(Opposite) Miao children in their finery at Langde village, Qiandongnan Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.
Three Miao communities in Leishan County, Guizhou Province, China, 2010–2011
The forests of Guizhou Province have been used, managed, and conserved by traditional Miao people and their ancestors for over a thousand years. The Miao are one of the fifty-five recognized ethnic groups in the People’s Republic of China; Miao is the collective noun used to describe this group of linguistically related ethnic minorities, some of which are Hmong. These have not been easy times for either the Miao or the forest. There have been repeated migrations, resettlements, civil unrest, intermittent rebellions against the Han Chinese,1 malaria outbreaks, and periodic burning of the forest—and Miao villages—by government armies trying to drive them out of the region. Through it all, the Miao have tended their rice fields, harvested timber to build their houses, collected forest fruits and medicinal plants, and consistently enriched local forests by planting useful tree species. These low-level, long-term silvicultural treatments have had a major impact on the forests of Guizhou.
Traditional patterns of Miao resource use in Guizhou, however, have been changing since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, in response to shifting government policies, population growth, and decreased access to forest resources. Although forests still provide an important source of building materials for house construction, fruits, fibers, resins, mushrooms, medicinal plants and other non-timber forest resources are being exploited and managed with decreasing frequency. The diminishing importance of these subsistence plant products has been accompanied by a reduction in the diversity of useful taxa in the forests.
Government incentives and planting programs have replaced the normal successional development, or fallow phase, of Miao agricultural fields with single-species plantations of shamu (Cunninghamia lanceolata), a particularly valuable local timber tree frequently referred to, erroneously, as Chinese fir.2 The total area of forest in many Miao regions has increased as a result of this planting activity, an achievement much publicized by the State Forestry Administration, but the variety of plant communities within the local landscape, as well as the taxonomic diversity of the species found in them, appears to be decreasing.
The Miao region of southeastern Guizhou is one of the most important and expansive forest areas in China. But not all forests are alike. The mosaic of species-rich forest vegetation originally created and maintained by the Miao is being homogenized by forest policies that focus on timber production and promote a higher degree of state and private-sector, rather than community, control over forestland. In 2010, I started collaborating with Minzu University, in Beijing, a school for non-Han Chinese, and we developed a project to document the changes in forest structure and composition that were occurring near Miao communities in the Qiandongnan Autonomous Prefecture, in the southeastern part of Guizhou Province.
The work in Guizhou was focused on three Miao villages that varied in size and in distance to Leigongshan Nature Preserve, a protected area. Larger villages, we speculated, would put a higher demand on the forest, while communities located closer to the protected area would have access to larger tracts of forest but would also be subject to more stringent regulations and enforcement. The composition and structure of the forests within the protected area were of special interest, given that Miao communities had been using and grooming them for hundreds of years before the land tenure was changed. These forests would probably provide the clearest examples of what the original vegetation of the region looked like.
The basic workflow in each village was the same. We first conducted a series of unstructured household interviews to compile a list of important forest resources and estimate the quantity of each resource that was used in a year. The objective of these household surveys was to come up with a preliminary assessment of the current demand for forest resources in each village. We then went to the forests—visiting examples of all the different forest tenures—to quantify the supply of these resources. The estimated demand was then compared to the observed supply to enable us to characterize the trajectory of the interaction between people and forest in each place. This would help us speculate about future forest use for the Miao villagers.
The largest Miao village in the survey contained more than thirteen hundred families and was a beautiful, expansive cluster of traditional tile-roofed wooden houses clinging to the steep slopes along the banks of a river. The forests were located in the mountains behind the village; all the flatter land was in terraced rice fields. The setting was gorgeous, Miao women wearing exquisite silverwork and detailed embroidery were casually strolling around, and the large plazas and cobbled sidewalks were teeming with Chinese tourists.
The second village had about a hundred Miao families and was located in the buffer zone of the protected area. The houses were also made of wood, with the same kind of roof tiles, and they were equally well crafted, but they appeared to be more worn and lived in; the rice fields were less manicured. No one was walking around the village in traditional Miao attire. The village had been in its current location for 350 years.
