arablism networked cultural and ecological elements to construct ethnic
and spatial hierarchies whose most enduring material legacy are the vast
grainfields radiating from China proper into borderland space.
Spatially in this respect, Qing grainfields and their cultivators did
differ from their dynastic predecessors to effect an unprecedented expan-
sion of imperial arablism in terms of extent and duration. Mongol and
Manchu military superiority proved ephemeral in this context, although it
crucially, and unwittingly, made this Han expansion possible. This differ-
ence is not simply one of disparate human numbers, but also of critical
human ties to more portable domesticated plants. Wild animals, in con-
trast, needed to stay in northern forested terrain to stay wild or just stay
alive, and Inner Asian hunter-soldiers needed them to stay this way as
well. These needs excluded wild animals and, ultimately even Inner Asian
hunter-soldiers, from Hanspace almost as effectively as any of Wang’s
“numinous natural defenses.”
Han of China proper, however, could not ignore venery and were
actually indebted to it for opening arable expanses beyond Yixing’s
northern barrier. Venery and arablism thus conditioned each other to form
part of the larger network of the Qing empire. The greater expanse and
transformative effects of China proper’sdefinitive environmental prac-
tices, however, has tended to overshadow, and even eclipse, the borderland
networks without which the Qing empire would not have existed. The
following chapters will attempt to track the environmental relations within
the forests, steppe, and mountains looming beyond these Qingfields.
Notes1 MWLF, QL 26 / 6 / 17 [ 03 - 0178 - 1880 - 012 ], 26 / 7 / 3 [ 03 - 0178 - 1883 - 009 ], 26 / 7 / 8
[ 03 - 0178 - 1883 - 021 ]; 26 / 7 / 9 [ 03 - 0178 - 1883 - 022 ]. For a historical overview of
locust plagues in China, see Zhang Yihe,Zhongguo huangzai shi.
2 MWLF, QL 26 / 7 / 9 [ 03 - 0178 - 1883 - 022 ].
3 Dikötter,Discourse of Race, 4. Hanspace can be seen as an ideological response
to social stresses that formed identities in a way compatible with Hale’s ideas
cited in the Introduction; cf. Geertz,Interpretation of Cultures, 193 – 220.
Viewing Hanspace as ideology, however, anachronistically places it within a
range of modernist psychological concepts from“false consciousness”to“cyni-
cism”to“fantasy”;Žižek,Sublime Object, 28 – 30. Here ecology“is never
‘ecology’as such, it is always enchained in a specific series of equivalences”
that are ultimately political–socialist, feminist, capitalist, etc.;Žižek, ed.,
Mapping Ideology, 12. With such dismissal of nonhuman factors in identity
formation, ideology becomes a“fantastically”anthropocentric concept. Han-
space was not“enchained”in these modern“psycho-political”terms.