Homicide in Eighteenth-Century China

To understand the challenges Qing criminal justice faced we must begin with the abundant extant records of homicides, which contain the details of crimes, depositions, autopsies and official judgements.

Research based on homicide reports relating to land and debts likewise depicts a prosperous but decidedly more contentious eighteenth century. My own research has drawn on homicides relating to land and debt records to reconstruct and analyse violent disputes over property rights in land in the context of large-scale changes in the structure of the eighteenth-century Chinese economy and society.^[596] Not surprisingly, with the Chinese population surpassing 300 million by the end of the century, tensions arose among land­lords, peasants, and tenants who sought to protect or extend their property rights in land under conditions of economic commercialisation and demo­graphic pressure.

Disputes over conditional land sales are indicatory of the complex motivations behind violent disputes. Customarily, ties to land were considered personal and trans-generational, making all land sales effectively conditional and subject to redemption. The original owner of the land, the owner's direct heirs or even more distant kin often asserted the right to redeem. Normally this right was assumed but not formalised in a contract. Legal ambiguities, emotional ties to land and outright fraud all contributed to violent disputes. With the growing commodification of land in an increasingly commercialised economy, an ‘origi­nal' owner's ties to the land became attenuated at best. In areas where the market for land was lively and turnovers in ownership were numerous, the practice waned. In another example of the legislative turn in Qing rule, legislation that overturned the custom that land sales were conditional by default, and that set limits on the right to redeem if a time limit was not stipulated in the contract, was added to the Great Qing Code in 1753. Unfortunately, the deeply rooted custom lingered and legislation alone could not eliminate violent disputes.

A careful analysis of land disputes shows that competing visions of social justice, legal remedies and economic rationality notwithstanding, often triggered violence. When individuals exploited their relative eco­nomic advantages in a seemingly rational manner, they might find them­selves in conflict with existing ethical norms. For example, a landlord who evicted a tenant solely to obtain a higher rent was punished for creating a situation that led to a killing when the evicted tenant and the new tenant became embroiled in a lethal confrontation.

The erosion of shared ethical norms regarding property rights created uncertainty, distrust and anxiety, but it also weakened the moral authority of local magistrates who tried to settle disputes that came to their courts. New substatutes aimed at clarifying property rights in land were added to the Qing Code, but enforcement of the new laws remained problematic. Underpaid, understaffed and overworked, local magistrates had trouble enforcing judge­ments in the best of times. Making matters worse for the courts, property rights and notions of fairness were in flux and some litigants openly and blatantly defied official adjudication. Indignant losers at court might refuse to abide by official rulings. Landlords who had won their suits in court sometimes resorted to violence to enforce judgements against recalcitrant tenants. Violence might be retributive, as in cases of tenants who lost their land, or pre­emptive, as in cases of landlords who feared their tenants would not respect the courts. Until economic institutions were adjusted to reflect changing realities and until these economic institutions were accepted as fair, violent disputes, some of which ended in homicide, were inevitable.