Cultivating the Frontiers: Agricultural Knowledge, Modernization, and the State in Western China, 1800-1962

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Agriculture has long been the central pillar of state policy in China. This panel examines state efforts to manage and modernize agriculture from the imperial era through the 20th century. The focus on the Western frontiers, including Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, and an extended time frame shed new light on the process of knowledge making in the peripheries and the way such knowledge was used to reinforce state policy issued from the center. Yi Wang focuses on irrigation and economic development in the Hetao region of Inner Mongolia in the nineteenth century. Martina Siebert uses local gazetteers, particularly in the border and frontier regions to the Northwest, to analyze the creation of an agricultural ideal in the late Imperial period. Peter Lavelle examines Qing efforts to mobilize foreign scientific and technological knowledge for the improvement of agricultural productivity in Xinjiang. Shellen Wu moves the action to the Republican period and examines 1930s efforts to settle and establish agricultural experimental stations on the frontiers. Yingjia Tan sees in the 1950s experiments to produce fertilizers using lightning in Sichuan Province a microcosm of the energy shortage problems that led to the failure of the Great Leap Forward. The juxtaposition of different regions on the Western frontiers and a longue durée time frame from the Qing through the PRC period open the way to a larger discussion about the differences between the efforts of the imperial-era state to manage agriculture and later endeavors, increasingly grouped under the rubric of “modern science.”

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Shellen Wu, University of Tennessee

Chair

• Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massaschusetts Amherst

Individual Presentations

• The Rise and Fall of Land Merchants: Irrigation, Commercialization, and Social Change in Inner Mongolia, 1800-1911 - Yi Wang, Binghamton University

• Searching for Growth in Arid Lands: Agricultural Exploration and Improvement in Early Twentieth-Century Xinjiang - Peter Lavelle, Temple University

• Fertilizer from the Sky: Energy Constraints and Technological Innovation in Great Leap Sichuan, 1958-1962 - Yingjia Tan, Wesleyan University

• Eden on the Frontiers: Military Land Reclamation Projects and Geopolitical Discourse in Republican China, 1928-1954. - Shellen Wu, University of Tennessee

Discussant

• Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massaschusetts Amherst