A View [of the State] from the “Other” Side

James Scott begins his book, The Art of Not Being Governed, with a lengthy quote from a Chinese official whose survey of the vast autonomous mountains in southern Guizhou sets the stage for the basic premise of this important work: “How might we best understand the fraught dialectical relations between such projects of rule and their agents, on the one hand, and zones of relative autonomy and their inhabitants, on the other?”  This paper will focus on a specific region in southern Guizhou, an area known to Chinese as the Miao Territory (Miaojiang).  Located where the three provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi meet, the Miao Territory was one of a handful of “shatter zones” in southwest China, and beginning in the eighteenth century the Qing state (1636-1912) was determined to incorporate this zone in order to possess its two most valuable resources, timber and people.  

Because the state-centric narrative that describes and justifies the enclosure and control of the Miao Territory is reasonably well known, this paper will instead examine the Miao Territory immediately prior to the state-sponsored enclosure movement in order to understand how the peoples of this territory viewed the Chinese state (a central feature of Scott’s thesis), and to highlight strategies used to keep the Chinese state/society at a distance.  This paper will rely on a growing collection of oral histories, unofficial travel accounts, and official records to illuminate non-Han relations with Chinese state/society.