Eminently qualified to write this first English-language book-length study of Sichuan's most infamous secret society (the Paoge, or “gowned brothers”), Di Wang has already established his credentials as a social historian of Chengdu with a speciality in the culture of teahouses, which frequently served as Paoge headquarters in rural Sichuan. This microhistory is oriented primarily around its sources rather than its argument. Based primarily on an undergraduate thesis written by Yenching University student Shen Baoyuan in 1946, and secondarily on wenshi ziliao, personal memoirs of Paoge leaders, the society's foundational myth Haidi (Bottom of the Ocean), and the author's own knowledge of Sichuan, it investigates the Paoge from a variety of discrete angles. These include Paoge mythology, the society's recruitment mechanisms and rituals, members’ use of argot and coded body language to create a distinctive micro-culture, and women's lives in rural Sichuan.
The book's argument is right in its title: through consistent application of violence directed both internally and externally, the Paoge contributed not only to social disorder but also to social order in rural Sichuan. Chapter five likens Paoge leaders to magistrates for their role in suppressing banditry and frequent use of “negotiation tea” to settle local disputes. This analogy stretches things too far, since Paoge men often broke the law while magistrates had always to uphold it. The more convincing part of this chapter argues that the society maintained internal stability over the course of centuries through the stringent application of a (rather Confucian) moral code and often violent punishments of its own members for transgressions thereof. Its assertion that “in Chinese society a nonofficial force always existed and played a crucial role in everyday life” encourages us not to “underestimate the full spectrum of nonstate power” and applies an admirably nuanced lens to social cohesion in rural China (pp. 93–94).
While the Paoge is his primary object of analysis, Wang investigates the society through the life of one inflammatory individual: Lei Mingyuan, a “patriarchal monster” (p. 111) and leader of one of the two lower-class Paoge branches in Hope Township (Chongyiqiao), near Chengdu. In 1939 Lei executed his own daughter and her lover in public; six years later the undergraduate student arrived in the village to conduct anthropological research on the Lei family. Both Shen's and Wang's analysis of this event and of Lei leave something to be desired. Wang notes that Shen's thesis failed to apply its purported research methodology (p. 158), was based on a stay of one month and ten days in Hope Township during which she did not reveal her true intentions to the Lei family (p. 162), and was written with a profound political bent (p. 157). Wang attempts to make up for these shortcomings by making Shen herself one of his objects of analysis, with close attention to her Leftist politics and academic training, but he never directly engages with the issue of how he can extract any kind of empirical value from such a flawed document.
In his own analysis, Wang notes that Lei was apparently afraid of his murdered daughter's vengeful ghost haunting him from the afterlife (p. 29), but fails to reference Janet Theiss's book on female rape victims’ suicides in the late Qing as an act of agency to clear their family name and grant themselves the power to haunt their perpetrators as vengeful ghosts (Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China, University of California Press, 2005). He claims that none of the villagers “thought Lei Mingyuan was guilty of the murder he committed” (p. 31) and that in the last moments of her life, the murdered daughter “likely… wanted to die simply to gain relief from a life of potential suffering” (pp. 29–30), even though these are deep emotions that the historian cannot possibly know. Readers have to wait until chapter nine to see any of Wang's gender analysis of this event, in which he does not question whether Lei Mingyuan's decline in power related to the fact that the entire village either personally witnessed or knew the details of his murder of his own child. Wang instead infers that Lei emerged unscathed and invincible from the murder (during which “[v]illagers tacitly approved the Paoge's tyrannical power,” p. 31), and that his power declined only because his monetary wealth shrank (chapters eight and nine). Given the paucity of analysis one wonders why Wang used these public murders as the introductory hook for the book, other than the fact that it is a dramatic tale that suits the bill for a microhistory.
Indeed, poor analysis is this book's primary weakness, though the data are rich and deeply contextualized in the manner of a microhistory. Wang mentions in passing that “[t]he most important credo promoted by the Paoge… was to forbid rape and adultery [and] [a]ny such accused would be executed” (p. 35), but he does not use this evidence – that a specific definition of sexual immorality was at the heart of the society's moral code – to enrich his analysis of Lei's murder of his own daughter for a supposed sexual transgression. In the chapter on gender Wang does not analyse Lei Mingyuan's (unfulfilled) plan to take a concubine, which seems to have been an insecure man's attempt to secure power through the purchase of a woman. Wang's description of the place of women in late imperial society varies little from the standard line of the Chinese Communist Party about “feudal” society that gender scholars have critiqued for decades (pp. 134–35). Chapter ten argues that the Paoge “were destroyed almost overnight” (p. 145) between 1950 and 1951, but only supplies the stories of Communist Party reprisals (including many executions) against known Paoge leaders in two Sichuan counties as evidence. Readers are left to assume that in a mere three years the Communist state managed to extinguish a secret society that had dominated village life for centuries.
Well written, with a compelling topic and short chapters tightly organized around discrete topics, this book is highly applicable to classroom teaching or quick reference.
