The earliest extant Chinese laws stipulated extraordinarily harsh punishments for forgery and impersonation, indicating that these offenses had already become grave concerns for the ruling elites more than 2,000 years ago. However, little has been written about this topic. In this well-researched and lucidly written book, Mark McNicholas not only fills a considerable gap in our knowledge but also makes an important contribution to the historiography of late imperial China. By skillfully connecting the stories of individual imposters and forgers with succinct and incisive discussions of the broader contexts, Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China offers valuable insights on various aspects of the politics, bureaucracy, popular culture, and society of Qing China.
Among the seven main chapters of this book, the first four analyze cases that involved impersonating princely and royal agents and then low-level officials and local constables. Chapters 5 and 6 study forgery cases, while the last chapter traces the history and transformation of imperial legislations on these offenses. The shifting patterns of forgery and impersonation cases reflected the changing realities of the socioeconomic and political circumstances of the time, as this study contends. The majority of the culprits in these cases were at or near the bottom of the social and economic ladder. For them, the immediate benefit apparently outweighed the potentially fatal consequence of breaking imperial laws. Revealing the motivations and life stories of these actors who otherwise have left no traces constitutes a significant contribution in itself. Moreover, what these impostors and forgers believed to be effective strategies for deceiving others and how they exploited others’ greed, fear, or ignorance give us rare, useful glimpses into some widely shared ideas, sentiments, and practices of that era.
McNicholas does an excellent job of explaining what different kinds of zhawei (deception and counterfeiting) cases can tell us about the social and political trends at the time. This requires not just extensive research and an impressive grasp of the vast literature on Qing China but also the skill to reconstruct a larger picture from fragmented evidence and individual cases. As this book demonstrates, the fact that imposters like Meng Guangzu—who claimed to be an emissary of the third prince of the Kangxi emperor in 1717—would try such bold moves and in some cases almost succeeded in deceiving local officials illustrated how the princely struggle for succession in the late Kangxi era made local officials feel vulnerable and eager to hedge against political risks. The religious bent of the Yongzheng emperor and the secrecy surrounding his accession to the throne explained why a number of impostors during his reign claimed to be the emperor's secret agents on a pilgrimage or investigative commission. However, with such early Qing power struggles fading away and considering the increasing routinization of the imperial bureaucracy during the Qianlong period, as McNicholas shows, there was a marked decline in the number and impact of such impersonation cases in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Unsurprisingly, most of the impostors or frauds were less interested in high politics and just tried to find ways to obtain money, food, or lodging. Pretending to be some low-level government officials (such as county jailors) or yamen runners (that is, local constables) would do for them. By carefully examining these cases, McNicholas provides convincing evidence, for instance, about how the notorious image of rapacious yamen runners created fear among the populace and enabled the impostors to extort their victims. His findings further prove that the limited personnel and capacity of the imperial government left a huge void in power in local Chinese society that could be manipulated by a variety of actors for different agendas.
Imposture frequently requires forging documents and other trappings of the alleged person or identity. Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China is full of fascinating details about this little-known world of forgery, where a great variety of counterfeits were in demand and supply, including imperial edicts, tax receipts, arrest warrants, and official seals. McNicholas's relatively short but illuminating discussion of official documents and official seals in the operation of Qing bureaucracy and governance (pp. 96–122) is very useful and calls for more critical attention to this under-analyzed area. Historians have extensively used the judicial and administrative records of Qing China, but few have studied the physical features and production process of these bureaucratic documents and their functions beyond the textual information therein. Scholars in anthropology and other fields have suggested that these documents were more than just instruments or records of government offices but were constitutive of bureaucratic power, ideologies, rules, and practices themselves. McNicholas's analysis of why and how official documents and seals were forged adds a new dimension to future scholarship in this regard.
This book also advances our understanding of another important aspect of Qing society. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of licenses for studentship (especially jiansheng) and certificates of official titles were sold as an important source of state revenue under the contribution (juanna) system. As the purchased status brought intangible and tangible benefits to their claimants—including exemption from mandatory labor service and corporal judicial punishments—a market emerged for the legitimate intermediaries who helped complete these purchase transactions and for the counterfeiters of licenses and certificates. Through examining the counterfeiters, McNicholas brings to light more vividly than most prior scholarship the prevalence of status hunger and its impact on Qing society.
When reviewing the imperial legislations and judicial practices on forgery and impersonation from the pre-Tang period through the Qing, McNicholas goes beyond just identifying the statutory changes and continuities and argues that the Qing period witnessed a process of “partial depoliticization.” Qing legislators and judges reduced the punishments for various types of forgery or impersonation offenses even as they continued to impose harsh punishments upon those offenders considered more politically offensive or dangerous, including forgers of official seals or importers of officials (p. 163). It will be interesting to explore whether such partial depoliticization happened in other legal areas during the Qing.
Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China is grounded in thorough archival research at the central level, and McNicholas shows an extraordinary skill in navigating through such voluminous sources as well as secondary literature to produce a remarkably concise and engaging book. His thorough research may lead some readers to expect analysis of more cases from the various county-level judicial archives that have been fruitfully explored by recent studies of Qing law and society and may complement the central-level archives wonderfully analyzed in this book. (This reviewer only came across one citation to the Baxian county archive.) The book could also have included more discussion of the statutes on imposture and forgery that were found in the Laws of the Second Year of Empress Lü (187 BCE) of the early Western Han, unearthed in the Zhangjiashan tomb in 1983 and translated by Robin Yates and Anthony Barbieri-Low in 2015. These minor nitpickings aside, this book is undoubtedly a welcome and significant addition to the scholarship on Qing legal and social history. It will be of great value for anyone interested in late imperial Chinese law, society, culture, and politics.
