Political Crime and Bureaucratic Monarchy: A Chinese Case of 1768

Vol. 8, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1987 POLITICAL CRIME AND BUREAUCRATIC MONARCHY: A CHINESE CASE OF 17681 Philip A. Kuhn "Arbitrary" and "Routine" Power in Chinese Politics Study of the Chinese political system under the late empires has produced two largely distinct literatures: research on the structure, personnel and values of the administrative bureaucracy;2 and on the development of the imperial institution, particularly on imperial communication.3 The past two decades have produced a more sophisticated view of officaldom as a way of life, and a view of the ruler that has moved far beyond simple concepts of "despotism." I wonder, however, whether we have yet reached a point where the machinery of bureaucratic routine can be related effectively to the exercise of arbitrary monarchic power. In describing such an integrated "system," if one existed, we would have to avoid the temptation to reason away the arbitrary component of autocracy by asserting any of the following: (1) that what seems to be "arbitrary" is actually the conventionalized activity of a monarch who is himself a mere instrument of the rules, or of conventional values; (2) that monarchs were largely manipulated by their advisory staff, who presented them with few real options for independent action; or (3) that monarch and bureaucrat were products of a single social system, so that any apparent contradiction between their roles is illusory. We lack an adequate theoretical description of how arbitrary power interacts with bureaucratic routine so that both are accounted for as functioning parts of a single system. What we have instead are descriptions in which the two are inversely related: the more of one, the less of the other; 1A Chinese version of this paper was delivered at the Conference on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the First Historical Archive of China, Beijing, October, 1985. I am grateful to the authorities of that archive for their generous cooperation, and to the National Academy of Sciences' Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China for support during a year in Beijing. I am indebted to Daniel Bell for reading and commenting on the present article. 2For instance, Watt 1972; Metzger 1973; Li 1975; Ocko 1983. 3Among others, Spence 1966; Wu 1970; Zhuang 1979; Bartlett 1979. 80 Political Crime and Bureaucratic Monarchy81 as one grows, the other shrinks. The tendency of social analysis since Max Weber is in fact to show the inevitable decline of arbitrary power (whether of patrimonial or charismatic origin) relative to routinized bureaucratic procedure. Weber, in his celebrated description of the Chinese polity, actually avoids confronting the issue of how arbitrary and routine power interact. Instead, he characterizes the Chinese monarchy as incompletely centralized and its operational norms as uncodified. The limitations of his data shielded him from a view of either arbitrary power or codified routine. The emperor himself is a shadowy figure in Weber's treatment of Chinese bureaucracy. Under the "average ruler," authority was not "centralized."4 Weber presumably believed, however, that the characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy would render it powerless when faced with a «on-average ruler because it lacked specialization (only modern "bureaucratic experts" can compete effectively with the "absolute monarch," whom they can dismiss as a "dilettante").5 Although he uses the term "bureaucracy" in referring to the Chinese system, Weber does not actually include that system under "Bureaucracy," a subject-heading he reserves for the specifically "modern" type. Instead the Chinese case falls under "Patriarchal and Patrimonial Domination."6 Just as shadowy is Weber's notion of the codified routine through which the Chinese bureaucracy was disciplined and controlled . Though the "patriarchal" monarchy was able to achieve an "authoritarian and internalized bondage" of the officials by transferring them frequently and thereby keeping them from forming regional powerbases ,7 the "patriarchal character of the political association . . . was opposed to any development of formal law."8 "Formal law," for Weber, must have included administrative codes by which the bureaucracy itself might be regulated. Although for these reasons Weber could not pose the problem sharply in the context of the Chinese state, his historical logic suggests that he saw arbitrary and routine power as incompatible, and visualized a historical process that tended to...