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Salt and Revenue in Frontier Formation: State Mobilized Ethnic Politics in the Yunnan-Burma Borderland since the 1720s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2013

JIANXIONG MA
JIANXIONG MA*
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This research reviews the formation of the Yunnan-Burma frontier since the 1720s, when the Qing government reformed the administrative systems from chieftainships to official counties in the middle and southern Yunnan mountains areas. One of some crucial political changes was the policy of salt revenue which directly stimulated large scale ethnic resistance in the region of salt wells. However, the social political context of continuing ethnic conflicts was not only rooted in the reshaping of the salt-consuming districts, but also rooted in social changes in the Yunnan-Burma borderland because of increasing Han Chinese immigration and their penetration into mining, long distance trade and local agriculture. In order to successfully control mountain resources as the base of revenue, the Qing government continued to gradually integrate native Dai chieftains into official counties. Local resistance continued and reached a peak from the 1790s to the 1810s. Pushed by the Qing government, and with the collaboration of different social actors, the synthesized mobilization of frontier formation had made ethnic politics a main style of social political reconstruction, even if commercial exchange, long distance trade, and demographic reshaping also continued to be mixed with ethnic politics as another layer of the Yunnan-Burma frontier formation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1637 - 1669
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Asian Borderland: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation Conference at Chiang Mai in Thailand, 2010. The research project was supported by the Direct Allocation Grant of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Areas of Excellence Scheme: The Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society. The author's thanks go to the anonymous reviewers and Professor Raj Brown for her encouragement and advice.

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