This book explores the connections between dikes and society in rural China from an environmental perspective. In particular, it analyzes the dike systems of the Jianghan Plain in central Hubei and covers a three-century long swath of history stretching from the Qing dynasty, through the Republic, and into the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Dikes have played a very important role in Chinese history. This is especially the case in the Jianghan Plain. Thus it is surprising that only a few book-length writings have treated the Jianghan dikes in depth. Although in the late 1980s I started to study the agrarian history of the Jianghan Plain during the Ming-Qing era (1368–1911), I did not choose the Jianghan dikes as a research subject until the late 1990s, when I started my PhD program at UCLA. I decided to make these dikes the subject of my first graduate seminar paper. For that seminar, the instructor, Professor Kathryn Bernhardt, asked us students to provide her with an outline of our selected topic on the first day of class. I spent the entire summer going over materials and prepared a detailed outline, “Dikes and Society in Rural China,” which I presented at the beginning of the fall semester. The outline included a discussion of both empirical data and theoretical issues. Professor Bernhardt liked the outline but thought it covered too much ground for a seminar paper, and in fact was more along the lines of a dissertation prospectus. At that time my main academic interest was connected with the notion of rural involutionary development proposed by Professor Philip Huang, and thus I did not expand that outline, but instead I only selected a small part of it, which I developed into a seminar paper. That paper later became a chapter of my dissertation.
In the 1990s, the notion of involution in China—namely, that rural development in modern China was trapped in a pattern of “involutionary growth” whereby per capita output stagnated and labor productivity declined—was influential but debatable. I went to UCLA with the intention of directly engaging in the debate by using the experience of the agrarian history of the Jianghan Plain during the Ming-Qing era to buttress or refute Professor Huang’s analysis. However, I soon found that I could not meaningfully engage in the debate since income and expense data of Jianghan families was simply too sparse. On the other hand, there are ample materials on the constant changes in the environment in the Jianghan Plain and how the Jianghan peasants responded to those changes. Furthermore, it would relatively easy to compare the history of the Jianghan Plain in this regard with that of the North China Plain and the Yangzi delta. More importantly, almost no one had attempted to do this before. Thus, I made that the subject of my dissertation. After many revisions, the dissertation was transformed into a book, Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949, published in 2014.
In that book I mentioned that building and maintaining the Jianghan dikes imposed a heavy burden on the local peasants, but dikes were not the book’s main concern. Regarding the great importance of the dike systems to the local economy and society, there are obviously many issues worthy of further and more thorough exploration: crafting a more comprehensive critique of Karl Wittfogel’s notion of “oriental despotism,” reevaluating the imperial government system, assessing the impact of the enclosure of illegal polders (i.e., polders built without government approval or even in contravention of government rules) on local society and economy, investigating the ramifications of war for dike affairs, and systematically comparing the Qing-Republican era with the PRC in terms of dike management and water control and their effectiveness, and so on. Therefore, after I completed the manuscript of Coping with Calamity, I began to concentrate on studying the Jianghan dikes, which has led to this second book.
The primary materials for this book include gazetteers, treatises of water control, and government archives. Over the past two decades, I have visited the Hubei Provincial Archives many times and have collected a great deal of source materials, many of which were used in my first book as well as in the present book. In 2016, I thought I had completed most of the manuscript of the present book, but in the summer of that year, I visited the Songzi City Archives, where I found a trove of documents about the daily operations of the annual repairs and high-water control agencies of so-called people’s polders (that is, polders paid for and built by local communities but registered with the government) in the 1940s. According to these materials, the directors of these agencies were mostly average people elected by their peers, not “local tyrants” who got their positions via bribery or by force in order to fatten themselves by bullying and exploiting others, as past scholarship and the PRC gazetteers had led us to believe. This discovery forced me to halt my writing. It was clear that it was essential to visit or revisit all the county archives in the Jianghan area and reread the source materials in order to avoid the possible biases in the new gazetteers (compiled in the PRC era, especially in the 1980s–1990s and after). In 2017 and 2018, supported by several grants, I traveled to China three times and in total visited twenty-one county-level archives and four prefectural-level archives in the Jianghan area in addition to revisiting the Hubei Provincial Archives many times. In these archives I read thousands of files and gathered an abundance of data. I also visited twenty-four libraries and read rare materials, such as township and village gazetteers. These materials—most of which have never been used by any scholar before—not only enriched my presentation but also largely reshaped my arguments and changed the structure of my manuscript. I virtually rewrote the entire manuscript, a process that was completed in 2021. All of this demonstrates what I presume most scholars eventually come to realize: writing a book is like venturing into uncharted waters, full of uncertainties.
