The River and the Modern State

Every modern Chinese government has inherited Yu's test. David Pietz's history of the river in the twentieth century traces how the imperative to control it survived the end of the empire and became a central project of the republic and then of the People's Republic, absorbing enormous labour and capital and carrying much of the state's claim to competence.

Two episodes mark the extremes. In 1938 the Nationalist government breached the dykes at Huayuankou to slow the Japanese advance, flooding an enormous area and killing on a scale that is still estimated rather than counted. In the 1950s the Sanmenxia dam was built on Soviet advice, silted up far faster than predicted, and had to be rebuilt twice. By the 1990s abstraction upstream was leaving the lower river dry for weeks at a time before it reached the sea.

The ritual dimension has not disappeared; it has been nationalised. Ceremonies at the tomb of the Yellow Emperor at Huangling in Shaanxi, on the loess plateau the river cuts through, were revived from the 1980s and are now attended by state officials as an act of national ancestral commemoration, drawing both mainland and overseas Chinese participants. What was once a dynasty's sacrifice for the mandate is performed as a nation's claim on its own antiquity, and the river remains its setting.