Professor Ma Junya is a historian at Nanjing University. Ma’s book, The Sacrificed Land: Transformation of Huaibei’s Social Ecology, 1680–1949, first published by the National Taiwan University Press in 2010, is a seminal study of the socioeconomic history of the Huaibei region, which covers the area north of the Huai River, including northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui and south-western Shandong. Ma shows how policy and bureaucracy transformed the Huaibei region from a land of plenty into an inhospitable wasteland, with serious consequences for its social order.
In January 2022, the discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, a mother of eight shackled and maltreated by her husband in a Feng county village there, generated fresh interest in Ma’s book.[1] Shocked by the cruelty and indifference to her plight by local villagers and authorities, people turned to Ma’s book for causes of the region’s economic and moral impoverishment—even though the book’s historical scope ends in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was established. In 2023, a revised version of the book, now considered a classic in the field of regional socioeconomic history, was published in mainland China. The following is abridged highlights from his interview with the Shanghai Review of Books on 28 January 2024.[2]
Editors’ introduction
Q1: Back in the Tang and Song dynasties [618–907; 960–1279], the Huaibei region used to be arable and prosperous; it was known as the ‘land of plenty’. But thereafter until the Republican period [1912–49], the region became a so-called inhospitable wasteland. How did this change occur, and why? What was the key turning point in this historical change?
This has to do with water control. Historically, regions were ranked according to their distance to the imperial capital. Every 500 li [roughly 250 kilometres] from the capital, the region’s ranking went down one level. At the centre was the Royal Domain 王畿 [the capital and its environs], then the core regions of the Sovereign Domain 甸服, the Noble Domain 侯服, the Peace-Securing Domain 绥服, the Restrained Domain 要服 and lastly the Wild Domain 荒服. In the past, dynasties focused on developing the Royal Domain and its surrounding core regions, in part because limitations in transportation and communication made it difficult effectively to manage regions further away.
Before the Northern Song dynasty [960–1127], imperial capitals were all located between the Yellow River and the Huai River. Therefore the central government had to ensure the prosperity and stability of the Huaibei area. During the Southern Song [1127–79], the centre of power shifted to Lin’an (contemporary Hangzhou) south of the Yangtze River. Then, in the Yuan dynasty [1271–1368], the capital was moved to Dadu [modern-day Beijing], north of the Yellow River. Huaibei was reduced from a core region to a marginal one. It became a battlefield with neither southern nor northern powers willing to invest in its development. In 1128, the year after Emperor Gaozong 宋高宗 moved his capital to Lin’an [Hangzhou], the imperial official Du Chong 杜充breached the dikes on the south bank of the Yellow River in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the enemy Jurchen army’s advance. Water from the Yellow River flooded southward. The broken dikes were never repaired.
In the Ming dynasty [1368–1644], during the Hongzhi period 弘治 [1488–1505], Liu Daxia 刘大夏, a water management official, blocked the main course of the Yellow River, forcing it to flow south into the Huai River, whose course was very narrow to begin with, and it flooded. Liu did this to protect the Grand Canal [a crucial water transport infrastructure in pre-modern China]. The Ming prioritised the north when it came to water management, including protection of the capital and its surrounding regions (today’s Hebei). The court offered flooded regions tax relief but did not concern itself greatly with the effect of the floods on the lives of the common people. In the early years of the Wanli period 万历 [1573–1619], the director-general of river conservancy Wan Gong 万恭 suggested breaching a levee at Tongwaxiang 铜瓦厢 in the lower reaches of the Yellow River to divert the waters into the Daqing River 大清河 instead. No action was taken, but in 1855, there was a breach at Tongwaxiang, and the Yellow River changed course exactly as Wan Gong had prescribed three centuries earlier.
Q2: We talked about the impact of water control in the Huaibei region earlier. Apart from water control, in your book The Sacrificed Land you also described in detail the effect of grain transport and salt production on the Huaibei region.
During the Ming and Qing dynasty, especially under the Kangxi Emperor [reign period: 1661–1722], grain transport, salt production and water control all centred on Huai’an in Huaibei. Water control was the most costly of all. Under an imperial autocracy, more spending naturally meant more corruption. Frequently, 90 percent of the funds for flood control were embezzled, leading to ineffective flood control. In the Qing dynasty, although eight provinces paid part of their taxation in grains, parts of Huaibei accounted for nearly 40 percent of the whole empire’s grain tribute. The common people had to bear the costs of both the taxes—including corvée labour and providing building materials for water control projects—and the corruption.
Q3: In The Sacrificed Land you used the ‘cult of power’ to explain various social–ecological transitions and transformations in the Huaibei region since 1680. You mentioned that this concept was greatly influenced by Marxist theory. Can you elaborate on it?
