In Fighting Famine in North China Lillian M. Li undertakes a reconsideration of China's late imperial period vis-à-vis the history of famine and famine-relief policies in northern China. A few remarks about the evolution of the field will help to put her work in context. Research into Chinese socio-economic history prior to the end of the Second World War had a strong tendency to seek causes of socio-economic stagnation. The postwar period led to criticism of those studies, and alternative theories emerged such as the domestic Chinese notion of a “sprout of capitalism”, and in the Western world the theory of the “port-economy” system. Yet these theories posited the historical trajectory of economic development in China as the same as the Western world. From the 1970s on many scholars came to think more strongly of China as having taken a historical path distinct from that of the West. What were the factors that might have led to this historical difference? Some scholars have tried to locate them in socio-economic weakness and ineffectual government due to the nineteenth-century conditions of land shortage and overpopulation; others have sought to attribute momentum for a unique development in Chinese history to the traditional structure of Chinese society and the spirit and rationality of Chinese merchants. In the end, however, these viewpoints were based on economic theory generated vis-à-vis the historical experience of the Western world.

From the early 1980s there was an increased awareness of the difficulty in applying such theories to Chinese history, and there came an increasing number of calls for the necessity of reconsidering the theoretical framework itself. It was proposed that efforts to interpret Chinese socio-economic history be undertaken via economic methods based on quantitative analysis, rather than the “theory-preceded” viewpoint of economic history that characterized prior studies.Footnote ¹ Some came to think that in order to interpret Chinese socio-economic history via quantitative analysis, what first was needed was a concrete appraisal of the various factors therein. The factors identified at that time were: various state economic policies; modes of transportation; distribution of food items and their consumption; and the regional variety and seasonality of China's economic context. Historical studies of late imperial China have developed many kinds of viewpoints and manifested many academic contributions regarding Qing state food policies, the market system and economic integration, the role of personal choice in economic affairs, and price movements in late imperial China.Footnote ² Li's work interprets Chinese history with these issues in mind. The volume is a culmination of her studies of the last twenty or so years, and might be regarded as her judgement about the question of whether such approaches and viewpoints can be applied fruitfully.

Li takes as her chief object of consideration the Zhili province (present-day Hebei) of northern China, because it is a site that allows a clear evaluation of the role of the state, a varied natural environment, the degree of market integration, and personal choice in economic affairs. In Chapters 1–3, the author surveys the history of Zhili's Hai River Basin during the Qing period by tracing the efforts made by emperors and their high officials to control rivers in the province and the basin's agricultural system. These chapters describe a gradual decline in the environment and a concomitant deterioration of the standard of living. While examining the close connections between these historical fluctuations, the author takes into account the importance of Qing food supply policy. In order to explain her hypothesis, Chapters 4–7 discuss the various state policies that exerted strong influence on long-term fluctuations in grain price. The author considers the relationship between price fluctuation and the Qing state granary system, and evaluates the degree of economic integration and the formation among the markets both within and outside Zhili province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Chapters 8–11, the author evaluates the effects of the policies implemented by the Qing state on the socio-economic situation in northern China from the nineteenth century on. She describes in detail the environmental decline in northern China (including Zhili) and describes the increasing frequency of famine in Hebei, as well as famine relief conducted by the Qing and the Republican government. The author shows the “high Qing model” of famine relief in eighteenth-century China to have been a success, but at the same time describes the tragic situation of nineteenth- to twentieth-century Hebei as it turned into “the land of famine”, with an increased frequency of floods and droughts and the collapse of governmental relief. Finally, her concern shifts to the socio-economic situation of contemporary China.

Chapter 12 gives consideration to famine and food problems in the contemporary period by way of the famine relief policies of the present Chinese government. As their basic policy, the CCP adopted the traditional means of famine relief, and by doing so actually liberated people in northern China from poverty and hunger. To this day the government continues to take very seriously the issue of food self-sufficiency. In this way, Li's volume emphasizes the importance of the government's role in the history of famine in China over a span of several hundred years, and argues that a food-centered logic is one of enduring principles of Chinese history to the present day.

This book is a major undertaking of over 500 pages, and takes up an array of topics such as food distribution, market structure, and international trade, as well as population, food, famine, and state intervention. Also, in the final sections of each chapter, the author provides responses to various arguments and criticizes earlier works. Of this wide array of arguments put forth by the author, the ones I would like to take up for further consideration are her twin assertions that 1) we should elucidate the socio-economic historical development of Chinese society via the phenomena of food, population and famine, and 2) this historical development should be regarded as always strongly dependent upon state intervention by successive Chinese governments.

Li argues that famine in China occurred when the balance among population, food, and food policies by the state was thrown off-kilter. In other words, she claims that famine is not the result of an economic scenario, such as excessive population or the insufficiency of farmland or production spoken of by other researchers, but rather is a product of the success or failure of state economic intervention. The author's particular object of criticism is the logic of Malthusian demographical theory, which explains as inevitable the frequency of famines in Chinese (and more largely, Asian) history. Though the author does recognize that famines occurred frequently in northern China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she argues that we should discuss the cause of famine frequency not vis-à-vis a Malthusian ratio of population to land or the amount of agricultural production, but instead as a result of the inappropriateness of state intervention in food and population.

