Roundtable on Zhang - H-Net · The Problem of ‘Medieval’ in China’s History,” Education...

H-‐Environment Roundtable Reviews Volume 8, No. 4 (2018) https://networks.h-‐net.org/h-‐environment

Publication date: September 4, 2018 Roundtable Review Editor: Christopher F. Jones

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). ISBN: 9781107155985 Contents Introduction by Christopher F. Jones, Arizona State University 2 Comments by Robert B. Marks, Whittier College 6 Comments by Maya Peterson, University of California, Santa Cruz 21 Comments by Yan Gao, Duke University 24 Comments by Donald Worster, Renmin University of China, Beijing 31 Response by Ling Zhang, Boston College 34 About the Contributors 53 Copyright © 2018 H-‐Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online H-‐Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, H-‐Environment, and H-‐Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.

H-‐Environment Roundtable Reviews, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2018) 2

Introduction by Christopher F. Jones, Arizona State University n the fateful day of July 19, 1048, the Yellow River changed course, overflowing its banks and turning roughly thirty degrees to the north through the Hebei Plain, in search of a new outlet to the Gulf of Bohai several hundred miles away. This dispassionate statement of fact does little to

capture the enormous consequences of one of the most extreme environmental tragedies in recorded history. Over the next eighty years, the Yellow River would shift course several more times before finally settling into a pattern that would persist until 1855 (see maps, courtesy of the author, following this introduction). As many as a million people may have died due to the river’s flooding during these years, most of them peasants who had never even seen the Yellow River before it swept their homes and fields aside without warning. Nor did the suffering end once the river reverted to a stable course in 1128. The depositing of sand, gravel, and salt sapped a once-‐prosperous region’s vitality in ways that are still felt today. Crucially, this disaster was not simply the act of nature. As Ling Zhang argues in The River, the Plain, and the State, human decisions shaped the Yellow River as much or more than rainfall patterns. Centuries of settlement patterns along its upper reaches led to desertification and extensive soil runoff that produced the river’s characteristic color; more immediately, state actors made selective choices over which levees to maintain. When water levels rose to dangerous heights, it was no surprise that the northern banks broke first, as government officials had prioritized the protection of citizens living to the south, including in the Song dynasty’s capital city of Kaifeng. The protection of the south came at the cost of the destruction of the north. The River, the Plain, and the State is a remarkable accomplishment, and a compelling winner of the 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history. The book covers a massive amount of time—not only the eighty years of time the river meandered through the Hebei plain, but also the thousand years leading up to the flooding and the nearly thousand years of consequences since that time. The book also engages theoretically with arguments about the role of the state and the natural world, moving from ideas in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State to an extensive engagement with Karl Wittfogel’s controversial construct of a “hydraulic mode of production” which claimed Asian countries favored despotic modes of government due to the need to manage large water systems. Zhang rejects dialectical arguments in favor of a trialectic approach and argues that the Song dynasty actually experienced a hydraulic mode of consumption that sapped state coffers and contributed to its downfall. With a dramatic event of epic proportions, a timescale spanning thousands of years, and fresh insights into long-‐standing theoretical debates, Zhang provides a great deal of analytical fodder for historians to consider.

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Fortunately, this roundtable is blessed with an ideal crowd for diving into this proverbial feast. Robert Marks opens the roundtable, offering a very helpful set of remarks placing Zhang’s work into context for those unfamiliar with Chinese environmental history before delving into political economy and the concept of the hydraulic mode of consumption. Maya Peterson’s comments follow, praising the book’s interdisciplinary methods and source base, while also raising the issue of the similarities and differences between what Zhang describes as environmental complexes and trialetic relationships. Next, Yan Gao extols Zhang’s storytelling while asking about whether the state actually wished to escape its hydraulic trap, what sources were available, and what role hope has in the narrative. Finally, Donald Worster agrees with Zhang that the state can be an environmentally destructive force, though wonders whether more agency should be attributed to the actions of peasants. They were the ones, he argues, whose expansion into new regions created the persistent runoff that turned the river yellow, and whose demands for protection no doubt shaped government policy. Ling Zhang responds generously to these comments, exploring questions of political economy, sources, agency, and hope in her response. Before turning to the first set of comments, I would like to pause here and thank all the roundtable participants for taking part. In addition, I would like to remind readers that as an open-‐access forum, H-‐Environment Roundtable Reviews is available to scholars and non-‐scholars alike, around the world, free of charge. Please circulate.


Figure 1: The Yellow River's Courses in Hebei, 1048-‐1128


Figure 2: The Middle Reaches of the Yellow River


Comments by Robert B. Marks, Whittier College

“The River, the Plain, and the State: Context, Summary, Discussion” early a thousand years ago in 1048, China’s Yellow River broke through the dikes on its northern bank and surged into the Hebei plain, flooding hundreds of square miles of densely populated farmland and inundating numerous towns and cities, ultimately finding its way to a new outlet to the

Gulf of Bohai. It stayed there until 1128 when a new break in the dikes on the river’s southern bank—this one intentional—sent the Yellow River on a southeasterly course where it ultimately overtook the lower reaches of the Huai River, joining the Yangzi River before debouching into the Yellow Sea. In 1855, the Yellow River shifted course again, this time heading back north to its pre-‐1048 course but never again invading the Hebei plain where it had visited for 80 years. But what an 80 years those were. Flooding, meandering, and even changing courses are all parts of a river’s hydrology. Sometimes the changes are so great that a river abandons one channel and captures that of another river. And very few times any place on Earth, a river changes its course and forges an entirely new path and outlet to the sea, a dramatic and unusual event, especially if people happen to be in the way. Mostly, hydrologists attribute these changes in a river’s behavior to natural causes, from more incremental changes in silt and water loads, to catastrophic events like earthquakes, landslides, or rapid glacier melt. Of course, when these events occur in populated places, people experience the changes as destructive and damaging floods. What distinguishes the story of the Yellow River’s 80-‐year sojourn in Hebei is the exceptional case of the Yellow River colliding with a plain that had no previous experience with the River, at a time in China’s history when the Northern Song state (960-‐1127) and economy were both rich and vigorous—a condition that the collision changed forever. The fateful intersection of “the River, the Plain, and the State” provides the raw material for the compelling drama that historian Ling Zhang unpacks and tells in this award-‐winning book, rewarding readers with deep insights into ecological and human processes that changed the course of history. In Professor Zhang’s history, it is not just humans who have agency, but the River and the Plain do too. Context for Understanding. The immediate effect of the 30˚ counterclockwise shift of the Yellow River into the Hebei Plain was a massive flood spreading 700 kilometers (over 400 miles) north and east from the breach to its new outlet to the sea. The death, destruction, and disruption is hard to imagine, but Prof. Zhang brings to bear her prodigious skills with Song-‐era sources to squeeze everything she can to bring the drama to life, even though the names of dead peasant farmers—those who seldom enter into historical sources—cannot now be resurrected. But what social historians of past generations have done—to use revolts, insurrections,

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and revolutions to part the curtains of history for glimpses into a history “from below” of those without historical voice—Zhang does for the environmental history of north China. She not only delves into the extraordinary and documented story of those fateful 80 years, but also uses it to open up her query to the previous thousand-‐plus years of environmental history of the Yellow River and the Hebei Plain, and to the subsequent millennium of lasting environmental changes brought to northern Hebei as a result of the 1048-‐1128 flooding. That one moment in China’s history is a pivot for a very long-‐term view of China and an exceptionally important moment in its environmental history. For those who are not historians of China or of its environment, a little context may be helpful to better understand Zhang’s book. First, historians of China have a (more-‐or-‐less) continuous written record of 3000 years to work with, and over the past 60 years the results of intensive archeological work too add to our archival sources. Of course, those written records are more voluminous for later centuries than earlier ones. Most of us have specialized in one period or another (Prof. Zhang’s is the Song dynasty era, ca. 960-‐1279), but we can look backward and forward in time to place our work into a very long historical perspective. We didn’t invent the concept of the longue durée, but we certainly can practice it. Also, for much of those 3000 years, China has had a central state. As John McNeill observed 20 years ago in his introduction to the volume of essays that announced the scholarly arrival of Chinese environmental history: In ecological terms, “[t]he Chinese imperial state was a meddlesome one, carefully looking after its own interests and, in keeping with cultural traditions, actively seeking to develop resources, and rearrange nature so as to maximize tangible and taxable wealth.”1 China’s imperial history—that marked by a central state presided over by an “emperor” (huangdi)—began with the Qin in 221 BCE and ended with the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912. The Song is in the middle of that long history, and so is sometimes called China’s “middle period,” although an argument has been made for using the term “medieval” to periodize it.2 Regardless of the term, the Song has long been considered an important transitional, and arguably revolutionary, period in Chinese history, when private ownership of land and operation of markets forever replaced the previous imperial states’ control of land and markets. Although recent work questions Mark Elvin’s thesis about the Song “medieval economic revolution,” there is no doubt that population and food production surged as the center of gravity of Song economic life moved from north to south, in particular from the North China Plain to the Yangzi River delta.3 1 J. R. McNeill, “China’s Environmental History in World Perspective,” in Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung eds.,

Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 36.

2 Keith N. Knapp, “Did the Middle Kingdom Have a Middle Period? The Problem of ‘Medieval’ in China’s History,” Education about Asia Vol. 12 no. 3 (Winter 2007), 12-17.

3 Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973). For the most recent and authoritative reconsideration, see Joseph P. McDermott and Shiba Yoshinobu, “Economic Change in China, 960-1279,” in John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5 Part II, Sung China, 9060-1279 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321-436.


Also, readers need to understand Song China’s strategic considerations. Despite the relative wealth and population advantages of Song China, it did have serious problems with northern states and peoples in the steppe to its north. Semi-‐nomadic Tanguts established the Xixia state in the northwest where earlier Chinese states (the Han and the Tang) had extended their military control, and the Khitan Liao to the north similarly challenged the Song state. Both were potent enemies. Even with a large military (1.2 million troops at its peak) and industrialized mass production of weaponry, the Song state struggled to keep the Khitan cavalry at bay. The Song bought peace with an annual payment of 200,000 bolts of silk and 100,000 ounces of silver. That ploy secured the Song until 1127, when invasion again precipitated the closing act in the environmental drama that Prof. Zhang tells in her book. Conscious of its predecessors’ 1500-‐year history of dealings with steppe nomads, the Song state was existentially concerned about its security—as in both 1127 when it lost its northern half to Jurchen invaders, and in 1279 when the Mongols completed their conquest of the Song. This apparent military weakness, perhaps because of better and more motivated Tangut and Khitan leaders and warriors, should not overshadow how able the Song state was. It was capable of making and implementing decisions, even if some of those, in the long run, had unforeseen consequences, as Prof. Zhang details in her narrative that weaves the Song state together with the Hebei Plain and the Yellow River. The book is organized into two parts of four chapters each. Part One examines the histories of each of the three main actors (the river, the plain, and the state) to show their dynamics prior to the 1048-‐1128 collision, especially how incremental changes in river dynamics and Song state strategic concerns with its northern enemies virtually guaranteed that when the dikes broke and the river flooded, it would be toward the north into Hebei province and not into the south where the Song capital was. Part Two explores what happened both during those 80 years of interaction, and environmentally in the millennium afterwards. The River. The hydrology of the Yellow River has been studied and written about for at least 2500 years, and so is quite well known to Chinese living with the River, and to historians who have incorporated it into their narratives.4 The basics of its hydrology are well known, and in Chapter 1 Prof. Zhang links those dynamics to the specifics of her narrative. Flowing for over 3000 miles from its source in northwest China through the loess lands in its middle reaches, the river tumbles out onto the flat North China Plain where it slows down and begins its meandering until it reaches its outlet into the Bohai Gulf south of the present cities of Tianjin and Beijing. The river was not always “yellow,” having run clear for some time but over the past 2000 years 4 In addition to Zhang’s book, readers interested in the Yellow River and its environmental history may also want to

consult to recent books: David Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), and Micah Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).


became “yellow” because of the vast amount of silt it picks up flowing through its “great bend” in the Loess Plateau. There, agriculture and grazing removed the vegetation that had held the fine, wind-‐blown loess in place (and thereby turning parts of the plateau into “desert”); it then eroded into the River, making it “Yellow.” The River became problematic for the humans who lived near it in its lower reaches after it plunged from the Loess Plateau onto the North China Plain. Slowing because of the decreased gradient, the silt settled out, gradually raising the river’s bed and creating conditions for regular flooding. From at least 600 BCE, states and powerful people built and maintained dikes to keep the river from flooding their fields and cities. Over the millennia, “managing” the river thus was a significant part of imperial Chinese statecraft. Despite these efforts to pin the river into a particular course, its hydrology meant that “control” and “management” were chimeras, for the river often flooded and sometimes even changed it course completely. For the people living during the early Song, the last time the River had changed course had been a thousand years earlier during the Han dynasty (202 BCE-‐220 CE). For those thousand years, “the river served as the [Hebei] plain’s southern border and did not impinge upon the plain in any remarkable way. The river and the plain had remained two marginally intersected, largely independent entities” (24). But by the beginning of the Song dynasty, the inexorable workings of the river were sending many warning signs that the “tranquility that people on the North China Plain had enjoyed” was coming to an end (36). The Plain. Geographically, the Hebei Plain in Song times was bounded on the south by the Yellow River, the east by the Bohai Gulf, the west by the Taihang Mountains, and the north the smaller Juma River (south of the current city of Beijing), which also served as the boundary between the Song state and its northern nemesis, the Khitan Liao. Not only was this plain as “flat as a billiard table” (as an early twentieth-‐century European characterized it), it was also low-‐lying and so subject to slow moving rivers, a high water table, and land that was prone to water logging and salinization. Because the Hebei Plain was geographically definable, it also had developed a particular cultural, political, and socio-‐economic character and tradition. Occupying a frontier and often-‐contested region, Hebei people were known for their independence and martial capabilities. A manorial economy that emerged during the Tang dynasty (617-‐907) “allowed estate owners to develop their military forces and gave them enough freedom to emerge as local political leaders and compete for power at higher” regional and national levels (45). By the eighth century, prior to the Song, Hebei had become as well quite agriculturally productive and a major contributor (via taxes) to Tang state finances. The booming agricultural economy allowed the population to grow to become the most populous province in Tang China.


