Why do I say that morals and customs are deteriorating? [What I refer to is the fact that] the scholar-officials have increasingly disregarded honor and lost their sense of shame, while the common people have disregarded their socio-ethical duties [as seen in the rise of rebellion]. The common people should not be blamed for this, however; the responsibility still lies with the scholar-officials themselves. During the past dozen or more years, I have seen presidents and vice presidents of the Six Boards gladly kneel before the chief minister [Heshen]. There have been Grand Secretaries who were supervisors of the “seven courts” and who, moreover, were twice as old in age, offering themselves as disciples and clients (siren) to Heshen. Some officials befriended the servants of the chief minister and were happy to deal with them on an equal footing. The imperial academies [including the Hanlin Academy] are [supposed to be] the font of scholarly morals and morale. Now there are academicians who spend entire evenings begging pitifully to be appointed a Libationer [Rector] (jijiu), as well as those who will kneel for hours seeking appointment as Lecturer from the Classics Mat. . . . If such is the behavior of the scholar-officials, how can one criticize the common people for being deceitful and dependent on the help of others? If these things happen at the imperial court, how can one criticize the pursuit of selfish interest and corruption in the distant parts of the empire?
[Hong Liangji, appendix, Hong Liangji nianpu, pp. 107–108—KCL]
CHINA’S POPULATION PROBLEM
There has never been a people who did not delight in living under peaceful rule, nor a people not happy about living under peaceful rule that has lasted for a long time. Peaceful rule that lasts more than one hundred years is considered to have lasted a long time. But in the matter of population, it may be noted that today’s population is five times as large as that of thirty years ago, ten times as large as that of sixty years ago, and not less than twenty times as large as that of one hundred years ago. Take, for example, a family that at the time of the great-great-grandfather and the great-grandfather was in possession of a ten-room house and one hundred mou of farmland. After the man married there were at first only the two of them; they lived in the ten-room house and upon the one hundred mou of land, and their resources were more than ample. Assuming that they had three sons, by the time the sons grew up, all three sons as well as the father had wives; there were a total of eight persons. Eight persons would require the help of hired servants; there would be, say, ten persons in the household. With the ten-room house and the one hundred mou of farmland, I believe they would have just enough space to live in and food to eat, although barely enough. In time, however, there will be grandsons, who, in turn, will marry. The aged members of the household will pass away, but there could still be more than twenty persons in the family. With more than twenty persons sharing a ten-room house and working on one hundred mou of farmland, I am sure that even if they eat very frugally and live in crowded quarters, their needs will not be met. Moreover, there will be great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren—the total number in a household will be fifty or sixty times that in the great-great-grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s time. For every household at the time of the great-grandfather, there will be at least ten households at the time of the great-grandson and great-great-grandson. There are families whose population has declined, but there are also lineages whose male members have greatly multiplied, compensating for the cases of decline.
Someone may say that at the time of the great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, not all uncultivated land had been reclaimed and not all vacancies in housing available on the market had been filled. However, the amount [of available farmland and housing] has only doubled or, at the most, increased three to five times, while the population has grown ten to twenty times. Thus farmland and houses are always in short supply, while there is always a surplus of households and population. Furthermore, there are families who [have bought up or otherwise] appropriated other people’s property—one person owning the houses of more than a hundred, one household occupying the farmland of a hundred households. No wonder, then, that everywhere there are people who have died from exposure to windstorm, rain, and frost, or from hunger and cold and the hardships of homelessness.
Question: Do Heaven-and-earth have a way of dealing with this situation? Answer: Heaven-and-earth’s way of making adjustments lies in flood, drought, and plagues [which reduce the population]. However, people who unfortunately succumb to flood, drought, and plagues are no more than 10 or 20 percent of the total population.
Question: Do the ruler and his ministers have a way of dealing with this situation? Answer: The ruler and the ministers may make adjustments in the following ways: pursuing policies to ensure that no farmland will remain unused and that there will be no surplus labor. Migration of farmers to newly reclaimed land may be organized; heavy taxes may be reduced after a comparison is made between past and present tax rates. Extravagance in consumption may be prohibited; the wealthy household’s appropriation of the property of others may be suppressed. Should there be floods, drought, and plagues, grain in the granaries may be made available, and all the funds in the government treasury may be used for relief—these are all that the ruler and his ministers can do in the way of adjustments between population and productive land.
In a word, after a long period of peaceful rule, Heaven-and-earth cannot stop the people from reproducing. Yet the resources with which Heaven-and-earth nourish the people are finite. After a period of peaceful rule, the ruler and the ministers cannot stop the people from reproducing, yet what the ruler and the ministers can do for the people is limited to the policies enumerated above. Among ten youths in a family, there are always one or two who resist being educated. Among the idle people in all the empire, how can it be expected that all will accept control from above? The housing for one person is inadequate for the needs of ten persons; how can it be sufficient for a hundred persons? The food for one person is inadequate for ten persons; how can it be sufficient for a hundred persons? This is why I am worried about peaceful rule.
[Hong, Yiyan, in Juanshi geji 1: 8a–9b—KCL]
THE DETERIORATION OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Prefects and County Magistrates
Hong Liangji worried not only that the surfeit of population made subsistence difficult. The deterioration of local government in the late Qianlong period did not escape his keen attention either. The smallest unit of government traditionally was the county (xian), presided over by a magistrate who was responsible for collection of taxes to produce the annual quota, as well as for administration of justice. The tenure of the magistrate was often short, and the quality of his government depended largely on his control over the permanent sub-bureaucracy—the notorious yamen clerks and runners known to have tyrannized the people. In the late eighteenth century, a county magistrate could be responsible for a population as large as a hundred thousand. The direct supervisor of the county magistrate was the prefect, whose prefecture (fu) included a number of counties. Neither the prefect nor the magistrate could reform the local administration, especially when the central and provincial leadership was corrupt.
Prefects and county magistrates are officials close to the people. When a prefect is a good person, blessings will spread to a thousand li; when the magistrate is a good person, the blessings will spread to a hundred li. Is there any secret to the work of prefects and county magistrates? The only secret lies in the motivation of these officials. In my youth, when I attended to my grandfather and father, I remember that when someone of the neighborhood was appointed a prefect or a county magistrate, he would receive sympathy and encouragement from relatives and friends who were bound to worry as to whether the vacancy [he might then have to fill] had an excessive or a light workload and whether it was in an area known as “difficult to govern.” Then during the twenty or thirty years between my coming of age and my becoming an official myself, customs and attitudes abruptly changed. When someone in the neighborhood was d
ue to become a prefect or a county magistrate, he would receive sympathy and exhortations from friends and relatives who would worry about him as to whether the position he might fill would yield enough profit to cover what must be spent on social relations [lit. compensation and entertaining]—in other words, how much the prefect or magistrate would get for himself each year. There would no longer be any talk about the people’s livelihood or the ideals of local administration.
[When the prefect or county magistrate has arrived at his post] his mind is not on the people. He must ask such questions as the amount of the customary fees (lougui) to be collected each year. How much will the gifts from his subordinates amount to? What surplus will there be from land and other taxes? Moreover, those who are said to be his wives, sons, brothers, other relatives, friends, servants and maidservants—all are characterized by insatiable greed and will help the prefect or the county magistrate in his pursuit of profit. When, unfortunately, the prefect or magistrate for the same area is changed several times a year, many will be in great distress—these include subordinate personnel at the boards [in Beijing]2 and, at the locality, rich merchants and common people. There may be among prefects and county magistrates those who possess self-respect and who actually have the interests of the people at heart, but it is difficult to find one or two of them among ten prefects or county magistrates. Moreover, these one or two [upright] officials will be ridiculed by the seven or eight other prefects and county magistrates as pedantic sticklers, stupid and incapable of watching out for their own interests. Even the higher officials [at the provincial level] will regard these one or two [uncorrupted local officials] as out of touch with the exigencies of the times and failing to go along with prevailing practice. If unluckily some fault is found in their conduct of official business, they will be removed as quickly as possible. . . .
Yamen Clerks
Yamen clerks or sub-officials (lixu) are a subject of frequent complaint by statecraft writers from the Song on down. The latter regard the sub-bureaucracy that handles most official business as venal, grasping, and unguided by the Confucian standards that are supposedly inculcated by the classical education required of regular officials.
In present circumstances, the harm [that] officials do to the people is far less than the harm yamen clerks do to the people. How so? This is because the yamen clerks today are not the same as the clerks of antiquity . . . who were versed in classical scholarship and expert in their knowledge of laws and imperial decrees. Clerks in those times not only would not harass the people, they would even benefit the people.
This, however, is not the case today. Out of a hundred yamen clerks, not even one has advanced to become a [regular] official. Since there is no channel for promotion [to become regular officials], they concentrate on the pursuit of profit. . . .
