Date: Wednesday August 30, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM BJT

Venue: IB #1011

Speaker: Dr. Wang You, Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Society of Fellows Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences Collegiate Division, The University of Chicago

Moderator: Dr. Fangsheng Zhu, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Duke Kunshan University

Abstract:

As a “world of water,” Jiangnan relied on proper water governance for its agricultural production and commercial navigation. While existing scholarship stresses the role of the state, this study excavates the contributions of local communities and highlights village men and women as architects of long-enduring self-organized hydraulic institutions. Specifically, it investigates a 169-year-long communal cooperation associated with one river—the Taiping—in Danyang, Jiangsu Province. Primarily based on a centuries-long river record collectively produced by nearly two hundred settlements and 14 genealogies that reveal the family trees and biographies of 122 river managers, this study argues that through institutional innovations, rural communities in Jiangnan crafted hydraulic enterprises that contributed to the region’s environmental sustainability and economic prosperity.

Tracing the emergence and evolution of local hydraulic institutions, this study bridges the competing narratives between environmental history and economic history through a community-based approach. In the literature of natural resource management, sustainable ecological systems often require active interventions of the state or the market (privatization). Here, the minimal presence of the state and the market in Jiangnan’s hydraulic maintenance demonstrates the tenacity of local communities and thus challenges the conventional emphasis on either the state intervention or the enclosure of the commons.

This event is organized by CSCC Governing China Research Cluster and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, and the Environment Research Center.