Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty, and: Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (review)

Both of these fine and innovative books about legal culture in late imperial China take advantage of recently opened archives to analyze topics that have not received much attention from historians because of the lack of original source materials. Reed challenges the appropriateness of the uncritical and unrefined application of Weber's ideal model of legal-rational bureaucracy to the administrative system of imperial China by investigating the role of county clerks and runners in the local yamen of Ba County (modern Chongqing city, Sichuan province) during the late nineteenth century. ¹ With the burgeoning population and the increasing tendency for ordinary commoners to resolve conflicts by going to court, these low-status staff were essential for the smooth functioning of the administration, despite being despised within official discourse and being illegal supernumerary employees according to the administrative statutes.

Reed's study is the first detailed investigation of how county clerks and yamen runners actually managed the increasingly complex and voluminous daily business of the lowest levels of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy. Because their jobs were originally obligatory corvée service requirements, and because Wang Anshi's (1021-1086) administrative reforms in the Song dynasty were ultimately unsuccessful in elevating clerks into regular members of the salaried bureaucracy, they were treated as "mean" people, performing stigmatized occupations for their social superiors, the ordinary "good" commoners and the official elite. They were marginalized, almost social outcasts, because they dealt with criminals who disrupted the harmony of the social, political, and cosmic order. Moreover, like midwives and other such people, they were marginalized because they managed negotiations between groups in the social world (in their case between ordinary people and government officials). In addition, because the law only recognized a few of their number as valid employees, they had no official salary and had to earn their keep by charging extralegal fees. In official discourse, they were represented as the poorest of the poor, incapable of respectable employment, only interested in profit and steeped in corruption, in direct contrast to their social superiors who abided by Confucian ethical principles and moral values. Nevertheless, they were indispensable; they knew local conditions, customs, and language and were (relatively) permanently attached to a particular yamen. Local magistrates were outsiders (due to the rule of avoidance that banned them from serving in their home provinces), appointed only for a limited term. Some families and family networks specialized in serving as clerks and runners for generations.

Reed paints a fascinating portrait of the Ba county yamen. He demonstrates that, as a result of the Single Whip tax reforms of the late Ming and early Qing, when most obligatory labor service was replaced by monetary exactions, clerical service was labeled as "servile labor" (70). ² Yet clerks were able to distinguish themselves from their baser colleagues, the runners, by their literacy and to develop a self-representation that mirrored their social betters. They portrayed their work as an honorable profession and they appealed to Confucian moral discourse and norms to establish standards of behavior—especially when their actions came under scrutiny of the magistrate and they had to appeal to him to prevent dismissal, seek reinstatement, or request promotion. Runners, who had to arrest criminals and manage the prisons, did not need to be literate, just strong and courageous.

In order to control the press of business, informal procedures were worked out by the clerks and runners themselves. The administrative duties of clerks were organized into ten offices: management of personnel, granaries, revenue, rites (including seasonal celebrations and visits by outside officials, schools, temples, orphanages, brokers, pawnshops), salt, the military, punishments, work (many...