Previous: Marx's "Asiatic mode of production" in the context of China's rise: Introduction
Back when I was a freshman at New York University in late 1999, I did a term paper and presentation about China's water scarcity crisis for an ecology class; my professor expressed stunned disbelief when he asked me what percentage of Chinese agriculture is irrigation-based, and I answered about 70 percent. At the time, I didn't realize that this was an exceedingly high figure for such a massive country. Nor had I any inkling that mass irrigation itself is very peculiar to Eastern, i.e. Oriental economies; rainfall agriculture has historically predominated in the West.
Karl August Wittfogel's magnum opus, "Oriental Despotism", has uniquely contributed to the understanding of Chinese civilization as the world's principal example of "hydraulic despotism", which more or less means centralized bureaucratic administration of food production, notably through large-scale irrigation systems.
In fact, so distinctive and definitive is the water-controlling aspect of every large pre-industrial empire - notably China, India, Persia, and the entire succession of empires that have ruled the Fertile Crescent and Egypt - that for Wittfogel the term "hydraulic despotism" is synonymous with "Oriental despotism."
This reflects the obvious observation that these most successful instances of hydraulic despotism were of Asiatic, non-Western origin; just as telling, the only notable European adoption of this centralized hydraulic governance was via the Greco-Roman colonization of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East in classical antiquity (circa 300 BC - 300 AD), which brought the longstanding hydraulic civilizations of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates under their control, which lasted until the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire was pushed out of these regions by the Islamic Arabs in the late 600s.
Hydraulic despotism's poster child: imperial China
But China exceeded every other hydraulic empire in the combined measure of durability, size of territory controlled, and population administered. Needless to say, its distance and isolation from the other hydraulic empires contributed to the continuity of its contiguous core area of control; but scholars and historians have nonetheless found China singularly remarkable for its resilience as a politico-cultural unit through so many upheavals, be they internal revolutions or external invasions and even outright conquest at times by alien peoples.
It's not surprising, then, for Wittfogel to uncover the very deep origins of scaled irrigation agriculture and flood control in China: they apparently go back as far as the initial Xia and Shang dynasties of the second millennium BC along the middle to lower reaches of the Yellow river valley and the north China plain. Granted, this was actually later than similar developments in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but it appears that by the late Shang and early Zhou periods (circa 1200-800 BC), increasingly large and coordinated systems of irrigation and flood control infrastructure rivaled or exceeded those anywhere in the world, laying a formidable foundation for political centralization of an ever-growing magnitude. This was in the millennium before the first empire, Qin (221 BC).
The socioeconomic and sociopolitical dimension of extensive waterworks is quite striking. Wittfogel betrays a Western emphasis of concern for the obvious loss of personal autonomy that entailed participation in large constructions that necessitated top-down supervision - and concomitant coercion - of conscripted menial labor. From the Orientalist perspective, however, all this loss of freedom was a token price to pay for what back in those days was as great a miracle as would be chemically altering desert sand to make it fertile and arable today; it was part and parcel of Oriental society that bringing water to dry areas while simultaneously stopping destructive flooding was a quasi-divine, mythic undertaking that conferred an extraordinary legitimacy to its organizers and a strong implicit acceptance of hardship, toil, risk, and even abuse for the prize of a more habitable earth for one's posterity. Thus where the West sees the loss of individual rights, the East sees the foundation of generational stability in the formulation of a basic bond of respectful interdependence between ruler and subjects - the origins of the "mandate of heaven."
In any case, Wittfogel treats well the complex social-organizational aspects of the ancient hydraulic infrastructure projects. Not only labor, but also building materials, tools, supplies - and not least basic provisions for the workers themselves - had to be managed on an ever larger scale, demanding ever better coordination of interdependent or sequential sub-tasks that comprised the whole affair. Without doubt, as efficiencies and best practices accrued, the range, scope, and density of the hydraulic infrastructure all blossomed.
All this led to the rise of what Wittfogel calls the "agromanagerial" bureaucracy, the world's first true "apparatus" state - and, in fact, its only true apparatus state until the industrial era of modern Western bureaucracies (!). In all hydraulic empires, the power of the ruling sovereign became increasingly dependent on an elite group of these agricultural managers, whose principal task was to ensure proper irrigation; the efficacy of their administration was one and the same as the sovereign's own efficacy in enforcing his authority throughout the land, even as he sought various ways to curtail their inevitable political influence and ambition. The agromanagerial bureaucracy, then, is the very heart of hydraulic despotism: without it, even the sovereign himself is not so sovereign.
