"Hydraulic lock-in"

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Mark:
> I'm still having problems with how an agriculture which has sustained
> itself for several millennia can be called ultimately unsustainable,
> but I suspect I haven't been paying close enough attention to your
> argument and I'm wondering if you can repeat the salient bits

You and Michael are right to question this idea that "Chinese
agriculture was ultimately unsustainable". It is not as if China
stopped growing after 1800. Perhaps it is best to speak of
blockages and solutions, regional scarcities and conquest of new
habitats,  as I was trying to do in the "basic theme" thread. I don't
accept Pomeranz's rosy (neoclassical) picture of China's
environment, or his claim that western Europe was encountering
similar ecological limitations. The forested areas in China  which P
compares to Europe were the southwestern frontier regions where
people had been moving into for awhile, but which still had room for
expansion. Michael's idea that the Chinese returned everything
back to the land should not detract us from the massive
afforestation China suffered through centuries of empire-building.
Deforestation and its environmental effects troubled  the Chinese
long before the rise of modern China. I have found additional
evidence indicating the population of  China may have already
reached a maximun of  50 something million during Zhou times
(1027-256BC), when the center of Chinese civilization was in the
North. When the North was still the center, the population was still
recorded at 59 million in 2AD, of which  Tuan has calculated  43
million lived in North China at the time of this census. In 140 AD,
the Chinese population had dropped to 49 million, and even more in
North China since by that time many  had migrated to the south.
The Tang census of 742AD recorded 48 million, of which 32 million
were estimated to have been in North China.

These numbers do seem to suggest that North China had long
reached a Malthusian limit, the only way China's overall population
kept on growing was thanks to the conquest of new space. The
North somehow could not sustain further increases due to famines,
plagues, civil wars, frontier wars, floods. By 1900, as Elvin writes,
"most of China Proper [which includes the now decimated frontier
regions of the past]  had been stripped  of the forest cover that
three millenia earlier had covered it in almost unbroken succession
from the tropical rainforests of the far south to the conifer forests on
the northern mountains. The only forests that remained in areas
that were relatively easy of access were in Manchuria, *an area
mostly debarred to Han Chinese immigration before the middle of
the nineteenth century, and which thus escaped Chinese-style
exploitation*"