Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (37 page)

"Event" has a slippery meaning to us, but in Chinese bureaucratic
practice it was a unit of accountability. It had a beginning (when
someone could first be held accountable for it) and an end (when
someone could be rewarded or punished for the way he handled it).
An official's career was formally measured by his performance, and
performance was measured by how well he handled specific tasks.
Were taxes collected in full? Were crimes solved on time? Were
rebellions forestalled or quelled? Were floods prevented or their
victims relieved? A notable success or failure was, in terms of accountability, an "event." It was generally an "event" that gave one official
an occasion to impeach another, or to patronize him by pointing to
his merits. "Events" were opportunities not only to advance one's own
fortunes but also to serve the needs of patrons and clients, and so to
embroider the fabric of personal connections that sustained a man
in public life.

So besides keeping the realm in order, the government had another
role to play: it provided the symbolic resources for the operation of
the bureaucratic monarchy. Just as the bureaucratic monarchy lived
on the economic surplus of China's society, it depended on society
for the "events" that served as raw material for the operation of its
internal relationships. The internal machinery of the bureaucratic
monarchy processed all such "events" and transformed them into
power and status.

Like every other relationship in the bureaucratic monarchy, that
between Throne and bureaucracy, the central axis of the system,
consumed raw material in the form of "events." The monarch needed
concrete occasions to assert his dominance over the bureaucracy, to
punish men in his black book and to reward those in his favor. A
provincial-level official was not merely a functionary in an organiza tion; his every public act was informed by the personal relationship
he bore to his sovereign, a relationship confirmed by an imperial
audience when he was appointed, and by regular audiences thereafter. The quality of this personal relationship and its complex interplay with the formal, "objective" structure of bureaucratic government was largely defined by the "events" in which the official
participated. Only through "events" did the relationship become part
of the documentary record.

Yet the bureaucratic monarchy was not simply a passive receptor
of whatever its social environment might provide in the way of
"events." Instead, men were capable of some selectivity in which
"events" they chose to handle, and indeed in the way they defined
them. An actor in this system could shape "events," redefine them,
or even manufacture them, if that would redound to his advantage
within the system. Similarly, it was possible to screen out "events" that
were likely to harm one's interests. Of course, such selectivity could
only operate within limits; a major popular uprising could be neither
cooked up nor screened out. But both monarch and bureaucrat could
use the documentary system to influence the way an event was
defined or perceived. The soulstealing crisis could certainly be manipulated this way. Popular panic forced it to the surface of public life.
Yet the meaning attached to sorcery by the bureaucratic monarchy
was clearly influenced by the needs of the various actors within it.
All who handled this "event" appear to have done so with an eye to
power and status relations within the official world.

What I am suggesting is that, besides being a genuinely urgent
problem for government, the sorcery crisis of 1768 provided an outlet
for Hungli's deepest misgivings about the state. To say that Hungli
intentionally used the soulstealing crisis to whip his bureaucracy into
line would be to reach beyond the evidence. The evidence does show,
however, that Hungli was used to thinking about bureaucracy in a
language born of his inmost concerns: routinization and assimilation;
and that the power of this language-to define and to motivategrew enormously in an environment of political crime.

The link between sorcery and Hungli's deeper anxieties about the
empire is to be seen in his vermilion rescripts. He wrote them quickly:
no drafts, no drafters. There, in the bare outcroppings of his thought,
are his spontaneous perceptions of the issues before him. The context
of these rescripts was the prosecution of sorcerers, but the content
was the control of bureaucrats. Hungli detested sorcery and feared its effects. But his reaction to it was colored by what he thought were
the persistent ills of his realm: routinization, assimilation, the baleful
effects of Kiangnan culture, all of which mocked royal power. The
language by which he goaded his officials to action against sorcery
shared the tone, and indeed the vocabulary, of his long-term frustration with the bureaucracy. He could vent this frustration only in the
context of concrete events. Now, in the context of this one, a political
crime, the vocabulary was about bureaucratic behavior.

