‘Bare Sticks'

Eighteenth-century China was not unique in experiencing an upsurge in violent crime during a period of rapid demographic expansion. Studies examining the relationship between crime and demography have consistently found that young males are disproportionately involved in violent crime as both victims and offenders.^[600] Research on the American frontier in the nineteenth century has explained violence in terms of the predominance of ‘young and single men'.^[601] Regarding violent behaviour of young men, it found that cultural norms and social institutions are also important determinants, but ‘endocrine research, bolstered by historical, criminological, and cross-cultural studies' suggests that ‘this tendency is universal and that it has a biological basis'.^[602] It comes as no surprise that, as the eighteenth-century demographic boom swelled the abso­lute ranks of young males, judicial officials also noted a worrisome increase in social unrest and interpersonal violence.

At first glance these downwardly mobile, young, unmarried men (so-called ‘bare sticks') would appear to be the likely targets of the severe penalties in the eighteenth-century bare stick substatutes, but the scope of these new laws was much broader. Conflating unmarried rootless males with criminal bare sticks would be misleading. For example, a substatute under the law on ‘monopolis­ing markets' specifically referred to employees of the Imperial Household Department or their relatives, imperial princes, eunuchs, officials or their relatives, none of whom would be considered downwardly mobile rootless males. Similarly, scapegoating bare sticks for sexual assaults was a staple of official rhetoric and four substatutes under the law against ‘fornication' were offences that could be sentenced under the bare stick substatute. But on closer examination, we find that one of these substatutes specifically addressed rapes committed by lamas and monks. Suffice it to say that although sexual crimes bulked large in official denunciations, bare stick crimes included violent and non-violent offences and depending on the crime the perpetrators could be more precisely described as hoodlum, drifter, conman, swindler or gangster.