ann
(Ann)
#1
ethnically polarizing. Then, as now, the statefinds itself caught in the
middle trying to balance the interests of both sides even as it also seeks to
define the nature and limits of those same interests. Then, as now, the
development of the Hanspace network comes, almost“naturally” or
“inevitably,”at the expense of the Mongol network, even as Han prac-
tices manifest as ecologically less sustainable and more disruptive. The
result, then and now, is an existential threat that extends throughout
China’s borderlands across forest, steppe, and mountain to non-Han
identities based on other environmental relations.
Of course, many things have changed, especially as Han activities
have shifted to an industrial form. Such a profound transformation,
however, has not altered basic human dependency on natural resources
and has, in many respects, intensified it. This is most apparent in the
increase in fossil fuel exploitation, exemplified in the above instances by
the hundreds of coal pits currently envisioned by IMAR authorities.
They plan to make their jurisdiction, now the PRC’s largest coal-
producing province, China’s most important“energy base”(nengyuan
jidi), an industrialletu.^2 The ongoing interdependency of humans and
their ecologies forms a continuum from the past through to the present
and into the future that endows environmental studies with a strong
historical component.
This does not mean, however, that the same interdependencies
simply progress in human-ordered fashion as time obligingly passes.
Witness the emergence of a Han twentieth-century state that was
hardly the anticipated or welcome progeny of its Manchu forebear.
Moreover, new patches of uneven development emerged in the process
of the Qing’s Republican successor’s pursuit of industrial moderniza-
tion. This regime“abandoned”the traditional state’s“most important
task” of “underwriting of the ecological stability” in inland rural
peripheries of north China left at the margins of new coastal urban
core trends.^3
Attempts to maintain such stability were predicated on questionable
equilibrium assumptions, which persist even infields such as conserva-
tion, up to the present.^4 One basic equilibrium commitment was rooted in
centuries of state-society adherence to a particular form of intensive
agriculture. Dependence on extensive water control and fertilizers
required increasing, and increasingly complex, resource inputs to keep
outputs high almost year-round without fallowing.^5 Ultimately, this
“Han”agriculture nevertheless required still more uncultivated land to
maintain its equilibrium.
Qing Environmentality 267
