The Yangzi River and the Environmental History of South China

Over the last seven thousand years, humans have gradually domesticated the environment of South China. Transitioning from a reliance on wild environments, humans tamed plants and animals and transformed the landscapes and waterscapes to better fit their needs. Rice paddies, orchards, and artificial ponds and forests replaced naturally seeded woodlands and seasonal wetlands. Even the Yangzi River, and many of the other rivers, lakes, and seashores, were transformed by polders, dikes, and seawalls to better support human activities, especially rice agriculture. In the last thousand years, farmers intensified their control of the cultivated landscape through terracing, irrigation, flood prevention, and new crop rotations. They planted commercial crops like cotton, fruits, oilseeds, tea, and sugar cane in growing concentrations. Migrants and merchants spread logging, mining, and intensive agriculture to thinly settled parts of the south and west. Since the 17th century, New World crops like sweet potatoes, chilis, maize, and tobacco enabled a further intensification of land use, especially in the mountains. Since the early 1800s, land clearance and river diking reached extremes and precipitated catastrophic flooding, social unrest, and a century of warfare. Since 1950, the People’s Republic has overseen three further waves of degradation accompanying the mass campaigns of the Mao era and the market reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Following catastrophic flooding in 1998, the government has increasingly worked to reverse these trends. Nonetheless, South China remains one of the most intensively cultivated environments in the world and continues to feel the effects of new attempts to tame and expropriate the forces of nature.

Guo Pu Crosses the River: Migration Anecdotes in Jinshu Biographical Narratives

In the early fourth century CE, after the escalation of a series of succession disputes among the imperial Sima clan, the Jin dynasty collapsed and its capital city of Luoyang 洛陽 was destroyed. However, the end of the dynasty did not cause the Sima clan to fall from power entirely. Instead, the Jin dynasty was reestablished in the new capital of Jiankang 建康, the city known today as Nanjing. The earlier incarnation of the Jin would come to be known as the Western Jin dynasty, while the restored Jin dynasty is referred to as the Eastern Jin. The impact of this cataclysm on the inhabitants of Luoyang and the surrounding regions is difficult to quantify, and even harder to understand in more personal terms. We know that many of those who did not perish fled to the southeast, crossing the Yangzi River to resettle in the new capital. Later texts refer to this period as “The disorder of the Yongjia Reign” (Yongjia zhi luan 永嘉之亂). This epithet uses the imperial reign name given to the period between 307 and 313, even though the disasters did not neatly begin and end with those years. Although the Yongjia troubles are addressed throughout surviving historiographic material, there is no work of history dedicated to documenting the ensuing exodus from Luoyang to Jiankang.

The Neolithic Revolution in the South ca. 7/6000–2000 bce: Majiabang, Hemudu, Daxi, and Songze Cultures

This chapter analyzes the Neolithic revolution in the south from ca. 7/6000–2000 bce. The cultures it discusses include the Majiabang, Hemudu, Daxi, and Songze, primarily located in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangzi River Delta. Key phenomena explored in this chapter include rice cultivation; use of the stone plowshare; advanced wood technology; column architecture; surrounding dry trench settlement; high man-made platform altars; advanced crafts of painting, sculpting, and engraving; cosmological double bird symbolization (images of moonlight and sunlight); and other light and fertility symbols (rotating sun symbol with birds).

Economic Development in the Name of Protecting the Environment in Rural China: The Case of the Swan Islet National Nature Reserves

Swan Islet, located in the old course of the Yangzi River in Shishou, Hubei, central China, was chosen as a nature reserve first to conserve milu 麋鹿 (Père David’s deer) in 1987 and white-fin dolphins 白鱀豚 in 1992. The local government then built dikes to protect this area from the annual high water of the Yangzi River, which turned a considerable amount of riverside wasteland into reclaimable land attractive to the local farmers. At the same time, more land was needed to feed the fast-growing herds of milu. In the river, dolphins and fisherfolk compete for resources. Different interests have caused conflicts between the government, farmers, and fisherfolk. Conflicts between governmental bureaus has made things even more complicated. With the increasing appeal of wetland preservation, the local government added wetland preservation to its agenda and applied for financial support from upper-level governments. Attempting to lure tourists with milu—a “national treasure”—and original wetlands, the local government is hoping to promote eco-tourism and eventually to boost local economic growth, all in the name of protecting the environment.

Change-Point Analysis of Precipitation and Drought Extremes in China over the Past 50 Years

Increases in climate extremes and their impacts have attracted global attention recently. In this study, the change-point years of precipitation extremes (PEs) and drought extremes (DEs) were investigated by Moving t-Test at 500 stations across the six regions in China. The detailed temporal change processes of them were demonstrated by the cumulative deviation method based on the data from nine typical stations. The results showed that: 1) DEs were more significantly and widely increased than PEs, the stations with increasing trends of PEs and DEs accounted for greater than 52.6% and 61.6% of the total, respectively; 2) increasing trends of DEs were mainly distributed in the east of Hu Huanyong Line. In this area, the increasing change-point years of DEs often occurred in the early 1980s in the south of the Yangzi River, while occurred in the 1990s in the north of the Yangzi River; 3) increasing trends of PEs were mainly distributed in Qing-Tibet Platen, Northwest China, and the southeastern area of Hu Huanyong Line. In these areas, the increasing change-point years of PEs often occurred around 1990 in the southeast of Hu Huanyong Line, while often occurred in the early 1980s in Qing-Tibet Platen. The results indicated that the area in the southeast of Hu Huanyong Line was under the threats of both PEs and DEs, this may produce severe impacts on agriculture, environment, water resources management, human society, etc.