This regional identity and power continued during the chaotic interregnum following the collapse of the Tang in the early tenth century as Hebei warlords refused to acknowledge or cooperate with any of the short-‐lived regimes which tried to rule China. The river border contributed to Hebei’s independence and “singularity,” challenging as well the new Song state as its military leaders gained control over China and began to establish the conditions of its rule. The State. By “the state,” Professor Zhang means specifically the Northern Song state (960-‐1128), and takes it up in Chapters 2-‐4. The appellation “northern” came only after 1127 when the Jurchen attackers forced the ruling family and its functionaries to flea its Kaifeng capital for the safety of Hangzhou in the south, and thereafter it became known as the Southern Song (1128-‐1279). That change is part of the drama that Zhang relates and explains in this book. In the first of three chapters devoted to the Song state’s engagement with the Hebei plain and the river from its establishment in 906 to the river’s 1048 invasion, Prof. Zhang takes up the challenge that Hebei’s particular traditions and culture, especially of independence from central states and a strong military culture, created for the Song state. Hebei was critically important in the standoff with the Khitan Liao, and it needed to be strong enough and integrated into the Song strategic plans to protect the Song state. To accomplish those goals, the state constructed a string of walled cities from the northern bank of the Yellow River up to the Juma River border with the Khitan Liao. It garrisoned a large number of troops in the region (all of which needed to be fed and supplied), and worked to ensure a single unified chain of command. It built roads and canals to integrate the region to facilitate movement of troops and supplies and secret tunnels within which to hide soldiers and supplies. And most extraordinarily, it turned a swath of land across the northern border into a watery world difficult for horses to navigate (if horses could navigate). Initial tactical moves by troops to staunch Khitan cavalry incursions by cutting river banks to inducing floods soon crystalized into a strategic vision of turning that northern border into a swampy landscape by channeling rivers and rainfall into a series of shallow “ponds” with north-‐to-‐south surface widths of one to 40 miles stretching 300 miles east to west and that could be maintained as a defensive wall keeping the Khitan out. “Clearly,” Zhang concludes, “before the Yellow River shifted its course in 1048…the Song state had already acted as a significant environmental force to reshape the land of Hebei. With its intervention on the regional environment, the imperial state transformed the land from an enclosed, singular geographic entity into a military-‐oriented, state-‐serving strategic infrastructure” (72). Hebei had been turned into a strategic periphery whose reason for existence was to protect the rest of the Song state south of the Yellow River. As the Yellow River became increasingly unruly in the first decades of the Song dynasty, the state formalized Hebei’s peripheral position within the empire by taking actions that effectively decided that Hebei could—and would—be sacrificed


to save the empire, the story told in Chapters 3-‐4. As the Song entered the 1040s, it had a string of successes that meant that the empire was peaceful, stable, and prosperous (84-‐91). But Prof. Zhang thinks those were just a prelude to a mid-‐dynastic crisis that pretty much determined that when—not if—the Yellow River broke through its dikes, that break would be on its northern banks, and the empire to the south would be protected. Just knowing the location of the Song capital—the city of Kaifeng—makes that predisposition clear: it was merely 60 miles south of the Yellow River on the Bian Canal (the northern stretch of what later became known as the Grand Canal) that linked the prosperous Yangzi River valley to the capital, and to the Yellow River. Kaifeng boasted a population of a million households (maybe five million people), making it the largest city on Earth. The city’s brilliance was captured in a famous scroll painting, “Spring Festival Along the River” by Zhang Zeduan, a small part of which is displayed below.5 Any breach of the Yellow River’s southern dikes posed an existential threat to Kaifeng and hence to the Song state. Zhang’s painting was completed over a 40-‐year period from 1080 to 1120, coincident with the period of Hebei’s “environmental drama” covered in the book under review. Comparing the painted images of Kaifeng with the word images of the destruction in Hebei provided by Prof. Zhang is startling and useful for anyone who wants to use Prof. Zhang’s book in their courses.

Figure 3: Zhang Zeduan, A small section from "Spring Festival Along the River" (Early 12th Century). Public domain image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

A series of military, financial, and political crises mounted in the decades leading up to 1048 that prompted numerous reform attempts, none of which were particularly effective (91-‐100). Equally startling, droughts, locusts, ice storms and other meteorological anomalies struck the empire, stressing needed relief measures. Simultaneously, a swarm of earthquakes rolled across China in the 1040s, killing thousands and probably shaking and destabilizing the Yellow River dike system 5 For those interested in viewing the scroll, see “The Song Dynasty in China,” in Asia for Educators: An Initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University <http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/songdynasty-module/index.html>


(103). An economic downturn prompted Song Confucian bureaucrats to inform the emperor of all these events in his realm—“all under heaven”—and to remind him that these all could be read that “the will of Heaven signals change” (104). For a state that located its legitimacy in the millennial-‐old concept of “the Mandate of Heaven,” those were worrying times indeed. But of course the river’s breaching of the dikes was neither accidental nor retribution from Heaven. In the book’s first three chapters, Prof. Zhang details the way the river’s hydrology led to silting and periodic flooding, and the natural circumstance of Hebei being flat and lower lying than the river bed. What she shows in painstaking detail in Chapter 4 is the political process in Song China that led to decisions made and actions taken that guaranteed that when the flood came, it would be to the north of the river, not to its south. “In the trialectic relationship [among river, plain, and state], the state’s deliberate choices pushed the river a little by little toward the empire’s northeastern periphery. To put it plainly, the peripheralized Hebei was chosen by the state to serve as the river’s flooding ground” (110). The Song state “prioritized the south at the expense of the north” (111) because that was where both the capital city Kaifeng was, and some of the empire’s most productive agricultural land too. It was not that Hebei people and their officials didn’t protest and push back against state policies that they understood were placing them at risk. It was that they lost those political battles, couched as they were in terms of the statecraft of shui-‐li, “water management,” or hydraulics, as well as “national security” (123) and the legitimacy of the Song state. To better manage his subjects’ expectations, the first Song emperor, Taizu, had “employed the legend of Yu [the Great, who had tamed the waters of China] as an ideological tool to justify the state’s demand for Hebei’s sacrifice in political and moral terms” (119-‐20). This chapter is not only a primer on the intersection between politics and nature in general, but about how Chinese leaders, bureaucrats, and engineers knew what they knew about the river and its behavior, and about political power. Hebei was peripheralized, sacrificed, flooded, and transformed into the Yellow River delta, not as result of state negligence, but because of conscious choice. That, fellow readers, is a sobering and damning assessment of the Song state. In Part II of the book, the author examines how the river, the plain, and the state responded to the ensuing environmental changes and continuing disasters. Even though the plain became a delta, population dropped because of death, destruction, disease, and flight, and the agricultural economy reverted to subsistence farming, Hebei remained strategically central to the Song state’s worries about their Khitan Liao enemy to the north. Hebei therefore attracted such a huge amount of state resources—human, financial, and natural—that it became a bottomless pit, a sink that demanded ever more resources, ultimately bankrupting the Song state and opening it up to attack and conquest. Prof. Zhang calls this dynamic a “hydraulic mode of consumption” (178-‐79), a topic I will return to below. The new Yellow River delta in Hebei was not a stable hydrological system, and what to do with and about it consumed a significant amount of state time and energy.


Some thought that the new watery world made a fine defensive system to held back the Khitan Liao. Some activist “hydrocrats” (as Prof. Zhang christens them) wanted to get to work returning the river to its prior course, or create a new, more easterly outlet to the sea, but other conservative and wary officials did not want to commit state revenues to such ambitions and costly projects. And these various approaches also got caught up in Song state politics, in particular the period of activist “New Policy” reforms (1069-‐75) championed by Wang Anshi and supported by the Shenzong emperor, and the reaction to them led by conservative neo-‐Confucians. These state actors assumed the river was an object that could be manipulated. “Yet,” Prof. Zhang observes, “the river itself remained unpredictable. It refused to conform to politicians’ wishes” (151). It continued to flood, to change course, to bring death, destruction, and misery to the people, animals, and landscape of the Hebei plain. Along with the river, politicians, hydrocrats, and emperors flipped and flopped about what to do, or not do, for 80 years. The end to the drama began in 1125 when a new group of semi-‐nomadic warriors attacked and conquered the Khitan Liao state, and quickly turned their sites on Kaifeng. They crossed the defensive “pond” system as if it wasn’t there, and besieged Kaifeng in 1127. In a last-‐ditch effort to save the Song dynasty, in the winter of 1128 the governor of the capital had his soldiers breach the river’s southern banks, hoping the ensuing flood would halt the Jurchen forces. The Yellow River turned clockwise 90˚ in a course it held until the mid-‐nineteenth century. When it then shifted north once more, it resumed its pre-‐1048 course, leaving Hebei alone to this day. In Chinese historiography, the 1127-‐28 act is what gets the most attention, for it did save the Song, albeit in a somewhat smaller size as the Southern Song with its capital in Hangzhou in the Yangzi River delta. A new border between the Song and the Jurchen stabilized about halfway between the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers, mostly along the Huai River. Prof. Zhang’s accomplishment is not merely to place that major turning point in Chinese and world history into the context of the 80-‐year drama on the Hebei plain, and to demonstrate the role that drama had in the history of one of the most important and storied Chinese dynasties, but also to explore the environmental and socioeconomic consequences for Hebei and the people of north China of being occupied by the Yellow River for 80 years. Those are the subjects of Chapters 6-‐8. People: Experiencing, Understanding, and Coping with Environmental Change. In his “Preface” to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel discussed how the relationship of humans (he said “man”) to the environment constitutes “a history whose passage is almost imperceptible…a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-‐recurring cycles.”6 We now know, of course, that environmental change can be rapid and

6 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Sîan Reynolds trans. (New

York: Harper and Row, 1972), 20-21.


immensely disruptive. Global climate change is showing us climate-‐induced environmental change before our very eyes, with ice sheets in Greenland and an ice shelf in Antarctica breaking off. To be sure, Prof. Zhang also relates the build-‐up to the 1048 Yellow River flood in part to prior climate change and the very long-‐term build up of silt on the riverbed. But when the river burst its dikes and rushed into the Hebei Plain, the environmental changes were immediate, creating a recurring, “repetitive turmoil” (188) for the people struggling to survive in the aftermath of the damage to houses and crops wrought by the flood. Prof. Zhang takes little delight in detailing the various Song state “schemes to improve the human condition” in Hebei (179-‐80), but she does show how the Song state failed the people of Hebei.7 Despite quite high official Song-‐era population figures (which Zhang usefully discusses, critiques, and dismisses), the picture she paints of the impact of the flooding on Hebei’s population is one of “high mortality” and “high emigration” (191), but with enough detail to show in harrowing detail how the 20 percent of the population directly affected lived and died, fled “suffering and resentful” (193), depriving the wealthy of their tenants and servants, feeding their insecurity as well (196). And it wasn’t just that once in the aftermath of the 1048 flood, but over and over again as the hydraulic schemes of the state failed to protect the people of Hebei. As “the Yellow River’s torrents” engulfed Hebei in 1099 and 1102, for example, one contemporary observer said “corpses of the dead fill the gullies and number in the millions” (198). Zhang concludes that “at the beginning of the twelfth century, Hebei appeared desolate” (200), and its population more likely than not suffered a “phenomenal decline” after 1048, despite what the officials figures showed (201). If one of the tasks of social history is to examine how ordinary people lived through the big changes (as Charles Tilly once argued), then Prof. Zhang has constructed what she rightfully calls a “disaster narrative” (201, 205-‐15), and draws the reader’s attention to Micah Muscolino’s recent book on the 1938 Yellow River disaster with its graphic accounts to help imagine how the 1048 flood “devastated the human society back a thousand years ago” (note 42, 201). She reconstructs her own case studies to show how Hebei society fragmented into smaller and smaller groups struggling against their environment and against each other. Given the uncertainties that the four to five generations who lived through the roiling disasters faced, it is not surprising that most farmers adopted the cautious, risk-‐minimization strategy that James Scott laid out in a path-‐breaking book.8 Instead of profit-‐maximizing behavior, the peasant farmers in Hebei chose to minimize the risk of catastrophic loss by their choice of crops and cropping rotations (millet over winter wheat), along with having more than one plot to till in the hope that one or more would escape locusts, drought, or floods, all of which afflicted Hebei. Harvest failure was an ever-‐present danger to be guarded against.

7 Prof. Zhang takes this concept from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human

Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 8 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1976).


Faced with food shortages in its most strategically important region, the Song state tried to get its large number of troops there to grow paddy rice in the newly watered environment, an experiment that failed utterly (233-‐39). The state had to continue to pour resources into Hebei to prop it and its strategic defenses up. Environmental Consequences of 1048. Just as Prof. Zhang put the 1048 invasion of the Hebei Plain by the Yellow River into a very long-‐term context, so too does she examine not just its more immediate effects but also the surprisingly longer run impact of that 80-‐year occupation. Not only did the inundation push a huge amount of water into the flat Hebei plain, creating a delta and a swampy environment, it rearranged the plain’s hydrology. Rivers that had run west-‐to-‐east from the Taihang Mountains to the sea had their routes cut off, contributing to water logging and salinization (256-‐58). The Yuhe Canal, which the Song state had relied upon to move troops and grain to guard its northern frontier, filled with sediment and became useless and abandoned after 1128 by both the Song and the conquering Jurchen. The largest and longest-‐lasting environmental consequences of the Yellow River coursing through the Hebei Plain for 80 came not from the water, but from the heavy silt load that it carried. When the Song governor of Kaifeng breached the southern dikes of the Yellow River in the winter of 1128 in an attempt to staunch the Jurchen invasion, “the Yellow River departed from Hebei within a day or two” (281-‐82). One can only imagine the look on the faces of the people whose lives had been buffeted for five generations watching the river drain away. What it left, though, was a huge amount of silt, gravel, and sand. Lakes that had dotted the plain had silted up, shrinking and then vanishing. One might imagine that the heavy silt load of the Yellow River would have contributed to enriching the fertility of the land it left behind. Indeed, Wang Anshi in the Song, and the rulers of the PRC in the 1950s and 1960s thought so too, and purposely directed Yellow River water onto land that had been losing its fertility. But in those cases the results were disastrous, just as they were for Hebei 900 years earlier. The silt was basically sterile, and within a year after the departure of the River, turned otherwise productive land into sand (260). This “sandization” (262-‐68) contributed to the continuing poverty of farmers who could barely get one harvest from that land, and impeded the ability of succeeding states to build dikes because the sand undermined the needed footings. More horrifying, the sandization process continued for centuries afterwards, contributing to recurring sandstorms that continue to this day (264-‐66). Astoundingly, where most contemporary analysts attribute the sandstorms that now regularly chose Beijing to the desertification of the Mongolian steppe and the movement of the Gobi desert ever closer to the capital, the “majority of wind-‐blown dust which can darken the sky in Beijing” comes from river bed sand in Hebei (265, n. 58).