I think Marxist theory can explain many things about pre-modern China. It is very useful for us to understand Chinese society. The concept of the cult of power encapsulates Marx’s argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ‘executive power subordinates society to itself’.[3] In my view, pre-modern Chinese society had no religious traditions in the Western sense. Western religions emphasise the purification of the soul through self-reflection, whereas religious worship in Chinese society is pragmatic and self-serving: people pray to Confucius for good examination results, to the Goddess of Mercy Guanyin for more children and to Lord Zhao the Marshal for more wealth. In essence, religious worship in China is the worship of power. People worship gods and deities because they themselves have no power.
Confucianism assigned scholars the highest social status. But the purpose of studying is to become an official, and only by becoming a high official can you rise above other scholars and obtain power. Even Daoism and Buddhism have hierarchies. In Daoism, the Jade Emperor sits at the top, followed by other deities below him, ranked in a strict order. As for Buddhism, there is a story in the novel Water Margin where Lu Zhishen 鲁智深 [a violent man who eventually attained Buddhist enlightenment] declares his intentions of becoming an abbot, and a monk at the temple tells him that he has to begin by carrying water and looking after the vegetable patch, and work his way up. To sum up, before 1949, the only sacred thing in China was power, which people devoutly worshipped.
New edition of Ma Junya’s The Sacrificed Land: Transformation of Huaibei’s Social Ecology, 1680–1949.
Q4: In The Sacrificed Land, you were critical in your analysis of power worship that was prevalent in traditional Chinese society, but you also showed great sympathy for ordinary people. How did this attitude come about?
When I was young, I read novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and imagined myself as a big shot like [the poet, general and statesman] Cao Cao 曹操 or Liu Bei 刘备 [founder of the Shu Han kingdom]. But around my third year at university, my perspective changed. After tracing my family genealogy I realised that my ancestors could not even compare to the lowest-ranking figures recorded in the Twenty-Four Histories. In fact, their likes were not recorded in any histories. Since then, I no longer viewed history from the perspective of powerful and famous men. Instead, I imagine myself as one of the corvée labourers building the Great Wall or one of those unfortunates described in a Tang poem about war as ‘bones lying by the banks of Wuding River’, a farmer, or the owner of some small business, squeezed by corrupt officials day after day. Ordinary people form the majority in history. This is also what Marxist historiography emphasises: to study history from the bottom.
I also study history from a regional perspective. Scholars outside China have devised many influential theories about Chinese history, but they are usually inapplicable to the Huaibei region, where I grew up. For example, the theory of ‘involution’ looks at the issue of diminishing returns per unit of labour in agriculture caused by overpopulation. However, the same theory cannot be applied to the Huaibei region. The Huaibei region historically had a relatively small population with a lot of land, but they could not farm it profitably because of constant flooding. During imperial times, the central government deliberately flooded the region again and again. This resulted in constant social turmoil and banditry. Peasants simply abandoned their land, which grew desolate. This had the greatest effect on the local middle class. Wealthy families could afford to keep private armies to defend themselves against bandits, while the poor had nothing to be robbed. The social structure of the Huainan region was dumbbell-shaped, with the richest families at the very top, the common people and bandits at the very bottom, and scant middle class in between. A middle-class household with an ox was the most desirable target for the bandits. A dozen people would rush into your house, snatch your ox, sell it the same evening and divide up the spoils. The common people also faced severe exploitation by officials and landlords.
Q5: You just used the reality of the Huaibei region to challenge the well-known theory of involution. This reminded me of a comparison you made in your book: some regions suffered from capitalism while Huaibei suffered from the absence of capitalism. Could you elaborate?
Capitalism developed relatively early in the Yangtze delta region. The harm caused by capitalist economic crises in that region has been well studied. However, scholars have failed to examine how places like Huaibei suffered from the lack of capitalism. Under a market economy, businesses experience profits and losses, and prices fluctuate. Farmers can decide whether to plant rice or mulberry according to the demands of the market. In contrast, in places where power is concentrated in the hands of the elite, like Huaibei, everything is subject to their arbitrary decision-making. People have no choice but to endure the greater losses and suffering that result.
In the Dictionary of Political Economy, edited by scholars including Xu Dixin 许涤新, a landlord is defined as ‘someone who rents out land’ while a worker is a ‘landless proletariat’. In reality, proletariats formed the majority of the landlords in the Yangtze delta region. According to research by economic historian Li Bozhong 李伯重, in the 1820s every household cultivated around ten mu [1.6 acres] of farmland in the Yangtze delta region. In many instances, the labour force of the household worked in factories and rented out the land to others to farm, making most landlords working class.
