Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine

In the decade after the First Opium War, Thomas Francis Wade, then an assistant secretary at the British Foreign Office in Hong Kong, carefully studied the public documents of the Qing state. Reading a file of court gazettes, he noted that officials could be removed for infractions including “corruption; defalcation; concealment of crime; erroneous decisions; remissness in not preventing, or tardiness in repairing, evil; incapacity, mediocrity; inexperience; informality; litigation; malingering; contumacity; presumption; and unpopularity.” He found in this vivid litany evidence of the empire's inexorable descent into corruption and decay.1 The list reflects the preoccupations of a British imperial agent, but it also accurately suggests the intense pressure on bureaucrats to produce documents testifying to their own exemplary behavior. Documents and rules were thus instruments of official discipline and self-preservation. Maura Dykstra's Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine suggests an additional, alternative reading of the Qing state's voluminous documentary record. She observes, not inaccurately, that the eighteenth-century Qing state had a capacious appetite for documentation and regulation. She further, and more controversially, argues that the abundant documentation generated by the bureaucratic state's reporting requirements inspired anxiety in the empire's rulers and thereby planted the seeds of the dynasty's decline.Throughout the book, Dykstra both analyzes documentary practices of the distant past and critiques archival practices of the present and recent past. For instance, the book's prologue, written in alternating first-person narrative, provides a concise overview of the “Qing Archives.” However, rather than describing how Qing central, provincial, or local offices created and utilized archives, Dykstra focuses on a longue durée history of archival fragility. She gives examples such as the periodic destruction of records during the Qing, the disarray of the archives in the early twentieth century and Chinese Civil War, and the state-led archival management practices in place since the 1970s. The author thereby places her project in a narrative of archival discovery amid the threat of archival destruction. In the context of the book as a whole, the prologue seems intended to substantiate the idea that the documentary records of Qing state institutions have long been vulnerable to distortions and interventions, and indeed, that they remain so. In effect, then, she argues that due to gaps in the documentary record a reconstruction of Qing administrative practice requires substantial interpolation. Scholars will differ in the extent to which they agree with this premise and over whether they find the resulting conclusions persuasive. The problem of silences and distortions in the archives is, of course, not unique to Qing history.2 Framing the book in this way forecloses the opportunity to clearly outline the central chronology, sources, methods, and historiographical context.The main body of the book, divided into two parts, “Building the Empire of Routine” (roughly 1644 to 1735) and “After the Administrative Revolution” (roughly 1735 to 1799), includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. In chapter 1, Dykstra explains that while the military conquest of China was accomplished quite quickly, the Qing administrative conquest was more protracted. This problem is illustrated with an example: the Shunzhi emperor was unable to assess how many prisoners languished in his empire's jails. Dykstra uses this as a pivot to introduce an imperial motive for the “administrative revolution”: early Qing emperors were deeply frustrated with the limits of their administration. Through the end of the seventeenth century, to gain administrative control of their large and growing empire, Qing emperors imposed “deadlines, mechanisms for enforcing responsibility for meeting them, substantive regulations about the duties attached to case handling, and sanctions demanding that high-level officials properly supervise those responsible for cases in their jurisdictions” (55). In subsequent chapters, Dykstra follows these impositions as they grew ever more elaborate and complex over the next century. For instance, chapter 2 focuses on the composition and review of case reports (primarily those documenting capital crimes), showing how the stringent requirements of “central review” influenced the documentary practice of local actors composing case narratives and other supporting materials. Here, the author draws on administrative handbooks and documents from the Ba County Archive. Chapter 3 turns to the reign of the Yongzheng emperor, when the court began to require the simultaneous maintenance of documentary records at different levels of the bureaucracy. Handling these “multiple new documentary streams” increasingly dominated the work of the provincial governor and his counterparts in Beijing (104).Part 1 of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine attempts a macroscopic view of shifting documentary practices across the Qing bureaucracy. In Qing China, officials generated bureaucratic documents used to communicate among three basic layers of bureaucracy: the local yamen, provincial offices, and what Dykstra calls the “central ministries,” meaning the Six Boards, here called ministries, plus the Censorate, Grand Secretariat, and other capital institutions (xviii); it is not clear whether the rarely mentioned Grand Council is meant to be part of the central ministries. Dykstra argues, and to some extent demonstrates, that at the beginning of the dynasty, the Qing state mobilized relatively little reporting across these three layers. By the dynasty's midpoint around 1800, the amount of reporting had exploded. In their attempt to improve surveillance standards and enhance administrative practices, Qing rulers unwittingly overburdened local and provincial officials with increasingly unmanageable levels of documentary work. Magistrates and governors seemingly spent all their