Defining ecological governance for historical analysis

Environmental transformation has long been central to human history. On the one hand, interlocking processes of state formation and social mobilization have often arisen from efforts to extract, manage, and control resources; on the other, the economic and political activities they generate have continually reshaped ecological systems. This reciprocal dynamic underscores the analytical value of ‘ecological governance’, a relatively recent concept emerging from interdisciplinary work in political ecology and policy science that has become increasingly important for historical analysis. Foundational studies such as Lynton K. Caldwell’s International Environmental Policy (1984) and Ronnie D. Lipschutz’s Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Governance (1996) delineate two primary poles of ecological governance: Caldwell foregrounds state-centred, top-down institutional frameworks, while Lipschutz shifts attention to non-state actors, grassroots networks, and civil society. Subsequent scholarship, exemplified by Essential Concepts of Global Environmental Governance (edited by Jean-Frédéric Morin and Amandine Orsini, 2014), synthesizes these perspectives into a multi-actor, multi-scalar framework that recognizes governance as operating across multiple scales through complex interactions among public and private actors. This evolution parallels work in the environmental humanities, including Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye (Environmental Humanities, 2017) and Jo Guldi (The Long Land War, 2022), both of which emphasize the necessity of deep historical context for understanding ecological resilience and sustainability.Footnote ⁷

At its core, ecological governance conceives of nature as an interconnected system requiring holistic, inclusive, and adaptive forms of management. The concept has gained prominence in the twenty-first century amid growing concerns over industrial pollution, climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss. Through multilateral initiatives such as the 1992 Earth Summit and the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the United Nations helped popularize ‘ecological governance’ within global policy discourse, promoting integrated, multi-stakeholder approaches to environmental management. This mode of governance has become increasingly polycentric, characterized by relational processes of challenges and recalibration across multiple scales rather than by simple top-down direction or bottom-up mobilization.Footnote ⁸

Although these frameworks were developed in response to contemporary crises, they provide a powerful lens for reassessing the late Qing state-building. By shifting the evaluative metric from a teleological focus on ‘modernization’ to an existential concern with sustainability, this perspective reveals that the Qing state was already grappling with environmental relations and the agency of non-human actors—what Joseph Seeley terms ‘more-than-human’ histories predicated on ‘relational views of the world’—well before such concepts were formalized in international law and environmental science.Footnote ⁹

Building on these intellectual and policy foundations, this article adopts ecological governance as its central conceptual lens for examining how the late Qing state and other strategic actors responded to environmental stress and crisis. When applied historically, the concept must be defined in broad, integrative terms in order to capture the mutually constitutive and co-evolving relationship among state, society, and nature. Ecological governance thus encompasses the political, social, economic, and cultural systems through which diverse human actors negotiate their relationship both with the non-human physical world and with one another. On one level, it includes the institutions, mechanisms, and practices through which states and societies manage natural resources in pursuit of social order, political stability, and ecological resilience. On another, it includes the formal and informal decision-making processes through which environmental knowledge, priorities, and policies are debated, contested, and implemented. Ecological governance, then, is neither static nor monolithic; it emerges from the dynamic interplay of historical legacies and immediate imperatives, forged through ongoing negotiations between state authorities, social actors, and the often unruly agency of the non-human world.

Why apply this relatively modern concept to the study of Qing history? Despite its contemporary origins, the core principles of ecological governance—interconnectivity, adaptation, sustainability, and multi-centred agency—have clear historical analogues in the institutions and intellectual traditions of China’s last dynasty. As Helen Dunstan has shown, Qing officials understood environmental problems as matters of governance rather than as purely natural phenomena. Environmental intervention—most notably in domains such as water control—was embedded in routine administrative practice, justified through a moral-cosmological framework that linked environmental order to political legitimacy and constrained by the limits of state capacity, including fiscal scarcity, informational distortion, and central-local tensions. Human activity was thus understood simultaneously as a source of environmental disruption and as the primary means of restoring balance through disciplined administration. Rather than reflecting environmental indifference or deterministic decline, Dunstan’s work reveals a polity deeply—if imperfectly—engaged in managing climatic uncertainty, subsistence risk, and ecological limits. By centring human-environment relations within institutions, norms, and administrative practice, her analysis provides a crucial conceptual bridge between classic political history and the subsequent environmental historiography of imperial China.Footnote ¹⁰

This interactive approach influenced many of the works reviewed here and helped orient the field towards ecological governance and state capacity as central analytical categories. Although the Qing lacked modern environmental science, its evolving and diversified practices for managing land, water, and other natural resources exhibited clear functional affinities with contemporary forms of ecological management. Rather than imposing a modern concept anachronistically, this article deploys ecological governance as a heuristic lens to interpret what Jane Kate Leonard has described as the ‘tricks of the governing trade’—the flexible, ad hoc administrative adaptations through which officials stretched bureaucratic capacity in moments of crisis. By assembling scattered evidence into a coherent narrative, the six case studies examined here reveal distinct forms of ecological crisis and governance, highlighting both convergence and divergence across time and space. Ultimately, this framework foregrounds the Qing state’s often overlooked capacity for adaptation, shifting the historiographical verdict from narratives of inevitable decline towards what Peter Perdue characterizes as a ‘developmental agrarian state’ struggling to maintain equilibrium amid mounting ecological strain and sociopolitical upheaval.Footnote ¹¹

More broadly, ecological governance not only reflected but actively constituted wider historical transformations, serving as an analytical bridge between the foundational statecraft studies of Helen Dunstan and Lillian Li and the material emphases of more recent environmental history. By adopting a revised evaluative metric, we can assess the Qing state not merely in terms of administrative capacity but in relation to its ability to manage state-society-nature relations under conditions of long-term resource constraint. As a process-oriented concept, ecological governance illuminates how the regime confronted the resource constraints identified by Kenneth Pomeranz and Peter Perdue, often prioritizing regime survival over abstract notions of efficiency. Viewed through this lens, the Qing experience offers valuable insights into how a premodern state grappled with unprecedented environmental challenges, providing historical precedents for adaptability and resilience that resonate strongly with contemporary debates on governance in the Anthropocene.Footnote ¹²

Baseline, criteria, and context of Qing state building

Any meaningful assessment of state performance must rest on appropriate comparative baselines, clearly defined evaluative criteria, and historically situated contexts. A crucial first step, therefore, is to reconsider the reference point from which Qing decline is measured. Following the forward-looking approach pioneered by Philip A. Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones, this analysis resists projecting the dynasty’s eventual demise backward into a linear narrative of deterioration. Instead, it evaluates the Qing state within the structural constraints and governing imperatives of its own time. It also adopts a different metric of success: rather than judging the late Qing by teleological standards of dynastic survival or economic-military parity with the West, it foregrounds an existential concern with environmental sustainability. Viewed in this light, the Qing appears not as a decaying premodern relic but as a regime confronting ecological challenges of a scale and complexity that may well have exceeded those faced by other contemporary states.Footnote ¹³

This prospective—rather than retrospective—viewpoint has been substantially deepened by environmental and socio-economic historians such as Lillian Li, Peter Perdue, William Lavely, Bin Wong, and Christopher Isett. Their work demonstrates that the Qing state was not simply eroding but actively recalibrating governance in response to mounting pressures generated by demographic growth, resource scarcity, and environmental volatility through complex bureaucratic, fiscal, and hydraulic strategies. Processes once read as decline thus emerge as pragmatic adaptation and strategic reconfiguration. William Rowe, Daniel McMahon, and I, for example, reinterpret the transition from the Qianlong to the Jiaqing reign—long portrayed as an era of social instability and state decay—as a period of constructive reform that helped the dynasty to endure the unprecedented crises of the nineteenth century. This historiographical reorientation redirects analysis away from reasoning backward from dynastic collapse and towards examining the Qing across its formative and mature phases, assessing governance by its management of existential environmental and administrative constraints rather than by its distance from ‘modernity’.Footnote ¹⁴

Once this temporal shift is in place, the criteria for evaluating state performance can be specified more precisely. In his comparative study of state-building in China and Europe, R. Bin Wong proposes a comprehensive evaluative framework organized around four interlocking categories: Challenges, Capacities, Commitments, and Claims. ‘Challenges’ refer to large-scale, long-term transformations beyond the state’s direct control—such as demographic growth, commercial intensification, ecological degradation, and hydrological volatility—which together produced structural pressures that increasingly outpaced bureaucratic capacity after the Tang-Song transition in the tenth century. ‘Capacities’ denote the organizational resources, institutional means, and fiscal toolkit available to the state, including administrative structures, revenue systems, and military power. ‘Commitments’ capture shifting normative priorities that guided state action, while ‘Claims’ refer to the expectations and demands articulated by major social actors as well as by state agents themselves. Taken together, these four dimensions enable a more nuanced and historically grounded analysis of Qing governance, situating state action within its evolving material, sociopolitical, and ideological constraints.Footnote ¹⁵

The most consequential structural limitation confronting the Qing was the growing mismatch between the state’s relatively static organizational apparatus and the empire’s explosive demographic growth—a dilemma that G. William Skinner famously described as a failure to expand the administrative ‘span of control’. Building on the estimates of Ping-ti Ho, James Z. Lee, Wang Feng, and Dwight Perkins, the Qing population nearly tripled, from roughly 150 million in 1700 to more than 430 million by the mid-nineteenth century, driven in part by state taxation policies and the diffusion of New World crops. This expansion fuelled internal migration and frontier settlement, extending what Christopher Isett terms a ‘Ricardian-Malthusian’ or ‘involutionary’ growth pattern across the empire. While these processes mobilized human labour for productive ends, they also imposed severe ecological strain and generated what Mark Elvin described as a ‘technological lock-in’, whereby maintaining existing levels of output required ever-greater inputs of labour and resources for diminishing returns. By the late eighteenth century, as Ho observed, continued population growth increasingly implied systemic overextension.Footnote ¹⁶

Under these conditions, the Qing’s administrative, judicial, and logistical infrastructure was pushed to its limits. As Madeleine Zelin and Anne Osborne have shown, the empire’s deliberately minimalist bureaucratic apparatus struggled to govern an increasingly populous, commercialized, and environmentally stressed society. Western imperial intrusion further compounded these pressures but did not begin them; the cumulative effect was a crisis of sustainability rather than a simple failure of governance.Footnote ¹⁷

