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in Yunnan and elsewhere in southwestern China were extremely limited in
terms of full abolition, although local powers were generally curtailed.^54
Whatever their limits, conversion operations attracted the relatively
boundless support of local arablization advocates such as provincial
administration commissioner for Yun-Gui, Chang Deshou. Chang com-
plained in 1726 that only 30 to 40 percent of Yun-Gui’s arable land,
including mountainous terrain, lay in junxian jurisdictions. The
remaining 60 to 70 percent was controlled by chieftains who“don’t know
how to coordinate things.”The chieftains, ruling“Yi people who know
nothing of cultivation,”were nominally subject to minimal, largely indif-
ferent, and entirely indirect supervision from subprovincialjunxianoffi-
cials. Others denigrated indigenous peoples as generally unfit to manage
all their rich natural resources, from minerals to timber.^55
Chang’s was only one expression of the rather conventionally dim Han
official view of indigenous agriculture, which was quite dismissive of its
efforts, especially in terms of scale. From the perspective of the imperial
Chinese state these practices were not legitimately“agricultural”in the
same sense as Han cultivation because swiddening failed to maximize
exploitation of arable land. Wang Lüjie’s exaggerated accusation that
indigenous peoples in Guizhou’s“Miao frontier”had“excellentfields,
but did not know how to plow and possessed extraordinary resources
but did not use them”must be read in this context. In 1732 ,Huguang’s
Provincial Military Commander (tidu) Yue Chaolong exaggerated in simi-
lar spirit that“places ripe for agricultural clearance are extremely numer-
ous, but the hill country is comparatively vast. The Miao lack the power to
fully exploit the land for cultivation (bianzhong) and so abandon it entirely,
something deeply to be regretted.”Radical agricultural clearance on a
sufficiently enhanced scale was proposed in the wake of the Yongzheng
chieftainship conversion operations. Ortai wanted to secure them in part by
“clearing brush and burning out mountains and marshes, which are all
long-term plans of prime urgency for frontier provinces.”Furthermore,
isolated enclaves of fewer than three households,“whether Han commoner
or tribal”would be relocated closer together to form more administratively
legiblebaojiaunits. This tactic would effectively narrow the range of
environmental relations, and ultimately ethnic identities, permissible under
a comparatively full-blown imperial arablist regime.^56
Such a regime for the transformation of land and people seems to have
been successfully implemented in Yunnan’s Zhaotong prefecture, a main
center of Yongzheng conversion operations. According to Yun-Gui Gov-
ernor-General Gao Qizhuo, there was“a kind of indigene”in Zhaotong
188 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
