Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

Destabilizing ethnic diversity is the direct result of a corrosive confluence

of ecological and anthropogenic conditions.

Wang’s remedy is a proper Han habitat consisting of an established

agrarian order mediated by thejunxiansystem of provinces, prefectures,

and districts for security and taxation to restrict itinerancy into spaces too

isolated for the state’s control apparatus. His program for the reclamation

of all Hanspace in China proper under ethnically appropriate principles

would be to settle the surplus population of“migrants”on a commensur-

ate amount of arable land,“delineate itsfields and boundaries,”and then

“indoctrinate the youth to settle their natures and enable them to attain

their aspirations.”The result would be a habitat that would“enable the

stabilizing of agricultural production, the constancy of the gentry, and the

regularization of state revenues.”In effect, Wang’s Hanspace is intended

to re-Sinicize locals by restoring relations between humans and cereal

plants. Wang even cites some locales in contemporary Guizhou supposed

to have undergone such conversion.^37

It is notable that Wang’s ideal Hanspace is ethnically homogenous,

unlike Hu Wei’s“Tribute”Hanspace encompassing peripheral non-Han.

This ethnic distinction is the consistent difference between dissident and

accommodationist Hanspace. Yet two vital common links persist. One is

the emphasis on historical continuity of imperial identity in classical

Chinese terms. Wang expresses this in his conclusion that“everywhere

in the Nine Provinces from mountain peak to winding shore, all are

become the great Xia.”^38

The other common link isqimechanics, although the dissident view

considers the natural depletion of“pure”(chun)qithat sustains Han-

space as an ethnoecological catastrophe. Pureqiis undifferentiated, and

its natural circulation in China nurtures political unity among its“unmis-

cegenated”(tonglei) people. Onceqiis exhausted, however, a corres-

ponding political vacuum results, attracting incursions of“motley”(za)

and“chaotically differentiated” qiembodied in non-Han“mongrels”

(yilei), spawned from the endemic disorder beyond China. Incursion is

ultimately fatal to the outsiders, for whom“the land is unsuitable and

heaven unhelpful,”but also pollutes China proper.^39

The ethnic ecology of differentialqiprovided a framework for histor-

ical explanation of Inner Asian conquest. In the eyes of the authors of one

Ming geomantic manual the motleyqiof the Jin and Yuan precluded

Jurchen and Mongol long-term residence in China’s“northern dragon”

trunk. The imperial polity was only properly reestablished with the

construction of Ming Beijing in the region, held the most environmentally

Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 35