The Chinese History Podcast - Professor Maura Dykstra on Her New Book ”Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State” (Governing China, Part 2)

Professor Maura Dykstra on Her New Book ”Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State” (Governing China, Part 2)

09/20/22 • 37 min

Professor Maura Dykstra of Caltech joins us today to talk about her new book titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. According to the publisher, the book "investigates the administrative revolution of China’s eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century with what seemed, at the time, to be straightforward policies to clean up the bureaucracy: a regulation about deadlines here, a requirement about reporting standards there. Over the course of a hundred years, the central court continued to demand more information from the provinces about local administrative activities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, unprecedented amounts of data about local offices throughout the empire existed.

The result of this information coup was a growing discourse of crisis and decline. Gathering data to ensure that officials were doing their jobs properly, it turned out, repeatedly exposed new issues requiring new forms of scrutiny. Slowly but surely, the thicket of imperial routines and standards binding together local offices, provincial superiors, and central ministries shifted the very epistemological foundations of the state. A vicious cycle arose whereby reporting protocols implemented to solve problems uncovered more problems, necessitating the collection of more information. At the very moment that the Qing knew more about itself than ever before, the central court became certain that it had entered an age of decline."

Contributors

Maura Dykstra

Professor Maura Dykstra is an Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. As a historian of Late Imperial China, her research interests are on bureaucratic, economic, and legal institutions of empire and their implications for political and social interactions in quotidian contexts. Professor Dykstra received her PhD from UCLA and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In addition, she has held numerous residential fellowships and visiting positions in Europe and Asia. Starting in Fall of 2023, Professor Dykstra will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Yale University.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode No. 15

Release date: September 20, 2022

Recording location: Los Angeles, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Professor Dykstra

Images

Cover Image: Cover of Professor Dykstra's book, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon.

A 1771 prisoner's register from Ba County. Fig. 6 in the book with the following description: "Draft of a 1771 prisoner register produced by the Ba County magistrate." It is document 清 006-01-03710 in the Sichuan Provincial Archives' Ba County collection. Photo provided by Professor Dykstra. References Bartlett, Beatrice S. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch’ing China,1723–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Fitzgerald, Devin T. "The Ming Open Archive and the Global Reading of Early Modern China." Ph. D. diss. Harvard University, 2020. Hucker, Charles O. The Censorial System of Ming China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Kuhn, Philip A. Origins of the Modern Chinese State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Mokros, Emily. The Peking gazette in late imperial China: state news and political authority in late imperial China. University of Washington Press, 2020. Wu, Silas H. L. Communication and Imperial Control in China: The Evolution of the Palace Memorial System 1693–1735. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. ———. “Transmis...

Contributors

Maura Dykstra

Yiming Ha

Credits

Episode No. 15

Release date: September 20, 2022

Recording location: Los Angeles, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Professor Dykstra

Images

Cover Image: Cover of Professor Dykstra's book, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon.

Previous Episode

The Ming Bureaucracy and its Practices: A Conversation with Professor Chelsea Wang (Governing China, Part 1)

China has a long bureaucratic history and tradition, and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was no exception. The Ming was one of the largest empires in the world at the time and it established a large and complex bureaucracy to govern it. In this episode, Professor. Chelsea Wang talks to us about some of the bureaucratic practices, which might seem strange to us today, that the Ming employed to keep the empire running.

Governing China is a new series that explores the various bureaucratic institutions and administrative policies that the various Chinese dynasties employed to govern their empires.

Contributors

Chelsea Wang

Professor Chelsea Wang is an Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. As a historian of late imperial China, Professor Wang’s research focuses on the intersection between communication and governance in premodern empires. Her current manuscript project is titled Logistics of Empire: Governance and Spatial Friction in Ming China, 1368-1644, and it examines how the Ming dynasty maintained control over its vast territories using certain administrative practices that modern observers often find counterintuitive and strange.

