4

CHINESE LABOR

我們船工的生活真悲慘	The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed
風裡來雨裡去牛馬一般	In wind we come, in rain depart, same as oxen and horses

—A Yangzi River boatmen’s song¹

All work such as tracking boats against the swift current of the Chinese rivers…is done by overtaxed hand labour, and thus the mass of the people are little better than the beasts of burden, docile to a degree, but with few more wants than the animals, with the additional quality of being a cheaper machine for the work.

—Archibald Little²

THE TRACKER—A CHINESE TYPE

In the previous chapter, I argued that the characterization of the Three Gorges as a land of wonder overlapped with its scientific reinscription as an empirically knowable Chinese landscape. The demystification of the region not only made travel easier, it also supported touristic fantasies that were grounded in tropes of Chinese difference. As the Yangzi’s rapids, boulders, and cyclical rise and fall were fixed in charts, maps, and graphs, and as local, embodied knowledge was displaced by a well-developed “information system,” the Chineseness of the river began to appear as an object of special interest for Western writers. Like conceptions of wilderness that emerge only as wild spaces become rare, the Chineseness of the river as a cultural value is tied to discourses of endangerment and, eventually, preservation through physical reinscription. The concrete retaining walls that shore up the new island of Baidicheng, the underwater museum surrounding White Crane Ridge, the creation of the Yu the Great Mythology Park, and even the relocation of Plant’s memorial at Xintan are all examples of how endangerment feeds the desire for preservation. As much as such acts might claim to preserve the outlines of the river as cultural space, they are, in fact, monuments to its erasure and traces of a new configuration. Discourses of cultural specificity and endangerment are not new to the river. Long before the dam project was first imagined, changes in shipping technology and commerce threatened to displace the landscape’s most characteristic figure, the Yangzi River tracker.

For the Western travelers who began to reconceptualize the Yangzi and its gorges beginning in the 1860s, the working people of the river were Chinese figures to match and meld with the Chinese landscape. By far the most fascinating of these were the Yangzi “trackers,” men who pulled boats up the river and over its treacherous rapids—sometimes in gangs of hundreds—before and well into the age of steamship travel.3 Though trackers do appear periodically in Chinese paintings, woodblock prints, poetry, and travel writing between the Song and late Qing, they play a relatively minor role in literati representations of the Three Gorges, especially when compared to the historical, mythological, and literary figures that made the region so famous.⁴ Yangzi boatmen play a similarly minor role in route guides and gazetteers through the late Qing and early Republican era, the period when they “emerged [as a group] with a fully developed system of organization,” thanks to increases in economic activity on the river.⁵ Chinese travel essayists of the 1930s sometimes mention them in passing, though they tend to focus primarily on the same natural and cultural landmarks that occupied travelers during the Song and Tang Dynasties.⁶ During the 1930s and early 1940s, trackers did become a theme for Chinese painters, woodblock artists, and folklorists who collected their work songs (haozi 號子), but they received their most sustained interest from Western travelers.⁷

This chapter explores how the tracker appears as a specifically Chinese type within the Western articulation of the Three Gorges as both a Chinese landscape and a source of power to be extracted, stored, and transmitted throughout the modern nation. It not only brings the tracker into view as a harbinger of key shifts in the conception of the river, it also places him within a genealogy of dispossession that links the writers and artists of the Tang and Song, from Part I, with the men and women displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project, as depicted by the artists I discuss in Part III. Part I drew together premodern and contemporary materials to explore how the immaterial aesthetics of the trace relate to the materiality of the landmark and the large-scale reinscriptional practices of national development. As I have argued, though the poems of Du Fu and Li Bai may seem far removed from the dreams of dam-builders, they contribute to a larger spatial imaginary that drives the production of space. The artists I describe in Part III, as we shall shortly see, take up the aesthetics of both the ephemeral trace and the landmark, but redirect them away from the literatus and toward the peasant, the worker, the displaced villager. How do we get from Part I to Part III—from those early coalescing coordinates composing the spatial imaginary of a gradually stabilized Three Gorges landscape, to the most recent interpreters of this same spatial imaginary, now drastically realized in the dam’s completion? To bridge these representational regimes—to understand how the landscape comes in various ways to include its human inhabitants—we must locate the figure in the landscape and zoom in. The tracker is the forgotten forebear of the displaced figures that appear in this book’s final chapters; like them, he comes into view only as he is on the point of being swept away, victim of forms of progress that are all too frequently presented as inexorable.

THE GRANDEUR OF THE GORGES

Between the “opening” of the Yangzi in the 1860s and the 1930s, the tracker appears as a figure of special interest in Western travel writing and visual culture. For Western observers, the tracker differs from the “coolie” in degree rather than kind; he is presented as poorer, more indifferent to pain, more abject, and more animal-like. If the coolie was associated with the global circulation of Chinese labor in the nineteenth century, the Yangzi River tracker was a quintessentially local figure. He is an object of fascination not only because he performs a kind of labor considered too cruel even for beasts of burden, but also because his livelihood is directly threatened by Western travelers, who researched the river with an eye to the introduction of steamships. Shaped by the physical labor of the tracker, the narratives produced by the Western writers and artists I discuss in this and the previous chapter established the spatiotemporal patterns that would come to define the Upper Yangzi River journey. Within the texts and images that these travelers produced, the tracker assumes mythic status as a natural or animal feature of the landscape to be counted alongside the stratigraphy of the gorges and the rise and fall of the river. His disappearance not only supports that natural history with a social-Darwinian narrative of extinction, it also brings to an end the Chinese modes of transport and forms of spatial experience that are so central to the Western travel narrative.

If the romance of the landscape was diminished by the disembodied power of steam travel, it could still be restored by the journey by native boat. It was the temporality of tracking, for example, that made Donald Mennie’s landscape images possible. Though he photographed the river on two separate trips, it was only his second, by “native boat” pulled by trackers (figure 4.1), rather than his first, by steamer, that allowed him to “reveal perhaps a little of [the river’s] mysterious fascination and convey an impression of the wild grandeur of those high forbidding Gorges of the Upper Yangtze.”⁸ Published in Shanghai in 1926, only six years after Plant’s Handbook, The Grandeur of the Gorges reinvests the demystified landscape with a sense of wonder that is unmistakably Chinese. The book’s promise to combine cultural authenticity objectively rendered by the camera with a sense of “mysterious fascination” is given material form by the cover of the first edition, which is bound in silk brocade with an embroidered image of Kuimen (figure 4.2). The Grandeur of the Gorges is not simply an account of the Chinese landscape made visible by the labor of the tracker, but also a piece of chinoiserie.

FIGURE 4.1   A photograph of trackers from Donald Mennie’s The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926).

FIGURE 4.2   The embroidered cover of Mennie’s The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926), featuring a view looking east toward Kuimen. See also color plate 10.

