Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

to create destablizing counterpressures similar to those at work in bor-

derlands under different environmental regimes subject to Han agrarian

migration. Warning signs regarding the unsustainability of arablist prac-

tice both within and beyond China proper are either ignored or misinter-

preted to continue to accommodate the expansion offields to the point of

overload. Elvin has insightfully summarized the period of“ 3 , 000 thou-

sand years of unsustainable growth” in China. He observes that“if

numerous details are ignored, it is possible to say that the long term trend

of basic exploitation of the environment was toward maximal‘arabliza-

tion’for cereal cultivation as opposed to”herding or foraging from“non-

farm”food sources in forests and wetlands. Elvin sees this paradox that

protracts unsustainable cultivation as possible only because of a combin-

ation of technical adaptations and straightforward expansion into areas

not yet subject to Chinese-style agriculture. The“single most important

factor”in his view is“the social structure of power,”which makes the“key

decisions”that control“what happens to the environment.”^21

This conception of“arablization,”important as it is to my study,

nevertheless tends to emphasize human action as solely decisive even as

it stresses the ecological limitations on that human action. In the Qing

case, this emphasis obscures a wider significance of the critical role played

by arable, but not yet arablized, regions. Such places largely lay in the

empire’s“forsaken”non-Han borderlands, where environmental rela-

tions had already been subject to alternative forms of dynastic organiza-

tion. Han arablism in China proper had resorted to expedients from

stripping hillsides with New World crops to siphoning off lakes through

dams, but these tactics alone could notfill the strategic need for more

farmland. So it is hardly coincidental that the eighteenth century saw both

the unprecedented doubling of the Han population and the equally peer-

less consolidation of Qing authority across vast, and fertile, areas of

Inner Asia.

Although each initially reinforced the other, serious contradictions

between the orders in the borderlands and China proper became acute

in the nineteenth century. The Qing elite’s“social structure of power”

found it increasingly hard to implement“key decisions”in its own long-

term interests, despite, and sometimes because of, the short-term efficacy

of those same key decisions. Its central role in the crisis of the Middle

Kingdom notwithstanding, Han population problems did not spawn such

mortal contradictions to empire. High population was, instead, one of

many products of interrelations between China proper and its border-

lands embodying these contradictions. Throughout these borderlands,

Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 227