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Two issues have emerged over the past decade as crucial to understanding Chinese state politics: corruption and data. They are, of course, also among the hottest topics in journalism and political science research: data is at the heart of both. Monitor status Reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin (commented in the previous issue of ” Global Asia) and Seek the truth and hide the facts Cornell professor Jeremy Wallace writes, while Yuen Yuen Ang dissects corruption in her seminal book China’s Gilded Age (Reviewed in the December 2021 issue). It is therefore purely accidental that one of the most fascinating and original books on the history of imperial China to appear in recent years explores the intersection of corruption and data in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Maura Dykstra writes primarily for historians The Uncertainty of Conventional Empire: Administrative Revolution in the Qing in the Eighteenth Century Provides insights into deep patterns of Chinese governance that should be better known.
Historians often try to distill a book’s basic argument in its title. So, what does “uncertainty in conventional empires” mean? To explain this statement, we must start with the issue of corruption, a key factor in the shocking collapse of the once powerful Ming Dynasty in the mid-1600s, and the dark cloud hanging over its successor, the Qing Empire. From the beginning, Qing rulers were determined to eradicate corruption, a priority for the three long-lived emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) who reigned for a century and a half. Their determination to stamp out corruption was at the heart of what Dykstra calls the “empire of routine”—the ideal of a smoothly-running imperial bureaucracy in which officials performed their duties fairly and efficiently, controlling a compliant populace while retaining power of superiors. , as for the emperor himself, he was well informed.
Qing emperors continued traditional anti-corruption methods from the Ming Dynasty, such as imposing avoidance and transfer rules (forbidding officials from returning to their hometowns to serve and transferring to a new position every three years), punishing corrupt or deceptive officials, or increasing government salaries to reduce the temptation to bribe. These are well-researched topics. But Dykstra draws attention to a new, “revolutionary” form of curbing corruption and enforcing routine, based on her fresh reading of the documentary record: the standardization of county-level reporting everywhere throughout the Chinese empire.
Dykstra explains how this ambitious process of standardization unfolded by focusing on examples such as prison abuse, death penalty cases, and personnel reviews. She shows how reports received by the court for the emperor’s consideration were systematized into a standard format that was then used as a blueprint for general reporting on criminal cases, and how the archival burden on local officials increased increasingly. The systematization of reporting steadily extended well beyond highly sensitive matters involving life and death or high-ranking appointments. Dykstra describes this as a “caseification” of the Qing government—not just on criminal matters, but also on a wide range of issues in the main functional areas of government (defence, taxation, public works, personnel, and etiquette). The paperwork must be prepared as a case at the local level, kept in the local archives, and submitted up the chain of command as a standard summary case report.
By the so-called “Qing Empire” in the mid-18th century, the efficiency of China’s “routine affairs” reached new heights. The standardization of reporting systems enabled the central court to conduct statistical analysis of “report summaries”—a big data innovation in the pre-digital era. The central government could track violent crime and government corruption province by province, using comparative data to promote some officials and demote others.
That sounds great if you’re a Qing emperor, and this “administrative revolution” undoubtedly contributed to China’s prosperity and power in the 18th century (in fact, Dykstra might have spent more time exploring the specific ways that standardization improved government performance). But there’s a problem, the “uncertainty” that plagues everyday empire, alluded to in the book’s title. Dykstra shows how a gnawing sense of doubt corroded the emperor and his court, creating a bottomless pit of suspicion and surveillance. After all, the remarkable standardization of reporting revealed a scale of corruption that previous emperors had been unable to see or track. The Qianlong emperor, who reigned from the 1730s to the 1790s, was convinced that all that reporting concealed more widespread graft, crime, and irregularities.
The only way to resolve uncertainty is to require more reporting. As Dykstra succinctly put it, “The more the Qing government learned about itself, the more uncertain it became.” As the nineteenth century progressed, the Qing began to drown in a sea of its own documents. A tipping point is reached, beyond which information overload becomes a problem. flow away state capabilities and exacerbated imperialist paranoia about local government deception.
Dykstra ends her fascinating book by posing a question to historians of China’s decline in the 19th century, asking: “How did the pursuit of certainty continue to drag the web out after the net was spread?” Did the Qing Dynasty push into more uncertain waters? ” Political scientists trying to understand corruption, data, and the Chinese government today may find Dykstra’s questions useful as they face the uncertain times ahead.
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