Even when it was not possible or desirable to “go native”—as was the case for most travelers—the tracker remained a potent symbol of the Three Gorges as a Chinese landscape, as in the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from H. G. W. Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (figure 4.3). Filling the bottom third of the full page advertisement, under the italicized phrase “The Gorge Line” and above the company’s address and phone number, two trackers strain to move an unseen object, their taut ropes paralleling the waterline of the ship in the landscape image above them. These men are nearly featureless, their front sides swallowed by shadows that hollow out their already skeletal forms. The rightmost man is doubled over, his right hand dangling close to the ground in front of him. The man to the left looks more vigorous, though he is cut off just below the knees by the edge of the image. The advertisement makes no explicit reference to them; it seems to assume that we will know them by sight, that they are part of what makes the gorges “a land of legend.” But if this is so, why have they been separated from the landscape, squeezed between text that reads “The Gorge Line” and “Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co.”? What role do they play in an advertisement for a form of technology that makes their labor irrelevant?

FIGURE 4.3   Detail of the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (1931). See also figure 3.14.

According to H. G. W. Woodhead, author of the travel account in which this advertisement appears, by 1931 “the steamer [had] to a large extent eliminated the tracker” from the river.9 The circular landscape above the trackers seems to illustrate this by erasing all signs of labor (see figure 3.14). Not only is the mechanical apparatus that propels the steamship out of sight, the smoke that would normally betray both its existence and its place within a global economy dependent on the extraction of fossil fuels has also been omitted. Even if we were to imagine a team of soot-blackened men stoking furnaces below decks, it would bring us no closer to the labor of the tracker. If this carefully framed scene simultaneously reveals and conceals the technologies that helped enframe the river as a modern Chinese landscape, its juxtaposition with the lower image reifies the displacement of embodied knowledge and labor by preserving the tracker in a space outside but still parallel to the landscape. The realization of the Chinese landscape is contingent on both the displacement of the tracker and his elevation to the status of a Chinese type.

When Woodhead actually encounters a group of trackers, he finds the animal metaphors of earlier accounts insufficiently dehumanizing.¹⁰ Instead, he proclaims with perfect confidence that “the trackers’ daily task would not be performed by any beast of burden”:

At Shantaoping I caught my first glimpse of the Yangtsze trackers. They were only hauling a small junk—about a dozen of them—but if anyone wanted to devise an intolerable form of hard-labour he might well select this. Wholly naked, or at best half-clothed, harnessed to loops in the long bamboo rope, these men were straining every muscle of their bodies to move their craft onward. Several of them bent double, others were literally crawling on their hands and knees over the boulder-strewn foreshore.11

Woodhead might as well be describing the men in the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement that precedes the first photographic plate in his book. The primary difference is that in that advertisement one cannot see the “craft” the trackers are straining to move. With the object at the other end of the ropes beyond the frame of the image, the trackers’ tremendous efforts appear futile, as though their invisible load has stopped them dead in their tracks. If the magic of this Chinese landscape is enhanced by a vision of propulsion without labor, then the image of the trackers presents a Sisyphean vision of labor without progress.

In this book, I argue that the Three Gorges are a product of multiple forces and processes—the imperial and national reinscription of the region, an “ ‘imperial’ view of nature” that treats the region as a source of natural resources, and an inscriptional landscape tradition more than two millennia old. What is harder to see is that the Gorges are also a landscape marked by the working people who have known them “through the labor [they] demanded of them.”¹² Those who looked closely at the landscape before the filling of the reservoir would have seen that the Gorges were inscribed by the labor of the tracker: not only did their towpaths shape the river, however feebly, to ease their labor, but the friction of their hawsers left deep ridges and grooves on the sandstone of its banks.¹³ Like so many other traces of earlier forms of spatial consciousness and presence, these marks are now deep beneath the Three Gorges Dam reservoir.

It was on the tracker and his trade that the “opening” of the Yangzi and the introduction of steamships had their greatest impact. By altering the forms of labor and power necessary for navigating the river, “steam travel collapsed time and space [in] a kind of technological alchemy [that] turned” hard labor and lengthy journeys into “comparatively relaxing travel,” as it had done decades earlier on the Mississippi and other rivers around the world.14 Steamships did more than reduce labor, however; they eventually deprived the tracker of his livelihood.¹⁵ As he faded slowly from the rocky banks of the river, the tracker appeared regularly in Western travel accounts, photographs, advertisements, and literature through the mid-twentieth century. Defined by the subhuman cruelty of his labor, he was an object both of touristic wonder and of Christian sympathy. Though not as famous as the coolie, he was a more extreme example of the physical laborer as both a specific Chinese type and a representative of Chineseness.

“A CHEAPER MACHINE FOR THE WORK”

The work of tracking was harrowing. While Chinese sailors had mastered methods of ascending portions of the river by sail, boats had to be pulled by trackers through much of the Gorges, where massive rapids, whirlpools, hidden reefs, shoals, and boulders created formidable obstacles. Individual boats generally had their own crews of trackers, though they frequently supplemented these with seasonal laborers, including large numbers of men and women who established temporary villages during the winter season at especially difficult spots, such as the Xintan rapids.¹⁶ Cargo was often transshipped there and at other rapids, though large boats still sometimes required upwards of three hundred trackers (or “Rapid coolies,” as one traveler called them) to pull them across serious obstacles.¹⁷ At best, trackers inched their way along the towpaths constructed on sections of the river, some of them little more than narrow, low indentations hacked into the sides of sheer cliffs.¹⁸ More often, they clambered over enormous boulders and precipitous, rocky shores, wading through frigid waters (the upriver journey was easiest during winter, when the water level was at its lowest) or diving into the river to free the thick bamboo hawsers that yoked them to their boat. Men who fell while tracking were often dragged along until they could extricate themselves. To fall overboard in midstream meant almost certain death. Trackers worked naked or wearing only a thin jacket, with no protection from the elements or the dangers of their work; the harshness of their labors was etched onto their bodies.

By Woodhead’s time, the tracker, with his naked body and “immemorial methods,” had long been a potent symbol of both the Chinese ability to endure pain and the “Chinese Lack of Imagination” that had locked that nation in its eternal past.¹⁹ The failure to rationalize the work of tracking by introducing mechanical devices rendered it a tragicomic ritual of endless, crazed repetition. For Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, second Marquess of Zetland, tracking was little more than a farcical allegory of geopolitics:

The thought that not unnaturally occurred to me was, what a marvellous thing it is that in the whole course of the two or three odd millenniums during which the Chinese have been struggling with the navigation of the Yang-tse, they have failed to evolve so simple a mechanical contrivance as a windlass! With the most primitive hand-winch a couple of men could have effected all and more than the dozen delirious maniacs in a quarter of the time, and at an expenditure of an infinitesimal fraction of the human force. It would be difficult to find a more striking example of that complete lack of imagination which has doomed China to a perpetual back seat among the competing Powers in the present advanced stage of the progress of humanity.20

Without the spark of imagination necessary to move beyond human limitations or the willingness to adopt innovations from abroad, China was doomed to a struggle of repetition without progress. Dundas’s equation of progress with labor-saving devices and stagnation with the “delirious” movements of Chinese bodies shows how the interaction of labor, technology, and race in the navigation of the Three Gorges was filtered through the lens of popular conceptions of national difference. The idea of hard labor with minimal gain that figures in many Western descriptions of trackers evokes not only the “not unnatural” idea of Chinese history as stagnant but also a more complex conception of labor in a specifically “Chinese” mode.

