Conflict, Community, and the State in Late Imperial Sichuan

Making Local Justice

Quinn Javers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Exploring local practices of dispute resolution and laying bare the routine role of violence in the late-Qing dynasty, Conflict, Community, and the State in Late Imperial Sichuan demonstrates the significance of everyday violence in ordering, disciplining, and building communities.

The book examines over 350 legal cases that comprise the "cases of unnatural death" archival file from 1890 to 1900 in Ba County, Sichuan province. The archive presents an untidy array of death, including homicides, suicides, and found bodies. An analysis of the muddled and often petty disputes found in these records reveals the existence of a local system of authority that disciplined and maintained daily life. Often relying on violence, this local justice system occasionally intersected with the state's justice system, but was not dependent on it. This study demonstrates the importance of informal, local authority to our understanding of justice in the late Qing era.

Providing a non-elite perspective on Qing power, law, justice, and the role of the state, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history, as well as legal history and comparative studies of violence.

Part I
Practices of conflict

1 False accusation and vernacular maps

Local tools for shaping justice

In Ba County, justice did not simply emanate from the court into the county. Indeed, as locals exerted influence on the state, they bent this authority to their needs. Local power could even extend into the courtroom, and, as locals engaged the state’s authority, they deployed various strategies to bend that power to their ends. In particular, when navigating state power, individuals attempted to control the information that made its way to the magistrate. By doing so, locals profoundly shaped the reality that was presented to the sojourning official in order to direct the outcome of the state’s intervention. They attempted to use local truths to fabricate legal truths. Rather than simply reacting to state power, these stratagems lay bare the very real ways in which locals – including the poor – drove disputation even as it entered the court. While moving from informal processes of dispute resolution to the courtroom altered the possibilities for a successful outcome, individuals continued to be key participants in the legal process. Locals brought their everyday politics and local truths into court, and continued contributing to the making of justice.

Two forms of information presented to the county court, false accusations and maps drawn by litigants, expose the sophisticated strategies Qing subjects employed to advance their interests in court, as well as the limits local intelligence could impose on the county court. The joint consideration of these two techniques highlights the driving role that members of local communities played in drawing state authority into their disputes, and stresses the enduring influence Qing subjects had on the making of justice.

The first of these techniques, false accusation [wugao], provided access to state authority, and the legal record is rife with this practice.¹ In particular, with false accusations of homicide, a seemingly daring act in which the litigant formally risked her or his life, individuals resorted to bold and potentially dangerous accusations to further their claims, suggesting that locals had a reasonable expectation that their falsehoods would succeed in gaining the magistrate’s ear without provoking severe punishment.² Strikingly, a wide range of individuals engaged in this behavior, including the rural poor.

A second strategy to influence state authority was the use of maps. These were often drawn by litigants themselves, yet even when sketched by court clerks, they relied on local information, and must be seen as expressions of local power. I call these disputative depictions of local realities “vernacular maps” in order to stress local and narrow goals of these cartographic projects, as opposed to those drafted by the central state. Vernacular maps are clear depictions of the shaping hand of local influence on state power, and make clear the enduring presence of everyday politics in the court.

Profiting from death: false accusation as legal strategy

Common people used false accusation to force the court to consider disputes it might have otherwise ignored. In many instances, individuals deployed explicitly illegal means to bring their grievances to court. Not only did the court not punish these transgressions, the magistrate commonly ruled on the underlying conflict, frequently economic, that was the root of the dispute. These cases demonstrate the degree to which ordinary people were able to work the system by exploiting illegal but common strategies of deception. These practices are especially surprising given the formal risks of lying at court.³ The Qing Code states:

In the case of anyone who falsely accuses another of an offense punishable with strokes of the light bamboo, sentence him to the penalty of the offense of which he falsely accused [the other], increased by two degrees. If the penalty is exile, penal servitude, or strokes of the heavy bamboo (regardless of whether it has been executed and the accused has gone to the place of punishment or not), add three degrees to the penalty for the offense falsely complained of. Each penalty is limited to 100 strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to 930 miles. (Do not increase to the extent of strangulation.)⁴

Yet, despite the threat of these punishments, false accusation constituted a common legal strategy deployed by a range of litigants.

By design, the court was not interested in hearing petty economic disputes. Philosophically, litigation was seen as a sign of poor governance and unruliness. And practically, late-Qing magistrates were overwhelmed with legal cases.⁵ A false accusation of homicide, however, provided entry into the court as a site of mediation. Consequently, locals resorted to formally dangerous tactics to pursue their interests. False accusations of murder posed an even risker proposition for their tellers since homicide was a capital crime and the Code mandated even more severe penalties for these falsehoods: “If the offense which was the subject of the false accusation is punishable with death, and the sentence has already been executed (then, according to whether the original law imposes strangulation or beheading), sentence [the accuser] to death.”⁶ With these claims, individuals legally put their lives on the line. Yet, individuals continued to resort to this tactic.

As a consequence, these legal strategies reveal a broader legal culture surrounding the court, and evoke a social world in which legal knowledge was generally present or at least widely available for purchase.⁷ Moreover, this legal culture was broadly dispersed both geographically and in terms of social standing. Rural residents, for example, are well represented in the following cases. With both “litigation masters” [songshi] selling their talents and inns catering to petitioners, the concentration of legal knowledge and culture would have been densest near the court. However, that peasants from as far away as 43 miles brought their claims to Chongqing suggests that legal culture was not the exclusive domain of the county seat. Moreover, the geographic pervasiveness of this legal culture was mirrored in the range of social classes engaged in legal combat. It may have been true in the nineteenth century (as it is today) that the rich and powerful had greater access to legal remedies. Yet, the host of lowly tenant farmers and barbers in the legal records shows that the manipulation of the legal system was not beyond their imagination or reach.

