The River, the Plain, and the State

• 了无痕

  2020-07-01
  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. 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...
• 了无痕

  2020-06-30
  The ordinary people in Hebei did not share the state’s grand vision of a carefully designed geopolitical landscape in north China. What benefited the state did not necessarily benefit the people in Hebei – in fact, the people often suffered from it. They could not visualize a vast region called Hebei versus one called Henan, or a giant body of water called the Yellow River. What appeared real to them were flooding waters, dreadful scenes of deaths and hardship, and frightening rumors that haunted their daily lives. This embodied, experiential reality shaped how these men and women made sense of the environmental changes, and how they made choices to cope with the disasters. The state’s projects did not address the needs of people in Hebei, but instead often called upon them to sacrifice fo...
• 了无痕

  2020-06-28
  Note that although I ask similar questions to Scott – how well intended schemes led to unintended, disastrous consequences – I do not emphasize his conclusion, that is the schemes’ disrespect and ignorance of local knowledge and local practices. I certainly do not provide the converse assumption that schemes employing local knowledge and practices would have a better chance to handle environmental problems. Chapter 6 will show that people’s individual, local strategies were inadequate to deal with the overwhelming Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. What I stress here is that, while tackling the trialectic complexity involving the physical environment, the state, and the society, any focus on the state-versus-society dialectics without acknowledging the spontaneity of non-human envir...
• 了无痕

  2020-06-24
  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.
• 了无痕

  2020-06-14
  We must distinguish this entrapment from Mark Elvin’s (2004: 123–124 and 2006: 115) use of “technological lock-in.” Elvin uses the notion to explain the “inherently unstable” manmade systems of water control in late-imperial China from a technological perspective. This notion is useful for understanding the constant failures of statesponsored hydraulic projects in the Northern Song time; on surface, it seems to some degree to overlap the “hydraulic mode of consumption,” because both notions signify a state of entrapment. But this book does not rely on “technological lock-in,” partly because the book does not take technological issues as its prime research agenda. The Song’s environmental and especially hydraulic technology demands careful treatment. The task is beyond the scope of this boo...