In the late nineteenth century, the figure of the “coolie” was seen to possess a “biological” capacity to work hard and long on a meager diet of rice (and opium) while “endur[ing] low levels of constant pain.”²¹ This trait made him a “machine” far better suited (economically and physiologically) to the depredations of industrialized work or hard labor than the meat-eating white man, whom he threatened to supplant.²² Beneath the surface of this “yellow peril” rhetoric lurked even greater perceived threats—that familiar forms of labor would be (or had already been) supplanted by transnational and industrialized modes of production, and that the appearance of such modes and the men who brought them into being destabilized what Eric Hayot describes as “the measure of ‘humanity’ itself.”²³

For the “measure of ‘humanity’” to have been thrown into doubt at the end of the nineteenth century must have seemed especially dire. Just as the world was measured, mapped, and scientifically reinscribed during this period, so too was the human body subjected to an unprecedented degree of measurement and classification. With the articulation in the middle of the nineteenth century of the First Law of Thermodynamics (which holds that the energy of a closed system remains constant), French and German scientists came to see “nature as a vast machine capable of producing mechanical work or…‘labor power.’ ”24 The physiologists who followed in their footsteps treated the body as a “human motor” that worked according to the same principles found in nature. If the energy contained within nature was inexhaustibly productive, then the same might hold for the human body, assuming that it could be managed properly. Freed from earlier religious and moral frameworks, the human body entered a realm of scientific measurement, rationalization, and systematization that promised to unlock its natural capacity for work, and with it, the door to social progress (i.e., increased production).²⁵

As a paragon of Chinese endurance—and “a cheaper machine” than even a beast of burden, as Archibald Little describes him in the second epigraph to this chapter—the tracker would seem to pose two related problems for European productivist theories. First, his “labor power” is disconnected from the models of socioeconomic development in which the idea was first developed. The foreign visitor was confronted by a system in which the transfer of natural forces through the human failed to fuel the progress of society. The human machine and the natural machine found along the Yangzi seemed in many ways superior to those in the West, but its social manifestation was profoundly out of order. As a result, energy was wasted in the maintenance of an ancient way of life, absorbed by the vacuum of Chinese history. Second, while his capacity to perform backbreaking work on a meager diet seems to fulfill the dream of labor without fatigue, he achieves this ideal without scientific rationalization, through a specifically racial/national and thus threatening capacity. It is his Chineseness that allows him to work in a manner that is not simply unlike the work of Euro-Americans, but subhuman, animal, and thus potentially superhuman.

The idea that one could clearly define such racial and national qualities was developed over the course of the nineteenth century through the pseudosciences of phrenology, physiognomy, eugenics, and social Darwinism. As part of far-reaching expansionist ideologies, the bodies of non-Europeans were subjected to methods of physiological and ethnographic measurement that naturalized racial difference, usually defining the other as deficient, degraded, or primitive.26 Popular racial theories were even used to distinguish between different types of Chinese. Archibald Little refers to his boat’s lead sailor and his brother—among the “first specimens of the “Four Streams” (Szechuan meaning Four Streams) province [he] had yet met”—as “tall, fair-skinned [and] dolicocephalic,” a term used in craniometry, phrenology, and eugenics to describe a long, thin head type associated with Northern Europeans.²⁷ In European accounts of China, this sort of racial typology was based mostly on anecdotal information (from travelers and missionaries, exported images, and journalistic and scholarly works) rather than direct “scientific” measurement (though medical missionaries did perform such work).²⁸ By the turn of the twentieth century, it had developed into part of an extensive discourse of racialized bodies and national “types” distinct from universalist scientific theories of human productivity.²⁹ The ideal body might still be a “human motor,” but there were as many makes and models of motor as there were nations and races.

The most influential account of Chinese difference was Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, published in 1890 and reprinted numerous times since, which presents a taxonomy of Chinese national character in twenty-six chapters (on topics ranging from “Face” to “Indifference to Comfort and Convenience”), with a twenty-seventh chapter dedicated to “The Real Condition of China and Her Present Needs.” Smith’s style, what Lydia Liu calls his “grammar of truth,” relies on a “discursive power that reduces the object of its description to a less than human animal through rhetorical and figurative uses of language.”³⁰ In his chapter on the “Absence of Nerves,” Smith begins with a description of nervous agitation as an inescapable effect of “modern civilization,” a condition that “include[s] all our readers.”³¹ It is against the ubiquity of nervous afflictions in “modern” nations that the Chinese “absence of nerves” signifies. He is careful to point out, however, that this difference is unlikely to be physiological:

It is not very common to dissect dead Chinese, though it has doubtless been done, but we do not hear of any reason for supposing that the nervous anatomy of the “dark-haired race” differs in any essential respect from that of the Caucasian. But though the nerves of a Chinese as compared with those of the Occidental may be, as the geometricians say, “similar and similarly situated,” nothing is plainer than that they are nerves of a very different sort from those with which we are familiar.³²

Through an imaginary, but still gruesome dissection of “dead Chinese,” Smith repeats the dialectic that structures his entire work: though part of a single humanity, defined here by the geometrical arts of modern medical science (note the affinity with Blakiston’s universal “physical features” of Chinese geography described in chapter 3), the Chinese remain unmistakably different. Having failed to find this difference under the skin, Smith locates it in a catalog of Chinese characteristics: the ability to “remain in one position” for a long time, to go without exercise, to “sleep anywhere,” to breath without ventilation, to bear overcrowding, and to endure “physical pain.” In each case, “freedom from the tyranny of nerves” is not only empirical evidence of a Chineseness that leaves neither outward nor inward trace, but also a reminder that the Chinese may one day pose a threat to “the Caucasian.”³³ As throughout, Smith’s catalog of difference poses the Chinese as not just other, but also threatening, especially in an imagined future in which China has modernized: “We have come to believe, at least in general, in the survival of the most fit. Which is best adapted to survive in the struggles of the twentieth century, the ‘nervous’ European, or the tireless, all-pervading, and phlegmatic Chinese?”³⁴

Smith makes only one reference to “boat-trackers,” in a chapter titled “Content and Cheerfulness,” on the “chronic state of good spirits…[called] ‘cheerfullness’ ” and the form of “conservatism” that makes the Chinese perfectly content with “the system under which they live.”³⁵ He describes trackers as “some of those whose labour is most exhausting…[and yet] not only are not heard to murmur at the unequal distribution of this world’s goods, but when they have opportunities of resting do so in excellent spirits, and with an evident enjoyment of their humble fare.”³⁶ As the most extreme, and thus most typical, of laborers, they prove the general rule of Chinese industry and endurance that Smith and others are at pains to establish, and of which cheer and contentment are merely subsidiary characteristics. But even this easy accommodation to harsh conditions poses a potential threat, as he reminds his readers: “We repeat that if the teaching of history as to what happens to the ‘fittest’ is to be trusted, there is a magnificent future for the Chinese race.”³⁷ The tracker is poised to enter the future with pain as pleasure and biology as destiny.

