Into the Woods

Ian M. Miller's important book follows the impact of the Chinese state and economy on the forests of southern China, from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries. Besides providing a new narrative of forest history, based on the scouring of official sources, his helpful comparisons to Europe and Japan ask us to rethink how we periodize Chinese history and evaluate the success of the imperial state.

His argument is a simple one: from the Song to late Ming, despite some ups and downs, forest usage displayed “astounding continuity,” based primarily on the expansion of commercial fir enterprises carried out by merchants with light supervision by the state. China was not completely deforested, and its forest exploitation was not unsustainable; instead old-growth forests were replaced by plantations, which provided all the timber that the state needed for building huge ships, constructing giant palaces, and providing for the material needs of its population. Detailed studies of labor levies, tax policies, land deeds, property claims and transport methods add valuable support and colorful confirmation of his dramatic tale. Success stories are so rare in discussions of Chinese environmental history that Miller's claim for rational, sustainable forest management over six centuries seems hard to believe, but the accumulation of evidence supports his claims.

I heartily recommend a close study of Miller's chapters, but instead of summarizing them I would like to draw out the implications of his argument for larger conceptions of Chinese environmental and economic history He himself argues that a study of forests “forces a reconsideration … of the periodization of Chinese history,” (15) changing how we view imperial China's place in the world of empires. In so doing, Miller addresses a deep paradox, which he only partially resolves.

He effectively integrates economic and environmental processes over the long term, tying each of them, inevitably, to the Chinese bureaucratic state. Although the myth of Oriental Despotism still survives in some benighted corners of Western social science, Western and Chinese historians have long since rejected the stereotype of an unchanging despotic bureaucratic state.Footnote ¹ Ever since Kenneth Pomeranz's masterful synthesis, published in 2000, we have recognized the commercial dynamism of Chinese regimes, their collaboration with merchant elites, the positive potential of both the commercialized agrarian economy and the mercantile economy, and significant technological change over the long-term, often analogous, or nearly equivalent, to that of Europe until 1750.Footnote ²

But Chinese environmental history in the last two decades, beginning with the edited volume of Elvin and Liu, Sediments of Time, and culminating with Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants and Robert Marks’ masterful survey, has offered a different alternative to the stagnant despotism thesis.Footnote ³ If economic historians usually describe progress, environmental historians by temperament are especially inclined toward a declensionist narrative; in any case, they can find plenty of evidence for it. Chinese sources are filled with accounts of the destruction of forests, the loss of lakes and wetlands, the disappearance of plant and animal life, and the rising threats of flood, famine, locusts, and disease. General surveys of environmental history organize their accounts around this theme. (In Marks’ survey, nearly one hundred pages discuss deforestation, while von Glahn's economic history survey has only three.) Both economic and environmental perspectives recognize that the empires’ population and economy were large and mainly growing, their territory was ecologically and economically diverse, as their history unfolded over the longue durée, but they diverge in where and how change happened.

In the economists’ view, rising populations in south China generated increasing labor supplies for intensive cultivation, dedicated to high value crops, including year-round rice paddy agriculture based on new seeds, cotton cultivation, silk cultivation, and others. These crops fed large urban populations beyond the farmers’ needs. Production increased to at least keep pace with population growth, or might even have increased per capita income. Even into the Qing dynasty, the arrival of New World crops made possible further population growth, supplying consumers with sweet potatoes, maize, and the delights of tobacco, peanuts, and chili peppers. The proliferation of markets, with currency supplied by copper and silver imports from Japan and the New World, facilitated the division of labor that supported the rise of giant cities. Chinese states, from Song to Ming, intervened only gently in market activity. Far from being despotic extractors, officials cooperated with merchants and even offered them favorable terms for monopoly trade. By this well-known account, at least up to the mid-eighteenth century, China had done well by world standards, reaching per capita income levels roughly comparable with Europe.

By contrast, China's environmental course during the two millennia of the Common Era ran mostly downhill. Two processes drove a relentless extraction and exhaustion of natural resources, including wood: the rising population and the strategic aims of Chinese states, primarily focused on warfare. Troops needed metal, wood, grain, clothing, transport vehicles, and animals, and every state set out to supply them regardless of cost. Others added to the pressure. Emperors needed palaces, scholars needed charcoal and paper, and farmers needed carts, tools, and firewood. Over the centuries, forests were ravaged for shipbuilding and the building of palaces; thousands of horses were submitted to military requisitions, grain supplies went first to the military, then to starving farmers; salt and other monopolies generated high revenues for the state at the expense of consumers.