The author also takes a critical position toward the logic of comparative history that seeks to explain the socio-economic trends and historical consciousness of late imperial China from an alternative perspective. This comparative historical argument is, like the author's, an attempt to destroy the descriptive method of Chinese and Asian history based upon Malthusian demographical theory; however, researchers of this bent concentrate simply upon the effort to negate the historical image of late imperial period overpopulation, or land or productivity insufficiencies due to overpopulation, that Malthusian theorist have fixated upon for so long. Scholars of comparative history assert that shifts in population, land, and agricultural output in late imperial China were similar to that occurring in Europe during the same period of the eighteenth century. In other words, these arguments put forward by comparative historians do not attempt to refute the explanatory principles of Malthusian theory per se. In contrast, Li argues against any viewpoint of Chinese history that is based on Malthusian demographic theory.

There is another divergence between Li and scholars of comparative history: the fundamental viewpoint from which to construe the socio-economic historical development of late imperial China. Since the second half of the 1990s, there have appeared works by Roy Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz that introduce the examples of Britain and central China as a way to build comparative arguments about the processes of economic development in the East and West, for the purpose of elucidating Chinese development during the late imperial period. Their goal has been to clarify differences between the Chinese and larger East Asian processes of development and the modernization experienced by the West. To that end they focused on the positive role of a state interventionist policy, such as river control and famine relief, as well as the development of agriculture and the rise of merchants in eighteenth-century Jiangnan.Footnote ³ Although Li, by a similar logic, puts the role of the government at the center of her argument, she regards its role as potentially both positive and negative, and with that flexibility tries to find within Qing policies the causes for a divergence in historical processes between the Western world and China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Like those who locate a historical divergence in eighteenth-century China, Li's work also argues that Qing policies of intervention exerted great influence upon the history of China in the eras that followed. Indeed, a correspondence exists between Li and the above-mentioned researchers in the sense that they all want to uncover the reasons for why post-eighteenth-century Chinese socio-economics struck a path so different from that of the West. Both Li and scholars of comparative history agree that state intervention did influence Chinese history. However, she differs from them on the point of whether the role and significance of the intervention, in the long run of Chinese history, was positive or negative.

One might say that the difference between these arguments is derived from fundamental differences of perspective over whether the trajectory of historical development in socio-economics during the late imperial period should be construed as “progress” or “deterioration”. Li's focus on the history of northern China, rather than the more economically advanced region of central China, leads her to conclude that northern China took the historical path of “deterioration”. Interestingly, both Li's viewpoint and that of the comparative historians were formed in the early 1990s, beginning from the same methodological starting point – but in fact they come to very different conclusions. A distinguishing feature of Li's work, then, is that it takes the historical path of China to be not one of “development” nor even “stagnation”, but rather “deterioration”.

Of particular interest to this reviewer is the conclusion, contrary to what prior histories have taught us, that outbreaks of famine in northern China from the nineteenth century on were not due to a “failure” of Qing state policy, but rather its “success”. The author insists that the historical importance of state policies in China should be evaluated not just by policy content, but instead via the peculiarities of the region taken as the policy's target, and the conditions there at the time of implementation. As Li describes, for example, the success of river control ironically caused natural deterioration in the river basins of northern China, which, in turn, necessitated even larger scale intervention that carried with it the danger of causing yet more deterioration. The state granary policy, which worked effectively for food supply in eighteenth-century Beijing, came to be regarded as unnecessary baggage. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state spent a great deal of resources in order to maintain the granary system because of its usefulness in preventing famine, but in doing so loosened the vigilance required to prevent the breakdown of the bureaucratic class whose duty was to manage it. In the end, all that remained was a mere shadow of the former granary system and a legion of corrupt bureaucrats. In such a way Li narrates the process of “deterioration” that was ushered in by Qing governmental food and river control policies, a phenomenon that she ascribes not to fundamental weaknesses of the policies themselves, but rather to the way these policies related to the various conditions of the places in which they were implemented.

Historical theories of the sort Li promotes in this work, such as the notion that the success of Qing economic policies later caused ordinary people to suffer and the natural environment to decline, in fact share the same orientation as Chinese ecological history, which has gained wide currency since the 1990s.Footnote ⁴ As Li states at the beginning of her volume, ecological history frequently emphasizes a mechanism by which human intervention in the natural environment often causes environmental decline, and indeed has a negative impact on society. This work interprets state interventions such as river control and the granary system as the main factors leading to the deterioration of the natural environment in northern China. As such, I believe we should regard this work as an important contribution to a new mode of historical studies.

As the author notes, despite the Qing period paradox of successful governmental interventionist policies actually causing damage in the long run, the hallowed tradition of governmental famine relief has continued in modern and contemporary China. In recent years, environmental problems in China and the need to solve them is of primary concern. The Chinese government and Chinese scholars have begun to pay attention to the history of famine and famine relief in their country, bearing in mind the necessity of formulating responses to environmental problems. The author suggests what they could learn from the historical experience of famine and famine relief in the Qing period, and furnishes an outlook for the future of the country and its government. In that sense, though Li's work focuses on the later imperial period, it also might function as a basic guide to resolving many problems of the contemporary period. It is worthy to be read closely not only by scholars studying Qing history, but also by those studying more recent periods.