"Hydraulic lock-in"

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

What follows are those passages in Elvin's 1993 paper which touch
on China's technological lock-in, a paper which is otherwise about
the related topic of "unsustainable growth" in China from archaic
times to the present.

These pasages are worth highlighting as they do convey the idea
that China's hydraulic system, once established, acquired "inertial
momentum" (Fairbank's term).

- "A Chinese-style rice-field is a useful initial example. It has to be
levelled and dyked, which requires substantial investment of human
energy. It has to be supplied with water, which means the creation
of a hydraulic system of dams, storage basins and distributary
channels. The system will alsmost always be to some degree
unstable, mainly because of the progressive deposition of
sediments in distribution channels (due to the slowing down of the
flow of current), siltation upstream of barrages, and degradation of
the bed downstream. Hence it will require indefinetely prolonged
further inputs of energy for maintenance if the original invesments is
not to be lost. This latter is a form of premodern technological lock-
in, the mortgaging of a proportion of future energy resources..."
(12)

- "...Removing, and later replacing, these baskets, which were 3
feet in diameter and 10 feet long required the repeated use of a
large quantity of labour, as did the annual dredging. This is an early
example of pre-modern lock-in: the initial investment, on which the
productivity of the entire system rested, could only be preserved at
the cost of *perpetual expansive maintenance*.." (my italics, 22-23)

- "Clearly, though, the historical balance-sheet of the pluses and
minuses of north-western agricutural expansion in imperial China
has to take into account these hydrological consequences. Simply
as an illustration of the costs directly involved...consider the
dredging of deposited sediments and the new dyking that had to be
done in 1606 at Xurzhou, where the Grand Canal - supply artery for
the capital - crossed the Yellow River, to keep the crossing
workable. Half a million men had to be conscripted to work for six
months, and the state had to pay 0.8 million ounces of silver. this
was not routine, but it was not exceptional for large scale
intermittent maintenance" (33-34) [We will see later that smaller-
scale works were routine].