Yet how far could the monarch push such a tainted case without
raising doubts about his own behavior? As the case collapsed, the
Throne had to be shielded from falling debris. Embarrassed and
angry, Hungli ended the soulstealing prosecution with a search for
scapegoats in the bureaucracy. But he wanted it both ways. Governor
Funihan had misled him by suggesting that soulstealers' confessions
had been extracted without the use of torture, and the man had to
be degraded and humiliated. Other bureaucrats, however, had
abused his trust by failing to prosecute the case vigorously enough.
This negligence had allowed sorcery to spread around the empire.
Only by punishing officials who had shown laxity toward sorcery
could he demonstrate, to his descendants no less than to his contemporaries, that he had been right to prosecute the case in the first
place.

As a final flourish, the monarch's fury focused on the newly
appointed governor of Shansi, Surde, fresh from six years of service
as provincial treasurer in Soochow and already under fire for tardy
reportage of sorcery cases. He had memorialized on Shansi soulstealing only after Hungli had raised the matter. Vermilion: "This
shows that you haven't rid yourself of the hateful habits of deceit you
picked up in Kiangnan.""' When the case finally collapsed, Surde was
singled out for special abuse. He "had served in Kiangsu the longest,"
and had been "deep-dyed with the ways of the hateful [Kiangnan]
clique." When the soulstealing affair first emerged, he did not report
it (although he was still serving in Soochow at the time). Later, as
Shansi governor, even numerous cases of sorcery did nothing to
change his ways. He had "impeded the prosecution most profoundly." Hungli demoted him to the rank of provincial judge and
sent him to an unpleasant post in remote Sinkiang."" What better
place to scourge Kiangnan decadence from a bannerman's soul?

Chinese culture was unified but not homogeneous. That, I think, is
why there could occur a society-wide experience such as the soulstealing crisis, even while different social groups represented that
experience in different ways.' We have had occasion to observe the
cultural disparities between silk-gowned inquisitor and ragged prisoner. But social distance did not mean mutual incomprehension.
Sometimes it meant different configurations of commonly available
symbols. Though the "evil arts" were feared and detested by all, the
components of sorcery lore were arranged by each social group to fit
its own view of the world. That is why an "event" like the sorcery
scare could "happen" to both prince and peasant, but to each in his
own terms. The different expressions of this event sprang from
different social roles and life experiences. Seen in this light, the
soulstealing theme was given voice through different stories, each of
which expressed the fears of 'a particular group. The theme they had
in common was danger from persons unknown and forces unseen.

The Throne: Shadow and Substance

Trying to plumb Hungli's state of mind, we begin with the fact that
soulstealing scares occurred at least twice thereafter: in i 8 i o and
again in 1876. On neither occasion did the court seize the issue and
make a national campaign of it. Reigning in i8io was Hungli's son,
Yungyan (the Chia-Ch'ing emperor), who refused to get alarmed by rumors of queue-clipping sorcery. Similar oddities had arisen in
1768, he wrote, and his august father had "ordered restraint in
prosecuting them"(!). Then they gradually ceased of their own
accord. Now Yungyan expressly forbade local officials to "prosecute
through implication" (chu-lien ken-chiu, to generate a chain of accusations by forcing suspects to reveal their associates, as had been done
in 1768, and, later, in the aftermath of the Eight Trigrams revolt of
1813). Instead, they were to make discreet. inquiries and secret
reports, to avoid "yamen underlings' victimizing innocent people"
and stirring up public disorder (as had, in fact, happened at the
outbreak of the great White Lotus uprising of 1796). In the end, the
affair came to nothing.2

The cases of 18 76 occurred during the minority of the Kuang-hsu
emperor. During this period, China was ruled by a regency in which
the dowager empress, Tz'u-hsi, was becoming increasingly powerful.
The Ch'ing regime was struggling with the effects of internal rebellions and foreign aggression. One particularly irksome effect was the
social conflict between Christian converts and other commoners,
which sometimes sparked violent riots. These factors lay in the background of the spring queue-clipping panic ithat broke out in Nanking
and then spread through the Yangtze provinces. Authorities reported
that some of those arrested had confessed to being members of sects
or of secret societies. The "evil arts" in this case involved attaching
human hair to wooden or paper figures, which would then (after
suitable incantations) come alive and serve their masters as armed
retainers. Some people also believed that queues were being clipped
by paper mannikins sent forth by sorcerers. Governor-general Shen
Pao-then believed that these sorcerers came from the White Lotus
tradition. Those whose guilt was "proved" were summarily beheaded
(an aspect of provincial power that had greatly expanded since the
Taiping Rebellion), "in order to settle the minds of the people." The
problem for local officials was, as always, to find a middle ground
between prosecuting those denounced as sorcerers (and thus risking
miscarriages of justice), and letting them go (and thus risking the
anger of the people).

