which a state is made prosperous are agriculture and war.”The orders are
a series of tactics to be employed to compel universal cultivation. One
significant tactic is for the state
“to take exclusionary control of mountains and moors, so that the people who
hate agriculture, the tardy, the lazy, and the greedy, will have no [other] means of
subsistence. So they must become farmers, thus, ensuring waste lands will be
brought under cultivation.”^56
Legalism totalizingly envisions the uniform transformation of people
and land into two monoculturally interdependent components as its basis.
With due qualification for change over time, especially urbanization, and
rhetorical excess, this foundational interdependency continued to form
the monolithic core of the multiethnic, ecologically diverse imperial Chi-
nese project as embodied in Han farmers’and China proper’sfields.
A rather narrow and persistent arablist“fundamentalism”was expressed
in this excerpt from a Ming agricultural manual:“registered wasteland is
wasteland. Having reeds and grasses still makes it wasteland. Yet some
lazy people...go after the minor profit of reeds and reject the great
treasure of crop cultivation.”^57
As Chen Jian has recognized, legalist agrarian theory’s main product
was not simply produce, but people, who had been made“guileless”(pu),
and so were easy to rule, through farming. Chen’s conceptualization of
this as a“spiritual physiocracy”(jingshen zhongnongzhuyi) should not,
however, obscure the fact that this condition arises from a state-
orchestrated environmental relationship between people and plants that
seeks to construct both in service of imperial continuity.^58 Accounts of the
ongoing, latent influence of Legalism, as various forms of regulation, on
subsequent Confucianized imperial institutions have generally ignored
Legalism’s similarly influential articulation of the environmental relations
of empire.^59
Of course, every aspect of this articulation did not remain relevant, as
Legalist thinkers themselves would have recognized. The Chinese imperial
system nevertheless sought to maintain a basic and remarkable continuity
of arablism in the face of continuous change. Certain core values such as
“guilelessness”could thus be expressed differently, as“diligence”(qin),
for example, for largely the same ends of imperial stability. Such a
variation is visible in the management of farmer andfield, which necessi-
tated ongoing administrative determinations of whether problems were
ecogenic or anthropogenic, an issue not always amenable to an unquali-
fied determination. In 1750 , for example, the Qianlong emperor noticed
Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 41