In reality, trackers and other boatmen were all too conscious of their physical and economic vulnerability. What appeared to the Western writer as contentment and cheer belied a tragic sense of self. Linguistically inaccessible to most Western travelers, this sense of self was expressed orally through the boatmen’s work songs, or haozi 號子.³⁸ As numerous travelers note, these songs and chants were an integral part of the Yangzi “soundscape,” though usually they registered as little more than “tremendous noise,” loud enough to drown “the roar of the rapid” or damage one’s hearing.³⁹ According to Igor Iwo Chabrowski, the most common haozi consist of a call-and-response structure that provides a clear and flexible system for pacing the work of tracking, while others constitute “mind maps” of the region or express romantic longing.⁴⁰ Songs complaining about meager pay, cruel bosses and middlemen, and the dehumanizing labor of tracking were also common. Not unlike the Westerners who were so shocked by their labor, boatmen frequently compared themselves to animals:

日子不如牛和馬	Our lives cannot compare to those of oxen and horses41
船工終年如馬牛	The boatmen through the year are as horses and oxen42
我們船工的生活真悲慘	The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed
風裡來雨裡去牛馬一般	In wind we come, in rain depart, same as oxen and horses43

Unlike Western writers, whose animal metaphors were grounded in racist conceptions of Chinese atavism, however, boatmen described themselves in this manner to draw attention not only to the harshness of tracking but also to how their poverty impinged on their ability to establish and maintain proper social ties, especially marriage.⁴⁴ As in the leftist literature that made rickshaw-pullers iconic urban workers, the haozi of Yangzi boatmen drew attention to the bestial nature of tracking to reassert the humanity of the tracker.⁴⁵

The “all-pervading…Chinese,” of which the tracker was an extreme example, were both excluded from and deemed to possess a super/subhuman capacity to weather the shocks of modernity because they offered a site for the schizoid marriage of the West’s superiority complex and its anxiety over modernity’s enervating effects. If the First Law of Thermodynamics made possible a productivist ideology of labor power, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that entropy in a closed system increases over time, forced a reckoning with the “inevitability of decline, dissolution, and exhaustion.”⁴⁶ According to Anson Rabinbach, “the paradoxical relationship between energy and entropy is at the core of the nineteenth-century revolution in modernity: on the one side is a stable and productivist universe of original and indestructible force, on the other an irreversible system of decline and deterioration…. The powerful and protean world of work, production, and performance is set against the decrescent order of fatigue, exhaustion, and decline.”⁴⁷ Whereas the fatigue, nervous ailments, and physical illnesses of modernity in industrialized Europe and America threatened to blunt the competitive edge that had raised the Caucasian races so far so quickly above the Chinese, the Chinese “absence of nerves” conjured the (enduring) specter of a role reversal. As both proof of Western progress and promise of Western decline, the tracker of Smith’s Chinese Characteristics was an essential partner within the “paradoxical relationship” of modernity.

In Smith’s account, the tracker as coolie functions as both harbinger of a Chinese future and symbol of the Chinese past because he embodies a timeless racial essence—the telos of progress could be just as easily fueled as foiled by the stagnant East. There is no irony here. After decades of scholarship dedicated to dissecting orientalist and colonialist discourse, it is easy to recognize such antinomy as the engine of difference propelling colonial power structures and maintaining their latter-day manifestations. Just as the “Chinese landscape” might refer to a timeless land of wonder or a region scientifically mapped and measured, the tracker came to embody contradictory conceptions of Chineseness. Shaped by the rhetorical template of Smith’s book, the tracker and the coolie were simultaneously primitive and primed for future dominance. What is missing from Smith’s secondhand account, however, but present in most firsthand accounts of trackers, is a sense of horror at the brutality of their labor and sympathy for their suffering. If evolving ideas of “labor power” allowed observers to pit the tracker and coolie against laborers of other nationalities and races, an older and more powerful discourse of sympathy encouraged them to consider the tracker as part of a shared humanity, even as they described him as a “less than human animal.”

SYMPATHETIC LABORS

The Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird frames her sympathy for trackers with that of earlier travelers, while also reminding us that the figure of the coolie had global currency at the century’s end:

Capitan Blakiston, Captain Gill, and more lately Mr. A. J. Little…have all expressed both sympathy with these men and their wonder at their hardihood, industry, and good-nature, and with my whole heart I endorse what these writers have said, and regard this class as typifying that extraordinary energy of the Chinese which has made and kept China what it is, and which carries the Chinese as thrifty and successful emigrants to every part of Eastern Asia and Western America.48

Bird, who based her travelogue on observations made during a trip up the Yangzi and into the mountainous Tibetan regions of far western Sichuan in 1897, is the most thorough source on the organization of the work of tracking. In two chapters mostly dedicated to them, “Rapids and Trackers” and “Life on the Upper Yangtze,” she describes both their work and their suffering in detail and with frequent recourse to the language of sympathy.

I quote her here at length to give a sense of the paratactic fervor of her writing when she focuses on these men:

Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff walls on each other’s shoulders, or holding on with fingers and toes, sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where only their grass sandals save them from skipping into the foaming race below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff with hardly footholds for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300 feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep his feet. The reader must sympathetically bear in mind that these poor fellows who drag our commerce up the Yangtze amidst all these difficulties and perils, and many more, are attached to a heavy junk by a long and heavy rope, and are dragging her up against the force of a tremendous current, raging billows, eddies, and whirlpools; that they are subject to frequent severe jerks; that occasionally their burden comes to a dead stop and hangs in the torrent for several minutes; that the tow-rope often snaps, throwing them on the their faces and bare bodies on jagged and rough rocks; that they are continually in and out of the water; that they are running many chances daily of having their lives violently ended; and that they are doing all this mainly on rice!49

Bird’s prose channels the violence of the river to convey the precariousness of the tracker’s labor as an object of sympathy. It does this not by giving these men psychological or biographical depth, but by carrying out a figurative dismemberment (and symbolic castration through omission), rendering them so many backs, shoulders, fingers, toes, hands, knees, heads, and feet. Even at the moment that they seem to regain a measure of wholeness as men (after being compared to goats), Bird draws a comparison between the straining tracker and the hypothetical “man unencumbered,” the two falling within separate categories.

Only after he has been systematically picked apart does the tracker come into integral focus as a “poor fellow” whom the reader “must sympathetically bear in mind.” Bird’s exhortation has a moral but not a practical function; there is no call to improve the condition of the trackers or change the way in which “our commerce” is dragged inland. What she asks of her readers is to convert the physical labor of the trackers (whose terrestrial brothers were often called “bearers”) into the mental, moral, and affective work of sympathy. The sympathetic act entails an effort of internalization, a bearing of the tracker inside the otherwise “unencumbered” mind. If they can bear such inhuman travails, then surely the reader can take a moment to bear them up in turn. It proves to be only a very brief moment, however; the inward turn spirals out almost immediately into the “tremendous current, raging billows, eddies, and whirlpools” of the river and from there, back to the “bare bodies” of the trackers.

