Mark Frank, " Chinese Physiocracy: Kham as Laboratory for the Agrarian Theory of China "
- document 1 document 2 document 3
- niveau 1 niveau 2 niveau 3
- audio 1 audio 2 audio 3
Descriptif
When a nation-state looks to intensive agriculture for its national essence, what are the implications at the local level? This paper looks at agricultural colonization efforts (tunken屯垦) of the Chinese state in Kham during the Republican era (1912-1949) and places these efforts in the context of a national discourse on agrarianism. Chinese nationalists circulated theories about agrarianism (or nongben zhuyi) as a necessary feature of Chinese civilization since ancient times. Elements of imperial Chinese agrarianism, distilled through early modern movements in Japan, France and elsewhere, were reinserted into Chinese nationalist politics under Chiang Kai-shek, resulting in what I call “the agrarian theory of China”—or the theory that China is by definition a nation founded on agriculture. Agrarianism was a major component of Republican China’s strategy in the borderlands, where administrators implemented tunken projects. However, “China” as an imagined community based on agriculture was subject to the environmental limitations of particular locations in the borderlands such as the Kham region. This paper examines tunken as a conduit for exchanges of ideas between national and Kham regional administrators during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a large body of Chinese documents, I show that the Kham region functioned as a policy laboratory when the administration of Liu Wenhui took creative steps to reconcile the agrarian theory of China with environmental conditions that were often inhospitable to agriculture. The challenge of establishing a new province in Kham titled Xikang prompted Han modernizers to pioneer visions of agricultural expansion that satisfied the twin imperatives of economic development and cultural assimilation. Unlike imperial incarnations of tunken, Xikang modernizers appealed to nationalist impulses in attracting planters and sought solutions to environmental problems in scientific experimentation.
International conference “Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Sino-Tibetan Kham Borderlands,” Februray 18-20, 2016. This conference is an outcome of a collaborative ERC-funded research project (Starting grant no. 283870). For more information, please visit the project's Website: http://kham.cnrs.fr
Thème
Notice
Dans la même collection
-
Fabienne Jagou, " Manchu Officials’ Khams Travel Accounts: Mapping a Course Through a Qing Territor…
Throughout the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), more and more travelers –officials, military and merchants- went to the Southwest border of China and dedicated some of their time to writing travel accounts,
-
Scott Relyea (Hamline University), " Settling Authority: Sichuanese Farmers in Early Twentieth Cent…
From 1907 to 1911, some 4,000 commoners from the Sichuan Basin ventured west. Enticed by promises of large tracts of uncultivated land and three years of free rent, seeds, animals, and farm implements
-
Isabelle Henrion Dourcy (University of Laval), "Making Movies in the Gesar Heartland: The Burgeonin…
This conference is an outcome of the collaborative ERC-funded research project “Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Sino-Tibetan Kham Borderlands” This research project focuses on the
-
Chen Bo (Sichuan University), “House Society” Revisited "
In this paper, I will begin by considering the concept of “house society” and its applicability to Southwest China. I ask the question of why no scholar, Levi-Strauss included since he originally
-
Tenzin Jinba (National University of Singapore), " Two Gyalrong Weddings Under Fire: Rethinking of …
Two weddings in 2009 and 2015 respectively have received wide publicity among Tibetans and others within and out of China. The first was that of Lobsang Dundrup, a renowned singer from Gyalrong, and
-
Yudru Tsomu (Sichuan University), " Rise of a Political Strongman in Dergé in the Early Twentieth C…
This paper discuses rivalry for the throne of Dergé between 1890 and 1940. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, internecine feuds created a power vacuum serious enough to invite
-
Stéphane Gros (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), "Matrifocality and the House in Drapa…
The practice of a non-contractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive visiting sexual system among a matrilineal group in Southwest China has generated as much interest in anthropology as in the mass
-
Dáša Mortensen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), " Wangchuk Tempa and the Control of G…
This paper examines the fascinating life of Wangchuk Tempa 汪学鼎 (1886-1961), the de facto early-twentieth-century political and military leader of Gyalthang (rGyal Thang) in southern Kham, in order to
-
Eric Mortensen (Guilford College)," Boundaries of the Borderlands : Mapping Gyalthang"
This project seeks to discern the physical and conceptual boundaries of the Tibetan region of Gyalthang, in southern Kham. At issue are questions about the relationships between older
-
Katia Buffetrille (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), " The Increasing Visibility of the Borderland…
For centuries, Central Tibet and its capital Lhasa were regarded as the center—as is obviously expressed in the very name of the region in Tibetan, dBus, “Center”—of political and religious life in
-
Dawa Drolma (Bay Path University), " The Renaissance of Traditional Dzongsar Craft-making in the Me…
As a member of a deeply-rooted traditional craft-making family in the Meshö (Sman Shod) Valley of Kham region, I will present the results of my ongoing fieldwork and academic study on the renaissance
-
John Bray, "French Catholic Missions and Sino-Tibetan Trade: Local Networks and International Enter…
The Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) sent their first missionary on an exploratory mission to the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in 1847, and they retained a presence in the region until 1952. Together
