Conclusion

Corruption and its prosecution are enduring subjects of political investigation, both as old as human institutions themselves. The term corruption is, however, an abstraction, a category into which a wide variety of individual actions can be placed. Such an abstraction may be useful to the social scientist in explaining why a regime doesn’t function optimally or enjoy full legitimacy, or even as a residual category where phenomena unsusceptible of other explanation may fit. It may be useful to the ethicist trying to determine the wellsprings of good and evil in the human character. But the historian has to look at a more granular level: What elements of an institution are being corrupted, by whom and to what ends? Individual corrupt actions, to the extent that they can be revealed—and very often they can’t be, as they are undertaken in secret—tell us a great deal about their historical moment. Who was important enough to bribe, and how had their importance been established? What were the networks that made corruption possible? On what social and economic foundations did bribery rest? Where did the money come from, and what class was most involved? What did people value enough to pay bribes, and why did they value it? What was the attitude of those in legitimate authority toward corruption and its prosecution? This book has examined in as much detail as possible Guo Xiu’s memorials on central government corruption in the middle years of the Kangxi reign, in an attempt to characterize the period and its principal actors. In conclusion it may be useful to sum up what the lens of corruption shows about the period.

In a historical era when the most commonly used primary source, the Veritable Records, focused exclusively on the emperor, testimony like Guo Xiu’s usefully highlights which of the many imperial servants of the day politically alert contemporaries perceived as most important. In Guo’s memorials Mingju appears, somewhat surprisingly in view of the limited extant sources about him, as one of the dominant figures of the age. He was the official who had to be bribed if one wished to advance in the early and mid-1680s. He was associated with, if not the author of, some of the most important departures of the middle Kangxi reign. Through his recommendation, Chinese scholars gained access to the emperor. During the Kangxi emperor’s late adolescence, he was the go-to figure at the Kangxi court. As war ended and the emperor aged, there was less need for Mingju and, from the emperor’s point of view, more danger in retaining him.

Jin Fu was also a crucial figure. He was bribed no doubt; infrastructure projects, which involved expenditure of funds in a wide variety of venues and times, were particularly susceptible to corruption. But more important in his case, he sought to bribe Mingju and others in the capital so as to secure resources and permissions to implement his vision of a workable river control system. The emperor, for the most part, ignored the possibility that Jin Fu accepted bribes and focused on the larger issue of Jin Fu’s plans. Gao Shiqi, Wang Hongxu, and Chen Yuanlong were also important enough to bribe. They have been known in the scholarship primarily as guarantors of the dynasty’s Chinese Confucian credentials. But they appear in Guo Xiu’s writings as underminers of the court’s reputation, as they accepted money to influence appointments and policy directions.

Malfeasance was not the product of just a few officials. Each of the figures Guo identified as corrupt commanded networks of followers. Collectively they demonstrated that it took, if not a village, at least a multiethnic coalition to achieve the consolidation of dynastic rule that was achieved in the middle Kangxi years. The skills of bannermen like Jin Fu, working with Chen Huang, were required to translate Chinese language and technology into forms the Manchus could use to secure their rule. Serving as an intermediary had its advantages, however, and according to the Kangxi emperor’s testimony when he first promoted Yu Chenglong, bannermen in the postwar era had become wealthy and corrupt. Mingju’s administrative ability, bilingual facility, and wide contacts were necessary to secure his teenage monarch’s rule. But his success was made possible by a network of followers, which included warriors from the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories as well as a generation of grand secretaries. Gao, Wang, and Chen provided necessary Chinese polish to the Manchu ruler’s actions and informal input into the Manchu emperor’s decisions. But they also had their henchman, who collected money and managed the properties that money bought. Each of these networks was performing important functions for the state, highlighted by the amounts of money that flowed through them, licitly or illicitly. The Qing achievements of the 1680s were not the emperor’s alone, despite the efforts of the Qing history-making process and the modern scholars who have used it to glorify the monarch. They were, rather, the achievements of a regime of diverse social elements engaged in a generally effective but occasionally misguided collaboration.

