Ch'ing Emperors and District Magistrates

16 CH'ING EMPERORS AND DISTRICT MAGISTRATES By John Watt When confronted with a civilization as rich and as humanistic as the Chinese, one obvious question to examine is how it governed its affairs. How did the government protect that civilization and enable its unique combination of ethics and artistry to unfold and illuminate the human condition ? One may also examine the government as a specific expression of that civilization, and governmental conduct as a test of its value. How then did the government operate? How effectively did it express the prevalent values? How well did it administer its people? How did it respond to challenge ? The relationship between Ch'ing Emperors and district magistrates provides a useful framework within which to review these questions. The relationship was primarily functional. It was guided by systematic regulations , but within which human relations could exert some influence. It touches at two basic levels of administration, in which the expression of political values was a dominant consideration. It bears directly on the government's relations with the people. Finally, it was set in a period of substantial change in the political and social life of the country, to which the government had to respond or risk the loss of its authority. Let us examine each of these aspects in turn. First of all, then, the relationship itself. This is a good example of the Chinese effort to bring human relations to bear on political conduct. Despite the vastness of the Empire the emperor personally reviewed district officials, at the time of their appointment, as a reward for special services, or as an inducement in response to administrative neglect. He would also have already reviewed those who held metropolitan degrees. At the same time the relationship was impersonal in that neither had any personal knowledge of the other. It was highly unequal: the august sovereign on the one hand, the lowly seventh grade official on the other. Normally it functioned indirectly through hierarchies of intermediaries. It was also one on which the magistrate could exert little leverage. The emperor's influence, by contrast, was pervasive, thanks to the administrative regulations and the systems for their enforcement. These regulations and systems were deliberately designed to impose the will of the public authority on local administration. Many of their features had been inherited from previous dynasties; but it was the Ch'ing emperors who so minutely defined the responsibilities of local administrators 17 and who welded the regulations with existing investigation systems into an instrument capable of controlling local initiative. The central feature of this control system was the so-called Disciplinary Regulations or ch'u-fen tse-li. These constitute a veritable encyclopedia of administrative duties and offences, together with the precise penalty for each kind of offense and level of culpability. They dealt with collection of taxes, arrest of criminals and maintenance of public security, conduct of lawsuits, execution of sentences, supervision of subordinates, relations with other officials and gentry, in short, every conceivable aspect of local administrative conduct. Penalties ranged from one month's loss of salary to permanent exclusion from office. Among many unique features of these regulations one might mention here their particular concern with the duties of the district magistrate and their propensity to impute to his actions, and even more to his oversights, the stigma of a crime or tsui. Because this was a serious implication some administrative handbooks, while denouncing 'private' offences, stressed that officials could not afford to worry about contravening 'public' ones. To back up these regulations the Ch'ing emperors brought together a complex review and impeachment system. In the first place they had regulations requiring district officials to send up regular reports and senior officials to check that they were sent up. They also enforced a series of annual and triennial examinations of conduct and capability. The triennial examinations, of which there are two, are a fairly well established feature of Imperial surveillance, so I shall concentrate here on the annual k'ao-ch'eng review. This review was inherited from the Sung dynasty , at which time it served as a general guide to promotion or demotion . Under the Ch'ing it was used...