Family and State

Jin Fu and his family experienced the seventeenth century as one of Qing success; Guo Xiu and his family experienced it as one of Ming decline. Dynastic decline brought chaos throughout China, although the nature of disorder varied with the geographical and social circumstances of different regions. Frederic Wakeman has emphasized the near anarchy in Guo’s native Shandong in the mid-seventeenth century. Civil order broke down during the late Ming, and political and social life in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were dominated by increasingly violent conflicts between bandit gangs and gentry-organized militias.¹ The Guos survived the chaos of the Ming-Qing transition but not without significant dislocation and a number of perilously close encounters with local violence and anti-Manchu resistance. Indeed, if some recent revelations may be trusted, the encounters were even closer than Guo Xiu himself was willing to admit publicly.

Two stories can be constructed of Guo Xiu’s early years, a public one and a private one that circulated within the family. The differences between them illustrate the concerns of seventeenth-century Chinese gentry families who lived through the conquest. Guo’s public story was related in a preface to Guo Family Genealogy (Guoshi zupu), where Guo Xiu said his family was originally from Qingzhou, which was in Qing times a large county in central Shandong that extended from the Bohai Sea into the center of the province. According to Guo, they moved in 1404 from Qingzhou to Jimo Xian on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula.² Both the date and the place were significant. In tracing their family origins to the early Ming, the Guos were like many Shandong landowning families who traced their origin to the early Ming. In The Culture and Family Histories of Great Official Families of Shandong in the Ming and Qing, Shandong University historian Zhu Yafei attributes these common early Ming origins to a forced migration of established families into Shandong that took place under the first emperor of the Ming.³ Most of the families Zhu studied, however, made their homes along the prosperous Grand Canal corridor in the west of the province. The Guos’ Jimo home was far from the center of the province. Today, Jimo is linked to the outside world through Qingdao, an international port to its southwest, but in the seventeenth century the region was more isolated. The Guos’ home village, which bore their name—Guo Family Lane (Guojiagang)—was located along the Black (Mo) River west of the district capital.

Although far from the central areas of the province, the Guos’ Jimo was not spared disorder during the conquest. The Jimo Gazetteer captured the chaos in early-Qing Jimo with the story of a local literatus, Huang Zongchang (1588–1646). A jinshi of 1622, Huang served terms as magistrate of a district in Zhili, censor at the Ming court, and governor of Huguang. While in Zhili, he resisted the demands of the dominant eunuch, Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627), and as censor after Wei’s death he impeached over one hundred followers of the eunuch. He was himself impeached during his time in Huguang, in part in payback for his impeachments, and retired from government. Returning to Jimo, Huang organized resistance to the invading Manchu armies, selling his own household furnishings to raise money for provisions. As a result of his efforts, Jimo city was spared occupation as the eastern portion of the province was conquered. Two years later, Huang again organized the city’s resistance, this time to a bandit army. One of the leaders of this army was Guo Erbiao (n.d.), a distant relative of the Guo family who was employed as a servant in Huang’s household. Guo Erbiao was defeated, but Huang’s son was killed in the fighting.⁴

Possibly because the rebel leader was a relative of theirs, the Guos did not follow Huang Zongchang’s heroic example. They fled from Jimo to Wendeng District at the tip of the Shandong Peninsula, the end of the world as they knew it, and spent the years of the conquest, 1642–46, living with relatives. Guo Xiu was born in 1638, the second son of Guo Jingchang, who held no civil service degree but was reputed to be a talented writer. When Guo Xiu was nine sui, he was adopted by his uncle Guo Eryin, who saw to his upbringing and education. Xiu’s father died two years later. Guo Xiu’s uncle was probably of the same Guo generation as the bandit Guo Erbiao, because both had the character er in their given names, likely a generational marker. But according to Guo Xiu, they were not closely related.⁵