Taken together, these dynamics call for a more nuanced understanding of late Qing rule—one defined not by steady erosion but by what Peter Perdue characterizes as the predicament of a ‘developmental agrarian state’ confronting the exhaustion of its ecological foundations. Faced with overwhelming demands, the regime strategically reallocated its limited capacities, scaling back the resource-intensive ‘High Qing model’ of river conservancy and granary provisioning described by Lillian Li, Pierre-Étienne Will, and Bin Wong. As Randall Dodgen argues, this retreat reflected not administrative indifference but a rational response to a ‘riparian predicament’, in which the costs of hydraulic maintenance exceeded the state’s financial capability. It consequently redirected attention towards fiscal extraction and security imperatives essential to dynastic survival. These adjustments illuminate both the constraints and the adaptive resilience of the late Qing polity, revealing a state that reoriented governance through what I have described as ‘political sustainability’ in order to survive within tightening ecological and institutional limits.Footnote ¹⁸

Ecological governance in the Chinese historical context

This section turns to the central problematic of the article: how to situate ecological governance as a historically significant yet underexamined dimension of Chinese state-building. Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants and Robert B. Marks’ China: Its Environment and History offer a bird’s-eye view of the deep historical entanglement of Chinese states and societies with the natural world. Their sweeping environmental histories provide a crucial longue durée context for understanding the ecological constraints that shaped political responses in the late Qing, emphasizing that the environmental crises of the nineteenth century were not aberrations but the cumulative outcome of millennia of human-induced ecological transformation.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet the two works differ in emphasis and analytical orientation. Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants, with its 3,000-year sweep, foregrounds the interventionist nature of the Chinese state and traces the relentless expansion of human settlement that drove the retreat of wildlife and the destruction of forests. For Elvin, the primary engine of this ‘unsustainable growth’ lay in the intensified exploitation of nature in pursuit of political, economic, and military power at the state, societal, and individual levels. By contrast, Marks emphasizes that China’s ecological history is ‘a story of the simplification of environments, peoples, and institutions’. He focuses on the millennia-long socio-economic drivers of environmental change, linking the loss of ecological diversity and complexity to the rise of a market-oriented economy and its attendant production specialization. In Marks’ account, commercialization and demographic pressure converged in the nineteenth century to produce a distinct ‘ecological crisis’ that sharply constrained state action.Footnote ²⁰

Across the long arc of Chinese history, population growth, commercialization, land reclamation, and agricultural intensification combined to exert relentless pressure on the empire’s ecological foundations. Elvin’s evocative phrase—’three thousand years of unsustainable growth’—captures this autocatalytic process of environmental degradation in the agrarian cores, visible in episodes of ‘great deforestation’ and in the retreat of indicator species such as elephants and tigers to the margins of China Proper. By the late Qing, however, ecological pressure had extended beyond the cultivated interior into the ostensibly ‘pristine’ borderlands, generating what Jonathan Schlesinger identifies as a crisis of ‘purity’ driven by commodity rushes for fur, mushrooms, and pearl mussels. As David Bello and Joseph Seeley demonstrate, the state’s predicament was not merely Malthusian but hinged on the complex governance of ‘imperial foraging’ zones and ‘liquid geographies’, where the commodification of nature collided with projects of dynastic identity and territorial order. This struggle to maintain environmental control was paralleled on the Korean border, where Seonmin Kim demonstrates that the illicit trade in ginseng created a ‘borderland’ that defied simple territorial demarcation. The Qing state’s inability to fully police the ‘trespassing’ of ginseng poachers and timber cutters revealed the limits of imperial sovereignty in the face of high market demand for frontier resources. By the nineteenth century, as Marks shows, these long-term processes had converged into an acute ecological crisis, producing a resource-scarce and risk-prone landscape that sharply constrained the Qing state’s capacity to manage both internal disorder and external threats.Footnote ²¹

A particularly critical and formidable challenge of the Qing state’s ecological governance lay in managing the precarious hydrology of the North China Plain, a subject authoritatively analysed by Karl Wittfogel and Lillian Li. In Fighting Famine, Li argues that both the mighty Yellow River and the smaller Hai River Basin experienced an ecological crisis in the nineteenth century that was, ironically, the ‘product of the very successes of imperial engineering of the eighteenth century’. By successfully diking and channelling these rivers, the state encouraged dense settlement in hydrologically vulnerable areas, thereby raising the human cost of inevitable future floods. As the most ‘dominating hydrological fact’ of the North China region, the Yellow River’s extraordinary silt load produced a path-dependent impasse, in which the techno-bureaucratic infrastructure required to sustain the Grand Canal became a rigid ‘straitjacket’, demanding ever-greater inputs of labour and silver merely to avert catastrophe. Karl Wittfogel’s theory of the ‘hydraulic mode of production’ conceptualizes such struggles as productive investments, assuming a state capable of coherent hydraulic leadership that used water control to deliver welfare and consolidate centralized, despotic power. Challenging this well-known but controversial framework, Ling Zhang instead characterizes this inherently unstable environmental mechanism as a ‘hydraulic mode of consumption’, in which the river functioned as a parasitic force that relentlessly absorbed the state’s political capital and material resources.Footnote ²²

This structural vulnerability was further compounded by what Ruth Mostern identifies as a failure of imperial ‘seeing’: although officials intensively managed the floodplain, they largely ignored the anthropogenic erosion of the Loess Plateau that continually replenished sediment loads. By the nineteenth century, these dynamics had crystallized into a riparian dilemma, a zero-sum confrontation between the ‘geologic’ force of rising riverbeds and the ‘fiscal’ limits of the Treasury. As David Pietz argues, the system’s eventual collapse in 1855 marked the outer boundary of the late Qing state’s capacity to ‘order the waters’, forcing a retreat from the hydraulic interventionism that had sustained the empire for millennia. This retreat marked a critical moment of ecological recalibration, as the state abandoned unsustainable hydraulic commitments in favour of strategies better aligned with its remaining fiscal and administrative capacities.Footnote ²³

Yet mounting environmental pressures did not lead the Qing state to abandon intervention. On the contrary, it sustained a long tradition of what J. R. McNeill has termed ‘meddlesome’ governance. As he observes, ‘in comparative perspective, the Chinese imperial state … appears remarkable for its ecological role … actively seeking to develop resources and rearrange nature so as to maximize tangible and taxable wealth’. This interventionist impulse, however, was far from monolithic. As Bello and Schlesinger demonstrate, it initially involved the management of ‘imperial foraging’ and regimes of ‘purity’ designed to maintain the ‘culture-nature’ boundaries of empire. During the Tongzhi Restoration 同治中興 (1860–1874), the state increasingly shifted towards what Peter Lavelle characterizes as a strategy of ‘colonial development’, seeking the profits of nature (ziran zhi li自然之利) in frontier regions such as Xinjiang to secure dynastic survival. Situated within the long-term trajectory traced by Elvin and Marks, these shifts allow us to reconceptualize the late Qing not as a polity in terminal decay but as an institution grappling with the cumulative environmental debts of its own success. In this light, the dynasty’s final century emerges as a period of embattled yet adaptive ecological governance, marked by repeated efforts to reorganize relations with the physical world in order to mobilize resources and forestall political rupture.Footnote ²⁴

Yet the limits of this adaptive ecological governance were not evenly distributed across the empire. They surfaced most starkly in the agrarian interior, where long-standing strategies of land clearance and hydraulic intervention collided with finite ecological thresholds. Perdue’s foundational study of Hunan, Exhausting the Earth, shows how the state’s drive to maximize production through dike building and land reclamation generated a form of ‘prosperity’ that was ecologically unsustainable in the Lake Dongting Plain and adjacent mountainous areas. By encouraging the enclosure of wetlands (polders) and the clearance of highlands, the state inadvertently accelerated siltation and flooding, leading to regional environmental degradation and intensified land disputes. These unintended consequences locked them into a cycle where short-term resource extraction (‘felling’ and ‘draining’) degraded the environment, forcing ever-greater investments of labour and capital merely to maintain the system against looming ecological collapse.Footnote ²⁵

If the agrarian core of Hunan reveals how ecological governance reached its limits under conditions of land scarcity and environmental exhaustion, the frontier region of Manchuria offers a contrasting trajectory—one shaped less by absolute resource scarcity than by distinct social property relations and patterns of labour intensification. Christopher Isett’s State, Peasant, and Merchant (2007) shows that despite the initial abundance of arable land in the northeast, Manchuria’s agricultural economy devolved into a ‘Malthusian-Ricardian’ pattern characterized by labour intensification rather than capital accumulation or rising labour productivity. He traces this outcome to the region’s social property relations: because peasants enjoyed direct, non-market access to land, they were insulated from competitive pressures that might otherwise have spurred labour specialization and technological innovation. Rather than pursuing profit maximization, settlers prioritized social goals—particularly expanding family size and practising partible inheritance, which progressively fragmented landholdings across generations. As average farm sizes decreased by roughly half from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth centuries, cultivators were compelled to abandon labour-efficient extensive methods (such as fallowing) and adopt labour-intensive permanent cropping simply to maintain subsistence. This shift required ever-greater inputs of labour for diminishing marginal returns, locking the region into an ‘involutionary’ cycle structurally similar to the small-peasant economy of North China—the very origin of most Manchurian migrants and their customary practices. Together, Perdue and Isett illustrate how the Qing state’s agrarian expansion was ultimately bounded by environmental constraints that intensified labour mobilization could hardly overcome.Footnote ²⁶

Land reclamation in the Lower Yangzi highlands

Following the quick empire-wide ecological overview above, we turn to the first case study: Anne Osborne’s analysis of highland reclamation in the Lower Yangzi area. While Perdue and Isett show how the Qing state’s imperative to maximize agricultural output to sustain a booming population produced diminishing returns and ecological vulnerability, Osborne provides fine-grained evidence of how this dynamic unfolded in the Anhui-Zhejiang borderlands. She focuses on the activities of pengmin 棚民 (‘shack people’), itinerant migrants whose clearance of upland forests for New World crops like maize fundamentally altered local regimes of ecological management, generating a structural conflict between the short-term profits of highland development and the long-term safety of lowland agriculture. By interweaving Perdue’s emphasis on the tension between ‘official goals and local interests’ with her analysis of the ‘local politics’ of reclamation, Osborne shows that the resulting ecological crisis was a prime example of the Qing ecological dilemma. The state found itself paralyzed between its commitment to ‘nourish the people’ through land reclamation and the growing recognition that such effort was environmentally unsustainable, transforming the highlands into a contested zone of social conflict and ecological risk.Footnote ²⁷

