THE FORON REPORT

A new report on Jin Fu’s activity commissioned in the late autumn of 1687 coincided with and may have precipitated Guo Xiu’s impeachment. Like previous reports, the 1687 document supported Jin Fu’s position. But unlike earlier cases, some members of the 1687 committee expressed dissatisfaction with the committee’s conclusions. The fall of Mingju and the attack on Jin Fu, which occurred after the report was made public and before it was discussed, may have loosened tongues. The result was a discussion that revealed much about the committee process and the river.

The composition of the committee was announced on November 29, 1687.¹⁷ The senior member was Foron, then Manchu minister of finance. The other members were Xiong Yixian (jinshi 1664, d. 1707), a Chinese member of the Ministry of Personnel, and two junior supervising secretaries, Dacina (n.d.) and Zhao Jishi (d. 1706).¹⁸ The group was balanced as to ethnicity; at each level, there was one Manchu and one Chinese. However, in terms of rank and influence the committee was unbalanced: Foron was clearly the dominant member of those appointed in the capital. Once the group reached Jiangnan, they were joined by Liangjiang governor-general Dong Ne (jinshi 1667) as well as the director-general of grain transport, Mu Tianyan (jinshi 1657, d. 1695). As he sent the group off, the emperor urged that, although Jin claimed that the agricultural colonies could produce hundreds of thousands in grain and cash, his purpose in supporting river construction was to benefit people, not earn revenue.¹⁹

A preliminary written version of the report appeared on January 21, 1688. Like previous committees sent to Jiangnan to investigate river work, the 1687–88 committee sided with Jin Fu. They argued that to control flooding in the downriver districts, the most important work was to regulate the flow upriver, and this could best be accomplished by building the secondary levee that Jin Fu had proposed along the Gao Family Dike. Embankments along the Grand Canal and the smaller east-flowing rivers needed to be reinforced, but the dredging at the mouths of smaller east-flowing rivers should be suspended. A partial text of the report that was copied into the Veritable Records made no reference to agricultural colonies, but subsequent discussion demonstrated that the report endorsed the idea, provided that the land used for colonies was “excess” land, created by reclamation and not owned by anyone. The report also confirmed that Jin Fu’s cost estimates were plausible.²⁰

This document produced an extraordinary flurry of responses. Governor-General Mu Tianyan argued that building a second wall around the Gao Family Dike was not necessary, and suggested that Foron had changed the content of the report after it was drafted. Sun Zaifeng claimed that when he met with the group along the coast, they agreed that coastal dredging should continue, but the final report recommended that the coastal dredging should be terminated. Censor Lu Zuxiu (b. 1652, jinshi 1679) observed that, for a territorial official, Jin Fu had a remarkably large following in the capital and was concerned only with his personal profit. Minister of war Zhang Yushu (1642–1711) and censor Xu Qianxue submitted memorials strongly opposing the formation of agricultural colonies.²¹ Jin Fu also memorialized, reviewing his own achievements and accusing Mu Tianyan, Sun Zaifeng, Guo Xiu, and Yu Chenglong of forming a faction against him.²² Guo Xiu’s memorial, the first of the series, started a cascade of criticism.

How was such a controversial report produced? Investigative committees were quite common in Qing administration, and their conclusions often appeared in the official record, cited as bases of imperial action. But rarely were accounts preserved of how the groups reached their conclusions. For Foron’s committee there was such an account, in the testimony of Dong Ne, one of its members. The account is biased, to be sure, but there were no unbiased observers of the river controversy of 1688, and Dong’s particular biases did not overly interfere with his tale. Dong Ne was an unusual governor-general. He took his jinshi in 1667, then served in the Hanlin Academy and the Censorate. When he was appointed governor-general of Jiangnan, he had no governing experience outside the capital.²³ The governor-general’s position was originally a military one, and many of Dong’s predecessors were military men. Dong, however, was stoutly civilian, his appointment having likely been the result of a central decision to return to civilian rule in the southeast.

Dong Ne met the emperor five days before the other participants arrived to discuss the report.²⁴ He took the opportunity of his early arrival and the emperor’s undivided attention to make clear that the committee report bearing his name did not reflect his views. Specifically, Dong claimed that Foron had dominated the discussion and bullied the participants into accepting his point of view. Moreover, Dong claimed that Foron’s report had ignored the reservations he and others had expressed about the secondary levee along Gao Family Dike and misrepresented the committee’s views on the downstream dredging projects. Dong also claimed that Foron had changed the final text of the report after the committee had agreed to it and before it was submitted to the emperor.

