Raymond W. Chu - Career Patterns in the Ching Dynasty: The Office of Governor-general

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

MICHIGAN MONOGRAPHS IN CHINESE STUDIES

NO. 51

CAREER PATTERNS IN THE CHING DYNASTY

The Office of Governor-general

Raymond W. Chu

William G. Saywell

Ann Arbor

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

1984

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program

Copyright 1984

by

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

all rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Chu, Raymond W., 1936

Career patterns in the Ching dynasty.

(Michigan monographs in Chinese studies ; no. 51)

Bibliography: p. 135

1. ChinaGovernorsHistory. 2. ChinaGovernorsBiography. 3. ChinaPolitics and government16441912.

I. Saywell, William G., 1936

III. Series.

JQ1519.A598C535 1984 354.51031609 8429310

ISBN 0892640553

ISBN 0892640561

Printed in the United States of America

cover design by Janis Michael

ISBN 978-0-89264-055-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-89264-056-0 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-12778-8 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-472-90174-6 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

For C. C. Professor Shih Chingcheng Scholar, Teacher, Colleague, Friend with great respect and affection.

Contents

We are most grateful to Professor Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, who read the manuscript at an early stage and offered a number of extremely useful suggestions. Ms. Nancy Evans offered editorial assistance throughout the preparation of the original manuscript. Ms. Patricia Saywell helped in the preparation of the final editorial changes. Mrs. Ruth Maloney of the University of Toronto and Mrs. Joan Pearson at Simon Fraser University offered graciously of their time and talent in much of the typing of the manuscript.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the University of Toronto in the research for the book and in its preparation for publication.

Finally we should like to claim that our editors, Ms. Janis Michael and Ms. Janet M. Opdyke, must be paragons of patience and good spirit.

The office of governor-general (tsung-tu) was the highest provincial post throughout the Ching dynasty. As such, it was a vital link in the control of a vast empire by a very small and alien ruling elite. This is primarily a biographical and statistical analysis of the incumbents of that office. By analyzing the biographical data of those who held the position of governor-general, much may be learned about the nature of the office itself. However, the main objective of the study is to provide information on career patterns, that is, the variety of different posts held from the first official appointment to that of governor-general, of an important cross section of successful Ching bureaucrats. By plotting and analyzing the different patterns their official careers took, we should be able to determine what kind of men reached the top of Chinas provincial and national administration during the final centuries of Chinas imperial history; the qualifications that were required; the factors which prompted rapid promotion or sudden disgrace. We should also be able to determine the extent to which these and other factors varied markedly among Manchu, Mongol, Chinese Bannerman, and Han incumbents and whether changes throughout the dynasty can be detected in policies concerning the office or in the career patterns of its personnel. If such detection is possible, this study may lend support to the view that late imperial China was not static, but a society undergoing significant change.

A number of important studies in Japanese, Chinese, and Western languages have appeared that are either devoted to a number of the problems with which we are concerned, or that contain important insights on these issues. While some of these are more exhaustive in their analysis of certain issues, none, to the best of our knowledge, concentrate specifically on the office of governor-general or study it with as broad a sweep of interests as is attempted in this analysis. A good deal of general information on the office itself is available in such studies as Ch Tung-tsus Local Government in China under the Ching, and the earlier work of Hsieh Pao-chao. No study of Ching government is possible without frequent use of Thomas Metzgers indispensable book The Internal Organization of Ching Bureaucracy.

Important early works such as John King Fairbanks study on the Manchu-Chinese dyarchy have analyzed, at least for short time periods, the problems faced by the alien Manchu rulers in controlling the large, ethnically distinct, indigenous population of Han Chinese and in implementing a dyarchy, problems

More specific studies on the office of the governor-general and its incumbents throughout the Ching dynasty normally have included the office of the governor (hsn-fu) as well and have tended to limit their range of interest to matters related to the ethnic identity of those who held the posts (collectively known as tu-fu). Although, as we shall describe briefly below, the distinctions between the offices of governor-general and governor were few and generally unclear, we have not included governors in this study for several reasons. Our work is primarily a case study of career patterns. If its main purpose was a thorough analysis of the office of governor-general, more attention to the role of governors would have been required to elucidate as fully as possible those elements that distinguished the governor-generalship from the governorship. However, for a study of career patterns, we believe the governors-general alone offer a sufficiently large sample to make the data statistically significant and our interpretation of them reliable. They offer a sample, moreover, for which biographical data is a good deal more complete than for the much larger group of governors. Therefore, in most areas of our statistical analysis we have greater confidence in the reliability of our data on the governors-general, and the extrapolations we make from them than we do in the comparable data for governors. Finally, while the responsibilities of the two offices were deliberately overlapped to provide a system of checks and balances, the governors-general were in rank and status at the top of the provincial hierarchy. (Normally the governor-general held the rank of 2A, while the governors rank was 2B, though either might hold more senior ranks by virtue of posts held concurrently in the central government.in the capital after reaching the pinnacle of provincial service. Thus, his career pattern was more likely to be near completion than that of a governor.

The first book-length study to attempt a reasonably complete statistical breakdown of both sets of officials throughout the dynasty, emphasizing changes in ethnic composition by period, was published in Taipei in 1963 by Fu Tsung-mao. Unfortunately, Fus study is based on a sample of 571 governors and governors-general rather than all who held either post and therefore tends to distort the data on many of the issues of concern to us. His sample was drawn from the group of office-holders who warranted biographical entries in the Ching-shih kao and Ching-shih lieh-chuan, and these men, by definition, were more successful than their excluded colleagues.

An important early article by Lawrence D. Kessler, Ethnic Composition of Provincial Leadership During the Ching Dynasty, appeared in the