The 80-‐year drama cast its ecological shadow westward into the Taihang Mountains. Fighting the floods and building (and rebuilding) dikes required a vast amount of organic material—trees, bushes, and grasses—that was taken from the Taihang Mountains (268-‐77). “Year after year, the more trees they felled, the farther the forest retreated” (274) until the mountains were denuded, contributing to further erosion and silting of the Yellow River. Even the elms and willows that had been planted along the dikes of the Yellow River were chopped down to deal with the 80-‐year drama, further destabilizing the system. And because the people in North China, as elsewhere, lived in what E. A. Wrigley called an “organic economy,”9 they were dependent on biomass for fuel for heating, cooking, and whatever industrial processes there were. The Yellow River and its dramas had higher priorities for the state, and so used up organic energy sources that people would have used to cook or keep warm (278). The land lost fertility and biomass, bringing even greater misfortune to the people on Hebei plain. Urban residents of Kaifeng too had to switch from wood to coal for cooking and heating, and food preparation came to include raw fish (sashimi?) and stir frying which took less time and fuel.10 Core and Periphery? Hydraulic Mode of Consumption? The social, economic, demographic, political, and strategic changes that the environmental disaster of the Yellow River encounter with the Hebei Plain precipitated over the 80-‐year period from 1048 to 1128 is a dramatic story in its own right, and Prof. Zhang has provided us with an exceptionally rich narrative founded on a solid documentary base. While she sometimes bemoans the absence of documents that might have enabled glimpses into the struggles of common folk, by and large the documentary treasure trove for Song China is deeper than most all other parts of the world at the time, and she accesses it to marvelous effect. Hers is a wonderful accomplishment that fully deserves the ASEH George Perkins Marsh Award “best book” of 2017. Along the way, she uses her facility with her sources and history of Song-‐era Hebei to address several larger issues that historians have been discussing and debating for sometime. In the section on “Context” above I have already mentioned the prevailing view of the Song as having been at least economically precocious, and possibly revolutionary. Prof. Zhang shows us that while that may have been partially true, it was not at all an empire-‐wide phenomenon. She rescues the story of Hebei from obscurity to show that it did not participate in the momentous demographic and economic surge that most historians see as characterizing the Song era, while spending time discussing and debating why that surge “failed” to usher in an early and potentially world-‐historically changing industrial revolution. She also takes on two other interesting and historically significant discussions and 9 E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 1. 10 For a brief account, see Robert B. Marks, China: An Environmental History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

2015), 160-61. Whether the surge in demand for coal was leading to a “medieval industrial revolution” in Song-era China is open for debate.


debates within Chinese historiography, contributing her own well-‐considered and -‐argued interpretations. The first has to do with what G. W. Skinner called China’s “macroregional” structure. Drawing on Qing-‐era data and maps, Skinner argued that China did not simply have the structure of an empire with a capital city and subordinate provinces and frontiers, but that economic activity arranged in what he called nested, hierarchical marketing systems created ten or so more or less economically self-‐contained physiographic macroregions, each with its own core-‐and-‐periphery structure. While Skinner’s work has been enormously influential among historians of China (this one included), it was not without its critics. Some argued that late imperial China (the Ming and Qing dynasties) actually had a more nationally integrated economy than Skinner thought, and others that it would be an error to project that structure back into earlier periods in China’s imperial history. Work by Robert M. Hartwell, though, confirmed China’s macroregional structure, core and peripheries included, extending back at least to the mid-‐Tang.11 Not only did these macroregions exist in earlier periods, Hartwell argued that they had their own more-‐or-‐less independent cycles of development, which he classified into periods of frontier settlement, rapid development, systemic decline, and equilibrium. This macroregional “structure of Chinese history,” as Skinner called it,12 is an important analytical tool that Prof. Zhang points out in her introduction (10-‐11). Her critique of it is not that it uses a core-‐periphery structure, or that China was more economically integrated than it implies, but that the story of North China’s tragedies that she so movingly documents has been lost to a historiography that is more interested in narratives of “growth and successes” (11), especially when it comes to the Song era. Not only is the story of Hebei in the Northern Song one of decline and peripheralization, Prof. Zhang argues that that history is critical for understanding the internal processes explaining how and why the Northern Song fell, rather than attributing that only (or mostly) to foreign invasions and conquest. To highlight her alternative narrative, but not to put it into the environmental historians’ bête noir of declensionist narratives, Prof. Zhang develops and uses the concept of “the hydraulic mode of consumption.” On the one hand, this concept allows her to distinguish her work from that of Karl Wittfogel who introduced the concept of “hydraulic civilization” to explain that the need for coordinated action to control rivers (especially the Yellow) created within China and other “Asian” empires an “Oriental Despotism” that continued to afflict contemporary China, an idea now thoroughly discredited. Certainly, Prof. Zhang demonstrates convincingly that the Song state, hydrocrats and all, was not strengthened by having to deal with the hydraulics of the Yellow River and was certainly not a model of “oriental

11 Robert M. Hartwell, “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550,” Harvard Journal of

Asiatic Studies, Vo.. 42, No. 2 (Dec., 1982), 365-442. 12 G. William Skinner, “Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No.

2 (Feb., 1985), 271-92.


despotism.” She also develops the concept of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” to distinguish her book from the work of other historians of China, in particular Pierre-‐Etienne Will, who used the concept of “hydraulic cycles” to unpack aspects of late imperial China’s regional (or macroregional) studies. Prof. Zhang is concerned that the macroregional bent toward success stories has focused Song historiography on the south to the detriment of North China, that Wittfogel draws attention not just to the dead end of “oriental despotism” but to its Marxian-‐derived productionist presuppositions, and that “hydraulic cycles” detract from what she sees as a story that has empire-‐wide significance, which it does. The Song imperial state became “entrapped” (178) in the watery post-‐1048 Yellow River-‐Hebei Plain landscape with no way out. Whereas prior to 1048 the Song state had peripheralized the Hebei plain to protect the capital of Kaifeng and its hinterland to the south of the Yellow River, Prof. Zhang argues that after 1048, in the new environmental circumstances and because of the continuing strategic importance of Hebei to the defense of the Song empire, the region became the de facto “core” of the empire, attracting a continuous flow of resources and energy from elsewhere in the empire that Hebei simply kept consuming and consuming until the Song state was depleted and weakened fiscally and militarily, opening the way to the 1127-‐28 invasion of the Jurchen and flight of Song rulers to the south. “[T]he 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” (245). The “swapping of core and periphery” was a consequence of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” that the environmental drama on the North China plain drove (246-‐47), and thus is central to Prof. Zhang’s narrative. It is also an argument, contra Skinner and Hartwell, that geography is not macroregional destiny—state actions matter, and an entire region could be made into a periphery. But does the fact that it sucked in resources from around the empire, contributing an internal dynamic to the depletion of Song wealth and power, make Hebei into a core region, and the rest of the Song empire its periphery? Might not other metaphors such as “black hole” or “bottomless pit” be more apt? Is the idea of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” the best way to conceptualize the dynamic that Prof. Zhang puts her finger on? One might see Prof. Zhang’s use of the concept of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” as part of the historiographical “turn” away from assumptions about the primacy of economic production toward the role of consumption in the making of history. Nearly all of this consumer/consumption literature looks at what and how people of varying classes and places consume, and how that consumption changes, or confirms, particular historical moments and class relations. That is not quite what Prof. Zhang is getting at with her concept of the “hydraulic mode of consumption.” For her, the consuming is done not by individuals, nor as a marker of a particular kind of society, but by a particularly situated hydraulic system—the Yellow River delta that had formed after 1048 on the Hebei Plain. For strategic reasons, the Song state had to dump resources into that system where they were


“consumed” by the hydraulics of that particular moment. As she said, the Song state was “entrapped” in this dynamic, one that proved fatal for the Northern Song regime. To some readers, this may sound similar to Mark Elvin’s concept of “technological lock-‐in.” In “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth: China’s Environment from Archaic Times to the Present,”13 Elvin is concerned with explaining how and why aspects of Chinese state, society, and economy perdured for long periods of time without apparently creating internal dynamics for change or “development.” His idea was that China’s hydraulic system, in particular that for the Yellow River, created a “technological lock-‐in” whereby the need to maintain the Yellow River system, including the Grand Canal, dictated that vast resources be poured into maintaining the system for economic, political, and strategic reasons, eating up any resources or initiative to develop new or different technologies, whether in hydraulics or other areas. Marginal returns to investment plummeted, but because of the “lock-‐in,” resources could not be switched to other, higher-‐return investments. To Elvin, this helps explain one of his long-‐term concerns about why China was able to develop to a certain high level, but not to break through to industrial capitalism. In an earlier book, he called that “the high-‐level equilibrium trap.”14 Prof. Zhang is very much aware of the apparent similarity of her concept of the hydraulic mode of consumption to Elvin’s “technological lock-‐in.” In an explanatory footnote (p. 13 n 21), she points out that while the topic of hydraulic technology is exceptionally important, it is not her concern in this book. She thinks her “consumption” approach would lead her to disagree with Elvin and his conclusions that the Chinese economic-‐environment system led to stasis or traps. She plans to “elaborate such theoretical differences more fully in future publications” (ibid.); her concept of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” no doubt will be part of that future work. Certainly, the concept of the hydraulic mode of production draws our attention to the dynamics of what happened in the particular case of the Hebei Plain/Yellow River delta complex that brought the Northern Song to an end. Does the concept have a broader application to other cases and other times? Is the concept of a “mode of consumption” a functional equivalent to the Marxist idea of “mode of production”? That concept is critical to the Marxist view of history. Composed of forces and relations of production, history moves when the growth of the forces of production come into conflict with the relations of production, producing (for example) a transition from feudalism to capitalism, or to socialism. Does the concept of the hydraulic mode of consumption aspire to that level of explanatory power? Is the hydraulic mode of consumption a contribution to the tools that environmental historians have at our disposal? Time will tell. In the meantime, we

13 Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth: China’s Environment from Archaic Times to the

Present,” East Asian History 6 (1993), 7-46. 14 Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Part Three, “Economic Development without Technological Change,” pp.

203-316.


have a wonderful book that will demand the re-‐visioning the historical narratives of the Northern Song, and of China’s environmental history.


Comments by Maya Peterson, University of California, Santa Cruz

ing Zhang’s The River, the Plain, and the State is a history of the region of Hebei in middle-‐period China. But the book is far more than a regional history. As the subtitle proclaims, The River, the Plain, and the State tells the story of “an environmental drama in Northern Song China, 1048-‐1128.” Hebei literally

means “north of the river”—in this case Huang He, the Yellow River—but in 1048 the Yellow River became a violent intruder, shifting its course to the north and invading the Hebei Plain, where it would wreak havoc over the course of the next eighty years. In 1128 the river retreated southward, as abruptly as it had come. The eighty-‐year period during which the Yellow River flowed through the heart of the Hebei Plain is at the center of a dramatic narrative which, according to Zhang, began well before 1048 and had an impact on the environmental and socioeconomic conditions of the region that is perceptible to this day. Looking at this dramatic episode, Zhang argues convincingly, compels us not only to rewrite the history of Hebei, but to rethink the nature of the Northern Song state, including the narrative of prosperity and stability which is often invoked as an important aspect of the “medieval economic revolution” accompanying China’s Tang-‐Song transition. But Zhang goes even further, arguing for a new narrative of the history of China itself, a “peculiar version of Chinese history” composed of “costs, losses, and suffering” (288) which may appear unfamiliar to the historian accustomed to narratives of progress, but nevertheless remains highly relevant today. Zhang achieves her goal by centering her drama on the “entanglement” of the three “environmental entities” comprising the book’s title: the Yellow River, the Hebei Plain (referring to the lands of Hebei region as well as the people who constitute Hebei society), and the Northern Song state. Part I of the book investigates how these three entities evolved until the onset of the environmental drama in 1048; Part II investigates the impacts of 1048 and the responses of these entities to the shift in the river’s course over the short and long term. Due to the relative paucity of sources, historians have tended to ignore China’s north in this period, focusing instead on the economically prosperous southern regions. Through an exhaustive reading of extant sources, including scientific studies of soil, silt, and sediment, Zhang reveals that many of the larger, overarching narratives about the Northern Song are an ill fit for Hebei; indeed, Hebei itself was sacrificed in order to fuel the growth of the geographical south. In Zhang’s telling, the Northern Song state consciously chose Hebei as its victim. The state deliberately targeted this historically independent frontier region, inhabited by notoriously disobedient, martial subjects, by encouraging the Yellow River to flow to the north, thereby disrupting social and economic life in Hebei, while promoting prosperity in the regions to Hebei’s south. This scheme, however, had its drawbacks. One of the strengths of Zhang’s book is to convincingly demonstrate the extent to which the environmental crisis in north

