Hitherto two discourses have dominated our thinking about natural disasters in China. The first is linked to the ancient theory of the Heavenly Mandate, interpreting natural phenomena in terms of people's behaviour and especially the government's performance. The second discourse describes China as a country especially prone to natural disasters, due to its particular geographical conditions and general backwardness. This view has gained prominence in the course of intensifying interactions with the Western world since the second half of the nineteenth century. This article is an attempt to get beyond the surface of these dominating discourses by looking at the local level experience in the pre-modern period. The history of disasters of Linfen county in the south of Shanxi province is reconstructed on the basis of local sources, such as records of portents, stele inscriptions, literati writings and popular legends. It shows how the experience of disasters is inscribed in local culture in ways very different from what the dominating discourses would suggest.
The North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.
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