After some preliminaries in which Dong apologized for a previous overly prolix memorial, the monarch asked, “What do you think of Jin Fu’s project to build a secondary levee to hold the Gao Family Dike?” Dong replied, “My colleagues and I originally felt that it would be not necessary to build the secondary levee.” According to Dong, the group had almost decided to recommend against the levee when Zhao Jishi expressed doubt about this recommendation and demanded that they consult Jin Fu. Zhao’s doubts were not about the levee project itself, but about the wisdom of submitting a report without consulting Jin Fu. Although of relatively low rank, Zhao was not a young man, and he had spent much of his early career supervising military conquest in Shanxi; he may well have had a more cautious nature or been intimidated by Jin Fu’s rank and place in the Manchu hierarchy.²⁵ Once consulted, Jin was predictably adamant that the committee report support his proposed new levee, and the committee consensus changed. For the emperor, Dong reaffirmed his view that in fact “the secondary levee would offer no benefit and be a burden on the population.”²⁶

Dong’s allegation that he had been bullied and not allowed to speak was striking. In fact, as governor-general, Dong Ne held the same rank as Foron; ministers and governors-general held 1B, the second of the eighteen ranks into which the Chinese civil service was divided.²⁷ If rank had been the determining element in their relations, there was no reason why Dong should have deferred to Foron. But Foron was a Manchu and a very well-connected one. Although educated Chinese were taking up positions of authority in the Qing in the 1680s, decisions of scope, about war and peace or large expenditures, still remained in Manchu hands. There may also have been a cultural element: Manchus were accustomed to speaking directly and were used to power. Although Dong was adept at the language of administration, he may not have been equally skilled in the language of power.

Dong’s most telling accusation was that Foron altered the text of the group’s report after it had been agreed upon and before it was submitted. Dong Ne was in a precarious position here, as he had in fact written the Chinese text of the report, translating the Manchu text Foron had drafted. Foron may have had a more limited Chinese education than his mentor, Mingju. He clearly functioned effectively in a Chinese-speaking environment, but he deferred on the presentation of a full report in classical Chinese. It seemed that Foron drafted the report in Manchu and then gave it to Dong Ne to translate into Chinese.²⁸ But Dong Ne claimed that Foron altered the text after it had been translated, making changes when he had a final, fair copy of the text made at a stationary shop. Dong said that the draft he had written referred to “creating agricultural colonies with the people’s land” (yi min tian zuo tun tian), and the final version of the report spoke of creating colonies with “the people’s excess land” (min zhi yu tian wei tuntian).²⁹

Two further memorials submitted to the court provided support for elements of Dong’s account. Full texts of these memorials are not extant, but quoted passages provide a fair indication of the main points. The first is from Sun Zaifeng, the official in charge of dredging the river mouths, who claimed that Foron had controlled (zhu) the production of the report, because he was engaged in a shady plot (yin mou) with Jin Fu. He also claimed that Jin Fu’s secretary, Chen Huang, was illegally seizing property.³⁰ The second memorial corroborating Dong’s account came from a figure of considerably higher rank and longer experience, the director-general of grain transport, Mu Tianyan. A jinshi of 1657 from Gansu, Mu had risen during a career of thirty years of service, earning praise and commendations as he did so. Much of his time was spent in Jiangsu, where he served as lieutenant governor from 1670 to 1675, and governor from 1675 to 1684.

He was known in these years for his work untangling land ownership and tax obligations, and his benevolence was much respected.³¹ As director-general of grain transport, it was Mu’s responsibility to oversee shipments of grain from southeast China to Beijing. He thus had a professional interest in the river works Jin Fu maintained, as the grain shipments passed along them. Interviewed by Foron, he expressed his view that the secondary levee at Gao Family Dike was unnecessary. Mu felt that the existing structure along the shore of the lake could be restored at significantly less expense. As Mu described his interaction with Foron’s committee, he had almost convinced Foron to recommend against the secondary levee when Zhao Jishi insisted that Jin Fu be consulted. This matched Dong Ne’s account, except that Mu claimed credit for the committee’s consensus. Mu also described the sequence of events that led Foron to edit the final report. When Jin Fu publicly announced his plan for creating military colonies, it elicited stiff protest from local landholders. Foron, according to Mu, recognized that he could not recommend to the emperor that Jin’s scheme be implemented, so he changed the language of the final report so that colonies would be created out of newly created land rather than land that was already owned.³² Read by itself, the transcript of Dong Ne’s audience with the emperor suggested an inexperienced and insecure territorial official more anxious to describe Foron’s bullying than to make a contribution to river policy. There was truth in this, but Mu’s and Sun’s memorials demonstrate that there was also truth in Dong Ne’s charges. The group had almost recommended against the levee at the Gao Family Dike, then Foron edited the report. There would be much to talk about at the court conference.