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China became a preoccupation of the central government between 1048 and 1128. The state first helped to cause the crisis, but then became entrapped and exhausted in its struggle to mitigate environmental disaster. This unforeseen trap, the unintended consequence of inviting the river into the heart of the Hebei Plain, drained the state of critical capital and labor resources, which were funneled into Hebei. Nor were the effects of the shift in the river’s course limited to Hebei; both environmental as well as socioeconomic effects emanated from Hebei to other areas of China. Rather than reducing independent Hebei to a dependent periphery, therefore, the Northern Song’s decision to encourage the flooding of Hebei to the north, rather than Henan to the south, with the waters of the Yellow River, committed the state to a destabilizing course of environmental management; encounters with the environment, as much as threats of invasion, thus came to form the core of the state’s existential anxiety, an image at odds with the standard narrative of this era in Chinese history. To describe this destabilizing process, Zhang coins the phrase “hydraulic mode of consumption,” a notion with which she counters the “productive logic” used by historian Karl Wittfogel to theorize the links between hydraulic investment and the rise of the state. China historians, Zhang warns, have been too content to follow Wittfogel and find a correlation between investment in hydraulic management and prosperity, even while they condemn his notion of Oriental despotism. For Zhang, the hydraulic mode of consumption in the case of eleventh-‐century Hebei represents two related ironies: far from strengthening the state, the Northern Song’s investment in hydraulic management in Hebei came to overburden the state, shaping both political decisions and economic policies, and, ultimately, inverting relations between core and periphery. Zhang’s critique of Wittfogel is one which both China historians, as well as environmental historians, particularly historians of water, will no doubt find welcome. In general the book is notable in the extent to which it engages with theorists from many different disciplines to make arguments and propose models which are relevant beyond north China. Agricultural historians, for instance, may be interested in Chapter 7’s argument about why Hebei did not undergo the agricultural transformations experienced by southern Chinese regions for thinking about other cases in which potential disincentives existed for adopting agricultural innovations. Furthermore, while Zhang only suggests other Chinese cases for which the notion of a hydraulic mode of consumption may be relevant, the model could also find utility beyond the geographical borders of China. Indeed, Zhang’s work opens up many interesting avenues for historians, in particular environmental historians, to explore. Environmental histories are often stories of states’ attempts to conquer nature, inevitably with unintended consequences that are visible in the degraded landscapes emerging from such misguided schemes. Though her story includes the struggles of the Northern Song state with hydraulic management, as well as the impacts of the state’s hydraulic endeavors on Hebei’s physical environment, evident in the region even today, Zhang’s drama does not unfold in such a straightforward manner. Instead, she tells a riveting story of the “trialectic” of river, plain, and state, whose struggles lead to the


formation and subsequent evolution of an “environmental world” in the mid-‐eleventh century, what Zhang calls the Yellow River-‐Hebei environmental complex. One of the boldest aspects of the book is Zhang’s unapologetic claim that the Yellow River is an actor in its own right in this environmental drama, joining with the Song state to choose Hebei as its victim. Though some readers might feel uncomfortable with the notion that the river, like James Scott’s state, can “see” and transform lands and landscapes (205), Zhang argues convincingly that “such human histories could not be made in the first place without being bound up with non-‐human actors in a complex, chaotic, and entangled environment [sic] world” (19, emphasis in the original). In this investigation of the failure of a (premodern) state’s scheme to improve the human condition, it is “the spontaneity of non-‐human environmental entities,” (180, fn 80) rather than the state’s ignorance of local knowledge which destabilizes and causes the state to founder. A powerful river, with its dynamism and unpredictability, is perhaps more easily recognized as a historical actor than, say, a mountain or a forest. Nonetheless, Zhang’s work is a provocative call to all of us to ask not only, borrowing from Timothy Mitchell, whether a mosquito can speak, but what the earth might have seen or the water might have experienced, and how such questions can help us to write “more-‐than-‐human” histories. This is not to suggest that people do not matter in Zhang’s environmental drama. Choosing environmental entities as the main actors could lead to a history devoid of people, but Zhang coaxes human actors out of her historical sources wherever possible and is careful to show that neither the state nor the society over which it rules is monolithic. Regional and local officials, hydrocrats, subsistence farmers, and refugees play active roles alongside political institutions, silt, and trees. Zhang estimates that the enormous environmental changes of the mid-‐eleventh century, caused by both the river’s intrusion as well as the state’s privileging of its own interests over those of Hebei society, may have displaced or even killed as many as a million people, one-‐fifth of Hebei’s total population. But the region was not just a victim; rather, individuals in Hebei employed strategies of resistance to both the violent river as well as the indifferent state, in the form of local officials seeking their own solutions to flooding or agriculturalists harvesting and selling salt from the salinized earth. Rather than being passive victims of the oppressive behavior of both river and state, Hebei’s people in this narrative are “tough survivors” (206). Another strength of the book is the impressive breadth, as well as depth, of Zhang’s research. For some aspects of her topic there exists a wealth of historical records, such as the many sources indicating demands for government relief in Hebei to address crises brought about by poor harvests and famines in the years of environmental upheaval; in such cases, it seems surprising that these have been largely overlooked until now. More often, however, Zhang’s intricate narrative seems to depend not on previously overlooked sources, but rather her skillful ability to weave together a coherent tale by piecing together fragmentary evidence to present a plausible scenario. She does not hesitate to make it clear when a lack of direct evidence forces her to speculate about Hebei’s demographics, geology,


agriculture, or climate, nor is she afraid to make a “bold conjecture” (103) where it seems warranted. In several instances she uses scholarship about Hebei and hydraulic management in north China in later periods to help the reader envision how eleventh-‐century Chinese subjects may have weathered the same kinds of disasters, such as floods and famine. By not privileging the state as the most important actor in her drama, Zhang is also able to utilize other kinds of available data, such as geological and hydrological studies to supplement the archival record. Overall, her work serves as a compelling model for employing an environmental historical perspective as a means of overcoming the limitations of the archives. The River, the Plain, and the State is lucidly argued throughout, but there are times when the disorderliness invoked by Zhang in describing the environmental drama seems to take on a life of its own. The “trialectic” invoked by the title, for instance, is immediately complicated by Zhang’s introduction at the outset of the book of the Yellow River-‐Hebei environmental complex, formed by the river’s merging with the plain. This complex itself seems to be an actor in its own right: it “established its own environmental regime…. Along the way, it incorporated the Song state into a vast environmental world, demanded its services, and shaped many ways in which the state ran its political, financial and environmental life” (6). In the epilogue, Zhang introduces another similar complex formed by the river in the lands through which it flowed after it left Hebei in 1128. This region would suffer from many of the same conditions which plagued Hebei, and like Hebei would serve as a center of consumption and drain on the resources of the surrounding regions, yet the state does not seem to have been responsible for the formation of this new complex, though it was undoubtedly conditioned by the need to respond to new environmental dramas. Does this new environmental complex also become both “pawn and actor” in the “political games” of the state (151), or are the interactions between non-‐human and human agents in the environmental drama of the Northern Song uniquely complex in their dynamics? Moreover, it is unclear to this reader, at least, whether the formation of rivers and regions into environmental complexes or environmental worlds with their own agency undermines the notion of the trialectical struggle between river, plain and state, or whether it is the ultimate illustration of Zhang’s “modest experiment…to capture how things entangle to constitute a messy, wild, blossoming world” (xv). Regardless, Zhang’s narrative inspires us with her “scholarly passion and compassion” (284) for her subject to seek to narrate our own “more-‐than-‐human” histories, with all of the messiness that entails.


Comments by Yan Gao, Duke University ing Zhang’s book presents an engaging environmental drama of three main actors—the Yellow River, the Hebei Plain, and the Northern Song State—during a time span of eighty years. By detailing the interactions of these three main actors, Zhang tells a tale of human manipulations and adaptations, of the

river’s actions and sorrows, and of the transformation of the plain. Zhang is certainly a skillful “playwright”; through her beautiful writing, Zhang provides the audience a feast of multi-‐voiced storytelling, theoretical insights, historical imaginations, and deep compassions for nature and the people of Hebei. The drama centers on a course shift of the Yellow River in 1048. Zhang examines the Northern Song State’s hydraulic decisions and thereby the social, economic and environmental consequences in the Hebei Plain until 1128 when the Yellow River shifted out of the Hebei Plain ever since. The plot is very focused, but Zhang’s narratives of the drama and her analysis of it go beyond the eighty years. The first four chapters extend backward to describe the Yellow River, the Hebei Plain, the state’s project to transform the plain socially, culturally, and environmentally, culminating in the 1048 flood. The second four chapters discuss the various responses of the state, the river, and the plain to the devastating flood. Zhang argues that the Northern Song State’s efforts to achieve political gains at the expense of natural river flows unleashed “slow violence” and led to massive flooding and long-‐lasting environmental damage in Hebei (p.134). By presenting this environmental drama, Zhang challenges the conventional scholarship in the following aspects. Firstly, this drama is not one of any single entity, nor of any dialectical relationships, but of “the constantly evolving, open-‐ending ‘trialectic’ complexity among the river, the plain, the state, and other small-‐scale, subordinate entities” (p.7). She uses the concept of Thirdspace by geographer Edward W. Soja to denote the story of the Yellow River-‐Hebei Plain environmental complex or the “environmental world” that she coins in the book. In so doing, she rejects the “conventional binary epistemologies (e.g., reality and representation, natural and cultural, subject and object)” (p.7); instead, she explores the interactions among three evolving conceptual layers—“sociality, historicity and spatiality”—that were played out in the river-‐plain-‐state relationships. Secondly, in this trialectic relationship, Zhang emphasizes the historical agency of non-‐human actors. Previous scholarship on rivers in Chinese Studies have generally treated nature as only “the stage” for politics to take place; for that matter, nature has been typically depicted as passive and non-‐participatory. In her book, Zhang calls for an “all-‐encompassing approach that respects non-‐human environmental entities as fellow players in the historical making of a complex, fluid environmental world” (p.19). This claim holds that the humans and non-‐humans were embedded and woven together in the drama which gives importance to the individual experience of each agent. Furthermore, while environmental historians commonly

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advocate putting nature into human history, Zhang calls for “putting the humans back into the natural history” (p.19). She argues that human histories of the Song state or of the Hebei people “could not be made in the first place without being bound up with non-‐human actors in a complex, chaotic, and entangled environmental world” (p. 19). In Zhang’s drama, the Northern Song government broke into the natural world of the river and the plain, ignored their natural rhythms and engineered the river course towards Northern Hebei, eventually leading to the devastating floods in the central plain. That process, as Zhang states in her book, represents the “dreamwork of imperialism” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s term (p.138, p.187), in which the landscape was made and remade to produce imperialist power. As the case shows, when the river systems were interrupted, the river did speak in its own ways, and with brutal consequences for human populations. Thirdly, like a drama usually reflects the unforeseeable interactions of circumstances as it unfolds, Zhang emphasizes the unpredictability and complexity in any reciprocal relationship or historical process and thus shifts away from the conventional view of nature as orderly and predictable and thus controllable.15 She “demonstrates how a multiplicity of actors like water, silt, trees, earth, different state institutions, communities, and individuals interacted, through supplying possibilities or asserting constraints to each other, to make a certain history happen” (p.7). To do so, Zhang employs “the probabilistic causation” throughout the story-‐telling and allows for an open ending in an influx of interactions. In addition, Zhang treats the center and the periphery as relative and constantly changing concepts. In that sense, the Northern Song State turned Hebei into an environmental periphery for the state’s security, but unexpectedly also made it the center of consumption for sustaining gigantic hydraulic projects. Such a center-‐periphery view offers a temporal insight to the Skinnerian spatial conceptualization of “physiographic macroregion” in which the center and the periphery mobilized resources across administrative boundaries.16 Zhang’s drama also contributes to a scalar analysis of the environmental problems, from local, regional, to inter-‐regional, which “defied the stable structure of the autonomous, self-‐sufficient macroregions” in Skinner’s conceptualization (p. 278). Environmental problems transmit across boundaries. The effects of water management in one place could hardly remain in that particular place; instead, those effects with various degrees traveled beyond the boundaries of a single

15 In her recent book, Carolyn Merchant argues that we should reconceptualize the human-nature relationship not as one of order and predictability but as one of unruliness and unpredictability. Humans have long tried to control nature and “order” the world, and there have been constant efforts of mechanizing, rationalizing and predicting nature especially since the Scientific Revolution. According to Merchant, we shall rethink the human-nature interdependencies and give emphasis to the ever-changing characteristics of nature and their role in the history making. See Carolyn Merchant, Autonomous Nature (Routledge, 2014). 16 G. William Skinner identified nine macroregions of nineteenth-century China based on watersheds and mountain ranges. See G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), esp. 211-252.


community (such as the Daming county of Hebei), an area (such as north Hebei or south Hebei), or a region (such as Hebei or Henan). As Zhang meticulously shows, the water management in Hebei relied heavily on resources from all of North China and the constant shipment of materials from Jiangnan, which at times caused economic distress in the latter. Such transregional effects of water management were part of the package of unintended consequences that the Northern Song government had never anticipated. From a contemporary viewpoint, what happened to Hebei in the eleventh century continues to happen today. There have been several recent cases in which the Chinese state has allocated the resources differently between urban and rural populations, between East China and West China, between designated “sacrificial areas” and “beneficial areas” in a single hydraulic project. Through the Northern Song case, Zhang raises questions of environmental justice past and present. With all the contributions discussed above, Zhang’s erudite work demonstrates her skills of maneuvering through a variety of sources and her rich historical imaginations. With all that said, I would like to bring up a few questions that I hope to serve as the base for further discussions. 1. Was there a “hydraulic trap” in which the Northern Song State could not pull out from its hydraulic commitments? Or, did the Northern Song State want to? A main contribution of Zhang’s book is that she re-‐conceptualizes the relationship between water control and state power. Zhang points out that although Karl Wittfogel’s theory of “Oriental Despotism” has long been discredited, the revisions of his theory, including “hydraulic community” and “hydraulic cycle,” emphasize the dialectics between hydraulics and politics, continue to be utilized.17 Zhang argues that we should understand the case of the Yellow River-‐Hebei Plain environmental complex not in its production mode, but in its consumption mode. Instead of building a centralized power through water management, the Northern Song State drained its power in expansive hydraulic commitments: it had to devote a large labor force, provide monetary support, and transport a huge amount of materials from other regions of the empire to sustain its commitments to gigantic hydraulic projects in Hebei, which seriously affected its financial and political capacity of running the state. Ultimately, these costs contributed to the state’s eventual defeat by the northern Khitans in a few decades (pp. 12-‐13, Ch. 5.3). By shifting the focus from production to consumption, Zhang offers a new thinking model to reassess the mutual constitution between politics and hydraulics. Zhang argues, from the perspective of production, the Northern Song State’s efforts in

17 Karl Wittfogel postulates that large scale hydraulic works gave rise to a despotic state. Furthermore, he develops theory of “Oriental Despotism” in which one or a few powerful people at the top had total control of the water management at the local level. Wittfogel’s theory has been criticized at all levels, from his logic of theorization to the empirical validity of his theory. For a detailed critique of Wittfogel’s theory, see Zhang’s discussion on pp. 178-179.


hydraulics was counter-‐productive. Like the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the Northern Song State was diligent, committed and staffed with officials with knowledge and means. However, it seemed that the state was entrapped ecologically – the more it manipulated the environment to build more security, the more risks and dangers it had to deal with. The dilemma Zhang pondered in the book centered on: was the Northern Song able to escape the trap and to withdraw from its commitments? (p. 286).18 The answer seems “no.” But why? Was it due to the “hydraulic trap”? Marvin Harris has largely inherited Wittfogel’s theory and he suggests the existence of “hydraulic trap” – given the technological constraints in pre-‐industrial “hydraulic societies,” after a state has committed to a particular technological and ecological strategy to solve the problem of declining efficiency, it may stuck with that choice, even having to bear the consequences of an unintelligent decision.19 I wonder if it could be applied to the Hebei case – the frontier lakes and the Yellow River dikes were projects of such kind, and the state might not have felt it possible to develop an alternative technological or ecological strategy. We could also ask, did the state want to withdraw from the overburdened hydraulic commitments? Plenty of historical cases show that the state attempted to centralize its power through crisis.20 For a state like the highly insecure Northern Song, it is possible that it needed crisis to assert its power in Hebei and nationwide. Committed to solving constant crisis, the state demonstrated its ability to organize labor forces, coordinate trans-‐regional shipments, and marshal investments into huge hydraulic projects. The hydraulic consumption still centralized power, though the centralization led to the fall, rather than the rise, of the Northern Song state. Essentially, the mode of consumption did not seem differ much from the hydraulic mode of production. In general, I hope that Zhang could elaborate on the Northern Song State’s mentality towards the natural world. There was obviously an instrumental dimension in the state’s ideology. But how did the state envision the abundance or poverty of its resources? Was the state confident of its wealth (though worrying about its national security)? Did the state see the declining hydraulic projects in Hebei more of a defense structure or a venue of power? 18 In contrast to Hebei, Kenneth Pomeranz discusses the case of Huang-Yun (Yellow River – Grand Canal) in which the Qing state decided to deinvest and abandon Huang-Yun and made Huang-Yuan an economic peripheral region. Zhang sees this case as the breakdown of the “hydraulic mode of consumption” and the state might have realized the huge burden of prior hydraulic engagements in Huang-Yun. See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993). 19 Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977; Vintage Books Reissue Edition, 1991), Ch. 13. I understand that this question could lead to a discussion on Mark Elvin’s pre-modern “technological lock-in.” See Zhang’s discussion on this concept in her book, p. 13, fn.21. 20 Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92.


