Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (32 page)

The bureaucratic official, for his part, was bedeviled by minute
regulations on the form, timing, and routing of paperwork, fiscal
and judicial deadlines, and the relations of superiors to subordinates.
To break any of these regulations exposed him to impeachment,
fines, transfer, or dismissal. Yet these onerous regulations at least
drew certain boundaries around his responsibilities and offered him
some protection from arbitrary demands by superiors and even by
the monarch himself.''

The Monarch's Control of Bureaucrats

Rules yield predictability and standardization. They also limit the
freedom of the one who applies them. In this sense they are a great
leveler of status: those who apply and monitor the rules may become
as entangled by them as those who are subject to them. The Ch'ing
autocrats accordingly had to pick their way carefully between routine
and arbitrary models of command. When rules were ineffective, the remedies included not only more rules but also procedures that
rested upon arbitrary power. From early in his reign, Hungli was
impatient with rules that did not work. His remedies included both
tightening the screws of the routine bureaucratic machine and
finding ways to inject his own arbitrary power into it. How he did
this can be seen most readily in his efforts to evaluate his officials.

Surveillance of Efficiency and Conduct

At the heart of monarchic control lay the evaluation of officials:
estimating their qualifications for appointment, surveying their conduct in office, and periodically evaluating their fitness for service.
The history of Hungli's reign suggests how hard it is to force a
bureaucracy to discipline itself. His despair at the system he inherited
led him to seek alternative means of control.

The essence of the official control system was the distinction
between crime and administrative failure. Criminal penalties, for
corruption or worse crimes, were handled by the Board of Punishments after the culprit had been impeached and removed from office.
Administrative sanctions (ch'u fen) were handled by the Board of Civil
Office. These penalties, which involved demotion in rank, transfer
to a less desirable post, and monetary fines, covered a broad range
of misdeeds, of which most were failures to meet deadlines or quotas
(for solving criminal cases or collecting taxes), concealment of information, or other breaches of standard operating procedure. No official dossier was without its record of ch'u fen offenses. Here are some
examples of typical offenses and their penalties, drawn from the
1749 edition of the Regulations of the Board of Civil Office, Administrative
Sanctions:

An official who fails to report the fact of a grain-transport boat's sinking:
to he reduced one grade and transferred.

If an official supervising the collection of the land tax falls short [of the
quota] by an amount less than one-tenth, he is to be blocked from
promotion and fined a year's [nominal] salary. If he is short a tenth or
more, he is to be reduced in rank by one grade ... and if he is short
five-tenths or more he is to be dismissed from office.

If 'a local official, fearing to be disciplined for laxity in arresting criminals, under some pretext intimidates a plaintiff and forces him to avoid using the word "robbery" and not report it as such, . . . he is to be
removed from office.'s

Although Chinese government has long included special organs to
investigate and impeach officials for incompetence and wrongdoing,
their history since medieval times has been one of decline. The
branch of government generally called "the Censorate" (under the
Ch'ing, to-ch'a-yuan) historically had duties of both remonstrating
with the emperor about his conduct and keeping an eye on the
bureaucracy. At least as early as the seventh century A.D., "remonstrance" upward was secondary to surveillance downward. But over
time even the independent surveillance function was eroded. The
Manchu conquerors inherited from their Ming predecessors a Censorate that had largely lost its ability to supervise field administration.
"Surveillance offices" (an-ch'a-ssu) in the provinces had, by the late
sixteenth century, already assumed the regular judicial work of provincial government. The Manchus completed their incorporation into
the provincial bureaucracy, and we now refer to these officials as
"provincial judges."17 Although there were censorial offices in the
capital to check on the work of metropolitan officials, they were
largely engaged in combing documents for irregularities. And
although there were "provincial censors" charged with overseeing
provincial administration, these men were actually stationed in
Peking, which meant that the "eyes and ears" of the sovereign were
considerably dimmed outside the capital. Accordingly, the job of
surveillance in both capital and provinces mainly fell to line bureaucrats, each of whom was responsible for watching the conduct of his
subordinates. To symbolize how administration and surveillance were
melded, a provincial governor bore the brevet title of vice-president
of the Censorate, to indicate his special responsibility to scrutinize
the conduct of his subordinates. In effect, the bureaucracy was really
watching itself. 18

This kind of in-house bureaucratic surveillance followed two
modes: ad hoc impeachment (for both incompetence and criminality),
and periodic evaluation leading to triennial fitness reports for all
officials, reports that also served as the basis for impeaching substandard officials. In both these modes, the process relied largely on the
work of line bureaucrats and rather little upon the Censorate. Of
5,151 impeachment cases in the Ch'ien-lung reign, less than 8 percent
were initiated by the Censorate, with the rest by line officials in Peking or the provinces.19 Though Hungli believed that both modes worked
badly, he identified the problem most clearly in the triennial fitness
reports.