The last Miao village, about two hundred families, was located inside the core zone of the nature preserve, and as a foreigner I was not allowed to enter. But we obtained permits so the Chinese researchers and students collaborating with the project could visit the village to do the household surveys and forest inventories. During the second year of the project, the boundary of the core zone of the reserve was moved to exclude this village. The village was not forced to move out of the core zone; the State Forestry Administration simply moved the boundary. I would speculate that the pattern and intensity of forest use by the village did not change in the slightest in response to this cartographic modification.
Once we started going down the side streets of the largest, most touristy village, it no longer felt like Disneyland. Our household surveys revealed that four small villages were merged in 2006 to form the current village; originally there had been houses on the site where the main plaza was constructed. The local authorities had expropriated the land and forced the residents to move; most of the people said that they liked their new house, though not their new location, better. They complained about the outsiders who had moved in and opened restaurants and hotels. All the households interviewed still walked several kilometers to the forest each week to collect firewood and harvest mushrooms and chestnuts.
As recently as thirty years ago, all the forestlands outside of the village were community forests. A village council, rather than a district office, decided how many trees could be cut and who could cut them, which species needed to be planted, and where would be the best place to plant them. These days, a permit from the government is required to cut or plant anything.
We walked about two hours up the mountain behind the village to run an inventory transect in a tract of community forest. We saw a few big shamu trees, but the canopy was mostly oaks, sweet gums, chestnuts, and beeches. The understory was filled with rhododendrons, hydrangeas, and the occasional tea plant. We saw many different tree species, few of which I knew, and none of them was in flower—it was a good thing we had a botanist with us. Yang Chenghua from the Guizhou Forestry Academy not only wrote the scientific names of all of the trees in his field book after each transect, he also made spreadsheets with the names of all the associated trees, shrubs, and herbs that he recorded on each site. In several places, the transect line crossed a shallow, five centimeters deep by sixty centimeters wide drainage channel. The channel had been compacted to the hardness of a ceramic tile and seemed to be ancient. The locals told us that a network of these channels ran throughout the forest; they had been built centuries ago to collect water from the forest and route it down the mountain to the rice fields. They were still in use.
We were exhausted when we finished the transect and started walking down the mountain. One of the foresters on the team had called back to town to get a truck, and it was waiting on the road for us when walked out of the forest. We all piled in—which was a bit tight, because there were ten of us—and slowly bumped and swerved our way back to town, arriving in plenty of time to bathe and take our place on the main plaza with all the Chinese tourists to watch the late-afternoon Miao dance extravaganza.
The forests surrounding Miao villages are currently subject to three different types of tenure. State forests are those in which both the ownership and use rights belong to the central government; community forests are the collective property of local communities that control the ownership and use rights; and private forests, which are also collective property, are those in which individual households have the ownership and use rights of trees and other forest resources. The various forests have different names and caretakers, but all were created from the same original forest base that the Miao have been farming, exploiting, and managing for hundreds of years. Our inventory transects revealed that there were few differences between what was growing in the state forests and the community forests.3 Private forests, on the other hand, were a different case. Individual households have created these short-rotation plant communities to produce timber that can be sold or used locally for building. These forests contain shamu, a single species of pine (Pinus massoniana),4 and not much else. They appear as green spreads on a satellite photo, they protect the soil to a certain degree, and they provide a source of revenue to selected households. But from a floristic, structural, or functional standpoint, they bear little resemblance to the forests the Miao created.
We detected an atypical abundance of shamu trees in both community and state forests. This endemic conifer is one of the most important timber species in China, and Miao villagers preferentially use the wood to build their houses and to make furniture, coffins, and agricultural tools. The species, however, characteristically occurs as scattered individuals in mixed deciduous and evergreen broadleaved forests, not in the densities of 500–600 individuals per hectare that we recorded in our transects. Given the extreme value and utility of the species, the long-term proximity of shamu populations to human settlements, and the demonstrated management capabilities of the Miao, it seems clear that these forests, even the ones currently under state control, have been purposely enriched with a useful species.
Miao villages are allocated a selected number of shamu trees each year, and this timber is distributed among households based on a permit system controlled by the provincial forestry department. Some fifty to sixty shamu trees are needed to build a typical Miao house, and it may take a decade of annual permit applications for a householder to get enough wood to finish it. Several people told us that the permitting process had taken less time for them because their original house had burned down and they were given preference when the shamu logs were allocated. Other landholders confided that if the shamu trees in their private forest were burned in a fire, they were allowed to do a salvage cut to save the timber. Fire presents a continual risk to people living in tight clusters of old wooden houses, and many of the larger villages boasted a network of fire hydrants scattered around town. The municipal authorities and village leaders assured me that everyone was extremely vigilant and fires never occurred in the region. Nonetheless, a small, carefully controlled burn appears to significantly reduce the time required to get the wood needed to build a house.
