. Not only did it continue to fund Hebei's military, whose size had dramatically increased since the early 1040s, it also had to deal with Hebei's dwindling civilian society and its deteriorating economy. As Hebei's economic self-sufficiency reduced, its tax collections could no longer meet state-issued tax quotas to satisfy the needs of its regional and local governments, to finance civil construction projects and their laborers, or to fill up local granaries as food reserves and famine relief. As I have discussed earlier in this chapter, by 1080, the central government had to set the highest budget (9,152,000) within the state finances to fulfill Hebei's regional consumption, double its expenditures for either Kaifeng (4,055,087), or Huainan (4,223,784) or Liangzhe (4,799,122) in the Yangzi valley. The disaster-ridden, peripheral Hebei sat at the core of the state's financial obligations.

  Take the prefecture Dingzhou as an example. Dingzhou was located in the highland of northwestern Hebei, and was not directly affected by the Yellow River. Beginning in 1048, it had become a major destination for flood refugees from central Hebei. In 1101, Zhang Shunmin 張舜民, a former Financial Minister who became the governor of Dingzhou, stated that the monthly costs for Dingzhou's civil government and military were about ten thousand strings of copper cash. Yet, the total reserve at its “Military Supplies Storage” and Fiscal Commission was only about 730 strings and 200 lengths of silk, which could barely sustain the functioning of the prefecture for a few days. As its metropolitan area experienced a serious shortage of cash and silk, Dingzhou's frontier garrisons lacked basic food supplies, and its soldiers did not even receive the spring uniforms they were promised.65 Another report was made in 1115: Dingzhou's entire military demanded 1,039,092 dan of grain, 225,576 dan of horse forage, and 2,104,080 bundles of grass/straw for one year. Its annual tax incomes provided a mere 547,269 dan of grain (53 percent of the demand), 96,850 dan of horse forage (43 percent of the demand), and 1,181,188 bundles of grass (56 percent of the demand).66 This means that about 50 percent of Dingzhou's military expenditure depended on the arrangement of institutions like the Fiscal Commission, which collected and purchased grain and other goods from elsewhere.

  Dingzhou was Hebei's largest and most strategically important district. It was well funded, and it enjoyed rather stable environmental conditions that guaranteed decent agricultural production. But even this prefecture could barely support itself. As Zhang Shunmin correctly pointed out, it was not hard to imagine how depressed the economic and financial situations were in other parts of Hebei. Hebei, as a whole, could no longer support itself. As a result, the state finances had to pour in to sustain the operation of Hebei's civil governments and military, feed its civilians and disaster refugees, fix its broken land and water, and battle against the burgeoning number of outlaws, bandits, and rebels. As early as in the 1020s, six and half million dan of grain were collected annually from the Yangzi valley or along the waterway of the Bian Canal; a considerable portion of that was shipped northward into Hebei.67 From the mid-eleventh century, Hebei's demands only went up. In the 1070s, every year, state treasuries released three million strings of copper cash to purchase grain for Hebei's frontier troops alone.68

  State interventions and Hebei's importation of goods presented something of a sword of Damocles, which cut both those who supplied the goods and the state – the grand coordinator and biggest buyer in the supply–demand chain. The lower Yangzi valley enjoyed tremendous economic growth during the Tang-Song transition; the agricultural production doubled or even tripled in the eleventh century as compared to the Tang period, so it was capable of producing large quantities of surplus for exportation.69 Yet, sometimes even this region experienced a reduction in production.70 In difficult years like 1048, early 1050s, 1068, and 1099–1100, south China experienced environmental disasters and famines, and its ordinary people suffered as much as those in north China. In the mid-1080s when a serious drought and epidemic led to a famine in Hangzhou, the most affluent part of the lower Yangzi valley, its prefect Su Shi 蘇軾 (1036–1101) felt compelled to petition to the imperial court to have its grain export reduced by one-third.71 Clearly, Hebei had become a burden to regions located a thousand kilometers away.

  In such situations, when the state continued to press south China to supply food and cash, regional officials sometimes rose to protest against state exploitation. Some refused to cooperate and shut down food exportation to defend the well-being of their own districts. Tensions between the central government and lower Yangzi regional governments soared, as the latter considered the state's treatments of different regions unequal. Historical sources often mention that shipments of grain from the south were delayed, or the institutions in charge of grain collection and transportation complained they were unable to meet high quotas the central government had set. In 1111, for instance, the central government discovered that the Fiscal Commission in the lower Yangzi area was supposed to ship 6,726,400 dan of grain northward to the capital; none of it actually arrived.72 Even if some of the grain indeed reached northern Henan, ready to be unloaded and reloaded at ports on the Yellow River, a great deal failed to make it further into Hebei's interior and northern frontier. As will be shown in the next chapter, Hebei's waterways were severely affected by the Yellow River's floods and shifting courses. The once cheap and smooth water transportation that Hebei benefited from before 1048 lost its routes to meandering waters and a thick cover of sediments.

