ann
(Ann)
#1
tasks that some provincial officials wished to replace them entirely with
junxiansubprefectures, districts, and departments.
Conversion of all native chieftainships in Yunnan to imperial arablist
administration nevertheless remained an unfulfilled official wish, because
despite their considerable and even destabilizing shortcomings as instru-
ments of Qing rule, chieftainships did fulfill a critical need. They could
fitfully mobilize numbers of indigenous bodies in the service of the dyn-
asty to go where no Han could go for long. In noting the critical role
played by auxiliaries in securing malarial areas during the advance into
Myanmar, one official stressed that it was imperative to“win the hearts”
of these auxiliaries, who were all“civilized tribals”(shuyi), so that they
could act as“the vanguard for the regular army. Lose them and bandit
incursions will result.”^107
The strategic need to construct and maintain“civilized tribal”iden-
tities is why the Qing state seriously pursued ideological policies as
alternatives to brute administrative conversion. The general intent of such
policies, particularly the“educational transformation”(jiaohua) of south-
western peoples advocated by officials such as Ortai, Cai Yurong, and
Chen Hongmou, was to gradually produce more stable chieftainship
identities rather than take the drastic and impractical step of eliminating
tribal identities altogether through conversion.^108 Differential resistance
to malaria underlay such identity (re)construction projects because of the
disease’s ethnic significance for the long-term occupation of strategic
border territory. Yunnan’s borderland order of imperial indigenism was
thus embodied in a“chieftainship tribal”identity, as Ortai noted.
Indigenous ethnicity in this way became linked with malarial areas,
not simply, or even primarily, because of Han prejudice, but because of
differential resistance between these two ethnic groups, broadly con-
strued. This is not to argue that Han prejudice was entirely irrelevant
to state connections between place and“race,”but it is to assert that
such prejudice was not the only or most important factor. Perceptions
of this differential resistance shouldbe analytically distinguished from
its demonstrable and discernible biological effects that made material
contributions to the construction of imperial indigenist space and
identity.
These constructs were, of course, also partly the product of official
wishful thinking that, as Liu Bin observed, uncritically maintained an
absolute distinction between chieftainship and wild groups. Such cultural
responses to the disease environment formed the basis for connections
that were not wholly subject to state control, as was continuously
208 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