Recently, this story of a rural family at the mercy of forces beyond their control has been called into question. In January 2021, a program aired on Shandong television in which Guo Xianping (n.d.), eleven generations removed from Guo Xiu and still living in Jimo, was interviewed about his family history. He claimed that there were branches of the Guo family throughout Jimo. According to family legend, however, Guo Xiu was descended from Guos who belonged to one of the great families of Wei, a commercial city to the northeast of Jimo. Sitting along trade routes along the Bohai Sea, Wei was prosperous in late Ming and early Qing times, when the Grand Canal was obstructed, and it served as a transshipping point for cargo shipped by sea from South to North China. According to Xianping, Guo Xiu’s most famous ancestor in Wei was his grandfather, Guo Shangyou (1569–1647), who earned the jinshi degree in 1601, then served as magistrate, director-general of grain transport, and minister of war in the Ming government. In 1639, Shangyu worked with Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672), the magistrate of Wei, to defeat a Manchu raiding party that attacked the city. Five years later, when the Manchus took Beijing, Guo Shangyou became concerned that he or his family would become the target of Manchu retribution, so he moved the family, including Guo Xiu, to live in Jimo at Guo Family Lane.⁶

This story would account for a number of anomalies in Guo Xiu’s account of his life. Guo Xiu was the first member of the family mentioned in the genealogy for which he wrote a preface, as if he wished to conceal his forebears. Further, Guo Xiu was adopted by his Jimo uncle two years before his father died, suggesting that the purpose of the adoption was not to ensure that he would be well raised but to securely graft Guo on the rural branch of the family tree, concealing his relationship with Guo Shangyou. Moreover, Guo’s birth father, Guo Jingchang, did not share the generational er in the given name with Guo Eryin, Guo Xiu’s putative uncle, making it unlikely that Jingchang and Eryin were brothers.⁷ Family legends can be twisted, either purposefully or accidentally, and even Guo Xianping remarked that this family history was “not fully proven.” Regardless of which story is true, Guo Xiu was likely to have been deeply affected by the Qing conquest, like many of his generation. Indeed, the rumor that Guo’s family was involved in anti-Manchu activity followed him through his career, complicating his interactions with colleagues.

Examination and First Appointment

The examination process was the defining feature of elite life in late imperial China; whether and how one passed determined the course of a career. In the late seventeenth century, there was the additional issue of whether to take the examinations at all. As the examination branded those Chinese who served the new Manchu dynasty as collaborators, some, particularly in the lower Yangzi Valley, chose not to participate. Guo Xiu made a different choice. He never wrote about his decision, which under the family circumstances must have been one of courage and conviction.

Guo was either early or late in his decision to take the examinations, depending on your point of view. He took his first test in 1668. Thirty years before, his family had fled the Manchus, suggesting they had perhaps been deeply implicated in the resistance. Caution might have dictated that it was too early for a Guo to risk Manchu scrutiny. On the other hand, most of the sons of Shandong elite families returned to the examination hall fairly quickly after the conquest. Why the sons of the north returned before the sons of the south has received relatively little attention from historians. Probably the convincing explanation is that the Chinese leaders of Manchu armies in Shandong quickly allied with gentry militias to preserve order.⁸ This was in contrast to the south, where occupation forces remained at loggerheads with local society until later in the seventeenth century. Valuing the order Manchu arms had brought to their province, Shandong men were able to countenance service in an alien court relatively early.

In any event Guo’s resolution was to serve not necessarily the Manchu rulers but the Confucian state they sought to implement for their Chinese subjects. He likely had a fairly strong commitment to the traditional values of Confucianism. The Confucian intellectual world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had many streams of belief, some of them quite radical. There were differing views of the origins of ethical obligations, as well as debates over the meaning and authenticity of classic texts and the proper political stance of the man of learning.⁹ But there is no evidence that Guo Xiu, who was educated at home far from centers of intellectual ferment, participated in any of the new forms of philosophical and epistemological inquiry. Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, has always had a conservative social and intellectual reputation as a world of family teachings and family values. Guo’s rural Jimo was far from any of the centers of intellectual radicalism of his day. His education pointed him to the principles of the Confucian tradition, and it was the role of the man of learning to enforce them.¹⁰

