Regional environmental histories are rare within Chinese studies. With this book, Jack Patrick Hayes contributes to the field by a rich and differentiated “history from below” of natural resource regimes in the Songpan region of north-western Sichuan.
Hayes begins his analysis with the late Qing dynasty, when the Chinese government started to seek more direct control over these “Sino-Tibetan borderlands.” At that time, a patchwork of different communities managed natural resources independently from each other. These were Hui, Tibetan and Qiang agricultural and agro-pastoral communities; Han military and agricultural colonies that were established by the Qing state to achieve control over the region; and the tusi system in which Tibetan chieftains, for minor obligations, were endowed with privileges and an official title, thereby formally submitting to the Qing government. These “agro-pastoral regimes” underwent major transitions during the Chinese Republican state, when warlords (and pao ge criminal networks) seized power in the region. The more profitable and portable opium became a main agro-natural resource, either out of Tibetan, Han and Hui peasants' dire need to pay high taxes to the warlords, or out of Tibetan headmen and Han and Hui landlords' interest to establish this “opium regime.” While the regime considerably transformed the landscape of the region, the “change in worlds,” as elderly Tibetans are said to name it, occurred with the Communist state. It established a “forestry regime.” Hayes adds to existing literature on the environmental history of the Communist period a detailed analysis of how Tibetan, Han, Hui and Qiang communities were governmentalized based on a hierarchy of ethnic stratification, and how this affected the transformation of Songpan's environment. This ethnic stratification continued into the subsequent state-led “tourism regime” that came into being in the 1990s. With this regime, the government tried to balance a remediation of previous state-led deforestation with economic development through eco- and cultural tourism. Songpan ethnic culture and natural landscapes became commodifiable and protected products.
Throughout the book, Hayes weaves diverse threads of analysis, for instance of different ethnicities and their co-inhabitation and interaction with each other and with their natural environments; how resource characteristics (for instance the portability and profitability of resources) and certain structures (transport infrastructures, migration, political or market networks) mediate the transformation of regional landscapes; Chinese governments' battles to incorporate a remote, mountainous region into the land's fabric; and finally, how China's governmental discourses and related policies have increasingly gained control over the relation of ethnic communities to Songpan's natural environment. These different threads enter into Hayes' presentation of “socio-economic regimes”: “systems in which an authority (including local Tibetan elites, warlords, cadres, and local government officials) declared its right to control certain practices and natural resources, and developed policies and mechanisms to exercise that right” (xxiv). It is the strength of this book that Hayes reveals how a regime institutionalizes by redefining and redistributing gains from the natural environment across different ethnic and social groups, and how the latter may or may not accept these changes. With this approach, he wants to overcome “binary generalizations” (p. 191) within Sino-Tibetan studies, and show how it is also “the people” who “make society,” through their interactions and on the basis of available resources (xxvi).
Given the richness of Hayes's analysis, the above provides only a rough indication of the book's main narrative. Following the “thick description” in the main part of the book, the conclusion would have benefited from disentangling the threads of analysis that Hayes so nicely had brought together. Furthermore, in the final chapter, Hayes illustrates in detail the relevance of the Songpan region to Chinese history. However, as a book that engages in a “history from below,” a systematic review of – what the author may consider – the most important dynamics within Songpan would have further deepened to the analysis. It would also have added more substantiation and differentiation to the conclusions, which are kept rather general.
The last chapter of the book also stands in contrast to Hayes's use of data in the main part. Data come from a variety of sources, ranging from local and regional archival sources, dynastic histories, lineage histories of prominent families and monastic figures, ethnic studies, reports of Western travel and plant-collecting exhibitions, source materials from the natural and social sciences, and interviews. A constraint with these sources, however, is that very few Tibetan materials were used and sources provide a mediated view on Tibetan communities.
In conclusion, this book is highly commendable for everyone who is interested in a rich, differentiated analysis of the development of local resource-use regimes and related power structures within a multi-ethnic region such as that of Songpan. It extends and complements environmental histories like that of Robert B. Marks's China: Its Environment and History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), and could well serve as complementary reading in environmental history courses on China.