time producing documents and then distilling them into summary registers and even “registers of registers” (111–13). In part 2, the well-studied process for review of capital punishment cases serves as a primary case study, though this section also suggests the implementation of integrated reporting practices across all areas of administrative concern. Dykstra argues that the proliferation of required documentation created the appearance of widespread corruption and decline by the turn of the nineteenth century. Over time, appearances substituted for reality and contributed to the actual decline and fall of the Qing state. This last and most consequential sequence of events features centrally in the conclusion of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, although its unfolding is not described in detail.The “administrative revolution” referred to in the book's title is alternately presented as taking place in the early Qing, the Yongzheng reign, and the eighteenth century. These are not identical descriptors, and the chronology needs further clarification. It hinges on the production and review of so-called “summary memorials” (huiti 彙題 or huizou 彙奏, discussed in the first half of chapter 4). These were the culmination of the eighteenth-century craze for documentation: lengthy memorials that tabulated an array of required reports at the provincial level for submission to the “central ministries.” According to Dykstra, these “summary memorials” were originally packaged “in a single mega-memorial,” but the reorganizing practices of the First Historical Archive (FHA) have obscured our ability to view them in their original contexts. However, simple searches in open-access archival catalogs reveal exactly the type of document of interest to Dykstra. Many of the Qianlong reign documents containing “huizou” in their titles were authored by provincial offices, number more than one hundred pages in length, and consist of extended lists of a highly variable set of matters such as “warships needing repair,” “expenditures and projects completed and remaining incomplete,” and “escaped fugitives on the lam.” Most (but not all) of these summary documents were submitted as part of straightforward annual reporting. Clearly, the available summary memorials provide ample source material for research. Here, as elsewhere, closer examination and description beyond quick tabulations would have provided welcome support for the book's far-reaching arguments.3Did the widespread production of these reports in the eighteenth century constitute an “administrative revolution”? Were the late eighteenth-century documents substantially different from reports produced earlier in the dynasty? Dykstra contends that the summary reports responded to an unprecedented demand for information from localities by the center (and mediated by the provinces), resulting in an “epistemological shift” in the activities of the entire state apparatus. Was this shift epistemological as Dykstra suggests? Or was it principally an operational shift? Administrative Terms of the Six Boards, one of many resources produced in the eighteenth century to facilitate the workings of the multilingual bureaucracy, describes the term huiti 彙題 as follows: “All matters lacking in urgency need not be memorialized individually. Instead, wait until several items have accumulated, then assemble them together to memorialize” (fan wu guan jiyao zhi shi bu bi yi shi yi zou, ke yi si ji you shu jian huiqi tizou 凡無關緊要之事不必一事一奏可以俟集有數件彙齊題奏).4 This definition—found only under the heading of the Board of Appointments—implies that huiti functioned more as a verb than a noun.5 This term does not appear in forerunners to Liubu chengyu. While this suggests an eighteenth-century trend toward routinization, “summarizing” would appear to have functioned as an expedient for “matters lacking in urgency,” rather than a highly consequential turn to “summary analysis” leading to the dramatic overreporting of bureaucratic infractions in the Qianlong reign, as the book seems to argue.The remainder of part 2 describes the ramifications of the “administrative revolution” in the Qianlong era by detailing the process of “case-ification.” The term “case-ification” refers to the idea that imperial demands for reporting caused administrative work and documents to be increasingly bundled into distinct and countable “cases” (an 案). Dykstra argues that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the FHA's archival and digital projects systematically disassembled cases, so that documents originally sharing a common origin and context are seen piecemeal and out of context. Archival disassembly therefore obscured the fundamental importance of cases for late imperial governance. However, as chapter 5 points out, the use of interlocking “cases” did not always enhance bureaucratic practice. The neat boundaries between “cases” were often illusory. In the extensively discussed example of Governor Zhou Wan, the author shows how key circumstances cases could remain obscure to the emperor and central ministries. Although they are not central to Dykstra's argument, three or four main administrative problems come up repeatedly in this chapter and elsewhere: documenting, investigating, and reporting complex crimes, especially homicides and cross-border investigations; assessing the treatment of convicts and prisoners before release or execution; and transferring administrative posts. These are all problems that required the coordination of geographically separated offices up and down the administrative hierarchy, suggesting that the weak point of the Qing bureaucracy was more logistical than documentary.Like this book, Philip Kuhn's classic Soulstealers wrestles with representations of the imperial bureaucracy and the emperor's place within it. It includes brief discussion of the “Sun Jia'gan False Memorial Case.”6 The Sun Jiagan case involved many of the logistical problems mentioned in this book: cross-border investigations, bureaucratic discipline and cover-ups, and a crisis of documentary authority. In memorials and edicts related to this case that survive