Qing Governors and Their Provinces

The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644-1796

R. Kent Guy

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295997506
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key roles. R. Kent Guy's comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from 1644 to 1796. In the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the responsibilities of provincial officials were ill-defined and often shifting; Qing governors, in contrast, were influential members of a formal administrative hierarchy and enjoyed the support of the central government, including access to resources. These increasingly powerful officials extended the court's influence into even the most distant territories of the Qing empire. Both masters of the routine processes of administration and troubleshooters for the central government, Qing governors were economic and political administrators who played crucial roles in the management of a larger and more complex empire than the Chinese had ever known. Administrative concerns varied from region to region: Henan was dominated by the great Yellow River, which flowed through the province; the Shandong governor dealt with the exchange of goods, ideas, and officials along the Grand Canal; in Zhili, relations between civilians and bannermen in the strategically significant coastal plain were key; and in northwestern Shanxi, governors dealt with border issues. Qing Governors and Their Provinces uses the records of governors' appointments and the laws and practices that shaped them to reconstruct the development of the office of provincial governor and to examine the histories of governors' appointments in each province. Interwoven throughout is colorful detail drawn from the governors' biographies.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The Burdens of History: Pre-Qing Territorial Government

In China, as in most early modern empires, provinces as administrative units were created from the earlier military jurisdictions through which territories had been conquered and controlled. The situation in China was unique in that the military jurisdictions that gave rise to provinces had much longer and more daunting histories than did military jurisdictions elsewhere. This history was both a burden and an opportunity. In the Chinese metaphor, historical records offer opportunities when they serve as mirrors of the past, reflecting the dangers and values of various institutional arrangements, and when they demonstrate the advantages of certain territorial divisions. Consciousness of history could be a burden when certain courses of action were determined to be historical dead ends and history constrained the exploration of roads not taken. Knowing history too well, the Chinese were in a sense condemned to repeat it, or rather to repeat the actions that they believed its lessons taught.

Imperial Chinese governments never had difficulty delegating authority to territorial subordinates. Nearly a century before the first Chinese dynasty, the redoubtable Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE) laid the foundation for subsequent imperial rule by replacing feudal lords with centrally appointed officials.¹ Lord Shang created territorial units known as “commanderies” (jun) and subsequently supplemented them with “counties” (xian). Together, these became the basic building blocks of Chinese empires. Inserting an intermediate layer of officials was more difficult, as it evoked fears of deceit and double-dealing at the central level and specters of harsh oppression at the local level.

There were probably many reasons why stable provincial governments eluded the Chinese, but two phenomena were both recurrent and telling. First, Chinese imperial regimes initially turned to provinces as units of military administration, only to find institutions with weak ties to the center and local leaders who were willing to put regional—even personal—interests ahead of those of the central government. The rebellions that ensued were read all too often as a caution against precisely the sort of institution building that would have made provinces effective supports for the central government. The rebellion of An Lushan during the eighth century is probably the most famous example of this cycle.

The second had less to do with historical contingency than with political vision and philosophy. In classical Chinese visions of the just political order, the middleman was suspect. Early Chinese political thinkers such as Shen Buhai and Han Feizi may have developed, as Herrlee Creel has argued, a theory of bureaucracy.² However, early Chinese thinking about bureaucracy was marked by an enormous interest in the problem of the ruler’s control of officialdom and concerned itself primarily with “impersonal, objective mechanisms for limiting the power of officials and subordinating them to the ruler.”³ As Jack Dull has pointed out, in earliest times there was an order in China that is conventionally called “feudal,” but there was no tradition of feudal subinfeudation. This means there was no way in which an imperial subordinate could legitimately exact from an inferior the same obligations he owed to the emperor.⁴ As the imperial system evolved out of the ancient feudal order, much more emphasis was placed on the loyalty that all officials owed to the center than to the more nuanced obligations officials owed to one another. There was simply little speculation about the duties of a subordinate who served by supervising lower-ranking officials or about the lower-ranking appointee who served, not a sagely emperor, but that emperor’s all-too-human delegate. The most effective model for delegation came ironically not from China itself, but from empires of the steppe, such as the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368), in which delegation of authority over a wider territorial scope was crucial for maintaining order. But “order” meant something different for the Yuan than it had for traditional Chinese regimes, and the Yuan produced a fairly loosely integrated regime that rested on an unholy combination of trust, distrust, and disorganization.