COURT CONFERENCE

The court conference took place over two days. The first day unfolded as a series of confrontations—between Dong Ne and Foron, between Jin Fu and his accusers, and between Jin Fu and Yu Chenglong—followed by a more general discussion of river policy. The accusations continued on the second day, climaxed by the emperor’s unusual angry outburst at his Chinese advisers, before the discussion settled down to a more serious assessment of Jin Fu’s legacy and future. Two of the issues raised in these discussions are worthy of more careful consideration: the emperor’s comments on the limitations of Chinese officials and the final decision on Jin Fu’s fate.

One of the most dramatic and colorful moments in the court conference occurred when the emperor lashed out at Chinese scholars, angrily denouncing them for failing to contribute to river policies. None of the exchanges at this moment appear in Veritable Records. Fairly early on the first day, Xiong Yixian joined the discussion with a tale of woe and a claim that he too could not support and had not contributed to the report. Like Dong Ne, Xiong was a distinguished holder of the jinshi degree who had served in the Hanlin Academy, rising through the ranks of postings open to Chinese at the capital; at the time of the report, he was a member of the Ministry of Personnel.³³ Xiong’s explanation for his disavowal was that during the investigations he had been seriously ill. At the time of his appointment, he was experiencing diarrhea, and by the time the group reached the south, he was having chills as well. For this reason, Xiong said that he had been unable to concentrate and had not participated in any of the group’s deliberations. The emperor said, “If you were ill, you could have submitted a memorial” requesting relief. Xiong responded that he had “committed an infraction worthy of death.”³⁴ This seemed a rather extreme response, although it anticipated the total collapse of Xiong’s position. Later in the interview, the emperor asked Xiong if he agreed with the recommendation that a secondary levee be built at the Gao Family Dike. Xiong said, “At the time of the discussion, I agreed that the wall should be built.” The emperor pounced: “Earlier you said you did not participate in the discussion. Now you say that at the time of the discussion you agreed. According to the evidence, you are trying to pass the buck to avoid guilt. You have turned your back on the responsibilities of a great official. In such a case, how can one not punish the one to instruct the many?”³⁵ Xiong kowtowed, silently accepting the emperor’s reprimand.

On the next day, the emperor’s frustration with Chinese officials, who seemed unwilling to commit to a course of action, boiled over: “In 1678, I issued an edict ordering that all officials work together [tongyin xiegong]; from ancient times it has been thus.” The edict the emperor referred to had been issued in the late summer of 1678.³⁶ It did, as the emperor remembered, urge all officials to work together for the common good. However, the edict was read with another level of meaning; it served as a repudiation of Songgotu’s leadership at court and recognized Mingju’s ascendancy. Officials were told to work together but also not to form factions. Evoking this context, the emperor was saying not only that his counselors were failing to do their job, but they were doing so because of their factional allegiances.

The emperor continued in vivid language:

Now as each of the ministries manages affairs, senior and junior Chinese officials try to pass the buck to Manchu officials. Affairs are appropriately managed only when an individual takes responsibility on himself. Then, when a matter goes awry, the blame can be placed on a single person. Chinese in office don’t see a matter to its conclusion but pass responsibility to a Manchu official, in the hope of returning home early to amuse themselves at dinner parties [zaogui yanhui xiyou]. They are not devoting their entire energies to their duties of appropriately and reasonably managing affairs.³⁷

The point here was not to urge austerity: the Kangxi emperor was not opposed to feasting, as Michael G. Chang has shown, and just at this moment, the court was turning more and more to Chinese social forms.³⁸ Nor was the objection that officials were leaving the office early to beat the commute. Qing officials worked on a ten-day-on, ten-day-off schedule; the emperor likely envisioned not hours of work missed but days. The point was rather to contrast Manchu officials who actually got things done with Chinese officials who socialized, verbalized, and fled responsibility. On the emperor’s telling, Chinese officials, either through fear or irresponsibility, deferred decisions to Manchus. Manchus could rule China, but the Chinese, hopelessly addicted to social forms and factionalism, could not.

