THE ROOTED STATE: PLANTS AND POWER IN THE MAKING OF MODERN CHINA’S XIKANG PROVINCE BY MARK E. FRANK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Languages and Cultures in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2020 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Dan Shao, Chair Associate Professor Robert Morrissey Assistant Professor Roderick Wilson Associate Professor Laura Hostetler, University of Illinois Chicago Abstract This dissertation takes the relationship between agricultural plants and power as its primary lens on the history of Chinese state-building in the Kham region of eastern Tibet during the early twentieth century. Farming was central to the way nationalist discourse constructed the imagined community of the Chinese nation, and it was simultaneously a material practice by which settlers reconfigured the biotic community of soils, plants, animals, and human beings along the frontier. This dissertation shows that Kham’s turbulent absorption into the Chinese nation-state was shaped by a perpetual feedback loop between the Han political imagination and the grounded experiences of soldiers and settlers with the ecology of eastern Tibet. Neither expressions of state power nor of indigenous resistance to the state operated neatly within the human landscape. Instead, the rongku—or “flourishing and withering”—of the state was the product of an ecosystem. This study chronicles Chinese state-building in Kham from Zhao Erfeng’s conquest of the region that began in 1905 until the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army in 1950. Qing officials hatched a plan to convert Kham into a new “Xikang Province” in the last years of the empire, and officials in the Republic of China finally realized that goal in 1939. The borders of Xikang Province enveloped a vast territory of 3.2 million square kilometers and some two million people. But as I show, Chinese authority there was also vertically bounded by a “grain line” at approximately 3,600 meters above sea level, beyond which agriculture gave way to relatively ungovernable yak and sheep pastoralism. As it became clear that mass migration of Han Chinese farmers into eastern Tibet was an unlikely outcome under present conditions, local Han officials adapted through innovations in three areas: tax policy, agricultural science, and the redrawing of provincial borders. Beginning with Qing Frontier Commissioner Zhao Erfeng, administrators implemented a land tax in kind that strategically accommodated the needs of farmers to maximize the grain supply of Chinese armies and reduce the “friction of terrain.” Breakthroughs in wheat, barley, and yak production at high altitude agricultural experiment stations helped to renew Han Chinese confidence in the project of agricultural colonization during the 1940s. And the provincial government absorbed fertile rice-growing counties from western Sichuan to supply life-giving grain to civil organs in Kham, such as the schools that aimed to educate the children of Han settlers and assimilate indigenous Khampas. These adaptations were crucial to the absorption of Kham into China’s provincial system, where it remains to this day. ii Acknowledgements I wrote this dissertation all over the place: in my Champaign bedroom, at the Flying Machine coffee shop in Urbana (hopped up on macchiatos), at the Parasol café in Chengdu (where the owner would sometimes strut out his two pet alpacas), at an apartment on Arbat Street in Moscow, at my parents’ house in the woods of North Carolina. First of all, I want to thank everyone around me who tolerated my obsession with a Chinese province that no longer exists. Professionally speaking, my first and fiercest supporter has been my PhD adviser, Shao Dan, and it was our first phone call in 2010 that convinced me to study at UIUC. Professor Shao’s mentoring style was just what I needed: she put me in touch with exciting ideas and scholars but gave me tremendous leeway in crafting a research topic. Hers has always been the voice of reason, from pressing me to include more Chinese-language texts on my prelim reading list to reminding me that this is “just a dissertation” as I dragged my feet on filing it five years later. I will never forget the thrill of (finally) defending my dissertation to Shao and three other historians I deeply admire: Laura Hostetler, Rod Wilson, and Robert (Bob) Morrissey. Laura’s work has inspired my pursuit of borderlands history since my first year of grad school, and I was over the moon when she agreed to join my defense committee from Chicago. She has often been the first to return feedback on queries and drafts—and it is always good feedback. Rod is beyond generous with his time and energies, even with his own deadlines looming, and I can only hope to pay it forward. He and Bob ignited my interest in environmental history and coached me through much of the literature that frames this study. My research in China was supported by a Henry Luce/ACLS China Studies Pre- Dissertation Summer Travel Grant and then a Fulbright Research Fellowship. The year and a half of archival research in China was one of happiest times in my life, and I have never leaned so heavily on the mercies of others. I am truly grateful to Yudru Tsomu for offering to mentor me at Sichuan University and thus salvaging my research plans after an earlier affiliation fell through. It is difficult to imagine my time in the Sichuan Archives without running into Li Songsong, who happens to be one of the few people as interested in Xikang Province as I am. It was Songsong who gifted me the copy of the Draft Gazetteer of Xikang (Xikang tongzhi gao) that I cite in every chapter. In the very early stages of document analysis, I bounced ideas off of my good friends and fellow historians Elizabeth Reynolds and John Thompson as they drifted in iii and out of my Chengdu apartment or over dinner at Tai Koo Li. Numerous others made our lives in Chengdu a pleasure, including Yuqin, Anne and Josh, Pat and Michelle, Camilla, Miles, and Ke’er. I had the privilege of workshopping every chapter of this dissertation at intimate meetings away from my home institution, and my chapters were much improved after incisive commentary from the following discussants: Deborah Fitzgerald at the graduate workshop of the Agricultural History Society, and Mariko Tamanoi at the Joint Consortia National Dissertation Workshop on Contemporary East Asia in 2017; Kenneth Pomeranz at the East Asia: Transregional Histories seminar in 2018; Ling Zhang, Benny Shafer and Alexander (Sasha) Day at a pair of workshops on Chinese Food in Boston in 2018 and 2019; and Kalyanakrishnan (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan and James C. Scott at the Agrarian Studies Colloquium at Yale University in 2019. I would also like to thank the many workshop and colloquium participants who read my very rough drafts and weighed in. Happily, the feedback from these workshops was so rich that I couldn’t hope to integrate all of it into the dissertation, and I must continue to grapple with it as I move from the dissertation stage to the book. Then there are the mentors, colleagues, and friends who read and commented on large excerpts of my work purely out of the kindness of their hearts, including Scott Relyea, Sakura Christmas, Josh Levy, and Spencer Stewart. My parents David and Lynn Frank, who also suffered through grad school, were ever sympathetic and supportive. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to my life partner Maria: for moving to China and adapting, for living below the poverty line, for working to support us, for listening to my half-baked ideas, and for giving me the opportunity to spend five years devoted to a passion project with no clear financial benefit. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Maria and our daughter Katya, who will eventually figure out what I was doing on my computer all that time. iv Contents A Note on the Transliteration of Chinese and Tibetan Terms ........................................... vi Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 Part One: Planting the Province ............................................................................................ 25 1. A Land “Without History”: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province ............. 26 2. “The Food is Spent and the Soldiers are Exhausted”: Taxation as Response to the Friction of Terrain .................................................................................................................. 54 3. Assimilation Ecology: Ethnicity, Gender, and Lifeways in the Chinese Settlement of Eastern Tibet ........................................................................................................................... 81 Part Two: Growing the Province ........................................................................................ 118 4. High Cold Country: The View from Kangding Weather Station ................................. 119 5. Wheat Dreams: Scientific Interventions at Chinese Model Farms ............................... 137 6. “Enlightening the Natives”: Schools and Grain in Wartime Kangding ...................... 162 Conclusion: The Imagined Community vs. the Rooted State .......................................... 197 Epilogue ................................................................................................................................ 203