Guo Xiu’s accusations show that the 1680s were an important moment in the ever-changing relation of Manchu bannermen, Hanjun bannermen, and Chinese scholar-officials in the Qing dynasty. The three groups had come to share a common purpose—the survival and enhancement of Qing rule—and in pursuit of this end, these groups had begun to routinely interact. But they had different interests, and Guo Xiu felt obliged to describe their corruption in separate documents. And each pursued advantage in its own way. Manchus, at least in Kangxi’s telling, had a sense of themselves as the people who got things done and viewed Chinese as officials who temporized, passed blame, and yearned to return home to their dinner parties. But Manchu control of the imperial center made possible Mingju’s profits. Hanjun bannermen shared their Manchu colleagues’ sense of themselves as doers and, if Jin Fu can be taken as an example, had little patience with the Chinese elites who stood in the way. Chinese scholars, like Dong Ne, feared the power of Manchus and Hanjun bannermen, but their monopoly on the language of politics proved valuable, giving them access to power.

Corruption in the 1680s reflected, in part at least, the Qing’s changing Chinese social and economic base in the mid-Kangxi era. The relation between economic change and corruption is difficult to establish. Corruption was hardly new in seventeenth-century China, and it is notoriously difficult to periodize corruption in the late imperial Chinese world.¹ When significant corruption cases emerge, it is always difficult to know whether the underlying problem was more serious or the perceiver more acute. Certainly, Guo Xiu’s status as something of an outsider at the Kangxi court of the late 1680s made him a sharp observer. But it does seem likely that bribery and extortion increased in amount and frequency as prosperity returned. The economy of the first years of Qing rule was tightly constrained. The peace that prevailed in China after 1683 and the restoration of normal agricultural and trade conditions brought a return of prosperity. The central state was able to invest more money in its projects, at least in the river project, and Mingju’s interest grew as state investments increased. On the local level, the return of prosperity likely made office holding more worthwhile. The expected profits of office were great enough that it was worthwhile to pay a bribe to achieve it. Collecting these payments became a valuable enterprise. Mingju and his network of financial henchmen were able to capture a significant amount of economic surplus—enough, when properly managed, to render his descendants one of the wealthiest Manchu families in the eighteenth century.

The changing social basis of Qing rule underlay Jin Fu’s frustrations after 1684 and conditioned his response. In its early years, Manchu rule in China rested on Chinese of the north. North Chinese peasants formed a large component of early Qing armies, and north Chinese scholars made up the majority of those who passed the first examinations. There is little collective data on the origins of Hanjun bannermen, but it is likely that they were northerners as well. After the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories, however, the emperor and court turned their attention to the landholders and scholars of the south—as it was then known, the lower Yangzi Valley. The emperor’s discovery of the interests of landholders in the seven downriver counties changed the nature of Jin Fu’s river enterprise. Mingju—who may have used his power initially to protect the northerners who had fought in the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories—switched emphases and used his connections to reach out to south Chinese scholars to invite them to court. Southerners began to pass examinations at a rate appropriate to their numbers and educational advantage, and southerners came to populate the emperor’s Southern Study. The sources of this turn to the south were numerous and complex. Among them were the lure of southern education and culture to the first Manchu emperor to receive a Chinese education, the power of southern money and its contribution to the Qing tax base, and the value of southern agriculture, proven during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories, when Mingju’s colleagues and protégés strained to feed the Qing armies.

What did Chinese of the late seventeenth century value enough to pay bribes to attain? The answer offered by Guo’s memorials was a position in the governing regime. Mingju and his henchman collected payments for appointments, as did the men in the Southern Study. In this respect, the Qing was no different from many contemporary regimes. Offices were for sale throughout the early modern world, a situation fostered by the monetization of economies and the growth of administrative apparatuses. These sales have been correctly condemned in moral terms: they were socially unfair, undermined meritocracy, and weakened the states that undertook them. Though these moral questions cannot be entirely laid aside, other analytical questions may be posed. Details of the way offices were sold, who profited from them, and where the money went are telling. Such details speak to universal questions of how wealth is translated into power and how private resources can be tapped, and for whose purposes.