The Song dynasty occupies a prominent position in both accounts, and our views of it are remarkably contradictory. Environmental historians stress the immense destruction inflicted by the Song dynasty for military purposes. The Northern Song (960–1127) constantly mobilized military forces to resist major enemies in Central Eurasia and Manchuria. Wang Anshi's reforms of the eleventh century and the tea–horse trade on the frontier increased state revenues, while major military construction projects on the northern frontier, including walls, garrisons, and even entire defensive forests, enacted strategic terraforming on a colossal scale.Footnote ⁴ The Song drastically transformed the landscape of north China, and from the point of view of the common person, mainly for the worse. To defend the capital city of Kaifeng and its hinterland from invasion, the Song rerouted the Yellow river, inflicting huge suffering on the inhabitants of the north China plain.Footnote ⁵ Military and official personnel benefited, but civilians paid the cost. Kaifeng, the extractive center, sucked in resources for urban consumers from thousands of miles away.Footnote ⁶

But the economic history of the Song gives us a radically different picture. Focusing primarily on the Southern Song, scholars find flourishing markets, abundant agriculture, foreign trade, currency circulation, powerful and prosperous merchant elites and coastal towns, and a relatively light state. It appears that what China we see depends on where we look: north or south, the eleventh century or the thirteenth, the prosperous core cities or the devastated periphery, the civilians of major cities and military forces or the marginal farmers and non-Han peoples, not to mention non-human species, of the periphery. Why do these two perspectives diverge so radically? Are we dealing with one China, or two, or many?

The vast scale of Chinese civilization, with its extended documentary record, provides abundant detail to support many points of view. But how can this paradox be resolved, even for one region in a short period, let alone a vast empire over 800 years?

Miller ambitiously tackles these puzzles from a refreshing viewpoint: the story of China's forests. Arguing against Elvin's dismal account of deforestation and decline, he points to the rising importance of commercial fir plantations as a sustainable source of timber products for state needs. The Song state, even in its military demands for timber, looks less heavy than we have thought: merchants played important roles, the state outsourced much of the supply chain, and this decentralized network over many centuries provided the state with timber. The state collected a considerable amount of revenue from tariffs on trade, but it did not run its own forests, and by the mid-fifteenth century corvée labor levies on timber workers yielded to monetary impositions. In general, Chinese states treated registered forests just like land; both wood and grain were held as private property, and taxes were low.

Japanese and European states created large state bureaucracies to manage woodlands, and village communities enacted special regulations to preserve them. China, by contrast, did not. China's forest management was in one sense a “lost modernity” anticipating in the twelfth century some of the elements of scientific forestry that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe.Footnote ⁷ In both places, forest ecosystems, serving multiple species and multiple human needs, turned into revenue-producing monocultural landscapes. We know this story well elsewhere, too, as it embraced the colonial world under European domination from the sixteenth century forward. A large literature on colonial India describes the massive role of the British state in transforming woodlands into managed forests, cleared of native peoples, wild animals, and dangerous species. But China began to do all of this much earlier, with different institutions. The Song through Ming states united economic and environmental management through regulated market mechanisms, based on private property rights, taxation, and specific state demands. On certain occasions, during military crisis or the founding of the Ming dynasty, the state laid claim to swaths of forests, but after a decade or two, it retreated. On balance, Miller argues, Chinese forest management over the long term until the mid-eighteenth century enacted remarkably far-sighted, rational, sustainable policies which endured through the vicissitudes of dynastic and social change. It was a “far longer history of success” than scientific forestry has achieved so far (168). We may add that the story of tea cultivation in China is much the same. Here, too, a gentle invader under private cultivation took over forest lands to supply China, and the world, with a sustainable, healthy product.

Critique and Elaboration

How persuasive is Miller's account? Should we believe his rosy story, or is it incomplete? I should say first that I am very impressed with his abundant sources. As he notes, a project of this kind, spanning five centuries and vast spaces for a topic that does not fall neatly into traditional categories, would have been impossible before the advent of digital search tools. He has found information on the subject of fir (shan 杉) scattered across over one hundred local gazetteers and compilations. Those of us who patiently paged through these gazetteers one by one in the old days can only sigh in admiration. I will not question the accuracy of his account, but only point to three limitations:

1. His discussion mainly covers south China, and only a few regions. He does not discuss all woodlands, but only those registered as “forest” (shan 山) by the state. His regional accounts follow the available official sources. As his maps show, registered forests before 1550 mainly lay in Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. In Ming and Qing China, forest extraction primarily struck Guizhou, western Huguang, and Sichuan. More broadly, his account really only discusses one of China's four forest zones: the subtropical forests of central and southwestern China. Of the others—northeastern boreal, north China temperate, and southern tropical—we hear little. It's risky to extrapolate from the experience of these regions to make claims for forests in the empire as a whole.

