Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768

by Philip A. Kuhn

  Learned and Popular Views of Sorcery

  The distinction between popular sorcery beliefs and the Throne's vision of sorcery as sedition recalls the distinction in late medieval and early modern Europe between village sorcery and the "learned" or "diabolic" version propounded by clerical courts. In his study of European witchcraft prosecutions, Richard Kieckhefer writes that most villagers who accused their neighbors of witchcraft did so because they believed these people were harming them by sorcery, but not necessarily through any pact with the Devil.

  The idea of diabolism, developed and elaborated on the Continent, was evidently the product of speculation by theologians and jurists, who could make no sense of sorcery except by postulating a diabolical link between the witch and her victim ... [T]he charge of diabolism was not even grounded in contemporary popular belief ... [It] occurred only with extreme rarity in English trials, and when it arose it was clearly the result of learned influence.6

  Trial judges and other "experts" superimposed the idea of the "demonic pact" upon villagers' simple fears of sorcery. Such men scorned folk beliefs in the "evil eye" and substituted their own finely rationalized vision of life as a struggle between God and the Devil.

  Like Europe's ecclesiastical judges, Hungli was imputing to village sorcery a significance that grew from his own fears. Here is another example of how sorcery overspreads social class in a complex, largescale society. Two or more versions may be current. The Throne's version centered on threats to Manchu hegemony and ultimately to the polity as a whole. The peasant version centered on sudden, random death (by soul-loss) inflicted by strangers. Yet monarch and peasant were not speaking entirely different languages. To Hungli, too, the plotters were outsiders ("treacherous monks" and "disheartened scholars"): outcasts of the Confucian order, of no fixed cultural abode, who were not under the restraints of the Confucian family system (monks who had turned their backs on their parents by refusing to produce heirs) or of the orthodox academic-bureaucratic system (men who had failed the civil-service examinations and turned against the system).

  The political behavior of the monarchy in the soulstealing crisis may help us refine our view of the "autocracy" that has been seen as the hallmark of the late empires. That behavior surely reflected the character of Hungli himself. Upon ascending the throne, he swore to seek a middle way between the rule of his grandfather, which he characterized as having been too lenient, and that of his own father, which he saw as too harsh.? Such a middle ground he did attain, but in an odd way: he vacillated between extremes of leniency and harshness, so that his "middle way" was really not a constant but an average. Does such behavior suggest an effective autocracy? His vermilion jottings drip pique and petulance. His reactions to threats real or imagined seem obsessive and vindictive. These qualities of the fourth and most glorious Manchu monarch may have made "political crime" a particularly needful ingredient of his personal control.

  Yet I cannot help wondering whether China's imperial system itself, by this time, had reached a state in which "political crime" was becoming a necessary part of politics. Steady, methodical, and reliable control of the bureaucracy was by now very difficult for any monarch to sustain. Hungli's father was the last to make a serious attempt at it. Rationalizing the fiscal system, bureaucratizing the control of border areas, firming up the impeachment system, tightening the secrecy of imperial communications: all had been undertaken energetically by Injen, all had stalled or slid backward under Hungli himself. Perhaps it was not simply that he lacked his father's staying power. The bureaucracy was by now so well entrenched, the conquerors so irreversibly sinicized, that routine control was not enough. If this is the case, then political crime may have seemed a fair substitute: mobilizing the bureaucracy around sedition crises like those of 1751 and 1768, intimidating the literati by literary purges like that of the 1770s. Without designing to do so, Hungli may have been led by his vindictive temperament and his taste for political theatrics into relying on such methods to attain what he otherwise could not: monarchic control over a powerful and resourceful elite.

  The Common People: Fantasies of Power

  Though we have examined the sources of popular soulstealing belief, we surely shall never know what "caused" the soulstealing panic of 1768-if that is even a meaningful question. Clues as to why it happened just then, and in just that way, must be sought in the effects of mid-Ch'ing conditions upon the minds of the common people, as I suggested in Chapter 2. Our study of eighteenth-century society will have to take into account a widespread perception of ambient evil, of unseen forces that threatened men's lives. But what I should like to consider here has less to do with the fear of sorcery as such than with the social nastiness it reveals.

  As an overture to China's modern age, the soulstealing panic strikes one particularly sour note to the observer of Chinese society: the widespread release of social hostility in the form of score-settling. This unpleasant quality suffused the case right from the beginning. In Te-ch'ing, the original lair of the soulstealing phantom, the monks at the Temple of Mercy sought to frighten devotees away from their competitors' temple by stirring up fears of sorcery. What is more, they did so by concocting what they knew was a believable story: that one company of masons would attempt to harm their competitors by sorcery. It was a play within a play, both scripts founded on popular fears. To malicious envy, add petty greed: constable Ts'ai's attempt to extort money from the Hsiao-shan monks was built upon his perception of a plausible crime.