2. How do we assess the eighty years of history of Hebei-‐Yellow River environmental complex in the long-‐term human-‐river relationship of North China? And how do Chinese historians utilize the available (but often limited) sources to analyze causations in long-‐term environmental change? Historians are fascinated with time; environmental historians are no exception. In this book, Zhang devotes two chapters (Chs. 7&8) to discussing the environmental consequences – both in short and long terms – in the Hebei Plain. According to her, many of the environmental problems that the Hebei Plain is facing today, such as soil salinization and land sandification, had already been sowed in the eleventh century, when the Yellow River crashed into the central Hebei Plain and ushered in crisis in all aspects of the environmental world. Zhang seems to argue that the environmental drama of the eleventh century marked a significant turn in human-‐nature relationships in Hebei and that the crisis unleashed by the drama has lingered on until the present. I wonder if Zhang could reflect on the temporal scale in doing the environmental history: which time scale is most effective in examining the human-‐nature relationship? The eighty-‐year time span is relatively short compared to millennia of the river history—in essence, it is an eighty-‐year crisis from a human perspective. How do we understand the environmental impacts that were caused by the events during this time span in the long term? More broadly, how do we assess the critical turning moments of the human-‐river relationship from a long-‐term perspective? Perhaps these questions are too broad to ask; and perhaps the sources are too scarce to offer any intelligible insight. But it would be helpful if Zhang could point to any directions to think about those questions. Furthermore, having been reading Chinese sources of late imperial China on water and landscape, which are much richer than those for medieval China, I know well the difficulty of interpreting sources on environmental changes and making possible causal relations between environmental changes and human activities. So, I wonder if Zhang could share some thoughts on excavating, utilizing and interpreting sources of a small temporal scale and indicating their environmental implications over a long duration. 3. Where was the hope? This environmental drama is a tragedy. It is beautifully crafted, yet it is tragic. I wonder, after reading this book, where the hope of sustainability resides. The Northern Song state had good intentions, but no good strategies to live with the environment; the government officials and elites were equipped with limited technological know-‐how and were divided by fractional interests. What about the locals and the commoners? Due to scarce and fragment sources at the local level around the eleventh century, we hardly know much in that respect. Still, Zhang admirably patches together a picture at the grassroots and discusses the local strategies to cope with the disasters (Ch. 8.2). The Hebei people were certainly the


victims of the environmental ordeal, and they were no doubt tough survivors. But for the most part, the locals seem to have been passive and deferred to authoritarian government. Perhaps their heroic spirits and activism had been completely wiped out by the Northern Song State’s decades-‐long project of peripherizing Hebei, as Zhang argues. In front of both an unruly nature and an authoritarian and opportunistic Northern Song government, the local people seemed particularly vulnerable, and the story has an unavoidably declensionist tone, as most of environmental history stories do. So, if none of the social stratum was strong enough to make the Song environment and society sustainable, where was the hope? Where was the power of resilience? German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote 200 years ago, “but where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Maybe Zhang can discuss about the sources of “the saving power” and provide us with a silver lining after learning the pain and suffering of the Hebei people. As Christoph Mauch has advocated, “we need stories not only of the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, but also of ‘slow hope’.”21 Today, the Yellow River is the famous “suspended river” (xuan he) whose river bed is up to ten meters above the street level. In many sections of the river, its water flow decreases into trickles or nothing. The mother river has endured numerous human interruptions, with a multitude of intentions. Environmental problems including the intensifying water shortage, sandstorms, and smog that are plaguing North China today are as inseparable from human actions as the case of the Northern Song a millennium ago. Humans continue doing the same things to the river, such as the construction of a series of mega-‐projects throughout the twentieth and twenty-‐first centuries. Though a thousand years apart, the political calculation and development-‐driven mentality today is not that different from the so-‐called pre-‐modern state. That’s a warning bell the book delivers in the end. Paraphrasing Donald Worster’s words, rivers have been there long before the humans, so it is not that rivers are in human time; it should be the other way around – we humans are living in rivers’ time. Thus, humans need to think like a river, to respect and understand the rivers.22 This tragedy of the Northern Song state, the Hebei Plain, and the Yellow River provides a cautionary tale to today’s China and other states in the world.

21 Christoph Mauch, “How vulnerable is our world? Environmental sustainability and slow hope for the future.” RCC workshop, September 2016. 22 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 331.


Comments by Donald Worster, Renmin University of China, Beijing he Yellow River, although small in terms of annual water discharge, ranking far below its mate the Yangtze, was nonetheless the cradle of Chinese civilization. Its historic significance has been the subject of much recent scholarship to which Ling Zhang makes a major contribution, exhibiting both mastery of

sources and an ambitious agenda of big ideas. Her book deserves careful attention from traditional political historians, from environmental scholars, and from anyone who must deal with the continuing power of rivers. In the end, however, I want to caution her against pushing her anti-‐state feelings too far and neglecting other culprits in the river’s story. Zhang focuses on a critical eight decades when the Song emperors tried to prevent the flooding of their capital region by diverting the Yellow River northward onto the Hebei plain, a project that eventually ended in failure. For all its efforts to save itself, the Northern Song dynasty could not avoid falling in the fateful year 1127 CE, and the imperial capital shifted from Kaifeng southward to Hangzhou. If readers expect the author to argue that this shift of empire was caused by the river’s rambunctious power rather than an enemy invasion, they will be disappointed, for Zhang never explicitly connects the downfall of the Northern Song to the river’s movements. What then is her main concern? This ancient state, she argues, was dominated by a string of inept and callous emperors and their advisors who committed a gross injustice against the common people of Hebei. Those rulers deliberately chose to destroy a land they held subject in order to preserve their hold on power. Keep in mind that the river, according to written and geological records, has jumped course dozens of times in the past. And remember that, in 1128 CE, one year after the fall of the dynasty, the river again changed course, breaching its right bank and rolling across the once favored lands of Henan. Revenge may have been served in that catastrophe, but it was the river’s revenge—or at least the river’s indifference to human plans or authority. Zhang has been inspired by the magisterial anarchism of political scientist James Scott, especially his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), in which 20th century “high modernism” was the main target. Readers may debate whether Scott belongs on the left or right politically, but he offers a telling critique of bureaucratic planning, centralized management, and Enlightenment dreams of rational order. To some extent I count myself his ally and would point to lots of state failures and environmental hubris in the United States, especially in the arid West where engineers, politicians, and other “builders” have committed many blunders and done ecological damage. Those who have tried to manage the Imperial Valley, the Colorado River, or the Columbia watershed all could be compared to the Northern Song managers. Anyone who believes that laissez-‐faire capitalists are the only incompetent or dangerous people

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on the planet should scrutinize Chinese history to see how destructive governments can also be. The Chinese state has long been a subject of critical interest to political thinkers from John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx down to the 20th-‐century’s Karl Wittfogel. Together, they advanced the notion that Asia gave birth to a unique mode of production based on large-‐scale, government-‐directed control of rivers. That so-‐called “hydraulic mode,” they say, led in a different direction than European feudalism. It was not “progressive—that is, it did not lead to modern bourgeois liberalism or industrial capitalism, as feudalism did, for it was too centralized, bureaucratic, and hostile toward freedom and innovation. Because of the straitjacket of water control, Asians suffered from “stagnant” involution and social repression. Wittfogel’s controversial classic Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957) was where that long interpretation of Chinese history ended up, blaming the rise of totalitarianism in communist China and Russia on ancient irrigation systems. But the theory has not convinced many historians, especially in China, and the whole edifice of an Asiatic mode of production has nearly collapsed. A better argument in my view would be that despotism threatens whenever the conquest of nature leads to high concentrations of capital, technology, and social control. Such intensification might indeed involve water, but it could happen wherever technocrats, bureaucrats, or industrialists try to domesticate and dominate the physical environment. Zhang convincingly argues that China’s state-‐based water control was far shakier than Wittfogel and the others realized. Earlier writers had tended to assume that past domination of nature was always successful and led to an equally successful domination of people. But if the Song emperors failed to dominate nature, how could they dominate society for long? Instead of Wittfogel’s all-‐powerful state exercising ruthless command, she points to the hapless Song emperors, who were doomed by their own miscalculations. She calls their failed relation with the river a “hydraulic mode of consumption”—a rather awkward way of saying that their efforts at big-‐scale water management brought bankruptcy to their treasuries, diverted labor from vital tasks like growing food, and undermined environmental stability. But why then didn’t the Song war on nature simply come to an end once and for all? Why did later regimes arise and feel compelled to wage the same battle? Almost a thousand years later came Mao Zedong who, as David Pietz has shown in The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (2015), set out to make the Yellow River obey his dictates. That war also met with failure. Again and again the state seems to fail to keep rivers flowing where it wants them, but why does it persist in trying? Perhaps we need a broader answer than Zhang provides. That answer, I submit, lies not simply in the arrogance or self-‐interest of the state, but also in demands coming from the common people. The war on the Yellow river began long ago in a rural society that could not control its numbers and in an all-‐too


human tendency to think only in terms of the near future and private benefit. Eleventh-‐century China continued that story of peasants trying hard to wrest a living from the earth. They were honest, hard-‐working souls whose tenuous lives deserve our sympathy. We can be sure, however, that they sought, as peasants have always done, to achieve higher levels of prosperity, protection, and defense from every threat they felt, not least from the threat of floods and droughts that might destroy their crops and leave them and their offspring starving. China’s peasants had a lot of children to feed as they sought to increase their labor pool and old-‐age security. Peasants demanded that the state save them from the ravages of nature and make their lives and those of their children more secure. Throughout its history China has ranked as the most dense, populous aggregation of people on earth. At least ten thousand years ago they were already so numerous and so short of food that they were forced to invent a system of agriculture based on millet, wheat, and rice. They exploited their river valleys to raise crops, and then, when they wanted more space to accommodate more people, they pushed onto the fertile but vulnerable Loess Plateau. The loose, yellowish soil of the plateau, blown in from Mongolia during the Pleistocene, offered them fresh opportunity for growing food, but doing so soon increased erosion and intensified the loading of the Yellow River with silt. The river’s nature is to remove every obstacle, including the Loess Plateau—whatever impedes its flow to the sea. Unwittingly, the peasants aided the river’s erosive work, but in doing so they made flooding worse and changes of river course more frequent. Why couldn’t the peasants see this long-‐term danger in expanding their production and reproduction? Where was the wisdom we are told that lies embedded in local knowledge? The hard truth is that peasant thinking, however rational and impressive it may have been at the local homestead level, was inadequate for dealing with a river that was over 3,000 miles long. They needed a broader, more comprehensive kind of environmental understanding and responsibility. To save themselves they should have thought about where their soil was going, what the effects downstream of that erosion would be, and how many people an eroding land could support. But they did not and perhaps could not. Early on Zhang summarizes that upriver story, but she does not criticize the peasants in any way. Nor have most other scholars, who have paid insufficient attention to the environmental stresses that agriculture has brought to the planet and the pressures that human fertility have brought to the rest of nature. In fact, scholars have too often excused the damage caused by our species’ hungry loins. Only by thinking critically about those matters, however, can we really explain what happened on the Hebei plain a thousand years ago. Only then can we grapple with the root cause of so much tragedy in earth’s history: ordinary, anonymous men and women ignoring the ecological consequences of their own fertility. When the Song emperors chose to sacrifice one part of their territory to save another, were they behaving more selfishly or unjustly than the peasants had


always done? Was it possible that the state behaved like the peasants in sacrificing others while saving itself? Did anyone, elite or common, really understand the river, both its great power and its vulnerabilities, or try to grapple with what was making it behave as it did? The Yellow became a “river of sorrow” because of the common people’s drive to conquer nature, which then became the task of the state. That conquest may have had more than one force behind it, but certainly it was driven by population pressures as much as by arrogant leaders or urban consumer demands. As Zhang says, the conquest went awry. But it was peasants, eager to reap their bumper crops of babies, who set in motion a long cycle of catastrophe.


Response by Ling Zhang, Boston College othing is more satisfying and rewarding to a scholar and writer than to have her book carefully read and thoughtfully critiqued. Isn’t that why we write and publish in the first place, to solicit different opinions, foster intellectual exchanges, and advance mutual learning? Given the critical attention my

book has received, I consider it a success and myself a very fortunate author. I want to thank Dr. Yan Gao, Prof. Robert Marks, Prof. Maya Peterson, and Prof. Donald Worster for engaging with my book in the most serious and generous way. I am very grateful that Prof. Chris Jones organized this roundtable and provided a platform for this conversation. My deep appreciation goes to the H-‐Environment Roundtable Reviews; it has offered me a great opportunity to learn. My readers have raised many significant critiques and questions. Instead of trying to touch upon all of them, I have chosen to focus my response on three issues that I think are most important and deserve deep engagement. They are: first, the gaps in the book that call for further research and writing; second, the challenges and opportunities in studying pre-‐modern environmental history; third, the issue of environmental history’s declensionist tendency and the possibility of hope in a seemingly hopeless environmental reality. Political-‐Economic-‐Environmental Trialectics; Chinese History Without the Teleology of Progress and Eurocentrism I will begin with some important issues raised mainly by Prof. Marks. To begin the discussion, I must revisit my writing process and some decisions along the way. The River, the Plain, and the State is a product of my transition from being a classically trained Sinologist and historian of the political economy of medieval China (I will skip a lengthy explanation of my use of the notion of “medieval” in the Chinese context) to becoming an environmental historian with an emphasis on political ecology. Ideally, this transition would not be so much “becoming something else,” but rather “becoming something more”—more interdisciplinary, more diverse, and more complex. In an ideal world, this book would not just be a work of environmental history; it would be a history of a complex political-‐economic-‐environmental trialectic (a concept explained in the book’s prologue). Unfortunately, the ticking of the tenure clock, which all junior faculty lucky enough to land tenure track jobs have to face, and the impossibility of convincing any press to publish the 180,000 words from this first-‐time author compelled me to scale down my ambition and choose to present only part of that transition. The result was that I dropped several chapters on political economy and focused on political ecology, which led to the book that my readers have in hand: a description of the complex interactions among a flooding Yellow River, chaotic state politics, and a struggling regional society.

