Qin’s ancestral dragon gave up his ghost, but Qin is still here.
Confucianism is just worthless chaff, despite its good reputation.
While a hundred generations have all used Qin’s governance methods.
—MAO ZEDONG, 1973
THE QIN EMPIRE COLLAPSED in 207 BCE, but its centralized bureaucratic model of governance has been passed down to the present, helping societies across East Asia domesticate their landscapes. Over the subsequent twenty-two centuries China has been ruled by many dynasties and various ethnic groups, but all of them shared Qin’s commitment to the expansion of taxable agriculture at the expense of natural ecosystems. Across East Asia, states drew on the political tradition of the Qin and Han Empires to homogenize the ecology of the regions under their control. They also worked to homogenize their populations, preferring their subjects to be farmers and herders who produced reliable tax income and shared the values promoted by the state. Ruling elites have tended to proclaim their allegiance to the respectable ideology of Confucianism but, as Mao suggested in the poem quoted above, they employed administrative methods that originated with the notorious Qin Empire. In this chapter I will briefly review how states and empires first formed in China, and then discuss the ways in which Qin’s successors have transformed their environments.
The roots of political organizations can be traced to the Stone Age. By domesticating plants and animals, people became capable of building their own ecosystems. These produced far more food and resources than foraging could and allowed humans to live at higher densities. As agricultural systems improved, so did the amount of surplus each farming family was capable of producing, and this made possible the growth of increasingly complex sociopolitical organizations. As states grew and administrative methods improved, political elites gained more control over how land and labor were used. Because agrarian states depended almost entirely on surplus agricultural production and labor, they had a fundamental interest in replacing natural ecosystems with agricultural ones.
Agriculture began in East Asia at least eight thousand years ago with the gradual domestication of millets, rice, dogs, and pigs. A few millennia later, domesticated sheep, cattle, and horses arrived from Central Asia, allowing people to exploit grasslands and arid places. Farther north, these domesticated animals made possible mobile lifestyles based around pastoralism. Pastoral nomadism turned Inner Asian herders into the most powerful military force in Eurasia, which they remained for two millennia. Meanwhile, settled farmers in the Yellow and Yangzi valleys domesticated a variety of fruit trees, vegetables and textile plants, and continuously worked to improve the productivity and hardiness of their crops and animals. Just as it took thousands of years for farmers to breed manageable plants and animals, state structures also evolved gradually. Administrative and ideological systems were gradually developed to the point at which the majority of the people acknowledged the dominance of a few and provided them with their surplus production and labor. In both cases, being domesticated allowed the species concerned to expand enormously.
This was not a simple trajectory. Neolithic people had many subsistence options and could vary them depending on the availability of wild food and the state of the harvests. But over the millennia there was a clear trend toward increased reliance on domesticated plants and animals. There was also a trend toward increasing social complexity, most famously in the development of cities and states in the middle Yellow River valley during the third and second millennia BCE. These Bronze Age states were made possible partly by the arrival of horses, chariots, and bronze weapons, which gave the elite new advantages over commoners. The Erligang state, which flourished around 1500 BCE, was vastly more powerful than any previous polity in East Asian history. Its influence extended hundreds of kilometers in every direction. The subsequent Shang dynasty, the first from which we have written evidence, received resources from various allied or conquered polities across a large swath of the Yellow River valley. In 1046 BCE, the Zhou alliance conquered the Shang and adopted many of their technologies, such as writing. The Zhou installed their kin and allies in a network of garrison towns that stretched across the middle and lower Yellow River valley. They maintained peace for almost three centuries, greatly facilitating the expansion of agricultural societies.
