Cross-Border Captivity in Southwest China

In a way, Scott’s Zomia thesis is a story of migration, where labor-hungry lowland states constantly imposed slavery or indentured servitude on neighboring tribes; such oppression, in turn, drove the oppressed into secluded highland terrain.  Yet many reviewers have pointed out that migration between lowland and highland Zomia is caused by factors far more complicated than the dynamic between state-building and stateless anarchy.  Nevertheless, the fact remains that population flow – be it voluntary or forced – was a critical dimension to Zomia life and warrants further examination.

On this point, southwest Ming China (1368-1644) offers a unique vantage point.  In this area, lowland states were not homogeneous predators but formed a competitive hierarchy among themselves.  Ming, the largest but not the dominant, had to vie for control with multiple native kingdoms.  The precarious balance of power turned issues regarding trans-border migration and trafficking into sovereignty disputes.  In fact, so much was at stake that disputes over captured/fled subjects often led warfare.  Yet most interestingly, contrary to Scott’s model, the strongest lowland state in the area – the Ming empire – claimed to have suffered the most from population raids.

This paper will examine the Bozhou campaign at the turn of the seventeenth century. The campaign’s success allowed the Ming to formally dismantle and incorporate an established native tusikingdom and radically changed the political landscape of today’s southern Sichuan and northern Guizhou provinces.  Looking through this moment of expansion and disintegration, this paper will ask two questions: first, how did political powers at the time perceive and negotiate over population flow?  Second, how was such negotiation represented in cultural discourse?  Why, instead of law and sovereignty, female sexuality became the trope of choice when it came to cross-border captivity?