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The decision to reduce the intellectual scope of the book generated a tension in the text. I struggled with it throughout the writing process, and perceptive readers like Prof. Marks have detected it—his perspicacity humbles me. The tension is that I have established a political ecological analysis, but I wanted that analysis also to connect with and speak to a political economic thesis that I did not have space to flesh out. Instead, I offer my readers a mere taste, mainly in the prologue, Chapter 5, and Chapter 7. In other words, although insisting on the interdependence of the two parts of the story, in my writing I privileged only one. The gap between my ambition and what I was able to do in the text itself has given some readers a sense of incompletion. That feeling is I believe behind many of Prof. Marks’ questions. He is right to point out that I have attempted to engage two prevalent economic discourses in the Chinese historiography: “Medieval Economic Revolution,” which I invoke explicitly, and “the Great Divergence,” which is in the background. He is also right to notice that I have quietly courted two Eurocentric economic theories—one Marxist and the other Classical. I have gestured at a critique of these theories, as well as indicated a desire for an alternative model to reimagine everyday economic life in premodern China. Throughout the book, I have named G. W. Skinner, Mark Elvin, Robert Hartwell, and Karl Wittfogel (I chose to keep behind the scenes Wittfogel’s theoretical guru Karl Marx and his fan Marvin Harris, whom Dr. Yan Gao mentions in her review). I have invoked and to some degree critiqued the ideas they championed, such as “macroregional structure,” “technological lock-‐in,” “the high-‐level equilibrium trap,” and “hydraulic society” (plus its derivative concepts like “hydraulic cycle” and “hydraulic community” or “hydraulic commonwealth” in Wittfogel’s words). But to Prof. Marks’s dissatisfaction, I have not gone further to pursue a full discussion of these issues. Instead, I left them to only a few lines in the prologue and in several footnotes. Prof. Marks’ comments echo my own regrets about the book: by excluding the political economic part of my research, the book suffers from theoretical fragmentation, because some of the ideas that the book advocates (e.g., the hydraulic mode of consumption and the inverse core-‐periphery) would make more sense and be more analytically powerful if embedded in my overall conceptual scheme of the political-‐economic-‐environmental trialectic; when serving merely as a political ecological discourse, their strengths and implications are constrained. Speaking pragmatically, by reducing the theoretical and methodological discussion in general, I have kept the book within the word limitation without sacrificing other more necessary content. I have elevated the coherence and intensity of the political ecological analysis, and have avoided alienating readers from diverse backgrounds who may not want too much economy-‐focused and theory-‐laden material. I was also acutely aware of publishing not with a China-‐specific press, but in an environmental history book series whose readers come largely from the field of modern Western environmental history. The resulting book is evidence of this writer’s challenges, struggles, and careful deliberation.


What I have taken out from The River, the Plain, and the State will be developed in the next book, something of a sequel to the present one. As part of my response to Prof. Marks’ comments, I would like to offer an introduction to my core concerns underlying both books. In both The River, the Plain, and the State and the next book, I aim to critique the Eurocentric teleology of progress and productive logics that have dominated historical inquiries about pre-‐modern China. The teleology of progress prescribes an end goal of human development that lies ahead in time; it views history as a linear advancement toward that goal. Hence, the present is better than the past, and the future will surely be better than the present. As the teleological end is assumed to dwell in the West, Asiatic societies (to use the Marxist-‐Wittfogelian term) like China will never enjoy betterment, but remain in stagnation unless they denounce their own historical categories and trajectories and board the Western progressive train. What drives such teleology and historical advancement is productive logics. Following these logics, every occurrence in history is generative of something else. For instance, economic activities produce political power, political power prompts social configurations, and social configurations give rise to collective psyches, which circle back around to reorganize, regulate, and generate new impetus for economic activities. Through history’s zigzagging dialectics, various historical movements—harmonious, conflictive, or even violent—together energize linear progression, produce positive outcomes, and thereby move humanity closer and closer toward its end goal. What sets the basic tone for such teleology and productive logics is optimism. Pessimism has no place in this history. However undesirable the past and the present have been, no matter how much struggle we have gone through and are still going through, things will get better and we will eventually achieve our best, as long as we accept the teleology and follow the path. This teleology of progress and productive logics, along with its optimistic ethos, is shared by various schools of Western economic, social, and political thought. For instance, Marxist political and economic doctrines and classical liberal social and economic principles may disagree sharply on what the linear progression should look like, what means a society or nation should take to pursue progress, and how to balance economic growth and social justice. Despite these disagreements, however, they share common teleological, productive, and optimistic beliefs. After entering China and being used to interpret Chinese historical development and evaluate China’s position in world history, different Western thoughts have created a variety of economic, social, and political discourses. They have to various degrees sought to induct China into European paradigms while acknowledging and accommodating some Chinese specificities. Without denying the differences of those discourses and their diverse views of China’s past and present, I insist that it is absolutely crucial for us to look beyond their differences and recognize their common inheritance: the teleology of progress and productive logics based on European experiences, all colored by of optimism. It is this common inheritance that binds together scholars like Karl Wittfogel and Mark Elvin—two major scholars of China with whom I engage in the present book and its sequel—even though their ideas and concerns appear drastically different. A


former communist and later champion of Western liberal democracy, Wittfogel carried Karl Marx’s “Asiatic Mode of Production”—a concept emphasizing the mode of property rights—into the domain of political theory. He developed a scheme called the “Hydraulic Mode of Production” to theorize the mutual reinforcement and production among the state’s total control of water works, its total control of economic, social, and religious resources, and its despotic political power. To Wittfogel, this peculiar mode of production opposes any European mode; it perpetuates the state’s total power in China and like countries, and prevents such places from attaining progress and freedom. To attain progress and freedom, China must shift categories and adopt European modes of production: a reciprocal productive relationship between economic activities based on private property and political decisions based on democratic procedures. There is hope. Hope lies in the West. To make China and other Asiatic societies become more European, Wittfogel advocated for external interventions. Such interventions could be multidimensional—social, economic, technological, cultural, political, and even military in the form of colonial conquest. As I pointed out in The River, the Plain, and the State, almost all scholars of China, historians especially, have condemned Wittfogel’s diagnosis of China as a self-‐perpetuating despotic society. They are also suspicious that his solution may legitimize and open the door to Western imperialism. Nevertheless, they do not disagree with Wittfogel about his theoretical assumptions and belief: a teleology of progress through the productive logics based on the European model. To them, the West is good and modern, and thus represents a more advanced state of historical development. They believe that by fixing its problems, China will have the opportunity to improve and become more like the West. Unlike Wittfogel—whom I view as a “hard Eurocentrist” who saw China as the absolute Other, demanded that it denounce itself, and called upon external interventions to enforce change—those scholars are “soft Eurocentrists” who regard China as the lesser (or as a civilization or country that has made mistakes and become lesser) that with help from the West may correct itself and get back onto the right—read: Western—track. Economic historian Mark Elvin and many other scholars of premodern China, in my view, belong to this latter group. Seemingly influenced both by neoclassical economic principles and by the Schumpeterian emphasis on the key role of innovation, Mark Elvin believed that premodern China thrived economically long before Europe did (I use the past tense here to avoid assuming that Elvin still holds the opinions he expounded in the 1970s and 1980s). He tried to explain how productivity soared in late medieval China and to identify why that productivity then declined (I use the past tense here to avoid assuming that Elvin still holds the opinions he expounded in the 1970s and 1980s). Along with Joseph Needham and other scholars, he grappled with questions around China’s lack of “the Industrial Revolution,” and “the Great Divergence” between Asia and Europe. In his classic text The Pattern of the Chinese Past (1973), Elvin first sketched an economic growth based on mutual reinforcing, cooperative productive relations among various factors of production: labor, surplus, market, technology,


property rights, the government, etc. Then he diagnosed an economic standstill: the malfunctioning or over-‐functioning of certain factors (e.g., excessive labor and diminishing marginal return) that triggered negative chain effects on other factors (e.g., decrease in capital inputs as well as in the demand and investment in technology); those chain effects then caused the overall productive relations as well as productivity to sink into a “high-‐level equilibrium trap.” The society and its economy continued to produce but failed to innovate. This trap, however, did not have to be permanent. There could be a breakthrough. As a historian, Elvin resisted the urge to prescribe solutions as political theorist Wittfogel provocatively did. His studies implicitly suggested that the energy to lift China out of its “technological lock-‐in” could not be generated inside China, but had to come from elsewhere. “The trap could only be broken by the introduction of new technology exogenous to the Chinese world” (“Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism: A Critique of Max Weber’s Explanation,” Theory and Society, 1984, 13. 3: 384). What Wittfogel and Elvin embodied, the different intellectual lineages they inherited, and the understandings of China they inspired in other scholars can, in my opinion, be summarized by a Chinese idiom “shutu tonggui 殊途同歸”: different paths to the same end. They have all thrived on the same teleological, productive, optimistic, and Eurocentric assumptions. It is not these scholars’ idiosyncratic and nuanced interpretations of historical sources that I am concerned with. What I care most about is their common assumptions. Coming from a stance of pluralism, I want to ask: Are there other meaningful theoretical assumptions, from which we can generate different historical questions, draw strength from different conceptual resources, develop different historical discourses, reconfigure our research methodologies, and generate different and diverse meanings to our limited historical sources? I see my research and writing not as definitive answers to these questions, but as experiments to explore new possibilities. And I am not alone and certainly not the first person to raise and attempt to answer these questions. Many scholars before me, including Prof. Marks, have made extraordinary efforts to introduce alternative historical narratives in the past three decades. Their works have profoundly influenced me. What I contribute is to bring these questions to the studies of medieval times, the period so early that scholars normally assume it has little to do with Eurocentrism that emerged much later. By revealing how deeply the Eurocentric teleology of process has shaped the historiography about medieval China, I hope to show that the Chinese history in the medieval period and beyond can be and should be understood and presented in different ways. In both The River, the Plain, and the State and the sequel to come, I experiment with two things. First, I test the following assumptions: history is not a collection of linear movements; historical change does not lead to one teleological end; production and progress are not the goal but only phenomena alongside many other phenomena; the Western trajectory is one peculiar way of seeing history, which has formed a hegemonic historical discourse to assimilate and erase other ways of seeing history; the world is open and wide and so consists of multiple, diverse historical practices


and experiences; it is possible to collapse linearity to flatten up and broaden up the world. It is with these assumptions that I identify meaningful research questions, make appropriate methodological choices, and discover useful historical sources. The present book evokes the notion of “trialectics” to reject the neatness prescribed by the notion of “dialectics.” It unravels history’s messiness and refuses to reduce it to a clear picture (even stylistically through my writing, as Prof. Peterson has observed). The book exposes the impossibility and impasse of human rationales and activities, and highlights the ambivalence and contradictions of human morals. It reserves substantial space for stories about the process of consuming, costing, and losing, opposite to producing, gaining, or winning. It demonstrates suffering as a significant and profound theme of history, within which only a small number of lucky ones gained the privilege of experiencing progress and optimism. It refuses a tone of optimism. All of these efforts were consciously made to perform my non-‐teleological, non-‐productive assumptions. My book is no doubt flawed, but Prof. Marks’ perceptive questions convince me that I am actually on the right track. I intend to continue in the same vein in my next book, but to go further and to do it better. The second thing that I experiment with in both the present book and the sequel is to insist that flattening and broadening the world demands a new definition of what the world is—an understanding no longer radical to most environmental historians but still jarring to many historians studying human-‐centered issues. The traditional humanistic worldview that sees the universe revolving around humans no longer suffices. In the “boldest,” “unapologetic” manner accurately observed by Prof. Peterson, I consistently champion the following message in my writing: It is not an assumption but a reality that the world is neither a world of humans, nor a world centering on and serving humans; history is not about or for humans alone; hence, studying history with a sole concern for human affairs is not only limited and partial, but it is also theoretically and empirically subject to deconstruction and reevaluation once it is placed back into the flattened and broadened human-‐non-‐human world. Given this understanding, I regard environmental history as one powerful approach to collapse the existing assumptions and suggest other possibilities. As I have shown in The River, the Plain, and the State and will continue to show in its sequel, acknowledging environmental matters as the everyday living reality right “here and now”—instead of as a bracketed-‐off category of others (in the name of Nature) out “there and then”—breaks down our conventional definition of what it means to be political, social, economic, and cultural within the human realm. Being political, social, economic, or cultural is no longer the sole domain of human actors; instead, these terms refer to diverse relationships and historical phenomena in which environmental matters and non-‐human beings actively play their own roles. Once we see the world as so vast and vibrant, as teeming with so many different historical actors, the rules governing the game of history (if there are any rules at all) cannot be set by humans alone to address human desires. There are other rules


that demand to be taken seriously. Given this flattened and broadened worldview, any previous assumptions that our intellectual ancestors and peers have held so dear—the Eurocentric world order, the teleology of progress, and the productive logics—are mere minor, derivative, and categorical issues. They will crumble under the interrogation of new historical inquiries. Within that big world, to work on a history without the Eurocentric, productive teleology is both a legitimate idea and a possible practice. I will explain more about my understanding of environmental history below in the section “Where is Hope?” Sources and Methodologies: How Is Premodern Environmental History Possible? Prof. Peterson acknowledges my “skillful ability to weave together a coherent tale by piecing together fragmentary evidence to present a plausible scenario” and my willingness to “make a ‘bold conjecture’” and “utilize other kinds of available data” to overcome “the limitations of the archives.” Dr. Gao asks me to elaborate on “excavating, utilizing, and interpreting sources of a small temporal scale and indicating their environmental implications over a long duration.” Together, they have pointed out an issue that troubles all practitioners in the field of environmental history, especially those who do not belong to the field’s mainstream of early modern and modern histories. How does one study something with very limited extant information, from a very long time ago, and probably involving experiences and knowledge systems very different from our modern ones? Without historical sources and without empirical data, any interesting theorization (such as mine above) will remain at the conceptual level and not evolve into meaningful historical analysis. Here, I would like to reflect on my historical sources and research methods. I will also respond to Prof. Worster’s critiques that my book attributes too much blame to the state and overlooks the negative environmental impacts caused by peasants and the population growth. To me, his meaningful comments are foremost a matter of the availability of sources. A historian’s business is often an agonizing one. It is full of constraints. Constraints are particularly salient to historians who work on premodern eras and rely on primary sources of lesser quantities and lesser quality (e.g., in terms of preservation). When it comes to premodern environmental history, the situation is even more dire. Our humancentric worldview and view of history have produced historical sources that largely focus on human concerns and human affairs. To a premodern environmental historian, not only is the overall quantity of historical data bearing environmental information limited, but even worse, such limited information never comes through in a systematic, concentrated fashion. It is buried under layers of human constructs and only reveals itself in fragmentary and obscure ways.


