The imperial effort to achieve closer control over bureaucrats had to reach resolutely beyond routine procedures. The audience system, the gathering of confidential evaluations, and the partial separation of top officials from the routine system all played parts in this effort. In Hungli's bureaucracy, the routine components grew weaker as the ranks of the men he was dealing with grew higher. At the very top of the system (the province chiefs and the heads of the administrative hoards-the "club,") the grammar of communication was highly personal. The personal relationship was stated and restated, both in operational documents and in ritual instruments such as the gratitude memorials. Dereliction of duty was treated as a personal affront to the monarch, a breach of trust that could only stem from ingratitude. Higher officials in both provinces and capital were, as a result, operating in two anodes: they were formally still subject to the standard administrative discipline system (ch'u fen), by which the monarch could turn them over to the Board of Civil Office for administrative punishment (i-ch'u). In addition, however, they were directly exposed to the attention of the emperor, who used the personal relationshipamply robed in ritual-to goad, to blame, and to frighten.
The personal relationship was played out both in the domain of ritual and in the domain of events. Certain classes of events-preeminently "political crime," as I have defined it-provided the best medium for nourishing the personalistic discipline that bound the upper layers of China's bureaucratic monarchy. It was the sort of occasion Hungli could use to keep his top officials from slipping away from his personal control and into the rhythms of routine and cronyism.
The Operation of Imperial Control in the Soulstealing Crisis
The soulstealing crisis was a particularly suitable context for personalistic discipline because it was so ill founded a case. The imperial spleen could be vented upon provincial officials for failing to turn up master-sorcerers-a failure that was inevitable because no mastersorcerers existed. That the case was so ill founded, Hungli certainly did not know at the time. It would be no more true to say that he "used" political crime than to say that political crime "used" him. Political crime was a context that called forth monarchic behavior of a certain type. That behavior was shaped by long-term structural features of the bureaucratic monarchy. Officials' failure to unearth master-sorcerers was variously attributed to sloth, dithering, coddling incompetent subordinates, Kiangnan decadence, and personal ingratitude. These shortcomings were perennial foci of imperial concern. We have seen how difficult it was for Hungli to cope with them in routine circumstances. The overall impetus of a political crime like soulstealing was to shake bureaucrats out of patterns of routine behavior that they used, so effectively, for their own protection; and to give Hungli a context in which to confront his problems with the bureaucracy head-on.
Cracking Down on Subordinates
We have seen how frustrated Hungli was with governors' failure to use administrative discipline on their subordinates. The image of crafty local officials withholding information from indulgent and credulous province chiefs was an imperial stereotype of bureaucratic behavior. His governors, believed Hungli, compounded laxity by gullibility. Governor Asha, in Honan, who had assured his master that the sorcerers must possess secret techniques to render themselves invisible and escape detection, got back vermilion ridicule: "If you think this way, it is no wonder your subordinates do not prosecute the case conscientiously and are deceiving you!"63 Hungli assumed that withholding information from superiors was standard practice for county officials who sought to avoid trouble, and the belated revelations of the spring queue-clipping scare proved the point. Having embarrassed G'aojin and Jangboo over their failure to report the spring queue-clipping incidents, Hungli berated them for their lax control of local officials. The magistrates of Ch'ang-chou, Yuanho, and Wu-hsien who had reported "that there had been no queueclipping incidents in their jurisdictions" were really "the ultimate in perversity and deceitfulness." G'aojin was ordered to verify the actual number of clipping victims in each county, then impeach the magis trates.' 4 The monarch soon had to back off from this stance, however. The chastened Jangboo was planning to impeach the magistrates but leave them on the job to prosecute the case. Hungli now worried that they might then be too intimidated to report anything at all. Although there definitely had been cover-ups by local officials, and cover-ups for local officials by province chiefs, wrote Hungli, Jangboo had better hold off on impeachments for the moment. Vermilion: "If you do [impeach them], will they be willing to malke any reports? Better just supervise them in prosecuting the case, then impeach them after the criminals are caught. Handling it your way will not solve the problem, and you probably won't catch the chief culprit. 1165 The point, however, had been made: provincial supervision of local bureaucrats had to be tightened.