The yamen clerks are feared by their neighbors; they are feared by scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants, and indeed by scholar-officials themselves.
When the especially evil-minded and cunning among them take over the actual control of the [local] administration, the government itself fears them.
Why is this so? It is because officials who themselves want to profit by exploiting the people cannot do so except through the yamen clerks. The latter know very well who is rich and who is not in the local area—these facts may be hidden from the officials but never from the yamen clerks. Whether a household is worth only one tael, or a hundred or a thousand taels, the yamen clerks know exactly, without fail. Of the amount then extracted from the people, 30 percent may go to the officials, but 50 percent will have gone to the yamen clerks.
Now among the larger counties, there could be as many as a thousand clerks; for counties of the next size, as many as seven or eight hundred; and for smaller counties, a minimum of one or two hundred. These one thousand to one or two hundred yamen clerks are not engaged in farming, and the women of their households are not engaged in weaving. Clearly, they are living off the people. Roughly speaking, the products of ten households among the people are not adequate for the demands of one yamen clerk. When there are a thousand yamen clerks in a county with a population of ten thousand, the people will be restive.
[Hong, Yiyan, in Juanshi geji 19b–22a—KCL]
THE ROOTS OF REBELLION
The following excerpt is from Memorial on the War Against Heterodoxy, which Hong submitted in the spring of 1798 on the occasion of an imperially conducted examination for Hanlin academicians. His theme is that the “White Lotus” sectarian rebellion had broken out in Hubei, Sichuan, and other provinces because of the abuse of power by local officials, who arbitrarily added new taxes and persecuted the people. Hong believed that once local government in these areas was reformed and the military and provincial officials properly rewarded or punished, the rebellion would end of its own accord. Here he discusses the crisis in local administration.
The deterioration of the county government is a hundred times worse than ten or twenty years ago. The [county officials] have betrayed the laws of the Son of Heaven and exhausted the resources of the common people. From what I have heard, although there are heterodox sects in such places as Yichang in Hubei and Dazhou in Sichuan, the people there value their lives and property and love their wives and children too much to dare to violate the law. The county officials were not able to prevent the spread of heterodoxy by exerting good influences on the people, and when sectarianism spread, the officials would use the pretext of investigating heterodoxy to make demands on the people and threaten their lives, until the people joined the rebels. I would humbly suggest that in locations where heterodox rebellions have arisen, inquiry must be made into the causes of conflict, to see whether the rebellion was precipitated by the officials, who should be punished according to the facts of each case.
County magistrates have incriminated themselves in three ways.
1. Funds authorized by the court for disaster relief were pocketed by the officials, who would declare that the funds were intended for making up deficiencies in what was due the government—in this way, the beneficence of the court never reached the people.
2. In ordinary times, the local officials would appropriate taxes and military funds [for their own use]. But when troubles arose, they would try to conceal their failure and even claim some merit. County officials would conceal the facts from the prefects and circuit intendants; prefects and circuit intendants from the governors-general and governors; governors-general and governors from even Your Imperial Majesty. Thus the sentiments of those on the lower level have no way of reaching the higher level.
3. When there is some success, even personal servants and secretaries [of the county magistrate] claim a share of the merit. But in case of failure, the blame is fixed on the good people who are in distress as roving migrants. Failure, to be sure, is not the fault of the county officials alone. High officials at the provincial level and the high military commanders and officers all behave in this way without even making a secret of it. It is no surprise that the county officials imitate them.
[Hong, Yiyan, in Juanshi geji 10: 2a–3a—KCL]
GONG ZIZHEN’S REFORMIST VISION
From a prominent family of scholar-officials with a rich literary background, Gong Zizhen (1792–1841) stands as a key link between the homegrown variety of statecraft thought and the later generation whose reformism responded to the challenge of the West. Though recognized as an important poet and a brilliant writer, Gong had no great success in the higher ranks of officialdom. Instead he demonstrated his talents in secretarial capacities for important state boards and in association with leading officials such as Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan, whose doings and writings, in direct confrontation with the West, continue this chapter on Chinese statecraft thinking.
Gong’s writings, of which only a small portion survive, covered a wide range of intellectual interests typical of the practical, evidential learning among Qing Confucians but distinguished in his case by penetrating analyses of Qing weaknesses and
prophetic warnings of dangers ahead. His independence and outspokenness no doubt account for the frustration he experienced in fulfilling his passionate desire to be of public service, while these disappointments only intensified his bitterness and sharpened his diatribes against incompetent leaders and their fawning subordinates.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 27