Abstract
During World War II, or the ‘Anti-Japanese War of Resistance’ (1937–45) as it is known in China, North China’s Henan Province endured a series of war-induced ecological disasters. The first struck in June 1938, when Chinese Nationalist armies under the command of Chiang Kai-shek breached the Yellow River’s dikes in Henan in a desperate attempt to block a Japanese military advance.1 For the next nine years, the Yellow River’s waters spread to the southeast into the Huai River system via its tributaries, inundating vast quantities of land. Perhaps the single most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history, the strategic interdiction threw long-established water control infrastructure into disarray, leading to floods that persisted until after the conflict had come to an end. Investigations carried out after 1945 estimated that the resulting floods killed over 800,000 and made nearly 4,000,000 people refugees in the provinces of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu. In Henan Province alone, wartime flooding killed over 325,000 people and displaced over 1,170,000.2
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Notes
For existing works that examine the flood from a military perspective see, Qu Changgen 渠長根, Merits and Wrongdoings for a Thousand Years: Research on the Huayuankou Incident [功罪千秋: 花園口事件研究] (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2003);
Diana Lary, ‘The Waters Covered the Earth: China’s War-Induced Natural Disasters’, in War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Selden and Alvin So (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004).
Most of the empirical information in this chapter draws upon Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Han Qitong 韓啟桐 and Nan Zhongwan 南鍾萬, Damage and Recovery and Relief in the Yellow River Flooded Area [黃氾區的損害與善後救濟] (Shanghai: Xingzhengyuan shanhou jiuji zongshu, 1948), 22–3.
The oldest and still the most influential account is Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1946).
For more recent accounts see, Lary, ‘The Waters Covered the Earth’; Odoric Wou, ‘Food Shortage and Japanese Grain Extraction in Henan’, in China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945, ed. Stephen R. MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Vogel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Largely because of flooding and famine, during the Sino-Japanese War Henan had a larger refugee population than any other province in China. From 1937 to 1945, an estimated 14,533,200 people in Henan, an astounding 43 per cent of the province’s total pre-war population, lived as refugees for at least a time. Stephen R. MacKinnon, ‘Refugee Flight at the Outset of the Anti-Japanese War’, in The Impact of War on Modern China, ed. Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2001), 122.
My conceptual framework draws considerable inspiration from the insights provided by Mark Fiege, ‘Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War’, in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward An Environmental History of War, ed. Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 93–109; and Simo Laakkonen, ‘War, an Ecological Alternative to Peace? Indirect Impacts of World War II on the Finnish Environment’, in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, ed. Tucker and Russell, 175–94.
Helga Weisz, ‘Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade’, in Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, ed. Alf Hornborg, John Robert McNeill, and Juan Martínez-Alier (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 291–2.
This approach has also benefited greatly from Joan Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (New York: Blackwell, 1987);
and ‘Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade’, in Rethinking Environmental History, ed. Hornborg, McNeill, and Martinez-Alier, 221–38; Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helmut Haberl, Socioecological Transitions and Global Change: Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007).
Edmund Burke III, ‘The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment’, in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 35.
See also Richard White, Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 4–5.
David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007), 9;
Gerald G. Marten, Human Ecology: Basic Concepts for Sustainable Development (London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2001), 109;
Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 4–5.
Smil, Energy in Nature and Society, 6–7; Marten, Human Ecology, 109–10; Pimentel and Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, 9–11; David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), Appendix II; Burke, ‘The Big Story’, 34.
J. R. McNeill, ‘China’s Environmental History in World Perspective’, in Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung, eds., Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 46.
See also Ralph Sawyer, Fire and Water: The Art of Incendiary and Aquatic Warfare in China (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004).
Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 164.
Robert Marks, China: its Environment and History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 336;
Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants; Mark Elvin, ‘Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth: China’s Environment from Archaic Times to the Present’, East Asian History 6 (1993): 7–46.
Emmanuel Kreike, ‘Architects of Nature: Environmental Infrastructure and the Nature-Culture Dichotomy’ (PhD diss., Wageningen University, 2006), 18–19. These ideas are refined and elaborated in Emmanuel Kreike, Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
A relatively abundant literature exists on the environmental crisis that prevailed in North China from the 1800s through the 1930s. See especially Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993);
Randall A. Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants;
Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s–1990s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘The Transformation of China’s Environment, 1500–2000’, in The Environment and World History, ed. Burke and Kenneth; Marks, China, 235–43.
Li, Fighting Famine in North China, 307. For a survey of flood and drought disasters in Henan during the Republican period, see Su Xinliu 蘇新留, Flood and Drought Disasters and Rural Society in Henan During the Republican Period [民國時期河南水旱災害與鄉村社會] (Zhengzhou: Huanghe shuili chubanshe, 2004).
Scattered oral histories and memoir literature are usefully collected in Wen Fang 文芳, ed., Natural and Man-Made Disasters [天災人禍(天禍)] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2004).
Micah S. Muscolino, ‘Violence Against People and the Land: The Environment and Refugee Migration from China’s Henan Province, 1938–1945’, Environment and History 17, no. 2 (2011): 291–311.
The term ‘warscapes’ is drawn from Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
S. Brönnimann, J. Luterbacher, J. Staehelin, T. M. Svendby, G. Hansen and T. Svenøe, ‘Extreme Climate of the Global Troposphere and Stratosphere in 1940–1942 Related to El Niño’, Nature 431 (21 October 2004): 971–4.
Peter Perdue, ‘Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature?’ in The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, ed. Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 114.
Hans van de Ven, ‘The Sino-Japanese War in History’, in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, ed. Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 458.
The concept of ‘advanced organic economy’ originated with E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Late imperial and early twentieth-century China has been characterized as an advanced organic economy by Robert B. Marks, China: Its Environment and History, as well as in his The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2001), 11–12.
Micah S. Muscolino, ‘Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in Wartime China: Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, 1937–45’, The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 2 (2010): 453–78; Muscolino, ‘Violence Against People and the Land’.
William M. Tsutsui, ‘Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan’, Environmental History 8, no. 2 (2003): 295.
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1998), 72.
Edmund Russell, ‘Afterword: Militarized Landscapes’, in Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain, ed. Chris Pearson, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 237.
Matthew Evenden, ‘Aluminum, Commodity Chains, and the Environmental History of the Second World War’, Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 70.
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© 2016 Micah S. Muscolino
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Muscolino, M.S. (2016). The Energetics of Militarized Landscapes: The Ecology of War in Henan, 1938–50. In: Liu, Tj., Beattie, J. (eds) Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57231-8_8
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