Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves. Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal and dike construction to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts and floods. But particularly during the Maoist years the North China Plain was radically re-engineered to utilize every drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric generation. As David A. Pietz shows, Maoist water management from 1949 to 1976 cast a long shadow over the reform period, beginning in 1978. Rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and agricultural intensification over the past three decades of China’s economic boom have been realized on a water resource base that was acutely compromised, with effects that have been more difficult and costly to overcome with each passing decade. Chronicling this complex legacy, The Yellow River provides important insight into how water challenges will affect China’s course as a twenty-first-century global power.

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river’s varied ecosystems—grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts—and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend.

This text had a major impact in its original Chinese version. Reviewed in the Far East Economic Review as 'one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside published in the reform era', it charts a long journey through the hinterland region of the Yellow River undertaken by the author between 1994 and 1996. It examines in exhaustive detail the lives and work of peasants, Party and local government officials, providing a wealth of data on the nature of life in post-reform rural China. The author argues that global integration is but the latest 'great leap forward' in a succession of reforms over a hundred years.

Bill Porter is the ideal travel companion. His depth of knowledge of Chinese history and culture is unparalleled. His wit is ever-present. And his keen eye for the telling detail consistently reminds us that China is not what you think it is. Yellow River Odyssey, already a best-seller in China, reveals a complex, fascinating, contradictory culture like never before.

This book explores the interplay between war and the environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan that raged during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-1943, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.

The Yellow River basin, located in the semi-arid and arid climate zones in northern China is confronted with serious problems of water deficit as well as water pollution. Due to increasing population levels, rising living standards, increasing pressure of expanding irrigation areas and developing industries in the basin, efficient water resource allocation has become a pressing issue here. On the surface it appears to be domestic, but in reality the problem is one of international proportions because it may impact other countries through trade. Development in the basin is restricted by acute water shortage, salinity damage and pollution. There are many scenarios for the allocation of water resources. One extreme is industry-oriented and the other is agriculture-oriented. The allocation between upstream and downstream is also another issue. In order to understand the current state of water resources in the basin and to provide a way of thinking about the issues, this book systematically explains the methods of modeling, mechanism of water circulation on each element and several technologies for water saving. It also introduces cutting-edge research results of the five-year project "improving the sustainability in utilizing and controlling water in the Yellow River basin" sponsored by Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST).

Justin Hill was only twenty-one when he arrived starry-eyed in Yuncheng, central China, a small town hidden among the plains of dusty Shanxi province. He was greeted by a place and people designed to shatter the most tightly held of illusions about the glories of Chinese tradition and culture: an ugly grimy town where spitting in public was encouraged and queuing was anathema, where the local TV output consisted of nightly readings of the works of Deng Xiao Ping interspersed with NBA basketball games. But after two years teaching Yuncheng's inhabitants he emerged knowing that nowhere was more authentically Chinese than this outpost nestling in the bend of the Yellow River, battling the contradictions of past and future with robust good humour.