I found this particular article highly illuminating in Professor Carneiro's succinct presentation of the so-called "circumscription theory" for the origins of the state in the history of humanity. Basically, he posits that the initial formation of the state - defined as a political union of previously autonomous villages - was the consequence of competition (i.e. warfare) between villages within a confined (i.e. "circumscribed") geographic area, which resulted in stronger villages subjugating weaker ones in a process of conquest and consolidation. The state can be said to have come into being when the victor of a conflict, now monopolizing the use of violence in a given area, could force a defeated village to pay tribute, i.e. additional food production, as the price for its continued habitation of the same territory - if not outright annex it.
Professor Carneiro poses this theory as in opposition to Wittfogel's "hydraulic despotism" in Oriental Despotism, which he describes thus:
Another current voluntaristic theory of state origins is Karl Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis.” As I understand him, Wittfogel sees the state arising in the following way. In certain arid and semi-arid areas of the world, where village farmers had to struggle to support themselves by means of small-scale irrigation, a time arrived when they saw that it would be to the advantage of all concerned to set aside their individual autonomies and merge their villages into a single large political unit capable of carrying out irrigation on a broad scale. The body of officials they created to devise and administer such extensive irrigation works brought the state into being.5
This theory has recently run into difficulties. Archeological evidence now makes it appear that in at least three of the areas that Wittfogel cites as exemplifying his “hydraulic hypothesis”—Mesopotamia, China, and Mexico—full-fledged states developed well before large-scale irrigation.6 Thus, irrigation did not play the causal role in the rise of the state that Wittfogel appears to attribute to it.7In fact, this is probably too generalized a view of Wittfogel. The German Marxist-Sinologist focuses more narrowly on the origins of the hydraulic or Oriental state, not on the state, period. For the purposes of Oriental Despotism, he conflates the general with the specific in a way that's admittedly confusing.
In fact, there's nothing in Wittfogel's theory to deny the existence of a more primitive state or proto-state in prehistoric (pre-Shang dynasty) China that, if one goes back far enough, was clearly not hydraulic; it's just that in China's case (as in Mesopotamia and Egypt), this has to be so long ago (probably before 3000 BCE) as to be irrelevant for the purposes of comparative study between East and West, and between the modern and pre-modern periods, which was Wittfogel's purpose.
That being said, both hydraulic despotism and circumscription theory have their role in tracing the origins of the Chinese state - as they probably have a combined role in the origins of the early Egyptian and Mesopotamian states. I will attempt to marry the two as follows.
By the fourth millennium BCE, farming had already been practiced in China for at least the preceding two to three thousand years; it had spread across the entire landmass on the eastern end of Eurasia that was temperate and reasonably fertile. These small neolithic (late Stone Age) communities were comprised of independent villages, as were their counterparts in other parts of the world.
Per Carneiro's circumscription theory, resource competition around the precious fertile banks of the Yellow river would have, at roughly this juncture, triggered the first glimmers of state-building:
With these auxiliary hypotheses incorporated into it, the circumscription theory is now better able to confront the entire range of test cases that can be brought before it. For example, it can now account for the rise of the state in the Hwang Valley of northern China, and even in the Petén region of the Maya lowlands, areas not characterized by strictly circumscribed agricultural land. In the case of the Hwang Valley, there is no question that resource concentration and social circumscription were present and active forces. In the lowland Maya area, resource concentration seems not to have been a major factor, but social circumscription may well have been.That is to say, as soon as enough tribes and clans saturated the best areas along the Yellow river to take advantage of its seasonal floods for raising crops, competition and warfare naturally followed for riverbank real estate, leading the winners of these contests to swallow up the losers, who could keep their river access only by augmenting the manpower and production of their new masters.
Throughout the fourth millennium (4000 to 3000) BCE, this late prehistoric consolidation took place all along the middle to lower Yellow river valley; the new statelets increased in size and decreased in number, so that by the first half of the third millennium BCE, there were probably only tens of them where formerly there had been hundreds.
At this time, the immediate valley of the Yellow river was already cultivated to its limits; the crisis of population pressure now forced the innovation of primitive irrigation methods. Such methods had a twofold purpose: to reduce the destruction caused by floods along the immediate path of the river and to bring the river water further out to the dry tracts on either side.
Whichever state mastered these new techniques first would have gained an immense strategic advantage over its rivals. Most likely, multiple states began with basic constructions and a few of the better organized and ruled ones moved on to bigger and more complex ones. The wise kings and chiefs of this period would have understood that their investments in irrigation works were as important as territorial defense, and would have balanced the need for arms in an uncertain environment with the imperative for peaceful relations with neighbors so that more time and energy could be devoted to optimizing use of the arable landscape.
