| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.3

Book Review

Engineering the State: The Huai River and Reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927–1937. By David Pietz. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. xix + 142 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index, notes. $110.
Water control has long been central to Chinese society, and is likely to be even more important in the decades to come. Through a case study of attempts to control one particularly troublesome river, David Pietz provides a useful window on how the Chinese politics of water control was transformed in the first half of the twentieth century. Though the book is aimed primarily at area specialists, people interested in the spread of dam building, basinwide planning, and other basic features of modern hydraulic engineering will find much of interest here.	1
At roughly 660 miles, the Huai is barely one-sixth the length of the Yangzi River to its South or the Yellow River to its North; but it has been a major flood threat ever since the stronger Yellow River broke its banks and usurped the last portion of its bed. Until the late nineteenth century, Chinese governments made it a high priority to prevent flooding in this area, because it threatened the Grand Canal which brought grain to the capital, but at that point new shipping technologies and new government priorities led to increased neglect, and much greater flooding, soil alkalization, and unrest in this region. The Republican regimes established after 1911 were particularly concerned about the political implications of flooding in an area near its main political bases, and hoped that the Huai might prove an easier and more affordable river to tame than the Yellow or Yangzi Rivers. It thus became a crucial laboratory for the introduction of new water control strategies more generally. The regime proved unable to stabilize the region—efforts were just beginning to gain momentum when the Japanese invasion stopped everything—but, no longer needing to subordinate everything else to grain transport and equipped with a new cadre of engineers inspired by Western models, it laid the conceptual and institutional foundations for systems that would be implemented after 1949.	2
As Pietz emphasizes, this was an international story, with foreign lenders (and their skittishness in unstable situations), foreign relief agencies, and above all foreign ideas playing a major role. Perhaps the most important of these were an interest in hydropower and irrigation, which became the central goals of a "positive" strategy (as opposed to the "defensive" strategy of merely preventing floods) for the region. The preference for hydropower (even, to some extent, at the expense of flood control) became stronger in the 1930s as Chiang Kaishek sought a national economic plan focused on rapid development of heavy industry for military purposes.	3
While much of this story may seem unsurprising to those who work on the environmental history of Western societies, it is striking to see these patterns in early twentieth-century China. This was, after all, a state that was constantly fighting both imperialist incursions and domestic uprisings, which regularly teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and which, prior to the twentieth century, had prided itself on placing generalists in public office, often paying little attention to technical credentials. The loyalty of several provinces to the central government was questionable—which indeed played a role in frustrating many water control efforts. Yet Pietz successfully argues that beneath this apparent chaos, a technocratic water control regime was taking shape, and that many of its plans and personnel would play leading roles in the intensive application of modern hydraulic engineering that took place after 1949. (Today, China has more large dams than any other country.) At the level of implementation, he also traces the increasing importance of military and corvée labor in dredging, dike-building, and other tasks.	4
The book is carefully argued and well-documented throughout. Pietz's principal concern is to demonstrate the continuity of Chinese state-building efforts across the 1949 divide, so readers more interested in water control per se may occasionally find more material than they would like on the ins and outs of factional politics and foreign financial involvements. But Pietz shows that behind those complex maneuverings lay the first part of a more linear story—and an extremely important one. He has made a valuable contribution both to Chinese history and to a global story of the emergence of technocratic environmental management designed to serve industrial growth.	5
Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (California, 1993), The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik; M.E. Sharpe, 1999; rev. ed. 2005), The Great Divergence; China, Europe, and the Making of a Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), and of numerous articles.

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