Arthur Smith may have been correct when he claimed that “it is not very common to dissect dead Chinese” (italics added), but there was no such prohibition against dissecting living Chinese, especially when the goal was the moral good of greater sympathy.50 For Bird, the lure of the internal proves irresistible. Even as she tries to move away from the topic of trackers, she finds herself drawn ever closer, from their appearance as seen from afar to an intimate dermal inspection of their battered bodies, and on to the liminal space of their wounds:

There is much more to be said about the trackers and their work, but the reader is weary, and I forebear. No work is more exposed to risks to limb and life. Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned; others break their limbs and are left on shore to take their chance—and a poor one it is—without splints or treatment; severe strains and hernia are common, produced by tremendous efforts in dragging, and it is no uncommon thing when a man falls that his thin body is dragged bumping over the rocks before he extricates himself. On every man almost are to be seen cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores from cutaneous disease, and a general look of inferior rice.⁵¹

Bird sweeps her readers up in a maelstrom of sympathy until they are drawn through “cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores” almost inside the body of the tracker. The inward trajectory of the reader’s embodiment—their bearing the tracker in mind—is reversed through the near invagination of the latter’s wounds. This reading is not intended as a psychoanalytic diagnosis of Isabella Bird as a prototypically repressed Victorian, nor is it designed to pass judgment on her personal sympathy for the tracker. What we see in action here is not only a colonial discourse of eroticization more typical of descriptions of women’s bodies, but also an expression of a discourse of sympathy in which Chinese suffering plays a constitutive role.

David Spurr has explored how eroticization (a “cliché of colonial history”) rhetorically constructs—through “metaphors, seductive fantasies, expressions of sexual anxiety”—the bodies of women as symbols of the colonized nation, “assign[ing] to subject nations those qualities conventionally assigned to the female body.”52 That Isabella Bird was writing during an extended period of anxiety over the “opening” of China (she was against the “sphere of influence” and for the U.S.-backed “Open Door” policy) further aligns her with a masculinized version of this discourse.⁵³ The trope of “unveiling” served as a “visual metaphor for ideas of opening and discovering everywhere implicit in this discourse.”⁵⁴ That the trackers are already naked precludes a literal unveiling but allows for a more piercing gaze, one that recalls both the nineteenth-century colonial turn toward the interior and the gendered imagery of penetration that is a nearly universal trait of contemporary travel accounts of journeys up rivers.⁵⁵

Bird’s call to understanding through penetration and unveiling also draws on a discourse of sympathy that had long functioned “as a kind of affective and cultural surplus” to the uneven political and commercial exchange between the British and the Chinese.⁵⁶ One of the primary foci of this sympathy was a symbolic Chinese body, which was measured out most precisely in the course of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “sympathetic revolution” that Hayot describes as producing “modernity’s dream of a universal subject.”⁵⁷ As an abstraction of both absolute physical distance and cultural difference, the Chinese, in the form of what Hayot calls the “hypothetical Mandarin,” became a favored test case for the creation of a universal subject as object of human sympathy. The expression of sympathy toward Chinese people was contingent on their bodily suffering and deeply entwined with discourses of Chinese cruelty and resistance to pain. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with the completion of the two “opium wars” and the signing of their punitive treaties, sympathy became both companion of and alibi for the European “opening” of China. The expression of sympathy required either an already suffering body or a body (politic) that one must maim in order to fulfill the commercial logic of “sympathetic exchange.”⁵⁸ As a symbol of a degraded form of labor power and an object of sympathy, the tracker was also a limit case at this moment for what it meant to be human and what might happen to human beings when fully subordinated to or excluded from progress.

⋆

As much as Bird’s descriptions of trackers might have been predetermined by earlier discourses of national character, eroticization, and sympathy, she seems genuinely concerned with their plight. If the space between her concern and the often violent discourses that help shape it constitutes “a kind of affective and cultural surplus,” it is an ambiguous surplus and one that we continue to produce today. The suffering of Chinese laborers—from Foxconn employees who assemble iPhones to migrant workers who build dams—remains an object of deep concern, not only for observers outside of China, but for the many Chinese artists who have worked to document their experiences of a changing homeland. We are still using the Chinese laborer to trace the borders of the human, and the affective surplus of the past has come to fuel a cultural industry in the present. But are we merely voyeurs when we watch Chinese documentary films about migrant laborers, coal miners, factory workers, or dispossessed farmers? Do we feel sympathy for Chinese suffering (generated by the representation of suffering) in order to assuage the guilt we feel for our complicity in the uneven economic and political systems that perpetuate it? Is the sympathy of Chinese observers less tainted by discourses and histories that have shaped sympathy in Euro-American cultures? And if all sympathy proves, in fact, to be unavoidably tainted and thus of dubious morality, is the only alternative to look away?59

AN ENGINEERED CHINA

If sympathy for the Chinese was part of the affective labor of opening China for writers like Bird, it posed serious dangers for others. According to some writers, to get close to the Chinese was potentially to absorb their Chineseness; to “go native” was to relinquish what made the Westerner morally superior. H. G. W. Woodhead expressed just such a concern when he wrote of his shock in finding “disturbing evidence of the assimilation by foreigners of Chinese legal conceptions”: “I have heard foreign business men in Shanghai talk airily about the prospects of improved trade resulting from greater understanding of and sympathy with the Chinese on the part of the younger generation of foreigners who is [sic] now coming out to this country.”60 For Woodhead, “Chinese legal conceptions” and “justice” amount to little more than a joke, albeit a dangerous one. To understand and sympathize with the Chinese in legal matters is to embrace the methods of the “crook” and to discard the “integrity and scrupulousness” for which the “British merchant” was supposedly renowned.⁶¹ It is a form of going native, an “assimilation” to be resisted at all costs. Woodhead does not consider what it might mean to understand and sympathize with the Chinese beyond the realm of commerce. There is only one type of exchange in his accounting, one sorely limited by political unrest, excessive taxation, Chinese stubbornness, and a host of other ills. In this he is quite different from Bird.

To understand why certain types of sympathy were regarded as dangerous, it helps to look to fictional texts that imagine the transformational processes that they supposedly initiated. There are few better examples than John Hersey’s novel A Single Pebble—published in 1956, the same year as Mao’s “Swimming”—in which an unnamed American engineer journeys up the Yangzi River in the early 1920s to assess the viability of building a hydroelectric dam in the Three Gorges. Traveling by native craft, the engineer finds himself in close quarters with the boat’s owner, his young wife, and the trackers who pull the boat up the river. Beyond the outlines of the plot, which the engineer narrates retrospectively, Hersey’s novel takes the form of an allegory of national difference and a defense of the organicity of the Chinese people and their landscapes against the incursions of Western technology. Simultaneously a critique of the evangelical zeal of American progressivism à la John Savage and an acknowledgment that such “progress” is inevitable, A Single Pebble figures the Yangzi and the Three Gorges as the site of a clash of modes of knowing and shaping the Chinese landscape. If the engineer’s sympathy for the people of the river threatens to undermine his national character, to make him more Chinese, it ultimately takes on a more violent character. To free the tracker from his labor by ushering in an “engineered China” is to make him obsolete, to eradicate him as a type.

