Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China

Challenging conventional wisdom which posits that chronic banditry is most prevalent in peripheral areas, this book shows that in mid-Qing Guangdong it occurred mainly in the densely populated core Canton delta where state power was strongest. In 1780 the Qing government enacted the first of a series of special laws to deal specifically with Guangdong bandits who plundered on land and water. The new law had been prompted by what officials described as a spiraling “bandit miasma” in the province that had been simmering for decades. To understand the need for the special laws, one must take a closer look at the complex relationships and interconnections between bandits, sworn brotherhoods, local communities, and the Qing state in Guangdong from 1760 to 1845. In Unruly People, Antony treats collective crime as a symptom of the dysfunction in local society and breakdown of the imperial legal system. Based on extensive research in the Qing archives, the author analyzes over 2,300 criminal cases found in palace and routine memorials, as well as extant Chinese literary and foreign sources and fieldwork in rural Guangdong, to recreate vivid details of late imperial China’s underworld of crime and violence.