  Whether or not central and south China could produce adequate surpluses and were willing to feed Hebei is one question; whether or not the state could afford to purchase the surplus supplies and organize their distribution is another. As early as 1055, Xue Xiang – who later became Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner and Dingzhou's prefect, and who had engaged in Hebei's pond construction and rice cultivation in the 1070s – remarked that the fourteen prefectures located in northern Hebei completely relied on state finances. To feed these districts, the state annually spent five million strings of copper coins to buy grain worth only two million strings. Three million was embezzled by corrupt officials and speculative merchants.73 Seeking higher profits even drove some merchants to ship grain from south China to Hebei's northern frontier and trade it to buyers in the Khitan Liao, at the risk of the Song's capital punishment.74

  Back in 1040, Ouyang Xiu recommended that the state “share profits (gongli 共利)” with merchants: by raising grain prices, the government lured private merchants to collect and ship grain to Hebei; the trade benefited the government too, because it could feed Hebei and its military without having to deal with the troubles of purchase and shipping.75 This peculiar state-merchant business was sustained throughout the Northern Song period. However, the longer it operated, the farther it drifted away from the “profit sharing” ideal. There emerged a seller's market, in which merchants as the supplier capitalized on the business without any constraints. The state, as James T. C. Liu correctly pointed out, became “the largest buyer” in the market.76 It lost more and more bargaining power, regardless of how it manipulated its fiscal policies to regulate the market. As Hebei's environmental and socio-economic situation worsened, the state desper
ately relied on private merchants and had to tolerate their speculative behaviors.

  In the late 1090s, Su Zhe was in charge of the state's Financial Ministry, and compiled the “Accounting Registry for the Yuanyou 元祐 Reign Era (1086–1094).” His office announced that the state's annual expenditure had exceeded its annual income.77 The situation only became worse over the next three decades. By the time Emperor Huizong took the throne at the turn of the twelfth century, the state's financial deficit was thought to be caused by four major expenses: annual tributes paid to the Liao and the Xixia, the hydraulic works for the Yellow River–Hebei Environmental Complex, military expenses, and the maintenance of the state's bureaucratic system.78 A great portion of the state's budget, in the form of grain, cash, or human lives, ended up in Hebei. It was devoured by Hebei's environmental disasters, its dysfunctional society, and its swollen military. It was also consumed by the state's continuous mistreatments of issues related to the Yellow River and Hebei, such as the state's last, most ambitious hydraulic project during 1115–1120. As Chapter 5 showed, Emperor Huizong and his hydrocrats tried to imitate Yu the Great and channel the Yellow River toward western Hebei. The deficit of the state finance kept growing toward the end of the dynasty, and eventually led to bankruptcy. When the Jurchen invaded in 1125, the Song state could not even raise enough money to recruit troops to thwart the Jurchen's advancement into Hebei.

  Despite the tremendous input of resources that went into managing Hebei and controlling the Yellow River over 160 years, and despite its unprecedented efforts, the Song state did not gain the rewards that it anticipated. It certainly did not produce a total state power that could take solid control of both the environment and the human society. When a real crisis descended, like the Jurchen's invasion, the northern land and people – the state's key strategic entity – did not stand strong to serve the state, as the state had expected them to do. Quite the opposite, over decades, the operation of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex had constantly disturbed the state's sense of security and stability, and gradually depleted the state power that the state took pain to build by attaining successes in other territories, such as the increasing economic power in south China and the expanding man power across the empire. The Yellow River-Hebei environmental complex had to a great extent formed the state's “accumulative impoverishment and accumulative weakness (jipin jiruo 積貧積弱),” a distinct characteristic featuring this “weak dynasty” that historians since the fourteenth century attributed to the Northern Song state.79

  From the beginning of the dynasty, Hebei was a target for the state's political, military, economic, and environmental appropriation, all of which sought to transform the autonomy-inclined region into an integrated, obedient subordinate of the state. When the Yellow River began to wreak havoc, Hebei was singled out by the state as an environmentally periphery that would bear the river's ferocious torrents; its sacrifice rendered security and prosperity to its neighboring regions in the south. The transformation of Hebei's geopolitical and environmental status showed that the Song state was quite successful in ridding Hebei of its long-standing martial tradition, political independency, economic self-reliance, and even its geophysical self-confinement. From the mid-eleventh century on, Hebei was no longer a land that produced strongmen like An Zhongrong in the tenth century, who could rally troops to challenge the imperial throne. It had lost its ability to produce kings or hegemons or rebels whom the people of the late Tang Dynasty, like poet Du Mu, had feared. Hebei had become a defender of the state's northeastern frontier, a political, socio-economic, and environmental periphery that executed Emperor Taizu's geopolitical ideal in 972: as a limb serving the state's main body and the “small good” giving way to the state's “greater good.”

