Preface

Retired professors often write big books, syntheses of a career of lecturing and reading in their chosen field. This is not such a book, but it does reflect a career’s worth of reflection. In the 1980s, when I was starting out in the field, many of us came to feel that the vein for studies of China’s nineteenth-century encounter with the West had been mined out, so we turned to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Motivations differed, but my own notion was to measure the capacities of the Qing state and society on the eve of its great encounter with the West. Having turned to the eighteenth century, we found a wealth of primary source material but almost no secondary sources to conjure with. We set out, usually after first monographs were completed, to create a body of secondary material. The result has been a number of large studies—of the Manchus’ great enterprise of conquest, of Manchu modes of organization, of the capacities of the eighteenth-century Confucian bureaucracy, of provincial institutions, of Chinese state economic policy and mechanisms for disaster relief. All of this work has begun to paint a more complete picture of the pre-nineteenth-century Qing state and the respects in which a Manchu-governed dynasty differed from Chinese-governed regimes. Contemplating all of these large studies as I retired, I came to feel the need for smaller studies of people, moments, and events that could confirm or challenge, even confound, our hypotheses. This book is meant to be such a study.

I came across Guo Xiu’s impeachments several times during my rambles through Qing dynasty sources, and I was repeatedly impressed by their detail. Rarely do extant sources say so much about a moment and the stresses and tensions that gave it life. As I read the impeachments more carefully, I discovered that they were not about single instances of corruption but about broad patterns of action that prevailed at the beginning of the long eighteenth century. How, and with what assumptions, did Mingju, Jin Fu, Wang Hongxu, Gao Shiqi, and Guo Xiu himself serve the nascent Qing state? What impact did Xuanye’s transition from adolescence to adulthood have on the course of Qing history? What loyalties guided the Chinese—no longer Ming loyalists but perhaps not fully Qing partisans—and how did they get on with their Manchu counterparts? These questions, inspired by Guo’s impeachments, led me away from the texts themselves into the dynamics of the early Kangxi state. The result is a book that has two thrusts. Those interested in corruption—how it was identified, described, prosecuted, judged, and punished—might want to begin with part 2 of the book. Those interested in the Kangxi reign, the work carried out along the Grand Canal, and the role of Mingju should begin with part 1.

Even a short book requires a great deal of support. I am grateful to Hoyt Tillman for inviting me to the Conference on Culture and Power in Chinese History at Arizona State University, to the University of North Carolina East Asia Center for inviting me to present at their 2022 seminar, and to the editors of Asia Major for allowing me to reuse parts of my article “Words on the Winds: The Kangxi Emperor and the Qing Censorate” (Asia Major 39, Part 1, [2021]: 11–32). My thanks also to Lorri Hagman, the editor extraordinaire who has piloted so many successful projects in our field, for guiding this project through its initial stages, and to her successor, Caitlin Tyler-Richards, for finishing it up. Ben Pease of Pease Publishing produced the maps, patiently entertaining requests to find places that no longer exist. My wife, Christine Cordell, consistently encouraged me to finish the project and endured when I “left for the Qing.” Many books by professors are produced of necessity; this one was a labor of love, and it’s appropriate that I dedicate it to my daughter, Alexis Rachel Guy, and to my first teacher of modern Chinese history, Jonathan Spence, who introduced me to the Kangxi emperor.