Challenges and recalibration: Ecological governance and state building in late Qing China

Abstract This article reconsiders late Qing state building through the underexamined lens of ecological governance, moving beyond teleological narratives of imperial decline to reassess the regime’s resilience and institutional adaptability under conditions of mounting environmental, fiscal, and geopolitical strain. Drawing on a transregional synthesis of ecological, social, political, and economic historiography, it argues that the crises confronting the Qing in the nineteenth century stemmed less from institutional stagnation or state decay than from a profound mismatch between inherited governing capacities and intensifying socio-ecological pressures generated by population growth, commercialization, and environmental degradation. Employing R. Bin Wong’s analytical framework of Challenges, Capacities, Commitments, and Claims, the article traces how the Qing state recalibrated its governing priorities in response to these challenges and constraints. Through six case studies spanning agrarian cores and imperial borderlands, it shows how ecological governance took multiple, regionally differentiated forms. Across these settings, the state selectively retreated from labour-intensive, resource-consuming paternalistic commitments while expanding extractive, coercive, and territorial strategies aimed at dynastic survival. Rather than signalling simple state decline, these uneven and survival-oriented adaptations constituted a process of governing recalibration shaped by negotiation among state authorities, local actors, and non-human forces such as water, soil, and forests. By foregrounding the agency of ecological dynamics, this article situates the late Qing within broader debates on empire, sustainability, and state capacity, offering a comparative framework for understanding how premodern and modern states confronted environmental limits in moments of systemic crisis.