Two broad types of office sale can be identified. In the first, the state itself collects the money and appoints the official, in what might be termed classic venality, identified most clearly with prerevolutionary France.² Such a pattern marks a state in need of resources, trying to secure private wealth outside the tax system. A second pattern involves intermediaries: the aspirant pays a well-positioned courtier to recommend him and, assuming all goes well, receives his post. Linda Levy Peck has vividly described this process in Stuart England.³ As she has argued, this pattern became particularly entrenched as the opportunities for patronage grew and the value of office to its holder increased.

The Qing empire saw both kinds of sale. In its early days, when revenue was scarce and expenses heavy, degrees were sold directly by the state. During its first years, the Qing contemplated such sales when tax income could not cover the expenses of military conquest. In 1673, at the beginning of the Three Feudatories war, Lawrence Zhang has recently demonstrated, the dynasty implemented an elaborate scheme for selling offices, promotions, and transfers to more desirable posts.⁴ Most of the time, emperors and their Confucian counselors tried to avoid official sales of office if revenues were sufficient to meet the state’s policy ends. In the 1680s, another sort of office sale emerged. Mingju and his colleagues received personal payments in return for recommendations for appointment. As with their counterparts in England, they practiced their selling at a moment when offices were becoming more valuable. As such, they were part of a universal trend, a mark of its time. But they were also products of a particular postwar moment. Men who had been wartime colleagues became peacetime associates, using the knowledge they had gained during the war and the trust the emperor vested in Mingju to ensure their future and their fortunes. Operating at the intersection between Chinese and Manchu administrations, they produced venality with Chinese characteristics.

There is no evidence that the Kangxi emperor himself was corrupt, if that concept can even be meaningfully applied to a figure who theoretically controlled all under heaven. But the emperor may have been less interested in prosecuting corruption per se than in ensuring that officials’ corrupt activities did not interfere with the great enterprises of the dynasty.⁵ The emperor did not choose to investigate Jin Fu’s corruption, nor did he seem interested in the details of actions of Mingju, Gao Shiqi, Wang Hongxu, or Chen Yuanlong. His approach, outlined in his edict on Mingju, was to hold back in the hope that officials would correct themselves, intervening only when he felt the activity had begun to interfere with his own authority or the legitimacy of the dynasty. As one historian has phrased it, recognizing that corruption and greed were constant threats to the governing process, the emperor felt it necessary to intervene from time to time to preserve the state. When he acted, his punishments were swift and decisive.⁶

Kangxi’s actions were determined by the needs of state. Mingju was interfering with his authority to govern, and the emperor’s resolve that the minister be removed was unmistakable. By contrast, his indecision about whether Jin Fu should be dismissed was based on his worry that a successor would not be as capable. The treatment of Guo Xiu also reflected a pragmatic approach to the censor and his concerns. So long as Guo served the emperor’s interests, he was praised and promoted. Once Guo’s actions, however sincerely undertaken, came to complicate management of the state, support diminished. Guo Xiu may have reached this point when he impeached the Southern Study scholars. Dismissals—ultimately temporary—came quickly, but there was no comment from the monarch. When Guo Xiu’s multiple accusations seemed to require complex and nuanced action on the emperor’s part, the simplest course was to simply ask the censor to resign. The suggestion that Guo Xiu retire was not an order or a punishment so much as a recognition that the needs of state would be better served by Guo’s departure than by his continued presence in Beijing.

So, finally, can Guo Xiu’s impeachments be termed successful? The answer depends on what we mean by success. His impeachments did not end the careers of any of his targets except Chen Huang. But Guo Xiu was not a factional infighter who sought to bring down one set of officials to make way for others. Nor, it seemed, did he seek power for himself. His vision was broader. At a moment when the direction of the dynasty was being established, when the great bargain between Manchu and Chinese was being struck, his aim was to ensure that Confucian standards would guide the new regime. He had an impact on those who served, and perhaps the emperor, in delayed careers, upset arrangements, and important realizations. His actions were significant enough that the Qianlong emperor preserved two of his attacks for posterity. Perhaps this was enough for this likely grandson of Ming resisters who ventured forth from Jimo to guide the Manchu order in the right direction.