Although this compact study may be read independently, it nicely complements the author's earlier State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–1644 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Indeed, from the outset Harry Miller notes that his two books are inextricably intertwined. Together they offer an elegant and astute narrative of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, the like of which has not appeared in the Anglophone literature since the publication of Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Judging from his citations and polished prose, Miller has drawn much inspiration from Wakeman's two-volume opus. But he also brings his own conceptual framework as well as new materials from archives and rare books to bear upon his account of the period.
For Miller, the Ming-Qing transition was marked by continuity, namely, “a dispute over sovereignty” between two antagonistic groups that formed within “China's amalgamated scholar-gentry bureaucratic elite” during the late Ming period (p. 1). To one side were those “scholar-gentry-officials” who cleaved to “a chauvinistic Legalism, which insisted that sovereignty resided in the imperial state”; on the other were those who hewed to “an equally fundamentalist Confucianism, which held that sovereignty resided within the gentry class itself” (p. 1).
The book's strictly chronological arrangement derives not only from the dictates of narrative coherence, but also from the substance of Miller's claim that “late Ming and early Qing factional strife was of a piece, with the same central issue, the same kinds of participants, and the same alternating rhythm” (p. 2). Chapters 1 and 2 trace the persistence of this “late Ming pattern” (p. 1) during both Dorgon's regency (1644–50) and the Shunzhi emperor's majority (1651–61). Chapter 3 demonstrates the neutering of any collective ethos of autonomy (moral or fiscal) among scholar-gentry-officials during the Oboi regency by recounting two well-studied episodes of 1661: the “Lamenting in the Temple” affair and the “Tax Clearance” case. These events made way for the young Kangxi emperor's cooptation of scholar-gentry-officials during the first three decades of his personal rule (1669–99), detailed in chapter 4. By teasing out subtle distinctions between the rhetoric and dispositions of various individuals, the author paints a nuanced picture of the intellectual fault lines along which tensions between China's scholar-gentry-officials and the emerging Qing state developed.
Qing specialists may find Miller's treatment of “the imperial state” thoughtful, but at times less than sure-footed. Take, for example, the influence of banner politics. The author readily acknowledges that insofar as the banners provided “a reliable local bureaucracy, an administrative technocracy relatively immune to partiality—both economic and philosophical—toward the gentry,” it also meant that “[t]he Qing state's potential independence from the gentry was a great advantage … in the continuing argument over sovereignty” (p. 12). But Miller, in the end, dismisses such possibilities. While discussing the demoralization and capitulation of the Jiangnan gentry in the wake of the Tax Clearance case, the author asks: “Could [the] novel composition of the Qing state have made the difference in 1661?” His answer: “Manchu regents and transnational bannermen” may have “functioned outside the traditional gentry-official ambiguity and [thus] might have been able to deal with the gentry without pulling any punches,” but “the point remains that Wanli's [r. 1578–1620] mine tax commissioners were likewise very straightforward attackers of the gentry from outside the gentry-official milieu” (p. 95). Assuming a functional equivalence between imperial agents operating during the late Ming and the early Qing, Miller concludes that “the unconventionality of the state's 1661 attack on the gentry” does not by itself explain its success (p. 95).
This assessment, however, effectively discounts the salience of banner politics. Moreover, it seems rooted in a rather reified conception of “the state” and even “the Oboi regency,” neither of which was a static or monolithic bloc. The Manchu banner lord Soni (1601–67) was not merely “a Manchu official” (p. 76), but a powerful co-regent and Oboi's political nemesis. Another of Oboi's archrivals was the Kangxi emperor's grandmother, the Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang (1613–88), who served as the young ruler's political mentor and protector, but surprisingly never figures in Miller's narrative. Other actors who seem absent are the versatile, young officers of the imperial guard and the coterie of highly educated and multilingual bannermen-“scholars” (Man. baksi) who served in various positions (including in the Hanlin Academy) as counterweights to Chinese scholar-gentry-officials at both the Shunzhi and early Kangxi courts.
Viewing the dynamics of banner politics from a parallactic perspective raises some interesting questions: Should we view Manchu grandees and bannermen (or did they view themselves) as “the same kinds of participants” concerned about “the same central issue” that animated the factionalism of the late Ming period? Or could the processes of early Qing state-formation in which such figures actively participated be inherently significant, that is, analytically independent from (yet still relatable to) Miller's “state versus gentry” paradigm? Such thoughts are not intended to deny the many valuable insights in this study, but rather to suggest that the conceptual framework, while illuminating in certain respects, may not fully capture the political complexities of the early Qing period. That said, Harry Miller deserves both praise and gratitude for having so eloquently and concisely delineated some of the manifold intricacies of the Ming-Qing transition.
