Qing Stability before the Nineteenth Century

Since all three of these putative governments were clearly subordinate to the Qing court and its immediate appurtenances, the value of considering them as separate governments within a single state may be unclear.

Understanding this helps to account for some of the stability of the Qing state, which between 1636 and 1755 expanded some 1,500 percent in area and probably 3,000 percent in population. The conquest of China proceeded from about 1644 to 1683 under the primary jurisdiction of the civil government and the Eight Banners. The prosecution of the conquests, indirect rule, and military occupation proceeded under the leadership of the Eight Banners elites and the Frontiers Department. The imperial court expanded its ability to coordinate these governments by evo­lution of its “inner bureaucracy,” as Beatrice Bartlett called it. In origin this was the emperor's personal staff, extended to a few hundred officials at its largest extent, and functioning through the “Inner Cabinet” (neige, inherited from the Ming), “Southern Study” (nanshufang, 1677-1898), and the “Grand Council” (junjichu, ca. 1729).^[2003] As each of these offices grew and became an impediment to imperial initiative, it was obviated by a smaller, newly created office that succeeded to its functions. Thus the Kangxi emperor pushed aside the inherited Inner Cabinet as he consolidated his personal rule and prosecuted his war against the southern occu­pation governors by creating the Southern Study in 1677; the Yongzheng emperor pushed aside the Southern Study and streamlined his military planning against the Dzunghars in 1727-1729 by creating the Grand Council; and the Guangxu em­peror in 1896-1898 pushed aside the Grand Council in favor of his own selection of advisors as he attempted (unsuccessfully) to effect his own personal rule.

The court's second tool in coordinating the three governments was the Ministry of Finance (hubu).

At the time of the Qing entry into Beijing in June 1644, the late emperor Hung Taiji had been replaced on the throne by his ninth son Fulin, then six years old, who ruled as the Shunzhi emperor. A regency controlled by Hung Taiji’s brother and uncle managed state affairs. They were coordinating not only the transition to the new reign, which had previously been based at Shenyang/Mukden, but also the invasion of north China and the capture of Beijing. The opportunity to breach the Great Wall and enter China as a whole army (as contrasted to the raiding parties sent occasionally by Hung Taiji) had arisen when the massive rural uprisings that had plagued the last two decades of the Ming era had culminated in the seizure of Beijing by the rebel Li Zecheng in April 1644.

They did not, however, restore the throne to the Ming. Instead, they installed Fulin at a new Qing capital in Beijing, and thereafter proceeded to add China to their domains.^[2007] This was accomplished in a punctuated fashion. North China was occupied by 1645. Extension of Qing political authority to south China was a fact by 1650, primarily due to the Qing decision to delegate the task, as well as the estab­lishment of provisional occupation governments, to a few Ming veterans who had defected to them, and who were of Liaodongese descent (foremost among them, Wu Sangui).^[2008] The Zheng family of Fujian—who controlled a large piracy and smuggling network encompassing Taiwan and the small portions of Japan and the Philippines—decided to support the Ming remnant court in Fujian and Yunnan, and Qing determination to root out this particular pocket of resistance eventually led to the capture of Taiwan in 1683 and its first incorporation into an empire based in China.^[2009] During these developments, Fulin died in 1661 and was succeeded by his third son Xuanye (then seven years old), who would rule until his own death in 1722 as the Kangxi emperor. By the late 1660s, Xuanye had decided to destroy the regency that obstructed his personal rule, and in the long course of consolidating his personal power he decided to destroy the provisional satrapies that had been es­tablished for the capitulating Ming generals in the late 1640s. The result was a war (usually called the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories) between the Qing court and its occupation governors that raged from 1673 to 1681.^[2010] It concluded with the de­struction of the families of the satraps and establishment of direct Qing occupation and rule of south and southwest China.