It fell to the final two imperial governments of China, the Ming and, particularly, the Qing, to integrate the values of sedentary empires into the institutions of nomadic regimes. The first emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–98), borrowed Yuan boundaries and appointed Chinese-style officials to oversee what he envisioned as the rather circumscribed role of the central state within them. Seeking greater security, his successors appointed coordinators of military affairs to serve alongside Zhu Yuanzhang’s provincial officials. The resulting provincial order was only a partial success, but it provided the offices that the Qing would use to create its more successful synthesis. In view of the history of false starts and new beginnings, rebellions and restorations, it is no wonder that the foremost institutional historian of the early Qing period, Gu Yanwu, had little faith in the province as a territorial unit, seeing governors as nothing more than the supernumerary servants of overweening autocrats.

PROVINCES IN THE EARLY IMPERIAL PERIOD

The history of Tang provinces in the eighth and ninth centuries, which is reasonably well known both in English- and Chinese-language historical works, is almost universally considered to have been a disaster. The details of this disaster —stories of scheming palace women, barbarian perfidy, and court intrigues— have been most often deployed to examine changing social status during the mid-Tang.⁵ The notion that social change in the Tang was either reflected or produced by the collapsing provincial order has been successfully challenged, but the details of the Tang story can still tell us much about evolving Chinese views of territorial governance. What is most interesting about the Tang system of provinces is not so much the system itself but the mistakes the dynasty made in its implementation. On what models of provinces were Tang rulers drawing? Why did the court turn to outsiders to govern these provinces, and how has the Tang history been read in succeeding dynasties, or, to put it another way, what was the impact of the Tang experience on subsequent institutional development?

The Tang rulers were not the first to confront the ambiguities of provincial power or the dilemmas of delegation. In the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), there were two types of territorial officials established to oversee the eighty or so commanderies that had existed from its beginning. Each commandery was governed by a taishou, a term that is customarily translated as “grand commander” when it refers to a Han official. A group more comparable to later imperial provincial governors, at least in geographical span of control, theoretically oversaw the grand commanders. These were the thirteen regional commanders, or cishi, who were charged with supervising and coordinating the efforts of the governors of commanderies. The establishment of this position by Han Wudi in 106 BCE marks the apogee of his power, a moment when the empire was at its greatest physical extent and the Han emperor was experimenting with new ways of governing in many spheres. It also represents one of the rare instances in early imperial history when provincial-level officials were created at a moment of imperial power rather than one of weakness. In practice, however, the regional inspectors were quite weak; in fact, they ranked below the officials they were meant to supervise.⁶ So long as the central regime remained the dominant power in the empire, this arrangement was perhaps workable. But low-ranking territorial subordinates could not command the resources necessary to defend a faltering center. Crisis demanded a different kind of official, and, by 1 BCE, the Han dynasty created the new post of “regional shepherd” (mu), which brought with it high rank and wide authority.⁷ The Later Han dynasty shifted between these two approaches to territorial governance, at times appointing low-ranking officials and at times dispatching senior officials. In 188 CE, the Han committed itself to governing via senior officials and appointed regional shepherds throughout the empire.⁸ From the dynasty’s point of view, these proved to be wolves with shepherd’s titles, and the competition between strong regional leaders and the central government eventually brought down the ruling house. Thus, in the Han, provincial officials created in moments of power proved too weak to preserve the dynasty in moments of crisis; those created in moments of weakness were too independent to rally to the emperor’s side in times of trouble.

Like the founders of the Han dynasty that preceded them, the early Tang rulers saw little need for provinces. The Tang followed the pattern of the Sui, which had distrusted the political units the commanderies represented and so reduced their size and renamed them; eventually the Tang were to create 350 zhou, customarily translated as “prefecture” in early imperial history, which presided over nearly fifteen hundred counties.⁹ Tang Taizu dispatched regional inspectors to review local governments in his empire, but his successors saw little need to continue the practice. In a stable order, with the borders guarded by Tang standing armies, the empire policed by garrisons from the divisional militia system, and the tax regime secure and productive, there was little need for the aggregation of resources and men that a regional unit could provide. There was also little desire for the threat such a leader could pose. But by the middle of the eighth century, the situation and needs of the Tang had changed. The dynasty was at the height of its power and geographic extent. As Charles Peterson has argued, provinces were made necessary for the Tang by changes occurring along the borders and within China during the eighth century. Along the overextended boundaries of the eighth-century empire with the Qiang in Tibet and the Khitans in the northeast, military threats necessitated the expansion of standing armies, which in turn required the establishment of stronger and more permanent structures of control. Within China, “population growth, [an] increased incidence of vagrancy, tax registers falling out-of-date, a growing complexity of administrative procedures, occasional lawlessness plus the perennial tendency of bureaucrats to become lax” forced the creation of new regional units.¹⁰ Provinces were thus new institutional structures in eighth-century China, created not because of the logic of bureaucratic order but in order to meet the emergent needs of an enlarged state.

