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disincentives for local administrators to apply tax relief for environmental
disasters with precision. Officials would have had to recalculate levies
separately for each plot affected to take into account differing levels of
damage and distinctions between exempt grain-producing land and other
nonexempt types.^93 In other words, tax exemption was a purelyfiscal
abstraction. Figures would not accurately reflect the actual condition of
the exempted plots, which could be out of production. Yet these notional
grounds could still“generate”incomes and revenues for state ledgers and
landlords’pockets as tenants were pressed into lower subsistence rates on
less productive land.^94
There were other oversimplifyingfiscal abstractions as well, such as the
differences between the Qing statutory system of tax assessment and the
one actually implemented. The statutory system’s quota was based on a
straightforward formula of land area taxed at variable rates based on a
plot’s level of productivity, which was influenced by various factors of soil
quality, access to irrigation, etc. This often resulted, however, in adminis-
tratively unwieldy assessments, such as the two hundred gradations of
land, each taxed at a different rate, in highly ramified Jiangsu province.
Many jurisdictions simplified assessment through the conversion of real
multiple units of lower grade land into a single“virtual”unit of higher
grade land. This practice conceals real acreage in overall Qing land
statistics and includes reclaimed fields such as some in Shaanxi that
produced an actual harvest only everyfive to ten years.^95 This amalgam-
ation, which reflects the limitations of administrative legibility in some
ways similar to the continued use of sable pelts as mere units of account,
would obscure drops in land fertility.
Thefiscalfilters blurring state perceptions of local conditions were
rendered even less transparent by the fact that land registers were not
consistently and precisely updated for many reasons, and that provincial
tax quotas were effectivelyfixed after 1750. As long as these quotas were
met, there was no substantial incentive to revise thefigures on which they
were based through official inspection of the ground itself.^96 Many of
Qingfiscal abstractions thus worked to“suppress temporal variation”
and“homogenize spatial heterogeneity”so as to enhance“constancy and
stability at the expense of variability and resilience.”In this respect they
resemble predispositions of present-day managerial structures in environ-
mental and developmental policy.^97
A memorial submitted to the throne around the time of the
Yongzheng-Qianlong regnal transition provides an extensive commen-
tary on how a number of social and administrative factors combined to
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 255