In 771 BCE, the Zhou ruling house was defeated and fled eastward to Luoyang, where it hung on, weakened, for five more centuries. The fall of the Zhou kings left a power vacuum in which dozens of polities competed for subjects and territory. Larger states gradually swallowed up smaller ones, and eventually a stable international system developed with established protocols of diplomacy. As they conquered more land and people, states had to develop administrative mechanisms to control them. The threat from rival states forced them to find new ways to extract revenue and labor from their subjects to support their growing war machines. Not only did they extract more from common farmers; they also took over forests and wetlands that had previously been communal resources. By the third century BCE, central governments had developed bureaucracies sophisticated enough to administer large territories that were home to millions of people. Their centralized political systems gave them the ability to manage the ecologies of their domains much more intensively than earlier states could.
Of all these states, it was Qin that prevailed. The Qin state was characterized from early times by its military strength and by its powerful royal house. It rarely played a central role in the affairs of the Zhou states during its early centuries, focusing instead on consolidating its control over the Guanzhong Basin and surrounding regions. But in the fourth century, under a succession of aggressive rulers, Qin moved its capital eastward to face the other warring states and enacted state-strengthening reforms. The radical reforms, most famously those undertaken by Shang Yang, aimed to make agriculture and war the two main routes to socioeconomic success, replacing aristocratic pedigree. Qin’s government did this by establishing a ranking system based on military service and awarding men with plots of land commensurate in size with their rank. This required reorganizing agricultural landscapes to facilitate land redistribution. Shang Yang also standardized governance through the use of laws and regulations. At the height of its power in the mid-third century BCE, the Qin state had a remarkable degree of control over people and land for an ancient state. It collected large amounts of grain taxes and used them to feed the armies of unpaid laborers and convicts who built and maintained its infrastructure. Qin squandered a lot of these surpluses on megaprojects and wars of conquest, but many others were used to expand transportation and agriculture infrastructure. It built a network of roads and bridges, facilitating the movement of colonists into conquered regions and resources out of them. It modified water systems to expand and improve agriculture, bringing water to crops in drier areas and keeping it out of flood-prone ones. But the Qin Empire overextended itself and was overthrown in a bloody uprising.
Although Qin collapsed, its system was quickly rebuilt by the Han Empire, which was founded in 202 BCE. Over four centuries, the Han Empire reconquered the territory once controlled by the Qin Empire, consolidated its grip over it, and conquered further. In contrast to Qin’s command economy, which had extracted as much as it could from a network of strategically important areas, the Han Empire fixed its tax rates at low levels. This does not mean that farmers actually paid lower taxes but that the central government left more of the surplus to be taken by local elites, giving them a strong incentive to support the imperial system. This alliance between central and local power structures relinquished some of the central control of Qin’s system but made the system politically sustainable. Qin-style command economies have been resurrected several times in Chinese history, most recently under Mao Zedong, but the Han model of low central government taxation was the improvement on the Qin model that allowed the imperial system to endure for two millennia. Qin’s centralized bureaucratic model was not only adopted by subsequent states within China; it also influenced most surrounding states in East and Inner Asia. This centralized bureaucratic system has been so vital to the creation of the cultural and political entity that we call China that it is fitting that the word “China” derives from “Qin.”1
It is important not to overemphasize the power of Chinese empires. Like most large agrarian states, they tended to be very weak at the local level, with very little influence over people’s lives. Most of the time local officials did very little to modify the environments of the areas they administered. But over the long term they played an important role in maintaining and expanding the agricultural ecosystems that supported them. They maintained peace over large areas for centuries at a time, permitting the population to multiply. They conquered neighboring regions and encouraged migration into them. They helped build and maintain water control infrastructure. And they encouraged any kind of economic activity that they could tax. What distinguishes the Chinese empires from others in world history is not so much their power as their continuity. Their governing techniques were passed down over two millennia, allowing rulers to repeatedly rebuild similar administrative systems after previous ones had failed. It was their ability to reincarnate themselves and adapt to changing circumstances that allowed China’s empires to play a key role in reorganizing the ecology of the subcontinent.
