Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (31 page)

Of the three original Soochow beggars, only Ch'en Han ju was still
alive (Chang Yu-ch'eng had died in jail; Ch'iu Yung-men was
reported to have died later of illness). Here, too, the original judgment by the county magistrate was upheld. The ten-year-old boy Ku
Chen-nan, whose testimony had implicated the beggars in queueclipping, had been brought to Ch'eng-te along with his father. The
boy now related that "he had been ordered by the constabulary officer
to identify them," but could only say that beggar Ch'en's clothing
"looked like" that of the man who he thought had jerked his queue.
This had not been good enough for the magistrate, nor was it now
for Fuheng. Beggar Ch'en "is definitely not a queue-clipper," and
should promptly be escorted back to Soochow and released. (Vermilion: "Let it be done as recommended.") The Soochow cases were
closed.40

Mason Wu and the Hsiao-shan monks, it will be remembered, had
been rearrested in early September and sent, by imperial order, on
the long journey beyond the Great Wall to the summer capital. The
trip took slightly over a month, and upon their arrival in early
October the emperor immediately appointed an investigative team
of Grand Council staff members, supervised by Duke Fuheng. All
the culprits were questioned anew, including the self-confessed perjurer, constable Ts'ai, who was brought before the panel and tortured. The inquisitors asked, presumably just to make sure: Might
not the Chekiang provincial authorities have concealed a real sorcery
case by making him a scapegoat, "instructing a confession" to make
the inquisitors believe it was all a frame-up? The doomed constable
reasonably objected that he would hardly perjure himself in order to
"obtain future benefits" from provincial superiors, if he would at the
same time be admitting to a capital crime. The panel took his point.
They sentenced him to be strangled, with execution delayed until
after the autumn assizes.

On November 19 the panel confirmed the findings of the Chekiang
court: the monks had been framed by constable Ts'ai, their confessions wrung from them by torture. Hair from the supposedly clipped
"queues" was carefully examined and found to be of identical color
and texture. Duke Fulieng narrowly observed the bearing and
demeanor of Chu-ch'eng and the other monks, and found that "they
exhibited no signs of sorcery or villainy." They were to be escorted
home and released.41

It remained for the inquisitors to grill mason Wu about his role in
the spring soulstealing affair in Te-ch'ing. Just as they began, there
arrived from Chekiang some curious intelligence about those spring
events, which cast a new light on the origins of the sorcery panic.42

The Temple of Mercy in the lush silk country of Te-ch'ing sheltered a small community of very poor monks. The "incense fire was
dim," it was said, meaning that the temple was little frequented by
pilgrims or by devotees wanting masses celebrated for the dead, and
so got few donations.43 Nearer the city, on Chien-yuan Mountain,
was a prosperous temple: a Kuan-yin Hall, much favored by the local
devout. Early in the spring of 1768, jealousy and privation had led
the poor monks at the Temple of Mercy into uncharitable thoughts.
A friend of the monks, an ingenious layman named Hsu, suggested
that current popular fears about soulstealing might be turned to
advantage. All the monks had to do was spread a rumor that masons were practicing sorcery in the vicinity of the prosperous temple,
which would pollute the power of that establishment to bring blessings to worshipers.

The story material was ready to hand. Down at the walled city,
mason Wu and his men were already at work rebuilding the watergate. As it happened, Wu had won the contract over a crew of rival
masons from another county. Might not the disappointed bidders try
(as masons would) to harm their competitors by sorcery? Local folk
believed that death pollution could be inflicted on an enemy by
"burying death-magic" in his path.44 A slain rooster buried under a
footpath would emit quite enough death pollution to do the job. All
the monks had to do, suggested layman Hsu, was to spread the word
that feuding masons had "buried death-magic" under paths leading
to the Kuan-yin Hall. One of the monks who "knew a bit of writing"
drew up the necessary posters: We have heard (he wrote) that last
month a mason "buried death-magic" near Chien-yuan Mountain,
and that persons passing over the spot on the way to the Kuan-yin
Hall might be infected by it. Just now, when many people are going
there to worship, we fear that they may come to harm. The Temple
of Mercy is one of those long known as "pure gates of Buddha." It
can "help one to approach good fortune and avoid calamity." Layman
Hsu spread this intelligence about the county and received 500
copper cash for his trouble.

With this story on their desks, the inquisitors asked mason Wu
about the reported plot by rival masons to injure them by sorcery.
This looked like a plausible origin for the spring panic in the
Hangchow region: another frame-up, another attempt to injure rivals
by an imputation of sorcery. But mason Wu, in his down-to-earth
way, offered no helpful details.

Mason Wu: Last year, masons from Hai-ning named Cheng Yuan-ch'en
and Mao T'ien-ch'eng came to Te-ch'ing to contract for the bridge
job. They couldn't agree on a price, so they left.

Inquisitor: Was there any talk of "burying death-magic"?

Mason Wu: This year we haven't laid eyes on Cheng or Mao and haven't
heard that they bore us any grievance.'''

Did this incident start the panic by fanning public fears of masonsorcerers? The grand councillors could not be sure. Yet the Temple
of Mercy incident confirmed, for the skeptical among them, that
"soulstealing" was a phantom conceived in ignorance and nourished in envy. Here was another case of cynical men manipulating popular
fears for private ends. Mason Wu, at any rate, could not be held
responsible. Along with Chu-ch'eng and the other monks, beggar
Chi, and peasant Shen, he was to be escorted home and released.
Here our original subjects, both victims and tormentors, drop gratefully from the historical record.