My book deals with flooding water and I need to understand its hydrology and materiality. Combing through premodern Chinese sources, such information exists in broken sentences and scattered phrases (imagine how envious I am of scholars studying a modern environmental thinker or a hydropower plant or a national park, who are blessed with a systematic set of data). Water motifs indeed appear everywhere in Chinese sources. But they are by and large about memories and imaginations of water, or about literary and artistic representations of water, or about philosophical and moral significance through water metaphors. Such metaphorical, representational information cannot be straightforwardly interpreted as describing material, physical water. I make this material-‐representation distinction without attempting to reify a nature-‐culture dichotomy; I do not deny that material, physical beings are always already socially and culturally conditioned (but only conditioned, not determined). One may say: textual information is certainly biased, but material culture is likely less so. Look at European medievalists. More and more of them use advanced technology to conduct archaeological digs and bring forth unseen materials: human skeletons, animal remains, soil sediments, carbon dating, ice core analysis, DNA testing, and so on. This kind of knowledge is the dream of environmental historians who worship the idea of “going down to the earth.” The situation of Chinese medievalists is both a blessing and a curse: rich textual sources and poor material sources. Environmental archaeology is only slowly taking hold in China, and it is carried out in only a few locales and focuses only on certain issues. To make the situation worse, Chinese archaeologists privilege ancient times: studying a period two thousand years ago is considered impressive; a period a thousand years ago not quite as much, and therefore it is less attractive to archaeologists. A Chinese medievalist like me has to rely mainly on textual sources predominantly about emperors, officials, philosophers, and poets—very few about women, or peasants, or refugees, not to mention animals and non-‐organisms. One may suggest: the constraints from sources can be alleviated by interdisciplinary approaches and knowledges. This is true. I am a big advocate of interdisciplinarity. Yet, the constraints cannot be fundamentally eradicated, as the interdisciplinary approaches and knowledges are bound within modern scientific knowledge systems. To tackle environmental matters a thousand years ago, the historian cannot easily rely on modern, scientific, instrumentally measured and observatory knowledge—as her early modern and modern colleagues can relatively comfortably do—without questioning the contradictions of different knowledge systems. As much as I have learnt from modern geology, hydrology, and soil science, as much as I have read through decades of scientific journals on hydrodynamics and sedimentation, I cannot ascribe their observations and conclusions to environmental circumstances in historical times. Doing so would risk essentializing the earth and water systems, and assuming they do not change over time. This kind of essentializing assumption, which treats environmental matters as the static, passive backdrop of active humans, opposes my theoretical position that the earth and the river and other entities do change and do act. As Prof. Marks correctly points out, although being Braudelian


disciples, we now know that the geological time is not always long and smooth and motionless; rather, “environmental change can be rapid and immensely disruptive.” The Yellow River a thousand years ago was not exactly the Yellow River today. So, how is studying premodern environmental history possible in the end? To me, it comes down to three issues. First, we must embrace interdisciplinarity, but treat it with care. To me, the ideal foundational training for environmental history should include both training in literary, textual analysis from traditional history studies and training in some knowledge of natural science (I wish I had more of that). Even if an environmental historian studies the representation of water, she or he should learn some basic hydrology in order to understand that there is no one abstract, conceptual, homogeneous water. I will always remember a moment when I enthusiastically told an eminent historian about my writing on a disaster involving a plague of locusts, the damage to the crops, and the physical and emotional suffering of famine refugees. With a kind smile on his face, the eighty-‐year-‐old historian asked me: “Have you seen a locust? Do you know how a cloud of locusts moves across the sky and land, and that farmers can see them coming?” No, I hadn’t, and I didn’t. The lesson from that exchange was to “learn about the locust.” A knowledge of biology and ecology could not explain the historical reality, but they could certainly help me to imagine the human suffering and ponder the human representation of the disaster with greater nuance and depth. Studying the material-‐discursive as a whole package, we environmental historians assume that other disciplines are all relevant to various degrees, as long as we learn to differentiate them and resist the temptation to generalize and fetishize them. Second, premodern environmental historians must cherish every single piece of historical material, since we do not enjoy the luxury of privileging some materials or discriminating against others. We must make creative uses of all existing materials, including seeking meaning from marginal or unconventional sources and reading them against stereotypes and intuition. For my research, that means looking in places other historians deem low value. To use an analogy: I spend a lot of time rummaging through the trash bins of intellectual, social, and political historians, looking for a few gems that speak to my peculiar research questions. My proudest finding of the past few years was twenty entries indicating sandification in north China. This finding came from a three-‐year hunt for the word “sand” in tens of thousands of historical texts of various genres across the ten centuries of the second millennium. One might say that the reward is too little, but that is the reality of studying environmental history for premodern eras. My sense is that any success in this kind of research must come from the researcher’s consciousness in identifying meaningful research questions, from her patience in covering a wide range of seemingly irrelevant or unpromising materials, from her willingness to experiment with every possible reading and analytical device, and from her courage to be “reasonably” bold and creative.


The third and last issue is how to work with humility, and to know when and what to give up. Negotiating with constraints, disciplining one’s wild intellectual desires, and engaging with materials instead of indulging in fantastic speculations are the basic training for and a great virtue of our profession. In the case of my book, however creatively or even subversively I interpret sources, however ardently I introduce information from other time periods and interdisciplinary knowledges to evoke imaginations, the range of environmental issues I can raise and the depth I can pursue are inherently restricted. While writing The River, the Plain, and the State, I felt humbled knowing the limits of what I could offer to my readers. It is with this sense of humility and limitation that I respond to Prof. Worster’s critique. Prof. Worster pointed out my “neglecting other culprits in the river’s story,” especially “the constant demands of the common people.” He raised the issue of population pressures and suggested that “it was largely the peasants, eager to reap their bumper crops of babies, who set in motion a long cycle of catastrophe.” In principle, I agree with Prof. Worster that multiple “culprits” participated in shaping the river’s story. The book does not claim that one factor alone dictated the outcome of history. For practical reasons, however, my book chooses to focus on one major culprit, the imperial state. The reasons are twofold. One is to engage with existing scholarly discourses on Chinese history and to critique its inadequacy. The historical discourses on China during the tenth to twelfth centuries are overly concerned with the sophistication of the bureaucracy and the advancement of the society, the economy, technology, and culture—all good, positive things. My book deflates this triumphant narrative by demonstrating how the state played a tremendous role as a political-‐environmental actor and how its environmental governance caused disastrous and long-‐lasting consequences—which previous scholars and readers of Chinese history knew nothing about. This dark history of the state and China’s political ecology is worth revealing, not only for its own sake, but more importantly for the purpose of deconstructing the existing discourses and demythologizing the impression of China’s extraordinary progress in that time period. The second reason the book gives the state so much attention is, once again, the constraints of historical sources. My readers will have noticed that with great care and caution the book utilizes whatever it can find, scraping together fragmentary sources, and risking making comparisons and analogies with information from other time periods. All that work aims to offer readers at least some knowledge about the “other culprits” in Prof. Worster’s words: the river’s hydrological conditions (in Chapter 1); long-‐term and short-‐term environmental change and climate change (in Chapters 1 and 3); demographic change and the ways in which ordinary people dealt with the floods (in Chapter 6); and the ways in which people managed a subsistence lifestyle and an agricultural livelihood (in Chapter 7). I wish there had been more sources from which I could tell richer stories about the common people and explain how their everyday environmental activities contributed to the exacerbation of environmental conditions in north China and


thereby to the flooding problems of the Yellow River. Alas, the extant sources are what they are. On the issue of the human population, I agree with Prof. Worster that population growth, after reaching a certain level, has become a fundamental factor in pressures on the planet, exhausting its resources, damaging its biodiversity, and producing all kinds of environmental problems. We are now living the outcomes of centuries of irresponsible human reproduction. As an ethical choice, I support environmental activism that advocates proactive, voluntary checks on human population growth. That said, when it comes to historical analysis, especially for premodern eras, I do not think it is meaningful to overgeneralize the correlation between the human population and environmental problems. After all, exponential population growth and its direct attack on the environment are early modern and modern phenomena. I find it more meaningful to historicize the correlation and attend to its nuances and morphologies, such as when, where, and how the two corresponded and affected each other. There is no one clear-‐cut answer or one single principle to explain all historical phenomena. For China as a whole, the demographic explosion did not become evident until the Qing, most likely in the eighteenth century, a couple of centuries after New World crops spread across China, became widely cultivated, and supplied abundant cheap calories. That population growth might have correlated with an overall environmental downturn across China. But we would need sources to substantiate that hypothesis. The situation is more complicated as we scale down to look at regional differences. For example, the lower Yangtze valley experienced overpopulation as early as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the area could alleviate the population-‐induced environmental pressures by externalizing them, such as by relying on grain, other agricultural products, and natural resources imported from other parts of China (e.g., from Hunan as Peter Perdue shows in Exhausting the Earth, 1987). Thanks to its ability to climb up the economic food chain and externalize its problems, the lower Yangtze valley was for several centuries able to maintain both relatively sustainable environmental conditions and a large, dense population. Such population growth created environmental pressures in other regions that were experienced by people there a few centuries later. To simply say that the population growth caused environmental pressures is not totally wrong, but it is not as interesting or as significant as to explore the heterogeneity of human communities, the power relations among them and among various regions, and the socio-‐economic privileges of some over others. On another matter, Chinese peasants were not just baby-‐making machines, whose greed, ignorance, and shortsightedness sent local societies and all of China into a Malthusian catastrophe. For instance, in One Quarter of Humanity (2001), James Lee and Wang Feng show that, at least based on the data from northeast China, people used a variety of practices to depress fertility and thus regulate population growth. The received wisdom that the Chinese always indulged in human reproduction, peasants could not think but only act, and China’s problems invariably derived from


overpopulation is, if not a complete myth, at least a vast overgeneralization (for a fairly comprehensive critique of such received wisdom, see William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, “Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China” in The Journal of Asian Studies, 57.3). Once we realize that China holds no one homogenous people and itself is not a monolithic entity, we should anticipate seeing diverse population behaviors and varying environmental responses across the land that now we call China. Back to my research about the Yellow River valley in north China during the tenth to twelfth centuries. Was there overpopulation prior to those centuries, especially in the river’s middle reaches, which had historically caused damage to the environment, such as depleting vegetation, causing soil erosion, over-‐farming, and over-‐grazing? Theoretically speaking, there might have been. As the book shows (Chapter 1), the river’s middle reaches are situated within a fragile ecotone, and hence are very vulnerable to population pressures. But we do not have sources to demonstrate that was indeed the case. Were there farmers who overproduced children, expanded family sizes, and conquered as much land as they desired? There surely must have been some, but again, we have no sources to show the extent of it. I simply cannot conduct the kind of research that Prof. Worster masterfully performed in Dust Bowl (1979), in which he shows how farmers followed their desires and how they individually and collectively transformed America’s great plains into a gigantic Dust Bowl in the early twentieth century. In fact, the few sources about the river’s middle reaches before the turn of the second millennium center around state-‐sponsored, state-‐organized military migrations and military colonizations, and are not about voluntary migrations and settlements by individual peasants (Chapter 1). Should those activities have caused overpopulation and environmental pressures, the state was no doubt the main culprit. Such historical sources and my interpretation of them bring us back to Prof. Worster’s initial critique, about my “anti-‐state feelings.” Given the sources that I have found, it is hard to evaluate the state’s role otherwise. Interestingly, several other readers of the book have made a completely opposite criticism, that I am a state apologist and not critical enough of the state. They think this because my book devotes substantial space to portraying the phenomenological life of the state, including its struggles and its impasses. That is, I have humanized the state. I regard these two conflicting critiques—being anti-‐state and being a state apologist—as a positive sign: of all the things that I may have addressed too schematically, I have at least treated the issue of the state in enough depth that my readers must grapple with its complexity. I want to end this section by briefly reflecting on the field of environmental history from my position as a Chinese medievalist. Unlike its classic era when environmental history focused on the United States and the West in general during the past four hundred years, the field has now entered a new era of global diversity and chronological multiplicity. Scholarship like mine and others about Asia, Africa, and Latin America prior to the colonial era and the slave trade, about various geographical zones during different time periods, all reveal the potential of pursuing environmental history. Classic environmental history based on modern Western


experiences has supplied invaluable conceptual thinking, research questions, and inspiration, but it cannot offer concrete methodological guidance to those new sub-‐fields. To be fair, it is neither the job of modern Western historians to figure out how to conduct non-‐Western, premodern histories nor the duty of non-‐Western, premodern historians to transplant or apply modern Western methodologies on top of their distinct materials and historical contexts. To do so would be to slip into another form of intellectual American-‐Eurocentrism. Beyond drawing resources from modern Western scholarship and inspirations from American-‐European colleagues, those new sub-‐fields must explore methodological innovations based on their own premodern, non-‐Western contexts. I believe a methodological conversation among scholars of premodern, non-‐Western environmental history should happen, as should a conversation between that group and more established modern, Western environmental historians. The new generation of environmental historians comes from diverse intellectual, cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds. This is the time for them to be creative and make their distinct contributions, so the field’s originally narrow and rather exclusive club may diversify and expand. Where Is Hope? Staying with the Trouble, for a Bit Longer Dr. Gao felt that the book carries “an unavoidably declensionist tone.” Fearing despair, she asked me to “provide us with a silver lining after learning the pain and suffering of the Hebei people.” I believe she is not alone in feeling this way. Her question is profound, as it presses this author to confront a significant issue: What does the author want the book to do, in terms of addressing our contemporary environmental problems? I would first say, the book has a modest intention. It tells a history that happened a thousand years ago. Its main agenda is to reveal that forgotten history. People’s preference for success stories has erased a long history of pain and suffering. To me, revealing that forgotten history and de-‐romanticize our partial, illusory understanding of the past is itself a significant task. Like literature, art, and music, history deserves to be a subject of appreciation and learning, whether or not it serves as an instrument to help us cope with our own lives in the modern age. This book does not supply a point-‐to-‐point comparison between the social, political, and environmental situations across that huge temporal gap. Rather, emphasizing the importance of historical continuity, it encourages other scholars to take on similar issues and substantiate that temporal gap with their own researches. The book means to unsettle, not to settle; to inspire, not to provide closure. Preferring a nuanced, tender treatment of history and eschewing any broad-‐brushed, grand-‐sweeping style of history writing, the book seeks to unravel history’s liveliness, not its distance, hollowness, or abstraction.


