ann
(Ann)
#1
other variables, as well as track related declines in ground cover and
discount unsustainable cultivation, a more environmental accounting
might reveal other net losses in both land and identity.
From an environmental, rather than a socioeconomic, perspective, it is
perhaps more accurate, if still problematic, to say that arable land was the
empire’s limiting factor. In simple terms, Han-style swiddening and casual
clearance destroyed arable land. Indigenous-style swiddening preserved it,
as did indigenous forms of foraging and pastoralism. Their imperial
counterparts were by no means inherently unsustainable, but were quite
vulnerable to what appear to be intrinsic, almost“logical,”excesses such
as those that methodically toppled pines in Jiaqing-era Manchuria.
Actively unsustainable practices in land use, rather than mere population
growth, were the deeper roots of the nineteenth-century crisis. This is a
Qing historical application of an environmental theory paradigm
asserting that“the numbers of individuals present locally...reflect the
set of attributes of those individualsandthe characteristics of the environ-
ment [emphasis added]. Numbers of individuals are not driving forces
of the ecological process, but its effects.” These individuals become
a, derivative, effect only when their“density becomes excessive,”but this
density is not a Malthusian entity that determines its engendering rela-
tions with the surrounding ecology.^100
Han arablism, the primary environmental relation configuring China
proper and radiating well beyond it, had also developed into the realm’s
primary contradiction between culture and ecology by the nineteenth
century. One of the empire’s key adaptations to Han population growth
was shack people’s“cultivated deforestation.”This adaptation rapidly
exhausted fertile reserves that still existed even in the full-blown arablist
Hanspace of China proper and eroded its developed areas as well. Like
Inner Mongolia’s naturally occurring limiting condition of rainfall, Han
swiddening and arablist overconcentration of the sort contemplated by
Zhang Zhidong anthropogenically converted fertile land into China
proper’s limiting factor.
In an unexpected way, such arablist radiation affirms some of Wang
Fuzhi’s most virulent convictions on the capacity of Hanspace’s numinous
natural defenses to cleanse this dragon’s true lair of polluting ethnic
diversity. Terrestrialqiworks, in the form of agriculture, not only to
obstruct foraging, herding, and even Zomi-culture within China proper,
but had also, by the nineteenth century, expanded its circulation to
erode these diverse practices in borderland areas. This enables the
“re-Sinification”Wang saw in Guizhou to restore a proper Han habitat
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 257
