ann
(Ann)
#1
A century later, local disease conditions seem to have overcome whatever
multiethnic harmony existed. Almost another half century after that, a
local saying recorded in 1939 confirmed that Simao subprefecture in the
middle of Pu’er still marked the ethnic boundary:“Go farther south and
enter into another world.”^80 Ethnic spatial distinctions, as part of the
local disease environment, outlived the demise of the dynastic system
itself.
the locus of virtue
Although the Qing dynasty did experience what many scholars see as a
significant post- 1860 “restoration”in certain respects,“it is undeniable
that systemic failures within the Qing empire became manifest around the
turn of the nineteenth century.”China was“left behind by Europe in
relative terms, and suffered“an intrinsic and absolute loss of capacity.”
This crisis emerged from“a perfect storm of three simultaneous problems:
the external shock of the expanding west, a secular crisis caused by an
accumulation of socio-economic difficulties over the long term and the
more acute political dysfunctions associated with the familiar pattern of
the dynastic cycle.”^81
The ecological metaphor is more appropriate to the empire’s predica-
ment than these three comparatively cultural articulations suggest. The
Qing was, perhaps, not so much swamped by a secular socioeconomic
crisis but inundated by an environmental one that washed away too much
fertile land, the empire’s keystone. Work currently done on empire-wide
trends toward resource exhaustion is suggestive but remains preliminary.
Yet there is a basic consensus that serious deforestation and related
erosion fueled the century’s environmental crisis.^82
It is very difficult tofind“virtuous”sustainable adaptations of any of the
main Qing environmental networked regimes of imperial foraging, imperial
pastoralism, imperial indigenism, or even imperial arablism during the
nineteenth century comparable to the relative harmony they all enjoyed
through most of the eighteenth century. In terms of Hanspace dissent,
motleyqi pollution waxes fully only in the nineteenth century. One
common dependency underlying all four regimes across these times was
their absolute reliance on fertile land that either was, or could usually be,
arablized at varying scales. Fertile land’sflexibility promoted diversity, but
was also susceptible to agrarian encroachment that could destroy both trees
and soil. This fundamental transimperial dependency on fertile land did not
produce a mere population problem, but an imbalance between arable
252 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