Peace was the most environmentally destructive achievement of the Chinese empires. We tend to think of war as being unusually destructive, but once people stop fighting each other they often focus their attention on attacking the nonhuman world. As this book has shown, military competition played an important role in forcing states to improve their administrative machinery. But when the wars ended and the empires were established, they maintained peace over large areas for centuries. This allowed people to multiply and to clear more land for farming. While smaller political units, such as those of the Warring States, often exploited their territory more intensively than did large empires, the latter opened huge areas to enterprising farmers, often encouraging them to clear land with tax incentives. As good land became scarce in core agricultural regions, people cleared marginal mountainous or waterlogged land. Others moved into conquered regions far from home in search of land. Peace even encouraged people to colonize land illegally, though it was precisely state-enforced stability that made it safe for them to do so. Peace also facilitated commerce, allowing the invisible hand of the market to reach out across the subcontinent and grab anything it could sell for a profit elsewhere.2
Agricultural ecosystems tend to be much simpler than wild ones. They often rely on a small number of species that are vulnerable to droughts, pests, and other disasters. States served to manage these simplified ecosystems, buffering against bad harvests and working to keep the population sufficiently productive to pay taxes. Granaries were key organs in the metabolism of the Qin Empire, which used them to feed their armies and to help hungry farmers. This tradition continued throughout the imperial period and played an important role in helping the Chinese population become one of the densest in the world.3
States maintained the stability not only of agricultural systems but also of most other aspects of the economy. They thus played an important role in stimulating economic growth, which means increasing the human impact on the environment. In Richard von Glahn’s words, “The Chinese imperial state galvanized economic growth by providing domestic peace, international security and investment in public goods—education, welfare, transport systems, water control, and standardized market institutions—as well as creating an institutional infrastructure that enabled Smithian growth in agriculture and commerce. The state’s role in creating demand (including war-making) also figured significantly in stimulating economic development.” This institutional infrastructure included minting coins, regulating markets, and lending farmers seed grain to help them pay their taxes and undercut merchants who sought to exploit their desperation. Even in recent centuries, when the commitment of the Ming and Qing Empires to low taxation left them with a much weaker ability to foster economic growth than their more proactive contemporaries in Europe, states remained a key factor in the economy.4
Another key result of the continuity of empires over two millennia, something that would never have occurred without them, was the creation across the subcontinent of a single cultural-linguistic group. When the imperial system was founded, the Yangzi valley and regions farther south were home to a wide variety of languages and cultures. The spread of people speaking Sinitic languages was backed by the military power of the empires, which conquered new territories and held them for centuries, crushing the occasional uprising and promoting policies that led gradually toward assimilation. Chinese settlers tended to prefer fertile lowland areas, leaving the mountains to the natives, who were usually governed lightly if at all. Fully two millennia after the Qin Empire conquered the Pearl River Delta, the surrounding mountains were still home to non-Chinese ethnic groups. Like colonization elsewhere, Chinese expansion was a process of cultural hybridization in which colonizers intermarried with local people and adopted many of their customs. But the empires tended to promote the classical Chinese cultural heritage and the adoption of Chinese names. This created a classic colonial dynamic in which it was more prestigious to be associated with the metropolitan culture, so people tended to underplay their indigenous roots. The result was that most of the people in mainland East Asia became Chinese-speaking farmers, a fact not diminished by the subsequent diversification of Chinese languages in the southeast. The spread of the Chinese-speaking peoples tended to involve the intensification of agriculture, not least because it was accompanied by a state that required farmers to produce surpluses to pay their taxes with.5
The military homogenization of East Asia’s cultural groups began at least as early as 1500 BCE, when the Erligang culture expanded outward from the Central Plains. It continued under the Shang. In the eleventh century BCE, the Western Zhou conquered a multiethnic Yellow River valley, founding an alliance that lasted for eight centuries and played an important role in homogenizing the population. By the time of Confucius (d. 479 BCE) the Zhou states had destroyed most of the polities of non-Zhou peoples (whom they referred to as Rong, Di, and Yi), and by the time of the Han Empire these peoples had mostly been assimilated, making the Yellow River valley among the most culturally homogeneous regions in the ancient world. In the south, the state of Chu conquered and colonized the lowlands of the central Yangzi River valley, and Qin did the same in the Sichuan Basin. After Qin founded the empire, its armies followed the river valleys south of the Yangzi and established garrisons in the distant deltas of the Min and Pearl Rivers, locations of the modern cities of Fuzhou and Guangzhou. Qin developed some conquered regions by moving tens of thousands of people into them.