Once Guo Xiu decided to take the examinations, he proceeded fairly smoothly through the system. In 1668, he passed the Jimo district examinations, third on the list. The following year, he was seventh on the Shandong provincial examinations. Guo Xiu journeyed to Beijing in 1671, perhaps his first time out of Shandong, to take the jinshi examination. He passed, number 124 in the third class. This was a good result, particularly given the intensely competitive nature of the Chinese examinations, but not an outstanding one. Guo would never be known as a brilliant test taker. It may have been his good fortune that Wei Yijie (1616–1686) was the chief examiner the year he took the jinshi. Wei brought an emphasis on practical morality to his role as examiner, a preference he may have inherited from his own teacher, Sun Qifeng (1585–1675), who never took the Qing examinations but advised many who did. Sun’s view was that upholding Chinese tradition was more important than any sort of doctrinal advocacy.¹¹ Wei believed that the explication of classical texts on the first day of the examinations was less important than the discursive essays that dominated the second day. In these essays, written in response to policy questions, the candidate was presented with a practical problem confronting the state and asked to provide a solution using Confucian principles.¹² Wei argued that such questions not only afforded the examiner a better view of the candidate’s abilities but were closer in form to the model of the ancients. As Lynn Struve points out in an essay on Wei, the Qing court eventually rejected his position.¹³ However, the practical thrust of Wei’s writing must have influenced him as he served as chief examiner. Guo would have been judged not on his mastery of the latest exegetical fashion, which could well have been a challenge for a young man from the provinces making his first trip to the capital, but on his ability to apply moral principles to actual circumstances.¹⁴

It must have been an exciting moment to pass the examinations. The young Kangxi emperor had just dismissed his regents, and the moment seemed to promise an opportunity for men to take up places in the new dynasty, to build a genuinely Confucian order under Manchu leadership. Wei Yijie observed that there were so many talented candidates in 1671 that choosing candidates was difficult and could be accomplished only by comparing the scripts on the 1671 examination with those of previous years. According to Wei’s Nianpu, Guo Xiu was one of six successful candidates in whom Wei took especial pride.¹⁵ Entering the official service at a relatively low rank during a time of turmoil probably meant Guo did not attract particular scrutiny, which may have been good for a man with a slightly clouded background.

Guo wrote little about his ancestors and his early life, because of either modesty or, more likely, a desire to protect family secrets from Manchu scrutiny. As a result, the significance of his early experiences must be established through comparison with family members, other educated young men from Shandong, and men of his examination cohort. These comparisons suggest that Guo, while aware of Manchu power, was willing to serve the Qing state and move it toward classical standards of morality and visions of the good. Guo also likely had a practical, rather than scholarly, bent of mind, which would serve him well in his early posting for the Qing.

Passing the examinations ensured Guo Xiu of a position in the Qing ruling order, but the specific posts he occupied were partly a matter of luck and partly a reflection of the abilities and passions he brought to his work. Guo’s low rank on the palace examination meant that he would have to wait for office.¹⁶ He made a trip to Beijing in 1676 to attend the appointments lottery, but his grandfather’s death necessitated a return to Jimo for a division of family property. If Guo’s family was, as his twentieth-century descendant suggested, a blended one, this property division could have been complicated. At the next lottery in 1679, Guo was selected as a magistrate of Wujiang District in Jiangsu.

Wujiang was one of the several districts that made up Suzhou Prefecture, among the wealthiest regions of the lower Yangzi Delta in China’s southeast. Wujiang was the southernmost district in the prefecture, linked by river with Suzhou City. Friends warned him that the journey to the south might be dangerous in view of the rebellion of Wu Sangui and continuing resistance of the southeast to Qing rule. Guo gamely responded that appointments are not made for the convenience of officials, but rather officials are appointed because of the needs of districts, and set off on his way.¹⁷ When he took up his post in 1680, Guo Xiu found himself an agent on the cutting edge of political change in Jiangsu. Life was fairly rocky during the early Qing in the districts of the lower Yangzi Delta. The flight of the Ming court from Beijing to Nanjing during the Manchu conquest meant that a decisive military engagement between the Ming and Qing would be fought on delta soil, and many communities, including Suzhou, joined the Ming remnants in resisting Qing occupation. Widespread resistance had necessitated a military occupation during the early Qing, which prolonged local resentment. In his initial years as district magistrate, Guo Xiu found himself potentially squeezed between a demanding provincial military order and the resistant and recalcitrant local population.

