ann
(Ann)
#1
As with Zhang Zhidong’s proposals for southern Mongolia, Bao’s
more generalized solutions are predicated on human impositions rather
than adaptations. In modern terms of nonequilibrium ecology, these
impositions may be understood as“regulat[ion of] natural variability
and diversity (culturalization) in an attempt to obtain higher yield pre-
dictability and thus a lowered agricultural risk.”The resulting“cultural
landscape”increases, often inadvertently, for some species at others’
expense. The range of permissible spatial variation upon which diversity
depends is steeply reduced, mainly through various forms of agrarian
clearance.^53
The requisite standardization to render Han swiddening sustainable
as a cultural, or perhaps more precisely“cultured,”landscape remained
unattainable during the Qing. The state did not even seem to have a
uniform policy to legitimate a consistent Han swiddening identity across
the empire. Instead it suppressed shack people in agriculturally
developed eastern provinces of the lower Yangzi macroregion, especially
Zhejiang and Anhui, while accommodating shack people in developing
western provinces of the Yun-Gui macroregion, Yunnan in particular.^54
By 1836 , for example, Liangjiang Governor-General Tao Zhu was being
ordered to bar further expansion of shack people mainly in Anhui. He
also had to return those already present to their places of origin because
their“clearing mountains for cultivation harms agriculture and harbors
the disloyal.”Tao himself had complained several years earlier that
the large-scaleflooding in his jurisdiction was the result of“too much
land clearance upstream” in provinces across several macroregions.
“Sichuan, Shaanxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou,” were infested with
“unemployed wanderers everywhere cutting wood in the mountains
and planting coarse grains, so that as soon as there is a storm, the soil
washes away.^55 Zhejiang authorities even held maize, a shack people
staple by the Jiaqing period, a primaryaccomplice in soil exhaustion and
duly banned its cultivation in 1802. Anhui followed suit soon after.
Although the opinion of many officials was mixed, by the nineteenth
century the state had decided on an ultimately futile prohibition of Han
swiddening in the lower Yangzi highlands to arrest security and eco-
logical deterioration that had become increasingly apparent since the
late eighteenth century.^56
While Tao was attempting to drive shack people from his Yangzi
jurisdictions, Yun-Gui Governor-General Ilibu spent part of the same
year of 1836 trying to regularize the status of the more than forty-six
thousand migrant households. Theirfirst formal census in 1823 revealed
244 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