Osborne, along with Stephen C. Averill and Sow-Theng Leong, situates the pengmin within broader patterns of demographic pressure and internal migration rigorously documented by Lillian Li, Ping-ti Ho, and James Z. Lee. Driven by land scarcity in established lowland regions, these shack people expanded into the uplands of China Proper, particularly from overpopulated coastal provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong. As specialists in marginal mountainous environments, they transformed previously underutilized uplands into commercial zones producing timber, indigo, and New World crops. This process peaked in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—often described as the golden age of internal migration—but, as Osborne emphasizes, it frequently led to rapid soil exhaustion and erosion, revealing the environmental limits of the state’s capacity to absorb surplus labour.Footnote ²⁸

Osborne’s study centres on pengmin settlements in the rugged border highlands between Anhui and Zhejiang, a peripheral zone of the Lower Yangzi Delta, China’s agrarian heartland since the Song dynasty. By the early 1800s, after centuries of demographic growth and agricultural expansion, even steep slopes once regarded as ‘untillable wasteland’ had been incorporated into lineage-based property regimes. Osborne details how shack people forged informal arrangements with lower-status lineage members to bypass official prohibitions, a pattern of ‘local politics’ that Perdue similarly identifies in the Hunan highlands. These itinerant cultivators introduced both subsistence and commercial crops—including maize, sweet potatoes, tea, tung oil, lacquer, and indigo—and relied heavily on slash-and-burn techniques. Maize, in particular, was favoured for its high yields and rapid returns, as it required little fertilizer, weeding, or irrigation. Yet its cultivation on steep, un-terraced slopes rapidly depleted thin mountain soils. Once fertility was exhausted—often within two to three years—pengmin moved on to new plots, perpetuating a cycle of transient, extensive agriculture.Footnote ²⁹

The contrast between upland and lowland land-use strategies highlights two divergent responses to demographic pressure and speaks to the long-standing debate between ‘involutionary’ and ‘Smithian’ growth paths in late imperial China. Lowland communities adapted through what Philip C. Huang and Christopher Isett term an ‘involutionary’ pattern of agricultural growth, intensifying labour inputs on fixed plots to the point of diminishing marginal returns. Bozhong Li, however, emphasizes that such intensification represented not stagnation but a rational strategy of resource management that sustained high productivity through complex cropping patterns and heavy fertilization. In contrast, upland cultivators turned to what Bello characterizes as ‘Han-style swiddening’, an itinerant mode of farming grounded in short-term extraction and continual mobility rather than long-term sustainability. New World crops enabled quick returns from marginal soils, rendering the highlands economically viable but ecologically fragile. By providing essential food supplies, the expansion of maize and sweet potato cultivation, in turn, fuelled upland industries such as mining, logging, and charcoal production, integrating highlands and lowlands into increasingly commercialized economic networks.Footnote ³⁰

These short-term gains came at a mounting long-term ecological cost. Forested uplands were essential to sustaining the agricultural and hydrological regimes of the river valleys, yet intensive maize cultivation on deforested slopes disrupted this balance. As the nineteenth-century statecraft thinker Wei Yuan observed, the stripping of ‘primeval forests’ caused torrents of soil and sand to wash downstream, silting rivers crucial to deltaic rice cultivation and social stability. Perdue conceptualizes this process as ‘exhausting the earth’, arguing that the state’s production and security imperatives, interacting with market forces and migrant survival strategies, generated a self-reinforcing cycle in which short-term expansion progressively undermined long-term ecological sustainability. By the late eighteenth century, these effects were already visible in the Lower Yangzi core and intensified throughout the nineteenth century. Although periodic disasters temporarily slowed highland reclamation, the cycle resumed within an increasingly degraded ecological context.Footnote ³¹

The social and political ramifications were equally profound. Highland reclamation eroded what Prasenjit Duara terms the ‘cultural nexus of power’ linking the imperial state to local society through gentry mediation. As Averill and Osborne show, this nexus was increasingly undermined by pengmin migration and the commercialization of upland agriculture. The influx of mobile settlers intensified tensions between ‘official goals and local interests’, contributing to divisions within the local elites and complicating their intermediary role. Conservative lineage leaders resisted reclamation by invoking fengshui and warnings of ecological degradation, while entrepreneurial elites—motivated by rent-seeking—colluded with migrants. The shack people exploited these divisions, persuading indebted families to lease lineage land in violation of regulations. Over time, such arrangements weakened collective welfare and eroded the normative authority of both gentry institutions and the imperial state.Footnote ³²

As upland economies expanded beyond the assumptions embedded in imperial law and local custom—particularly concerning land tenure, social order, and environmental management—the boundary between state and society became increasingly porous. Local elites and outside actors operated in legal and administrative grey zones, exploiting the widening gap between competing official objectives and diversified local interests. Initially, the Qing tolerated and at times encouraged highland reclamation to relieve population pressure and expand fiscal capacity. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, mounting alarm over deforestation, soil erosion, and the uncontrollable mobility of pengmin prompted a shift towards preservation. A series of edicts issued between 1802 and 1850 banned outsider reclamation and prohibited maize cultivation, reflecting a desperate attempt to reassert control over an environment pushed beyond its limits.Footnote ³³

These measures largely failed. As Osborne emphasizes, the state’s efforts were undermined by the growing ‘span of control’ problem. Since the Tang-Song transition, population growth and territorial expansion had far outpaced the expansion of the formal bureaucratic apparatus, leaving a thinly staffed and overstretched administration ill-equipped to monitor migration or enforce land-use regulations in peripheral highlands. The Qing state was caught between the imperative to ‘exhaust the earth’ in order to nourish its population and the recognition that such intensification generated an existential ecological crisis. As administrative capacity stagnated, the state increasingly turned to ‘entrepreneurial’ intermediaries, whose predatory practices further strained governance and deepened elite divisions. Consequently, despite repeated bans and investigations, highland reclamation by pengmin not only persisted but accelerated throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁴

At first glance, the state’s inability to enforce its own policies might appear to confirm a conventional narrative of state failure and imperial decline. Elvin famously argued that ‘Short-term rewards from the over-exploitation of resources tended to reduce any inclination of the state to limit exploitation within sustainable limits at a time of crisis (at a given technological level).’ Yet, as Osborne demonstrates, this interpretation fails to capture the negotiated complexities of ecological governance in imperial China. Moreover, it obscures the deeper structural predicament of a premodern polity overwhelmed less by myopia or opportunism than by chronic structural constraints. Her study of highland reclamation shows that Qing authorities at multiple levels not only recognized the dangers of overexploitation but also possessed the political will to restrain it; what they lacked was the infrastructural, administrative, and coercive capacity to do so. Hence, the problem was less one of political failure or institutional decay than of state overburden: as rapid demographic growth, fragile upland ecologies, and competing socio-economic demands converged to produce socio-ecological pressures that few premodern regimes could absorb, let alone resolve. As Philip Kuhn demonstrates, the state’s inability to project authority into peripheral zones compelled it to cede effective power to local elites and militarized networks, eroding governance coherence across an increasingly polarized landscape.Footnote ³⁵

Seen from this perspective, highland reclamation in the Lower Yangzi emerges as a paradigmatic site of late imperial ecological governance—one that encapsulates the broader contradictions of Qing rule by exposing a chronic mismatch between ecological pressures and the state’s structural capacity to govern them. The oscillation between expansion and conservation thus reveals the ecological limits of the Chinese empire, prompting a pragmatic recalibration of governance in response to competing subsistence, fiscal, and environmental pressures rather than signalling policy incoherence or state collapse.

Yellow River conservancy on the North China plain

Just as the challenges of highland reclamation illustrate the Qing state’s attempts to navigate mounting socio-ecological pressures, a similarly constrained yet adaptive institutional response is visible in the management of the Yellow River on the North China Plain. Long regarded as the ‘cradle of Chinese civilization’, this river basin remained both a politico-cultural heartland and a critical agricultural region of the Middle Kingdom. Like highland reclamation, Yellow River control was never merely a technical undertaking but always carried profound political, economic, and symbolic implications. Since antiquity, Chinese statecraft had been shaped by efforts to ‘order the waters’ of this ecologically fragile region, especially the lower reaches of the Yellow River where it intersected with the Grand Canal—the vital artery that, from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) onwards, carried tribute grain from the Lower Yangzi to Beijing, the imperial capital. As China’s ‘mother river’ and its most volatile waterway, the Yellow River posed the single greatest challenge to imperial hydraulic governance; success or failure in taming its floods was widely regarded as a barometer of dynastic legitimacy.Footnote ³⁶

As Lillian Li argues, North China was ‘the original and principal location for imperial intervention into the environment’, where deep state investment in hydraulic engineering enabled population densities that the natural environment alone could not sustain, creating a precarious interdependence between polity and landscape. This intervention forced the bureaucracy to funnel extraordinary amounts of labour and capital into a river system that Ruth Mostern characterizes as a ‘sediment sorting machine’, administratively disconnected from its erosion-prone sources on the Loess Plateau. The nineteenth-century crisis thus stemmed not from dynastic decline alone, but from a ‘riparian predicament’ and ‘technological lock-in’, in which the geologic reality of siltation increasingly outpaced the fiscal capacity of the state to maintain dikes and channels. Yet the Qing did not simply accept collapse. As Jane Kate Leonard demonstrates in her analysis of the 1826 Grand Canal crisis, the regime mobilized extra-bureaucratic resources and experimented with maritime grain transport, revealing a state that remained functionally adaptive even as it confronted the ecological limits of its power.Footnote ³⁷

A substantial body of scholarship has examined the Yellow River’s centrality to Chinese ecological governance. Works by Dodgen, Pomeranz, Li, Pietz, Mostern, and Zhang collectively reveal the multiple ways in which the river shaped China’s ecology, political economy, and state-building trajectories across different temporal and spatial scales. Pietz’s The Yellow River focuses on the twentieth century, tracing how flood control, irrigation, and water management informed state-building from the late Qing through the People’s Republic. Crucially, Pietz situates these modern challenges within the river’s long history, emphasizing how its immense sediment load and volatile flow generated an engineering deadlock that repeatedly tested the limits of hydraulic governance. His analysis highlights both the scale of the problem and the adaptive strategies demanded of the modern Chinese state, including the repeated invocation of the myth of Yu the Great—the ancient sage-king and legendary flood-taming founder of dynastic rule—to legitimize intervention.Footnote ³⁸

While Pietz extends the narrative into the modern era, Mostern’s The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History reconstructs the longue durée processes that produced the premodern infrastructural cul-de-sac. Adopting a ‘whole-basin and sediment-centred’ approach, Mostern rejects the treatment of sediment as a timeless natural fact and instead historicizes it as the cumulative outcome of specific human interventions that transformed the Loess Plateau. By asking when the Yellow River turned ‘yellow’, she delineates three major ‘lifespans’, demonstrating that the disaster-prone river of the late imperial period was a comparatively recent historical formation, shaped by agricultural intensification, deforestation, and state-sponsored development. Her findings resonate strongly with Ling Zhang’s argument that the Qing state became locked into a ‘hydraulic mode of consumption’, in which political legitimacy required increasingly unsustainable engineering investments to manage the unintended ecological consequences of its own policies.Footnote ³⁹

Ling Zhang’s The River, the Plain, and the State offers a more focused but equally revealing analysis of the Yellow River, centring on an 80-year-long ‘environmental drama’ (1048–1128) during the Northern Song. Following a catastrophic dike breach, the river shifted hundreds of kilometres across the Hebei plain, reshaping relations between river, state, and society. Zhang conceptualizes this process as a constantly evolving ‘trialectic’ between non-human forces, political institutions, and human communities, emphasizing the agency of the river itself. Recurrent disasters compelled massive state investment in hydraulic works, yet deforestation and soil erosion in the middle reaches—exacerbated by demands for construction timber—perpetuated a vicious cycle of siltation and flooding downstream. Zhang’s ‘all-encompassing approach’ and interactive analysis highlight how hydraulic projects, fiscal pressures, and bureaucratic rivalries exposed the limits of state power and reconfigured governance in moments of acute ecological stress.Footnote ⁴⁰

A similar emphasis on institutional constraint appears in Dodgen’s Controlling the Dragon, which provides a microhistorical analysis of the last major Yellow River crisis of the imperial era. Situating the 1855 avulsion within the late Qing’s riparian impasse, Dodgen argues that the collapse of river conservancy reflected not simple administrative failure but the technological, fiscal, and organizational limits of a premodern state overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the hydroengineering challenges it faced. The decision to abandon major hydraulic intervention after 1855—prioritizing grain transport to Beijing over the safety of inland North China—echoed earlier state choices, including those identified by Ling Zhang in the Northern Song. Yet this retreat did not signal a withdrawal from environmental governance. As Seeley demonstrates in Border of Water and Ice, the Qing continued to assert sovereignty and manage resources along the Yalu River, grappling with ‘liquid geographies’ at the empire’s periphery even as its capacity to control the Yellow River waned.Footnote ⁴¹

Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Making of a Hinterland reframes the Yellow River not as a worsening hydraulic problem but as a dynamic ecological condition shaping both the regional balance of political economy and the national strategy of state building. Focusing on inland North China between 1853 and 1937, Pomeranz shows how the river’s avulsion rendered the Grand Canal inoperable and accelerated the economic marginalization of the Huang-Yun (Yellow River-Grand Canal) region. This transformation prompted a reorientation of state priorities towards coastal development, situating the Yellow River crisis within broader shifts in Qing ecological governance and intensifying global competition.Footnote ⁴²

A full assessment of ecological governance in this setting requires close attention to the Yellow River Conservancy, the Qing’s most resource-intensive hydraulic agency. The works of Li and Dodgen demonstrate that the conservancy relied on markets, merchants, and flexible labour arrangements to manage large-scale logistical challenges. Although this institutional flexibility facilitated project execution, it also undermined oversight, fostered corruption, and escalated costs. The river’s worsening sedimentation—driven by erosion on the Loess Plateau—produced the infamous ‘hanging river’, whose elevated bed made catastrophic breaches increasingly likely. Maintaining both the river and the Grand Canal—‘Beijing’s throat’—placed enormous fiscal strain on the state, especially as more durable engineering solutions remained technically and financially prohibitive.Footnote ⁴³

By the Tongzhi Restoration (1860–1874), controlling the Yellow River had become a near-impossible task. Conservancy expenditures consumed an ever-growing share of state revenues at a moment of intense military strain driven by internal rebellion and foreign aggression. The loss of the Lower Yangzi to the Taiping in 1853 and the river’s catastrophic avulsion in 1855, in particular, forced the state to abandon inland hydraulic priorities and shift to maritime grain transport. While traditional narratives cast these developments as evidence of imperial decline, revisionist scholarship complicates this view. Dodgen and Leonard both show that officials in the early Daoguang period achieved measurable success through targeted reforms and institutional experimentation. The eventual retreat from large-scale intervention thus reflected a rational recalibration under conditions of extreme ecological and fiscal constraint.Footnote ⁴⁴

Placed in dialogue, the works of Li, Dodgen, Pietz, Pomeranz, Mostern, and Zhang reveal the Yellow River as a central arena of Qing ecological governance—one defined by technological complexity, environmental volatility, and administrative limitation. Moving beyond declensionist narratives, they portray a regime grappling with an existential concern for sustainability, repeatedly adjusting its strategies in response to forces it could not fully control. The Yellow River emerges not merely as a site of disaster but as a powerful historical agent, shaping state priorities, regional economies, and the very limits of imperial governance.

Water-land management on the Jianghan Plain

While much of the scholarship discussed above emphasizes the state’s primary role in water conservancy, Jiayan Zhang’s Coping with Calamity and Yan Gao’s Yangzi Waters foreground the crucial yet underappreciated contributions of local communities in shaping hydraulic regimes on the Jianghan Plain (江漢平原). Lying at the confluence of the middle Yangzi River and its largest tributary, the Han River, this fertile alluvial basin had roughly one-fifth of its total area covered by water, a proportion that exceeded 50 per cent in some counties. Shaped by centuries of fluvial sedimentation, it was characterized by an amphibious landscape of lakes, wetlands, networked waterways, and shifting land enclosures. Compared with the North China Plain and the Lower Yangzi delta, the two most intensively studied agrarian regions of China, this ‘marshy kingdom’ emerged as a major agricultural zone relatively late, beginning in the Ming period with large-scale dike construction aimed at both water control and land reclamation. As Bello observes, it represents a distinctive rural economy, ‘adding a third, and comparatively unexplored, dimension to the standard north-south divide in Chinese agrarian studies’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Together, the two works offer a layered and society-oriented perspective on environmental management, in which ecological conditions, rather than market forces alone, structured economic life and political authority. Zhang’s Coping with Calamity challenges market-centric economic history by arguing that the peasant economy of the Jianghan Plain was fundamentally environment-driven: local decisions regarding crops, settlement, and land use were primarily survival strategies in response to endemic flooding and hydrological instability rather than simple reactions to commercialization or class conflict. Gao’s Yangzi Waters extends this ecological emphasis by conceptualizing the region as a ‘water regime’—a ‘hydrosocial’ complex in which the materiality of water was intertwined with political culture to produce a distinctive ‘socionature’. Drawing on Bello’s concept of ‘cultured nature’, originally developed to analyse Manchu foraging identities, Gao reframes the Jianghan Plain as an ‘amphibious culture’ in which human adaptation to water shaped social organization, legitimacy, and governance.Footnote ⁴⁶

Central to both analyses is the yuan (垸)—dike-enclosed polders that functioned as the primary mechanism of settlement, reclamation, and flood control. Gao conceptualizes the yuan not merely as essential infrastructure for managing land-water resources but as a hybrid socio-ecological assemblage that enabled an ‘amphibious’ livelihood of semi-farming and semi-fishing. These communities achieved a degree of resilience and partial autonomy from direct state intervention by embedding hydraulic management within lineage organization, ritual practice, and localized knowledge. In the early Qing, the Jianghan Plain thus occupied what Gao describes as a ‘hydraulic periphery’: unlike the politically critical Yellow River basin or the revenue-rich Lower Yangzi, the region was viewed as environmentally complex, disease-ridden, and costly to govern. The Qing court, therefore, adopted a largely hands-off approach, tacitly encouraging local self-governance in water management and land reclamation.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the Qing state remained the primary authority for major river-control projects, it deliberately delegated responsibility for the vast majority of polder dikes to local gentry and lineage leaders in this water-rich region. This arrangement exemplifies what Philip Huang terms ‘centralized minimalism’, in which state capacity was strategically concentrated on critical hydraulic segments rather than uniformly extended across the empire. Legal classifications, such as ‘people’s yuan’ and ‘official yuan’, were consequently fluid, shifting in response to fiscal constraints and changing administrative priorities. This mode of semiformal ecological governance challenges Karl Wittfogel’s claim that hydraulic societies necessarily depended on despotic central control. Instead, it reveals a state commitment not to comprehensive domination but to a triangular process of negotiation among the central government, local officials, and grassroots communities, a dynamic vividly documented by Jiayan Zhang in his 2025 study Dikes and Society in Rural China: The Jianghan Plain, 1788–2010s.Footnote ⁴⁸

The labour-intensive process of yuan construction transformed marshes and flood-prone lowlands into productive agricultural zones, serving as both a foundational safeguard of the local economy and the dominant mode of hydraulic control. While this infrastructure substantially increased output, its overexpansion due to population pressure eroded natural flood buffers and locked the region into a precarious balance between heightened productivity and growing vulnerability. Zhang characterizes this distinctive tension as the ‘Jianghan pattern’, in which economic life was shaped less by market integration or class struggle than by continual ecological adjustment. Local water management operated within what Peter Perdue terms a ‘fifth mode’ of hydraulic organization—situated between despotic state control and complete self-governance—where yuan communities, organized as largely self-contained units of enclosure and anchored in gentry-led lineages, maintained dikes under intermittent and limited state oversight.Footnote ⁴⁹

