Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (20 page)

Ritual sabotage. Here we are cutting close to the core of soulstealing
fear. Where was respectable society most vulnerable to attack? All the
riches and connections in the world were no protection from being
bullied by men who had nothing to lose. Hence it is no surprise that
weddings and funerals were occasions of customary payoffs to beggars. Failure to give the beggars their due could (and sometimes did)
result in gangs of ragged and filthy people barging into the festivities,
their very presence embarrassing the hosts and, much worse, ruining
the efficacy of the ritual. The clanger was had enough at weddings
but could be ritually fatal at funerals: one nineteenth-century account
tells of angry beggars actually jumping into a grave to prevent a
burial from proceeding.I' People were vulnerable to such terrorism
because they felt their defenses against supernatural forces to be so
tenuous, and the battle between beneficent and hostile spirits so
evenly drawn. As we have seen, the nexus between body and soul
was another danger point that was vulnerable to attack by malevolent
forces. In this situation, social outcasts gained a peculiar power, precisely because they themselves were already so polluted or so unlucky
that they seemed to care neither for social "face" nor for cosmological
fortune. The mere "touch" of the queue- or lapel-clipping beggar
was enough to awaken fears of lethal pollution. By extension, a
beggar's anger was cause for alarm because his polluted nature was
entirely compatible with magical terrorism. The beggar's curse at one
who refused alms carried more than mere rhetorical force.

Our exploration of Chinese sorcery reveals two related structures
of fear, both of which involve the fragility of a spiritual-corporeal
link. The popular fear was of soul-loss: the delicacy of the bond
between soul and body meant that agencies either natural or supernatural could sever it. Dreams and disease were dangers to the stability of this link, as was of course malevolent magic. The imperial
fear related not to the individual but to the collectivity. The integrity
and durability of Heaven's Mandate required recurrent confirmation
through the imperial rites. It could be severed by natural agents (the
cosmological forces visible only in nature's disasters and omens), as
well as by turbulent men who wished the state ill. Such men's communication with spirits was both stoutly denied and sternly prohibited. The way imperial dignitaries scoffed at any spirit-link except their own confirmed a deeply founded anxiety about the longevity
of their own mandate. For commoners, the sorcerer's magic menaced
the vulnerable link between body and soul. For the imperial elite, it
imperiled the tenuous link with heavenly powers. What bred such
fears at both the top and the bottom of the social scale, in the third
quarter of the eighteenth century, is worth considering after we have
pursued the soulstealing story further. Against the soulstealing evil
the Throne is now about to mount a national campaign, in the course
of which the link between sorcery and politics will become plainer.

A nationwide prosecution of sorcery ignited a struggle between the
emperor and his provincial officials, a struggle no less intense because
it was well disguised. The fuel for this smouldering combat lay in the
system of official accountability: failure to catch a criminal was punishable through the system of sanctions run by the Board of Civil
Office in Peking. An official's supervisor was supposed to impeach
him for bad performance, and failure to impeach was itself ground
for impeachment by higher levels. On the exalted stratum of provincial governors-general and governors, administrative failure was
taken as a breach of the monarch's personal trust.

The whole system of accountability revolved around control of
information. An official could not be punished for failing to prosecute a crime, if the crime was not officially known to have been
committed. This absurdly simple fact underlay the strained relations
between Throne and bureaucracy in the soulstealing case. Although
the Ch'ing regime lacked a professional secret service, the Throne
had "eyes and ears" in the provinces. Through such a private source
the Shantung cases had emerged. Through such a source Hungli
discovered that provincial officials had covered up the sorcery cases
of the past spring. It hardly matters whether the cover-up had
resulted from official scorn of popular superstition (elite agnosticism
about sorcery) or whether the tonsure offense hinted by the Soochow
and Hsu-k'ou-chen affairs seemed, to provincial officials, too hot to
handle. Hungli believed it happened because his officials feared awk wardness: court cases that might disrupt their comfortable routines,
impeachments that might rend their patronage networks. We may
forgive his suspicions: for a full two months, not a single provincial
bureaucrat-whether Manchu or Han-had brought sorcery to the
Throne's attention on his own initiative. Those suspicions were confirmed by the initial responses to his demands for information and
action.

Hungli's Provincial Bureaucracy

How effective were Hungli's provincial prosecutors? China's civil
provincial bureaucracy in 1 768 was a tiny elite corps of only sixtythree men. I use "provincial bureaucracy" in a special sense: men
with duties on the provincial level or higher. Such duties included
(i) comprehensive responsibility for the affairs of one province (the
governors) or two provinces (the governors-general);' (2) specialized
posts on the scale of one province (the provincial treasurers and
provincial judges); and (3) specialized posts of a nonterritorial nature
(such as the superintendents of the Grand Canal and Yellow River).
Here, surely, was the world's most exclusive club. To enter it was to
join the monarch's circle of special trust and personal communication.
Its members (like officials of ministerial rank in the capital) were
distinguished by being allowed, indeed required, to communicate
directly and confidentially with the Throne. Although it lacked the
old-boy co-optation and leather-chair coziness of a "club" properly
so-called (that is, its internal cohesion was weak), membership gave
a man a special self-image that transcended the world of the lower
bureaucracy.2

