ann
(Ann)
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sacred edicts, issued in 1673 , can stand as a representative expression of
the basic assumption of cultivation relations as an ever-expanding process
for the maintenance of the imperial state:“From antiquity, there has been
no task more primary for the long-term tranquility and order of the state
than the people’s material prosperity. It is thus necessary thatfields be
cleared in such a way that the treasury has a surplus without levies that
entirely exhaust such efforts.”^64
It is significant here that the prosperity of those the emperor subse-
quently identifies as the“little people”(xiao min), or the average Han
commoner of“the provinces,”is assumed to come fromfields, specifically
those that have been newly cleared. The corollary to this imperial pro-
nouncement is that if there is no virgin land to open for cultivation, there
will be no more law-abiding Han and, therefore, no more Qing state. By
1716 , however, the emperor felt that the arable limits of China proper
had been reached:“since an era of great peace has long endured, the
population [of China proper] has multiplied considerably, but the land
has not increased...Those who speak of clearing land do not know that
China proper actually has no such space.”Perhaps this change in per-
spective arose from the Kangxi emperor’s own encounter with what he
reckoned were“several hundred thousand”Shandong cultivators and
peddlers during a 1681 imperial tour beyond the passes. The territorial
imperative for sustaining cultivation, however, remained intact because
the emperor’s solution was to permit further Han migration beyond the
passes.^65
The year 1716 was also around the time that double-cropping paddy
rice was successfully introduced on a large scale in the Yangzi Delta.
However, such intensification of cultivation, along with similar and more
established practices elsewhere in places such as the middle Yangzi Valley,
does not seem to have been an adequate adaptation to contain the Han
population within China proper. For the eighteenth century overall, a
period of great economic stability, there was hardly a grain crisis as such.
However, there was a burgeoning population of overwhelmingly Han
peasants, produced by factors such as the extension of double cropping,
that was of increasing state concern. Indeed, as Robert B. Marks has
pointed out, the Qing“substantial achievement”of minimizing the effects
of climate change on food supply to reduce mortality may have contrib-
uted to subsequent problems linked to high population. The outlines of
such a dynamic are visible in the rejection by officials of the Yongzheng
emperor of tighter restrictions on Han northern migration in 1724. They
held that if commoners from Zhili, Gansu, and Shandong went north to
Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 43
