How China’s 5,100-year-old dams challenge Western narratives on despotism

While some Western scholars have maintained that the development of large-scale water projects fostered what they called “Oriental despotism”, new archaeological evidence from China has presented a different story.

According to the Key Laboratory of Archaeological Science and Cultural Heritage Protection at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the study has pushed the history of large-scale water conservancy in China back by nearly 3,000 years.

Researcher Liu Jianguo said in Beijing on January 14 that ancient Chinese societies had been building hydraulic water systems as early as 5,000 years ago, with widespread evidence of projects across the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze Plain.

“This challenges the previous erroneous theory of Western scholars that ‘water projects led to Eastern despotism’,” he said, referring to a concept that originated with German-American historian Karl August Wittfogel’s 1957 work, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power.

Wittfogel argued that the formation and development of Eastern societies were inextricably linked to water management, positing that the construction and administration of large-scale hydraulic projects required a powerful, centralised organisation leading to a political system distinct from the West.

Liu countered Wittfogel’s theory, saying the study found that prehistoric communities across various regions of China began collaborating on family or clan-based projects, such as digging ponds for water storage, irrigation and flood control.

South China Morning Post