This accomplishment has appeared all the more remarkable because the size of the Qing civil government did not grow significantly from the size of the Ming civil gov­ernment before it.^[2012] In an age of tiny continental imperial governments ruling huge expanses of territory, the diminutiveness of the Ming and Qing governments was not remarkable. Precise figures cannot be produced with our present documents, but it is hard to see how either the Ming or the Qing civil governments could have exceeded 30,000 officials, and the numbers were probably closer to 20,000 or slightly fewer. They governed a population that grew from about 150 million in 1600 to about 300 million in 1800, while the territory under Qing control was nearly double that of the Ming before it. In relation to the population the Qing state presence was less dense than the Russian empire, and probably on a par with the Ottoman Empire (if segments of the provincial Ottoman administrations can be considered part of the central government). In relation to territory, it was far less dense than Ottoman, but denser than Russia. What is more striking is to compare the size of Qing government to that of the Song 800 years earlier (970-1279). The size of the Song state in relation to the population may have been twice that of the Qing; professionalization of and compensation to Song officials was much higher than Ming or Qing, and Song levels of corruption appear to have been a tiny fraction of the practices of Ming and espe­cially Qing officials. The source of the trend toward very small governments on very large territories, guided largely by the priorities of what Marshall Hodgson called “military patronage,”^[2013] is probably not very mysterious.

The Qing decision to continue the Ming tradition of a light state appears to have been premised on both a confidence in the competence of the three governments it had brought to China and the political exigencies of the continuing conquests. The role of the court and of the Eight Banner forces in the conquest of China had precedents in the earlier conquest of the Ming conquest of Liaodong, but the scale of territory to be covered and the immensity of the population to be occupied effected a transformation in the understanding of what the Eight Banners were and how they were to be used. Far from being a means of administering an en­tire population, the Eight Banner forces were now a tiny portion of the conquest forces. The overwhelming majority of the soldiers involved in the conquests in China were Chinese soldiers who had lately been in the employ of the Ming, and had joined the Qing either to survive or because of the magnitude of opportunities offered by the change in regime. They were not brought into the Eight Banners, as some Chinese defectors had been in Liaodong. They became part of a new military force, the Green Standard Armies. In the conquests, Eight Banner generals were in command, but they had little knowledge of the terrain and virtually no effective plans for occupation. Chinese-martial commanders were generally relied upon to actually create the local occupation regimes. Over a period of years, Eight Banner forces were transferred from Liaodong and Jilin to garrisons established for them and their families in the Chinese provinces. From its historical origin as a govern­ment for administration of the entire population at the turn of the seventeenth cen­tury, the Eight Banners by the turn of the eighteenth century had become an organ for administration of a tiny minority within the minority of the conquest forces. They were no longer self-supporting, as they had once been in Jilin province; they ran small farming and technical enterprises to attempt to support themselves, but were increasingly dependent upon transfers from the central government for their monthly stipends. What the Eight Banners could continue to do for the government through the earlier eighteenth century was to supply well-educated and reliable horsemen and commanders to the forces of the continuing conquest, and perhaps more important, the personnel to provide policing of the conquered regions.

