ann
(Ann)
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of Han agriculture to“fill the borders”(shibian) in response to over-
population, imperialist pressure, and Mongol elite blandishments
combined at this time with ecologies that were already cool, dry, and
very fragile.^44
Grasslandfragilityseemslinkedtoacombinationofunfavorable
climate and an unbalanced expansion in Han arablization rather than
simple, and exclusively Mongol, overgrazing. Large herding popula-
tions, however, remain subject to catastrophic loss that stockpiling does
little to avoid. Pastoralism in Mongolia proper was nearly shattered
by the“winter of white death”in 2009. Temperatures dropping to
minus 50 C and blizzards that buried grass killed off 10 million, about
20 percent, of the country’s livestock despite anticipatory provisions
including the stockpiling of fodder. Some authorities in Mongolia, a
country of 2. 6 million people (about a third of whom are pastoralists
and half of whom are to some degreedependent on pastoralism), have
stated that this disaster has simply exposed the endemic unsustainability
of attempting to pasture 44 million animals, afigure one considers“far
beyond Mongolia’s natural capacity.”Consequently, there have been
contrasting calls. Some want to shift the national economy away from
its dependency on herding to dependency on Mongolia’s relatively
unexploited mineral wealth. Others want to hold to the pastoralism
“identified with the country’sveryspirit,” arguing that “Mongolia
without herders is unimaginable.”^45
virtue under pressure at the peripheries:
southwestern yunnan
In contrast to its integration of people and ecologies in the constitution of
the empire’s Manchurian and Mongolian borderlands, southwestern
Yunnan’s unusual conditions obstructed commensurate Qing state access
to human and natural resources. It is suggestive that unrest in northern
areas was quite limited once the state had established a foundation for
imperial pastoralism and imperial foraging. Southwestern Yunnan by
comparison remained profoundly unstable even in the eighteenth cen-
tury.^46 Regional instability was directly embodied in multiethnic rebels,
but state control was critically hobbled by a disease environment that
made it difficult for the dynasty to supervise local resource access.
Instead, the state was always excessively dependent on indigenous
humans for this access, and its presence was correspondingly weak from
the outset.
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 241
