Will on Li, _Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (May 2008)

Lillian M. Li, _Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and 
Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s_. Stanford, CA: Stanford 
University Press, 2007. xix + 520 pp. $75 (cloth), ISBN: 
978-0-8047-5304-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Pierre-Étienne Will, Collège de France, Paris.


In this long-awaited book Lillian Li offers us a masterful account of 
three centuries of environmental and socio-economic history in one of 
the core regions of China -- the Hai River drainage that more or less 
corresponds to present-day Hebei, the capital province since the 
Mongol period. Li's achievement is especially noteworthy when we 
consider the multiplicity of variables she addresses with equal 
thoroughness and clarity and combines into a convincing narrative of 
ever-mounting problems and tensions: the climate and natural 
environment, models and techniques of agricultural production, 
hydraulic engineering, market organization and price movement, 
dynastic and bureaucratic institutions, political and military 
history, and more.

As its title indicates, famine and the attempts at fighting it are 
central to the book. Not that North China always was a "land of 
famine" (a phrase coined by Western philanthropists in the 1920s and 
the title of a famous book at the time); but _avoiding_ famine and 
promoting agricultural production in a context of high rainfall 
variability and environmental instability were traditional tasks of 
the Chinese state, tasks at which the Manchu rulers of China proved 
particularly adept during the heyday of the Qing dynasty in the 
eighteenth century. Indeed, one of Li's dominant themes -- not 
entirely new, to be sure, but treated here with especial sensitivity 
and attention to all conceivable factors -- is the dangers of 
success. Following a pattern that is found elsewhere in Chinese 
history, efficient river control and disaster relief during the 
middle decades of the eighteenth century encouraged population growth 
and land reclamation. This in turn led to a higher impact of natural 
disasters from the early nineteenth century on, at a time when the 
political and financial means of the state were rapidly diminishing, 
and eventually to the mega-famines of the late Qing and early 
Republican eras. The mega-famine of the 1959-61 Great Leap Forward is 
a special case, as it was caused not by environmental overload, 
government powerlessness or military disturbances, but by mad social 
engineering.

Such, then, is the narrative that Li unfolds in chapter after 
chapter, making important methodological points along the way. She 
starts with an historical account of the natural environment, 
stressing in particular that "what is important about the climate of 
the past or present is not that it directly causes particular social, 
economic, or social results, but rather the way in which politics, 
economy, and society have adapted to the weather and other 
environmental challenges" (p. 37). Much of the book is a development 
of that notion. Chapter 2 on river conservancy -- a particularly 
onerous task in Hebei -- is subtitled "Emperors as Engineers," 
pointing less at the Qing rulers' engineering interventions (only the 
Kangxi emperor [r. 1662-1722] claimed competence in that profession) 
than at their political and bureaucratic impact. Li proposes the 
intriguing notion of a "reign cycle" in floods, with exceptional 
disasters at the start of a new reign resulting from the gradual 
accumulation of negligence during the preceding period and triggering 
a fresh effort at bureaucratic mobilization and infrastructure 
building. This pattern well describes the situation through the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, and in some way it re-emerged 
under the "reign" of the powerful Zhili governor general, Li 
Hongzhang, during the last three decades of the same century. Still, 
if strong political leadership was vital, it was not enough to 
prevent such long-term environmental problems as increased silting 
and reckless land reclamation that was detrimental to drainage; and 
more and more it gave way to fragmented bureaucratic responsibilities 
that made any concerted action impossible: in Lillian Li's phrase, 
"the rivers themselves became bureaucratized."

The next chapter discusses the relation among population, land 
resources and agricultural techniques -- already a hot topic, 
incidentally, in the early eighteenth century, when the Kangxi 
emperor and his successor expressed much concern about population 
growth on a limited land base. Li offers the best educated estimates 
of Hebei population one can hope for given the present state of 
knowledge, as well as careful descriptions of crops, yields, 
techniques, cropping patterns, and so forth. The general picture -- 
here as in most chapters -- is one of overall downward trend after 
the eighteenth-century successes, even though Li refuses to speak of 
a "Malthusian tale": coarse grains get more land at the expense of 
higher value-added crops like wheat and cotton, yields tend to 
diminish, no technological breakthroughs are in sight, the silting of 
rivers makes transportation more difficult and costly, available land 
per capita decreases, and so on.

Chapter 4 on prices is of strategic importance to the narrative as Li 
uses the massive price data produced by the Qing system of economic 
monitoring as well as that of its Republican inheritors as a backdrop 
to the ensuing chapters on disasters and famine relief. She tackles 
brilliantly the considerable methodological problems entailed by the 
data: several sorts of grain were monitored, the quality of the 
surveys was uneven, the pricing system resorted to different 
currencies with a volatile exchange rate (official figures were in 
silver weight but ordinary people used copper cash), statistics used 
the traditional lunar calendar, and finally, in order to make real 
sense the curves created by connecting the dots representing the data 
-- which have many gaps -- need to be subjected to various 
statistical procedures. As the administration monitored not only 
grain prices but also the weather, one major ambition of the book is 
to explore every possible correlation between the two. In the long 
term the secular rise of prices in imperial times appears 
surprisingly moderate despite steady demographic growth and increased 
pressure on natural resources. As far as the annual cycle is 
considered, the system seems to have been made more stable by its 
very complexity ("multicropping with different seasonalities," p. 
122); but massive state intervention in the form of organizing 
imports (the crucial role of Manchurian surpluses is stressed again 
and again), maintaining food reserves, and providing relief 
definitely was the major stabilizing factor. After all the region 
under scrutiny was the metropolitan province of a vast empire, 
therefore subject to special care on the part of the dynasty.

