The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Yet, will modernity and modern technology spare us from socio-economic struggles, political chaos, resource war, and environmental degradation that the Song state and Hebei's men and women experienced a thousand years ago? Can we break through the curse of the hydraulic mode of consumption? Trapped in and worn down by its hydraulic commitment, the Song state was incapable of seeing beyond its own perceptions and desires and embracing the fundamental constraints the environmental world set upon it. Now, as various environmental problems are looming large in contemporary China, as polluting smog darkens half of China's sky, readers of this book and I – a Chinese and historian of China – should ask ourselves: can we see beyond our own perceptions and desires, to honestly face both the complex environmental entanglement that our ongoing activities are producing and the past history that yielded painful lessons we should have but unfortunately have not learnt?

  1 Muscolino (2015) and Edgerton-Tarpley (2014: 447).

  2 The irony between an intention and its unexpected, opposite outcome is certainly seen in the 1938 flood, as Muscolino (2015: 141) points out, “When they created the Yellow River flood in 1939 and constructed hydraulic works to impede the Japanese, Nationalist military leaders tried to enlist the river as a natural ally. Ironically, their actions also unleashed a natural enemy.”

  3 For a detailed study on the Yellow River's southern courses and its effects on the Huai River, see Zou (1993: 107–117), Han Zhaoqing (1999), and Pietz (2002: 3–22).

  4 The scholarship on the Ming-Qing economic history is gigantic; I shall not list everything here. For the “Great Divergence,” see Pomeranz (2001). For the debate on the “buds of capitalism,” a hypothesis widely endorsed by Chinese scholars, see Fu (2007a) and (2007b).

  5 Lillian M. Li (2007).

  6 Xu (1995: 32–40) and Zhao (1984: 8–18).

  7 Elvin and Su in Elvin and Liu (1998).

  8 Han Zhaoqing (1999).

  9 Ma (2011) and Pomeranz (1993).

  10 Zhang, “Environmentalizing State Politics and Politicizing the Yellow River: The ‘State Mode of Environmental Production’ in Northern Song and Jin China, 960–1234” (article manuscript).

  11 Ma (2011).

  12 Pomeranz (1993).

  13 For studies on environmental destruction and degradation after 1949 that were caused by government policies and economic concerns, see Shapiro (2001 and 2012), Economy (2004), and Pietz (2015).

  14 For studies on the political discourse, regional struggles, and environmental, socio-economic, and cultural implications of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, see Chetham (2002).

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