Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (35 page)

Ritual Behavior

The monarch's control of his "political appointees" rested largely on
his personal relationship with them. This relationship was a two-way
communication, proclaimed by the monarch and acknowledged by
the bureaucrat. The monarch's constant and conventional recourse
to expressions like "arms and legs, heart and backbone" (the upper
echelons) is visible everywhere in the documents .59 The bureaucratic acknowledgment closed the loop of this dialogue of dependency and control. This acknowledgment shows up pointedly in the
ritual that immediately follows an official's audience with the emperor
and his assumption of a bureaucratic post: the submission of a "gratitude (hsieh-en) memorial" by the newly appointed official.

In a modern context, the gratitude memorial might seem the most
abject of documents. It expresses utter personal dependency. Where
is the "status honor" that is supposed to characterize the exalted
scholar-bureaucrat? The "gumption" quotient seems low, if not nonexistent. It is an "oriental-despotic" document, a long verbal kowtow.
Here is an example from 1769, which is worth quoting whole:

Wu Ta-shan, Governor-general of Hukuang, respectfully memorializes,
humbly expressing gratitude for Imperial Benevolence:

Your humble official's nature is undistinguished, stupid, and base. I
have received Your Majesty's munificent benevolence, have been nourished and raised by Your Majesty to the extent of repeatedly being appointed to provincial office. I am ashamed that I have in no way
repaid Your Majesty, but rather my errors have multiplied with time.

Now I have received the extraordinary generosity of Your Majesty's
appointment to fill the post of Hukuang Governor-general. On the
twenty-sixth day of the twelfth month of last year, I journeyed to the
Palace, kowtowed before the Imperial Countenance, and respectfully
received Your Majesty's sacred instructions. My feelings on that occasion
are eternally engraved upon my inmost parts. Your Majesty's having
also conferred on me gifts in rich profusion, Your Majesty's benevolence
has exceeded all bounds, and Your Majesty's favor has reached an
extreme.

Though even dogs and horses know how to repay their masters, yet
I, your humble official, though I have a human heart, have yet dared
fail to recompense you by serving you with utmost sincerity. What can
I do, but with my whole heart and strength reverently obey Your Majesty's instructions to govern my jurisdiction and, without fraud or concealment, to repay, in all matters great and small, Your Majesty's
immense generosity?

This, with your humble official's exceeding gratitude and humble
sincerity, I respectfully memorialize, kowtowing, in gratitude for the
Imperial Benevolence, humbly praying for Your Imperial Majesty's
royal perusal.

(Vermilion: "Noted." )60

That this language was repeated, with minor variations, in every
gratitude memorial does not justify dismissing it as "mere" ritual. It
was the symbolic form of a basic political fact. The fact that it was
repeated makes it, like other rituals, more significant rather than less.
It was a ritual of largesse and gratitude that sustained the relationship
between sovereign and high official.

Even in the ordinary conduct of business, the symbolism of dependency had its place. Operational documents, too, were framed in
ritually significant forms. For example, it was normal for a memorialist to quote, in full, the imperial order to which he was responding.
This was not only good bureaucratic practice, to keep the documentary chain clear for purposes of reference. As a ritual act, the writer
often quoted his master's words at much greater length than his own
humble reply.s' Another common form of verbal prostration
occurred when the memorialist humbly quoted the vermilion interlineal scoldings he had received when his memorials were returned.62

These documentary rituals reinforced the official's personal link
to his sovereign, a relationship first established by the man's appointment. The moving force was reciprocity, as expressed in the gratitude
memorial we have just seen. These ritual humiliations were signs, not of degradation, but of special status: in Confucian terms, these gentlemen were not tools. They could be scolded, ridiculed, or punished
by their imperial master, as an errant son by a stern father. But the
relationship was not abject, because they were presumed to have
"human hearts," and hence the capacity to act like men, not machines
or dumb animals. Unlike mere clerks, they were neither artifacts of
a body of rules nor automatons controlled by routine procedures.

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.