Ruth Mostern - The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History

THE YELLOW RIVER

A Natural and Unnatural History

RUTH MOSTERN

Maps and Infographics with the Assistance of

RYAN M. HORNE

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

Funding from the Asian Studies Center and the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh is gratefully acknowledged.

Copyright 2021 by Ruth Mostern.

All rights reserved.

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Designed by Mary Valencia.

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Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932807

ISBN 978-0-300-23833-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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CONTENTS

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GRAPHICS STYLE REFERENCE GUIDE

Administrative Geography Map Style. This map shows the style used throughout this book to depict prefectures, counties, settlements outside the administrative system, and places of interest.

Event Map Style. This map shows the style used throughout this book to depict disaster events and infrastructure management events. Size gradients represent the number of events that occurred at each location during the time period depicted on a given map.

Timeline Style. This timeline depicts the style used throughout this book to depict disaster events and events of floodplain infrastructure management as they occurred in time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have completed this book during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the failures of governance and struggles for racial justice that have accompanied contagion itself here in the United States. I have written about the causes and impacts of environmental catastrophe while sequestered in a spacious and comfortable home office. This experience has caused me to reflect newly and deeply about the conditions that permit some people to remain sheltered from illness and death while others shoulder hazards on their behalf. My first and most profound acknowledgment is to the delivery and sanitation workers, the medical professionals, the education and child-care employees, the librarians and office staff, the cooks and shop clerks, and the protesters who have borne the perils that have permitted me to finish this book.

This has also been a troubled season in global geopolitics and in the relationship between the United States and China, as each country turns away from the other and toward a more repressive politics. I am moved to have written a book that has permitted me to spend so much time in dialogue with generous and erudite Chinese scholars and in intellectual engagement with Chinese scholarly traditions. The history of the Yellow River is a huge field in China. I will always be a student and a learner. Han Zhaoqing and Sun Jinghao have been my friends, my colleagues, and my hosts on numerous trips to Shanghai and Hangzhou. Chen Longwen and Li Denan have invited me on field trips to the river around Zhengzhou and Huaian, respectively. Wang Yingjie hosted me in Beijing, and he and Su Yanjun provided me with an invaluable collection of data tables. Chen Yunzhen also provided essential data and advice. I am grateful to the Institute for Historical Geography and the International Center for Studies of Chinese Civilization at Fudan University, and to the History Department at Zhejiang University.

I have benefited from the periodic willingness of environmental scientists to help me understand my topic from the perspective of their disciplines. I am lucky to have embarked on this project while working in the exceptionally interdisciplinary culture of the University of California, Merced. There, interlocutors in the sciences helped to set my direction, steer me away from early mistakes, and let me know when I was on the right track. My colleagues in the sciences there included Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Teamrat Ghezzehei, Josh Viers, Leroy Westerling, Valerie Leppert, and Shawn Newsam. More recently, I have benefited from conversations with Amy Hessl at West Virginia University, who sent me relevant content from the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas and helped me understand how to use it (my thanks as well to Nicola Di Cosmo for introducing me to Amy), and with Mark Abbott at the University of Pittsburgh.

This book would simply not exist without immense amounts of labor, expertise, and creative contributionfar less well remunerated and more precarious than my ownon the part of numerous undergraduate and graduate students, technical staff, and postdoctoral fellows. Kaiqi Hua performed years of expert data collection, data entry, and data analysis. Ryan Horne is the lead author of the database, data management platform, data queries, and data visualizations that underpin this book. Shen Zhifeng was my coordinator and companion during two weeks of touring sites around the Yellow River basin. Shaobai Xiong, Erin Mutch, Rocco Bowman, Ed Lanfranco, and Elijah Meeks also played essential roles in the process. Elijah was the first person to launch me on this research and is the coauthor of my first article about it.

Two anonymous readers offered helpful readings of the draft manuscript of the book. I am humbled that four other extraordinary historians agreed to read the entire draft manuscript, to offer generous and bountiful advice, and to save me from numerous mistakes. My thanks go out to Brian Lander, Ling Zhang, David Pietz, and Ken Pomeranz. Ling Zhang was the colleague with whom I first discussed Yellow River history when I was initially scoping this project. She has offered innumerable connections to people and texts, she has helped me develop its intellectual framework, and she has been one of my main interlocutors throughout the project. Ian Miller shared prepublication excerpts of his important work on the history of deforestation in China.

I have presented this work in progress on literally dozens of occasions on multiple continents over the course of ten years. I have gained new insights each time. The conferences, workshops, and invited talks at which I have discussed Yellow River history are too numerous to name exhaustively. Some particularly memorable and generative events were a workshop on the history of the Grand Canal at Princeton University hosted by Paize Keulemans; a series of conferences on the global history of science hosted by Pat Manning at the University of Pittsburgh; a visit to Washington University hosted by T. R. Kidder, and a number of water history meetings and workshops. They were hosted by Ann Waltner and myself at University of Minnesota, by Rina Faletti and myself at UC Merced, by Philip Brown and Nicholas Breyfogle at Ohio State, by Ling Zhang at Harvard, and by Donald Worster and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Renmin University. I also published work in progress on this topic in several journals and edited books, and I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of those publications: