Timber And Forestry In Qing China

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse that devastated European forests at the same time. This comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development.

Although China is generally considered to have suffered continuous deforestation over most of its history, forests were protected or even planted and maintained for centuries in some places. This study identifies six such cases. It uses historical evidence to show that individuals and communities act to manage resources sustainably for a number of reasons including economic benefit, religious or symbolic purposes, and that sustainability of the management system depends on the form of control exerted over the resource.

The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.

Details the socio-political effects of forestry in China in recent decades and forestry's importance to China's future. Included is a comprehensive look at harvesting, sawmilling, tariffs and foreign exchange, pulp and paper production, seed collection, urban forestry, and soil erosion. Shows how the Chinese people are attempting to solve their problems and become self-sufficient in areas of industrial timber and fuelwood.

Details the socio-political effects of forestry in China in recent decades and forestry's importance to China's future. Included is a comprehensive look at harvesting, sawmilling, tariffs and foreign exchange, pulp and paper production, seed collection, urban forestry, and soil erosion. Shows how the Chinese people are attempting to solve their problems and become self-sufficient in areas of industrial timber and fuelwood.

Presents the current state of China's forestry industry. Explains that the transition from a focus on timber production to ecological development is inevitable, and a major breakthrough for forestry development in China.