The Han Empire established firm control over most of the areas previously occupied by the Qin Empire. It also conquered southward into Yunnan and the fertile Red River Delta (northern Vietnam), eastward into the Korean peninsula, and westward far into Central Asia. Despite this reach, its population was concentrated in the fertile plains of North China and Sichuan. During and after the Han, states and empires extended roads and administrative control into remote areas and encouraged subjects from core regions of the empire to migrate there. Following Qin precedent, they sometimes moved large numbers of people into areas where they wanted reliable taxpaying subjects. They used soldiers to farm newly conquered areas or those depopulated by war. Even when other groups conquered China, they tended to further the expansion of the Chinese agrarian order. For example, Kublai Khan’s conquest of Yunnan in 1253 CE was merely a flanking maneuver to conquer the Song dynasty, but it permanently opened upland Southeast Asia to Chinese colonization. In the eighteenth century the Manchu Qing Empire accelerated the assimilationist project in this region by encouraging the children of indigenous elites to study Chinese, not Manchu. Perhaps the best example of the power of the imperial governance system can be seen in Korea and Vietnam, provinces of the early Chinese empires that managed to gain independence. Like many former colonies, they adopted governance methods of their former rulers and used them to avoid becoming provinces of subsequent Chinese empires. Japan’s early states were also modeled explicitly on China’s. The adoption of Chinese governance models usually involved increased state control over environments.6
While rulers like the Qin First Emperor conquered to satisfy their megalomania, most empires conquered to achieve economic and strategic goals that were quite rational from the perspective of central government officials. They tended to focus their conquests on good farmland since populated arable land was the best source of tax revenue. Over time, states gradually extended their control into the mountains, not least by regulating and taxing silviculture, which slowly replaced most of the natural forests of South China over the last millennium. Metals were another draw. Rulers wanted conquered territories to cover the costs of administering themselves as soon as possible, often by importing farmers who spoke their language and were accustomed to paying taxes and serving in the army. These loyal subjects often received the best land in the fertile river valleys, leaving the conquered to take what was left or flee into mountainous terrain outside state control. States have now conquered these areas and have often forced once-mobile peoples to settle down in fixed locations where they are easier to control.7
Arable land was the main prize in the conquest of the south, but to the north and west Chinese empires often found themselves on the defensive against nomadic pastoralists. While they did extract resources such as furs and livestock from these areas when they could, the main reason to conquer such areas was to keep control over the dangerous nomadic peoples there. This is why the Han, Tang, and Qing Empires conquered Xinjiang and why the Qing conquered Tibet. Even when agrarian empires managed to conquer these vast regions, they found them mostly too dry to be farmed, which made it impossible to settle enough taxpaying subjects there to repay the cost of administering them. Because of this, empires held onto these regions as long as they could afford the military expenses of doing so, and then lost control of them when they could not. The failure of premodern Chinese empires to permanently assimilate Inner Asia makes clear that agriculture was the key to the long-term expansion of the Chinese-language political order. The current government’s emphasis on Chinese immigration and cultural assimilation in these regions is based on its understanding of this dynamic and is intended to ensure that these areas remain culturally Chinese even if Beijing loses control of them. Incidentally, the geopolitical importance of the steppe also explains why rulers of various ethnicities repeatedly chose Beijing—on the boundary between steppe and sown—as an imperial capital.8
In both old population centers and newly conquered lands, states consistently promoted agricultural expansion and intensification. Passive incentives for expanding farmland, such as tax cuts for newly cleared land, were occasionally combined with significant state expenditures on other projects intended to create stable agriculture and promote more intensive agriculture. Water control was often a key factor. In places where waterways would naturally move around, such as seasonal wetlands or alluvial plains, states built dikes to keep them in one place so the rest could be farmed. In areas where water was scarce or unreliable, they built irrigation systems to water crops. Since water transport is far more efficient than transport over land, they also built canals and reworked natural waterways to facilitate transport. There are now no waterways of any size in China that have not been dammed, and the hydraulic systems in core agricultural regions have been totally reorganized.
