.> Pierre-Etienne Will has carefully reconstructed the fascinating history of the 1743–44 relief campaign from contemporary records. Under the skilled Confucian administration of Fang Guancheng, the agricultural and hydraulic expert who directed relief operations in Zhili, the renowned “ever-normal granaries” in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties.....> As Will emphasizes, this was famine defense in depth, the “last word in technology at the time.” No contemporary European society guaranteed subsistence as a human right to its peasantry (ming-sheng is the Chinese term), nor, as the Physiocrats later marveled, could any emulate “the perfect timing of [#Guancheng’s] operations: the action taken always kept up with developments and even anticipated them.”10 Indeed, while the #Qing were honoring their social contract with the peasantry, contemporary Europeans were dying in the millions from famine and hunger-related diseases following arctic winters and summer droughts in 1740–43. “The mortality peak of the early 1740s,” emphasizes an authority, “is an outstanding fact of #European demographic history.”11 In Europe’s Age of Reason, in other words, the “starving masses” were #French, #Irish and #Calabrian, not #Chinese.
.> Moreover “the intervention carried out in Zhili in 1743 and 1744 was not the only one of its kind in the eighteenth century, nor even the most extensive.” #MikeDavis in #LateVictorianHolocausts presents fascinating #ComparitiveTech, #Technology and approaches to #Famine and #Poverty, #HumanRights. Policy in #China and #Europe are compared during the #AgeOfReason... #Famine #PierreEtienneWill #Zhili #FangGuancheng #ConfucianAdministration image at odds with stereotype of bureacratic #Mandarins? The book seems important to keep in mind while thinking about #TechWillSaveUs discussions.