Because the province was a new institution, there were few rules or even useful precedents for incorporating them into the bureaucratic order.¹¹ In particular, there were no procedures or precedents for appointing individuals to serve as regional coordinators. It would have been possible for Tang aristocrats to take on this responsibility, and some members of old court families were sent to establish order in the empire. But more often political leaders, such as the autocratic prime minister Li Linfu, preferred to appoint to these new and powerful positions men who had no ties to factions in the capital and would therefore pose no threat to established structures of authority. In fact, Li preferred outsiders who would have little expectation of rising within the Tang political hierarchy and whose skills, in his view, better suited them for service on the borders of empire. Combining flattery with practicality, Li Linfu argued that a brave emperor required brave subordinates:

In view of your majesty’s talent and bravery and the power and wealth of the state, if the foreign barbarians are not destroyed it is only because the [Chinese] generals are timid and fearful and incapable of military office. Your majesty surely wants to destroy the barbarians and extend your prestige to the four corners of the world. For this purpose nothing would serve better than military leaders, and among these, nothing would be better than foreigners. From their birth they have a brave temperament, and from their childhood, they ride horses. When they reach adulthood, they are used to fighting enemies. This is their natural disposition.¹²

Li Linfu imagined that he had found such a person in An Lushan (702–757). A soldier who had risen through at least the upper ranks of the Tang army, An Lushan was of mixed Turkish and Sogdian parentage, an illiterate who had no significant period of residence at the Tang court. As a young officer, he had been admired by the emperor for his bravery and had even been granted a special pardon from the court in 736 after a battlefield defeat. In 740, he received his first appointment in the Tang territorial government and, by 742, was established as a regional governor in what is today northeastern Hebei, around modern-day Beijing, which adjoined the territory of the Khitans. Each of these characteristics distinguished him from the oligarchy that dominated Tang politics, composed as it was of hereditary descendants of the Tang founder and literati examination takers from southeast China.

Although the emperor bestowed honor after honor upon An Lushan, many in the capital came to resent his influence. The tenuousness of his connections— even to those with whom he was most closely associated—was legendary. According to one tale, An Lushan broke out in a profuse sweat whenever he met Prime Minister Li Linfu or received a communication from him through an emissary. On one occasion, when he met Li during the winter, it is said that Li requested a blanket for his damp and perhaps clammy protégé, who was no doubt shivering. An Lushan’s large physical size and his “gaucherie in matters of court” became the stuff of capital jokes. On his birthday in 751, he was formally adopted as a son by the emperor’s favorite concubine, Yang Guifei. Several days later, she and her ladies “wrapped his huge hulk in baby clothes and went through a burlesque of the ceremony of washing a new-born infant.”¹³ There were reports that An Lushan failed to recognize and appropriately honor the heir apparent. When Li Linfu died in 756, his successor Yang Guoqing (brother of the imperial concubine) engineered several deliberate provocations. An Lushan became convinced that he would fall victim to a purge at court and therefore assembled his troops to march on the capital, which they did in 757. They eventually occupied Chang’an, and a civil war ensued in which the armies of An Lushan and his successors fought the armies of the Tang for eight years, nearly ending China’s second great imperial regime. When the Tang finally achieved victory, it did so only at the cost of conceding even more authority to An Lushan’s fellow governors.

Perhaps less important than the details of the rebellion and its suppression, for the purposes of this volume, was the way in which the history of the rebellion has been told and read. Given the Confucian penchant for explaining political, or even social and intellectual, change in personal terms, the stories of An Lushan’s slights at the hands of the Tang court must be discounted. They may well have ...