Environmental Issues in Pre-Modern China

Abstract

The current scholarly discourse on pre-modern Chinese environmental history, in both the western and Chinese literatures, has only been developing since the 1990s. While there are certainly studies, especially numerous in Chinese, that long predate this period, they were not conducted within a systematic framework of explicitly environmental history, but rather in relative isolation or as components of other approaches—mainly institutional, political, or economic. In many respects the new emergence of environmental history is a product of China’s market reforms begun in the 1980s, both in terms of opportunities provided by new technologies and foreign exchanges as well as problems produced by some of the highest rates of industrial development in world history within one of the globe’s largest populations. Indeed, Chinese authors often expressly cite concern over the very palpable environmental consequences of this development as a main motivation for their work in environmental history. While some of these patterns recapitulate the rise of environmental history in the west during the 1960s and 1970s, they differ significantly because of China’s immense scale and the profound depth of its historical record. Broadly speaking, China has always maintained an environmental historical awareness (the long official record of “water control” (shuili水利) being one classic example) but the specific nature of this awareness has changed over time. It can be asserted, with an unquestionable degree of oversimplification, that pre-modern (here meaning primarily pre-industrial) China as a society understood its environmental relations mainly in terms of maximizing cereal cultivation. During the modernization of the 20th century, these relations were re-understood in terms of totalizing industrial exploitation. While neither concept has disappeared, there is in the early 21st century an emerging reconceptualization of environmental relations as a dynamic and critical interdependency between human culture and its ecological surroundings, rather than as simply active human exploitation of passive ecology for purposes of economic development. This trend has even become “officially” visible. Most recently the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in November 2013, expressed commitment to a program of sustainable development under intensifying pubic pressure arising from serious ecological degradation by virtually unrestrained industrialization. Historical work in China certainly cannot isolate itself from this pressure, which has now openly influenced the highest levels of state. So there are a number of consequent divergences between the concerns of the English-language and Chinese-language literatures that form the bulk of the works cited in this article, which in turn may be radically simplified as differences between people actually living with the historical consequences of the society under study and those living outside of it. Among other distinctive results, this means that some work done by scholars in China may have implications for contemporary policy or that contemporary policy may directly influence such work. This probably contributes to the proliferation of Chinese-language work on disaster, for example. Both literatures, however, tend to focus on the last six hundred years (out of a dynastic period ranging from 221 bce to 1912 ce) partly because of source abundance, and the citations herein inevitably reflect this tendency. Given the diverse range of inquiry required for even a single study of an environmental issue, many works could easily have been cited across several categories here. This sort of excessive duplication has been avoided to provide the greatest diversity possible within editorial constraints.