During the eighteenth century, however, this dynamic equilibrium began to unravel. The proliferation of both communally managed (legal) and privately run (illegal) yuan generated a problem of ecological governance that exceeded the state’s regulatory capacity. This crisis was intensified by environmental degradation upstream. As Osborne, Perdue, and Zhang demonstrate, the influx of migrants like mobile pengmin into upland regions accelerated soil erosion and sedimentation throughout the Yangzi watershed. Qing officials such as Yan Ruyi observed that loosened topsoil washed downstream, silting channels and obstructing drainage systems in the Jianghan Plain. The fate of lowland yuan communities thus became inseparable from highland ecological exhaustion, binding local peasant adaptation to empire-wide environmental processes.Footnote ⁵⁰

As ecological stress mounted, collective coordination within and among yuan communities frayed. Local peasants increasingly prioritized immediate private gain over communal risk management. Consequently, infrastructure maintenance became fragmented, disputes over dike repair proliferated, and the once-cooperative yuan system evolved into a contested sociopolitical arena. Zhang underscores the paradox of ecological management on the Jianghan Plain: while essential for short-term economic survival, decentralized strategies of local adaptation often undermined long-term social order and environmental stability. Like Osborne, Gao further emphasizes the tension between forces of preservation and encroachment, which continually confronted and negotiated with one another. She also shows how growing disorder—described by contemporaries as a ‘plebeian culture’ of violent disputes—invited greater state involvement in the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹

These tensions were dramatically intensified by peasant uprisings, most notably the White Lotus (1796–1805) and Taiping rebellions, which destabilized the region, accelerated militarization, and heightened flood risk. To suppress insurgency, the Qing adopted the defensive strategy of jianbi qingye 堅壁清野 (‘strengthening walls and clearing fields’), concentrating populations and food supplies within fortified settlements (zhai in the highlands and bao in the lowlands) to deny rebels access to resources. While intended to restore order, this radical strategy inflicted severe ecological damage. The construction of forts required extensive deforestation, thus exacerbating hillside erosion and accelerating downstream siltation. To protect these fortifications, militia organizations (tuanlian 團練) were mobilized and drilled. Drawing heavily on existing yuan networks and gentry leadership, they effectively militarized hydraulic communities and disrupted routine water-control operations. At the same time, fiscal resources originally earmarked for dike maintenance were frequently diverted to military purposes, compounding environmental degradation and contributing to more frequent water calamities and the catastrophic famines of the 1860s.Footnote ⁵²

In the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing confronted a full-fledged environmental and hydraulic crisis on the Jianghan Plain. Reconstruction debates over flood control, particularly proposals such as the ‘four-outlet diversion system’, echoed the ‘riparian predicament’ of the Yellow River, forcing officials to navigate between local resistance and regional stability. Yet the Republican period marked a decisive rupture. As Gao argues, the region shifted from a premodern water regime centred on balancing population and land use to a state-directed model focused on energy extraction, hydroengineering, and watershed management. Influenced by what David Pietz terms a ‘high-modernist’ technology complex, including TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)-style planning and international expertise, projects such as the Jinshui Sluice transformed the Jianghan Plain from a hydraulic periphery into a hydraulic centre of national development.Footnote ⁵³

Together, Coping with Calamity and Yangzi Waters illuminate the enduring tension between grassroots management and state-led regulation at the heart of Qing ecological governance. Rejecting simplistic models of hydraulic despotism or local autonomy, both works emphasize negotiation, adaptation, and recalibration. The history of the Jianghan Plain thus reveals a state that neither simply failed nor withdrew, but continually adjusted its strategies in response to ecological volatility, social conflict, and the unruly agency of water and silt. In doing so, this case study affirms the environmental turn in Qing history by foregrounding non-human forces as active participants in the making—and unmaking—of imperial order.Footnote ⁵⁴

Forestry and timber use in South China

The intricate relationship between human activity and the natural world is further illuminated through the history of forestry and timber use. As James Harkness observes, forests are among China’s most vital ecosystems, both for their rich biodiversity and for the essential resources they have long supplied to the state and society. For this reason, Stanley D. Richardson described China as the most forest-dependent civilization in the world. In ecological terms, forests and mountains formed a mutually sustaining system: forests stabilized slopes and regulated water flow, while mountains provided the environmental conditions necessary for forest growth. During the Qing dynasty, according to Yoshiyuki Aihara, mountains were classified as either ‘private property’ or ‘government mountains’. Private mountains could be owned individually or jointly, with co-owners enjoying exclusive use, while government mountains were formally open to the public for activities such as gathering firewood or burial, provided such use did not interfere with others. Despite their different access regimes, both types effectively functioned as commons that underwrote everyday subsistenceFootnote ⁶⁰

When it comes to forest management, mid- and late imperial China has long been interpreted through a master declensionist narrative, most powerfully articulated in Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants. Elvin depicted an empire-wide trajectory of ‘great deforestation’ driven by an interlocking set of structural transformations, including population growth, agricultural expansion, and commercialization following the Tang-Song transition. Like highland reclamation and Yellow River control, the transformation of China’s woodlands formed part of a broader intensification of land use. Yet unlike early modern Europe, the late imperial Chinese state largely refrained from directly administering forests, a factor that has contributed to the relative neglect of forestry in historical scholarship. This absence of centralized bureaucratic management, however, did not diminish the importance of forests, which remained deeply entangled with local economies, regional ecologies, and state power.Footnote ⁶¹

Three major works published over the past three decades have substantially revised this picture, moving beyond narratives of inevitable degradation to reveal a more complex and regionally differentiated history of forestry governance. Nicholas Menzies’ Forest and Land Management in Imperial China played a foundational role in establishing this subfield. Offering broad temporal and spatial coverage across two millennia, it focuses particularly on the Ming-Qing period to demonstrate that Chinese society developed enduring and plural mechanisms of forest conservation and stewardship. Rather than a uniform trajectory of depletion, he identifies a wide array of institutional arrangements, including imperial hunting preserves, temple groves, clan forests, and agroforestry systems, each producing distinct ecological outcomes. While some local practices fostered preservation, others, including state-managed projects such as the imperial hunting enclosure (mulan weichang), ultimately succumbed to encroachment despite formal prohibitions. Menzies, therefore, argues that questions of sustainability and ecological governance must be posed at the regional and local levels, where overlapping and institutionally diverse modes of regulation shaped long-term outcomes.Footnote ⁶²

Building on Menzies’ pioneering work, Ian Miller’s Fir and Empire and Meng Zhang’s Timber and Forestry in Qing China shift attention to the empire’s southern regions, where mountainous terrain and commercial networks enabled large-scale timber production. Miller situates forestry within the broader political, social, and economic transformations of Song-Yuan-Ming China, when the Lower Yangzi emerged as the demographic and economic core of the empire. Like the Yellow River, which Ruth Mostern characterizes as increasingly ‘unnatural’, southern forests underwent a structural shift from relatively natural ecosystems to highly anthropogenic production regimes. Miller describes a ‘plantation revolution’ centred on Chinese fir, driven primarily by households and lineage organizations but embedded within state systems of taxation and fiscal oversight. By allowing forested land to be registered as private property and regulating timber markets rather than forests themselves, the Qing state enabled the emergence of bounded, exclusive, and commercially managed plantations. This system of ‘great reforestation’, Miller argues, replaced old-growth forests largely destroyed by 1600 and supplied the state with timber through market channels long before the rise of European scientific forestry. Only in the nineteenth century did this relatively effective system begin to experience sustained strain.Footnote ⁶³

Meng Zhang challenges even this periodization by emphasizing the enduring vitality of interregional timber markets throughout the Qing, despite mounting pressures. She rejects the retrospective imposition of late Qing decline as an interpretive framework for understanding Chinese forestry practices. Adopting a people-centred and institutional approach, Zhang reconstructs a dense web of production regimes, shared ownership structures, long-distance transport networks, broker-merchant organizations, and flexible state procurement mechanisms that linked frontier supplies in the Southwest to core demand in the Lower Yangzi. The Qing state, she shows, largely entrusted timber production and circulation to private actors, intervening primarily as a consumer. Alongside commercial logging, population growth and land reclamation posed serious threats to forest cover and hydrological stability, contributing to erosion, silting, and flooding. At the same time, Zhang documents sophisticated silvicultural techniques—such as coppicing and stump sprouting—that sustained productivity and mitigated depletion.Footnote ⁶⁴

Taken together, Menzies, Miller, and Zhang reinforce Robert Marks’ insight that commercialization powerfully reshaped early modern China’s landscapes, while also revealing that its ecological effects varied sharply by region and institutional context. Rather than portraying markets as engines of depletion, these studies highlight the role of private management and commercial incentives in sustaining forest resources over long periods. They offer an evolving picture of Chinese forestry across a millennium, emphasizing resilience, adaptability, and institutional diversity.

To fully grasp Qing forestry governance, however, this market-driven regeneration in the commercial south must be read alongside the state-centric management of the northern borderlands analysed by Schlesinger and Bello. While southern timber regimes flourished under relatively laissez-faire principles, the Qing state enforced strict prohibitions (fengjin 封禁) in Manchuria and Mongolia to protect forests as ‘pristine’ imperial foraging grounds essential to Manchu identity. Read together, these bodies of scholarship complicate the conventional declensionist narrative not by denying environmental pressure, but by revealing a bifurcated system of ecological governance: commercial reforestation in the interior coexisted with conservationist preservation at the empire’s strategic margins. This duality underscores the adaptive—but uneven—ways in which the Qing state negotiated resource use, identity, and power across its diverse ecological zones.Footnote ⁶⁵

Qing ecological governance from a non-Han perspective

Recent scholarship on China’s environmental history has increasingly turned to the Qing empire’s diverse external borderlands, uncovering complex politico-ecological histories long obscured by Han-centric historiographical frameworks. These studies approach ‘ecological governance’ from an underexamined angle: how the Manchu court constructed ethnic identity and political legitimacy through the management and exploitation of ecological resources in its ancestral homelands. Jonathan Schlesinger’s A World Trimmed with Fur argues that the ‘purity’ of the Manchurian and Mongolian borderlands was not a natural condition but a deliberate state construction, designed to protect the ‘Manchu Way’ from the corrosive effects of commercial booms in pearls, mushrooms, and furs driven by Han consumption. Complementing this perspective, David A. Bello’s Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain demonstrates how the Qing adapted its administration to specific regional ecologies to preserve the distinct identities of subject peoples. Extending this analysis to the Korean frontier, Seonmin Kim’s Ginseng and Borderland shows how Qing management of the ginseng monopoly was central to defining the boundary with Chosŏn Korea and safeguarding the symbolic and material sanctity of the Manchu homeland. Drawing heavily on Manchu and Korean sources, these works contribute to the New Qing History by revealing how the state negotiated persistent tensions among Manchu ethnocentrism, commercial expansion, and environmental conservation.Footnote ⁶⁶

