By the *third century BC* the wonderful world of the Yang-shao
farmers and Lungshan peasants living peacefullly together and
practicing an extensive system of cultivation, i.e, shifting or slash
and burn agriculture, with only a rudimentary degree of social
stratification, had long been consigned to oblivion, and already
replaced by the distant memory of the earliest recorded dynasty,
that of the Shang (1766-1045BC). The extremely fertile and easy
to work loess lands of the north had been capable of yielding good
crops *without the need for elaborate intensive systems of
cultivation* for thousands of years. But once the loess lands were
fully colonized on an extensive basis and the gradual build-up of
population speeded up the cycle of land clearance until the point
was reached at which the forest could not replaced itself fast
enough to permit shifting agriculture to continue, a more intensive
system of farming based on irrigation and metal tools was adopted.
The irrigation of water sustained the Shang and the Zhou (to 256
BC) dynasties.
The semimythical figure named Yu the Great was the first of the
Yellow River's dike builders (though some say that instead of
dyking he cleared the river channel to facilitate drainage and
alleviate floods). Either way, Yu is said to have mobilized
thousands of people to dredge the riverbed and dig diversion
canals. When the project was completed , the legend goes, Yu (or
his son) founded the Xia empire (2205-1766 BC) - which some
sources list as the first dynasty before the Shang, but this is still
unverified.
Yet, it seems that before about 500 BC or, more precisely, up until
about the *third century BC*, there were no are no huge dike-
building projects where hundreds of thousands of workers were
mobilized to excavate millions of tonnes of earth. Before Ch'in (or
the Chh'in or the Qirn) (221-206 BC), and the Han (206 - BC)
dynasties China seemed to have enjoyed an ecological economic
system with a "political philosophy that put at the centre of its
conceptions the conservation of a well-ordered nature" (Elvin, 17).
But such environmental wisdom could only coexist for so long with
the need to overcome population pressures and the desire to
achieve political and military hegemony.
I have already cited Bray that "The Chhin government had already
built two considerable irrigation projects during the --3rd [BC], the
Cheng Kuo canal in Chhin (Shensi) itself and the Kuan-hsien canal
in Szechwan".
Using different names, Elvins also sees this period as the one
when China decided to take a great leap forward in hydraulic
development: "The state of Qirn was in due course to unify the
empire, greatly increased the effectiveness of its war-machine in
the third century BC by the improvement and creation respectively
of two gigantic irrigation systems...systems that permitted a
greater, cheaper, and more reliable production of food. The first of
these was that in the present province of Sichuan [Szchwan] where
the Mirn River leaves the mountain and flows out across a sloping
fan-shaped plain. The principle was simple: water, moved by
gravity, was first diverted from the main stream (in such a way as
to stabilze, as far as possible, the quantity entering the system...);
then it was directed through a network of distribution channels,
used for irrigation, and the residue returned to the main course far
downstream. The details required solving the problem presented by
the deposition of sediments, as the slowing of the current reduced
the competence of the flow to carry suspended particles, and thus
the system was threatened with the infilling of its channels over
time[regular dredging, flushing out periodically deposits,
regulating the water supply] required the repeated use of a large
quantity of labour...This is an early example of pre-modern lock-in:
the initial investment, on which the productivity of the entire system
rested, could only be preserved at the cost of perpetual expensive
maintenance"
"The Zheng Guor Canal to the north of the Weih River, in what is
today Shaanxi province, and started in 246BC, took heavily silt-
laden water from the Jing River to the Luoh River...so that water
would be released onto the fields below where, in the words of a
Hahn-dynasty ditty 'it served as both irrigation and fertilizer'...The
canal needed continuous re-engineering because of siltation,
including new adit channels"
As we also saw earlier from Bray, Wu-Ti, the first emperor of the
Han dynasty, carried to new heights what the Chhin dynasty
started through "an enormous programme of canal building in
Honan and Shansi that irrigated over a million acres of arable land,
while lesser projests were realised in Northwest China and Wei and
Huai valleys. By the middle of Wu-Ti's reign...productivity in the arid
areas of the Northwest had been raised considerably. " (588)
A Faustian bargain had been sign
