Banishment to Xinjiang in Mid-Qing China, 1758-1820

Vol. 10, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1989 BANISHMENT TO XINJIANG IN MID-QING CHINA, 1758-1820 Joanna Waley-Cohen1 Banishment, a time-honored feature of the imperial Chinese legal system , acquired new dimensions during the Qing dynasty. The Manchu incorporation into the empire of extensive territories in Inner Asia, and particularly the conquest of Xinjiang in the mid-eighteenth century, made available a vast new frontier as a destination for exiles. At the same time, the nature of this new frontier, with its diverse minority populations and its strategic vulnerability to Russia and Central Asia, made it essential that penal policy harmonize with other goals. From 1758, immediately following the pacification of northern Xinjiang, the Qing designed a careful system of banishment intended to combine severe punishment with the controlled rehabilitation of offenders and frontier settlement. The policy thus embodied the cherished principle of achieving multiple ends by a single means (yi ju Hang de).2 In addition, in Xinjiang the Qing sought to reconcile the exile system with the sometimes conflicting aims of encouraging Han immigration, ensuring minority cooperation, promoting economic development, and securing border defense. The policy continued in force through 1820, when domestic difficulties within China proper and Western pressure on the southeast coast combined with Muslim insurgency in Xinjiang to shift state priorities elsewhere. 1 This essay includes portions of the material and summarizes some of the conclusions of my forthcoming book: "The Stranger Paths of Banishment: Exile to Xinjiang in Mid-Qing China , 1758-1820." For research funding and institutional support, I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities. I wish to acknowledge the hospitality and assistance of scholars and staff at the First Historical Archives, Beijing, the National Palace Museum, Taibei, and the Fu Sinian Library, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Particular thanks for advice and help over several years are also due to Jonathan Spence, Yu Ying-shih, Beatrice Bartlett, Susan Naquin, Jonathan Ocko, Monica Yu, Parker Huang, the anonymous reader of an earlier version of this article, and the editors of Late Imperial China. 2 See, e.g., Qingshi Iu Qianlong ("QSL QL") 599, 17b-18a, 24/10/21; 716, 16a, 29/8/2; Daqing huidian shili 1898 ("HDSL") 721, 16a-b (QL 26). For the purposes of this article, "China proper" denotes the eighteen provinces where settled agriculture was the norm. For a discussion of this term's meaning in the Qing, see Waley-Cohen, forthcoming, Chapter 2. Late Imperial China 10, No. 2 (December 1989):44-71 e by the Society for Qing Studies 44 Banishment to Xinjiang in Mid-Qing China, 1758-1820 45 Xinjiang in the 1770s ?f* Balkhash -. MONGOLIA KOKAND Altai Mountains Hu?yuan • Huimng Urumqi Tianshan Mountains/\V\/^^ -* ^^ Turfan· Hami • Kucha Ush Kashgar • Aksu Pamir Mountains Tarun Basin Yarkand Khotan Kunlun Mountains TIBET AFGHANISTAN .%#»?? GANSU QINGHAI¦¦¦¦¦ Extent of Qing Power ^¿V*i\ Mountains .v/////;-l·'. Desert 46Joanna Waley-Cohen A brief survey of Qing colonization policy in Xinjiang and the evolution of the law of banishment itself is prerequisite to any examination of the simultaneous role of exile as an instrument of social control and as an integral part of the settlement process. That policy was shaped by several unique features of the Qing legal system: the principle of collective responsibility, which often led to the exile of the relatives of major criminals ; the policy of commuting the death penalty to banishment in certain circumstances; the use of exile to punish crime among scholar-officials, which brought to Xinjiang a small but significant group of intellectuals and administrative experts; and the Confucian moral norm of "selfrenewal " (zixin), which the Qing used to rationalize rehabilitation under the shadow of coercion. These features of criminal punishment, as well as the important role of exiles in the development of border areas, continue to be relevant in China today. The Colonization ofXinjiang The extraordinary demographic growth of eighteenth-century China, and the consequent population spread into such peripheral areas as Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, Taiwan, and Manchuria, are wellknown .3 On the...