Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market by Meng Zhang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market by Meng Zhang Faizah Zakaria (bio) Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market By Meng Zhang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Meng Zhang's engaging and empirically rich study deconstructs the "market," an institution that has surprisingly garnered little deep attention in Asian environmental history. More than an examination of the circulation of goods—in this case, timber—Timber and Forestry reveals how the timber market in Qing China was built at the intersection of a complex supply chain connected by multiple players along the Yangzi river and a rising demand for timber that fueled the felling of millions of trees. Deftly interweaving economic and environmental histories, the book demonstrates that—far from being an alternative to the state in forest management—the timber market worked with and around the state to produce self-regulating mechanisms that promoted sustainability. This core insight provokes a rethinking about the environmental impact of capitalism and the possibility of staking sustainability to profit. The book first establishes that the Qing state ruled the market with a light hand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, moreover, imposed a procurement system that "was in a market, not in replacement of it" (p. 47). This argument resonates with and extends recent conclusions reached by scholars that timber markets in China were sustainable up to the 1600s. But it also indirectly refutes contentions that this sustainability declined rapidly during the Qing period; instead, this chapter shows major continuities in the governing of the timber market during the Ming–Qing transition. What distinguished the Qing era, though, were the sheer volume of the timber trade and the pressing need to develop interregional transport and market routes that incorporated relatively undisturbed forests of southern China into a widening cross-regional timber network. The second chapter follows the infrastructure of this long-distance riverine trade, paying close attention to distinctive cultural features of the timber business such as the system of measurement and pricing. Pegging prices to a function of the circumference of the logs sold set in motion processes that enabled the cross-regional market legibility and enriched traveling merchants, with Hankou in the middle Yangzi area becoming the country's largest timber market by the nineteenth century. Zhang's work is at its most lively and innovative when tracking timber market players from below—cultivators, merchants, brokers, and trade associations—and their impact on the market. Here, historians of technology will find Zhang's depiction of Qing silviculture informative in demonstrating how fir planting could be made sustainable. Financing such efforts also involved innovation. Demystifying contracts that were used to create incentives for timber cultivators to rotate and replant to maintain supply, the third chapter [End Page 647] highlights that tradeable and divisible shares based on landownership and labor input were not only crucial in maintaining the level of long-term investment needed for this market but also in encouraging reforestation. Moreover, the market spurred participation across class and ethnic lines, incorporating players such as the Miao of the lower Qingshui region, who adopted Chinesestyle contracts and began profiting from—as well as replanting—pine and fir. The final chapters expand on the theme of market self-regulation through the perspectives of timber brokers and trade associations. The wide variety of sources ranging from legal digests, contract disputes, and local gazettes provide a persuasive basis of evidence for the argument that these players, when given full rein and direct stakes in the health of the forests, tended to move toward responsible management of woodland resources. The overall positive view of the market in this book might spark unease among market skeptics about the self-regulatory potential of such mechanisms as described in the book. Indeed, Zhang herself points out caveats to market success, including but not limited to the reduced biodiversity of reforested landscapes and the dual-faced nature of the market, which "could be devouring and enabling" unless there was "a careful deliberation over how to delineate and assign the bundle of rights … that constitute the abstract notion of 'property' to different entities" (p. 178). One could extrapolate then that such...