The Triennial Evaluations

Periodic evaluation of officials has a history as long as that of Chinese
government.20 The Manchus inherited the system from the Ming and
had installed it even before the conquest.21 By the mid-eighteenth
century the basic elements of the evaluation for civil officials22 were
the Capital Investigation (ching-ch'a) which included all Peking officials except those of the three highest ranks, and the Grand
Accounting (ta-chi), which included provincial officials except for
governors-general, governors, and provincial treasurers and judges.

For both the capital and provincial systems, the cumbersome procedure was that every year an official would be rated (k'ao-ch'eng) by
his superior officer. These ratings served as raw material for the
triennial evaluations. In the capital, the triennial registers would be
aggregated by the heads of the Six Boards, and in the provinces by
the governors. The registers (bound traditionally in imperial yellow)
were then forwarded to a review commission consisting of officials
from the Board of Civil Office and the Censorate, along with one
Han and one Manchu grand secretary. The commission would then
review the "yellow registers" and decide who should be promoted,
demoted, or retained in office. The cases of men due for promotion
or demotion would then be the subjects of separate memorials to the
Throne from the Board of Civil Office. Men whom the Throne
approved for promotion as "outstanding" (cho-i) still had to be recommended in separate memorials by their superiors. Strict accountability applied in these cases of promotion for merit. In the case of
lower-level officials, recommendations had to note whether there
were any outstanding treasury shortages or unresolved court cases
that might block promotion. If any were subsequently found after
promotion, the recommender himself would be punished by demotion and transfer.

The apparent rigor of this system seems less impressive when we
examine the actual documents used in it. To begin with, the format
was extremely stereotyped. The registers, sometimes known as "fourcolumn books" (ssu-chu-ts'e), contained, for each man, a single page
with four headings: "integrity" (ts'ao-shou), "executive performance" (cheng-shih), "native talent" (ts'ai-chii), and "physical fitness" (nien-li),
listed in that order. Under each heading, one of three standard
ideographs would be filled in:

Based on their ratings, officials would be grouped into three ranks.
The criterion for ranking was the number of categories in which an
official received better-than-average ratings. For instance, an official
who received ratings of "incorrupt (ch'ing)," "assiduous (ch'in)," and
"exceptional (yu)" in the first three categories was ranked in group
one. ("Physical fitness" seems not to have played a part in the group
rankings. If age or illness made the official unfit, he was impeached
in a separate procedure.) Those with two above-average ratings were
grouped in group two; and those with one or none comprised group
three.23 All three groups, however, were considered fit for duty.
Those in group one might be recommended for promotion, which
was done in separate memorials attesting to their "outstanding" (cho-i)
qualities. Also in separate memorials, those whose general fitness was
below standard were impeached (chic-ho). The provincial triennial
evaluation (ta-chi) used substantially the same format but added, for
each official, a four- or eight-ideograph evaluation (k'ao-yii) that
offered an overall assessment of performance.

How little latitude these fitness reports permitted the evaluating
officer! The scale of qualities was hardly fine enough to make careful
distinctions among officials. Hardly more revealing were the four- or
eight-ideograph evaluations on each man's file in the "Grand
Accounting." An examination of numerous eighteenth-century
yellow registers suggests that evaluators were choosing their comments from standard phrasebooks. The specificity is still crude, the
result bland. Here are a few examples from a 1751 list of magistrates
from Chihli ranked in the middle grade (erh-teng). One is reminded
of a third-grader's report card, prepared by a teacher who is strug gling for something special to say about each of her charges ("participates actively in class, written work neat").

One would expect that in the subsequent recommendations for promotion there would be more to say. Indeed the ratings are more
complimentary, but the format is just as confining and stilted:

Although one finds minor differences of vocabulary among provinces (suggesting that each provincial yamen had its own handbook
of such stock phrases), the impression left by these registers is of
officials who were struggling to differentiate subordinates whose records seemed generally acceptable but of whom they had little or no
personal knowledge.

Such stilted, conceptually cramped procedures grew naturally from
bureaucratic life and reflected the mentality of the men who applied
them. First, there was the need to avoid risks. Recommendation of a
man who later turned out to be disappointing (or worse) could incur
penalties for the recommender. Perhaps the more closely the criteria
of merit hewed to a narrow, unexpressive format, the more likely
were officials to risk making recommendations, on the principle that
the less said, the better. Furthermore, descriptions of acts rather than
analyses of character were more easily defensible, should anything go
wrong. Second, the evaluations probably were adequate to describe
what bureaucrats themselves considered a "good" official. In a ruleridden environment, the best official was the one who caused the
fewest problems-that is, who exemplified largely negative virtues by
avoiding trouble. In any bureaucratic system, to excel can be risky. Nor are whistle-blowers and boat-rockers appreciated. The overzealous official trips over rules more often than does the cautious
plodder. Hence prudence, circumspection, and diligence were prominent values in the routine evaluations.