ann
(Ann)
#1
an 1851 response to accusations of concealment by Han cultivators. Qi
asserted that any household clearing new land for cultivation would soon
come into public conflict with other households over limited water
resources. Neither could“spare the smallest drop of water, and it would
come to afight. It isn’t like the situation in China proper.”^89 Ecological
realities kept locals honest and legible.
G. William Skinner’s amusingly masterful 1987 exposé of gross errors
and“mindless incompetence”in Sichuan’s nineteenth-century population
registers remains a fundamental check on demographic arguments for
Qing historical change powered by vacuums such as acreage conceal-
ment. It is possible that what Skinner calls a similar “dialectical
dynamic,”which could distort decades of demographic data on the order
of 6 million people, was also at work in registration offields.^90 Here I can
only briefly sketch an outline of what may be a similar agrarian dynamic
from a more critical perspective taken on land registration, in a similar
spirit if not in similar detail, within a wider context that includes border-
landfields beyond core macroregions.
Some losses in arable land would have been absorbed by increases in
wet rice productivity on existing Jiangnanfields, as argued by Li Bozhong,
or by state action to alleviate a range of adverse conditions in Lingnan, as
argued by Robert B. Marks. Rice imports from both Taiwan and South-
east Asia offset losses as well.^91 Conditions north of the Yangzi, however,
were different. The onset of a colder mid–nineteenth century related to the
Little Ice Age almost certainly created greater problems for the more
fragile agricultural conditions in north China and beyond, where frantic
clearance of poor soils was expanding. Furthermore, in contrast to effect-
ive adaptations to structural problems such as climate change by seasoned
farmers in the south, cultivators in northern steppe and even on south-
western mountains appear to have been quite green.
By precise measures, loss of productive land was not reflected in the
official record. Overall, state disaster relief to the more than nine thou-
sand counties seriously affected by climate change from 1796 into the late
1840 s was restricted to a lower percentage of these afflicted areas than in
the eighteenth century, leaving more places to weather disasters by them-
selves and off the books.^92 Moreover, tax exemptions that were extended
did not necessarily trickle down to revitalize ruinedfields. As Pierre-
Etienne Will has pointed out, “the taxpayer was not necessarily the
farmer, the‘real’disaster victim.”This was a major problem“in areas
of high land concentration” because“landlords were not obliged to
adjust rents to reflect a tax exemption.” There were also practical
254 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