With his fresh civil service degree, Guo represented a type of official unusual in the early Qing delta. Guo Xiu was only the third of eighteen early Qing magistrates of Wujiang to hold a jinshi degree; many of his predecessors had held lesser qualifications, and three of them were Hanjun bannerman, Chinese-speaking soldiers. In addition, Guo was the first Qing magistrate to serve in the district for more than two years. Violence had ended several terms in Wujiang, and few of Guo’s predecessors had the time to come to know the district and its concerns.¹⁸ Guo’s first challenge in Wujiang was a flash flood. A dry winter and spring had left the district suffering near-drought conditions, but sudden rains in August flooded the fields and destroyed crops. Taking a small boat along the canals of Wujiang, Guo inspected the damaged crops and requested a temporary tax remission. In the next year, Guo assisted the centrally appointed examiner for Jiangnan in administering the provincial examinations.¹⁹

In 1683, Guo addressed what local history and subsequent scholarship have identified as the central problem of Wujiang District: tax arrears.²⁰ As Guo wrote, taxes had been high in the district since it had sided with a local rebel against the first Ming emperor (r. 1368–98). As a result, the southeast had the highest taxes in the empire, Suzhou Prefecture had the highest taxes in the southeast, and Wujiang had the highest taxes in Suzhou Prefecture.”²¹ The prosperous southeast could bear a greater tax burden, but in the early Qing, natural disasters, military occupation, and tax resistance meant that not all taxes could be collected. In March 1661, Suzhou people protested excessive tax collections at a memorial service for the Shunzhi emperor, in an episode known as the Crying in the Temple Case.²² By the time Guo reached Wujiang, there had been several remissions of tax arrears, but debts still remained.²³ The problem of collecting tax arrears was exacerbated by the practice of district clerks who, failing to inform taxpayers of the exact amount of arrears they owed, collected more money than was owed and pocketed the excess. Guo alleviated this problem by preparing a register stating exactly the amount of tax, including arrears, that each household owed and sending this record with tax collectors when they called on taxpayers to make collections. Although this expedient did not completely solve the problem of arrears, it earned Guo the respect of the local tax-paying population.²⁴

In 1683, Guo Xiu responded to an imperial edict ordering magistrates to sponsor the publication of local histories. These works were compilations of local historical fact but also statements of local pride. Short-term wartime magistrates of Wujiang had not made the effort to compile a history. The last local history of Wujiang had been written at the very end of the Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty, circa 1567. To update it, Guo and local scholars collected sources intensively for a three-month period and produced a work of forty-six juan, or two hundred thousand characters. Unfortunately, this work is not extant today, although portions of Guo’s preface were recorded in his Nianpu and in the preface to the more readily available 1733 edition. Gazetteers, as local histories, generally gathered information in broadly similar categories, but different regions might have more information to include under some headings than others. The great points of pride for the 1733 gazetteer of Wujiang—and this was likely little changed from Guo’s account—were the number of degree holders from the county and the volume of their writings. Preserving such material was important to the identity and pride of the county, and Guo’s role in organizing and supervising the process was important to the reemergence of the county as a seat of learning in the southeast.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that Guo was at loggerheads with provincial officialdom, at least in the early years of his magistracy. Because of the resistance to Qing rule in the southeast, many of the early Jiangnan officials were military men. As the gazetteer and Guo’s Nianpu related, Guo was on especially bad terms with the provincial military intendant, Yang Jie. Yang was no ordinary military hack. He had been active in Qing service during the conquest, serving in northwest Guangdong and Jiangxi. Appointed Jiangsu military intendant in 1676, he commanded the forces that successfully resisted Zheng Chenggong’s invasion of the provincial capital, for which he was given the prestigious, if honorary, title of junior protector of the heir apparent (taizi shaobao).²⁵ For Guo, Yang’s military achievements did not excuse corruption. On one occasion, the intendant ordered a patrol boat constructed in Wujiang District and sent an agent to demand a kickback. When the agent tied up one of his clerks, Guo was summoned and struck the agent on the jaw, knocking him into the canal. Yang was furious, but there was little he could do to Guo under the circumstances. Later, Guo refused to provide the intendant extra money for military rations. He did not pay a bribe demanded by the Suzhou prefect and refused to attend a memorial service the governor held for the mother of one of his district’s most difficult residents.²⁶

