Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China (review)

This collection of essays is the result of a research workshop on "Qing Crisis Management and the Bonds of Civil Community, 1600-1914," funded in part by the American Learned Societies.¹ Building on growing body of scholarship that has developed since the 1970s that has led to a deep revision of the old Weberian paradigm, and concentrating primarily on state performance in various areas of practical governance during the Qing, these well-researched essays attempt to further shape our understanding of Qing governing institutions. As phrased by Robert Antony and Jane Leonard in their concise introductory essay, a key question raised by these scholars, which underscores an important polemical focus of the new generation of Qing scholars in the West, is essentially still a revisionist one: "Given the magnitude of economic, demographic, and social changes in the Qing period, how did the spare structure of Qing imperial government cope with daunting problems in its regionally diverse empire to achieve political integration and social-economic stability?" (p. 7). In answering this question, many contributors to this collection have reconfirmed a now well-established view in the field that, while rejecting earlier "negative stereotypes" about the Qing state system, reevaluates it according to "Qing norms and its own governing mandate" as well as "its own unique trajectory of development" (pp. 7-9), and highlights the aspects of the governing system's rationality, administrative innovations and efficiency, organizational capacity, responsiveness to the empire's prosperity, and so forth.

However, these researchers also strongly feel the need to correct what they think is a wrong course taken by recent scholars who have involuntarily repeated some of the mistakes of their predecessors. Antony and Leonard point out that although scholars since the 1970s have "tended to 'disaggregate' China and look at historical problems in discrete spatial and temporal settings, . . . [they] sometimes lose sight of the evolving historical processes in different regional and local settings, and generalize the findings of studies of discrete locales to all of China, thus constructing anew overarching interpretive schemes that highlight similarity and the synchronic whole at the expense of differences and the discrete diachronic aspects of China's multiple regional governing environments" (p. 1 ). The studies presented in this volume thus particularly emphasize the "astonishing variety of regional conditions, the special demands that this variety imposed on Qing governance, and the Qing imperium's extraordinary ability to accommodate regional differences" (p. 2). By reading these essays, students of Qing history will learn how the state, in response to the "great diversity of governing environments in the Qing empire, . . . used a repertoire of accommodative governing strategies . . . to draw bureaucratic, sub-bureaucratic, and extra-bureaucratic elements together into a variety of different working arrangements to adapt to emerging problems with flexibility and economy" (p. 16 ).

For example, as Robert Antony demonstrates in his essay, although both the population and the economy of the empire expanded enormously from 1644 to 1860, the number of county magistrates remained static. An administrative strategy adopted by officials in Guangdong was not to increase the number of posts for magistrates (who earned annual salaries of about 1,500 taels) in county seats, but to add substantially more subcounty personnel (who earned only 90 to 120 taels a year) in major commercial hubs, markets, and villages, where the state was brought closer to the people. Although it is still unclear why it was only in Guangdong that there was an abnormally high number of subcounty officials (Guangdong had 150 deputy magistrates, whereas other provinces each had only thirty to forty) and why the number stopped increasing after the 1760 s, subcounty officials, at least in Guangdong, played an important role in the local administration. Contrary to a general perception that subcounty officials...