The most famous water control projects in Chinese history have been the large dikes built to keep the Yellow River in a single channel. The North China Plain is the enormous alluvial plain of the Yellow and Huai Rivers, which under natural conditions would migrate freely across it, regularly changing course during floods. States spent heavily to keep the Yellow River in a predictable course because the North China Plain was the most populated and productive region for much of China’s history. It would have been impossible for people to convert the entire plain into farmland without the enormous concentration of labor and resources that successive states were able to mobilize to contain the river. States also built and maintained huge dikes on the Yangzi, which was essential for the colonization of the fertile lowlands of the Yangzi River valley. States have therefore played a key role in replacing the diverse wetlands of that region with rice paddies. This effort was considered worthwhile because rice produces more surplus per area than other crops. The rice surpluses of the lower Yangzi led subsequent empires to build the Grand Canal to ship them northward. This required the re-engineering of the hydrology of large areas of the North China Plain. The importance of states in maintaining these systems is clear from the cycles in which water systems broke down during times of turmoil and were then rebuilt by newly established empires.9
While most historical records concern larger water works, the smaller ones were at least as significant because they were much more widespread. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the Qin Empire employed the unpaid labor and tax grain of its subjects to build and maintain waterways of various kinds across the empire. The Han dynasty and its successors continued to maintain water control infrastructure at the local level. Excavated documents fortuitously preserved at two different sites in the Central Yangzi region reveal how state officials surveyed damaged dikes and irrigation reservoirs with the aim of repairing them. In later times, these smaller-scale water projects were more often undertaken by wealthy families or religious institutions, often with state backing, while the government focused on large-scale infrastructure.10
Apart from water control, states also occasionally encouraged farmers to increase their productivity by providing them with new crops or by publishing agricultural knowledge. There is a long tradition in China of agricultural manuals written to teach people improved methods of producing food and textiles. Some of these were written at the behest of the government, while others were privately written by officials for the same ends and were thus indirectly state-supported. The same is true of the voluminous literature on water control. After printing was invented, states occasionally printed agricultural manuals and distributed them widely. The Mongols printed and distributed several such manuals, encouraged the popularization of underappreciated crops, and imported some new ones from Iran.11
In 1840 the British Empire attacked the Qing Empire and forced it to open itself to European commerce. For the following century, foreign powers found ways to extract wealth from a China racked by wars and rebellions. This ended with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The People’s Republic has overseen one of the most successful state-strengthening efforts in human history, which—not coincidentally—has been a disaster for its natural ecosystems. Not only has the human population increased by almost a billion but the amount of resources and energy consumed by each person has also multiplied several times. All of the processes of environmental change described above have accelerated over this period, but by the 1950s the only environments remaining to be colonized were marginal ones whose clearance had profound ecological consequences with negligible economic benefits. The government’s ambitious environmental policies offer some hope, but there is a fundamental contradiction between its goals of protecting the environment and increasing consumption.12
The environmental effects of European empires on their colonies have long been recognized, but this book has emphasized that all states have a fundamental incentive to transform environments, and China’s have been among the most successful. While China’s empires were often weak by modern standards, they played important roles in the long-term conversion of East Asia’s natural ecosystems to farmland and areas for other human uses. Their formation required the empires to transform environments, and each increase in power improved their ability to rebuild environments for their own purposes. Because of this, state formation should be considered an important process in the earth’s environmental history and the founding of the Chinese imperial system a momentous event in the history of East Asia’s environments.