This book makes several important contributions. It clarifies the role of the environment in the rural economy and the interrelation of humans and their environment in Hubei, and pays particular attention to the Jianghan dike systems. The book stands as the first and most thorough study from an environmental perspective of any of China’s dike systems. Most importantly, it enriches our understanding of rural China over the past three centuries by reexamining some general understandings of, and assumptions about, rural China in imperial times, under the Nationalists (Guomindang) in the Republican period, in the Mao era, and during the post-Mao reform era. For example, the early PRC (or the Mao era) had features that are close to those described by the oriental despotism model. Second, with the development of the local economy since 1979, large-scale land reclamation from lakesides and riversides—a tradition that began in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and lasted for about a thousand years—seems to have ended. And third, with the increasing integrity of the dike systems since 1954, the Jianghan people have step by step changed their way of life: the cultivation of famine-relief crops (urgently planted to prevent starvation from floods or other disasters) has disappeared, there has been a reduction in disputes over dikes, and today no one takes the possibility of inundation into consideration when building their houses in low-lying places.
Beyond its academic contributions, this book also has some unique characteristics. First, its source materials are the most detailed by far in the field. Over the years I have collected an enormous amount of local gazetteers and archival materials. Many archival materials are handwritten and are difficult to decipher and even harder to translate but are of inestimable value. Second, my unique personal experiences (I personally participated in dike building and high-water control, and I also toured and surveyed many Jianghan dikes) and multidisciplinary background (I was trained in sciences in college) have helped me avoid or at least minimize some bizarre or absurd assertions. Third, the longue durée perspective and the in-depth and comprehensive analysis in this book help overcome many of the shortcomings of both Chinese and Western research. Chinese scholars oftentimes cite numerous sources without sufficient or in-depth analysis, while Western scholars tend to favor a theoretical approach but frequently lack in-depth knowledge of local realities.
In the long process of writing and rewriting, I have benefited from the help, guidance, and criticism of numerous people, too many to be named. Nonetheless, I want to express my gratitude to some of them. I wish to thank first Professors Bernhardt and Huang for their advice, inspiration, comments, and trust. This book, as I have mentioned, grew out of a paper prepared for a graduate seminar led by Professor Bernhardt. It has also greatly benefited from Professor Huang’s comments and advice. As I wrote the book, these two mentors continued to comment on the manuscript—particularly on Chapter 4, which was presented at a conference on “The Social Sciences of Practice and China Research” in honor of Professor Huang’s eightieth birthday (held at the School of Sociology of Renmin University in Beijing). After I completed the manuscript, they also provided insightful suggestions for revisions, and most importantly, they recommended that the monograph be included in the prestigious “Social Sciences of Practice” book series, published by Brill. I am grateful to Brill’s referee, who wrote a very detailed report: I benefited tremendously from the referee’s critique and revised/reorganized the manuscript accordingly. At Brill, I thank Iulia Ivana and Masja Horn, senior acquisitions editors, Stephanie Carta, Asian Studies editor, and Melissa Henson, production editor, for their enthusiasm, patience, guidance, and support. I also want to thank Brian DeMare, who read the manuscript and offered many excellent comments and suggestions. Richard Gunde deserves special thanks, not only for carefully copyediting the manuscript but also for providing many practical suggestions for revisions; without his editorial help, this book would not be what it is now.
Since this book heavily relies on archival materials, I particularly want to thank staff members in the archives I visited over the years. Many of them provided me with excellent professional services and made my work more effective and productive.
Chapter 5 was published in the Journal of Social History (2016); I thank its publisher—the Oxford University Press—for permitting me to include it in this book.
Financially, I have benefited from several travel funds from the Department of History and Philosophy and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University, which supported my trip to China to collect research materials. In 2017 I won a faculty on-leave grant from Kennesaw State University and a research grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. These made it possible for me to stay in China for several months, systematically reading and collecting archival materials in the Jianghan area. I sincerely thank them for their support.
Many of my siblings and other relatives in China not only hosted me but also helped me in multiple ways, especially by driving me to archives and dikes. My wife, Ningxia, provided moral support and made constructive comments on my research; she also drafted the maps used in this book. I sincerely thank them all.
Last but not least, I especially want to thank all the people who have contributed to the safety of the Jianghan dikes, including everyone from ancient times to the present, both local residents and people from afar, who were directly or indirectly involved in the maintenance and protection of the dikes and contributed to their integrity. This book is dedicated to them.