  Once the state campaign against sorcery began in earnest, there arose splendid opportunities for ordinary people to settle scores or to enrich themselves. Here was a loaded weapon thrown into the street, one that could as well be used by the weak as by the strong, by the scoundrel as by the honest man. Malicious imputation of "soulstealing" was a sudden accession of power in a society where social power, for ordinary people, was scarce. To anyone oppressed by tyrannical kinsmen or grasping creditors, it offered relief. To anyone who feared prosecution, it offered a shield. To anyone who needed quick cash, it offered rewards. To the envious it offered redress; to the bully, power; and to the sadist, pleasure.

  Are we glimpsing here the moral nemesis of a society that was becoming impacted by overpopulation, by a worsening ratio of resources per capita, and by declining social mobility? In such an "impacted society" men would come to doubt that they could better their circumstances either by work or by study. Such conditions were made less tolerable by a corrupted and unresponsive judicial system, through which no commoner had reason to hope for redress. In such a world, sorcery was both a fantasy of power and a potential addition to every man's power. Even if soulstealing was never really attempted, it was widely believed that anyone with the right "techniques" could conjure power out of the shadow world by stealing another's soulforce. This fantasy was both fearsome and titillating. Its obverse was the real windfall of power that could be acquired by labeling someone a soulstealer, or by threatening to do so. Both sorcery and accusations of sorcery were projections of powerlessness. To the powerless commoner of a certain type, Hungli's campaign catered generously.'

  Labeling someone a soulstealer could be done by anyone, in high station or low. Indeed, the scapegoating of monks and beggars involved a certain collusion between monarch and commoner. Hungli was convinced that the sorcery-sedition plot was the work of "traitorous monks," who hired beggars to do their legwork. Against these socially marginal groups, Hungli swung the lash of state power. In so doing, he was reinforcing well-worn stereotypes about men who had rejected the Confucian order and who were ipso facto politically unreliable. Such men were the perfect foil for his fears of sedition. For their part, the commoners were, on their own account, already labeling monks as soulstealers. They, too, had stereotypes ready to hand: monks were dangerous outsiders, possibly polluted by their ritual services to the dead, and habituated to traffic with the spirit world. Hungli's persecution of these vulnerable strangers cannot have been unwelcome to the villagers
, who could otherwise expect an agnostic bureaucracy to offer them scant protection against the evil arts.9

  The impacted society into which this power was injected resembles in one respect twentieth-century America's "zero-sum" society described by Lester Thurow.10 Both societies find that their major problems can no longer be solved by increased production, but now require "loss allocation." A major difference, however, is that in Thurow's late industrial America, the sense of betrayal is sharpened by the very faith in progress and economic growth that led the West to believe that all difficulties must yield to human effort, with benefit to some and no loss to anyone. In late imperial China, by contrast, nobody had ever imagined that human effort could (or should) yield unlimited progress or growth. But "loss allocation" in a poor agricultural society is a grimmer process than in a rich industrial society, however wide its disparities of income. China entered her modern age crowded, poor, and with little awareness of the real forces that were eroding ordinary people's life chances.

  In these conditions emerged the politics of the impacted society. In late imperial China, most people lacked the access to political power that would have enabled them to compete, one interest against another, for social resources. Merely to form groups to promote particular social interests was, for ordinary subjects, politically dangerous. In time, such power would be sought outside the old imperial system; the results would be rebellion and revolution. Meanwhile, power was available to most people only in fantasy, or in the occasional opportunity to exploit such free-floating social power as a state campaign against deviants. Only extraordinary circumstances could give the powerless a sudden opportunity to better their lives or to strike at their enemies. Because the empowerment of ordinary people remains, even now, an unmet promise, it is not surprising that scoresettling (the impacted society's most pervasive form of social aggression) is still a prominent part of Chinese life.

  The Bureaucracy: Two Cheers

  Of the three versions of the soulstealing story, the least spectacular is that of our antihero, the bureaucracy." if these practical, agnostic men feared unseen forces, they were the volatility of the mob and the unpredictability of the monarch, both of which endangered their comfortable establishment. They tried to defeat the first by intimi dating those who brought sorcery charges, the second by withholding information from the Throne. Neither stratagem worked, and they were forced to press a campaign on the basis of very unpromising material.

  One weapon not in Hungli's armory was the capacity to make common cause with his subjects. Both monarch and villager-each from his separate perspective-feared the soulstealer. Both were quick to hunt for scapegoats among the vulnerable outsiders on the fringes of the Prosperous Age. But to rouse the mob was the last thing in Hungli's mind. It was the panic factor, after all, that constrained him to tread so softly at the outset and to keep his communications in the confidential channel. Basic to the old regime's political outlook was the political passivity of commoners. That explosive combination in which vindictive leader and aroused masses gang up on common enemies (the hallmark of the modern political "campaign") lay far in the future. The eighteenth-century bureaucracy was not exposed to that deadly cross fire. Though they might be picked off one by one by an enraged sovereign, their position as a group was quite secure, and they knew it.

