The 1744 Annual Audits of Magistrate Activity and Their Fate

Paradoxes, impossibilities, and contradictions seem at first sight to characterize what had become of the system of local administration during the high Qing. In most regions a rapidly growing population had to be kept peaceful and secure, educated in the proper ways, and fed when times were difficult. The settled territory to survey and keep under control was fast expanding beyond the old plains and valley bottoms where most of the population had stayed concentrated until recently. A vibrantly developing economy needed to be monitored and taxed, encouraged in the directions deemed desirable, and provided with the necessary infrastructure. And all of this had to be accomplished by a handful of officials, whose numbers had stayed more or less constant since the Ming. What is more, these officials---the magistrates, essentially---had to make do with ridiculously low operating budgets and with staffs which were not necessarily small, but were routinely considered unreliable and dishonest. In sum, ambitions were immense---not just extracting a little revenue and seeing to it that an appearance of order be maintained and that the regime not appear threatened, but civilizing the masses and controlling their lives. On the face of it, the means that were mobilized to attain such goals were exceedingly modest, and would have to stay so, since maintaining the administrative workforce and state expenditures at a low level was celebrated as a proof of good government and a manifestation of dynastic legitimacy.

Quantity and Quality

All of this is well known, of course, as is the additional paradox that in spite of this quantitatively-limited governmental output the empire was, by and large, efficiently run for comparatively long periods of time, most strikingly the eighteenth-century Qing. How was this achieved?

A variety of methods, many of which have already been well described by historians, were used to offset the structural insufficiency of the regular bureaucracy in material means and human resources. Mostly, they come under the general notion of delegating or subcontracting specific tasks to state-approved non-bureaucratic agents. For example, local elites would be co-opted to monitor and educate the masses; citizens “honest and of means” would be selected to run granaries or other organizations; merchants known and respected and with sufficient assets would be entrusted with “liturgical” services like controlling their respective trades, policing the market-place, and levying commercial tax; landowners and merchants would be required to contribute funds to build and maintain infrastructures and services from which their communities were to benefit; systems of mutual surveillance and responsibility would be imposed on the populace to enforce self-discipline; and so on. Such techniques made it possible for the state bureaucracy to limit itself to setting examples, laying down rules and guidelines, and giving warnings, and to concentrate its organizational and financial efforts where scale and complexity required it. Thus, for example, coercion and repression would be applied selectively but harshly enough to discourage misbehavior, while state funds and an unusual concentration of field officials would be mobilized to combat natural disasters and famines, or direct public works of a regional scale.

Another type of approach was to try by every means to raise the efficiency, reliability, and output of the existing bureaucratic apparatus in the performance of its ordinary tasks. The present essay will be devoted to one method experimented with by the Qing government for a few years in the mid-eighteenth century---the so-called “things to promote and to prohibit” (xingchu shiyi) audit procedure, whereby magistrates were to tour annually every village of their constituencies and report in full detail on what they had been able to do to improve conditions. What I would like to emphasize in this introduction is that, in doing this, the Qing could avail themselves of a rather unique combination of mobilization from the top and activism among the rank and file, or, differently put, of an encounter between a succession of competent and interventionist emperors and a bureaucracy with at least an active minority of highly committed professionals, of which Chinese imperial history gives few other examples.

The...