If the book has any general message for its readers, I might point to two. First, history’s multifaceted liveliness includes pain and suffering. We must learn to face up to that pain and suffering, own up to our history’s ugliness, and cultivate our ability to carry history’s tremendous weight. Second, with no intention to lecture the readers with a lesson from medieval China, the book is more willing to use its narrative to demonstrate a viewpoint and an attitude. That is, to take a close look at history and build intimacy with it, and to show vibrant environmental beings and their intricate relationships with a great deal of care and empathy. The book encourages its readers to make similarly intimate engagements with our own everyday lives, with the history unfolding right in front of our eyes, and with the world emerging, flourishing, and decaying with our presence and participation. We modern humans are not short of lessons; what we lack is attention to the various existences and their vibrant relationships around us. Having said that, I would like to go beyond the book and reflect more on Dr. Gao’s comments by taking the perspective of an environmental scholar and of an ordinary human being who lives, consumes, wastes, and cares. I think reactions like Dr. Gao’s are understandable. We are living in an era when the Great Acceleration (to paraphrase the title of John McNeill and Peter Engelke’s new book) is driving our mother planet into its Sixth Extinction, and climate change and global warming are wreaking havoc around the world. Championing environmental consciousness, environmental historians (myself included) repeatedly caution our readers not to romanticize the past but to historicize the present. There were very few good old days; human societies in the past often made a mess of environmental relations; historically and accumulatively, we have altogether created the environmentally problematic world we are living in today. Learning all this, no wonder many readers of environmental history feel desperate and concerned about the common future of humanity. No wonder they desire reassurance. Hence the question: Where is hope? My response includes three points. First, I strongly urge my fellow humans not to rush into a search for reassurance, but instead to resist our drive for optimism. Let’s first allow anguish and pain to penetrate us thoroughly. Let’s learn to mourn. Let’s learn to take responsibility and gain response-‐ability, before leaping into the search for hope. Second, instead of asking where hope lies, I encourage us to ask what true hopes are, whose hopes we care about, whose sustainability we pursue, and—above all—who “we” are. What kind of “we” are we determined to make for the future? Is that “we” again made up of the exceptional Human and its most privileged members (e.g., in the Global North)? Lastly, I hate to disappoint my colleagues and readers, but I can offer no silver lining. A silver lining is the wrong place to look for hope. Instead of hoping for a golden ray to break through the dark cloud of our troubles and to shine upon blessed human beings with celestial optimism, futurism, and triumphalism, I choose to direct my gaze on the world around me and connect it with the gazes of my fellow earthlings—right here and right now. I choose to seek hope by “becoming-‐with” feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway, and “to stay with


the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth” (Staying with the Trouble, 2016, 121). Let me explain what I think is a bad hope. Earlier I made a critique of the teleology of progress, productive logics, and the ethos of optimism. These driving engines of our modern world have made us into the kind of modern human beings who constantly demand certainty, crave reassurance, desire happiness, hunger for order and stability, and believe in our human ability to conquer, fix, overcome, perfect, and prevail. With an eye for a teleological paradise, this masculinist Human rides the storm of progress and races across the earth and the sky. Shattering everything he encounters and dissipating every memory about past destruction and suffering, he leaves Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” in shock, horror, and melancholy (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 1969, 257-‐5). This Human neither dwells nor lingers. He mourns little and forgets quickly. Always chasing a new solution and rushing into new action, he confidently equips himself with new tools, technology, and weapons. Haven’t history studies, especially studies in environmental history, revealed many of the marvelous and yet horrendous actions of this Human? In one historical episode after another, this Human has swept aside tragedies, guaranteed repair and change, and promised that tomorrow would be better. Running out of wealth? Mine silver and gold from a new continent. Falling short of labor? Enslave another people. Wanting more land? Destroy forests, exterminate animals, and drive out indigenous peoples. Powering more cars and planes? Drill for oil and gas, preferably in others’ territories. Consuming more meat? Feed livestock with cheap antibiotics and then care for the sick human consumers with the pharmaceutical industry. Demanding clean water, fertile soil, and breathable air? Ship domestic trash overseas or dump it in the middle of the ocean. To every problem he detected or created in history, the Human discovered a solution in “there” and in “others.” Because his world constantly expands and never runs out of “there” and “others,” the Human was and is always full of hope. Hope lies in the very assumption of the exceptionalism of the Human—his exceptional rights and abilities to command, expand, and dominate uncharted terrains and unknown beings. Just as I am writing this on August 3, 2018, NASA announced the first astronauts who will fly in the SpaceX and Boeing spacecraft for the agency's “Commercial Crew Program.” On July 30, five design teams won the latest stage of the “3-‐D Printed Habitat Competition” that NASA and its partners held for deep space exploration. The goal of the teams was to design future human settlements on Mars. On July 25, European scientists announced the discovery of liquid water on Mars. Almost immediately a discussion exploded in the mass media among journalists and the general public, asking if, when, and how we can extract that water for our use to relieve the increasing water shortage in Earth. These events are not something random or sudden; they are new steps in a history of development. For instance, a few months earlier, billionaire Elon Musk announced that his enterprise SpaceX was projected to send a spaceship to Mars in 2019, with the ultimate objective of


planting seeds and starting a human colony on the red planet. As early as 2012, realizing that outer-‐space resource extraction and colonization were no longer a science fiction fantasy but a lurking reality and a profitable business—no longer a matter of if, but a matter of when—Harvard-‐Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis published an essay in Nature, called “Let’s Mine Asteroids—For Science and Profit” (Nature 485, 549, 31 May 2012). Acknowledging “a smallish asteroid, about 200 metres across and rich in platinum, could be worth $30 billion” and realizing “greed is a powerful motivator to get things done,” the forward-‐thinking scientist advocated a collaboration among venture capitalists, mining companies, scientific communities, and government organizations like NASA for a “commercial development of space resources.” Judging by the events that have developed in 2018, clearly, the scientist’s call has been heard and responded to positively by those entities to whom it was proposed. To historians, the ambition, rhetoric, and experiments involved in the above events, which formulate a hope and may materialize that hope into a future reality, are not unfamiliar. Such ambition, rhetoric, and experiments preceded, envisioned, and facilitated every major historical occurrence (e.g., the Age of Discovery). In the name of the survival or betterment of the “civilization” and the “civilized,” they have altogether produced horrific historical outcomes like colonialism and imperialism. Except this time the colonial expansion will not be in the name of an empire or a nation, but in the name of the Human. Not terrestrial, but celestial. It will be a celestial transcendence of global neoliberal capitalism, the profit-‐chasing machine that pumps blood through the veins of the Human. Is this the hope we are looking for and the future history we aim to produce? The silver lining of a spaceship carrying the Human to a new frontier, a new virgin land, leaving behind a pile of debris here and creating more ruins out there. This sounds like a very bad hope to me. The teleological, productive, optimist, masculinist Human and his unchecked hope for endless expansion and ruins are the fundamental disease that sterilizes our imagination for good hopes. What are good hopes? Historians know well that at every past moment, history exhibited various possibilities and different trajectories. Hence, as history-‐makers for the present and the future, we must formulate better hopes that guide the development of more meaningful histories. Better hopes are more just, equal, democratic, and wide-‐reaching. They do not cling to triumphs and exceptionalism but grapple with tensions, suffering, and remembrance. They deconstruct the notion of the exceptional Human and reconfigure a more inclusive, more egalitarian notion of “we”—fellow human-‐and-‐non-‐human holders of those hopes. Good hopes care about the wellbeing and future not only of human beings, but also of animals big and small, plants tall and short, water running and still, soil arable and barren. With such hopes, we—human-‐and-‐non-‐human beings—dwell here, connect with each other, remember our past, support each other’s growth, and mourn each other’s loss. These verbs and the actions they prescribe are, to my mind, what good hopes envision.


I want to mention a particular kind of hope. Scholar of religious studies and African American studies Joseph R. Winters, whom I proudly call a friend, has opened my mind and heart to the melancholic hope. In his book Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (2016), Winters cautions that the concept of progress “functions in public discourse to downplay tensions, conflicts, and contradictions in the present for the sake of a more unified and harmonious image of the future” and “the discursive reproduction of this concept results in the conflation of hope and optimism, a process that cultivates expectations of a better future by marginalizing or downplaying dissonant memories and attachments (6).” Examining black literature, literary expressions of music and film, and critical theory, Winters introduces a melancholic hope “in opposition to triumphant, overconfident narratives, tropes, and images (16).” “[A]s a way of thinking about and being affected by the world,” melancholy supplies “a critical gaze toward…and hope for a different kind of existence (22).” To Winters, “the work of the negative”—remembrance of tragedies, loss, suffering, and violence—does not mean pessimism; it is not “merely critical dispositions and strategies that lack a constructive component.” Quite the opposite, “it opens up spaces for contestation, tarrying, revision, and reimagination. Leaving the constructive moment indeterminate does not necessarily mean a retreat on practical matters or an unwillingness to imagine a different kind of world; the indeterminate moment with regard to reconstructing the world is an ethical and political strategy that acknowledges and registers the violence involved in well-‐intentioned endeavors to envision, project, and bring into being a well-‐defined alternative to the order of things (244).” Writing about environmental and political violence and suffering in historical China, I resonate strongly with Winters’ appreciation of the melancholic and yet incredible power of remembrance and receptivity. Like Winters, I understand but am critical of our all-‐too-‐human desire to forget the pain, avoid tragedies, and “get over it” and “move on” quickly. I understand but am troubled by our tendency to downplay tensions and accountability and to seek easy, superficial reconciliation and restoration. Through war, genocide, racial and gender violence, and in my research political-‐ecological violence, this desire and tendency have historically caused and then erased the massive damage to various beings in less privileged positions—thus killing the dead twice in Benjamin’s understanding. I cannot agree more that “[a] less violent and cruel world depends, in large part, on our capacity to be figuratively wounded and opened by the dissonant qualities and blue notes of life’s many soundtracks” (29). To confront “the broken, tragic quality of human existence,” to imagine a better world with “hope draped in black,” we must remember, even if remembering itself might inflict pain and compel us to escape. Let me end my reflection by invoking Donna Haraway, whose non-‐teleological, non-‐futuristic, Terra-‐bound, and kin-‐making environmental ethics has deeply influenced the ways in which this tiny earthling named Ling thinks, writes, and lives. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway observes that “[i]n urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an


imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations.” In her version of hope—a hope resonating with Winters’ melancholic hope in terms of not avoiding damage and not fearing indeterminacy—“[s]taying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings (1).” Haraway’s message is profound. It inspires me to rethink what the world is. The world is teeming with quadrillions of known and unknown earthlings, including us humans, and all of their myriad relationships: environmental, ecological, social, economic, political, psychological, cultural, and many other relationships that we haven’t begun to comprehend or appreciate. Her message also demands that I rethink who I am and who we humans are. We are a group of mortal critters who, with a god and/or hero complex, strive to dissociate from the rest of the quadrillions and do so often by denying, hurting, and eradicating others. But by dissociating from others, we have hollowed out and sterilized our own existence. “To be truly present” is to re-‐associate with those who have always been here—living and dying with us—but whom we have grown to un-‐notice. Starting from this worldview and ethical position, I, as an ordinary human being and a professional historian, commit my research and writing to reveal the many unnoticed existences around us and rebuild those broken or forgotten associations in history. Even though many of those associations tell tales of pain and suffering, even though telling such tales may not provide immediate healing, my commitment—revealing and rebuilding—helps to fill the hollowness of our history with substantial realness and liveliness. So, where is hope? I find my peculiar hope in melancholic remembrance, in staying with the trouble, in being curious and playful with unconventional history-‐makers like water, sand, and trees, and in being present with their-‐our difficult and yet intimate relationships. Blessed with such tragicomic hopes, I find my life and my research joyful and meaningful. I encourage my colleagues and readers to share in my hope or build their own diverse, thoughtful, good hopes. I want once again to thank Dr. Gao, Prof. Marks, Prof. Peterson, and Prof. Worster for their extremely perceptive reading and insightful questions. They have provided me with a wonderful opportunity to contemplate and learn. I am tremendously grateful to Prof. Jones and the H-‐Environment Roundtable Reviews for giving me this invaluable platform to express my thoughts and share my experiences.


About the Contributors Yan Gao is a Research Associate at the Global Asia Initiative of Duke University. Her areas of specialty include social and environmental history of late imperial China, history of water and rivers, and global environmental history. Christopher F. Jones, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, studies the histories of energy, environment, and technology. He is the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard, 2014) and is currently working on a project examining the relationships between economic theories of growth and the depletion of non-‐renewable natural resources. Robert Marks is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Whittier College. He is the author of China: An Environmental History (2015), The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-‐first Century (2013), and Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (1998). Maya Peterson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her current book project, Pipe Dreams: Water, Technology, and the Remaking of Central Asia in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Based on archival research in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and the United States, Pipe Dreams examines tsarist and Bolshevik efforts to irrigate the Central Asian borderlands and how such hydraulic engineering projects reflected imperial and Soviet notions of civilization and progress, as well as Russia’s quest to be a European empire in the heart of Asia. Donald Worster taught for many years at the University of Kansas and now holds the position of Prestigious Foreign Expert and Professor of World History, Renmin University of China, Beijing. His long paper "The Good Muck: An Excremental History of China," was recently published by the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, in its Perspectives series. Ling Zhang is an Associate Professor of History at Boston College and an environmental, economic, and political historian of pre-‐modern China. Beside The River, the Plain, and the State, she is currently working on two book projects, "North China during the Medieval Economic Revolution'' and "China's Sorrow or the Yellow River's Sorrow: Environmental Biographies of a Water Zomia." With John McNeill, she co-‐edits the “Studies in Environment and History” book series published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright © 2018 H-‐Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online


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