  Yet, this core-periphery structure, which the state established to hierarchize the imperial system and to centralize its control over its territory and subjects, came with heavy costs. It certainly brought about unintended consequences. Since the mid-eleventh century, the mounting environmental and socio-economic pressures turned Hebei not into a healthy, functioning limb, but a gangrenous one. The main body of the imperial state could not simply amputate Hebei because, in a tightly gridded imperial system, as the periphery goes so goes the core. In order to sustain the core-periphery structure and keep the entire empire functioning, the state had to endlessly nourish the limb with human resources, construction materials, various goods, and financial support, although knowing that its malady was incurable. Even worse, the state's need to prevent Hebei from collapsing allowed its disease to spread in the state's main body and affect its other limbs, such as key economic areas like the lower Yangzi valley.

  As the source of the disease, whose maintenance sucked up wealth and resources produced elsewhere, Hebei had grown into a de facto center of the empire, the center of consumption rather than a center of economic production like the lower Yangzi valley, or a center of political, institutional, and cultural production like Kaifeng. Hence, within the imperial system, there emerged different sets of core-periphery structures, instead of the single set that the state desired to establish. Or, in other words, from the perspective of resource distribution and consumption, the core-periphery structure that the state sought became inverted. Rather than Hebei being at the state's disposal, the Song empire geared up to serve Hebei's needs, with the state acting as the institutional engine of that service.

  After the 1040s, many statesmen at the imperial court began to share an extraordinarily high assessment of Hebei's role within the empire: Hebei became the “root of All-Under-Heaven,” the center and foundation of the empire, a geopolitical status that used to be exclusively attributed to the metropolitan area of the capital Kaifeng before the 1040s. In 1044, Fu Bi, a prominent statesman from the mid-1040s to the late 1060s, used this expression and pointed out that Hebei was more significant than other provinces in the empire.80 Bao Zheng made the same remark twice, in the mid-1040s when he acted as Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner and in 1049 as the state's Financial Minister.81 He emphasized that Hebei was the foundation to the survival (cunwang 存亡) of the Song state. In 1051 and 1053, Wang Ju 王舉 and Song Qi 宋祁 (998–1061) repeated the idea of a foundation, stressing that Hebei was the foundation of the imperial court.82 The same view was shared by many in the late eleventh century. Wang Yansu, for instance, returned to the same expression at the court in 1085. Even Emperor Renzong issued an edict in 1055, proclaiming that “Hebei is the root of All-Under-Heaven,” and deserved special institutional attention.83

  When a catastrophic flood of the Yellow River destroyed the land of Hebei at the end of the eleventh century and again killed a substantial part of its population, many feared that the collapse of Hebei's environment and society would eventually bring down the state, so the significance of Hebei within the imperial system was further elevated. Chao Shuozhi (1059–1129), who repeatedly professed the significance of Hebei at the court during the last three decades of the Song period, evoked poet Du Mu's writings about Hebei in the early ninth century. In 1126, when the Jurchen were already invading Hebei and shortly before the downfall of the dynasty, Chao once again warned the last emperor about Hebei's critical role to the empire. “For those who rule All-Under-Heaven,” he remarked, “they can acquire All-Under-Heaven as long as they own Hebei; once losing Hebei, they will invariably lose All-Under-Heaven.”84

  Clearly, despite the state's painstaking efforts to appropriate Hebei, this frontier land did not assume a subordinate role in the imperial system and serve the state as an obedient, dutiful periphery. It turned into a remarkable player of the imperial history of the Song state, acting both as a trouble-taker whom the state sacrificed to the ferocious Yellow River and as a troublemaker who, while joining force with the Yellow River, increasingly threatened the state's stability. This double-faced Hebei was not the same Hebei as in the Tang Dynasty or in the tenth century. Chao Shuozhi and Du Mu, alive three hundred years apart, were concerned about two dif
ferent sets of issues. The old Hebei during the Tang–Five Dynasties challenged the imperial state as a rival; its weapons included its sturdy economy, strong local military, powerful political-military leaders, and ambition for independence. The post-1048 Hebei, however, corrupted and dissolved the state slowly from within; its internal environmental and socio-economic disease caused the state to implode before external shocks (like the Jurchen armies) arrived. Ironically, the present book shows that this new, sickly Hebei was the unexpected product of the Song state's centralizing efforts to eliminate the old, powerful, and self-reliant Hebei that commenced with the start of the dynasty. It was certainly a consequence of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” that drove the state's unsuccessful management of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex.