The Local Politics of Land Reclamation in the Lower Yangzi Highlands

THE LOCAL POLITICS OF LAND RECLAMATION IN THE LOWER YANGZI HIGHLANDS* Anne Osborne Long-term demographic, economic and ecological trends made themselves felt with increasing urgency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in China. These trends posed new problems and exacerbated old ones, and yet offered novel opportunities as well. Land use changed in response, leading to expanded reclamation of new lands, as well as intensified use of those long under cultivation. This altered the standards by which land was judged as valuable or wasteland, and therefore redefined the landscape in new economic terms. Control of the landscape and ofreclamation became more problematic, the subject of sometimes fierce competition. This paper studies the local politics of this competition, the struggles between different interest groups at the local level to control land reclamation for their own purposes. The secular trends which redefined the landscape are well-known. The population of China began to grow rapidly in the late Ming dynasty. It reached a high of around 150 million at the end of the sixteenth century, fell and recovered in the seventeenth century, more than doubled in the eighteenth century, and continued to grow in the nineteenth to reach around 430 million at mid-century, and one-half billion by its end.1 Malthusian checks of massive proportions—war, flood, drought, famine, disease—merely created ripples in this upward surge. The rapid demographic growth in late Ming and Qing China was accompanied by long-term growth in agricultural production and great expansion in the commercial economy. The late imperial period was also marked by progressive deterioration of the environment in some of the most important and productive agricultural regions in China. Best studied to date in the Middle Yangzi,2 reclamation of new lands made potentially prof- *I would like to thank Stephen Averill, Mary Backus Rankin, and Susan Naquin, as well as the panelists and audience at the panel on The Politics of Land Development in Eighteenth Century China at the American Historical Association's Annual Meeting in 1992, and the anonymous reviewers for Late Imperial China for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am grateful to Rider College for financial support for this research. 1LaVeIy, Lee and Wang 1990:816. 2WiIl 1980a; Perdue 1982, 1987. Late Imperial China Vol. 15, No. 1 (June 1994): 1-46 1 2 Anne Osborne itable by demographic and commercial expansion increased agricultural risk, and in some cases may have lowered long-term productivity in both lowland and highland environments. In the lowlands, excessive reclamation around lakes and rivers cut off some lands from irrigation, and destroyed the natural basins for seasonal high water that prevented flooding during runoff and rainy seasons and preserved water for irrigation in the dry season. In the highlands, deforestation often led to serious erosion, which might expose sterile subsoil or bare rock, and prevent further agricultural use of the degraded land, or even reestablishment of native vegetation. The erosion increased the risk to agriculture in the valleys, by silting up lakes, rivers and irrigation works. Loss of population due to a combination of natural and manmade disasters periodically reversed some of this reclamation, but the cycle soon started again, as population recovered and expanded to new levels. After each such cycle, the next began in an increasingly degraded environment. These long-term trends contributed to a fourth: increasing span-of-control problems for the state. It is well-known that the Chinese government and bureaucratic structure did not expand in proportion to population growth during the last thousand years of imperial rule. The number of counties actually fell slightly between the high points in Ming and Qing, while the population more than tripled. Not only would each magistrate, on average, have more than three times as many people under his jurisdiction; counties in the core areas were consolidated to allow for the creation of new counties on the frontier. So span-of-control problems were not limited to an ineffective government presence on the frontier; they included as well a reduced presence in the core areas of the empire.3 Its power stretched thin over a rapidly-expanding population , its revenues' unable to keep pace with...