Rivers and Chinese Society

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

It is widely but wrongly believed that "oriental societies" like China developed "despotism" through mobilizing and monitoring hydraulic projects, from the century-old Yellow River Conservatory to the more recent Three Gorges Dam. Based on well-established studies, this course refuses such state-centered narratives between human and environmental landscape. Through the lens of rivers, we will collectively investigate both classic and emerging scholarship on the social, political, and environmental history of early modern and modern China. From North China Plain to the Upper Yangzi Valley, from Xinjiang to Shanghai, we examine the different agents of water governance (especially the relations between the state and riverine communities), the painstaking efforts to manage water resources, and how deeply everyday life was intertwined with rivers and their water.