in the Veritable Records of the Qianlong reign, the emperor and officials explicitly referred to the fiasco as a “case,” but in abstract terms, not as a discrete archival fact. In using the single “case” of Governor Zhou Wan as the culminating example of the book, Dykstra attempts to showcase both the momentous transitions and the defects of the eighteenth-century bureaucracy. Puzzlingly, she does not incorporate the administrative mechanisms, document types, and reporting structures described in the preceding chapters into the study's narration. Instead, it plays out as a dark comedy of malfeasance and mistakes, overseen by an emperor who “demands,” “sneers,” and “opines.” Indeed, although the book's framing stresses impersonal factors, its language repeatedly suggests that the expansion of bureaucratic reporting took place largely at the impetus of the Qing emperors. It thus portrays these emperors as the consummate masters of their vast empire and its overburdened bureaucracy. But can bureaucratic cases be understood without deeper understanding of the lives, careers, and relationships of the men drawn into them? And are there ways that the proliferation of routine documents may have in fact served the interests of imperial bureaucrats vis-à-vis the court?Few other fields have such rich scholarly traditions centering on critical readings of documents and documentary systems as does Qing history. Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine should be in closer conversation with fifty years of transnational scholarship on Qing institutions and administration. It is jarring to find the creation of the palace memorial system and the Grand Council—pioneered by Chuang Chi-fa and Beatrice Bartlett and still the subject of important research—barely mentioned in a monograph focusing on transitions in the mid-eighteenth century. Engagement with scholarship on the people and systems of the imperial bureaucracy, by Madeline Zelin, R. Kent Guy, William T. Rowe, Yingcong Dai, and others would have enriched the discussion, even as reference to the scholarship of Evelyn Rawski, David Porter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, and others would have allowed Dykstra to show that the Qing state was just as multilingual and multiethnic in its Beijing administrative nexus as at its borders.7 Although the book's language, framing, and acknowledgments suggest extensive comparative inspiration, there are few explicit comparisons made with polities outside the Qing Empire, or indeed beyond the particular case studies that the author has selected. The book does make many tantalizing comparative claims, such as the statement regarding the formation of the “distributed archive” that “the result was one of the most dizzyingly sophisticated mechanisms of principle-agent [sic] control in the history of bureaucracy” (18). Statements like these are intriguing and appealing. But they do require a greater degree of substantiation and engagement.Dykstra's first monograph is stimulating, even provocative, and has already attracted a very great deal of attention and controversy. Unlike most first books, this one is not based on the author's 2014 UCLA dissertation. In her acknowledgments, the author cites collaborations with the Legalizing Space in China (LSC) working group and the Max Planck Institute for History and Legal Theory as influencing her turn toward legal and administrative history.8 She further describes multiple opportunities for discussion, engagement, and review in the context of invited talks, a manuscript workshop, and sponsorship by the Weatherhead Institute. Unfortunately, all of these levels of input and feedback, including Harvard University Asia Center's review and editorial process, did not lead to a polished final product.Given the book's publication in August 2022, the final stages of writing and revision clearly took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel to Asia was virtually impossible from the United States. Besides travel restrictions, the challenges for academic research in China that emerged around 2020 and remain unresolved are significant, troubling, and asymmetrically burdensome. Important digital resources for the study of Qing archives are now available online. These include the online catalog of the FHA, the National Palace Museum Digital Library of Qing Archives, Academia Sinica's Grand Secretariat Archive, and the Qing Veritable Records and other standard dynastic compilations. However, not all of these are freely available. For instance, not many libraries and institutions in the United States subscribe to the Grand Secretariat Archive.9 The result is that while faculty and graduate students at a few elite institutions have top-tier digital resources, students and scholars elsewhere are at a considerable disadvantage, especially when in-person access has been interrupted. This may be an unstated reason why, besides limited examples from the central and local archives, the study makes such extensive use of published imperial compilations like the Qing Veritable Records and Collected Statutes (Huidian).10 If indeed this is the case, the author has missed an opportunity to start a conversation in this regard.Ultimately, the book's merits lie in its invitation to inquiry and discussion. Ultimately, the uptick in interaction between the localities, provinces, and center spotlighted by Dykstra was in fact an important and documentable trend in the Qing, and indeed it is one that has been well studied by others. Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine clearly describes how the imperial appetite for information grew beyond the bureaucracy's capacity to deliver it. But what were the specific constraints upon this overreach? Perhaps material—how much paper was consumed, and how much did it cost? Perhaps financial—did local administration ever grow enough to handle the increased burden of paperwork? Or perhaps time—was there ever enough time in the day to get the work done? These are just a few of the questions introduced by this challenging volume

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