Each decade the finances of the Eight Banner garrison communities declined, and while the court made attempts to satisfy the demands of the troops for depend­able and adequate support, no basic changes in the sources of government revenue or distribution were effected. Why, in a regime obviously oriented toward con­tinued conquest, a large military population so intimately connected to the court was not provided financial security is an issue worth considering. In some ways this can be seen as a modernization process. The earliest Eight Banners government was an extension of a household regime, in which the soldiers were the putative slaves, children, and household guards of the ruler. From the point of the conquest of Liaodong in the 1620s, the process of building a distinct professional military force, directed through the bureaucratic apparatus of the imperial court, began. It accelerated very rapidly after the entry into China in 1644, and resulted in the Eight Banners communities taking on a new function as occupiers and suppliers of elite soldiers to much larger and much more complex military forces. The tradi­tionalist, hereditary, familial character of the Eight Banners made them obsolete in much the same way as the Janissaries were becoming obsolete in the Ottoman em­pire. However, by the end of the seventeenth century the Eight Banners population permanently settled in China, in legally segregated communities, was well in excess of a million individuals. The need for the Eight Banners government to continue to administer them was clear. The alternative would have been abolishment of the Eight Banners and Eight Banner identity, as well as the ideologically potent his­tory of the relationship of the Eight Banners to the Qing court. As with any mass demobilization, the threat of public disorder from such a move would also have been considerable. The result was that the Eight Banners remained a distinct zone within—and overlapping with other jurisdictions of—the Qing state until the end of the empire in 1912; indeed, remnants of the Eight Banners survived until the re­sidual Qing court was expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Qing court was faced with the choice to either continue money and goods transfers to the Eight Banner garrison communities by raising taxes on the civil population, or to neglect the finances and in­directly induce the bannermen to either learn to live in much reduced circumstances or leave the garrisons altogether (technically illegal, but in practice common). We know that the scattered and diverse banner populations chose both solutions, as well as occasional riots, participation in criminal rings, or occasional fraud. Garrison commanders who could not afford weapons or ammunition for their soldiers were forced to abandon military training. Banner immiseration and occasional disorder- liness were clearly regarded by the state as tolerable. In the same way that the impe­rial court did not require that the civilian government assume the financial burden of the Eight Banners, it also required that the civil government be supported on its own resources. The number of officials was not significantly increased, and rises in stipends were modest. The state understood well that its underfunding of local gov­ernment in particular meant that these officials—like the commanders of under­supported Eight Banner garrisons—had to rely upon their own initiative to make up the difference. This was primarily accomplished by entering into partnerships with local landowners and aspiring officials, trading favorable tax assessments or judi­cial decisions for a supply of staff or cash. In sum this effected a partial privatization of governance, which not surprisingly also had strong parallels in Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It also created a constant temptation for officials to engage in the degree of privatization that fell within the state definitions of corruption.

It appears that the stability of conquered regions was a primary consideration for the state in keeping the size of the civil government small. Low taxes were not only a reliable means of restoring the economy that had been damaged by two decades of fighting in some parts of China, the warfare that accompanied the Qing conquest of north China and the Yangtze delta, and the war to suppress the oc­cupation governors of the south. Low taxes were also an overt means by which the Qing emperors ingratiated themselves with landowners, particularly in the Yangtze Delta, which the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors occasionally visited on their “Southern tours.”^[2014] Even after illegal or surreptitious shifting of the tax burden from elites to the farming population, the effective tax rate through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may have been no higher than 8 percent. In 1713 the court announced a permanent freeze on the head tax and corvee labor. At the time revenues were rising due to the economic recovery, but the reasons for the freeze were primarily political and as a consequence the freeze remained in effect even when the reserves of the government shrank. The Qing government until the nineteenth century successfully predicated its expansion and occupation on resting relatively lightly on its conquered territories, retaining the local elites to the extent possible, and keeping land and commercial taxes low.

The persistent refusal of the imperial court to dismantle the discrete financial responsibilities of its residual governments, to force substantial transfers from one to another, or to require the civil population to provide more revenues for all the governments and the courts appears rational when the dependence of the small state upon the large society is considered. Qing state presence was sparse, with officials rarely functioning below the level of a single country magistrate (each administering an average of about 200,000 people). The entire government was founded on the competence of the localities to feed themselves, maintain their own roads and water works, and provide for their own security. In order to sustain local coherence, the state made many provisions in law and policy privileging extended lineages and their enterprise, and permitting magistrates great flexibility in dealing with local organizations. The risks were high. The emperors worried that local elites and kinsmen would form factions, even among the highest levels of the bureauc­racy. They feared that local organizations of labor cooperation or religious affilia­tion would grow to become a threat to public order or imperial authority. In order to maintain some leverage against a well-organized and competent society, the court employed many strategies—examination quotas preventing any particular prov­ince from dominating the central bureaucracy, laws of avoidance for local officials to prevent them from being posted to their home counties, selective prosecutions for corruption or sedition to keep the elites from becoming too confident, among them. The strategies were remarkably successful for two centuries, before the state fell prey to the very forces it had both depended upon and feared.