Beyond the Harmony/Exploitation Dichotomy—Rethinking Human–Nature Relations in Premodern Chinese Sources

This article reconsiders a recurrent interpretation of human–nature relations in premodern China: the claim that Chinese discourses emphasizing harmony or consonance with the natural world stood in fundamental tension with historical practices of agricultural and environmental transformation. I describe this interpretation as the “mismatch thesis” and trace its explicit formulation in Chinese environmental history and its more implicit presence in scholarship on early Chinese cosmology and religion. I argue that the thesis rests upon a deeper harmony/exploitation dichotomy in which harmony is associated with leaving nature substantially untouched, whereas cultivation, domestication, hydraulic intervention, and other forms of purposeful transformation are treated as evidence of exploitation. Drawing on William Cronon and Richard White, the article historicizes this opposition as a specifically modern formation indebted to Romantic aesthetics and later preservationist conceptions of wilderness. It then turns to neglected premodern Chinese materials concerned directly with environmental transformation, including traditions surrounding Yǔ the Great and agronomic works such as the Qímín Yàoshù, Sìshí Zuǎnyào, Wáng Zhēn Nóngshū, Biànmín Túzuǎn, Tiāngōng Kāiwù, and Qūtiánbiān. These sources articulate a different conceptual configuration in which human intervention may follow, assist, supplement, and bring to completion tendencies already operative within the natural world. The article thus proposes a preliminary conceptual rearrangement in the English-language reception of premodern Chinese environmental thought: harmony need not imply non-intervention, nor must environmental transformation necessarily be conceptualized as exploitation.