By David A. Pietz
Flowing in the course of the middle of the North China Plain―home to 2 hundred million people―the Yellow River sustains certainly one of China’s center areas. but this very important water offer has develop into hugely susceptible in fresh a long time, with probably critical repercussions for China’s monetary, social, and political balance. The Yellow River is an investigative day trip to the resource of China’s modern water situation, mapping the confluence of forces that experience formed the drawback that the world’s such a lot populous kingdom now faces in dealing with its water reserves.
chinese language governments have lengthy struggled to keep up ecological balance alongside the Yellow River, venture formidable courses of canal and dike building to mitigate the consequences of recurrent droughts and floods. yet really in the course of the Maoist years the North China undeniable was once appreciably re-engineered to make use of each drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric new release. As David A. Pietz indicates, Maoist water administration from 1949 to 1976 solid a protracted shadow over the reform interval, starting in 1978. speedy city development, commercial growth, and agricultural intensification over the last 3 many years of China’s monetary increase were learned on a water source base that used to be acutely compromised, with results which have been more challenging and dear to beat with every one passing decade. Chronicling this advanced legacy, The Yellow River presents vital perception into how water demanding situations will impact China’s path as a twenty-first-century international power.
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Extra resources for The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China
Example text
Thus, the manipulation of existing waterways and the creation of artificial arteries were deemed necessary to expand agricultural production through irrigation and to enhance military mobility. Chinese states had an important stake in the planning and 33 34 MANAGEMENT AND MISMANAGEMENT IN THE IMPERIAL PERIOD implementation of large-scale projects in early China. ” In this way, the myth of Yü the Great served to perpetuate this form of statecraft for centuries in China. The adoption of levees for flood control was one of the first organized expressions of water management on the North China Plain.
It is not surprising that an ethical canon developed that reflected these challenges. China’s importation of development models from Japan and the West, beginning in the nineteenth century, introduced technologies and institutional arrangements that had profound environmental consequences. But twentieth-century high-modernist perspectives on nature, the state, national identity, and economic growth were not simply grafted onto an alien Chinese cultural and ecological landscape. Irrespective of their various ideological orientations, Chinese states of the twentieth century drew upon a long tradition of ecological intervention that could accommodate environmentally transformative structures like hydroelectric dams.
As the Chinese geographer Xu Jiongxin stated, “Rivers belong to the most active elements of a geo- system. There exist complicated interactions and interrelationships between rivers and 20 ON THE ECOLOGICAL MARGINS other elements. A river flowing on an alluvial plain therefore can be regarded as a sub-system within the geographical system of the alluvial plan, which is coupled to other sub-systems such as landforms, soils, groundwater, vegetation, as well as to aquatic and agricultural ecosystems.