Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s–1900s (review)

A distinctive feature of China’s civilization was a belief shared by the emperor and his retinue that agriculture was their foundation and that to defeat famine was the sovereign’s moral responsibility. Li’s path-breaking work explains how North China, from the 1720s to the 1980s, struggled to overcome famine.

Li’s narrative explains why famines persisted in China. Increases in the harvest also tended to increase the population, which sometimes stressed the food supply. When bad weather, followed by poor harvests, turned into famines, the state mobilized to provide famine relief and restore farm production. The possibility of famine recurring, however, was always present, owing to environmental degradation and population increases.

In recent decades the Chinese have been able to stabilize their harvests by introducing a “green revolution,” which has alleviated some of the environmental deterioration caused by drought and water logging, and by relying on the global economy to stabilize harvest output. Li’s fascinating, multilayered history, tells how northern Zhili province and the metropolitan areas of Beijing and Tianjin cities worked to feed a steadily increasing population despite unstable harvests, an increasingly damaged environment, and a declining ratio of farm land per capita.

Between 1668 and 1900, thirty-one great floods or droughts occurred in Zhili’s Hai River Basin. Six great calamities occurred there between 1801 and 1895, and twelve major disasters and famines struck the Zhili-Hebei area from 1900 to 1949. Li vividly describes the regional calamities and the ensuing human misery caused by the Great Leap famine of 1958 to 1961, during the Marxist regime, in which millions perished.

The instability of the region’s eleven rivers and an escalating population on limited arable land were primarily responsible for the environmental degradation. Moreover, frequent weather fluctuations prevented many farmers from restoring their land to former levels of productivity. As a result, this northern region suffered the highest frequency of natural disasters within the empire. To make matters worse, as population increased, the expansion of cultivated land slowed, and the population became denser. Farmers retaliated by planting new crops and by applying new multiple-crop methods and weeding practices. Li, like Elvin, describes much of Chinese farming of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “increased labor inputs fail[ing] to increase productivity after reaching a certain level.”¹

To cope with harvest instability and to fight famine, state officials had gleaned from experience a large repertoire of methods to relieve famine: sending monthly reports to the throne, describing crop conditions and grain prices; routing grain-filled ships to cities and areas to reduce prices; organizing different granary systems to issue money or grain to help the needy; lowering the annual land tax; and issuing seeds to farmers for the next harvest. In Beijing and Tianjin, state officials patrolled the grain markets, monitored merchants’ stocks and sales, and punished merchants who hoarded grain. These efforts helped to prevent prices from rising, but excessive market intervention often had the reverse effect of exacerbating scarcity in the market.

Li argues that historical records suggest a low degree of commercialization in most localities, with only a small-scale marketing of grain in the region. She believes local-market integration and their scale to have been slight. Using price data to produce coefficients for price variations of sorghum, millet, and wheat, as well as to trace market-price correlations, she convincingly shows that market integration for wheat and millet occurred in only a few large centers, such as Zhili’s Baoding district and Tianjin. Such limited market integration in North China suggests that a customary economy of huge size existed, in which barter, rather than market prices dominated. Thus, two different exchange structures coexisted; this phenomenon deserves more research.

Even so late as the early 1900s, environmental deterioration continued to spread in North China. Although commercialization of agriculture accelerated, political and social instability increased. According to Li, the region’s qualitative change...