ann
(Ann)
#1
the state’s relation to heterarchical diversity begins to break down. State
assertions become correspondingly less authoritative as its contrivances
multiply to prevent or simply deny inevitable and often uncongenial
change rather than adapt to it.
Something of this conviction, amnesia, and delusion seems to have
hardened around the dawn of the nineteenth century. At this time imper-
ial arablism was radiating across borderlands whose regional orders were
no longer able to manageably contain it, regardless of how many local
ordinances or imperial decrees were stubbornly issued. Environmental
scholarship in China generally tends to concur and often portrays the
century in grim, nearly Malthusian terms. Whatever economic develop-
ment that occurred led to a combination of destabilizing population
increase and ecological degradation.^2
Western studies tend to be more qualified, but may be equally
explicit, as in the assertion that “the 1810 s were a watershed that
marked the beginning of intensified Malthusian pressures”in the Liao-
ning community of Daoyi tun. It is, however, necessary to qualify
the role of Han migration in this process of the“environmental deg-
radation” of “frontier regions,” especially in its acute nineteenth-
century form. Kenneth Pomeranz has perceptively noted that
although this degradation may have been related to eighteenth-century
Han expansionism, it did not manifest uniformly across the empire
as the inevitable consequence of Han population pressure. Lee and
Campbell’s study of demographic change in eighteenth-century
Liaoning, for example, identifies climate change as one likely origin
of price rises associated with periods of high mortality. Wang and
Huang, correlating several major studies of Chinese climate trends with
the most common Qing disasters, found greater frequency of drought
and flood during the cooler nineteenth century than in the warmer
eighteenth century. Li Bozhong has argued that a rapid climate change
from dry to wet conditions associated with a nineteenth-century
cooling trend had a devastating effect on Jiangnan rice production
during the Daoguang period ( 1821 – 50 ). This contributed to the ensur-
ing“Daoguang depression”(Daoguang xiaotiao). David D. Zhang and
his associates have made a more detailed climatological argument that
links state instability over the last millennium to similar cold phases
rather than to population growth.^3
The Qing’s nineteenth-century environmental crisis was unquestion-
ably grave, particularly in the north and northwest macroregions.
This period also marks the high point in the state’s unprecedented
220 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
