Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

In many respects, the entire Qing water control enterprise can be

viewed as an inadvertent “feasibility study” to determine how much

complexity the state’s hydraulic system could impose before it collapsed

under its own water weight. The dynamic networked behavior of humans

and rivers, rather than simply humans alone, is relevant when considering

the contradictions of hydraulic statecraft.

Water control disharmony also surfaces in the Dongting lake area. The

process begins with effective state-sponsored dike infrastructure construc-

tion programs, followed by unauthorized private local initiatives that

radically expand arable land while also undermining vital drainage

routes. The resulting period of economic expansion increases the local

population and draws immigrants until all the land is overoccupied and

resource conflicts break out to undermine the whole system. Signs of

unsustainablity are unambiguous from the end of the eighteenth century

as“the ecology of the Yangzi River and Dongting Lake region [became]

increasingly precarious.”^19 Disharmonious ecological change that

exceeds human expectations is not limited to the Qing, as shown in a

study of land reclamation in Republican-era Hangzhou Bay. The substan-

tial tracts of newly arable land deposited by the Qiantang River were

dependent for their“very existence”on“unpredictable”river currents.

The random emergence and submergence of this land made it impossible

to stably cultivate or tax. Qing officials experienced similar problems with

marshlands“fluctuating from time to time,”emerging and submerging at

random.^20

This“cycle of growth and decline”understood in terms of nonequili-

brium disharmony dynamics effectively concentrates resources to create

an intense, destabilizing efflorescence. Human concentration of land and

water resources results in a drastic increase in human population and

triggers commensurate ecological changes, such as silting. The resulting

synergy creates much more precipitous and disruptive change than would

occur without the initial concentration. In effect, without timely adapta-

tions, the more successful the concentration, the bigger the pile-up of

instabilities resulting in a more drastic collapse of existing networks. This

is not, exactly, a Malthusian process in which human reproduction even-

tually exceeds agrarian carrying capacity. Instead, carrying capacity is

exhausted through networks that intensify it unsustainably. The end

result is more people and less acreage than before, not more people and

the same amount of arable land.

These brief glimpses of water control from Hunan, Zhejiang, and the

Yellow River reveal the dynamics of disharmony at work in China proper

226 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain