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land, people, and the identities formed from the intersection of the two. An
open season on highland and borderlandfields ensued, but the ratio of
arable farmland per capita is nevertheless estimated to have fallen 43 per-
cent between 1753 and 1812 to less than half an acre per person.^83
This insufficiently bleak statistic, however, conveys the impression that
there was no net decline in farmland, merely a scarcity that implicitly
results from dynamic population increase. However, work on the effects
of an absolute rollback in productive areas of Yunnan and the lower
Yangzi highlands indicates there was a significant loss of previously arable
land.^84 This is also true for parts of Inner Mongolia, particularly in the
Ordos plateau region. Losses likewise occurred in adjacent areas of Shanxi
and Shaanxi, as well as, most plainly, in the Hexi Corridor. There were
problems in the eastern leagues too. One account based on a 1906 survey
acknowledged that cultivation on alkaline soil could be pursued for only
“several successive years”until neither grains nor grasses would grow in
the exhausted ground.^85 Eighteenth-century attempts to increase arable
land in Lingnan highlands during both the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns
may have also become unsustainable by the early nineteenth century.^86
Similar results of agrarian overreach are also visible today in the northeast’s
steadily eroding“black soil” (phaeozem, a humus-rich topsoil) region,
originating in unrestricted arablization officially sanctioned from 1860
on. More recently, the black soil zone has contracted 27 percent since the
1950 s from the synergistic effects of intensive human cultivation of a rich
but fragile ecology naturally prone to erosion. Agrarian, not demographic,
excess has eliminated both black soil and agriculture in some areas.^87
The evidence, for and against a substantial agricultural rollback, is
neither complete nor unambiguous. Contradictions abound, most starkly
between evidence for an expanding population, a precipitous drop in
acreage per capita, and a net increase in the empire’s cultivatedfields.
The contradictions inherent in all such calculations based on incomplete
and far from unimpeachable records are visible in Yen-chien Wang’s
analysis of land registered in 1753 and 1908. Wang concluded that“there
was practically no change”in taxable acreage between these two periods,
with the exception of Manchuria and Xinjiang, but speculated that as
much as 80 percent of newfields could have gone unregistered from the
mid–eighteenth century on. In contrast, Li Bozhong’s more recent and
more regionalized environmental study of the Jiangnan wet-rice heartland
comes to the opposite conclusion that concealment“must have been
low.”^88 Hiding new cultivation in water-starved borderlands such as
Xinjiang was not easy, as noted by Xinjiang military officer Qi Xizao in
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 253
