This is a love story. Most love stories, however, are bound to be punctuated by disasters, both natural and manmade. The Chinese have been infatuated with the Yellow River since the mythic age of Yu the Great. Every dynastic ruler premised his mandate on the state's capacity of “ordering the water” (p. 7). And not just any water. It had to be the Yellow River, the “cradle of Chinese civilization,” no matter how much silt perennially drained into the river as it completed its Big Bend around the Loess Plateau. The inundations of the Yellow River made and remade the North China Plain, reinforcing the latter's role as China's political center despite the plain's inherently unfavorable biophysical conditions. Waters rose, dynasties fell, and maintenance costs climbed steeply along with the river's dikes, which ruptured nonetheless. This exhausting cycle finally broke down in 1855, when the Yellow River violently changed its course and swept through three provinces. Looking back at the entire history of imperial China, David Pietz sums up a sad irony: “The North China Plain had [by 1900] returned full circle to the ecological conditions confronted by Yu the Great” (p. 72).

Pietz's biography of the Yellow River spans six chapters, from imperial China to the present day, with portions dedicated to the Qing and Republican hydraulic designs. The choicest meat of the book, however, consists of the three chapters on the People's Republic of China. What happened when China's inveterate obsession with the Yellow River was compounded by modern nationalism and equipped with giant machines? The answer: an audacious plan to build a cascade of forty-six dams on the Yellow River and a stern principle that “water that ran freely to the sea was water wasted” (p. 229). Communist China had to tame the Yellow River for pride, food, and factories; the examples of America's Tennessee Valley Authority and the Soviet Union's Great Volga Project fed this ambition. Water projects were carried out on three levels: Sanmenxia Dam showcased a grand-scale “technology complex,” and the People's Victory Canal was the poster child of medium-scale diversion projects. On the ground, “irrigation development was the single largest area of investment for the [people's] communes” (p. 208). Then came the aggressive exploitation of groundwater, made possible by cheap electrical pumps.

Pietz chronicles how forty years of high modernism and high socialism reversed the South's millennium-long role as the “breadbasket” of China. Since 1978, the North China Plain, with its production of 60 percent of China's wheat and 40 percent of its corn, has been transferring foodstuffs to the South (pp. 254, 265). Meanwhile, the entire ecosystem of the North China Plain has depleted its water both aboveground and underground: Yellow River desiccation, clogged irrigation gates, 3,000 collapsed dams, and nitrogen sinking into groundwater aquifers are mounting problems. Crops are growing in precisely the region that is among China's driest, and they must continue to grow because of the government's stated commitments to the peasantry and its need to maintain the nation's political center in Beijing. Ultimately, the state decided to use sheer engineering force to order the water of the Yangtze River to flow north. The proposed South-to-North Water Diversion Project would take the entire first half of the twenty-first century to complete, and its viability remains highly controversial.

Perhaps this is why Pietz provides a map of “regional virtual water transfers” in the opening chapter (p. 11) to help readers comprehend the root irrationality of China's water situation. The map divides China into eight regions and marks each region's export/import volume of “virtual water,” which means the amount of water consumed for agricultural production. The North China Plain exports the most foodstuffs out of the eight regions, and each year 26 billion cubic meters of “virtual water” are transferred southward. In other words, the parched North is exhausting its precious water to feed the water-abundant South, while the South is forced to have its rivers emasculated to flush water northward. Pietz's meticulous analysis allows readers to see the writing on the wall as clearly as he himself does: sedimentation, salinization, pollution, engineering debacles, sinking cities (including Beijing itself, according to recent news), exasperated peasants, and battles over Himalayan headwaters.

Pietz's research on the Yellow River, together with his 2002 monograph on the Huai River, represents a concerted effort to create a field of water studies in Chinese history.Footnote ⁴ Scholarship on China's seven major river systems—the Songhua, Liao, Hai, Yellow, Huai, Yangzi, and Pearl rivers—has been limited. After Lyman P. Van Slyke's masterful book Yangtze, it is Pietz alone who has completed stand-alone biographies of the Huai and Yellow rivers.Footnote ⁵ Pietz goes one step further and looks to the future, revealing China's ongoing historical trajectory toward hydro-crisis. His book thus pairs strongly with Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black on the topic of contemporary Chinese water management.Footnote ⁶ Precisely because of its potential appeal to a wide range of readers across the disciplines, a more systematic explanation of many frequently appearing terms would seem appropriate (e.g., drain, seepage, turbine, penstock, estuary, settling basin, detention reservoir, riparian water table, second salinization, and so forth). This is, however, a minor criticism.

In sum, Pietz has written a superb book, but sadly, this Yellow River romance, as old as China itself, seems to promise still more watery tears in the century ahead.