Yellow River: Facts on File

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Mark Jones:
>
 I guess my problem comes down to not quite believing
> that you've etsbalished more than a kind of mentality, a mass or more
> properly, an elite psychology which consitututed lock-in: the elites
> were trapped not so much by scarcity of capital which could be
> diverted from hydraulic maintenance as by a moral investment in the
> past and by a political need to stabilise society in the conservative
> ways characteristic especially of the Ming.

You may be reading this into my posts because I suggested that
military expansionism and/or protectionism from the barbarians of
the north, not just population pressure, drove the Chinese to build
large hydraulic works starting in the third century BC, and because
I have sometimes worded this as a falling out of the Garden of
Eden. Yet it is a scientific fact that the augmentation of power
requires, as Elvin puts it,  "the creation of means to capture and
direct the flow of energy in nature just as much as its flow in other
human beings (sometimes known as exploitaion)" (21). The
greatest  flow of energy in Ancient China was in the Yellow River.
But this river, *given its ecological characteristics*,  was unwilling
to relinquish its enormous energy, which was contained less in the
current of the water than in the extreme amounts of silt it carried,
without continuous and *expansionary* investments in hydraulic
works. My disagreement with Elvin is that his explanation of lock-in
is more technological than ecological although he is well aware of
the sedimentation problem. He, however, makes no distinction
between lock-in in the wet rice regions and lock-in in North which
was specifically a characteristic of this River.

Mark:
 Because in fact there was
> plenty of surplus available to redirect into take-off; if you compare
> with the English Industrial Revo you see there that the high-growth
> manufacturing industries were sectorally insignificant at the start
> and the amounts of capital which take-off required were relatively
> quite small (relative to what was avaialble, or to elite luxury
> consumption). So you end up wondering about the wider context of
> Chinese and Japanese failure to capitalise  on early technological
> advances, and even the tendency to lose them and to regress.


I agree there was plenty of surplus in China. Elvin does not present
his notion of  hydraulic lock-in, which he always calls "technolgical
lock-in" except for one instance, as an attempt to explain China's
long-term pattern of development. It is simply an observation he
makes in a paper which is otherwise about the ecologically
"unsustainable" growth of  Imperial China. His well-known "high-
level equilibrium trap" is  his explanation  why China did not
industrialize; and it says that while China had ample supplies of
capital, merchants were reluctant to invest it in new technologies
due to lack of effective demand and availability of cheap labor...I
think, however, we can develop this notion of hydraulic lock-in into
a general theory. Other Sinologists have noted similar "lock-in"
qualities in China most prominently the idea of population-lock in.