Restating Norms of Official Behavior
Nothing offered surer protection to the local bureaucrat than the boundary around his jurisdiction. He was responsible for everything that went on within it, but it followed that everything outside it was someone else's problem. Yet this routine norm conflicted with the nonroutine side of the provincial official's identity: his master's business was boundless, and as his master's personal servant he was not protected by boundaries in cases affecting dynastic security. Hungli wasted no opportunity to hammer home the point. The mastersorcerer Yu-shih was said to be hiding in Su-chou, Anhwei. Governor Jangboo wrote apologetically that Su-chou, since it was not in Kiangsu, was outside his jurisdiction, and that he was loath to cross the provincial boundary in pursuit. Hungli objected that even in ordinary criminal prosecutions officials cooperated to make arrests across boundaries. In this extraordinary case, how could they use boundaries as an excuse? Provincial officials ought to take "the Dynasty's public business" (kuo-chia kung-shih) as their main task. Tender concern for "amity among fellow officials" was not "the Way of publicminded and loyal official service." If all officials were "stymied by bureaucratic obstacles," unable to proceed with urgent business, "what kind of governmental system is that?"ss
In cases of political crime, bureaucrats found functional boundaries to be no better protection than territorial ones. When Governor Feng Ch'ien wrote that he had entrusted the interrogation of sorcery suspects to his provincial judge, a perfectly reasonable step in normal times, the monarch dressed him down for buck-passing: "What sort of case is this, that you have to follow precedent by turning it over to the provincial judge? Ought you not personally to conduct judicial investigations every day? The habitual work-style of the provinces is truly hateful!"67
Reinforcing the Personal Relationship
Besides the whip of criminal sanctions for outright corruption, the monarch grasped two reins to control his provincial bureaucrats. One was the routine system of administrative discipline, by which he could refer an official's case to the Board of Civil Office for reward or punishment (the ch'u fen system). The other was the nonroutine application of autocratic power, behind which loomed unspecified sanctions ranging from loss of favor to loss of property, freedom, or life. We can assume that the latter was no idle speculation in the official mind: Hungli was known to have repaid serious dereliction of duty, either in waging war or crushing sedition, with brutal severity.68 In Hungli's rhetoric of personal control, duty neglected was trust betrayed. When the provincial judge of Kiangsu, Wu T'an, admitted that he had failed to inform the Throne about the spring soulstealing cases, the monarch cracked the vermilion whip: "When you were serving in the Board [of Punishments] you were an outstanding official. As soon as you are posted to the provinces, however, you take on disgusting habits of indecisiveness and decadence. It is really detestable . . . you take your sweet time about sending in memorials, and there isn't a word of truth in them! You have really disappointed my trust in you, you ingrate of a thing (pu-chih-en chih Wu)!-(is
A natural complement to the gratitude memorial, such rhetoric was, in its milder forms, part of a ritual exchange. A standard response from the culprit would
be a conventional expression of fear and humility, such as "I am so fearful that I cannot find peace of mind (sung-ch'u nan-an)" or "I blush with shame and have no place to hide (k'uei-nan wu-ti)," conventional expressions that graced hundreds of provincial memorials.70 Yet royal trust traduced might lead to real terror. Governor Funihan was surely aware of what had happened to his predecessor in Shantung, Juntai, who, sixteen years earlier, had been caught covering up evidence in the Bogus Memorial case of 1751-52- Juntai had failed to pass on information that a copy of the Bogus Memorial had turned up in his province. Because the "memorial" impugned the monarch's personal behavior (and possibly the dynasty's legitimacy), it is not surprising that Hungli vented his fury on this luckless bannerman. The governor had "disgraced his post and shown ingratitude for Our benevolence," and was "wholly ignorant of the sovereign-minister relationship."" Hungli jailed the ingrate and confiscated all his property. Political crime subjected the tidy formal garden of bureaucratic life to the harsh gale of autocratic power. That is why the soulstealing case was an imperial issue and not a bureaucratic one.
Bureaucratic Resistance
How the bureaucracy responded to such royal bullying must be teased out of the documents with some care. There seem to have been several varieties of resistance. Some was, no doubt, calculated; some may have been simply the viscosity of bureaucratic procedure that stalled prompt response to urgent demands. Some may have been the disdain of agnostic officials who could not bring themselves to take soulstealing seriously. Some may have reflected fear of how the prosecution might affect bureaucratic careers. And finally, some may have been principled refusal to prosecute innocent commoners on trumped-up charges.