  Hungli was quite sure that his province chiefs were not prosecuting sorcery cases vigorously, though they kept assuring him of the contrary. The real story is suggested by the only complete provincial list of arrests that I have been able to retrieve: Governor Asha's accounting of October 21, just two weeks before the campaign ended. In it he offered a county-by-county description of all soulstealing suspects arrested in Honan over a three-month period. Here, indeed, were the usual suspects: a ragtag assortment of vagabonds, beggars, and roving clergy, the everyday fraternity of the open road in late imperial China.'`'

  Of a total catch of twenty-five people (in addition to poor monk Hai-yin, whose case I recounted earlier, and whom Asha delicately refrained from including in this list), from the beginning of the campaign until just before its end, eight had been released for lack of evidence and seventeen held for further investigation. This was the paltry result of a three-month prosecution in a province with a population in the neighborhood of twenty million. Was Hungli being unreasonable when he scolded his provincial officials for lax performance?"

  If there were bureaucratic roadblocks to Hungli's campaign, surely most were built of those "ingrained practices" the monarch most despised: prudential concealment of information, self-protective dithering, cover-ups to protect personal relationships, and an unshakable preference for routine procedures. Even when he intended no special obstruction, the average Ch'ing bureaucrat-with only his everyday venality and mendacity-was a tough nut for any monarch to crack. Yet we know that the ultimate turnabout resulted, not from such ordinary qualities of average bureaucrats, but from a few highly placed ministers who dared to tell Hungli that it was a bad case, based on bad testimony, and that it promised bad trouble unless stopped.

  I should not like to suggest that herein lay some "constitutional" check upon arbitrary power. In no reliable way could the Ch'ing monarch be held subject to the law, and there was no reliable civil protection for anyone who got in his way. Even a county magistrate could run his courtroom with only modest danger of being brought to book. Yet in certain extraordinary cases, it was evidently still possible for the highest officials to curb such power by invoking a superior code under which all human governments might be judged. To do so required that they regard themselves as something more than servants of a particular regime. Such self-confidence could persist only among men who believed themselves to be certified carriers of a cultural tradition. In late imperial politics, such gumption was scarce enough, even at the highest levels of ministerial power. It became scarcer yet after the empire collapsed, a. century and a half later, along with the social and intellectual systems that nourished that elite self-confidence.

  Nobody mourns the old Chinese bureaucracy. The social harm it did, even by the standards of its day, went well beyond the crushed ankles of helpless vagrants. Yet its nature impeded zealotry of any sort, whether for good or for ill. Without that great sheet-anchor, China yaws wildly in the storm. Without a workable alternative, leaders can manipulate mass fears and turn them with terrible force against the deviants and scapegoats of our own day-anyone vulnerable to labeling, either for his social origins or his exotic beliefs-with none to stand between.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Notes

  1. Tales of the China Clipper

  1. A selection of original documents on this case was published in 193031 by the Palace Museum, Peiping, in Shih-liao hsun-k'an (Taipei: Kuofeng ch'u-pan-she reprint, 1963). For scholarly treatments of these events, consult the works by de Groot (1882-1910), Entenmann (1974), Kuhn (1987), and Tanii (1987 and 1988) in the bibliography.

  2. A Chinese province in Ch'ing times typically contained more people than any single European nation. The twelve provinces affected by the 1768 sorcery scare had a combined population of more than 200 million. Official population figures for 1787 are listed in Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 283. Ho believes the population to have been somewhat underregistered (55), so the 1787 estimates may not seriously overrepresent the population in 1768.

  3. Robert Fortune, A Residence among the Chinese: Inland, on the Coast, and at Sea (London: John Murray, 1857), 359, 363-

  4. Te-ch'ing hsien-chih (1673), 4.3. The eighteenth-century silk industry is explored in E-tu Zen Sun, "Sericulture and Silk Textile Production in Ch'ing China," in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 79-108. See p. 91 on the instability of the silk market and its harmful effects on smal
l producers.

  5. The reign-period (1736-1796) of the fourth monarch of the Ch'ing Dynasty was officially called "Ch'ien-lung," or "Heaven's Munificence." (See Chapter 3 on the meaning of this term.) The emperor himself, whom I have referred to by his personal name, Hungli, is conventionally referred to by historians as "the Ch'ien-lung emperor," or simply as "Ch'ien-lung." To anyone who rightly objects that nobody called him Hungli at the time (his personal name being taboo), I can only say that nobody called him "Ch'ien-lung," either.

  To emphasize their ethnic distinction, I have represented all Manchus (including Hungli) by their Manchu personal names, romanized by the Mollendorff system (except that sinicized Manchu names such as Hung Li, which properly would be separated, are represented here as single words for consistency). The glossary gives Chinese ideographs for all Manchu romanizations.

  6. This account of events in Te-ch'ing, Hangchow, and Hsiao-shan during the months of January-April 1768 is drawn from a batch of confessions relating to the Chekiang sorcery scare in LFTC/FLCT CL 33. Both the drafts and the edited copies are preserved, with only minor differences between them. These confessions were evidently assembled by imperial order in late August 1768. See also CPTC 853.2 and 853.4 (CL 33.7.1 and .17, Yungde) and KCTC CL 33.7.21, all bearing on Yungde's handling of these cases. For the convenience of specialists who may wish to consult them, documents cited in the notes are dated by the Chinese lunar calendar.