Empire and Identity in Guizhou

Reviewed by: Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local resistance to Qing expansion by Jodi L. Weinstein Jonathan Chappell Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local resistance to Qing expansion By Jodi L. Weinstein. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. The novelty of Jodi Weinstein's book, Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local resistance to Qing expansion, lies in its adoption of a "livelihoods approach" to understand Zhongjia attempts to negotiate Qing dynasty rule through resistance or collaboration. The Zhongjia were a minority ethnic group residing in central and southern Guizhou and are now known as the Buyi. The livelihoods approach, borrowed from human geographers and anthropologists working on contemporary southeast Asia, involves considering "not only the activities that people use to make a living, but also the social, ethnic and religious resources at their disposal, and the decisions they make in view of local conditions and external forces" (5). Weinstein astutely argues that, in the absence of a wealth of Zhongjia source material, a focus on livelihood choices can help historians to understand how the Zhongjia responded to increasing pressure from the Qing state across the eighteenth century. Following this introduction, in her second chapter Weinstein introduces the social, economic and political history of the Zhongjia people up until the eighteenth century. Chapter Three examines reforms to the Qing management of the region which enabled administrators to better understand and control it or, as the anthropologist James Scott has argued, to "see like a state" (9). Chapter Four moves on to explore continuing Zhongjia resistance to Qing rule through a study of three mid-eighteenth-century criminal cases. Each case involved Zhongjia people taking advantage of local superstitions to swindle their neighbours, an example of livelihood choices in action. Chapter Five explores the Zhongjia Nanlong uprising of 1797, arguing that it can be seen as a more extreme version of the everyday resistance to the state outlined in Chapter Four. Finally, Chapter Six concludes by assessing the Zhongjia's place within the Qing imperial vision and how the Zhongjia continue to make livelihood choices which resist state power in contemporary Guizhou. This will be of particular interest to scholars of Qing imperial expansion. Weinstein follows Emma Teng's insight that minority groups lying outside of the five main ethnic groups (Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan and Uighur) were superfluous to the Qing vision of multi-ethnic empire.1 Her focus on Guizhou, however, is unique and adds to our overall understanding of the mental geography of Qing administrators. Weinstein's arguments rely on Qing state documents as well as on Zhongjia folk narratives. Paradoxically, it is through reading against the grain of the former that she makes her most productive analyses. In particular, Chapter Four's exploration of three swindling cases demonstrates the effectiveness of the livelihoods approach. In each case Weinstein considers the use of religiously inspired scams to enable their organisers to escape from the limiting economic conditions they faced. She does so by combining existing knowledge of Zhongjia religious beliefs with collections of Qing documents on the affairs of minority groups. For example, through the case of Huang San, a travelling peddler of good luck charms, Weinstein effectively demonstrates the livelihood choices of both those resisting Qing rule as well as collaborators with it. Huang San sold his charms with promises that their purchasers would be able to locate the elusive "spirit silver" of Zhongjia myth. In doing so he was not only taking advantage of of Zhongjia beliefs to to escape from the marginal agrarian existence available in Guizhou; he was also resisting the Qing state, which oversaw and in part created those conditions. In her thorough analysis of the case Weinstein also considers the livelihood choices of the informants who bought the case to the Qing authorities, who were themselves Zhongjia. Weinstein convincingly argues that these men were benefitting enough from the status quo to be dissuaded from participating in Huang San's scheme and even to report it when they could alternatively have decided to collaborate with it. One minor weakness of the work is Weinstein's overemphasis in her introduction of her use of Zhongjia texts, which is not substantiated in the remaining chapters. This

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