We now have read several stories: about sorcery panic spreading among the common people; about a monarch becoming convinced that sorcery is a mask for sedition; about agnostic bureaucrats struggling to cope with demands from both sides but
failing to satisfy either. These stories are layered one upon the
another, several texts written on a single historical page. Beneath
them lies another story, the hardest to read: how local events-including the sorcery scare-served as fuel for running the political
system.'

Sorcery played its part in the political system as the kind of event
I shall call "political crime." Political crime included sedition in all its
various guises, whether religious heterodoxy, literary innuendo, or
outright revolt. Because it threatened the foundations of the system
itself, political crime was considered distinct from the ever-present
corruption, which merely reduced the system's efficiency. But if this
were the case, why were not the bureaucrats as concerned about it
as the monarch? It was, after all, their system too. The answer must
lie at the core of bureaucratic monarchy itself, at least as we see it in
the Chinese case. Documents from the sorcery crisis suggest why
political crime was a monarch's issue and not a bureaucrat's issue.
The heart of the problem was the relationship between routine and
arbitrary power.

Routine and Arbitrary Power in the Bureaucratic Monarchy

Study of the Chinese political system under the late empires has
produced two largely distinct literatures: on the structure, personnel,
and values of the administrative bureaucracy;2 and on the development of the imperial institution, particularly the imperial communication system.' As a result, we now have a more sophisticated view
of officialdom as a way of life; and a view of the ruler that makes
him part of a political system, rather than a remote and all-powerful
despot. I wonder, however, whether we have yet discovered how
arbitrary power interacts with bureaucratic routine over a long period
within a single system.`' We still tend to assume that the two are
inversely related: the more of one, the less of the other; as one grows,
the other shrinks. The tendency of social analysis since Max Weber
is in fact to show that, in the long run, autocrats yield to bureaucrats.
Yet I believe that arbitrary and routine authority may not have been
incompatible in the Chinese system, and may indeed have found
ways to live side by side.

In his celebrated description of the Chinese polity, Max Weber
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. 115 Weber presumably
believed, however, that Chinese bureaucracy would be powerless
when faced with a nonaverage ruler because it lacked specialization
(only modern "bureaucratic experts" can compete effectively with the
"absolute monarch," whom they can dismiss as a "dilettante").6
Although he uses the term "bureaucracy" in referring to the Chinese
system, Weber actually includes that system not under "Bureaucracy,"
a subject heading he reserves for the specifically "modern" type, but
rather under "Patriarchal and Patrimonial Domination."' 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 power-bases,8 the
"patriarchal character of the political association ... was opposed to any development of formal law."" "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. History tends to replace the former with the latter
through routinization and rationalization.10

In his classic treatise on the evolution of the Prussian state, Hans
Rosenberg distinguishes between "dynastic absolutism" and "bureaucratic absolutism." By "absolutism," Rosenberg means power essentially unchecked by constitutional limits or by compromise with influential social strata. By "dynastic," he emphasizes the dominance of
the monarch himself ("a royal bully," as he describes Frederick William I) over society at large, as well as over the corps of "royal
servants" recruited to carry out his orders. This system Rosenberg
also characterizes as an "experiment in royal monocracy." Although
he does not describe in detail the interaction between the "monocrat"
and his bureaucracy, the implication is that the "hideous spirit of
fearful obedience to authority" that infused Prussian society at large
was a projection of the bureaucracy's own state of mind." Nevertheless, Rosenberg asserts that even under the early Hohenzollerns, royal
control relied upon minutely regularized procedures: the "public
law" that governed the bureaucracy as well as the populace.12 We are
left uncertain about how "monocracy" or dynastic absolutism preserved its freedom of action within a system of regulations that were
designed to reduce the operation of government to a finely tuned
routine.

If there was a purely "arbitrary" component to this system, it was
unstable and short-lived. It fell victim to "an unremitting struggle for
replacing arbitrary royal powers ... with general legal rules." Even
under Frederick the Great, monocratic power was frustrated by officials who had "real power to obstruct and divert" by manipulating
information and other acts of bureaucratic "sabotage." Under Frederick's weaker successors, the bureaucracy succeeded in securing itself
against arbitrary sanctions by introducing life tenure and due process
into the bureaucratic personnel system. The result, as Rosenberg
describes post-Napoleonic Prussia, was it state ruled by career bureaucrats ("bureaucratic absolutism"); the monarch was simply the "top
functionary."13 Here arbitrary and routine power were subject to a
historical process that weakened the one to the advantage of the other-a process like Weber's "routinization" and "rationalization."
In Rosenberg's Prussian case, arbitrary and routine power could not
long coexist.

"Bureaucratic monarchy" reads like an oxymoron. To the extent
that it is "bureaucratic," what scope is left for the monarch? To the
extent that it is monarchic, how can one man's autocratic power
coexist with a system of universal rules? Both monarch and bureaucrat were caught in this dilemma; both were ambivalent toward
formal administrative procedures. The monarch had to regulate his
thousands of bureaucratic servants by written codes, to ensure that
everyone stuck to the administrative procedures that underlay his
own wealth and security. At the same time, he was naturally concerned to maintain his own distinctive position, his extra-bureaucratic
power and autonomy. Consequently he had to struggle unceasingly
to avoid becoming bureaucratized himself. Much of the normal business of government involved him in sanctioning decrees drafted for
him by the Grand Secretariat, or in ratifying appointments of candidates presented to him by the Board of Civil Office. Faced by his
document-drafters with a narrow range of choice, the busy monarch
found himself "functioning" as a cog (albeit a bejeweled one) in a
document-processing machine. How was he to break out of this trap
and assert his position as master, not functionaryj14