Hersey was very much aware of the conceptual and physical transformation of this landscape begun by earlier British travelers, and his novel reads at times as a pastiche of episodes and attitudes culled from Blakiston, Little, Bird, Plant, and others. Yet his narrative relies less on any one source than on the deep structures of colonial discourse and narrative. Chief among these are the tropes of the inland river journey as an act of penetration and the sovereign gaze that establishes possession over the racial and cultural other. Hersey’s engineer does not aim to possess the land as colony, but he looks on the landscape with no less an imperial impulse. His goal is not territory, but resources; he seeks to enframe the river as a natural resource, a standing reserve of energy that remains nonetheless in/of the Chinese landscape:

The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels…created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress flowing out through high-hanging wires over six wide-spread provinces…A terrible annual flood…was leashed in advance by this beautiful arc. Beyond the tall barrier, junks sailed forward with their wares, to Chungking and farther, as on a placid lake.62

The river as power work bleeds into the river as artwork here, blurring any distinction between the aesthetic framing of the landscape and the enframing of the river. Over the course of the novel, the engineer’s visions of the landscape as a site of the technological sublime build in number and intensity until they possess him. Hersey’s critique of his megalomania is not ecological, but rather historical and allegorical, at once a reference to a high modernist ideology of progress and a figure for the American democratic evangelism of the Cold War. Yet he frames this critique through a landscape mode that presents the Yangzi as a tightly integrated ecological, cultural, and geological system.

For Hersey’s engineer and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers on which he is based, the scientific survey reinscribes and enframes the Yangzi as a (potentially) modern landscape, paving the way for exploitation of the river as a natural resource. That the engineer is a representative of an American company that wishes to sell “a vast power project in the river’s famous gorges” to the Chinese government in no way alters the basic relationship between power and the physical world that underlies resource imperialism as it operates in the contexts of both imperial exploitation and national development. In A Single Pebble, the appropriative gaze is always operative, even when the engineer proclaims his impotence:

At length we erupted from the gorge. The limestone formations fell away, and we moved all at once into a region of plutonic rocks. In a valley nearly a mile wide huge boulders of gneiss and granite, larger by far than our junk, lay strewn about, and straight across the line of the river, relenting only enough to grant it a shallow channel, curious dykes of greenstone and porphyry rose up out of the other stone. It was a primeval landscape, and it seemed to have been arranged by some force of fury. I was deeply moved and humbled by the sight of the trackers scrambling like tiny, purposeful crickets over the rough and intractable banks. We were all hopeless insects in this setting. My career, engineering, seemed only nonsense here. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could be done by man’s puny will for this harsh valley littered with gigantic rocks.⁶³

From the narrow confines of the gorge, which directs the gaze vertically, the engineer moves into the horizontal spaces of a valley, which frame and envelop him, rather than the other way around. In contrast to the experience of gazing out at a prospect from a high point, which places the viewer in a position to encompass the landscape, the engineer looks up from the low point of the river, over which the boulders and dykes loom. Struck with a sense of horror, he proclaims not only his own impotence, but the impotence of man in general to challenge the natural “forces of fury” that have shaped the earth. The narrative of progress and the myth of timelessness collide here in and through a particular type of landscape and landscape experience. The engineer calls it “primeval,” but that is not accurate. The scene he describes could not exist without the language and representational modes of modern geology and Romantic aesthetics. The gneiss and granite might be many millions of years old, but the “landscape” is no more than a few hundred years old. As the product of historically and culturally specific ways of seeing and knowing the world, it comes into focus through acts of framing, of cutting out extraneous matter to present a coherent “view,” in this case, of a sublime “land of pre-history” (figure 4.4)⁶⁴

FIGURE 4.4   “Directly beneath the sandstone lies the gorges-limestone formation, which, rising up in an anticlinal limb, has again been transected by the Yang-tzi in a magnificent and grand gorge.”

Source: E. C. Abendanon, “Structural Geology of the Middle Yang-Tzïkiang Gorges,” Journal of Geology 16, no. 7 (1908): 601.

This is certainly not the landscape experienced by Hersey’s trackers. Not only are these men not equipped with the scientific knowledge to recognize the valley as “primeval,” they have no access to the literal and figurative viewpoints without which one cannot encompass and frame space in this way. They are part of the landscape itself, insects scrambling across the valley’s plutonic rocks. The engineer’s claim to a shared impotence—“we were all hopeless insects in this setting”—thus masks the most important forms of power one can possess in relation to landscape: the power to see, frame, and thereby enframe. Puny as it may be, man’s will is still the will to power, especially when compared to the supposed “indolence” of the Chinese.

As the story progresses, the narrator’s faith in his ability to change China is challenged not only by his belief that it exists outside of the temporality of progress but also by his assimilation of native ways of seeing the river. The dam’s “beautiful arc” rises in his mind’s eye, as it did in Sun’s and Mao’s, but the image he presents closes with the graceful junk— “a craft well designed forty centuries ago”—rather than the steamships that had plied the waters of the Yangzi since the turn of the twentieth century.65 It is in wavering between visions of an “engineered” and a timeless China that the engineer undergoes an abortive process of Sinicization, which begins when he takes sick after passing through the first of the gorges:

I feared the typhoid, but now from this distance I can guess that I was ill of mystification and disappointment, and of a churning up of inner forces I had never known. I had approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand. What bothered me, and was incomprehensible to me, was their indolence, their lack of drive, their indifference to goals I held valuable…. The central idea of my energetic country meant nothing to them, I thought. Since I had pinned my hopes for China, for an engineered China, upon that idea, I was prostrated, I suppose, as I floated through the awesome terrains of the wild Great River, by what I imagined to have been a terrible discovery—as well as by some trivial germ of that district.⁶⁶

The engineer conflates his biological illness with a spiritual infection caused by the realization that the Chinese “had no desire to get ahead.” He comes to this realization as he watches the crew entertain themselves with jokes and “slapstick” and wonders: “How could they have traveled all day through this land of pre-history only looking forward to an evening of pranks and cackling.”⁶⁷ Posed as a violent reaction to Chinese “indolence” and the type of cheer that Smith praises, this passage voices the engineer’s unspoken fear that the “trivial germ” he internalizes is in fact a vector for something far more dangerous, an assimilation of Chinese ways of inhabiting the “primordial river.”

There are few Chinese ways more foreign to the scientifically minded Western traveler than Chinese superstition. Little deems China a land “more given to superstition than science” and complains that “it is as hard to lead a Chinaman to believe that natural phenomena are due to natural causes…as it is in the West to convince a devout believer in witchcraft of the non-existence, or rather non-interference of the supernatural in current mundane affairs.”68 Little’s comparison grounds Chinese superstition in a failure to recognize the relationship between phenomena and causes, to accept that nature is always natural. It is precisely in his search for “natural causes” that the engineer in A Single Pebble comes to develop his own superstitions. Though he mocks the superstitions of the crew and rails against the Chinese faith in fengshui (as did the real travelers who preceded him), he fails at times to see the river as merely a scientific problem. At such moments, it is more than a symbol of China’s stagnation; it is an ominous force, ready to react against his desire for change:

A queer thing I did observe in certain deeps of the gorges was this: However strong the gale and however open the reach, no waves ever formed on the surface in those places. All the water there had an ugly slickness, laced with froth, and the wind slid over it as if it were molten metal….

