Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Law, Society, and Culture in China) Review

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Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Law, Society, and Culture in China) ReviewThis book is by far the most important study of local government in late imperial China that has yet been published. Its only possible rival might be T'ung-tsu Ch'u's 1962 classic, "Local Government in China Under the Ch'ing," which Reed's book has largely superseded.
A unique feature of Reed's book is that it makes use of the only county government archive of any size that survives from the Qing dynasty, the Ba County archive. This singular body of material became available to scholars only shortly before Reed began his doctoral research, and he was quick to seize the opportunity to provide an insider's view of how local administration actually worked in the late empire. Previous scholarship had depended on the writings of senior officials appointed by the imperial center, and was severely limited by the top-down, condescending perspective of such sources; it tended to pass along unwittingly the prejudices of Qing elites as empirical fact.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the book is to rescue us from diehard stereotypes of clerks and runners in the local government offices ("yamen") of late imperial China. For centuries, these locally-recruited personnel were vilified as inherently evil and corrupt; such rhetoric was a standard part of official and elite discourse for several dynasties, and earlier generations of scholars tended to accept it at face value. Yet no one until Reed had bothered to ask why a system that employed such personnel, and depended on them for most of the vital and sensitive tasks of government, could function so well for so long. For example, clerks and runners were constantly blamed for supposedly provoking litigation in order to extort personal profits - and yet, as Reed proves, the entire local court system was financed by fees collected from litigants. The increase of litigation was hardly the result of extortion by clerks and runners. Reed shows that this discourse of vituperation was vital to the ideology of empire; it enabled degree-holding Mandarins of elite pedigree to cloak themselves in the symbols of Confucian legitimacy while distancing themselves from the dirty work of government (tax collection, arrests, etc.) that was performed by the clerks and runners under their supervision. Such rhetoric was one of the ways that late imperial regimes tried to obscure the coercive bureaucratic machinery that underpinned their supposedly virtuous rule.
Another important contribution of Reed's book is his discovery of the "customary law" of the local yamen, which was used to resolve disputes among the clerks and runners themselves. The local magistrate would adjudicate internal disputes on the basis of longstanding internal rules and norms, which the clerks and runners themselves would report to him. (Magistrates were outsiders who served relatively brief terms before being rotated elsewhere; the clerks and runners were long-serving locals.) This process was invisible from the outside, and it runs completely counter to the top-down view of law and government in late imperial China that constituted our received wisdom; in fact, it clearly violated the nominal rules dictated by the imperial center for running local affairs. But, as Reed shows, if such nominal rules had been enforced, the imperial system would have collapsed immediately. Like the official rhetoric about clerks and runners, these nominal rules published in the imperial capital had long been taken at face value, as a description of how local government really functioned. But increasingly it appears that the imperial system worked in precisely the manner that Reed describes, through flexible negotiation between lofty ideological norms and practical local needs, with the latter frequently proving decisive.
Reed's great strength, based on his mastery of rich archival materials, is to view the imperial system "from the bottom up," through the lens of the local. This perspective makes his study of government come alive: it is far more social history than institutional history.Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Law, Society, and Culture in China) Overview

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