Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

rather weakly correlated across continents, but their charts (5) show it as strong everywhere, with dramatic warmth during 1000–1200 in Asia).

      Another advantage, not often enough appreciated, is that China is centripetal. It seeks its center. The central part of the country is composed of the Yellow, Huai, and Yangzi valleys, a vast continuous area of fertile soil. In early historic times, this was an unbelievably lush landscape—swarming with game, covered by billions of fruit and nut trees and edible wild plants, and generally blessed with riches. China is bounded by rugged mountains and deserts that protect it from invasion—not enough to keep invaders out, but enough to prevent them from routinely devastating the landscape, as happened in eastern Europe.

      The downside of this is that China is all too easy to centralize. Almost all historians now seem to agree that Europe’s great natural advantage is the fact that it cannot be conquered and held as one single empire—at least, nobody has ever managed to do so (Lieberman 2009; Morris 2010). The central spine of mountains is surrounded by a set of detached, widely separated, very rich lands: the regions we know as France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and so on. The fact that nobody could centralize control over this disparate range of countries has led to a great deal of independence. In particular, in the critically important seventeenth century, when science, capitalism, imperialism, and liberal politics were all becoming major forces, the desperate attempts by autocrats to enforce their absolutism (P. Anderson 1974) were doomed to fail, because dissidents simply went to the next country.

      China, unfortunately, could easily centralize, set up a dinosauric bureaucracy, and crack down on independent inquiry. This was done repeatedly: under Qin Shi Huang Di, Han Wu Di, and on down to Chairman Mao. The Warring States Period, of course, proves the point: China’s great age of thought and philosophy was precisely when the country was divided into many small states, each seeking to attain an advantage over the others by getting the best experts on statecraft, war, and policy. The period of disunion from 300 to 589 was probably similar, but is poorly documented.

       Why Study the Chinese Food System?

      The world is now in desperate need of an intensive yet sustainable food production system. Such a system can be constructed on the basis of East Asian insights. For 10,000 years, East Asian peoples have been developing systems that often used resources in relatively sustainable and efficient ways, permitting extremely intensive and productive systems to survive over millennia. East Asian agriculture uses minimal land and resources for maximal production.

      One key design feature of that agricultural system—arrived at by trial and error, not by deliberate plan—is the overall purpose of maximizing nutritional adequacy, not maximizing profit or starch or oil or any other single output. This objective has been accomplished by selecting strains of plants and animals that would produce maximum nutrients of all sorts, including vitamins and minerals, with minimum input. The result has been an agricultural system that maintains a great deal of biodiversity, both in the wild and in cultivated crops. Fields, gardens, managed semiwild lands, managed forests, and specialized agricultural landscapes are all part of this integrated system.

      The system generally increased its food production capacity by intensifying the latter in place. This required a “biological” development strategy (Hayami and Ruttan 1985), in which more and more fertilizer, compost, and land improvement were used, and more and more crop species grown, over time. This requires a concomitant increase in skill and knowledge.

      By contrast, the Western world has tended to rely on constantly expanding the range of cultivated landscape. The conquest of the New World and Australia was driven in great measure by the desperate need for more land. This was in large part because of concentration on animal husbandry—especially cattle and sheep—and on relatively low-yield grains, notably wheat and barley. The Chinese, typically, managed to develop high-yield wheat agriculture, and eventually the West did too, but expansion remained the key western developmental idea. Latin America, for instance, was, and continues to be, cleared of natural vegetation—and indigenous people—largely for cattle ranching.

      There have been large pockets of intensive, and intensifying, agriculture in the West, for example, Italy throughout much of history, Moorish Andalucia, and northwestern Europe since the 1700s or earlier. China has had its extensive, expanding, low-yield zones, especially on the northwest frontier, where agriculture kept encroaching on the steppes, only to collapse and retreat when dry periods occurred. But the general difference was enough to make Chinese grain yields five times those in most of the West in the early twentieth century: about 2,500 kg/ha versus 500. Comparing, say, Denmark with northern Shaanxi would reverse those figures, but we are still contemplating a real and important difference. It matters for the future: the world has run out of agricultural land, and a collapse inward has begun as more and more land goes out of cultivation due to urbanization and erosion.

      Especially intensive and sustainable has been the system that initially developed in southern China—long before it was “China” or “Chinese”—and spread widely throughout eastern Asia and Oceania. Rice paddy agriculture, highly fertilized vegetable plots, tree cropping, and intensive, dryland garden-fields are components. The principal domestic animals—pigs and chickens—did not require the vast expanses of grazing land required by cattle and sheep. Variants of the system exist from northern Japan to southern Indonesia. China has generally been the major site of innovation, but far from the only one.

      Such hopeful and creative modern systems as polyculture carry these insights forward today. Traditional Chinese agriculture was far from perfect, but it was incomparably more efficient and environmentally sane than modern industrial agriculture—especially the form currently used in China itself.

       The World-System Model

      My analysis of the formation of this food system rests on a generalized world-system model. The idea of a world-system began with Immanuel Wallerstein (1976), who had a detailed and systematic theory of how such a system operates. At some point, a translocal or transnational network of exchange becomes so important that it is a real system—a bounded entity within which goods and information flow in large quantities and relatively freely, as opposed to sharply reduced flows outside the bounds of the system. Furthermore, in a system, everything is connected, directly or indirectly. Any fairly major event in the system influences every part of it. A human body is a system. So is the electrical wiring of my house. A world-system—or oikumene, to use an old Greek term—is a system of interacting polities that are closely linked by trade, communication, and information flow. The world has had local “world-systems” (or local polity systems, if you will) for a very long time (Chase-Dunn and Anderson 2005; Chase-Dunn et al. 2007). The major ones had joined into a single world-system by 1600.

      Obviously, these definitions are vague and relative. There is no question that the world today is one system; a financial shock in Japan ruins companies in Germany and South Africa. There is no question that the world economy of 15,000 BCE was not a system. The flood of population from Asia into the Western Hemisphere around that time, and its dramatic increase there, did not affect the rest of the world one whit. In between, a great deal happened. Fairly arbitrary cutoffs have to be selected if one is writing histories; thus the invasion of Syria by Pharaoh Thutmose I around 1500 BCE is somewhat—but not entirely—arbitrarily set as the point at which the Egyptian system fused with the West Asian one into a single Near Eastern oikumene (Christopher Chase-Dunn, forthcoming).

      The corresponding date for the Near East and East Asia has not been set. In formal world-systems theory, it probably did not occur until the nineteenth century, when the West could directly invade, dominate, and dictate terms. But this was only the end of a long process. The Mongols definitively united East and West in the 1200s, and no one could really say there were separate systems after that. Still earlier, West and East first came into violent contact in 751 CE, when the expanding Arab and Chinese Empires met and clashed at the Talas River in the dead center of Asia; the Arabs won, and Central Asia became Muslim. Far earlier came the fateful moment when wheat and barley reached China. No one knows the exact date, but it was apparently around 4,500 years ago. At some point a trader or farmer from somewhere that might later be called Afghanistan showed up at a compound in what would much later be called Shaanxi, and said “boy, have