Feelings were inflamed by the missionary presence. Many commoners believed that Catholic missions and their Chinese converts
were busily engaged in sorcery, and the popular antisorcery movement therefore took on an anti missionary animus. The situation was
made worse, according to Shen, when sorcerers or gangsters became Christian converts to escape prosecution. What the court needed
least, at this point, was mob violence against missions, which would
provoke foreign powers to intervene. Commoners were therefore
warned not to "grasp the wind and seize the shadows" (that is, make
up wild unfounded stories). Instructions from Peking forbade official
laxity, but they even more forcefully forbade mob action."

On neither occasion did the 'Throne undertake a campaign
remotely resembling Hungli's of' 1768, in each case for excellent
reasons. But in addition to having reasons not to undertake it, the
rulers of these later eras evidently lacked good reasons to undertake
it. We are now left with the question: what was it about Hungli's
outlook, or the situation he confronted, that led him to respond to
sorcery as he did?

It may be no coincidence that Hungli's two most implacable prosecutions of sedition occurred in the wake of frustrating military
campaigns, in which the monarch was deeply chagrined by the performance of his armies. The crisis of 1751-52, which included the
Bogus Memorial case and the frantic search for Ma Ch'ao-chu, came
shortly after a protracted struggle to subdue the Chin-ch'uan aborigines of western Szechwan. So costly and futile were Ch'ing attacks on
the Chin-ch'uan wilderness strongholds that Hungli executed his two
top generals for allegedly having botched the campaign. The crisis
of 1768 occurred while the campaign against King Aungzeya of
Burma seemed hopelessly mired in the malarial jungles, and after
Hungli had exposed his own field commanders as incompetents and
liars. As the Ch'ing armies floundered, might Hungli's fury and
frustration have spilled over into domestic politics?4

Though such frustration may have added steam to Hungli's antisorcery campaign, the actual content of the campaign had its own
logic. Hungli's fears were part substance, part shadow. The substance
was the difficulty of breaking through the bureaucracy's self-serving
and routine-ridden habits. The interests of the Throne had to be
boosted by repeated injections of autocratic, unpredictable power,
which were best administered in the context of political crime. The
shadow (and who can certify the unreality of shadows?) was the fear
of forces unseen: sorcery, of course, but also the twin menaces of
sedition and assimilation. Even as sinicized a Manchu ruler as Hungli
could not dissociate sedition from the ethnic factor, and a case
involving the symbolism of the queue was a perfect lightning rod for
his suspicions. Lurking beside sedition was assimilation, a threat slower-acting but more insidious. Hungli's response was partly cultural (championing Manchu language and. history, and launching a
literary inquisition to root out supposed anti-Manchu slurs in books
all over the empire); and partly political (stamping out "bad practices"
characteristic of the worst of the Han bureaucracy).

Kiangnan was the link. From the rich and cultured lower Yangtze
provinces, danger was making its way northward through the counties bordering the Grand Canal. In the South, as Hungli saw it, Han
bureaucratic culture was to be found at its worst: decadent, refractory, clique-ridden, timid, and mendacious. Sturdy bannermen could
fall under its spell, and his harshest language was reserved for
Manchu officials who had been bewitched by Kiangnan culture. From
Kiangnan was spreading something evil: signaled in the bureaucracy
by decadent values, and in the world of shadows by sorcery. It may
be objected that Hungli "really believed" in the first danger, but not
the second. Yes, he was officially a scoffer: sorcery was bunk, an
"absurd" superstition. Yet there are personal notes on memorials that
reveal his lively interest in the details of how sorcery was practiced,
and to what end.5 Did he "believe"? Better ask, did the magic of
sorcerers seem to him less plausible than the bewitchments of Han
culture? Did the theft of men's souls by sorcerers seem less plausible
than the theft of Manchu virtue by Han decadence?