Throughout the history of China (and other places, but most famously of China), the incidence of floods and droughts and the famines caused thereby have been responsable for esentially every cycling of the dynasty. Where a famine occurs within a small area or over a short duration, order is rarely interrupted. However, widespread or long-lasting famines cause enormous amounts of popular unrest. Not only do famines cause people to go hungry (that is more or less the definition of a famine), they also tend to cause people to become idle. Droughts, floods and pestilence destroy fields, leaving farmers without work. The lack of food also propegates through society, creating urban breadlines and the like. When groups of people gather without work to do or leave work in search of food, they cause disturbances.
So long as the disturbances are just related to the food shortages, they tend to remain a regional problem and a minor threat to the group in power. However, when a charismatic leader or group disseminates a particularly applicable idea or a notably appealing ideal, the problem tends to spread. When floods or droughts render the fields infertile to crops, they make them fertile ground for revolutions. The French and Russian revolutions resulted from bread lines, the Boxer rebellion, which threated the failing Qing dynasty, was the outgrowth of a drought famine, the list goes on...
In most areas of the world, the dangers of famines have been largely eliminated. The modern threat is related more to issues of economic - rather than agricultural - growth. In areas where growth has come too quickly, as in the oil-funded booms in the Middle East, instability has resulted. The top growth of the soil is washed out in the flood of wealth into a few hands, much like a flood famine. In other areas where growth has come too slowly, as in the areas variously called the Global South or the [non-]developing world. Much like in the case of a drought famine, the impoverished people rely on raiding their slightly-less-poor neighbors as a major source of sustinance, resulting in banditry, smuggling and civil strife. In many of these areas, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease and actual crop famines only worsen these problems.
In Imperial China, it was the role of the Emperor to protect against flooding, and to make efforts at famine relief. In this vein, he called upon elites, both local to the problem and across the empire in order to help assuage the death and destruction. This was done both out of concern for the people and out of concern for the kingdom, as a preventative measure against civil unrest. If he did not provide adequate relief, sometimes the result would be a revolution and the end of the dynasty.
End lecture, begin...
In this frame of mind, I come to the central concern of this blog. I am very interested in the impacts of industrialization, modernization and globalization upon the world as well as its specific localities, both as a student of history and as a concerned individual. Putting aside my concerns with the political situation in America and elsewhere, I have a conflicted view on the the seemingly inevitable course of the global economy which, like a river, is the lifeblood of the nations through which it flows. This river is, however, quite capable of overflowing and destroying the livelihoods of those on its banks. My knee-jerk reaction has always been against the rising tide of capitalism, noting that it drowns beatiful and ancient things and remarkable people (as has happened quite litterally in the Three Gorges of the Yangzi). On the other hand, a greater stream floats more and bigger boats. It is increasingly my view that those in power must, like emperors of old, take precautions against the flooding of this great river or face the concequences. It is less clear to me what to think of the river's gradual rise.
Like an ancient Chinese scholar, my choices lay before me:
- To become a scholar-official and work with the imperium to control the flooding but allow the rising tide (can it truly be stopped?)
- To oppose the work of those in power in the interests of those caught underneath its waves
- Or to retreat to high ground and observe (or ignore) the events taking place
What better place than Henan (a province whose name means "south of the river," and which is part of one of the most infamously famine-prone regions in China) to explore these possibilities.