Such relations with the military administration might have ended Guo’s tenure in Jiangnan were it not for a change in the central government’s attitude toward the province. Beginning in the 1680s, the imperial court, likely the Kangxi emperor personally, recognized that the standoff between military administrators in the Yangzi Delta and the educated population that had prevailed under the Oboi Regency (1661–69) was unproductive. A new provincial capital was established in Suzhou for Jiangsu, and the court began the practice of assigning to the post officials who were accomplished scholars as well as proven administrators. Guo’s appointment may have been one of the early results of this policy. One of the first appointees of the new type at the provincial level was Governor Tang Bin, appointed in 1684.²⁷

Tang’s career was unusual. Passing the jinshi examinations in 1649, he first held appointment as a circuit intendant. He chose to interrupt his career for a year of study with Sun Qifeng, the teacher of Guo Xiu’s examiner, Wei Yijie, which put Tang and Guo in the same lineage of northern scholars who served the Kangxi emperor. After his study with Sun, Tang took and passed the special 1679 boxue hongci examination, which immediately raised his prestige and prominence. Like many of those who had passed the special examination, Tang was appointed to edit the Ming History, but the emperor decided that his talents would be better employed as a provincial governor.²⁸ His nearly unique combination of service at the local level and at the highest levels at court shaped both his career and Guo Xiu’s. Tang resided in Suzhou, so that interaction with Guo was easy, and the two shared a northern identity. The History of Wujiang District (Wujiang xian zhi) reported that when Governor Tang heard Guo Xiu had not gotten along with the previous military administrators of Jiangsu, he was “pleased.”²⁹

Several stories survive that describe how Guo Xiu attracted Tang Bin’s attention. The nineteenth-century Manchu courtier and historian Zhaolian (1747–1823) included a brief account of Tang’s relationship with Guo in his Miscellaneous Notes from the Xiaoting Pavillion (Xiaoting zalu). According to the account, Tang Bin arrived at his post in Jiangnan determined to foster honesty among his subordinates. When he encountered dishonesty or corruption, he would first counsel the official involved, and if that failed, he would undertake disciplinary action. Hearing of corruption in Guo Xiu’s Wujiang, he called the magistrate to his office and spoke with him. Guo responded, “The source of corruption in my district was that I had to provide bribes to your predecessor. You are conducting yourself honestly, and if after one month’s grace, your reputation is the same, I can restore order” to the district’s finances.³⁰ When Guo did as he promised, Tang remarked, “It is as if the old Guo has died, and a new Guo has been born.” The anecdote probably preserved elements of truth, three of which were significant. First, despite the probity emphasized in Guo’s biographies, there was a whiff of corruption about his administration of Wujiang that troubled his subsequent career. Second, the anecdote reinforced the change in Jiangsu administration represented by Tang Bin; he was certainly different than his predecessors, and the effect was perceptible. A third point of interest was the tone Guo took in responding to his superior. Guo Xiu’s remark to Tang Bin was impertinent, a tart if somewhat impolitic statement of the truth that governors could also be corrupt.

There was another version of this anecdote. In his nineteenth-century history, Chen Kangqi (1840–1890) recalled hearing in his youth the story of Guo Xiu. In Chen’s version, Guo Xiu appeared without summons in Tang Bin’s office and declared that he would no longer accept corrupt revenues. Guo then returned to his own office and ordered his servants to bring water and scrub brushes and wash it clean. It would appear, on this telling, that Guo Xiu had a sort of conversion experience. Chen Kangqi argued that only one who had undergone such a searing experience would be qualified for the senior office at the capital.³¹ There is no way of knowing which of these accounts was true, if either was. True or not, the anecdotes provided answers to the question that must have arisen in the eighteenth century as Guo Xiu’s impeachments were made public by the Qianlong emperor: How did an obscure magistrate come to be in a position to challenge some of the most powerful figures at the Kangxi court? The fact that there were two stories suggests that many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled to explain Guo’s unexpected appearance in high office in Beijing.