That there was resistance is beyond doubt. It started before Peking got wind of the spring incidents in Kiangnan: these curious affairs were simply not reported to the Throne. Because preemptive control of information did not succeed in keeping the matter quiet, various kinds of damage control followed. Every one of the measures I am about to describe can be explained on other grounds. Taken together, I am persuaded, they indicate a cautious, pervasive resistance to autocratic pressure. That they were concerted is unlikely, that they were deliberate cannot be proved. But neither connivance nor deliberation is needed to make the case. The bureaucratic work-style, which followed well-worn mental tracks, was quite enough to do the trick.
Busy Inaction: Wu Shao-shih in Kiangsi
When someone told Hungli, a year before the soulstealing crisis, that people were referring to his Kiangsi governor, Wu Shao-shih, as "old Buddha" (a compliment), he was concerned lest the old man had become so passive and indulgent that he could not attend to busi- ness.72 Wu was in fact seventy, the patriarch of a family of noted jurists.'-3 So highly did Hungli esteem the family that Wu and his sons, Huan and 'Fan, had been allowed on two occasions to serve in the Board of Punishments together, postings that would normally have been precluded by the "rule of avoidance" that kept families prudently separated in bureaucratic assignments.
Fast of Kiangsi's core area, the valley of the Hsin River offered convenient access from neighboring Chekiang, whence rumors of soulstealing seeped into the province as early as mid-June. Governor Wu did not report them. Instead, he told Hungli later, he had "verbally ordered" his subordinates to be watchful for "suspicious persons" traveling about. No arrests were made, and nobody reported any queue-clipping in Kiangsi. Hungli, unwontedly restrained toward this elderly and respected figure, contented himself with a mild rebuke: not reporting the rumors had been "an error on your part." In early October, however, Wu proposed a dragnet more finely meshed than that of any other province: a corps of spies "who would change both their clothing and their surnames" to cover every county and report suspects to officialdom every ten days. Also, every prefecture would appoint special agents to inspect "Taoist and Buddhist temples, as well as shrines and academies, whether busy or secluded." Wu soberly warned his master about practitioners of "deviant ways and black arts": They "establish an organization that purports to burn incense and do good deeds," which "overtly gathers men and women from among the ignorant rustics, but covertly hooks up with desperate scoundrels." Under pretext of avoiding calamities and defending against bandits, they "concoct magic sayings, prepare weapons, and lure followers." All suspicious persons, whether Buddhist monks, Taoist priests, or persons of furtive demeanor or uncertain abode, were to he reported promptly to local officials. (Vermilion: "Probably empty talk. Very hard to believe." )"
Indeed, absolutely nothing came of it. With profuse and abject apologies, Wu reported six weeks later (after Hungli had called off the prosecution) that not a single queue-clipper had been found.75 No documents survive to suggest even a roundup of "usual suspects," like those faithfully reported by governors of neighboring provinces. What can we make of it? Either Wu's dragnet was never deployed, or else it failed to catch plausible suspects. Conspicuously lacking are the torture and perjury we have seen in other provinces. We have to conclude, I think, that Governor Wu was simply not prepared to pursue what he considered a bad case, and that the somber warnings and elaborate preparations he conveyed to the Throne were so much window dressing. Governor Wu got away with it: not only did the sovereign not rebuke him, but the following year he named him president of the Board of Punishments. Shielded by his juristic reputation, and also perhaps by his immediate superior, imperial in-law G'aojin, Wu was not so easily to be disciplined for his unwillingness to play with the team.