The emperor continued:

Henceforth, let us all work together with a common purpose, striving to achieve effective administration, not just pass the buck. In the ordinary memorials of censors and circuit attendants, there may be one or two proposals that can be implemented, but hidden in them are always private interests, plots to malfeasance. Everything that is proposed has its hidden purpose. Most of the memorials I read take self-interest as the public interest and distort laws flagrantly. Territorial officials preen their authority, extorting money and favors in many ways. There are none among the governors and governors-general who are not feared, and there are none of the people’s miseries that cannot be attributed to this.

You who were sent to inspect the rivers are senior officials who should take the state’s purpose as your own. What is it that you fear, that you are unable to speak clearly? It is obvious that you are unable to devote yourselves fully to the public interest. You take illness as an excuse, hoping to escape responsibility. The cases of Chen Mingxia and Liu Zhengzong come to mind. As we assess guilt in this case, those whom we should punish are precisely yourselves!³⁹

This extraordinary reprimand was suppressed completely in the Veritable Records. Although it was directed at Xiong Yixian, it was clearly addressed to all the Chinese in attendance. The emperor averred that he could trust no Chinese official to put aside self-interest and act with a public spirit. When Chinese officials spoke, he couldn’t trust them; when they didn’t speak, they hid private motives. Chen Mingxia (1604–1654) and Liu Zhengzong (n.d.) were Chinese grand secretaries who had manipulated personnel processes in the Shunzhi period to benefit their friends and family members; both had private motives that they did not reveal to their Manchu superiors.⁴⁰ The emperor’s point was to impress upon his hearers the seriousness of the charges. Chen Mingxia was executed by strangulation during the late Shunzhi reign, and Liu Zhengzong lost his post and half of his property during the Oboi regency in Kangxi’s youth.

It is hard, but not impossible, to reconcile the image of the Kangxi emperor as patron of Chinese learning and scholars with this outburst, in which he pointed to Chinese habits as faults, and this may be why it was suppressed in the Veritable Records. When the emperor patronized learning he was paying fealty to the intellectual tradition on which Chinese governance was based. In his comments above he was expressing frustration with social habits and practices and asserting that it was Manchus who got things done, an ideological theme of Qing rule.

Getting things done was very much at stake when the question of Jin Fu’s fate took its final form at the end of the second day. If the emperor was not prepared to go along with Jin Fu’s proposal to create colonies—and he had made clear that he was not—did this mean Jin had to be relieved, and if so, could another official as knowledgeable as Jin be found? How was the harm Jin Fu had done by seizing land to form colonies to be balanced against the accomplishments of his long tenure? Which of the several projects along the canal and river were to be completed and which terminated? How was the extraordinary furor created by the project to be quieted? At the conclusion of the conference, the monarch asked his advisers to deliberate and report back on actions that needed to be taken.

The case against Jin Fu boiled down to a claim that he had not attended to the wishes of the elite of the lower Yangzi. Fields had been flooded, and for that reason the people were bitter. Literally, the people wanted to “eat his [Jin’s] flesh” (shi yi zhi rou). In response, Jin expressed for the first time what would become a theme of his resistance to the charges against him, the argument that there was an elite conspiracy against him: “I have exerted myself on the emperor’s behalf for a long while, and during this time I have discovered many pieces of land that have been illicitly occupied by rich and powerful families. Because of this the rich families hate me. But what has this to do with the ordinary people?” Serving the emperor’s interest meant serving the people, even if this involved attacking landlords.

During the court conference, Jin Fu offered a further self-defense:

When I began, the hydraulic works were broken down and there were breaks in the levees everywhere. Since I became director-general, I have filled in the broken places and built levees along both sides of the river, through the emperor’s grace. In recent years the rivers have been restored to their traditional courses, and there is no longer the worry about breaks. For this reason, the people’s land has been dried out and for several years there have been no floods. It was my intention to return the revenue produced by the land to its rightful owners and make colonies out of the excess land, in order to refill the river director’s treasury. This is because of my subordinate’s mistake; I can do nothing about it.”⁴¹

This would be Jin Fu’s last comment during the court conference, and it was effectively a coda to his twelve years’ work on the riverbank. For the first time, he acknowledged that there was resentment against him, though he blamed it on his subordinates’ mistakes. He also urged the emperor to consider this resentment in the larger context of all he had accomplished during his years in Jiangnan.⁴² Concluding the conference, the emperor ordered his counselors to deliberate on appropriate actions.

