The Long River 长江

Courtney, Chris

doi:10.1017/9781108278362.002

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Drought may have may have destroyed harvests in Rwanda and Vietnam, yet the subsequent famine was also caused by Belgian and French colonial policies, which were themselves influenced by the general economic malaise of the Great Depression. 195 Likewise, a dearth of rain killed crops in northern China, yet it was internecine warfare that drove millions into starvation, while broader processes of systemic decline, similar to those detailed in this chapter, had left them chronically vulnerable. 196 Stalinist agricultural collectivisation, rather than drought and wheat rust alone, helped to plunge the Soviet Union into famine.…”

Section: A Water-plagued Landmentioning

confidence: 87%

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The Nature of Disaster in China</I>

Courtney

2018

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THE LONG RIVER Floods would not be a hazard were not man tempted to occupy the floodplain. Gilbert White 1 Cartographers have always struggled to represent rivers. To render nature legible, they are forced to freeze water in time, turning complex evolving systems into fixed blue lines, which cut simplistic linear trajectories from origins to destinations. If it were possible to view history on a time-lapse-condensing millennia to minutes-we would see rivers writhing across their plains like living entities; expanding and contracting with the pulse of the seasons, rising and falling with longand short-term climatic changes. This chapter reconstructs the history of one such river-the Yangzi-a watercourse that shaped and was shaped by the people who made their homes on its plains. We focus, in particular, on Hubei, a province in the middle reaches of the Yangzi that is dominated by rivers, lakes and wetlands, and, as a result, is naturally highly flood-prone. Humans did not always see this as a problem, as abundant water could be a blessing as well as a curse. It took a particular mode of human interaction with the environment to transform natural floods into humanitarian disasters. This chapter describes the history of this transformation, tracing the long-term evolution of the modern disaster regime from which the 1931 flood emerged. The epigraph from the renowned geographer of disasters Gilbert White encapsulates much of what is argued in this chapter. Flooding, as a human hazard rather than a hydrological process, is never entirely natural. Disastrous inundations occur when people interact with water in particular ways. Succinct as it may be, however, White's assessment does not do justice to the complexity of environmental history.

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Section: A Water-plagued Landmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…The common link seems to have been a powerful and prolonged El Niño event. 99 This may well have contributed to the flooding of Hubei in 1788.…”

Section: Fighting Water For Landmentioning

confidence: 99%