Fighting to Keep the Land Wild: Huifang and Vernacular Forestry in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria

Abstract: This article examines the "association houses" (huifang) that emerged in the late nineteenth century as a major political force in the mountainous area of southern Manchuria and the Russian Far East. Using Chinese, Russian, English and Japanese primary sources, this article examines the formation of the Tanghe huifang, a prominent huifang in the Mt. Changbai area, and its tumultuous relations with the Qing state from 1880 1910. The central argument of the article is that the huifang was an autonomous polity a mini-state of sorts organized by hunter-gatherers (primarily Han Chinese migrants from Shandong), and based on the utilization of forest resources such as deer antlers, medicinal herbs, gold, and most importantly, ginseng plantations. The huifang protected the community from the threat of bandits, taxed the forest industries, regulated trade, and protected the forest resources from destruction, if only on a limited scale. Initially unofficially managed by the Jilin military authority, the huifang collided with the Qing state in the 1880s 1890s and finally revolted against the state in 1897 when the state opened the mountain forests for agrarian development—known as the "Opening the wasteland" (fanghuang) policy. Unable to subdue the resistance, the Qing state decided to incorporate the mountain polity into its political domain, accommodating the huifang as the government's police force and its leaders as the police heads in 1908. This article qualifies the current scholarship that examines the politics of the Chinese borderland primarily through the lens of the national and international politics—a lens that focuses on the top-down process of central state power and state-initiated agricultural and industrial development that took place in the context of growing imperialist expansion into the Qing frontier. Instead, this article highlights an alternative pattern of politics and economic transformation articulated from the bottom up, a pattern predicated on the decentralized utilization of the forest resources in Manchuria's mountains.