The Men in Charge

To prosecute this case, Hungli depended on an experienced group
of middle-aged and elderly men, each with a record of service in
several provinces, and who had been (at their upper ranks) serving
in the provincial bureaucracy for about a decade.' Manchus made
up a disproportionately large fraction of the group as a whole (38
percent), and an even larger fraction (58 percent) at the top levels
(governors-general and governors). For the provincial bureaucracy
as a whole, this was a substantial ethnic shift from the beginning of
Hungli's reign: since 1736, the Manchu component had increased by
84 percent; those cultural hybrids, the Han bannermen, by 33 per cent (though the number was so small as to be insignificant); and the
ordinary Han had decreased by 51 percent. The composition of the
governors-general remained almost unchanged, but there was a substantial increase in the proportion of Manchus in governor's rank
(mainly at the expense of the Han bannermen), and another substantial increase of Manchus (at the expense of Han) in the post of
provincial treasurer. More Manchus were working their way into
provincial office by the standard route of promotion from provincial
judgeships. This might be expected as Manchus became more sinicized and better at handling the affairs of the largely Han lower
bureaucracy. But it also suggests a deliberate imperial policy to
increase the representation of ethnic Manchus in local government.

By the standards of the eighteenth-century world, Hungli's province chiefs in i 768 ruled immense populations. In the three-province
jurisdiction of the Liangkiang governor-general lived more than seventy million people, a population more than twice that of France at
the time. The governor of Kiangsu, the largest province in this group
and the most populous in the nation, ruled perhaps thirty million, at
least triple the contemporary population of the United Kingdom.
Even the smallest province involved in the soulstealing case, Shensi,
contained some eight million people, which was roughly the size of
Great Britain, minus Scotland.4 Clearly the tautness of such a ship
had to be far short of what we (and the Chinese) are used to in
modern bureaucracies. Chiefs of such immense societies had to be
left substantial discretion. Yet the vast powers of these men were kept
in check by numerous institutional safeguards. Moreover, collusion
among them was balked by the confidential palace memorial system,
in which a man never knew what was being reported to the Throne
by his colleague next door. Finally, the emperor kept his province
chiefs on the move by frequent transfers.5

Frequent rotation meant that province chiefs could hardly be
deeply knowledgable about the special problems of their jurisdictions,
and that much of the work of governance devolved upon the permanent staff of clerks.6 Each member of this highly mobile elite corps
was kept busily circulating among provincial capitals, yet was bound
to the imperial center by two iron cords: the personnel dossier in the
Board of Civil Office that (as was the case with all officials) bore his
cumulative record of promotions and demotions; and, more important, his personal tie of clientage and obligation to the monarch.

Although we are accustomed to calling provincial officials "bureaucrats," in an American political context these men would surely be called "political appointments." Although most had followed standard tracks into the provincial bureaucracy (either from a circuitintendancy, which oversaw several prefectures, or from a junior vicepresidency of one of the Six Boards), their elevation to provincial
rank immediately signaled a special relationship to the Throne, a
relationship marked by powerful rituals of loyalty and dependency.
From such favored servants, the emperor expected not just reliability,
but zeal: not merely to report accurately on local events, but to go
the extra mile to further his royal objectives. Upon these qualities,
more than upon the routine dossiers maintained by the Board of
Civil Office, hinged the special trust and favor by which their future
careers would he governed.

How did this special relationship affect the performance of a governor's job? The aspect of his job that most concerns us here is the
insidious linkage at the heart of Chinese law enforcement: a territorial official was simultaneously policeman, prosecutor, and judge.
Indeed, in every jurisdiction, the judicial power was simply an aspect
of the executive. At the county level, the magistrate was in charge of
arrests, prosecutions, and trials. Cases that carried penalties heavier
than Hogging were referred upward to the governor's court, and
sentences in all capital cases were automatically reviewed by the
emperor. Because sorcery in many of its guises was classed by the
Ch'ing Code as a capital crime, soulstealing cases might be expected
to make their way to provincial courts, and ultimately to Peking. The
governor had to exhort his subordinates to scour the counties and
prefectures for sorcerers and then judge the cases of those they
caught.

As Hungli turned up the pressure to crush the "evil arts," the
governor-as-prosecutor loomed larger than the governor-as-judge.
Most provincial officials in 1768 had some legal experience, generally
obtained in the post of provincial judge through which they had
entered the provincial bureaucracy. Yet few were legal scholars or
administrators of wide reputation,' and I wonder whether many of
the others had judicial self-images firm enough to withstand the
political pressures inherent in their positions. Pleasing the monarch
was a central part of administering the law.

The Communication System

Making government work effectively required carefully organizing
the flow of information. From the point of view of the eighteenth century monarchy, this involved two problems: (i) separating routine
from urgent business, so that problems could be handled at the
appropriate levels and in the right order; and (2) ensuring that
reports from field officials were timely and accurate. Neither problem
was ever solved to Hungli's satisfaction."

To deal with the first problem, Hungli had inherited from his
predecessors a documentary system with a routine track and a confidential track. Ordinary matters were communicated by routine
memorials (t'i-pen) through the Grand Secretariat, a committee of the
highest ministers that oversaw the operation of the Six Boards (the
ministries of the six traditional functional divisions of government).
Through this channel flowed regular reports on tax receipts, criminal
justice, public works, and routine personnel matters. The forms of
these documents were rigidly prescribed, and irregularities were
grounds for impeachment. Although today's social historian finds in
these "routine" memorials the very pith of everyday Chinese life, the
medium was ill suited to urgent matters that required speed and
confidentiality, including such matters as sedition.