This smoothness of the water, together with the awesome cliffs of the gorges, gave certain passages of the channel on which we rode a supernatural and malevolent atmosphere, at least in my mind.

Yet the slickness was easy enough to explain; the Yangtze’s waters, I could see, moved not only seawards but also up and down, stirred by rocks beneath, and none of the water was ever on the surface long enough to be moved by mere wind. It fought stone, not the plastic sky. It was sheer power, and should have lifted the heart of a young engineer—but instead the sight of it made me uneasy.⁶⁹

The engineer’s ability to read the river as a source of “sheer power” to be measured and harnessed cannot forestall his growing sense of doom. The “slickness” of the river can be explained scientifically, but it cannot be explained away. It clings to the engineer with an uncanny viscosity, engendering a superstitious belief that the river is somehow “supernatural and malevolent.” Unlike the ship’s crew, he cannot assuage his fear of the river through ritual—whether the maintenance of behavioral taboos or the use of pagodas to improve poor fengshui. He has assimilated a Chinese belief without its cultural apparatus.

As in Woodhead’s disgust at the “assimilation by foreigners of Chinese legal conceptions,” cultural interest and sympathy were seen as potential seeds of racial transformation. “Going native” was far more than a sympathetic affectation or even an active decision. According to one anonymous “old China hand,” no one, least of all the dedicated student of China, is immune to its contagion:

[Sinologues] are all in the clouds, lost in the fogs and mists of the Chinese language and the poetry of 2000 B.C. Something queer comes over the best of men when they get very far in the Chinese language and its classical literature. They become abnormal, impersonal, detached, dissociated from the living world, from the white-skinned, red-blooded human races of the West. Something in the climate, some mental microbe, gets into all of us here in China. The longer we stay here the less we see, the less we are fitted to judge.70

Residence among, and especially intimacy with, the Chinese threatened to change the “red-blooded” Westerner.⁷¹ Such beliefs appear throughout the literature of colonial encounter, both unreflectingly, as above, and as objects of (qualified) critique, as in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.⁷² Hersey’s novel owes its greatest debt to perhaps the most famous literary treatment of the threat of racial and cultural transformation, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.⁷³ In that work, a trip into the African interior exposes the brutality of the colonial enterprise and refigures the inland journey not as an act of penetration but an experience of envelopment, of being swallowed by and swallowing the other. Though it relies on a similar narrative structure, A Single Pebble does not descend to the abject depths of Conrad’s novel. It presents both a more sympathetic picture of the other and the Western archetype and also a milder version of racial transformation. It also diverges from its predecessor in the mode of resource extraction it describes (the creation of a standing reserve of energy versus the extraction of ivory) and how the protagonist is transformed through contact with the racial and cultural other (through a romantic attachment and interest in Chinese lore versus the adoption of “savage” customs).

Hersey’s narrator speaks of man’s will and progress as tenets of faith. A secularized missionary, his is a vocation rather than an occupation, one that demands rationality, objectivity, and manly vigor, but one that is also driven by something darker and more protean—desire. It is the quickening and the thwarting of desire that fuel the dramatic turns of the plot. Desire is also what aligns A Single Pebble with what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “anti-conquest strain” of colonial discourse, which promotes its appropriative goals under cover of narratives of sympathy and reciprocity.74 It is through the allegorization of the desire for exchange, for example, that anti-conquest narratives moved beyond their origins in “objectivist science” into sentimentalist strains of travel writing, where tales of reciprocity and transracial love refigure capitalist expansion as an affective union of the European and non-European.⁷⁵ In stock figures such as the “nurturing [female] native,” European travel writers found a way to reconstitute the colonial other as subject rather than object of sympathy, a welcoming figure in a hostile land and a willing participant in free exchange. Yet as a narrative trope, the Utopian erotics of reciprocity can never be realized.⁷⁶ When the engineer finds himself attracted to the boat owner’s wife, who nurses him during his illness and provides him with knowledge of the river, Hersey reenacts the old trope of transracial romance as a potential form of nonexploitative reciprocity. When he discovers that she is already in love with Old Pebble, however, the promise of romantic exchange crumbles and he becomes fixated on the transformation of the river, which he justifies as a way to improve the subhuman lives of the trackers.

Rather than a fantasy of reciprocity enacted through transracial love (which is exposed almost immediately as a narrative dead end), the novel meditates on the relationship between landscape and identity and the threats posed to that relationship by a particular form of modernity. For the unnamed engineer, the journey upriver briefly opens him to Chinese ways of seeing and inhabiting the river that render his scientific knowledge irrelevant. He rediscovers his progressivist faith, but he is tainted, his career ruined and his plans “tagged by sound men as impractical.”⁷⁷ For the Chinese characters, the journey seems at first to have the opposite effect: it reveals and reinforces the timeless material and cultural bonds that tie them to the river. Despite the fact that they are named and the engineer is not, however, Old Pebble and Su-ling are not so much individuals as animal-like creatures, manifestations of earth and water. For them, changing the landscape is unthinkable because it represents a fundamental threat to their existence. The engineer, of course, is a harbinger of such change, a figure whose sympathetic engagement with Old Pebble leads to his demise.

As in Euro-American travel narratives, the tracker in A Single Pebble is simultaneously a figure of sympathy and a sacrificial victim, a superhuman laborer and beast-man:

I thought of my dam, and of what a crime it was that this man confronting me should have to spend the years of his life towing a junk up this dangerous river. I thought: we speak of donkey engines, horse power—how horrible to use the strength of men for the work of animals and motors!78

More than a means of producing power, the dam has become a way of sparing the tracker his subhuman efforts, but only by ending his trade. Hersey is attuned here to the real-life paradox contained in the rhetoric of development that has been directed at the river, whether through the introduction of steamships or the construction of dams. The salvation of progress requires a sacrificial offering—of people, of land, of landscape. The sacrifice demanded by progress in the novel is less Christian than pagan, more murderous than messianic. Its violence comes to a head when the engineer attempts to befriend Old Pebble and is humiliatingly rebuffed. Pebble mocks the American’s talk of engines and steamships, and the latter responds with petty anger and the conviction that the dam is a necessity: “what this river certainly needed was a dam!”⁷⁹

The engineer can justify his project because it will improve the hard lives of the trackers and their families, though he knows full well that any improvement will also render them redundant. In this he follows his predecessors, for whom the impact of steam travel on native labor was a perennial question. Although Hersey updates this discourse by personalizing the head tracker, Old Pebble, and placing him within a web of cross-cultural libidinal attachments, he continues to rely on animal and mineral metaphors that dehumanize him, rendering him, yet again, allegorical—not only of China, the Chinese, and their landscapes, but also of mankind’s grounding in the earth. Though the “ordinary Chinaman” that Archibald Little once called an “unsympathetic creature” has been rendered undeniably sympathetic by Hersey, he remains, in the language of A Single Pebble, a creature.⁸⁰ Rather than a figure against the ground of the landscape, he is coterminous with the landscape, the rock that forms the gorges, and the creatures that make up its ecosystems. When the engineer describes the landscape beyond the first gorge as primeval, it is the trackers as much as the rocks that make it so. Symbol of the intractable patterns of Chinese history and the harsh realities of the Chinese landscape, Pebble has a name but no identity beyond his trade and his Chineseness. And so a man said to be in his mid-thirties becomes “Old”—primeval stone made flesh, and flesh made stone.⁸¹