By about 2700, the date of the legendary huangdi or Yellow Emperor, perhaps one or a handful of rulers dominated the rest, but even if these legends had some historic truth, it is unlikely they actually exercised more than direct rule of their immediate territories plus some limited profession of fealty by lesser vassals in a loose federation. A true, centralized state spanning a large contiguous chunk of the Yellow river valley and north China plain would be at least the next millennium in taking shape.
Birth of the Chinese hydraulic state and the "Mandate of Heaven"
This long gap is where we can insert Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis: in the second half of the third millennium BCE, irrigation likely grew enough along the entire length of the Yellow river valley that it became the single greatest factor in Chinese social organization and economic activity. As the population continued to grow, ever greater demands were placed on effective diversion of the river to water the surrounding farmland and on more precise control of its often unpredictable flooding; though the heavily silted waterway defied all efforts to tame it with permanence, the entire civilization was now so dependent on the attempt to do so that the apparent long-term futility of the project only spurred ever more ambitious schemes.
It is no coincidence, then, that the first dynasty, the Xia (2070-1600 BC) was by tradition founded by a hydraulic engineer who finally devised a comprehensive solution to harness floodwater into a large network of canals and basins that would provide farmers with the water they needed even as they also adjusted the flow characteristics of the river itself. This coincided roughly with the start of the Bronze Age in East Asia.
This was a late development in China - Egypt and Mesopotamia had already devised such integrated water control systems about a millennium earlier - but the effects were as significant. With such a sophisticated, geography-altering technology, political development got its biggest boost since the neolithic villages first began merging into statelets. The economy began to take on an increasingly regional, as opposed to merely local character. With its superior organization and technical sophistication, the Xia dynasty increased its grain surpluses, manpower, and other resources, and was thus able to subjugate, through direct conquest or indirect vassalage and tribute, the central habitable portion of the Yellow river valley.
But there were clear limits to the efficacy of the nascent centralized Chinese state. Revolutionary as they were, the large irrigation systems were still crude and shoddy, and simply could not account for all the deviations of the Yellow river's flow, which thanks largely to the high silt content would periodically veer violently off in a new direction. The mobilization of men and resources for the large constructions and for their maintenance and operation required a degree of both technical and organizational competence and sophistication that were not yet common. Far worse, however, no sooner did Wittfogel's "agromanagerial" bureaucracy arise - the special corps of officials tasked with administering the water control network - did it begin abusing the enormous power it enjoyed, especially its prerogatives with the reigning sovereign, with the result that the irrigation system became a victim of the regime's long slide into moral decay.
For a hydraulic society, the effects of chronic mismanagement of the comprehensive irrigation system are strikingly apparent. Because agriculture depends on the right amounts of water being applied to specific plots of land at specific times, any failure of the water control infrastructure can trigger flooding or desiccating effects (sometimes both) that threaten many livelihoods. Not only would a competent agromanagerial bureaucracy reduce the likelihood and frequency of preventable disasters; but a clean and upright one would expedite the recovery from unavoidable calamities by such sensible measures as budgeting grain surpluses from good harvests to cushion food losses from widespread flood destruction.
It is therefore not difficult to surmise how only a few successive generations of corrupt misrule would have reduced the proud hydraulic infrastructure of the Xia dynasty to a shell of its glory days. By the time the Shang dynasty arose to replace the Xia, somewhere between the mid-18th and early-17th centuries BCE, there is good reason to believe the Yellow river valley had largely reverted to its pre-Xia, in some cases even late neolithic state. The virtually complete lack of archaeological evidence of Xia society coupled with the very primitive irrigation agriculture exhibited in the early Shang (circa 1750-1500 BC) points to a fresh start for Chinese civilization that could only be indicative of the degree of prior destruction and degradation. That is to say, as early as the first half of the second millennium BCE, Chinese society underwent an experience of dongluan or "chaos" precipitated by dynastic decline on an epic proportion.
But where the Xia failed, the Shang succeeded. By 1300 BC, central flood control systems had been reconstituted and augmented beyond its previous capacity along the Yellow river and its tributaries; superior tools, techniques, and increasingly the early writing system combined to streamline the administration of the irrigation networks to a level approaching, but still notably below, that of Egypt and Mesopotamia. This led to an unprecedented boom in grain production, population growth, and territorial expansion. The Chinese hydraulic state had arrived on the scene in a permanent way.
Along with it, the "Mandate of Heaven" was also born. As steward of the great river which was the divine gift of life itself, the Shang monarchy was nothing less than the earthly vicar of the celestial realm. Its legitimacy - that is, the legitimacy of the sharply stratified society it ruled - was one and the same with its continued ability to tame the waters, distribute them, and administer a sufficient or overflowing food supply for a large, growing, and ever expanding population; the fraying or loss of this stewardship would be a cataclysm of supernatural origin that would cause all hell to break loose.
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