Q6: You used the novel Water Margin to support your research on the social and economic history of the Huaibei region, which reminded me of the book Water Margin and Chinese Society by Sa Mengwu 萨孟武. Can you talk about the reasoning behind it?
I refer to Water Margin in the context of a historiographical method called mutual verification between literature and history. I have two principles in historical research. The first is to identify and critically examine historical materials. The second principle is never use materials that I cannot verify elsewhere. As in a court trial, there must be a chain of evidence. Water Margin and other novels I refer to, like Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, can be classified as ‘social novels’, which supplement historical materials to serve in the chain of evidence.
Water Margin was written in the early Ming dynasty, with modifications and new versions appearing later in the dynasty. The theme song of the 1998 TV series Water Margin sings about ‘a friendship of life and death forged over a bowl of wine’. To offer one’s life in exchange for a bowl of wine or a meal indeed reflects the material scarcity of a famine-stricken society. This was also the social norm of Huaibei society. During an uprising at the end of the Yuan dynasty [1279–1368], a wealthy family only had to slaughter a few cattle and prepare a few jars of wine to incite a mob to murder the county magistrate.
Q7：Some have criticised you for showing too much personal emotion in your book. In the epilogue, you talked about your experiences growing up and studying in Huaibei in stark poverty, as well as the challenges of doing field research in your hometown. Is it right to assume that you brought your personal experience into this book and, to some extent, you wanted to tackle prejudices against the Huabei region and its people?
I do not think there is any historian who writes without any personal bias. Even choosing what to study and which materials to use is based on personal likes and dislikes. Scholars who claim to be purely objective are lying.
I studied at Soochow University in the 1990s. Back then I could barely afford proper clothing. For three-quarters of the year I would wear the same outfit: a khaki military jacket, a pair of track pants, and sneakers with holes in the toes. Poverty was one reason why I was drawn to this subject. Most of my classmates came from the relativity prosperous Yangtze delta region, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. I dared not attend the social dances that were popular at that time, or invite anyone to the movies. My classmates looked down on me, and I gradually discovered from my readings that people from Huaibei had been discriminated against for their poverty by those from the neighbouring Yangtze delta region since the Ming dynasty. However, if you look back further in history, things were different.
The more I read about the Huaibei region, the more perplexed I became: before the Northern Song dynasty, not only was my home region way more developed than the Yangtze delta region, it also produced many noteworthy figures, including the Han general Xiao He 萧何 [257–193 BC] and the Three Kingdoms military strategist Zhou Yu 周瑜 [175–210]. How come a thousand years later, by the time of Emperor Qianlong’s southern tour, he described Huaibei as ‘barren mountains and poor rivers, vulgar men and shrewish women’?[4] Why have there been so many misunderstandings and prejudices against the Huaibei region? I began doing fieldwork in the region because I wanted to find an explanation for this historical change. I was dissatisfied with what existing history books, models and theories had to say about the Huaibei region.
My background is in history, and I have not received any formal training in anthropology or sociology. So I did not have a carefully formulated plan for field research. I just wandered around looking for answers to the questions that had piled up from my readings. At that time, I was living entirely off my scholarship. To save money, in winter, I lived in a public bathhouse because it was warm, and in summer, I stayed in any cheap guesthouse as long as it came with an electric fan. I was living among street performers and vendors.
The most unforgettable experience was when I went to Feng County for research. As soon as I entered a village, villagers began to follow me, cursing me from behind. I turned around to see what was happening, and I was immediately surrounded by people who started hitting me. More people joined in the beating, all shouting and cursing. It seemed like half the village had come running over. When I told this story to the director of the Xuzhou Salt Industry Bureau, who had also grown up around there, he shrugged and said that was nothing. Their division director had been stabbed by a mob before.
Because I grew up in the Huaibei region and conducted fieldwork there, my research focus and perspectives cannot be the same as those who write about the region while sipping coffee in their studies. For me, it is necessary through research and writing to reconstruct the ecology of the Huaibei society with which I am familiar. I hope my book can serve as a different point of reference and offer readers a new way of thinking.
Notes
[1] Joel Wing-Lun, ‘What have we learned from “the woman in chains”?’, China Story, 9 May 2022, online at: https://www.thechinastory.org/what-have-we-learned-from-the-woman-in-chains/
[2] ‘Interview with Ma Junya’ 马俊亚谈被牺牲的“局部”, Shanghai Book Review, 28 January 2024, online at: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_26167117
[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm.
[4] When the Qianlong emperor visited Xuzhou, he reportedly uttered the phrase ‘poor mountains and rivers, untamed men and women’ 穷山恶水，泼妇刁民. Although lacking any historical record, the saying became popular when describing the Huaibei region.
