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2 INTERVIEW China's timeless tussle with
nature
The Great Way is easy but people are forever taken
down sideroads they look
after the palaces but
ignore the fields! The
granaries are empty/but they wear wonderful
clothes! Dao
De Jing
Will
the march of China's material progress trample the
tiger into oblivion? Professor Robert B Marks
reviews the Middle Kingdom's environmental history
- farming, defeating rivals, disease and taming
the Yellow River - as a prelude to calling for
measures that protect the big cat in this
exclusive interview with Asia Times Online
contributor Victor
Fic.
Deihl Professor of History at
Whittier College in California, Marks
is the author of China:
Its Environment and History (World Social
Change), which examines
the evolution of China's relationship with nature
from ancient times to the present day. Fluent in
Mandarin, he holds a BA, MA and PhD from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Victor Fic: Is your
book unique?
Robert B Marks: My
new book is trailblazing. Other scholars have done
major environmental studies of imperial or modern
China, but mine is the first to cover all of
China's 10,000-year-long environmental history
from the emergence of farming to now.
Robert
B Marks in his Whittier College office, October
2009.
VF: How did you
prepare to write it?
RM: I received my Phd
in Chinese history from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 1978 and have been at
Whittier College since. Now I hold the post of
Richard and Billie Deihl Professor of History. I
spent a year in Hong Kong doing my dissertation
research before Americans could travel in China. I
first went to China in 1980, and then every other
year through 1989. I've done field research in
south China, archival research at the Number One
Historical Archives in Beijing at the Imperial
Palace and have traveled to many of the places
discussed in my book.
VF: Did the Chinese
achieve Daoist harmony with nature?
RM: The Chinese have
radically altered their environment over several
thousand years. Agriculture especially has
stripped the natural vegetation. Daoist ideals
that there should be "harmony" between people and
nature arose during extraordinary environmental
change around 300 BC, when there was little
"harmony". Confucianism did not directly address
what "nature" was, but various philosophers did
think deeply about what human nature was - good,
perfectible or evil. Regardless of their position,
they felt people should be constrained by social
customs, leading to the notion that natural
systems like the Yellow River should also be
constrained.
VF: We often read
that the north's "loess" soil was ideal for
farming ... why?
RM: In China, one
driving force for long-term change combined small
family farms, a powerful central state and a
market economy. The imperial state made farms the
empire's basic taxable unit. Small family farms
predominated in part because of the loess soils in
north China and rice farming in the south. The
soil brings essential nutrients up to the root
zone through capillary action.
VF: You skilfully link
strategy and ecology. How did the Chinese defeat
the pesky Xiongnu?
RM: One cardinal
theme in China's environmental history is the
relations between Chinese and others. The Xiongnu
were pastoralists who exploited the ecological
niche of the vast steppe grasslands running across
central Asia from Russia to Mongolia.
Their herds of goats, sheep,
and horses grazed there, transforming grass, which
humans cannot digest, into a form they could,
meaning milk and meat. So the Xiongnu way of life
depended on grassland ecologies. Rulers in the
Han-era (206 BC-220 AD) understood that to defeat
them, the ecological basis of their lifestyle must
be changed. The Han turned the grasslands into
farms. Tun-tian are military agricultural
colonies. To conquer and rule new areas, the
imperial state used military force, but then first
settled soldiers on these new lands to create both
the environmental and political infrastructure for
additional Chinese migrants to move to these new
lands.
VF: Disease also
arises in Chinese history. Cite some major
examples.
RM: Two thousand
years ago, China had many different peoples living
and working there. They had different relations to
the various local ecologies - nearly 600 different
ecosystems ranging from alpine mountains to
tropical forests. That ecological diversity, in
fact, is a main source of state power because the
state could tap a vast array of natural resources
like metal and timber. The Han Chinese group
migrated from the north around the Yellow River's
bend southward into the Yangzi River valley and
Lingnan starting around 200 BC. These wetter,
warmer climates had different micro organisms and
"disease pools", in particular malaria, that
killed many Han people. They feared those
diseases, and so moved south in large numbers in
the 4th and 13th centuries because of invasions
from northern grasslands by nomadic peoples.
VF: Why do you assert
that China reached its ecological limits in the
1300 AD-1800 AD period?
RM: Both the Ming
(1271 AD - 1368 AG) and the Qing (1644 AD - 1911
AD) states expanded their control over areas to
the north, the northwest, and the southwest. The
Ming, for instance, used the tun-tian to better
incorporate Yunnan and Guizhou into their empire.