This theme is developed in the next few chapters, on "Provisioning 
Peking," considerably qualifying the textbook image of a northern 
capital fed with southern "rice" transferred through the Grand Canal 
(Chapter 5); on the granary system, seen as both "solution and 
problem" and the object of much debate in official circles (Chapter 
6); on markets and prices, with the interesting notion that the 
apparently strong integration of markets across the province in the 
eighteenth century was a "false integration," state maintenance of 
the waterways and intervention on the market largely explaining the 
parallel behavior of prices (Chapter 7); and on famine relief during 
the high Qing (Chapter 8) and in the nineteenth century (Chapter 9). 
Even though Li draws generously on existing research (notably the 
work on storage policies and famine relief by R. Bin Wong, Helen 
Dunstan, and the undersigned), there is an abundance of new materials 
and, especially, original interpretations. Chapters 7 and 8 in 
particular provide a sense of texture and impact, and of change, by 
progressing painstakingly from one major disaster to the next and 
analyzing in great detail the way each unfolded, the impact on 
prices, the nature of official intervention, and the aftermath. To 
this reviewer the lesser-known part of the story -- the 
nineteenth-century devolution from the "classical" model of famine 
relief -- is of particular interest, with the reservation perhaps 
that there is too much adherence to the imperial discourse on 
corruption and abuses during the Daoguang reign (1821-50).

The last famines of the Qing (beginning with the great North China 
famine of 1876-79) make the transition to the modern era. Unlike 
similar earlier events they were considered as "national" events by 
the philanthropic sphere newly emerging around Shanghai, whose action 
was crucial even though, as Li shows, the state was far from being as 
absent as is often claimed. And they were "international" famines 
publicized overseas through diplomatic communication and missionary 
propaganda. Together with international (mainly missionary) 
organizations, Chinese philanthropies, which have been the object of 
recent research in China not mentioned here, continued to play a 
major role in the early Republican era. (The crucial impact of the 
Buddhist revival at the time might have been more clearly brought 
out.) This is when Hebei and North China become the "land of famine" 
(Chapter 10). The major disasters, described here with the same 
thoroughness as the earlier famines, were compounded by a series of 
military conflicts culminating with the Japanese invasion. They 
reveal several important shifts that were in large part due to the 
foreign presence in China. While the discourse on famine acquires 
nationalistic overtones and focuses on the need to eradicate its 
socio-economic causes, rather than restoring the existing balance 
between land and resources as in imperial times, the conditions for 
the management of relief change drastically with the advent of the 
railway and the development of Tianjin as a major port and industrial 
city. It is also during the early Republican decades that the 
ever-growing hydraulic problems of the Hai River basin start being 
addressed systematically and with the help of modern engineering, 
although the major work required had to wait until after 1949 to get 
accomplished.

The impact of such infrastructural change is analyzed with much 
subtlety in the important Chapter 11 on "Rural Crisis and Economic 
Change, 1900-1949." To negotiate her way between the conflicting 
interpretations, then as now, of economic conditions in Republican 
China and their causes, Li takes us on a tour of selected districts, 
availing herself of the many well-informed local gazetteers published 
in the 1930s and showing that, indeed, the landscape was highly 
contrasted. Many places enjoyed new opportunities in terms of 
handicrafts (predominantly cotton goods), new commercial crops, 
employment outside the region, and so forth, and there _was_ an 
improvement in living standards (further favored by a steady rise in 
prices through 1931) despite environmental change and general 
poverty. While admitting that this cannot be described as a 
fundamental economic "break-through" (p. 340), Li takes exception to 
such notions as "economic involution" (Philip Huang) or "high-level 
equilibrium trap" (Mark Elvin), which have been widely influential in 
the field of Chinese economic history: there _was_ a process of 
development at work, but this was cut short by political and military 
turmoil.

The last chapter, "Food and Famine under Communist Rule," which is 
perhaps less new, takes us to quite a different world. But disasters 
were still there, and at least one major famine, actually the worst 
in the whole of Chinese history -- the Great Leap famine. Li goes so 
far as to use the term "holocaust" (p. 359, following Jasper Becker's 
_Hungry Ghosts_), probably not the best one in this case; but 
indisputably this mostly man-made event would deserve the appellation 
"incredible famine" (qihuang) much more than the 1876-79 famine for 
which it was coined. The period after 1980, called 
"post-revolutionary" by many and marked by the "unleashing" of the 
market (p. 371) and a quantity of scientific inputs in the 
improvement of agricultural production -- though the Chinese "green 
revolution" had already started in the 1960s -- leaves us with 
ambiguous perspectives: while it is true that "at the end of the 
[twentieth] century, prosperity for many people in China has allowed 
them to leave hunger behind" (p. 375), rapid urbanization and 
mounting problems with water availability and desertification, not to 
speak of price instabilities, remind us that this is not yet the end 
of history. Certainly Li's monumental work is a must-read for 
present-day planners and decision-makers.


Pierre-Étienne Will is the author of _Bureaucracy and Famine in 
Eighteenth-Century China_, Stanford University Press, 1990 (original 
French edition 1980) and co-author with R. Bin Wong of _Nourish the 
People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850_, 
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1991. He is 
currently researching famine and the role of philanthropy in 
Northwestern China during the 1920s and 1930s.

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