After a remarkable demographic increases in the developed areas in Qing period, many people went to a 'new world' to seek for new economic opportunities. One of the most popular regions for these immigrants was the bordering areas of three provinces, ...
After a remarkable demographic increases in the developed areas in Qing period, many people went to a 'new world' to seek for new economic opportunities. One of the most popular regions for these immigrants was the bordering areas of three provinces, the Hubei, the Shaanxi and the Sichuan.
Rested intact for a long time, they were rapidly exploited by the immigrants. In present level of study of these mountainous regions, we can not generalize the type of their exploitation, but there existed grosso modo two types of exploitation. One was a simple exploitation for self-subsistence, the other was a systematic exploitation in which we can find some groups of cultivators, proprietors, and renters.
The complex structure of exploitation due to the several types of alienation heightened the tension between cultivators and proprietors, and accelerated the destruction of forest. The forest was also damaged by such industrial activities as iron, charcoal, salt productions. In contrast to the Province of Shaanxi where the exploitation begun due to the immigrants, a state policy called gaituguiliui(改土歸流: incorporating non-Han people to regular administrative system) stimulated the exploitation of the province of Hubei.
Many immigrants and their exhaustive exploitation of natural resources made this region's environment change very rapidly. The first change, even the contemporary felt it, was the fast decrease of the forested areas. Second, wild animals also disappeared with the decrease of forest and trees.
Except that frontier settlers brought here inappropriate techniques and tools, the existed agriculture in Hanjiang(漢江) area lost its productivity very rapidly because of the insufficient water supply caused by mountainous soil erosion. In other part of this area, the industrial activities also encountered insufficient supplies of wooden fuel.
These environmental changes made the Hanjiang hydraulic system more dangerous than before. More serious was that the Shaanxi and the Hubei were exposed to flood simultaneously.
The bureaucratic reaction about this catastrophic changes was limited to keep public order which would be menaced by immigrants en mouvement. Even though some regional bureaucracies payed much attention to plant trees, it was to raise the peasants' profits, not to ameliorate the deteriorating environmental conditions.