108 Views
China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
This paper investigates the intersection of peasant survival strategies and changing tax regimes in Gansu’s Islamo-Tibetan borderlands. In the wake of the horrific, ethnicized violence of the 1860s, the local state sought to fund its reconstruction and infrastructure development through a range of new levees that fell, for the first time, on nested jurisdictions—tusi territories—and resources—opium poppies—that had long been beyond the county taxman.
The changing geographies of local taxation would not go unchallenged. The local state’s attempts to extract these resources led to violence, feuds, and lengthy legal disputes over the jurisdictional limits of the civilian magistrate. Case records from one small Gansu administration bring these tensions to light, revealing in textured detail how peasants, local powers, and state agents fought over the implementation of new taxation infrastructures. In these cases of jurisdictional arbitrage, we find local villagers forcefully (re-)asserting the confusing mix of tax and population regimes that defined the ante bellum borderlands against officials intent on changing local finances. The villagers would not be successful. Ultimately, economic transformations were political transformations, as the local state bound once peripheral populations ever closer to civilian jurisdictions.
Wesley Chaney
Bates College