Stung perhaps by the complexity of the case and the emotions it had aroused, the imperial courtiers approached their final decision cautiously. After four days, on April 12, the courtiers stated their conclusion “that drilling at the mouths of east-flowing rivers should be completed, but the project at the Gao Family Dike should be halted. Decisions about the water gates along the canal should be deferred until the river dredging is finished, when a determination can be made about which gates are necessary and which can be eliminated.” The advisers then asked the emperor whether they should wait to consult with Mu Tianyan and Sun Zaifeng before deliberating on the appropriate punishments for those involved in the case. The emperor responded that they need not wait. In fact, far from consulting Sun and Mu about punishments, the emperor observed, Sun and Mu should themselves be punished: “Dong Ne, Sun Zaifeng, and Mu Tianyan are important officials. They should have memorialized about any problems they saw. Instead, they waited until someone else had submitted a memorial and only then expressed their views. Today they say this; tomorrow they say that. They are completely inconsistent. Can they really be called important officials?”

There was a fine line between keeping open the flow of opinions and allowing the impeachment process to degenerate into factional warfare, between listening to the “words on the winds” and inviting backbiting. Six months after the emperor had invited censors to submit loosely sourced impeachments when they saw something wrong, at a moment when memorials of accusation were pouring in from the south about the Foron report, the emperor wrote, “Recently there have been very many memorials of impeachment from censors. If there have indeed been cases of great greed or great evil, you should memorialize promptly. But if in memorializing the purpose is to intimidate or to profit yourself, to such an extent that an official cannot rest secure, then the intimidator should be reported promptly. Let this edict be circulated in the censorate and the Ministry of Personnel.”⁴³ Just as the edict on loosely sourced memorials signaled a change not of law but of policy, this edict sent a signal that censors needed to watch carefully so that they were not accused of greed or intimidation.

Eleven days later, the courtiers recommended that Foron, Xiong Yixian, Dacina, Sun Zaifeng, Dong Ne, and Mu Tianyan be cashiered from office. The emperor approved these recommendations, except in the case of Foron. Foron, said the monarch, “was very effective in his time as minister of works. Each time he was charged with a commission he was up to the task.” Two Manchus among the courtiers then testified that indeed Foron had been an effective administrator and valued supervisor. Kangxi continued, “Foron has been a loyal official. How can we, because of this matter, mistakenly condemn him?”⁴⁴ Had the emperor forgotten the reports of Foron bullying and changing the text of the report, or even Guo Xiu’s accusation that in collusion with Mingju, Foron had collected corrupt revenues? If so, memories seemed to have faded when the emperor imagined a sturdy, subordinate Manchu who actually got things done. However, Foron was advised to watch himself. The monarch reflected bitterly, “All officials have their private interests and accuse each other; it has always been thus. Not only have Han officials long walked this evil path, but now Manchus seem to be treading it as well!”

And what of Jin Fu? On the last day of the conference, the emperor had wondered how a replacement for Jin could be found, and how many years it would take to determine whether the successor was as competent as Jin. Guo Xiu suggested that the court might consult people who lived in Jiangnan, but the emperor replied that local landholders had their own interests and were not likely to agree on a single course of action. When the courtiers had presented their preliminary conclusions, the emperor again asked whether a Chinese successor could be found. Again, Guo Xiu spoke up, observing that Jin must have archives of his work that could be consulted, and that Jin was in fact “not without talent.” This was a rather surprising intervention from Guo Xiu, which highlighted his perception that the harm in Jin Fu’s directorship resulted from his reliance on an uncredentialed and likely immoral subordinate.⁴⁵

The court officials were not so tolerant of Jin Fu. They recommended that he be cashiered from office, whipped one hundred strokes, and made to wear the cangue for two months. They further stipulated that Jin should not be allowed the official’s privilege of paying a cash fine instead of undergoing corporal punishment. Chen Huang was to be beaten forty strokes with the flat bamboo and exiled to a distance of three thousand li. The emperor modified the two sentences, eliminating the corporal punishment for Jin and substituting imprisonment for beating and exile in Chen’s case. But the monarch was still dissatisfied. “There are those who say the river administration has become seriously decayed during Jin Fu’s administration. If this is true, then why don’t the levees collapse? How can the tribute boats continue to run without obstruction? I don’t believe it!” Moreover, the emperor asked again where another capable official could be found, and how one could know in advance that such an official had been found. Only after six or seven years in office would it be possible to judge that one had found an adequate successor. The emperor remained torn, although he finally agreed to remove Jin Fu from office.⁴⁶ The emperor’s doubts here did not make their way into Veritable Records, where the young monarch remained calm and decisive.