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(Ann)
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around the turn of the century in 1799 – 1800. The resulting Changchun
subprefecture institutionalized the residence of previously unauthorized
Han tenants, whose numbers blithely continued to rise beyond official
quotas. The ruling allowed Han to rent land from Mongols and was
subsequently cited in other cases as regulations developed in recognition
of Mongol elites’ongoing recruitment of Han cultivators.^38
Manifestations of state-sponsored arablist expansions have been rec-
ognized as an“interiorization”or a“growth without change”that trans-
planted institutions and practices previously established in China
proper.^39 Such formulations tend toward a relatively exclusive and teleo-
logical focus on the Hanspace arabalist dimensions of the analysis that
downplays pastoral resistance, commitments to pastoral accommodation,
and the complex dynamics of environmental relations. The Qing state’s
“vulgar”arablism, which sought to turn everyone into (Han) farmers and
everywhere into (Han) cropland, was a nineteenth-century, rather than
perennial, phenomenon driven by state responses to both Han demo-
graphic and imperialist military pressure.
Furthermore, the dynastic shift to unrestricted promotion of imperial
arablism was also a consequence of the success of imperial pastoralism in
certain critical respects, disaster relief chief among them. Such relief,
heavily reliant on silver-driven grain markets and extensive water trans-
port infrastructure, was an unwarranted extrapolation of Jiangnan con-
ditions made plausible by the Qing unification of Inner Asia and China
proper.^40 The“ignorant”Mongol attitudes Zhang decried as fundamen-
tal to their“recent feebleness”thus embody the Qianlong emperor’s
1741 worries about the ethnically debilitating effects of grain and silver
relief. This tendency was only encouraged by the systematic establishment
of an ever-normal granary system throughout southern Inner Mongolia
initiated in the early eighteenth century. The system was functional in
Guihua, Rehe, the Khorchin banners, and many other places by 1718 .As
of 1784 , it had reserves of more than 440 , 000 shi, comparable to low-end
figures for Shanxi in 1721 or Sichuan in 1731 , but was not really com-
parable to contemporary China proper civilian grain holdings, which
averaged around 2. 5 millionshi. Even Fengtian and Urumqi held about
790 , 000 shi and 600 , 000 shi, respectively.^41
Furthermore, as some economic reform problems in present-day
Mongolia suggest, any practices reducing the seasonal mobility of pastor-
alists tend to undermine sustainable herding. A problematic legacy of
reduced mobility has been particularly acute in the IMAR. As one herder
in Mongolia concisely explained,“if we stay in one place, the livestock
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 239
