ann
(Ann)
#1
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