Chinese environmental regulation in the 1970s and '80s

Pollution in China (credit: Anjali aisha)

Just appearing online in Environment and History is an artcile by Yun Liu, "Voices of Protest Against Industrial Pollution in Hubei, China, During the 1970s and 1980s". The abstract:

This article examines local official records to find voices of protest against industrial pollution in Hubei, China, during its early reform era from the 1970s to the 1980s. Archival evidence from unpublished official documents indicates that to some extent local officers responded to citizens’ petitions against two main forms of industrial pollution: air pollution and soil pollution. Air pollution mostly affected urban residents but elicited more contention. Soil pollution got comparatively less exposure but caused more direct damage to impacted peasants. Both rural and urban victims of industrial pollution projected their own voices of protest typically by submitting group-authored and signed or anonymous whistle-blowing letters. Protests against pollution emerged with inter-group conflict negotiation in public or semi-public venues as well as in local investigation reports. The findings discussed here help to explain how local environmental governance evolved through increasing public awareness at subnational levels in China’s early reform years.

Mongolian hunting regulations

The Qianlong Emperor Hunting Hare, by Giuseppe Castiglione (1755)

Last year Inner Asia published Khohchahar Chulu's "The Formation and Regulations of the Military Hunt in Qing Mongolia". (Thanks to Mitra Shirafi at Legal History Blog for noting it.) The abstract:

In the Mongolian tradition, hunting and war have had strong connections with each other. During the Qing Empire, Mongolian hunts were not only local practices, but were also involved in the Qing empire-building project. On the other hand, the collective hunt itself was by nature a dangerous activity that contained potential physical risks from wild animal attacks as well as human errors. It is conventionally understood that the hunt therefore must have been well organised in order to secure success and security. But how a hunt was organised and operated in reality has not yet been well examined. This study explores the organisational structure and regulations of a military hunt in Qing Inner Mongolia, a geographically important zone where both the Manchus and Mongols actively held hunts. The primary focus of this article is the nineteenth-century Alasha Banner grand hunt, a well-organised and documented Mongolian military hunt from the Qing period.

Rivers, Rifles, Rice, and Religion

Law and History Review recently carried a review by Jaakko Husa of John Haley's Law's Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice, and Religion (Edward Elgar, 2016). From the review:

In this extraordinarily sweeping volume, Haley analyzes and discusses how certain legal and political systems historically evolved in varying ways. Importantly, these systems share common threads when it comes to the political foundations of their law and the modes of their law's enforcement. Haley explains and compares three, which he calls dominant, legal orders so that past and present are bridged. The underlying idea is to bind the storytelling around narratives of rivers, rifles, rice, and religion.

*****

Chapter 2 is based on the idea that “legal institutions develop in conjunction with the capacity of rulers to appropriate wealth and acquire revenue and the demands of needs they confront for the allocation of the material resources they control” (37). This chapter also explains the storytelling narratives of the book. First, basic geographical conditions, such as climate, terrain, and, first and foremost, rivers, are pre-eminently determinative: “Law and ‘civilization’ emerged first along rivers” (40). The Tigris, the Indus and the Ganges, the Nile, the Yellow, and the Yangzi rivers are mentioned.

Control of rivers and their wealth-producing basins has been, argues Haley, tremendously important for the development of legal and political systems. A second key factor is warfare (i.e., rifles) because warfare and the accompanying need for better weaponry and human resources had continuing political and legal consequences. Third, rice production also had major consequences for the foundations of law, as it requires interdependency and cooperative behavior. Fourth, religion is key because of its storytelling narrative, as enduring political and legal orders reflect the commonly shared beliefs and values of those who are governed.

Chapter 3 then deals with the specific foundation of public law and private ordering in China by discussing rivers, rifles, and rice. The patterns of agricultural production caused shared habits of interdependence and cooperation influencing the modes of social organization in the whole region connected by rivers. Haley explains the tension between so-called Confucians and Legalists, showing that Legalist thinking had an important role in China to the effect that morality and law were seen as completely different domains. Here law remained a secondary instrument of social control enhancing the birth of a centralized form of governance without a religious base. On the whole, for Haley, China exemplifies public law ordering.

Chapter 4 then explains in a detailed manner the foundations and history of private law and private ordering in Japan by emphasizing the role of rice and warfare. In Japan's case, the lack of rivers was a key factor that prevented the birth of the centralized rule that had taken place in China. Rice production was the major source of sustenance and wealth, but producers were denied access to governmental power. This led eventually to warrior rule and development of adjudication. In the absence of imperial power, adjudication of private claims developed into a routine function of governance. Even during the Shogunate, the regulatory reach of central government remained modest. In short, Japan exemplifies private law ordering.

The book also includes chapters on law in Europe and in Hispanic America.

