Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (38 page)

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.