The Yellow River

Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s cont...

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Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves.

Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal and dike construction to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts and floods. But particularly during the Maoist years the North China Plain was radically re-engineered to utilize every drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric generation. As David A. Pietz shows, Maoist water management from 1949 to 1976 cast a long shadow over the reform period, beginning in 1978. Rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and agricultural intensification over the past three decades of China’s economic boom have been realized on a water resource base that was acutely compromised, with effects that have been more difficult and costly to overcome with each passing decade. Chronicling this complex legacy, The Yellow River provides important insight into how water challenges will affect China’s course as a twenty-first-century global power.

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables*
Introduction
1. On the Ecological Margins
2. Management and Mismanagement in the Imperial Period
3. Transforming the Land of Famine
4. Making the Water Run Clear
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List of Figures, Maps, and Tables*
Introduction
1. On the Ecological Margins
2. Management and Mismanagement in the Imperial Period
3. Transforming the Land of Famine
4. Making the Water Run Clear
5. Creating a Garden on the North China Plain
6. Managing Legacies, Managing Growth
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
* Figures, Maps, and Tables
Figures
“Hanging” Yellow River bed
“Historical” Yü the Great
Contemporary Yü the Great
Engraving of the 1887 flood
The Obernach Yellow River Model
Four Yellow River channel configurations at Obernach
Map of the 1933 flood
Map of the 1935 and 1938 Huayuankou floods
The Huayuankou breach
Ambassador with a bulldozer: Harry Morrison
Model workers from the Huai River Engineering Project
Women’s Yellow River Dike Construction Brigade
Mao at the Yellow River, 1952
“Today’s USSR Is Our Tomorrow”
The 1955 Great Plan to transform the Yellow River
“Make the Mountains Bow and the Rivers Yield”
Mao at the 1955 Yellow River Plan Exhibition
Happiness Canal
Mao digging at Ming Tombs Reservoir
Idealized commune
Joint Sanmenxia planning meeting in the USSR
Mao swimming in the Yangtze River, 1966
Sanmenxia Dam, 1961
“Spring Rains”
“Transform China in the Spirit of the Foolish Old Man”
Maps
North China Plain
Yellow River Valley
Regional virtual water transfers
Historical course changes of the Yellow River
China’s hydrologic divide
Canals linking Yellow and Huai River systems by 1000
Yellow River drainage into the Huai River, ca. 1400
Yellow River drainage after 1855 dike break
People’s Victory Canal
South-to-North Water Diversion project
“Water Tower of Asia”
Tables
5.1 Increase in mechanized irrigation in China
6.1 Yellow River dry-ups
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