Diversion: The Prosecution of the Soochow Sectarians
Wu's Shao-shih's younger son, Wu T'an, was provincial judge of neighboring Kiangsu and, like his father, was a respected legal scholar. He had decided, like his superiors, not to report the spring soulstealing cases to the Throne. He, too, had later been embarrassed by Textile Commissioner Sacai's exposure of the cases and had faced the withering imperial attack that I related earlier. But soon this "ingrate of a thing" was able to send his master more creditable news. Around September 28, three weeks after receiving his vermilion scolding, he reported that, although he had caught no soulstealers, he had discovered, through his own investigations, eleven "sutra halls" established by lay Buddhist congregations just outside the Soochow city walls.76 Two related groups were involved: the Greater Vehicle sect (Ta-sheng chiao) and the Effortless Action sect (Wu-wei chiao), the latter of which, it will be recalled from Chapter 6, had been persecuted in Pao-an just a few weeks before. The Wu-wei sect, and possibly the Ta-sheng sect as well, revered the patriarch Lo Ch'ing and had been banned by imperial order since 1727. Now some seventy people were arrested by Wu T'an. Their depositions revealed the astonishing fact that these groups had been in existence, in their present locations, since the year 1.677, when the first of their sutra halls had been erected.77
We must shift to conjecture here. I infer (though I cannot prove) that proscribed sects of this size could not long have remained unknown to some level of local government in a busy city like Soochow. County functionaries probably had been extorting protection money from them for years. Not by nature secret groups, the sects afforded solace and shelter to Grand Canal boatmen from the grain tribute fleet, and some of those living in the halls were evidently retired boatmen. The provincial judge, pressured to produce soulstealers, must in turn have pressed his subordinates for results. Someone down the line must have decided that the secretarians would make a fair substitute. Turning in these inoffensive but vulnerable groups would, for the moment, appease the imperial appetite for prosecutions and would allow the shamefaced Wu T'an to display his attention to duty. Hungli, predictably, responded harshly-toward the sectarians. He ordered that they be treated severely in order to discourage others from joining such sects, and that they be questioned narrowly on possible connections to soulstealing. Wu T'an was to be especially vigilant for "seditious writings" like those unearthed in Pao-an.78
Criminal prosecution of the sect also triggered the bureaucratic impeachment of officials who had "failed to investigate" it.79 Because
the sects were deemed to have been active in and around Soochow since 1677, when the first sutra hall was built, a host of former officials of several counties, along with their superiors, were technically accountable for having failed to prosecute it.80 The cumulative result was laughable. The list of former incumbents to be disciplined retroactively included sixty-eight county magistrates, twenty-two prefects, fourteen circuit-intendants, thirty-two provincial judges, twenty-nine provincial treasurers, twenty-six governors, and fourteen governors-general. Many of' course were already dead, and some were excused because they had served in the jurisdiction less than six months. Others were let off because they had taken part in breaking the case. Some had since risen to high position: Yenjisan, former Kiangsu governor, now a grand secretary and grand councillor, was slapped with a fine of nine months' nominal salary, which for a man in his position had about the force of a parking ticket. Though a few lower ranks suffered demotion and transfer, most got off with token penalties. This elaborate impeachment proceeding was an embarrassing farce, yet Wu T'an and other Kiangsu leaders may have accounted it a modest price to pay for relief from Hungli's relentless pressure.
Unanimity: The Chueh-hsing Case
In the matter of the amorous monk of Hunan, whose story I related in Chapter 7, Governor-general Dingcang afforded his sovereign scant satisfaction. After Chueh-hsing had recanted and told the full story of his dalliance with the young wife of innkeeper Liu, he had been absolved of soulstealing charges and had merely been beaten and exiled for adultery. Dingcang returned to his yamen in Wuchang and wrote Hungli on October 31 that no progress had been made in the sorcery prosecution. The monarch was furious. He now understood the reason for Dingcang's conscientious desire to travel more than two hundred miles to be present at the investigation. Vermilion: "You use your tricks and hateful techniques once again to present unanimity in order to close a case (shen-ch'u wan-shih). How can you be said to earn your governor-general's salary? What can be done about a shameless, useless thing like you?"81 Nothing in the rules required the presence of the governor-general at a provincial trial. We can safely assume, along with Hungli, that provincial officials had presented a united front so that he would have had to discipline the lot of them if the outcome were not to his liking. The record is full of cases in which interrogations were attended by a number of officials on the scene, presumably for safety in numbers. A seamless joint report by high provincial officials would more likely turn aside imperial wrath than a report from an isolated bureaucrat, and would minimize the danger of a discrepant opinion from someone else.82
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