China Along the Yellow River

China Along the Yellow River
Author: Cao Jinqing
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2004-12-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134296630

This book, by leading Chinese sociologist Cao Jingqing, has had a major impact.

The Yellow River

The Yellow River
Author: David A. Pietz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674966929

Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves. Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal and dike construction to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts and floods. But particularly during the Maoist years the North China Plain was radically re-engineered to utilize every drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric generation. As David A. Pietz shows, Maoist water management from 1949 to 1976 cast a long shadow over the reform period, beginning in 1978. Rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and agricultural intensification over the past three decades of China’s economic boom have been realized on a water resource base that was acutely compromised, with effects that have been more difficult and costly to overcome with each passing decade. Chronicling this complex legacy, The Yellow River provides important insight into how water challenges will affect China’s course as a twenty-first-century global power.

Controlling the Dragon

Controlling the Dragon
Author: Randall A. Dodgen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2001-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780824823665

The Yellow River has long been viewed as a symbol of China's cultural and political development, its management traditionally held as a gauge of dynastic power. For centuries, the country's early rulers employed a defensive approach to the river by building dikes and diversion channels to protect fields and population centers from flooding. This situation changed dramatically after the Yuan (1260-1368) emperors constructed the Grand Canal, which linked the North China Plain and the capital at Beijing with the Yangtze Valley. One of the most ambitious imperial undertakings of any age, by the turn of the nineteenth century the water system had become a complex network of locks, spillways, and dikes stretching eight hundred kilometers from the mountains in western Henan to the Yellow Sea. Controlling the Dragon examines Yellow River engineering from two perspectives. The first looks at long-term efforts to manage the river starting in the early Ming dynasty, at the nature of the bureaucracy created to do the job, and finally focuses on two of the Confucian engineers who served successfully in the decade before the system was abandoned. In the second section, the author chronicles a series of dramatic floods in the 1840s and explores the way politics, environment, and technology interacted to undermine the state's commitment to the Yellow River control system.

The Ecology of War in China

The Ecology of War in China
Author: Micah S. Muscolino
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107071569

This book explores the interplay between war and the environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan that raged during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-1943, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.

The Yellow River

The Yellow River
Author: Ruth Mostern
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0300263112

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river’s varied ecosystems—grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts—and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend.

The Water Kingdom

The Water Kingdom
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 022647092X

From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries. Water has been so integral to China’s culture, economy, and growth and development that it provides a window on the whole sweep of Chinese history. In The Water Kingdom, renowned writer Philip Ball opens that window to offer an epic and powerful new way of thinking about Chinese civilization. Water, Ball shows, is a key that unlocks much of Chinese culture. In The Water Kingdom, he takes us on a grand journey through China’s past and present, showing how the complexity and energy of the country and its history repeatedly come back to the challenges, opportunities, and inspiration provided by the waterways. Drawing on stories from travelers and explorers, poets and painters, bureaucrats and activists, all of whom have been influenced by an environment shaped and permeated by water, Ball explores how the ubiquitous relationship of the Chinese people to water has made it an enduring metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression. From the Han emperors to Mao, the ability to manage the waters ? to provide irrigation and defend against floods ? was a barometer of political legitimacy, often resulting in engineering works on a gigantic scale. It is a struggle that continues today, as the strain of economic growth on water resources may be the greatest threat to China’s future. The Water Kingdom offers an unusual and fascinating history, uncovering just how much of China’s art, politics, and outlook have been defined by the links between humanity and nature.

The River, the Plain, and the State

The River, the Plain, and the State
Author: Ling Zhang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2016-09-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107155983

This book explores the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how it affected the state, environment, and inhabitants of the region.

A Bend in the Yellow River

A Bend in the Yellow River
Author: Justin Hill
Publisher: Phoenix (USA)
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780753801147

Justin Hill was only twenty-one when he arrived starry-eyed in Yuncheng, central China, a small town hidden among the plains of dusty Shanxi province. He was greeted by a place and people designed to shatter the most tightly held of illusions about the glories of Chinese tradition and culture: an ugly grimy town where spitting in public was encouraged and queuing was anathema, where the local TV output consisted of nightly readings of the works of Deng Xiao Ping interspersed with NBA basketball games. But after two years teaching Yuncheng's inhabitants he emerged knowing that nowhere was more authentically Chinese than this outpost nestling in the bend of the Yellow River, battling the contradictions of past and future with robust good humour.

Red Land, Yellow River

Red Land, Yellow River
Author: Ange Zhang
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Total Pages: 75
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1773063669

The amazing, dramatic, and painful autobiographical story of Ange Zhang as he came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China. When Mao’s Cultural Revolution took hold in China in June 1966, Ange Zhang was thirteen years old. His father was a famous writer. Shortly after the revolution began, many of Ange’s classmates joined the Red Guard, Mao’s youth movement, and they drove their teachers out of the classrooms. But in the weeks that followed, Ange discovered that his father’s fame as a writer now meant that he was a target of the new regime. When his father was arrested, he began to question everything that was happening in his country. Finally, Ange was forced to join many other young urban Chinese students in the countryside for re-education where he found the emotional space to develop his own artistic talent and to find that he, like his father, was an artist — except that Ange’s talent lay in painting and drawing. This dramatic, painful autobiographical story is complemented by photographs, many drawn from Ange’s personal collection, as well as a non-fiction section that explains the historical period and is also illustrated with archival images. Key Text Features author’s note glossary Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.7 Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.

The Technical History Of China's Grand Canal

The Technical History Of China's Grand Canal
Author: Xuming Tan
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1945552050

Based on the past 30-years' research on the technical and cultural values of China's Grand Canal, this book, based on interdisciplinary research, studies the natural and social background of the evolution and development of different sections of the Grand Canal in different historical periods, as well as the interrelations between the Grand Canal and the Chinese politics, economics, and culture. It also assesses the effects of the Grand Canal on the progress of the Chinese civilization, engineering technology achievement, the natural environment, and the society, providing the readers with an understanding of China's Grand Canal from the perspectives of hydraulic engineering and history.