Once a family has a stack of shamu logs and a place to build, the next step is to turn the logs into boards. Not everyone has the means to do this. I met a fellow during one of the household surveys who had built a portable sawmill that householders could lease, and he would set up his mill behind the house under construction and make boards. He moved from village to village, going wherever he was needed, and said that he helps build about three houses a year.
The Miao make their houses out of shamu poles and planks using simple post-and-beam construction. The two structural components are held together with a mortise-and-tenon joint locked with a wooden peg, a centuries-old technique that is still in use. The boards used for the walls, windows, and doors are carefully countersunk into grooved baseboards. All the boards are neatly planed and the joints carefully chiseled and tightly fitted together using a mallet. No nails are used at any point in the construction process. I have been in Miao houses that are three stories tall and more than thirty years old.
The Grain for Green program, also known as the Sloping Land Conversion Program, was initiated in the late 1990s as a way to control soil erosion in areas of mountainous terrain. Farmers who had agricultural fields on lands with slopes greater than 25 percent could take these fields out of production and plant them to trees, and the Grain for Green program would give them sacks of rice and a cash subsidy every year for doing so. Many Miao farmers took advantage of this program, and the steep slopes surrounding their villages are covered with young Grain for Green forests. In terms of scale, budget, and duration, it is one of the largest payment-for-ecosystem-service experiments ever attempted.
Before the revolution, the Miao would also periodically take their agricultural fields out of production when yields started to drop. The site would be allowed to go through a natural successional process back to forest, and the fallow regrowth would be enriched with several species of fruit trees and shamu. After several decades, the forest would contain dozens of tree species and a variety of useful forest resources. Once the timber trees in the forest had attained a merchantable size, they would be harvested, and the site would be cleared and recycled back into agriculture. The Miao landscape was a mosaic of young forests, old forests, and agricultural fields, each vegetation type continually growing into or being replaced by another type, based on the needs and collective decisions of the village. I was told that soil erosion had never been a problem when this system was in place.
The Grain for Green program interrupts this indigenous system of land management by introducing a new vegetation type that can never become anything but another rotation of itself. Farmers are provided with planting material for the program, and based on our household surveys the choices are limited to shamu, one species of pine, and tea. Farmers are not allowed to enrich these plantings with other species, and the plantations are periodically checked to make sure the farmers are complying and that the shamu, pine, and tea trees are being well cared for. Additionally, the farmers do not own the shamu or pine trees they have planted. These trees, when they attain a commercial size, will be allocated through the existing permit system just as all the other timber species are—unless, of course, there is a fire.
Every year fewer Miao families are involved in the management of community forests. Decisions made in the village council currently are focused more on allocating shamu logs for construction than on planting fruit trees, scheduling a thinning operation, or maintaining the drainage channels that supply water to rice fields. Existing forest policies provide little incentive for the Miao to use the formidable silvicultural skills they have gained from living in the forests of Guizhou for millennia, and the original species-rich forests of the region are being slowly converted to monocultures.
We visited a well-known Miao village in Guizhou that was founded during the Ming Dynasty; the residents had been living and farming in the same place for more than six hundred years. The villagers were busy planting their rice fields when we arrived, and we were able to wander quietly along the trails and through the back alleys of the village without being disruptive. Both the men and women wore work clothes with their pants rolled up, and were digging, transplanting, weeding, and periodically tapping the water buffalo with a stick to make it get up out of the mud and leave the rice field. (I had never before realized that farmers used a string to ensure that the rice seedlings are planted exactly in straight lines.) At the sound of a loud gong in the village, they all finished what they were doing and headed back to town.
The men put on dark pants and jackets, and the women changed into their embroidered skirts and blouses, silver necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and elaborate headdresses. The transformation was magical. A busload of tourists had just arrived, and the Miao were preparing to offer them a welcome dance. We stayed to watch the performance, which was lovely and much appreciated, but I was glad that I had had the opportunity to peek behind the curtain before the bus arrived.