Yiming Ha

Credits

Episode No. 14

Release date: August 21, 2022

Recording location: Vancouver, Canada/Los Angeles, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Professor Wang

Images

Cover Image: Section of a Ming officials' handbook showing a map of territorial government offices in
Zhejiang province (Image Courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library's Digital Collections)

Structure of the Ming bureaucracy (Image Source)

Conceptual map of the Ming territorial bureaucracy (Image by Professor Wang)

Deadlines for newly appointed officials to arrive at their locations of service. The red star indicates the location of Beijing, the imperial capital (Image by Professor Wang. Please do not cite or circulate without permission)

A memorial reproduced in a Ming literary collection. This memorial, written by the controversial Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng and addressed to the Wanli emperor, contains information about Zhang's speed of travel when he returned to Huguang province to bury his recently deceased father (Image Courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library's Digital Collections)

Section of a Ming officials' handbook showing information about individual administrative units in Zhejiang province. The text contains information about each prefecture's tax quota, subordinate counties, distance from Beijing, and arrival deadlines for officials traveling from Beijing (Image Courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library's Digital Collections)

References

Dardess, John W. Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

Guo Hong 郭红 and Jin Runcheng 靳润成. Zhongguo xingzheng quhua tongshi: Mingdai Juan 中国行政区划通史: 明代卷. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2007.

Hucker, Charles O. “Governmental Organization of the Ming Dynasty.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 21 (1958): 1–66.

Nimick, Thomas G. Local Administration in Ming China: The Changing Role of Magistrates, Prefects, and Provincial Officials. Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2008.

Schneewind, Sarah. “Pavilions to Celebrate Honest Officials: An Authenticity Dilemma in Fifteenth-Century China.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orien...

Next Episode

The Maritime Kingdom of the Zheng Family: An Interview with Professor Xing Hang

The fall of Beijing in 1644 did not immediately put an end to the Ming Dynasty. For almost half a century, Ming pretenders and loyalists in the south warred with the Manchus. One of the most prominent Ming loyalist factions was the Zheng family regime based in Fujian and Taiwan. Founded by the pirate-merchant Zheng Zhilong, the enterprise reached new heights under his son Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, who is best known for driving the Dutch out of Taiwan. This regime carried out the pro-Ming, anti-Manchu banner until it was finally defeated by the Qing in 1683. Joining me to talk about this fascinating regime is Professor Xing Hang of Brandeis University. He will cover the history of the regime from its rise to its fall, how it became so powerful, how and why Koxinga took over Taiwan, as well as what Ming loyalism meant to the Zhengs.

Contributors

Xing Hang

Professor Xing Hang is an Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University and a scholar of China and of the East Asian maritime world. His first project is about the Zheng organization in Taiwan, its role in seventeenth century East Asian maritime trade, and how it defined its legitimacy, and he has published extensively on the topic. His research on this topic has also greatly informed his more recent project, which is on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first centuries.

Yiming Ha

Credits

Episode no. 16

Release date: November 28, 2022

Recording location: Boston, MA/Los Angeles, CA

Transcript (proofread and punctuated by Lina Nie)

Bibliography courtesy of Prof. Hang

Images

Cover Image: Painting of Zheng Zhiling (in green robes) and his son Zheng Chenggong by Dutch painter Pieter van der Aa (Image Source)

17th century portrait of Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga (Image Source)

Maximum extent of Koxinga's territories in the late 1650s/early 1660s. Red shows areas under his direct control, while orange shows his area of influence. (Image Source)

Birth rock of Koxinga, in Hirado, Japan. (Image Source)

Koxinga worshipped in a temple in Tainan. (Image Source)

References

Andrade, Tonio. Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Andrade, Tonio and Xing Hang, eds. Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019. Cheng Wei-chung. War, Trade and Piracy in the China Seas (1622-1683). Leiden: Brill, 2013. Clulow, Adam. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Ho, Daphon David. "Sealords Live in Vain: Fujian and the Making of a Maritime Frontier in Seventeenth-century China." PhD diss., UCSD, 2011. Keliher, Macabe. Out of China: Yu Yonghe's Tales of Formosa: A History of Seventeenth-century Taiwan. Taipei: SMC Publishing, 2003. Shephard, John R. Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Struve, Lynn. The Southern Ming, 1644-1662. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Wills, Jr., John E. "Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History." In From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China, edited by Jonathan Spence and John Wills, 201-238. New Haven: Ya...