Tang Bin was in fact responsible for Guo Xiu’s elevation to a capital post. As governor, Tang was required to undertake the Great Reckoning (Da Ji), a triennial evaluation of all the ranked personnel in Jiangsu. The evaluation could be fairly mechanical, and officials were invited to identify a small number of their subordinates as outstanding (zhuo yi).³² In a memorial submitted with his evaluation, Tang identified as outstanding one prefect, one department magistrate, and four district magistrates, including Guo Xiu. He described Guo as a man who was “blunt and argumentative” (fengjie jiaoran), terms that well describe the dialogue Zhaolian attributed to Guo. Tang also praised Guo for “collecting abundant tax [revenue] without having to dun” (youke bucui), a comment that likely reflected the system of receipts described in the History of Wujiang District.³³

The impression of Guo that survives from sources on his tenure in Wujiang is of a competent local official dedicated to civilian rule, who was capable of direct speech and bold action. He was unwilling to pull his punches, either along the canals of Wujiang or in the official yamen in Suzhou. Luck in the lottery had placed Guo in Wujiang, but his own character had distinguished him among the Jiangsu magistrates. Recognizing his abilities, Tang Bin recommended him, becoming a mentor in the process. Guo’s career at the Kangxi court was launched.

Censor

Although there was a path for a magistrate to enter the Censorate, it was a difficult one; Guo Xiu made it only with luck and the benefit of Tang Bin’s capacious coattails. Guo Xiu’s move to the Censorate involved an increase to the fourth rank and a shift to a qualitatively different type of post. The increase in rank was significant. The fourth rank, the rank of censors, was midway between the seventh rank held by newly created jinshi appointed as magistrates, and the effective top of the system for ministers, grand secretaries, and governors-general.³⁴ Under the rules in place in 1686, magistrates with jinshi degrees who had served for a full two years and were recommended by the governor under whom they had served were entitled to sit for a special examination, known as the appointment examination (kaoxuan ke), to determine whether they could be promoted. Recommended magistrates competed in the examination against several categories of capital officials, who would likely have been better known to the grand secretaries who read the examinations. Those who passed were eligible for postings as censors or circuit intendants.³⁵

Tang Bin’s recommendation followed a tortured path. Initially, the Board of Personnel refused to award an outstanding designation to Guo Xiu. By statute, outstanding designations could not be given to officials who had any tax arrears in their jurisdiction, and despite Tang’s praise of Guo Xiu’s ability in tax collection, Wujiang had arrears. In fact, Tang had anticipated this objection and prefaced his recommendation with the observation that since Jiangsu had higher taxes than many other provinces, many of its most capable officials presided over districts with arrears.³⁶ The emperor intervened, ordering that any official recommended by Tang Bin should be brought to court.

In December 1686, Guo Xiu was one of thirty-six candidates examined for promotion. The Diary of Action and Repose preserved a discussion of the 1686 candidates.³⁷ On December 12, 1686, the emperor asked the grand secretaries, “You have read what was written [in the examinations], and I have glanced through them [lue jia guanlan]. You ranked Liu Kai as number 1. What sort of person is he?” Wang Xi responded, “Liu Kai is in the Central Drafting Office, and his work is often seen in proclamations and patents of office. He is an intelligent person.” The emperor then asked whether Liu had ever been sent out of the capital on commission, and Wang responded that Liu had been sent as a junior member of a team to carry out provincial examinations in Fujian. The emperor turned to an official from Fujian and asked what sort of reputation Liu had as an examiner. The official responded that he had not heard anything negative.

The emperor, it seems, had done more than glance at the examinations, and he had some significant reservations about the top candidate: “This script of his does not seem to be very well written. His cursive writing is rough and irregular.” Had there been a fix in for Liu Kai, who served in a division of the Grand Secretariat? If so, the grand secretaries were willing to abandon their choice when confronted with imperial doubts. Mingju and Wang Xi responded to the emperor’s question: “Your majesty is correct. [Liu] has long ago given up scholarship. Not only does he write characters poorly, but he does not seem to answer the questions precisely. He uses empty words to gloss the question in his answer, as if to say that he cannot answer it. His answer has very little content and leaves the reader feeling dissatisfied.” The emperor then observed, “In his answer there is discussion of the merits of implementing an irrigation system in the northwest. Natural environments shape irrigation systems. If it really would have value, why didn’t the ancient peoples long ago implement such a system?”³⁸

