ann
(Ann)
#1
differential resistance on the steppe would, if anything, favor Han
settlers as smallpox crossed the passes with them to exploit“virgin”
Mongolia.
Banner Mongol cultivators had repeatedly given ground to more
skilled and persistent Han farmers in 1727 , under pressure from tigers
and disease, and in 1745 , from what looks like plain despair. Again in
contrast, southwestern Yunnan’s pestiferous conditions may also have
saved some of its forests from several decades of cutting by thousands of
Han. Whole forests fell before the likes of the more than ten thousand
Shanxi and Shaanxi migrantsfinally unearthed in the Muna range in
1734 or the concentrated descent of a mere one thousand Han cultivators
who nevertheless managed to clear an estimated thirty thousandqingof
woodland in Daqing by 1760.
As imposing as they seem to have been, Han farmers did not spread
throughout Qing borderlands by themselves. They werefirmly backed by
their close allies the six domesticates and thefive grains (both paid due
tribute as primary Hanspace components by Wang Fuzhi). They were
also abetted along the way by some opportunistic wolves and tigers, land-
hungry, lake-thirsty Han governors-general such as Sun Jiagan, and, in
the nineteenth century, directly by the Qing state, previously an equivocal
partner. This was hardly the fruition of a Sinification plot laid in
1644 and systematically cultivated, but a process that developed organic-
ally and continues to do so beyond Qing purview in the form of other
networked relations.
Like its Manchu predecessor, the Hanstate still attempts to orches-
trate environmental relations in China proper and its adjacent border-
lands, if under enormously altered circumstances. Malaria continues
to pester the inhabitants of a less porous southwestern Yunnan, herds
continue to roam the shrinking grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and a very
few communities of Orochen, Dagur, Ewenki, and others continue
to hunt and gather along the northern fringes of a truncated Chinese
Manchuria.^16 There is, moreover, the beginning of another state roll-
back of steppe agriculture in favor of herding in deference to ecological
realities denied for more than a century, even as a new challenge of
industrial mineral extraction threatens to undermine the reemerging
pastures. There has also been growing reforestation, if not yet a return
to foraging.
Certainly borderland cultures and ecologies have not remained
unchanged, especially judged by modern Han industrial, agrarian,
and commercial practices, whichexhibit their own resonances and
Qing Environmentality 273
