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

So the twentieth-century socialist state declares human technology has

rendered herding obsolete,weather permitting. Of course, the weather

does not always permit, and in 2001 theTaipusiBanner of the Shili-yin

Gool League repasturizes. So the eighteenth-century Qing state seeks to

construct Mongol identity as solely and“naturally”dependent on live-

stock,weather permitting. Of course, the weather does not always permit,

and in 1879 Zhang Zhidong wants banner Mongols to forsake herding

for farming.

Neither instance is a purely mental exercise in which“men [sic] dis-

tance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it

to themselves...to determine how it is to be dominated.”^11 In both

instances subjects are formed through interaction with ecology and

culture, although this is not always recognized or fully anticipated. So it

is not“the human social condition”alone that“perpetually generates

frontiers, dismantles them and generates new ones.”^12 Although general

cultural relations unquestionably inform historical spaces, these relations

do not dictate their own terms of existence within an ecological vacuum.

In fact, disruptive change is a sign that dictation has displaced an adaptive

awareness along such marginal“cultural ecotones.”

In the ideal Qing cases, banner Mongols are impervious to Zunghars

anddzud; borderland Manchus can forage, farm, and bookkeep as

needed; chieftainship tribals diligently work paddies to banish ehe

sukdunforjunxian administration. In all cases, proper relations to

forest, steppe, and mountain are naturalized so that virtue is central

everywhere and marginalized nowhere. Relations must be maintained

with minimal supervision because of sheer ecological scale. Like its

forest and mountain counterparts, even now the steppe“is simply too

geographically dispersed and theunderlying problems too complex for

central officials to be aware of all the local nuances.”^13 Environmen-

tality becomes the prerequisite adaptation for human access to dynamic

ecosystems.

The Qing state sought not to eliminate the diversity of adaptation

throughout its borderland order, but to take all adaptations into its

service as environmental subjects,produced through a structure of

administrative control under conditions of both cultural and ecological

change. The identity constructs of a Qing environmentality would

be the agents who embodied a“Qingspace”triple-trunked dragon’s

true lair of Manchu forests, Mongol steppes and Zomian mountains

from hide-bound Warka, free-range Chakhar, and gumlao ridden

Kachin zones.

270 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain