During the Qing dynasty, commercial centers in Jiangnan and the court in Beijing demanded high-quality timber to erect palaces, build ships, and construct houses. But this timber could only be supplied by a limited number of forests. These were located in the Yangzi highlands, Jiangxi, and, eventually, Hunan and Guizhou. How the Qing Empire cultivated, felled, and marketed this timber is the guiding question of Meng Zhang's Timber and Forestry in Qing China. In pursuing this question, Zhang provides an authoritative account of the evolution of China's late imperial timber industry, as well as a fascinating and important addition to our understanding of late imperial business, environment, and society.
Zhang's thesis is simple yet elegant: after an abortive attempt to harvest timber resources directly (as the Ming dynasty had done), the Qing state left timber production and distribution to the market. The result was, “an interregional trade structure [that] developed over the course of several centuries and expanded to cover thousands of miles, sustained by a complex system of institutions in production, harvesting, transportation, investment, transaction, and taxation” (pp. 4–5). Moreover, the market allowed the timber industry to expand to geographies and markets with far greater scope and efficiency than state logging operations could have managed. Southern timber markets delivered at least five million logs per year to downstream consumers in the Lower Yangzi.
The monograph begins with a discussion of state-market relations. Chapter 1 identifies a long-term trend of liberalization. In Zhang's words, “the Qing official procurement almost completely relied on market purchases, thanks to the increasing incorporation of even remote areas into the interregional timber trade system” (p. 20). By the eighteenth century, even timber officials tasked with acquiring pine and fir on behalf of the state relied on the market. They did so in two ways. First, they levied “tribute” from private merchants. Second, timber officials purchased logs in the open market. This led to the emergence of merchant officials. As Zhang explains, “insufficient official [state] funding was remedied by the profit made from the private sideline business . . . the state tolerated, even formally approved, government personnel attending to private gains while on official trips” (p. 45). In short, market purchases entailed expenses in excess of official budgets. To make up the difference, and then some, timber officials engaged in personal trading.
Chapter 2 shifts the perspective to the private market. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the market expanded in geographic reach. Remote forests in Hunan and Guizhou gained in market share at the expense of Jiangxi and the Lower Yangzi. These geographic changes had repercussions for urban markets, as the Hankou timber trade rose to rival downriver ports. Similarly, merchant groups from Hunan and Hubei leveraged their proximity to southwestern timber to challenge incumbents from Huizhou and Jiangxi. The most arresting part of this chapter is a discussion of timber pricing. Timber merchants relied on “Longquan ma,” a system of grading that captured the geometric increase in timber value as the weight of a log increased. This system allowed market quotations that reflected the significant differences in value between logs of varying sizes.
The timber market's rapid growth created new challenges, none more urgent than the need to replenish forests. This is the subject of chapter 3, in which Zhang charts the emergence of plantation forestry. She argues that “[a]lthough excessive demand for forest resources has always been blamed as a major factor leading to the exhaustion of natural forests . . . the market's demand for an increasingly scarce resource could also translate into considerable profit to be made from managed forests” (p. 80). But managed forestry had to solve two problems. First, the trees needed at least thirty years to mature. Second, forestry plots were only efficient at scale. Plantations therefore required capital that could finance production across large plots over long time horizons.
Chinese forestry met these challenges with a complex system of securitization. Partible shares in timberlands were used to compensate labor and allowed investors and tillers alike to sell claims on standing timber before the trees matured. Thus, a tiller might spend five years planting a forest in return for shares in that forest. They could hold those shares or sell them as their liquidity needs demanded. The result was an Ostromian system of organically developed rights and markets that aligned the interests of investors, tillers, and consumers with the long-term maintenance of forestry resources. Zhang concludes, “The economic analysis of transactions of timberland properties . . . provides new perspectives on the issue of environmental sustainability . . . in some scenarios, strong market demand could also motivate long-term labor and capital input into reforestation” (p. 112).
The final two chapters deal with the institutions of the timber trade. Chapter 4 focuses on brokers, who mediated buyers and sellers, appraised timber cargo, and provided trade financing. Though brokers were licensed by the state, Zhang convincingly shows—with echoes of Susan Mann, R. Bin Wong, and Kenneth Pomeranz—that the licensing system was usually meant to preserve rather than stifle competition. A key exception to this rule was Guizhou: “In regular timber markets the Qing state usually upheld the principle of equal-and-fair market access . . . In the Miao frontier, by contrast, concerns about ethnic tension and social stability committed the state to a monopoly system at the perceived Han-Miao border even after the initial economic rationale withered away” (p. 137). That is, the Qing court granted Sinified Miao villages a monopoly on regional timber brokerages as a means of incentivizing civil harmony. Chapter 5 explores the role of trade associations from the late Qing into the Republican period. Trade associations failed to limit competition, but were useful to members for providing “club goods,” most notably information sharing and collective bargaining with tax authorities.
Zhang's work is superlative. Her use of “popular sources” (minjian ziliao) such as contracts and other commercial documents places her in the historiographical tradition of Madeleine Zelin, David Faure, Joseph McDermott, and, more recently, Ian Miller. Such sources can be difficult to parse, but Zhang's command of the material enables her to analyze the timber trade through the eyes of a Qing-era practitioner. This methodological rigor is joined with an exceptional degree of theoretical sophistication. Zhang draws on insights from New Institutional Economics to cast late imperial business in a new light—one in which private markets excelled at finding creative solutions to a range of common goods and coordination problems.
The result is a monograph with important contributions both to Chinese business and environmental history. In the realm of business history, she demonstrates a degree of market integration and scope that extended from wealthy, urban Jiangnan cities all the way to rural Guizhou. Her contribution to the environmental historiography is equally impressive. Contrary to the more common, declensionist view of Han agrarian practices, Zhang demonstrates how for-profit securitization of timberlands could stall environmental degradation and even foster reforestation. If this falls short of our contemporary sustainable forestry ideal, it is still a good deal closer to it than previously recognized. As such, this remarkable book belongs on the shelves and syllabi of any scholar interested in the economic and environmental history of early modern China.
