ann
(Ann)
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Mengmian, Mengding, Zhefang, Longchuan, Mengmao, Menglian,
and Ganya, as listed by Zhou Huafeng in his commentary discussed in
Chapter 4. This was the rule even in extreme cases, as Yongchang
Magistrate Wang Xuzai discovered in 1812 when he sent troops to the
Mengding chieftainship in answer to an exaggerated distress call from a
chief fearing a coup. The throne considered such events, real or not, to be
internal affairs. Wang was reprimanded for his interference. Of course, if
internal conflicts threatened to spill over into Yunnan proper, the throne
would authorize intervention, as it did in 1818 in Gengma.^66
Such state limitations, self-imposed and otherwise, qualify the nature
of indigenous ethnic identity in relation to a more nominal, or even
notional,“native chieftainship system”(tusi zhidu).^67 Checks on Qing
authority to build chieftainships systematically, however, not only
include decentralized indigenous resistance, and rival Southeast Asian
polities, but also malarial mosquitoes and haematozoa within the larger
disease environment. The unity of purpose and culture Scottfinds among
diverse Zomian peoples is questionable. Nevertheless, the recognition
and further articulation of state limitations, especially before the mid–
twentieth century, in the face of this same environmental variation is
indisputable. This recognition must condition accounts of inner frontiers
or gumsa and gumlao organizations, or, more recently, “native
chieftainship zones” (tusi dai), to acknowledge that these constructs
are to a significant degree provisional, reified, and sometimes delu-
sional.^68 Their degree of dysfunction is substantially related to an inabil-
ity or refusal to recognize ecological factors obscured by imperial and
scholarly constructs.
The comparatively narrow cultural space occupied by recent and past
analyses of chieftainships has yet to meaningfully include a broader
ecological space that would help alleviate some of this dysfunction.
Chieftainships actually oscillated over time within a range of manifest-
ations. Their degree and type depended not only on the amount of power
exerted by various human actors, but also by varying ecological inputs,
including famine and disease, that were largely outside human control. So
it is more accurate to speak offluctuating chieftainship relations rather
than of a concrete system. Nevertheless, Qing officials did exert them-
selves to maintain these relations in an organized, even systematic, fash-
ion over time, as bureaucratic regulations attest.
These oscillations and some of their underlying environmental causes
must also qualify both ideas of a“Confucian civilizing project”fueled by
relentless Han imperial expansion and accounts of early modern state
248 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