The near complete deforestation, literally, of north China by the Han lies outside of his story, to be sure, but the same extractive pressures persisted, and they returned in force in the nineteenth century, once old growth supplies were exhausted. Even if much deforestation actually meant commercial production, we can still recognize two contradictory impulses in the Chinese uses of natural products: a relentless unrestrained drive to exhaust the earth and its products (jin dili 尽地利), and a more regulated, sustained practice of long-term investment coupled with maintenance of a renewable resource. (As far as I know, there is no single term for “sustainability” in Chinese sources before the twentieth century—it does not appear in Miller's index—but terms for “exhaustion” abound.)

Chinese investors and planters could indeed think about the distant future. Meng Zhang's valuable study of the use of shares in forest deeds in eighteenth-century Guizhou and Hunan shows that China, once again the land of lost modernity, had pioneered futures markets to allow for returns that took an extended time to realize.Footnote ⁸ Likewise, farsighted local officials, literati, and lineage leaders aimed to preserve the production of important lakes in Hunan and Zhejiang, fighting a rearguard action against those aiming for immediate gain.Footnote ⁹ All debates about balancing environmental sustainability against economic growth, past and present, pose this question about how much to discount the future. We should certainly study how China's imperial state and markets managed these paradoxes, but we should not overemphasize the presence of sustainable practices at the neglect of their enemies.

2. In part, the contrast between reckless extraction and efforts at sustainability reveals itself in different kinds of sources. Miller's account, based almost entirely on official sources, including local gazetteers, describes very well the evolution of state policy and its local impact. Elvin, by contrast, relies heavily on poets and private writings to give us moving accounts of environmental decline. Contributors to Sediments of Time used a wide range of sources in their chapters, including quantitative data, poetry, official documents, private writings, and scientific evidence. Zhang Ling's brilliant book on the flooding of the Yellow river in 1048 masterfully integrates all of these materials. I feel that Miller, heavily inclined toward official sources, leaves out too much of the aesthetic stance embedded in the classical Chinese documentary tradition. In addition, while including fascinating woodcut illustrations of timber transport, he has narrowed the meaning of “forest” to one species of tree, leaving out other plants, such as herbs, seen in medical texts. Including these would enrich, and also complicate, his account.Footnote ¹⁰

3. What happened to the forest peoples who faced the onslaught of Han settlers backed with state authority? We learn a little bit about them in sporadic references: they influenced religious Daoists who protected mountains (24); their chieftains paid timber tribute, in return for which the state gave them titles and protected them from displacement (143, 146). Of these highland peoples, we know most about the “Hakka” (kejia 客家, or “sojourner families”), who came down from the high mountains of southwest China to become planters of upland crops for sale. Clearly, their genealogies to the contrary notwithstanding, the Hakka did not come from north China, and certainly not from elite families. Modern historians know about many famous Hakkas, like Hong Xiuquan and Deng Xiaoping, who were active secret society members and leaders of rebellions. Miller's refreshing thesis ties the conflicts instigated by Hakka and other upland peoples to rights over woodlands. He gives us, however, only one primary source about them. It describes how the hill peoples in the sixteenth century had split into two groups, one of whom, the Hakka, entered the forest economy, while the other, known as She, remained as shifting cultivators. This fascinating source gives us direct evidence of ethnogenesis in the making. I wish that he had supplied more.

Nevertheless, Miller's study has opened up a fascinating area of research and it invites exploration by many more adventurous scholar-pioneers. As Chinese environmental history continues to advance in depth and sophistication, we may expect new revelations from pathfinders in the backwoods. Although forests and wildernesses have not held such a tight grip on the Chinese imagination as on the American psyche, they have shaped all of us deeply, settlers and urbanites alike. Even if there is no Chinese equivalent to Natty Bumpo or Daniel Boone, the anonymous planters of the Chinese hills deserve as much respect as the more notorious inhabitants of the greenwoods (lülin 绿林).