Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (9 page)

Sorcery, Hostility, and Anxiety

Though such information is suggestive, it does not establish that
China's economy by the 176os was already squeezing large numbers
of people into a growing underclass. Yet here is more evidence that
perceptions matter: around the time of the sorcery scare, judicial
records contain some suggestive cases of hostility toward beggars. In
one case, a beggar named Huang comes to the door of householder
Huang (possibly a kinsman, but not within the "five mourning
grades") and demands alms. Householder Huang tells him to come
back later. The hungry beggar tries to push his way in, shouting angrily. Householder Huang beats him with a wooden cudgel,
causing his death. In another case, three beggars accost a group of
neighbors who are sitting around eating and drinking. When given
a handout, they complain loudly that it is too little and begin to smash
the crockery. The neighbors attack and beat them. Two beggars flee,
one is killed. The sentences for the killers in both cases were strangulation, commuted to prison (a common sentence for man-
slaughter).53 If such homicidal hostility could be shown to have grown
over time, it might mean either that the underclass was becoming
more intrusive in community life, or that feelings of obligation toward
the destitute were becoming weaker and more ambivalent.54

Can we explain fears of sorcery by pointing to social or economic
anxieties? Such explanations have been attempted, but I am not
entirely comfortable with them.55 However clear the facts (sorcery
fear, social tension), the connection between them is generally neither
provable nor disprovable. I would love to be able to say that Chinese
of the eighteenth century feared soul-loss because they felt their lives
threatened by unseen ambient forces (overpopulation, perhaps, or
the power of fluctuating market forces to "steal" their livelihoods).
Such an assertion, however bewitching, can certainly never be proved.
Yet the Prosperous Age was clearly capable of arousing some somber
perceptions: if not of invisible economic threats to survival, then
certainly of dangerous strangers on the move. And as the soulstealing
story unfolds, we shall run into some social experiences more palpably linked to sorcery fear. Meanwhile, we must pursue somber perceptions of eighteenth-century life in the sphere of national politics.

The smile that the middle-aged Hungli offered his portraitist is not
a warm one, nor (I think) one of satisfaction. Perhaps it is the bleak
smile of recognition: that great enterprises are laid low by the pettiness of the men who serve them, that the pettiness of many will
always overbalance the greatness of one, that to sow in joy is to reap
in tears.

If any monarch was carefully groomed for rule, it was Hungli. As
a boy, his imperial grandfather adored him, as much for his coolness
and pluck as for his evident intelligence. His father, Injen (the Yungcheng emperor), secretly named him heir-apparent as soon as he
himself acceded to the throne in 1723, in order to spare the regime
a vicious succession struggle like the one he had recently fought and
won. Injen had confronted a grim scene when he took power: a
polity demoralized by factional fighting among the entourages of
rival imperial princes. His response had been to secure his personal
position by stripping the Manchu aristocracy of its military powers,
and to bring the fractious bureaucracy to heel through rigorous
discipline. To tighten security and centralize imperial control, he
introduced a confidential communication system that was managed
by a new high-level advisory committee, the Grand Council. To
rationalize the finance of local government. and thereby reduce corruption, he replaced informal tax-surcharges with a new system of
public levies. These accomplishments of Injen, stern rationalizer and
masterful institution-builder, were presented to the twenty-five-year old Hungli on his succession to the throne in October 1735. Compared with how his father had got it, Hungli was handed the empire
on a platter.'

Hungli (1711-1799) in middle age.

Upon his succession, Hungli named his reign-period "Ch'ien-lung."
Although this is not susceptible of literal translation, an imperial edict
explained that the new sovereign had received the "munificent (lung)
aid of Heaven (ch'ien)" and that he would labor with "solemn dedication (ch'ien-t'i)" to further the purposes of his imperial father's
"splendid legacy."`' In fact, Hungli's reign saw the gradual dissipation
of that legacy. This cannot fairly be laid to lack of solemn dedication,
but to problems peculiar to the age.3 Injen had faced direct challenges
to his personal security, but Hungli faced subtler ones. Although he
did not have to confront a contentious aristocracy, he had to wrestle
daily with an official establishment that had become expert in finding
quiet ways to protect and enrich itself. The age was one of surface
amity between conquerors and conquered, signified by the monarch's
own ostentatious sheen of Chinese culture and his patronage of arts
and letters. The Manchu elite had learned to cope with Chinese elite
culture, even as the Han elite had come to acquiesce in Manchu
overlordship. Yet this dulling of cultural distinctions had its price,
and Hungli suspected that his Manchu compatriots were now but
feeble support for his imperial supremacy. This slow, quiet dissipation
of Manchu hegemony was a threat impossible to ignore but hard to
grasp effectively. And beneath the surface of politics sounded those
great engines of historic change, commercial vitality and human
fertility.

Material for Hungli's biography is so overwhelming that the job
may never be done." To penetrate his ghostwriters and reach the
man himself, there is no escape from reading the monarch's own
comments, instructions, and obiter dicta, jotted in vermilion ink upon
reports as he read them and now preserved in the imperial archives.5
This can of course be done only in the context of events. If the events
of the soulstealing crisis contribute to such a biography, it will be by
showing (wherever possible through documentation in his own hand)
how Hungli reacted to certain problems that he perceived to be particularly troublesome: chief among them, sedition and assimilation.