By drawing on nonhuman metaphors and images, Hersey echoes those Westerners who actually visited the gorges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who almost invariably described the trackers as “howling and bellowing like cattle,” “little better than beasts of burden,” or “like quadrupeds.”82 A Single Pebble is full of similar descriptions: the trackers are “beast men” and “lynx-footed”; Old Pebble is like a “glistening crustacean” crawling along the riverbed and a man with “animal reflexes.” In nearly every example, it is the appearance of the trackers’ naked bodies in motion that justifies such comparisons, a reminder that in colonial discourse, “the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented.”⁸³ For the engineer narrator, the tracker’s body is a site of obsessive scrutiny. Sometimes mineral, sometimes animal, it is subjected to a descriptive dismemberment that conjures up images of both morphological analysis and vivisection, as in Bird’s rhapsodic descriptions. This tendency toward disassembly appears in the very first detailed description of Old Pebble:

I noticed that one of them, a lumpy, broad-faced fellow with a shaven head, who was dressed in new blue cotton pants and a drab ragged jacket, took the lead in all that was done. From his powerful larynx to his square feet, this man, whom the owner addressed with a nickname, Old Pebble, seemed to be one whole, rhythm-bound muscle. Everything he did had rhythm…. His head was spherical, and he had the crow’s feet of cheerfulness all the way from his narrow eyes back to his ears.⁸⁴

Old Pebble comes together as a physical specimen best understood by isolating and describing his characteristic features: face, head, larynx, feet, eyes, and ears. His most important asset, however, is his musculature, which supplants the other features in Hersey’s synecdochic description of Old Pebble as “one whole, rhythm-bound muscle.” The tracker as human is reduced to his physical capacity to perform labor, to the rhythmic muscular vitality that allows him to pull ships up the massive rapids of the Yangzi. In this he not only stands in opposition to but also resembles the river, which the engineer describes earlier as “an enormous sinew, a long strip of raw, naked cruel power waiting to be tamed.”⁸⁵

CODA: HUMAN POWER

While Euro-American writing around the turn of the century saw the Chinese laborer’s capacity for work as a threat to Western dominance, Chinese reformers writing in the first decades of the twentieth century often had less sanguine views of their countrymen’s abilities. In what is generally taken as locus classicus for the idea of damming the Yangzi at the Three Gorges, Sun Yat-sen presents Chinese labor as a major obstacle to national development. He dreams of sidestepping this obstacle by translating the Yangzi’s flow, first into a mechanical measure of force, and then into a form of labor power as standing reserve:

If we were to take the waterpower of the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers and use the new methods to produce electric power, we could probably produce 100,000,000 in horsepower. The power of a single horse is equal to the power of eight hearty men; to have the power of 100,000,000 horses is to have the power of 800,000,000 men…. If you use manual production [this amounts] to no more than eight hours everyday, whereas horsepower production can be used everyday for a full twenty-four hours. According to this type of calculation, the labor of a single unit of horsepower, over the course of a whole day would equal the labor of 24 men. If we can manage to exploit the waterpower of the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers to produce 100,000,000 horsepower of electricity, then that would be like having 2,400,000,000 laborers show up for work…. Of China’s 400,000,000 people how many really do work? China’s young and elderly certainly do not labor, and to be sure, many hearty youths, such as landlords who collect agricultural rent, also rely on the labor of others to support themselves. Thus the great majority of Chinese people do not labor; they all share the benefit of others’ work and produce no benefits of their own. As a result, China is very poor. [But if we] were to put such massive electric power to work for us, it would be extremely productive and China could surely transform poverty into wealth.86

Hydropower appears here as a technological solution to a series of problems: the fundamental limitations of the human body, the suboptimal structure of the body politic, and the expense and difficulty of converting fossil fuel into industrial power. It is in the articulation of these problems that we can discern the roots of an important shift in Chinese conceptions of the relationship between human labor and the natural world.

First, for “human power” (renli 人力) to be found wanting required a conception of labor divorced from the human body and vested in the mechanical. Even Sun’s horsepower metric, which seems at first to pit forms of biological power against one another, refers primarily to the measure of the power of an engine, each unit equivalent to 745.7 watts or 550 foot-pounds per second. The human body is thus judged against and ultimately absorbed by that of the working animal, which is itself merely a sign of the technological and its capacity for unceasing production. The sign of the animal not only supplants the human in technological discourse, it also stands for the human in an evolutionary-inflected discourse not unlike what we see in descriptions of the tracker.

Second, for the human and the animal to be figured in terms of labor and power required a conception of the natural world as a source and store of energy. What Sun’s text does is reveal—in the Heideggerian sense of the word—the Yangzi and other rivers of China, not as routes for transportation, communication, or commerce, or as historical and aesthetic sites, but as sources of latent power/energy (li 力) superior to that available elsewhere. Chinese engineers had long made use of waterpower for various kinds of labor. The difference was in the conception of rivers not simply as a source of power for labor but as a form of energy that could be stored, extracted, and “used without depletion.”87 In this sense, Sun draws on the imperialist and productivist approaches that first made the Yangzi an object of modern scientific knowledge, but radically expands them by envisioning the transformation of the river into a power plant. Whereas European imperialist forces failed (or never tried) to capture “the body and the land” of China, the Chinese nationalist project made the mastery of natural resources a priority from its inception.⁸⁸

For Sun, the technology of the hydroelectric plant is the primary means of revealing, challenging, and unlocking the river as energy, a process that Hersey would envision decades later in poetic terms: “ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress flowing out through high-hanging wires over six wide-spread provinces.”⁸⁹ As a combined decryption and transmission device, the large-scale dam—with its turbines and high-tension wires—decodes and disseminates the river, which recedes into the shadows cast by the electric lights it now powers. In Sun’s vision of the river as standing reserve, its power is measured through and against that of the Chinese population as labor pool. As this metaphor suggests, Sun’s accounting constitutes a process in which the social character of labor and the social life of the laborer are gradually effaced by a set of natural metaphors (horsepower, labor pool) and abstractions (energy). The naturalization of labor signals both its passing and the rise of a technologized nature (and a naturalized technology). This is true not only of Sun’s technocratic plan, but also of British accounts of the demise of the tracker and the elemental characters in A Single Pebble. In each case, the most vividly imagined consequence of the technologized Yangzi is not the alteration of ecosystems or the destruction of ancient cities, but the erasure of labor and the laborer.

As we have seen, however, the tracker did not simply disappear. He lingered on for decades, a spectral remainder of earlier forms of embodied knowledge and a reservoir of naturalized Chineseness. This is how he appears at the bottom of the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement—erased from the landscape, but frozen in the posture of his labor, a Chinese figure within the techno-poetic landscape. Without him, the history of the Three Gorges and its dam would be incomplete. Famous for both the traces he left behind and the processes that effaced him, he is an unlikely figure of transition between the literati men who inscribed the landscape and the modern laborers who disassembled the cities and villages of the gorges brick by brick to make way for the dam.