The emperor then asked, “Are there any other good candidates among the group?” Wang Xi responded, “There is Pei Gun [n.d.], the magistrate of Liyang District in Jiangnan. Pei Gun was very accomplished in his posting. There is also Guo Xiu, magistrate of Wujiang, who was recommended by Tang Bin and brought to the capital by special order on his recommendation.” Responding perhaps to the emperor’s dissatisfaction with their first choice, the grand secretaries seemed anxious to assure the emperor that there were capable people in the mix. This worked in Guo Xiu’s favor, as he seemed not to have ranked among the top candidates.³⁹ Five days later, the emperor returned to the results of the mid-career examinations. “How many candidates were ranked in the first class, and how many in the second class?” Mingju responded that there were eight in the first class, sixteen in the second class, and twelve in the third class.” “How many vacancies are there?” asked the emperor. Since the examinations were given at regular intervals and served to identify candidates who could be appointed until the next examination, there was no simple answer. Mingju responded, “Last year there were quite a few, thirty people, appointed. At present there are five vacancies as censor and five as circuit intendant. The emperor should decide how many appointments to make.” The emperor decided that ten would be designated as censors and ten as circuit intendants, according to the ranking in the examinations. Wang Xi proposed that two men be dropped from the rankings; one of these was Zhao Shenqiao (1644–1720), whom Wang Xi described as one who “writes characters badly, and whose prose is only ordinary.” Wang also recommended that Guo Xiu and Wang Zhuo (n.d.) be substituted for the two names that had been dropped. Apparently neither had made it into the top twenty names, but the grand secretary felt that because they had been recommended, they should be approved. The emperor concurred and ordered that the twenty individuals selected be appointed in sequence, according to their examination ranking. Guo Xiu, it would appear, had just made it into the ranks of middle-level officials. Although he was not the initial favorite of the grand secretaries, Tang Bin’s recommendation had proven decisive when the emperor doubted his secretaries’ judgment.

The Kangxi Censorate

Guo Xiu was appointed as censor the following spring. Little has been written about the Qing Censorate, in part because with the exception of a handful of episodes, it did not actively participate in politics.⁴⁰ This was in contrast, and likely in reaction, to the history of the Censorate during the late Ming, when censors’ accusations were loud and acrimonious.⁴¹ Early Qing rulers, who perceived that the Ming had fallen in part because the court had been overwhelmed with censorial conflicts, were anxious that this history not be repeated. The Qing developed a regular procedure for handling impeachments that placed all power in the hands of the emperor, allowing him to channel and limit the impact of censorial accusations on political life.

For one of Confucian convictions, service in the Censorate represented one of the highest responsibilities that could be earned. The Censorate was a very old institution; in fact, the title yushi, rendered in English as “censor,” may be one of the oldest political terms in China, appearing first in oracle bone texts. Associated with the term and the role was a complex of assumptions and understandings familiar to any Chinese scholar. The term “censor,” as a translation for yushi, is based on an analogy between the Chinese office and a Roman office; both polities imagined politics as rooted in a notion of virtue and provided space for an official who pointed out the differences between ideals and realities. The Chinese office was likely more heavily bureaucratized and, as it existed for a longer period of time, was associated with a more complex range of assumptions and procedures than the Roman office, but broad parallels were visible. Chinese censors traditionally had two tasks: impeachment and remonstrance. These were conceived as opposing functions: in impeachment, the censor pointed to things that should not be; in remonstrance, he pointed out what should exist but did not. For much of early imperial Chinese history, different officials engaged in these two functions, though by late imperial history the two roles were merged.

Charles Hucker has pointed to four characteristics of the Chinese censorial heritage. First, censors were officials of high prestige and autonomy; they represented an ideal cherished by the Confucian political order. It was important that avenues of criticism be perpetually kept open, and from “a very early time, the censorial agencies seem to have gained a reputation of being fearless defenders of the unwritten constitution upon which the state system and the Chinese way of life were based.”⁴² Second, censors had considerable independence of action. Their writings were meant to proceed directly to the emperor rather than being passed through bureaucratic channels, and they were traditionally allowed to address such subjects and employ such evidence as they felt necessary. Third, censors were relatively young and of low rank. As men advanced in their careers, it was feared they would come to love their positions more than principles, and thus advocate compromise and be unable to perform the tasks expected of them. Fourth, there were no specialists in censorship. Censors were always expected to perform noncensorial tasks and to be able to move between the censorate and other institutions.⁴³ To Hucker’s four principles, a fifth may be, indeed must be, added if the Guo Xiu case is to be understood: censors were vulnerable. There were never any whistleblower laws to protect censors from the sort of accusations they leveled at others. The models for the censor were the sages of antiquity, intellectuals who spoke truth to power regardless of the consequences and who stood to lose or gain based on the value of their advice. While it was considered bad form for an emperor to dismiss a censor, it was done when circumstances and charges seemed to merit it.