Perceptions of Treason

After the thirteenth century, all China's ruling dynasties originated
in conquest: no palace coups, no praetorian juntas, but instead large scale military campaigning. All conquest regimes were, by their
nature, military impositions upon the nation. For the Ch'ing, as for
their Mongol forerunners of the thirteenth century, this imposition
was complicated by the conquerors' alien culture. However cunningly
the conquerors might frame the rhetoric of succession (a virtuous
regime replacing a corrupt one was the conventional rhetoric of the
Mandate of Heaven), there was always the danger that the symbolism
of legitimate rule might be challenged by ugly ethnic feelings: the
claim that these rulers were usurpers precisely because they were
outsiders. It was such a possibility that kept Ch'ing rulers alert against
sedition. But the terms in which the Throne confronted sedition
evolved with the times.

By Hungli's time the full ornamentation of the universal empire
seemed firmly in place. Here was no raw victor-vanquished relationship, but one in which sedition could plausibly be confronted in
conventional terms: a legitimate and virtuous Confucian monarchy,
worthily graced by Heaven's Mandate, confronting perverse and
degenerate plotters. How far beneath the surface lay the old ethnic
hostility, we can never determine. Yet to understand the events of
1768, when the crudely ethnic issue of headdress came back into
prominence, we shall have to sample the atmosphere of the early
conquest years, when the issue was very much alive. The macabre
tonsure cases of the early Ch'ing suggest what dark surmises may
have hidden behind the imperial smile.

Retrospective: The Conquest Years

While combat still echoed through the Yangtze Valley, the newly
installed Manchu court was already preparing, in 1645, to forge
chains between victors and vanquished. The young emperor, Fulin,
was but nine years old and wholly dominated by his uncle, the regent
Dorgon. Although Dorgon was a skillful cultivator of Han support,
in this matter he was implacable: the sign of unconditional submission
would be a simple, visible hallmark of Manchu culture, the shaved
forehead in front and braided queue in back.,

The tonsure decree. Even before the Manchu armies had entered the
Great Wall, Chinese who surrendered to them had to signify submission by adopting the Manchu headdress. Accounts of the conquest
generally emphasize the shaved forehead as the indispensable sign
of surrender. Dorgon's determination to enforce the Manchu tonsure on everyone was evident from the day he entered Peking (June 5,
1644). During the conquest of the South, headdress became the
rallying point of a desperate Chinese resistance and certainly made
the Manchu takeover many times bloodier than it would otherwise
have been. Nevertheless, for the first year after the conquest of
Peking, Dorgon wavered about enforcing the headdress even at
court. At last, however, he issued the requirement as a formal statement through the agencies of civil government.'

The origin of the tonsure decree was Dorgen's exasperation at
court officials' simpering objections to the Manchu headdress by
appealing to the "System of Rites and Music" (the mandated ceremonials) of the defeated Ming Dynasty. Notwithstanding that Ming
institutions would undergird the reconstituted imperial government
after the conquest, Dorgon would brook no sneers at Manchu customs. Such talk was "highly improper ... does our Dynasty not have
a System of Rites and Music? If officials say that people should not
respect our Rites and Music, but rather follow those of the Ming,
what can be their true intentions?" When it came to the shaved
forehead, Dorgon conceded that there might be some justifiable Confucian objection that because a man's body was inherited from his
parents it ought not be violated. "But instead we hear this incessant
`Rites and Music' rubbish. I have hitherto loved and pitied the [Han]
officialdom, allowing them to follow their own preference [in matters
of dress and tonsure]. Now, however, because of this divisive talk, I
can but issue a decree to all officials and commoners, ordering that
they all shave their foreheads."8

The decree sent to the Board of Rites (the board that, among other
things, set the dress code for all important ceremonies) on July 8,
1645, was nevertheless couched in Confucian terms." Now that the
empire had been pacified, it read, it was time to enforce the tonsure
on all. Since the ruler was like a father and the subjects like his sons,
and since father and sons were naturally a single entity, divergence
between them was impermissible. If their way of life were not unified,
they might eventually be of "different minds." Would not this
(reverting to the political side of the simile) be almost as if they were
"people of different kingdoms (i-kuo chih jen)"? This matter ought not
require mention from the Throne, but rather should be perceived
naturally by all. Now, within ten days of the decree's promulgation
in Peking (or within ten days of the proclamation's reaching a province), all must conform. Disobedience would be "equivalent to a rebel's defying the Mandate [of Heaven] (ni-ming)." Officials who
memorialized on behalf of those seeking "to retain the Ming institutions and not follow those of this Dynasty" would be put to death
without mercy. On the matter of "clothing and caps," a less coercive
and more leisurely approach would govern; but in the end conformity was expected in these matters as well.

Surely such language was meant to resonate with the conventional
legal phrases that dealt with treason. The Ch'ing Code (7a-Ch'ing
lu-li) handles treason in the statute "The Ten Abominations (shih-o),"
the third paragraph of which is titled "conspiracy to revolt (moup'an)." The sole clarification of this broadly gauged rubric is "This
refers to betraying one's own kingdom (pen-kuo) and secretly adhering
to another kingdom (t'o-kuo)." The penalties for "conspiracy to revolt"
are listed in the Punishments section of the Code: decapitation for
the conspirators, with no distinction between leader and followers.
Their wives and children are to be given as slaves to meritorious
officials, their parents and grandparents to be. banished to Tur-
kestan.10 It is especially striking that the tonsure decree itself does
not appear as a statute or substatute in the Ch'ing Code, nor in any
edition of the Collected Statutes (Ta-Ch'ing hui-tien). Perhaps the monarchs of the new regime, however implacable in enforcing it, wanted
the decree to remain outside the body of formal written law: either to
be enforced without reference to the Code or the Collected Statutes, or
decorously hidden beneath the Code's general statutes on treason (the
greater part of which had been inherited from previous dynasties
and bore a thick patina of legitimacy).