Schlesinger’s A World Trimmed with Fur offers a particularly incisive account of the ecological dilemmas of Qing empire-building. Through three frontier crises—the depletion of pearl-producing freshwater mussels in Manchuria, the mushroom-harvesting frenzy in Mongolia, and the overhunting of fur-bearing animals along the Russian border—he shows how environmental degradation emerged from the commodification of imperial identity itself. Rather than resulting from simple Han encroachment, these resource rushes were driven by Han imitation of Manchu sartorial and culinary practices, which transformed wild products into markers of status and distinction. Between roughly 1760 and 1830, rising consumer demand pulled waves of undocumented Han migrants into the borderlands, often in defiance of state prohibitions, undermining ecological sustainability and the ideological foundations of conquest rule.Footnote ⁶⁷

To contain these pressures, the Qing court imposed more regulations, moratoria, and exclusionary policies that fostered an image of pristine wilderness in Manchuria and Mongolia. Schlesinger emphasizes that this ‘purity’ was not a primordial landscape but a political project: through strategic regulation and administrative finesse, the state sought to expel undocumented migrants while preserving the symbolic and material bases of Manchu sovereignty. Environmental protection thus became central to the multi-ethnic construction of the Qing empire, serving simultaneously to defend frontier ecologies and to police ethnic boundaries between the ‘pure’ borderlands and the commercially saturated interior.Footnote ⁶⁸

This preservationist impulse extended beyond Manchuria. As Seonmin Kim demonstrates, the Qing applied similar principles along the Chosŏn frontier by enforcing a ginseng monopoly and maintaining an ‘empty’ buffer zone along the Yalu River. Here, environmental management functioned as a tool of territorial definition and imperial security, producing a borderland characterized less by a fixed linear boundary than by regulated absence. Yet this logic was not applied uniformly across the empire. As Meng Zhang observes, the timber-rich southwest followed a more pragmatic and negotiated trajectory. Acting as intermediaries within the ‘three-town monopoly’, local Miao communities leveraged their ethnic identity and the state’s interest in stability to defend their position in the timber economy. These arrangements complicate simple binaries of Han oppressor and minority victim, revealing instead a flexible Qing strategy that adapted governance to distinct ecological and political conditions.Footnote ⁶⁹

Bello’s Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain further deepens this perspective by examining the ecological foundations of Qing legitimacy across three regions: northeastern Manchuria, south-central Inner Mongolia, and southwestern Yunnan. He argues that the empire’s authority rested on sustaining differentiated environmental relations among non-Han peoples, achieved through region-specific modes of governance—‘imperial foraging’ in forested zones, ‘imperial pastoralism’ on the steppe, and ‘imperial indigenism’ in the disease-ridden mountains of the southwest. These borderlands were not abstract administrative spaces but were constituted through concrete human-animal and human-environment relations, including reliance on game and sable in the north, livestock on the steppe, and the ecological barrier posed by malaria in Yunnan. Such relations shaped the Qing’s plural conception of empire and imposed material limits on expansion.Footnote ⁷⁰

Similar to Madhav Gadgil’s and Ramachandra Guha’s framework of ‘modes of resource use’, Bello underscores the comparability of environmental change across the empire while emphasizing its regional specificity. At the same time, he highlights the destabilizing effects of what he terms ‘Han arablism’—the projection of agrarian relations from China proper into frontier zones—and the resulting ‘Han contamination’ that threatened to erode the boundaries between the cultivated interior and resource-rich peripheries. This contamination encompassed not only ecological transformation but also the disruptive influence of Han merchant activity, including alcohol trading and debt relations, on minority economies and identities. Crucially, the Qing state did not seek to impose a uniform ecological order; instead, it attempted to harness frontier diversity and its varied adaptations into a form of state-led ‘environmentality’, exercising control amid continual cultural and ecological change.Footnote ⁷¹

Taken together, the works of Schlesinger, Bello, Kim, and Zhang illuminate the central role of ecology in Qing empire-building and borderland formation. By treating the empire’s frontiers as an interconnected yet heterogeneous whole, they demonstrate that Qing environmental history cannot be understood through a Han-centred lens alone. Kim extends this analysis to the Korean frontier, where ginseng and an asymmetrical tributary relationship produced a distinctive borderland defined by regulated emptiness rather than fixed lines. As later sections will show, Joseph Seeley’s concept of ‘liquid geographies’ further refines this perspective by demonstrating how seasonal freezing and thawing along the Yalu River conditioned the state’s capacity to police boundaries and manage resources. Together, these studies foreground the entanglement of politics, culture, and nature in shaping borderland identities and Qing ecological governance across the empire’s vast peripheries.Footnote ⁷²

Resource development in Xinjiang

Let us now turn to another non-Han borderland: Xinjiang. Whereas the river systems of central and northern China—the Yellow, Yangzi, and Han—required sophisticated engineering and bureaucratic coordination to manage sedimentation and flooding, the late Qing state’s approach to its northwestern frontier followed a different logic, one oriented towards frontier consolidation and resource extraction. If Anne Osborne characterizes the Anhui-Zhejiang highlands as an internal frontier shaped by migrant-driven, ecologically disruptive commercial agriculture that the state struggled to regulate, Xinjiang constituted an external, ethnically diverse borderland transformed through aggressive, state-led infrastructure and development projects aimed at reinforcing imperial authority. Peter B. Lavelle’s The Profits of Nature traces this strategic reorientation, showing how large-scale resource development in Xinjiang during the latter half of the nineteenth century became central to the Qing’s project of self-strengthening and survival. Under the leadership of Zuo Zongtang, the intensified exploitation of what statecraft officials termed the ‘profits of nature’, through land reclamation, mining, and cotton cultivation, emerged as a core strategy for reviving Qing power amid extraordinary crises.Footnote ⁷³

As Lavelle shows, mounting internal upheavals forced the beleaguered state to recalibrate its priorities and rethink long-standing principles of governance. In place of the Confucian doctrine of yangmin (nourishing the people) and what Kenneth Pomeranz describes as the traditional commitment to ‘social reproduction’—a system of inter-regional support and socio-ecological maintenance central to High Qing legitimacy—the late Qing increasingly emphasized fuqiang (wealth and power). The convergence of hydraulic exhaustion and fiscal crisis, epitomized by the catastrophic 1855 shift of the Yellow River’s course, rendered the resource-intensive welfare model of the eighteenth century increasingly untenable. As Lillian Li and Randall Dodgen argue, the state scaled back large river conservancy and famine-relief projects, redirecting limited resources towards military defence, diplomacy, finance, and industrial development in response to an increasingly competitive global order.Footnote ⁷⁴

This reorientation reshaped frontier policy, as ecological governance shifted from preservation towards extractive resource mobilization and territorial consolidation. The Qing moved away from the conservationist logic of ‘imperial foraging’ identified by Bello and Schlesinger towards a more interventionist strategy of frontier development. In Manchuria and Mongolia, for instance, the mid-Qing regime enforced migration bans to protect subsistence ecologies and preserve the ‘Manchu Way’ from Han commodification. Xinjiang initially followed a similar pattern, with restrictions on Han settlement intended to mitigate ethnic conflict. Yet as fiscal pressures mounted and demographic growth strained land availability in the interior—a process Christopher Isett identifies as the engine of eighteenth-century ‘subterranean’ migration—Qing leaders increasingly reconceptualized the frontier as what Lavelle terms a ‘colonial solution’. Facing the twin threats of internal resource scarcity and external encroachment by Russia and Japan, officials such as Zuo Zongtang promoted yimin shibian (移民實邊, ‘moving people to strengthen the border’), recasting Han settlers as agents of both economic extraction and demographic consolidation. This logic underpinned a series of transformative reforms, including the lifting of the Manchurian migration ban in 1860, the provincialization of Xinjiang in 1884, and the formal opening of Mongol lands in 1902, processes that Seonmin Kim, Peter Lavelle, Yi Wang, and Joseph Seeley identify as marking the transition from fluid imperial frontiers to bounded territorial governance.Footnote ⁷⁵

Lavelle illustrates this shift most clearly through his analysis of Zuo Zongtang’s administration in Xinjiang. Having risen to prominence during the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion and later leading the reconquest of Xinjiang following the Muslim uprisings of 1862–1877, Zuo sought to extend the logic of post-Taiping reconstruction, honed in the Lower Yangzi, to the Qing northwest. A committed advocate of statecraft learning and self-strengthening reform, he viewed the systematic exploitation of frontier resources as essential not only to stabilizing Xinjiang but also to restoring the empire’s fiscal and geopolitical standing.Footnote ⁷⁶

This vision translated into an ambitious programme of frontier development that combined agrarian reconstruction with industrial experimentation. Zuo prioritized the expansion of arable land, its incorporation into the imperial tax system, and improvements in agricultural productivity through irrigation, improved farming techniques, and the dissemination of new seed varieties. Aware of Xinjiang’s arid conditions, he placed particular emphasis on canal construction, directing military commanders to invest heavily in irrigation works. Beyond agriculture, Zuo promoted sericulture by importing skilled labour from Zhejiang and experimented with mining, dredging, and textile production through the purchase of foreign machinery. These initiatives were institutionalized through newly created administrative bureaus dedicated to natural resource management, signalling a notable expansion of the Qing state’s extractive and bureaucratic capacity. More than ad hoc recovery measures, they constituted a sustained project of colonial development aimed at transforming Xinjiang’s environment and population into productive components of the imperial polity.Footnote ⁷⁷

Although the results were uneven and constrained by fluctuating levels of central support, Zuo Zongtang’s initiatives represented a serious and sustained commitment to frontier development as a strategy of fiscal recovery, administrative consolidation, and geopolitical security. Deeply influenced by statecraft thinkers such as Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan, who had long envisioned Xinjiang as an outlet for the demographic and economic pressures of China Proper, Zuo emerged as the principal architect of its provincialization in 1884. This institutional transformation replaced the loose military governance of the High Qing with direct bureaucratic governance, thereby embedding the region more firmly within the administrative and fiscal structures of a reconfigured nation-state.Footnote ⁷⁸

