Water, water, everywhere

The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. By Philip Ball. Bodley Head; 316 pages; £25. To be published in America by University of Chicago Press in March 2017.

THE Chinese mental compass is oriented not north-south as with the rest of the world, but west-east—a consequence of tectonic forces that threw up mountains in inner Asia from which rivers seek a course down through China to the sea. “Twisting around ten thousand times but always going eastward,” said Confucius: it seemed a law of nature. Philip Ball argues in his new book, “The Water Kingdom”, that the two greatest waterways, the Yellow river that flows across the north China plain and the Yangzi that charges through the heart of the country, are both “symbols of the nation” and, for millennia, have been the “keys to its fate”.

Nowhere is this clearer than with the Yellow river, China’s “mother river”. Rising on the Tibetan plateau, it cuts a giant loop through the loess badlands of China’s north-west—the famous “yellow earth” formed of fine dust blown from the Gobi desert. By the time the river has turned abruptly eastward onto the vast and populous north China plain, a litre of river water carries up to 300 grams of alluvial silt.

For thousands of years the silt has both nourished and destroyed on an unparalleled scale. As the sediment settles, it raises the river bed and makes the river more prone to flooding with the summer rains. The response was always to build higher ramparts of mud, rocks and matting of woven reeds until the river ran on its own conveyor belt, sometimes 15 metres above the surrounding countryside. When rains inevitably breached the dykes, the consequences could be catastrophic: up to 2.5m people are thought to have drowned or died from disease and starvation in the flood of 1887. After such disasters, it was impossible to force the river back into its old watercourse. Like an out-of-control fire hose, the Yellow river has thrashed across the north China plain, its sea mouth shifting by hundreds of miles. “China’s Sorrow” indeed.

The vast ecosystem is shaped by human agency, yet nature remains god. The Yangzi, the more immense torrent, divides the wheat-growing north from the rice cultivation of the south. It has long been China’s commercial artery, running deep into the country through spectacular gorges, as well, in earlier dynasties, as its line of defence. With floods no less brutal than the Yellow river’s, the Yangzi has no equal for beauty and cruelty, as can be seen from the flooding of Changzhou in 2015 (pictured).

Nearly all cultures have flood myths and legends. China’s are unusual in that at the heart of them are the engineering challenges of flood control. The first attempts to tame the Yellow river are ancient. The huge Three Gorges dam on the Yangzi, which a decade ago turned a fast-flowing stretch into a reservoir the size of Lake Superior, is just the latest scheme.

Mr Ball argues that “whatever one might think of China’s mega-engineering schemes, doing nothing is not an alternative.” Indeed, his book, a rewarding read, is at its most fascinating when describing how in China the laws of nature seem to have embedded in them a moral precept. Success or failure in flood control and irrigation can furnish or remove the Mandate of Heaven. The Yellow river catastrophe of 1887 was seen as evidence that the Qing, the last dynasty, was losing its mandate. When Chiang Kai-shek caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by ordering a breach of the same river’s dykes in an effort to avoid defeat by the Japanese in 1938, it was grist to the Chinese Communists’ claims that the Nationalists were unfit to rule.

If heaven’s mandate comes from controlling the waters, might the demands of hydrology, including the need for considerable resources and legions of workers for flood control and irrigation, have created the highly centralised, authoritarian states of Chinese dynastic rule, the Communists’ one included? The idea of an “Oriental despotism” based on a “hydraulic civilisation” was advanced in the 1950s by Karl Wittfogel, a Marxist historian. His ideas have fallen out of fashion, not least because they often overplay emperors’ reach and downplay historical local actors in trade, commerce—and even hydrology.

And yet: China’s biggest current water projects, including piping water from the Yangzi under the Yellow river to slake Beijing, are on an imperial scale that without authoritarianism would be hard to envisage. At the very least, water management has created, as Mr Ball puts it, “a political language, and it is one that speaks of legitimacy to rule”. Look how it soaks into political gesture, for instance, with the prime minister, Li Keqiang, wading into the flood waters in his office clothes. Such symbolic offerings will have to count for more as popular concerns grow about sediment building up behind the Three Gorges dam, increasing water extraction and desertification in the Yellow river basin. There is so much toxicity in northern Chinese cities that half the water there is undrinkable.

Like Confucius’s rivers, “The Water Kingdom” twists around in spirals and meanders. That is its charm, as it takes in painting, poetry and ancient history. Sometimes the reader wishes the author had walked the rivers’ banks as much as the library stacks, and on occasion the narrative is shunted off course, as in overenthusiastic claims for China’s maritime prowess. The shock-and-awe voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the early 15th century that reached Hormuz and eastern Africa were remarkable. But they were never repeated, while his vessels were little more than lumbering rafts. Meanwhile, for much of history, the overseas trade with China was carried not in Chinese craft but on foreign (Arab, Indian and later Western) bottoms. But these are quibbles. Mr Ball puts water back beautifully at the heart of China’s story.