R. Kent Guy's recent book is an overview of the top administration of China's provinces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It deals with a great many individuals, their abilities, careers and personal relationships with the emperor, and includes thus a huge amount of biographical information embedded in a detailed description of how government worked on the provincial level in late imperial China.
The first part of Guy's book deals with the chronological development of the office of provincial governor and the creation of provinces; the qualities demanded from a governor and how qualified ones were to be selected; the practice of special appointments; and the problem of how to preserve flexibility while bound by a tight collar of increasing standardization and legalization. In the second part, the empire is divided into four different macro-regions with distinct historical, political, economical and social characteristics. The author has carefully analyzed not only the biographies of the governors appointed in all provinces throughout each of these macro-regions, with a focus on the single steps of their careers as well as their social and ethnic background, but has also put these variables into a relationship with the conditions prevailing in the particular provinces. He was able to determine certain patterns according to which positions of governor were filled, with geographical and chronological distinctions.
In the first chapter, Guy describes how the province developed as a standard form of regional administration. The Qing government transformed the “protean regions” of the Ming into provinces with crucial and distinguishable roles (p. 325). They were able to “manufacture homogeneity” and routine in a factual diversity (p. 352). Chapter 2 explains that the Qing did not simply take over the model established by the Ming. The xunfu during the Ming was a ‘grand coordinator’ with ill-defined military responsibilities and appointed by the emperor in case of need. For the Qing, the xunfu was a regular and civilian “provincial governor” and a product of the bureaucracy.
All dynasties battled with the “conundrum” how to identify “competence” (Chapter 3). Guy sees the length of terms and the evaluations of office holders as factors to answer this question. Nominally, a term of office was three years, but most terms were much shorter, and in border regions also longer in order to secure continuity and stability. The personal selection of competent governors was an important institutional reform that arose out of the specific context of a conquest dynasty that could never trust a bureaucracy whose representatives were selected by a random process (p. 110).
The process of appointment is investigated in Chapter 4. There were a surprisingly large number of special appointments, and these can often be correlated with simultaneous dismissals or with attempts by newly enthroned emperors to appoint their own trusted staff. Bureaucratization during the late eighteenth century, coupled with legal justification and codification, initiated a “bureaucratic flu” (p. 141) after 1800.
In Chapter 5 the author shows that while early Qing emperors could simply decree new procedures and thus had great flexibility in their choices, it later became quite complicated to make changes. All emperors circumvented the rule of avoidance (not appointing a local in his home region). The chapter closes with statistical data on the bureaucratic origin of governors. Those coming from the Six Boards were mainly Manchus, who were not obliged to pass the state examinations. Service on the Boards was a period of apprenticeship before entering service as governor. Lateral transfers from province to province were mainly for junior officials who needed to prove their competence. Beginning in an easy and less demanding province, they could then be transferred to provinces with more complex economic and social structures, and later promoted to governor-general.
Northern and North-eastern China (Chapter 6) were characterized by heavy concentrations of military forces and also by a set of important civilian tasks to be fulfilled. The provinces of Henan, Shandong and Zhili required strong governors appointed directly by the emperor. The financial competence of the governors was a crucial requirement. Shanxi was home to a group of merchants needed by the court to finance military campaigns in the West. While the governor of Shaanxi was entrusted with more civilian matters, those of the “imperfect” province of Gansu needed to be individuals with experience of military service. Governors' military responsibilities in Sichuan were so onerous that in 1748 the office of the “civilian” governor was abolished. The governor-general had to observe both the duties of a commander for the numerous campaigns in Tibet and also those of a civilian administrator taking care of “Heaven's storehouse”.
While there were virtually no local elites in the North and Northwest, the administrative order in the Southeast had to be negotiated with the local elites. The posts of governors of Anhui and Jiangsu were regularly occupied by persons coming from those regions, so that the author speaks of “scholar-governors” (p. 243). This can especially be seen in the distinct politics in Zhejiang and Fujian whose elites were much more heterogeneous and offered a longer-lasting resistance to central control. Qing governance took the shape of a “colonial form of power” in this region (p. 274). The governorship there was made more difficult by the importance of the coastline that exposed the empire to dangers from outside.
The southern provinces (Chapter 8) became a regular part of the empire only after the end of the war against the Three Feudatories. Only the compilation of a local gazetteer gave the region the status of a regular part of the empire. Another means of integration was the implementation of provincial examinations. Hunan had at its disposal a rich grain production, so that grain management and coordination with the grain reserves of other provinces played an important part in a governor's schedule. Hubei was a province serving as a hub for river transport on the Yangtse. The governors of these provinces were “sojourners” on a training ground. Guangdong was much more tightly controlled because there was always the fear of a separatist regime in the far south. Governors were personally chosen by the emperor and were rarely transferred to governor posts in other provinces. Guangxi served as a training ground for young governors.
The chapter on the last macro-region (Chapter 9) is somewhat less homogenous than the earlier chapters, and includes a sub-chapter on palace memorials. As a basic instrument of communication between the governors and the emperor, this system would probably better have been explained in the first part of the book. This sub-chapter nonetheless includes information on Guizhou and Yunnan, probably the last provinces to be fully integrated into the empire. The many particular difficulties of these border provinces made it necessary for governors to serve long-term to ensure stability, continuance, and the organization of a regular administration.
The description of the organization of the provincial government of each region by the Qing court is clearly laid out horizontally and vertically, showing how the emperors met the demands of each particular province, and how changes were made over time. Guy has thus provided a three-dimensional picture of the provincial government. He demonstrates that individuals played a crucial role in what the provinces became before provincial administration was more routinized. The Qing provincial governors gave shape to their provinces, and the Qing created a coherent empire by developing regularly administrated provinces throughout the empire. Guy's book is based on a considerable number of regional studies and helps the reader to gain an overview of the multi-centered character of the Chinese empire. The book is rich in detail and repeatedly explains what the particular features of each region were. With his “prosopographic” approach (p. 15) Guy opens a type of source that is not sufficiently utilized by Qing historians. At the same time, he explains the functioning of many basic and important instruments and agencies of the Qing government, like the Imperial Household Department and the exploitation of the private funds of high officials, the palace memorial system, the rule of avoidance, the control of native peoples in the Southwest, the function of the Six Boards, and so on. All this valuable information is scattered over many chapters in a relatively large book. It might have been more convenient to create more sub-chapters and list these fully in the table of contents. With such a method, Guy's book could have served as a very helpful handbook on provincial government by the Qing and the characteristics of the various provinces during the Qing. It is an extremely rich book, yet the tools to operate it with are not convenient. This concerns mainly the index of the book, which has not been produced with sufficient care.