A parallel trajectory from segregation to integration unfolded in Inner Mongolia. As Yi Wang demonstrates, the Qing state’s initial efforts to isolate the Mongol banners in order to preserve imperial pastoralism were steadily eroded by the convergence of ecological crisis in the interior and commercial expansion on the steppe. Facing demographic pressure and recurrent disasters in North China, the court gradually acquiesced to, and eventually promoted, the migration of Han farmers into the pastoral ecotone. By the early twentieth century, land reclamation had become not only a means of food provision but also a fiscal instrument for financing the New Policies (xinzheng 新政), the late Qing reform programme launched after the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901) to reconfigure state institutions in response to mounting domestic and foreign pressures. In the Hetao region, the extensive alluvial lowland created by the Yellow River’s great northern loop as it flows through present-day Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, this recalibration took material form through collaboration between the state and ‘land merchants’, who developed large-scale irrigation works that reconfigured the region’s hydro-social order and integrated the frontier into global commodity circuits.Footnote ⁷⁹

Taken together, these developments complicate conventional narratives of late Qing passivity and decline. As Robert Antony and Jane Kate Leonard argue, the dynasty retained significant capacity for strategic adaptation under crisis. The case studies of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia show how acute environmental, fiscal, and geopolitical pressures prompted the Qing to experiment with extractive, administrative, and coercive strategies to reassert control. In this sense, frontier development in the north and northwest exemplifies the dynasty’s pragmatic pivot towards resource-driven statecraft and underscores the central role of ecological governance in the late Qing’s struggle to survive profound transformation.Footnote ⁸⁰

Borderland management along the Yalu River

Turning back to the northeast, Joseph A. Seeley’s Border of Water and Ice offers a compelling case study of ecological governance in the contested Yalu River (鴨綠江) region between China and Korea during the first half of the twentieth century (circa 1905–1945). Spanning the late Qing, the Republican period, and the rise of Japanese imperialism, Seeley’s work adopts a transnational and environmental perspective to show that this seemingly peripheral zone was in fact central to competing state-building projects in East Asia. In this context, relations between humans and the natural world became a critical axis through which rival regimes articulated claims to sovereignty and authority. Drawing on multilingual archival sources, Seeley demonstrates that the Qing and its successors, including warlord governments, actively governed this volatile borderland, revealing forms of adaptive statecraft amid profound geopolitical and environmental disruption.Footnote ⁸¹

The late nineteenth century marked a decisive shift in Qing policy towards Manchuria. Previously, as discussed earlier, the region had been governed through a logic of ancestral preservation and resource protection. Policies such as fengjin, including the sealing off of the upper Yalu basin, were designed to limit Han Chinese and Korean migration while safeguarding monopolies over high-value commodities such as ginseng and freshwater mussels. These restrictions were enforced through severe penalties for illegal settlement, crossings, or poaching. From the 1870s onwards, however, mounting Russian and Japanese encroachments prompted a reversal of policy. The Qing began to promote Han colonization and incorporated areas north of the Yalu, including Andong (安東) and Tonghua (通化), into the regular administrative system. Sovereignty was further asserted through institutional innovation, most notably the creation of the Yalu-Hun River Waterfront Police (1909) to oversee river traffic and resource flows.Footnote ⁸²

To defend Chinese interests amid intensifying Korean and Japanese competition, Qing authorities engaged in what Seeley terms ‘seasonal border-making’, a practice that required continual recalibration in response to the river’s natural rhythms of freezing, thawing, and flooding. His analysis of disputes over winter reed harvesting on the Hwangch’op’yŏng river islands, spring icefish fisheries, and the collection of flood-dispersed timber during the summer rains illustrates how the Qing sought to regulate resource use while asserting sovereignty on the ground. At the same time, officials often adopted pragmatic compromises. During the 1909 timber disputes, for example, authorities negotiated with both local Chinese timbermen and the Japanese-backed monopoly, prioritizing social stability and local livelihoods over strict enforcement. Such decisions reveal a flexible frontier strategy shaped by ecological constraints and foreign pressure, complicating narratives of Qing inertia or collapse.Footnote ⁸³

Central to Seeley’s analysis is the concept of ‘liquid geographies’, which captures how the movement of ‘peoples, goods, water, ice, sediment, and other human and nonhuman elements’ structured the limits of state power along the Yalu River. Environmental variability, alternating between flood, freeze, and thaw, produced a seasonally unstable and politically unpredictable terrain that enabled both licit and illicit mobilities, from timber rafts and fisheries to smugglers, bandits, and anti-Japanese guerrillas. By foregrounding these mobile interactions, Seeley aligns with a broader body of scholarship emphasizing the agency of water systems in Chinese history, including Gao’s analysis of ‘water regimes’ and amphibious adaptation in the Jianghan Plain, Dodgen’s work on the Yellow River’s hydraulic cycle, Pietz’s study of technological deadlock on the North China Plain, and Muscolino’s linkage of environmental energy, warfare, and resource extraction.Footnote ⁸⁴

Policing this fluid borderland required continuous, seasonally differentiated interventions. During the icebound months, when the frozen river became a corridor for smugglers and insurgents, authorities deployed German Shepherd dogs, constructed surveillance huts on the ice, and intensified foot patrols. During the thaw and summer flood season, by contrast, officials relied on propeller boats, searchlights, and river patrols to monitor shifting channels and currents. Efforts to stabilize governance also included investments in communication infrastructure, such as telephone lines—frequently cut by insurgents and supplemented by carrier pigeons—and the strategic use of local ecological knowledge to counter Japanese expansionism. By documenting these sustained and adaptive practices, Seeley presents a nuanced portrait of a state that was neither inert nor omnipotent, but engaged in a continual struggle to govern a volatile environment under severe fiscal, political, and ecological constraints.Footnote ⁸⁵

Seen in this light, the Yalu River borderland exemplifies a broader pattern of late Qing and early twentieth-century ecological governance under duress. As with river conservancy in North China or maritime management along the coast, state authority here was shaped less by fixed territorial control than by improvisation, pragmatism, and the management of environmental flux. Seeley’s analysis thus reinforces a central argument of this article: that late Qing and post-Qing statecraft cannot be understood solely through narratives of decline or failure, but must be situated within historically specific efforts to negotiate sovereignty, resources, and legitimacy in an unruly natural world.Footnote ⁸⁶

The Tongzhi Restoration and the reshaping of Qing statecraft and frontier governance

As the empire-wide case studies above suggest, the mid- to late nineteenth century marked a period of acute and systemic crisis for the Qing state and society. Ecological degradation and fiscal strain intensified what Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn identify as the late imperial structural dilemma: a declining ratio of resources to population that overwhelmed the organizational capacities of the traditional bureaucracy. This fragility was violently exposed by massive internal uprisings, including the Taiping, Nian, and Muslim rebellions, and by escalating foreign aggression, most notably the two Opium wars. Confronted with these converging pressures, the Qing regime was compelled to reconfigure its governing priorities, shifting from paternalistic maintenance towards selective extraction and regional prioritization, a transformation crystallized during the Tongzhi Restoration. Although Mary C. Wright famously characterized this initiative as the ‘last stand of Chinese conservatism’, it also generated substantial institutional innovation and strategic adaptation.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Restoration marked a fundamental reorientation in Qing statecraft and political economy. Facing mounting internal and external constraints, the state retreated from labour-intensive and fiscally burdensome functions of social production, most notably the Yellow River Conservancy, while expanding its extractive and coercive capacities through commercial taxation, mercantilist policies, and military mobilization. This strategic reorientation carried far-reaching spatial consequences. The state redirected investment towards the economically vital Lower Yangzi region, recently devastated by the Taiping Rebellion, by offering tax incentives and curbing reclamation in the surrounding highlands. This shift was facilitated by the sharp decline in grain tribute shipments along the Grand Canal following the 1855 Yellow River course change. At the same time, as Pomeranz argues, the state withdrew support from previously subsidized regions such as the environmentally fragile Yellow River-Grand Canal corridor, effectively transforming a former strategic core into a marginalized ‘hinterland’. This spatial redistribution reveals a latent but consequential linkage between the regime’s preservationist policies in the Lower Yangzi highlands (as analysed by Osborne) and its forced neglect of ecological governance in inland North China (as examined by Pomeranz, Dodgen, and Li). The stabilization of one region was achieved partly at the expense of another, exposing a state engaged in a desperate yet rational strategy of resource prioritization under conditions of systemic constraint.Footnote ⁸⁸

This reallocation of state capacity reflected a broader transformation in the regime’s understanding of the challenges it confronted, the capacities it could mobilize, and the commitments it could sustain. Rather than simple retrenchment, the Restoration represented a strategic reconfiguration of state functions in response to a crisis of unprecedented scale. The regime’s resilience rested on two critical fiscal innovations. First was the rapid expansion of the likin (厘金) internal transit tax, which became the financial backbone of regional armies and signalled a decisive shift towards indirect commercial taxation. Second was the regularization of customs revenue through the Imperial Maritime Customs Service (皇家海關總稅務司), established in 1854. As John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu argue, the foreign-staffed Customs Service provided the central court with a relatively reliable and corruption-resistant revenue stream, funding projects such as the Jiangnan Arsenal (江南製造總局) and the Tongwen Guan (同文館). Equally important was the mobilization of local elites. The proliferation of gentry-led militias (tuanlian) exemplifies what Kuhn describes as the Qing state’s pragmatic capacity to harness decentralized power for collective security. By endorsing the formula of ‘official supervision and gentry management’ (guandu shenban 官督商办), the court integrated militarized local elites into the imperial defence structure, effectively trading a monopoly on violence for regime survival.Footnote ⁸⁹