The Qing actively extended control over Tibet and
the northwest, all very different environments
than China's farmed areas. But the Ming state
confronted a northern limit in the Mongolian
grasslands and built a wall to demarcate the
extent of the former's influence. When the Qing
state in the mid-18th century tried to invade
Burma [now Myanmar] from Yunnan, malaria turned
back its armies.
VF: What explains
China's huge population?
RM: Over the past 2,000
years, China's population has been between 25-40%
of the world's. That high number occured in both
the Song (960 AD - 1279 AD) and the Qing (1644 AD
- 1911 AD) era in the 18th century. A large
population signals people can extract sufficient
energy from their environment to grow through
efficient agriculture. China's population growth
means that for over 2,000 years it had the world's
most productive farms and farmers. Productivity
surged from the 16th to the 19th century as they
added New World food crops, in particular maize,
peanuts, and sweet potatoes. Then Chinese began
exploiting the central and southern high lands,
causing significant environmental damage such as
erosion of hillsides.
VF: For the 1800 AD -
1949 AD stretch, why do you judge it as an
"especially complex ... acute crisis?"
RM: In the 19th
century, China faced numerous political, economic,
and social crises. The Qing (1644 AD - 1911 AD)
government failed to fend off Britian's
imperialism and lost two Opium Wars. But I argue
that China's widespread ecological problems
heightened the crisis. It made a massive, very
long-term effort to create farming practices like
using human waste to recycle critical nutrients
into the soil. But evidence shows the soil lacked
nitrogen. The Chinese pushed farms into upland
areas eroded and denuded hillsides. Vast
quantities of sand washed from high ground into
the low-lying fields and river valleys. Silt
clogged waterways and contributed to floods. The
cardinal example was when the Yellow River's lower
reaches and the Grand Canal became very silted
beyond Qing control. The river changed course in
the mid-1850s, reverting to its current northerly
route.
Landsat photograph from space
showing the ongoing flow of silt into the Pearl
River Estuary, December 1975.
VF: World history
enters here because of many disasters ...
RM: Complicating it
all, the entire globe experienced some of the most
powerful El Nino phenomenon of the previous five
centuries, bringing drought to north China.
VF: How did it
generate tension and famine, for example in Honan
in 1876, as a legacy that the communists
inherited?
RM: The Chinese
communists seized power in 1949 because of many
interlocking causes including the Japanese
invasion, the Kuomintang regime's shortcomings and
rural poverty. That last item did not emerge
overnight, but from longer-term social, economic,
and increasingly environmental processes. My book
surveys environmental conditions in the 19th
century's first half. I present evidence of
ecological degradation such as deforestation, land
and wind erosion and silted waterways nearly every
where, possibly excepting Sichuan province. It
contributed to the rural poverty that was provided
fertile ground for communist organizers.
VF: How did imperialism harm
the ecology?
RM: The Western
and Japanese "scramble for concessions" at the end
of the 19th century made China a "semi-colony" as
the powers carved out "spheres of influence" often
to extract resources. In Manchuria between the
1930s and 1945, Japan took out an estimated 70
million cubic meters of timber, one-tenth of all
of China's timber reserves.
VF: But you underscore that
the Chinese also spread at other's expense ... .
RM: Chinese states from the
Shang (1600 BC - 1100 BC) and Zhou (1027 BC - 221
BC) expanded forward. The Shang and especially the
Zhou established colonies on the North China plain
to increase agricultural lands. The Qin (221 BC -
206 BC) and Han (206 BC - 220 AD) expanded to the
northwest and into the south as far as present day
Vietnam. Tang dynasty (618 AD - 907 AD)
colonization projects included Lingnan and the
southeast. The Ming (1271 AD - 1368 AD) and Qing
(1644 AD - 1911 AD) had the colonial projects I
already mentioned.
The complex causes
vary, but the state's strategic interests and
vision were significant, plus their sense that the
population in the empire's core regions would not
suffer if Han Chinese settled the frontier.
VF: And the Chinese changed
them?
RM: The frontier
natives were there probably longer than the Han
Chinese were in the north. The former inhabited
environments that spanned arid grasslands,
forests, swamps, lowland river valleys, and upland
forests included with various ways of government.
In much of China's history, people already
changing the environment became incorporated into
the Chinese empire. Their environments were remade
in the particularly Chinese way - settled
agriculture based on farming families tilling land
now considered private property and paying taxes
to a central state.
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