Wittfogel clearly lays out the enormous central power that naturally accrued to the organizers of the hydraulic infrastructure. With such a large and dispersed population dependent on irrigation, they pretty much ran the entire show; the fate of the people literally rested in their hands. The state became extraordinarily powerful; the society extraordinarily subservient. Through control of the nation's very lifeblood, the agromanagerial apparatus state naturally and easily performed such mass functions as censuses, land surveys and registrations, and - you're probably waiting for this one - universal taxation in such forms as surplus grain requisitions. Equally obvious, as Wittfogel points out, the universal conscription of labor and the organizational sophistication and discipline for large waterworks translated rather seamlessly into effective mobilization and supply of vast armies and the rapid construction of large defensive fortifications. The German Sinologist leaves little doubt: China's density and scale of hydraulic management was matched by its depth of study of the problems of warfare (including notably issues of logistics and supply), best exemplified by Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
China was actually a relative latecomer among the Asiatic hydraulic civilizations - it was, for instance, much later in entering the Iron Age than the Near East - but it more than made up for the slow start. By the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 BC), the ducal and other blood-vassal subdivisions of the Eastern Zhou crown had begun a process of consolidation into centralized territorial "hydro-states" in their own right. Fierce competition and warfare between these fledgling nations weeded out the weak from the strong, and a series of conquests and consolidations left only seven standing to confront each other in the Warring States period (475-221 BC), the twilight of pre-imperial China.
Thus, as Wittfogel observes, China, like other hydraulic civilizations, simply never had "feudalism" in the medieval Western European or Shogunate Japanese sense: the dukes and earls who ruled the large hereditary fiefdoms of the Eastern Zhou on behalf of their kin sovereign already had an agromanagerial bureaucracy they could rely on to run the regional and local administrations, with ever increasing experience and competence in the aforementioned agromanagerial functions. They thus did not have to parcel out land to lesser lords and nobles who would fray their central authority, but from early on such tracts were distributed as "office land" to state functionaries who, even if they did happen to be nobles, were completely beholden to their government service. By the time the fiefdoms reduced and consolidated into the Warring States, China had become a collection of just a handful of competing, increasingly absolute dictatorships. Unsurprisingly, this general period marked the zenith of Chinese societal and cultural development, including the Confucian philosophy - later peaks were attained through a combination of importation (i.e. Buddhism) and renewal or adaptation of the longstanding cultural base.
Again, we see the double-edged, East-West duality of this hydraulic civilizational expansion. On the one hand, by the 4th century BC the largest warring states of China could boast of cities and standing armies exceeding one million - figures that Western Europe would not match until the modern period. Such a boom of human life and activity was made possible by the agromanagerial bureaucracy of hydraulic despotism. On the other hand, the potential for further civilizational development and progress, particularly in the realm of ideas and systematic worldviews, was becoming increasingly constricted, even suffocated; the contrast between late pre-imperial China and its contemporary city-states of Greece, for instance, is quite glaring in light of the latter's strong advances in all manner of philosophy, reason, science and mathematics.
Perhaps China's fate was not inevitable even at this juncture, on the eve of Qin's ruthless campaign of conquest and unification in the 3rd century BC, which saw the western fringe state of the Chinese world push the limits of the agromanagerial model of governance to maximize economic and military power, merging this too with an outright barbarian mentality that had no qualms destroying much of the gentler and more universally humanitarian aspects of Chinese culture. But what's done is done...we are almost two and a quarter millenniums later, and the big question now is just how the world will deal with the new Oriental despotism of communist China - the new "Qin" - at a time when indicators abound that it is Western freedom and democracy which are in retreat, and the other Eastern autocracies of Russia and Islam look to Beijing as their guiding light.
The West - the only great civilization that arose and developed on a fundamentally non-hydromanagerial (non-agromanagerial) path of rainfall-based agriculture - may indeed have peaked by now in terms of hard military and economic power. But it has at least partly won the war of ideas; the Oriental despotism of today is not the worst of what it was in the 20th century under communism; at least some strands of Western thought and ideology seem too strong to be completely extinguished even in China or Russia should they truly turn culturally retrograde.
The next part of this series will treat the transition of hydraulic despotism from the pre-industrial era to its modern incarnation of totalitarian communism under Stalin and Mao, again referencing Wittfogel's great work.
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