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Conclusion
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Conclusion A technology is the expression of man’s working relationship with the natural world, the point at which environment and society meet and shape each other. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past The construction of the Grand Canal in the Yuan dynasty and the Ming decision to confine the Yellow River to its southern channel for the sake of inland grain transport together created the conditions for a complex interaction between the river, the state, and the bureaucracy—an interaction that changed all three. Two views of the relationship between the state and the river have prevailed. One treats the river as a perennial problem responsive to efficient management. From that perspective, Yellow River floods were the product of administrative laxity, corruption , and imperial inflexibility, and the river’s change of course in the midnineteenth century was a symbol and a symptom of dynastic decline. What that approach cannot explain is how Daoguang’s engineers overcame supposedly enfeebled dynastic institutions to produce two decades of successful river control, a record equal to that of any of their predecessors working in more virtuous times. According to the second view, the Yellow River’s flooding and change of course was a natural and inevitable product of geologic and hydrologic forces against which human institutions could not prevail. The second view ignores the fact that by the end of the Ming dynasty, the Yellow River—“cribbed, cabined and confined”1 in a network of dikes that stretched from the coast to the western hills—had long since ceased to follow “natural” cycles. Although the natural forces that complicated management of the Yellow River—heavy siltation, erratic flow, sudden flooding—remained unchanged, the dikes and other components of the 145 system disrupted and contravened the river’s natural tendencies. Even so profound an event as a change of course was neither natural nor inevitable. The Yellow River changed course every time it breached its dikes; and with every successful repair by river officials, the river’s course was changed back again. The crisis that created the river’s shift in the 1850s signaled neither dynastic decline nor an irresistible natural cycle, but the administrative, technological, and economic limits of the late imperial state. Ming and Qing engineers succeeded in constructing a system that defied nature for two and a half centuries, but at a high price both in environmental and monetary terms. The yearly cycle of flood and siltation that raised the river’s bed also lengthened the dikes, added to the number of defensive sites, and raised the stakes and the costs of control. By the nineteenth century, the fiscal strain was becoming insupportable. The legacy of precedent and the dictates of dynastic prestige affirmed the strategic and economic necessity of the Grand Canal, even as its engineering costs soared. Daoguang and his predecessors sought to shore up the system in spite of its obvious limits. In the 1850s, with the Grand Canal silting up and the Taiping rebels rampaging through the Yangzi River valley, the Qing leadership finally abandoned the Yellow River, allowing it to follow its new, northern course. The Yellow River–Grand Canal hydraulic system was perhaps the most ambitious imperial enterprise of any age, but it was costly and, with the South in revolt, irrelevant to the state’s immediate survival. The (Neo-)Confucian engineer personified the imperial state’s quandary over how best to handle the Yellow River. A hybrid literatitechnologist , he was expected to bridge the gap between Confucian administrative ideals and practical hydraulic decisions. The blending of bureaucrat and technologist was nothing new in Chinese history, but the men who worked in the river bureaucracy in the nineteenth century were unlike their predecessors in many ways. For most early technobureaucrats , technological accomplishments were a sideline, not a career. They were amateurs. In contrast, late Qing Confucian engineers were chosen primarily for their ability to manage technological tasks, not their achievements as literati-bureaucrats. Unlike their early Qing counterparts , nineteenth-century river officials seldom had the prestige to affect national policy. The elevation to positions of great responsibility of men 146 Conclusion [54.165.248.212] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:18 GMT) whose skills were technical was a mark of both the flexibility and the limits of the dynastic system: the Confucian engineers were a compromise ; they were as far as the late imperial state could go to accommodate the need for a technical meritocracy...