The Censorate took various institutional forms during Chinese history. In the Ming and the Qing it was headed by two censors-in-chief of the left and right, assisted by four assistant censors-in-chief, two each of the left and right. During the Qing period, one of the two censors-in-chief and two of the assistant censors-in-chief were Manchus. Under this leadership, the Qing Censorate had two branches, one for supervising officials at the capital and one consisting of what Hucker calls investigating censors. The censors responsible for the capital were divided into six groups, each responsible for overseeing the activities of one of the six ministries. Investigating censors bore titles that contained a geographical element but had the authority to investigate any matter regardless of where it occurred. In the Qing, there were forty-four investigating censors.

A foundational rule of impeachment, preserved in the Great Qing Code (Da Qing lüli) was that “in all cases where high and low officials in the capital or outside commit an offense,” the impeaching official will “send a memorial under seal, with a statement of the facts, requesting an imperial order, known as a rescript [zhi]. The impeaching official may not himself, without authorization, proceed to investigate the case.”⁴⁴ On receipt of a memorial of impeachment, the emperor first had to characterize the accusation. For the least less serious matters, the ruler could call on his officials to “examine and advise” (cha yi); where the ruler envisioned that punishments would be assessed, he could call on officials to “recommend administrative punishment” (yi chu); and on the most serious matters, he could ask officials to “advise on severe administrative punishment” (yanjia yichu).⁴⁵

After the emperor had received and characterized an impeachment, he could order an investigation and appoint an investigating committee, sometimes of one or two but more often of three persons, at least in serious cases. If the alleged infraction took place outside the capital, these individuals traveled to the site of the offense and carried out such investigation as they saw fit. The investigators’ role was limited to fact-finding; when their report was submitted, the monarch reviewed it. If the ruler judged that guilt had been established, he could refer the case to the Ministry of Punishments for criminal sanctions or to the Ministry of Personnel for administrative sanctions. Administrative sanctions could include fines, demotions, or removal from office, and were assessed according to a manual, the Regulations on Administrative Punishments (Chufen zeli). The deliberations of the ministries were only advisory; it was the ruler who decided the sanction. In fact, the recommended sanctions were often reduced as a mark of imperial grace.

Obviously, the procedures of the Censorate did not produce a rule of law, but they were not meant to. The goal was instead a rule of virtue, and the assumption was that a ruler could best achieve such a rule when properly advised by an officialdom that represented a repository of virtue. Historical assessments of the Censorate in China have gone to extremes, with some seeing the censor as nothing more than a disciplinary official responding to the orders of an absolute monarch. Others have seen the Censorate as embodying a sort of democratic principle, with the censor speaking for the masses. Neither of these perspectives is valid. A more balanced perspective would see the censor as part political commissar, part ombudsman, and part moralist. As Charles Hucker concludes, “Neither representatives of the imperial will, nor representatives of the majority will, they were spokesmen for the general will—that is to say, guardians of the Confucian governmental heritage handed down from the past. In this manner alone can their prestige and their influence be accounted for.”⁴⁶

What characteristics brought Guo Xiu to the center of Qing power in 1686? Educated at home in a rural setting, he may have had some of the character of an autodidact unused to debate, but he knew what he knew and was prepared to act on it forcefully. Although his family had suffered during the Manchu conquest, he was willing to serve the Qing so long as they abided by Confucian principles. He was a smart man, though perhaps not brilliant, with a mind attracted to the practical problem of applying Confucian principles to real world situations. As in most successful careers, Guo’s was marked by luck. He was fortunate that his examiner and his bureaucratic mentor appreciated his talents and that the drift of conversation at court resulted in his selection as censor. Guo was able to capitalize on these strokes of fortune, however, making a significant career for himself. He could be outspoken: he spoke his mind on the canals of Wujiang, in the yamen of the provincial governor of Jiangsu, and at the Kangxi court. These characteristics suited him well for appointment in the Kangxi censorate, where his courage and habit of direct speaking could find an outlet in impeachment and remonstrance. Above all, he was committed to the rule of virtue, which was the ultimate goal of the censorate.