Jung Chang’s biographical account of Empress Dowager Cixi supports this revisionist interpretation by highlighting strategic adaptation at the highest levels of the court following the 1861 Xinyou Coup (辛酉政變). Working with Prince Gong, Cixi shifted away from the xenophobic isolationism of the preceding reign towards cautious international engagement. This recalibration was institutionalized through the establishment of the Zongli Yamen (總理衙門) in 1861 and the Tongwen Guan in 1862, signalling a pragmatic reorientation of state capacity. Her administration further navigated the ‘unequal treaty’ system by sanctioning diplomatic precedents such as the appointment of Guo Songtao as China’s first minister to the West and the abolition of the kowtow requirement for foreign envoys in 1873. Crucially, the court broke Manchu precedent by empowering Han reformist officials, including Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang, who became central to the military and fiscal reforms of the Self-Strengthening Movement (自強運動). While Chang’s portrayal of Cixi remains contested, it underscores the importance of elite agency in the Restoration’s strategic reconfiguration.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Tongzhi Restoration not only transformed governance at the imperial core but also laid the institutional foundations for renewed engagement with the empire’s volatile frontiers. As the case studies of Xinjiang, the Yalu River, and the Zhoushan Archipelago demonstrate, the post-Restoration state extended the logic of self-strengthening, particularly the mobilization of likin revenue and the selective adoption of Western technology, to environmentally and geopolitically sensitive borderlands. In Xinjiang, Zuo Zongtang leveraged these innovations to move from military reconquest towards a project of ‘colonial development’, treating frontier resources as instruments of wealth and power. Along the Yalu River, the state abandoned passive preservationist policies in favour of active administrative incorporation and ‘seasonal border-making’ to counter Russian and Japanese encroachment. In the Zhoushan Archipelago, it increasingly asserted sovereign authority over marine resources through state-directed fisheries governance. These initiatives should be understood not as isolated responses but as extensions of the strategic transformation forged during the Restoration.Footnote ⁹¹

In sum, the Tongzhi Restoration and its frontier repercussions reveal a Qing polity capable of recalibrating ecological governance under extreme pressure. Rather than collapsing or remaining rigid, the state actively adjusted, redistributing resources, reforming institutions, and redefining its management of territory and population. Whether along the silt-laden Yellow River, the shifting banks of the Yalu, the arid landscapes of Xinjiang, the steppe world of Inner Mongolia, or the contested waters of the East China Sea, the Qing pursued innovative, if uneven, strategies to confront intertwined environmental and geopolitical crises.

Towards an integrated understanding of Qing state building

Building on the regional case studies of ecological governance and sociopolitical transformation examined above, this section revisits the conventional narrative of late Qing ‘failure’ through the lens of Wong’s four-Cs analytical categories. Together, these categories offer a dynamic and integrated framework for understanding state-building under extreme pressure, moving beyond teleological accounts of collapse towards a historically grounded analysis of adaptive governance.

Challenges. The challenges confronting the late Qing were systemic, cumulative, and deeply interlocking. Long-term ecological pressures—deforestation, sedimentation, resource depletion, and intensified land use—were exacerbated by rapid population growth and commercialization, pushing the empire towards its ecological limits. These dynamics produced severe environmental deterioration, manifest most visibly in the ‘riparian predicament’ of the Yellow River basin, the soil erosion associated with the shack people settlement in the Lower and Upper Yangzi highlands, and the destabilized ‘water regime’ of the Jianghan Plain. At the same time, the state faced the social consequences of mass internal migration, frontier expansion, and the legacies of large-scale rebellions—most notably the Taiping—alongside a deepening fiscal crisis driven by warfare, indemnities, and rising administrative costs.

Externally, Qing sovereignty was further strained by foreign encroachment, unequal treaties, and intensifying geopolitical competition. In frontier regions such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and the Yalu River basin, these pressures forced the state to transition from indirect rule and preservationist policies towards more explicit forms of territorialization and resource extraction. Together, these ecological, social, fiscal, and geopolitical challenges constituted an all-encompassing crisis that exceeded the assumptions of earlier models of imperial governance.Footnote ⁹²

Capacities. Despite these converging pressures, the Qing regime retained significant, if uneven, capacities for adaptation, complicating narratives of inevitable institutional decay and state failure. Fiscal constraints and bureaucratic inertia limited performance, yet the regime sustained core administrative functions while developing new institutional competencies. Two innovations were particularly consequential: the establishment of the Zongli Yamen (1861) to manage foreign affairs, and the expansion of the foreign-staffed Imperial Maritime Customs Service (after 1854), which provided a relatively reliable and centralized revenue stream crucial for funding military and industrial modernization.Footnote ⁹³

The Tongzhi Restoration marked a critical phase of strategic recalibration, during which the state shifted from subsidizing environmentally vulnerable regions to supporting economically and geopolitically strategic ones in pursuit of wealth and power. Key figures such as Empress Dowager Cixi and Zuo Zongtang played central roles in this process, overseeing reforms in diplomacy, education, infrastructure, and frontier security. These capacities were neither comprehensive nor uniformly successful, but they reveal a state experimenting with new extractive, administrative, and coercive strategies in order to survive within an increasingly hostile global environment.Footnote ⁹⁴

Commitments. Equally important was the transformation of state commitments. Whereas the early Qing prioritized ‘social reproduction’ through agrarian stability, water control, and granary provisioning, the mid- to late nineteenth century witnessed a pragmatic turn towards national defence, technological modernization, and regional prioritization. This reorientation is exemplified by the administrative transformation of Inner Mongolia. As Yi Wang’s book suggests, the state’s commitment to preserving the nomadic integrity of the Mongol banners—a pillar of early Qing legitimacy—was renegotiated under the pressure of imperialist encroachment and fiscal insolvency. By redefining the steppe as an agrarian resource to be extracted rather than a cultural zone to be preserved, the late Qing state effectively ‘reterritorialized’ the region, replacing the decentralized rule of Mongol princes with centralized administrative units capable of mobilizing revenue for dynastic survival. This shift entailed a fundamental reorientation of ecological governance. Resources were increasingly concentrated in economically and strategically critical zones—most notably the Lower Yangzi Delta and coastal treaty ports—while the state retrenched from interior regions such as the environmentally fragile Yellow River-Grand Canal corridor.Footnote ⁹⁵

As Pomeranz, Li, and Pietz argue, this withdrawal transformed much of the North China Plain into a marginalized ‘hinterland’ or ‘land of famine’, as the state abandoned the unsustainable hydraulic commitments of the High Qing era. This was a strategic and rational response to ecological exhaustion, fiscal scarcity, and geopolitical vulnerability. Commitments to Western diplomacy, technological learning, and infrastructure development thus signal a state navigating an integrating world economy rather than retreating from it.Footnote ⁹⁶

Claims. The late Qing state was also enmeshed in evolving and often conflicting claims advanced by diverse actors, underscoring what Perdue describes as a ‘negotiated state’. Local communities, including pengmin, Indigenous populations, and elite lineages, competed for land, water, and access to state resources, articulating their demands through litigation, patronage, and protest. In the Jianghan Plain, Yan Gao and Jiayan Zhang show how hydraulic communities negotiated dike maintenance and water rights with officials, compelling the state to mediate among upstream and downstream interests. In Manchuria, Christopher Isett demonstrates how peasants employed customary practice and legal manoeuvring to press claims on banner lands, forcing the state to compromise exclusionary policies to preserve order.Footnote ⁹⁷

Within the legal system, Philip Huang and Mark Allee show that the state remained a central adjudicator, upholding a ‘positive principle’ of property rights even amid administrative strain. Within the bureaucracy itself, officials debated the scope and direction of reform. Externally, foreign powers imposed their own claims on Qing sovereignty; yet, as Joseph Seeley’s work on the Yalu River illustrates, the state actively contested these claims through policing, diplomacy, and resource regulation. Governance thus unfolded through continuous negotiation rather than unilateral command.Footnote ⁹⁸

Reassessing state building under duress. Taken together, Wong’s four-Cs categories provide an integrated framework for reassessing late Qing ecological governance and state building. Environmental, demographic, and geopolitical challenges continually pressed upon state capacities and forced painful reassessments of commitments, while diverse claims from within and beyond the polity shaped the trajectory of policy and reform. This interplay highlights the contingent, relational, and environmentally embedded nature of Qing state power—its deep entanglement with both human and non-human forces in shaping landscapes, waterscapes, and institutions.

Judged through this lens, a state capable of recalibrating its commitments, redeploying its capacities, and renegotiating claims and legitimacy under encompassing challenges should not be dismissed as a failure, but understood as a polity engaged in adaptive state-building under severe constraints. What appears as a retreat from traditional roles often reflects a rational strategy of prioritization, directing limited resources towards coastal modernization and frontier defence rather than maintaining unsustainable interior commitments. The expansion of commercial taxation through likin, the consolidation of customs revenue, and the growth of gentry-led local militia demonstrate that the Qing retained effective instruments of extraction and mobilization, enabling it to survive crises that would have destroyed less adaptable regimes.Footnote ⁹⁹

The six case studies presented in this article reveal a hard-pressed but resilient state undergoing adaptive transformation rather than simple failure or steady decline. They also show that structural pressures consistently outpaced the formal capacities of a minimalist bureaucracy, producing a condition of what might be termed ‘state involution’, in which power expanded through informal and semi-autonomous channels rather than through bureaucratic rationalization. In the context of ecological governance, state involution meant that funds extracted for hydraulic maintenance or famine relief were increasingly siphoned off by unsavoury brokers, leaving the state with ‘uncontrollable’ local agents who exacerbated rural involution rather than alleviating environmental stress. More broadly, the Qing relied on expectant officials staffing ad hoc institutions, gentry-led tuanlian militias exercising police and fiscal authority, and entrepreneurial intermediaries—clerks, litigation masters, and smuggling networks—who monetized state functions. As Robert Antony and Jane Kate Leonard observe, this resulted in a ‘bifurcated state with two distinct faces’: an integrating imperial ‘superstructure’ resting on a diverse array of localized governing formations that collapsed distinctions between public and private power even as they expanded the reach of the state amid sustained crisis.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

These challenges and entanglements did not signal disintegration so much as recalibration. As Pomeranz notes, what eroded was not the presence of the state, but its exclusive control over governance functions. Rather than collapsing, the Qing experimented with new mechanisms, devolved authority, and alternative forms of legitimacy. This reframing moves us beyond binaries of success versus failure or tradition versus modernity, towards a more nuanced understanding of ecological governance as adaptive statecraft. As Li’s work on famine relief makes clear, the interventionist state did not disappear after the High Qing but shifted towards a new mode of negotiated governance, struggling, often imperfectly, to sustain resilience amid profound transformations in the relationships among state, society, and environment.Footnote ¹⁰¹