Threats to Gong: Environmental Change and Social Transformation in Northwest China

Introduction

On May 9, 1849, Yan Antai carried a hoe and some seeds and headed up to the hills. Not that he could expect to reap much come autumn. On the slopes, he would have to rely solely on the summer's oft-failing rains. And, even as hillsides go, Yan had chosen a particularly difficult spot. We know this because customary regulations explicitly forbade cultivation of this bluff. Peoples along the Gansu margins generally maintained mixed agro-pastoral survival strategies that reduced the threat of subsistence crises due to specialization and offered flexibility in evading state tax agents, corvée duties, and periodic violence.¹ Hillsides too steep or too dry to farm could provide just enough pasture for a flock of sheep or a reservoir of wild plants and herbs to make it through hard times. These were commons and access to such resources was necessarily restricted, whether to a couple of villages, a single village, or even a single lineage. The Qiao family oversaw this particular hillside as a communal resource (Qiaoxing gongzhong shanpo)—both as grazing ground and source of "wild vegetables"—and vigilantly policed its borders. Yan was an outsider, a resident of a nearby village, and could make no claims to usage rights on these slopes. His attempt "to secretly open up (touken) Qiao family land" provoked a swift response; a group of Qiao men stabbed him to death.²

Yan's murder lays bare the socio-environmental tensions that attended population growth and imperial expansion over the course of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At one level, this is part of a frequently told, particularly Malthusian-inflected story of demographic growth, migration, and conflict. Yan climbed the Qiao's hillside, not to maximize profit, but to ensure survival. And yet, to speak simply of competition over resources, as if, to use Garrett Hardin's deterministic language, such "tragedies" were inevitable, tells us nothing of how such disputes were experienced nor the import of specific local institutions and land-holding regimes.³ Yan's actions imperiled the maintenance of local practices and village customary regulations (jiugui, xianggui) and went to the heart of that all-important word, "common." Secretly farming hillsides, felling trees, or siphoning water carried significant social costs and represented a threat to communal cooperation.

This article examines such disputes over common-pool resources and the subsequent strains in social relations, particularly along the middle and lower courses of the Tao River (Tib. Klu chu) watershed in central Gansu. In doing so, it reveals how the ecological transformation of landscapes once considered marginal to intensive agriculture had legal manifestations.⁴ Legal cases allow us to uncover the specific ways in which communities fought over and violently renegotiated the management of resources to fit changing social and environmental realities. In textured detail, they show how people actually experienced amorphous demographic growth and how both villagers and state agents simultaneously navigated and shaped changes at the local level.

When we zoom in to the village, we find socio-environmental tensions expressed in terms of "gong." Historians invested in debates over the "public sphere" have often understood gong as denoting a domain free from "official / government" (guan) intrusion, in other words, as the realm of a nascent civil society.⁵ The term, however, can hardly be reduced to a single definition. As we will see below, in the villages of central Gansu the nuance of gong occasionally overlapped with guan: gong land could also be guan land.

For peasants along the Tao River, then, gong holdings were not defined in opposition to the state. Gong property here meant, quite simply, "the commons." Whether describing lineage pastures, village forests, or collectively managed irrigation works, gong had clear and definite limits—such claims operated at the level of lineages or individual villages (or clusters of villages) and required inputs beyond the means of a single household. The commons were thus primarily about social relationships. In regulating access to depletable resources, gong regimes delineated, and perhaps even played a role in defining, the boundaries of a community...