In many of these legal cases, the goal of the false accusation was financial gain. Death could be an unexpected opportunity for an economic windfall.⁸ By agitating at court, many litigants hoped to secure a payoff from the death of a relative. In other instances, plaintiffs used the death of a relative to draw the court into ongoing contractual disputes, and we see the magistrate arbitrating the underlying dispute even after the false accusation has been exposed. At the very end of the nineteenth century, individuals in Ba County still wanted the state’s authority brought to bear on their conflicts, and found ways to compel this intervention. One such individual was the tenant farmer Chen Bingtang.

In a plaint filed in 1895, Chen, 38 sui, described how he had fallen behind on his rent, in part, due to flooding.⁹ As a result of the disaster, he wanted his rent deposit returned. There was no accusation of violence in this initial plaint – this was a tenancy dispute pure and simple. In 1894, Chen had sublet land from Wang Fengshan, but flooding wiped out his crop, leaving him in debt. Chen filed a plaint stating:

This summer at flood season the water rose. The seedlings were wiped out. The entire large field was soaked. You can still find the piles of mud now. During the autumn harvest, [Wang’s] workers [took my grain as my final rent payment]. I wasn’t left with a single grain. Relying on local leaders, Li Juefu, Yang Jingqi and others, my rent was dismissed. The community discussed it: if you don’t have grain, then you don’t pay rent. At that time, [Wang] delivered [some of my deposit]. [But] there remained 40 [liang] from my original [cash] deposit. I have repeatedly demanded [this money], [but he] delays to this day…. This has forced me to move house. Farming is cruel and bitter to me.¹⁰

The magistrate wrote on this initial plaint that Chen should have his deposit returned but that he did not want the case heard in court. Chen’s second plaint, filed almost three months later, complained that his deposit had still not been returned as ordered by the magistrate’s rescript. He then further accused his landlord, Wang, of coming with a gang of family members to intimidate him into signing a statement releasing his claim on the deposit. Finally, in addition to all these economic grievances, Chen added that an employee of Wang’s had killed his infant son during the clash at his home. Chen reported:

Qiu Biaoting [Wang’s employee] led over twenty people to my house. They for some reason cooked up this statement. They forced me to sign [this statement saying] that my deposit was not valid. They [then] crowded into my house and threw all my furniture and other household items outside. You can go and see the damage. They tied up my wife, Guo Shi, and caused my one-sui child to be thrown to the ground. His face and eyes received serious injuries. He bled and [then] died.¹¹

Now there was an alleged homicide, although the accusation (later proven false when Chen admitted that his son had died of illness) came only after the magistrate had explicitly said that he did not want to hold a formal hearing about what seemed a purely economic dispute. Chen’s desire for a court hearing was heightened by local mediation’s failure to resolve the dispute. An accusation of homicide guaranteed that Chen’s case would be heard at court.

To counter these allegations, Wang filed his own plaint. In this document, he detailed the economic dispute, but made no mention of the death of Chen’s child – an incident that, if true, would certainly seem to require some explanation, refutation, or at least obfuscation. Further, He Xingfa, who had initially assisted Chen in renting Wang’s land, also filed a plaint in which he stated that Chen’s young son had, in fact, “died from some illness.”¹² This document again paints the dispute in purely economic terms, clearly laying out the terms of the rental and the consequences of Chen’s inability to recover his initial deposit on the land. As Chen himself reported: “I rely on the deposit to pay a deposit”¹³ – meaning that he first had to recover the monies deposited on Wang’s land before he could move and put down a deposit on a new piece of farmland, leaving him trapped in his dispute with Wang.

Chen was unable to extract himself from this economic relationship despite concerted local attempts at mediation. In his first plaint, Chen had indeed reported that the community had intervened on his behalf, but that Wang had still not returned his deposit. Chen again stressed the failure of community mediation in his second plaint, but it was not simply that this process could not help him. Now, the community actively worked against him by witnessing the public pledge in which Chen (apparently against his will) had renounced his right to the deposit.¹⁴ With this act, the local authority moved to block Chen’s claim.

In their own report to the court, local community leaders related the basic contours of the quarrel, highlighting their own engagement as the conflict intensified from a simple rent dispute into something more protracted. In fact, the local warden, security chief, and village head had visited Chen’s home following his accusation of trouble caused by Wang’s men and the death of his son. They reported that Chen’s things were strewn about outside his house and that his son had indeed exhibited injuries on his “face, eyes, upper arms and hands.”¹⁵ They also stated that the boy had died the next morning.

Local leaders noted that even before this visit to Chen’s home, they had attempted to mediate the conflict a total of four times. They had interceded on Chen’s behalf, arguing that the flood constituted what contemporary insurance companies might call “an act of God,” which entitled Chen to relief. The failure of their interventions to produce an amicable settlement led to the legal case, which had been driven into the court by Chen’s false homicide accusation, despite the magistrate’s explicit attempt to avoid hearing the case. Chen was able to continue to push his case by injecting violence into the dispute that caught the court’s attention, although he quickly dropped the murder charge once he no longer needed it.

This strategizing suggests both a fairly wide scope of judi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps and figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on conversions and conventions
• Introduction
• PART I Practices of conflict
• PART II Webs of power
• Appendix
• Character list
• References
• Index