Forest regulation and its critics in early China

The latest Environmental History has an article by Ian Matthew Miller, "Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China", with some fascinating discussion of arguments for and against regulation in Chinese philosophy. The abstract:

Between the sixth and second centuries BCE, Chinese states developed offices to oversee the sustainable use of forest resources. This era, often cited as a period of rampant environmental degradation, also saw the emergence of a discourse of sustainability. The early philosopher texts criticized the environmental and moral degradation of their era in order to promote specific policy interventions. In response to the deforestation they depicted, moralist and pragmatist philosophers alike argued for regulations on land use as the basis of a sustainable political order. Early states used these ideas to justify state forestry, culminating in extensive forest bureaucracies under the Qin and Han empires in the second and third centuries. These forestry institutions were among the earliest in the world, preceding state forestry programs in Europe and Japan by nearly two millennia. Yet even at the early apex of state forestry, many thinkers criticized government regulation as immoral or ineffective and promoted the self-sufficient community as an alternative basis of conservation. These early texts were established as the core of the Chinese philosophical tradition, and their arguments for and against state regulation became the basis of many later debates over sustainability and institutional forestry.

9th century version of the character yu (hunter or forester)
(Chuan Cao, 2016, from the article)

Old maps, natural resources, and international law in the South China Sea

(By way of Imperial & Global Forum:) Quartz recently published "The Philippines hopes a trove of ancient maps will prove its territorial claims against China", by Lily Kuo. Kuo writes that last week:

the Philippines opened an exhibit featuring dozens of maps spanning over 1,000 years of history—a collection that the Philippines says disproves China’s claim of sovereignty over a rocky shoal in the South China Sea, which has provoked increasing tensions between the two countries.

The exhibit held by the Institute of Maritime and Ocean Affairs includes maps from as far back as 1136 A.D. that purportedly show China’s southernmost territory has always been the province of Hainan—which would undercut China’s claims to much of the South China Sea, including territory that is claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam, among other countries. Ancient maps of the East Indies, of which the Philippines was a part, are shown to include what is today known as the Scarborough Shoal, a small piece of land about the size of three rugby pitches to the west of the Philippines, home to valuable fisheries and potential fossil fuel reserves.

The article includes some gorgeous old maps, including these:

World map published by Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1602 )

Published by Jesuit Pedro Murillo (1734)
(US Library of Congress)

Tian Ditu, or “the Atlas of Heaven and Earth” (1601)
(US Library of Congress)

The exhibit catalog is available on line.

Rural conservation in China

More contemporary history, this time from China. The Journal of Peasant Studies last year published Emily Yeh's "The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China". The abstract:

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against the grain of political ecological studies, the essay reviews contemporary environmental issues including Payments for Ecosystem Services and other market-based approaches, the establishment of national parks and resettlement schemes justified through ecological rationales. The first section following the introduction focuses on two of the largest forest rehabilitation schemes in the world. Next, the paper reviews work on China's rapidly growing number of nature reserves, examining their role as enclosures and their entanglement with tourism income generation. This is followed by a discussion of research on the politics of rangeland degradation and property rights. The inclusion of pastoralism within the scope of rural politics is sometimes obscured by the fact that China's extensive rangelands coincide almost completely with its minority populations. The misrecognition of rural politics over resources and the environment as ethnic politics is addressed in the concluding section.

Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas (CCTV.com)

Wheat and industrialization?

Food historian Rachel Laudan has a nice blog post on a recent article from Science, "Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture", by T. Talhelm, X. Zhang, S. Oishi, C. Shimin, D. Duan, X. Lan, and S. Kitayama. (This kind of work is a close relative of "legal origins" scholarship.) To me Laudan's critiques are a good example of how good humanities thinking is critically valuable in this age of supposed reverence for numbers and the social sciences (a claim which could use some historicizing itself). The article's abstract explains:

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. 

After making the point that recent scholarship in many fields casts doubt on supposed different ways of thinking in the East and West, Laudan goes on to question these categories:

Woman harvesting wheat,
Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh, India

West and East seem incredibly problematic categories.  The authors tend to use the West as a synonym for Europe (and, I presume, European settlement colonies such as the US, Canada, and Australasia, though whether the former Iberian empires would count as western is not addressed). Japan and Korea, both with modern economies, remain according to the psychologists more holistic than might be expected.

India, with a similar wheat/rice split is mentioned as a possible test case.

And the Middle East, a wheat area, is left unmentioned.

Laudan goes on to raise some additional questions about the article's commentator's claim that “wheat farming may contribute to explaining the origins . . . of the industrial revolution”:

What about millets and maize in China? Not to mention root crops? What about the fact that China was on a par with the West until the late eighteenth century?  What about the fact that its most economically dynamic area was the lower Yangtze Valley in rice country. What about the industrialization of Japan that was more or less simultaneous with the West?  And when Japan was still relying heavily on root crops in farming? What about the other Western staple crops (mentioned in passing as being barley similar to wheat).  What about maize in the industrializing United States? What about Asian Americans?

What Hath Lynn White Wrought?

John Nagle recently posted "What Hath Lynn White Wrought?", a short piece discussing White's influential article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (Science 10 March 1967: Vol. 155 no. 3767 pp. 1203-1207). The abstract:

Lynn White Jr.

Lynn White’s 1967 article on “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” famously blamed Christianity for modern environmental problems. White’s historical analysis viewed Christianity for cultivating a dismissive view toward nature and for embracing technology in a way that resulted in unchecked pollution and extinctions. Since White wrote his article, Christian scholars have accepted the challenge that White’s diagnosis presented. Other nations, perhaps most notably China, have experienced crippling environmental destruction even in the absence of a legacy of Christian thought. More positively, White’s thesis has encouraged a generation of scholars to explore the positive aspects of Christian thought for environmental policy.