Matters Not That Trivial: Damage to the “Safety-Valve” Mechanism in Civil Justice and the Rise of the Boxer Movement in the Late Qing Period

Rural China ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Guiping Qu (渠桂萍)
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
North China ◽  
Safety Valve ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Civil Justice ◽  
Valve Mechanism ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Judicial Protection ◽  
Unequal Treaties ◽  
Land Transactions

Abstract Litigation in rural China under the Qing involved “trivial matters” 细事 over marriage, land transactions, debt, theft, and so on. “Going to court” 打官司, as a regular means of resolving such disputes, functioned as a “safety valve” in maintaining social order, while the mishandling of civil disputes by local magistrates and prefects often had severe consequences. After 1860, Western missionaries became increasingly active in rural North China under the system of unequal treaties. Their arrogance and interference with lawsuits by providing local converts with judicial protection caused damage to the safety valve and disgruntlement among the victims of their abuses. It was the growing enmity toward the missionaries that led to rampant violence by the Boxers around 1900.

Chinese Perceptions of American Democracy: Late Qing Observers and Their Experiences with the Chinese Exclusion Act

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-346
Author(s):  
Sam Wong ◽  
Brian Wong
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Chinese Perceptions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Exclusion Act ◽  
The U.S

Abstract Analysis of the writings of Kuang Qizhao and other Chinese self-strengtheners suggests that their emphasis on promoting education before democracy and continuing to endorse classical Confucianism were not signs of a retrograde kind of conservatism, but an entirely rational decision based on the actual experiences of late Qing observers of 19th Century American democracy. Observing the U.S. Congress’s passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese officials observed the real dangers of demagogue led populism without an educated, moral citizenry and the apparent importance of Christianity to creating the moral foundation for an effective modern society. For Kuang, Confucianism was equivalent to Christianity to establish that moral basis, and not a conservative desire to preserve the old social order. Kuang would pass on his thoughts to some of China’s most important reformers and officials on his return home, suggesting he and the officials he associated with had a more realistic and sophisticated understanding of American society and democracy than is currently assumed.

From Bodhisattva Earth to Man-Made Meat Essence: Famine Foods in Late Qing, Nationalist and Maoist China

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Kathryn Jean Edgerton-Tarpley
Keyword(s):  
North China ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Wild Plants ◽  
Tree Bark ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
The Government ◽  
Maoist China ◽  
Grain Foods ◽  
Famine Foods

This article examines change and continuity in the selection, conceptualisation and state-sponsorship of 'famine foods' in late Qing, Nationalist and Maoist China. It employs as case studies the following severe famines that struck North China under three markedly different regimes: the North China Famine of 1876-79, the Henan Famine of 1942/43 and the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. Continuities that cut across the three periods include the particular non-grain foods - beginning with tree bark and wild plants and extending to Bodhisattva earth (Guanyin tu) - consumed at the local level, and a tradition of elite involvement in identifying and endorsing items that could relieve starvation. The terms used to describe survival foods changed significantly, however, as did the rationale for promoting such foods. Moreover, as twentieth-century Chinese modernisers joined their Western counterparts in championing the use of science and technology to address food crises and other disasters, state-run health and scientific agencies played an increasingly active role in testing and promoting recipes for non-grain foods. This trend reached its zenith during the Great Leap Famine, when the government launched a 'food substitute' (daishipin) campaign that aimed to address food shortages without reducing grain quotas by encouraging the mass-production of food substitutes such as chlorella and artificial meat. This campaign can be understood as a sharp departure from Qing China's grain-centred famine relief policies, a radical extension of rhetoric and priorities laid out during the Nationalist period and a case of high modernism gone badly awry.

Rural Migrants and Settlement Rights in Early Twentieth-Century Shanxi: A Study of “Class Background Registers”

Rural China ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-276
Author(s):  
Aiming Zhang ◽  
Yingze Hu ◽  
Matthew Noellert
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
North China ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Survival And Development ◽  
The One ◽  
Migrant Households ◽  
The Village

Shanxi experienced a severe population shortage after the late Qing Dingwu famine. The frequent disasters and warfare of the Republican era further increased population movements in north China, and in addition to northeast China, Shanxi became a major destination for migrants. In this period over two million migrants settled in Shanxi. Those that settled in the countryside formed a unique social group of immigrant households. The kinship and territorial bonds of north Chinese villages are well known, and such villages are often considered to have been very insular and xenophobic communities. Migrant households found it difficult to join the village community, and often had no choice but to live precarious lives on the outskirts of villages. Migrant households had to acquire “settlement rights” in the village in order to have any chance of survival and development. But settlement rights could not be achieved overnight; they were not only a matter of time, but also involved certain requirements and favorable circumstances. Through a close examination of “class background registers” compiled during the Four Cleanups movement (1963–1966), this article shows how migrant households in late Qing and Republican China used famine as an opportunity to gradually acquire settlement rights. On the one hand, migrants used wage labor, tenancy, and credit to form dependent relations through land with resident households. On the other hand, they used social relations, adoption, and uxorilocal marriage to form kinship relations with resident households. Compared to south China, where village settlement rights emphasized recognition of common ancestry, settlement rights in north China villages emphasized common lived experience. This difference is an important factor in explaining rural social formation and development in north China.

The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924–1931

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 793-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund S. K. Fung
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Unequal Treaties ◽  
First World ◽  
Treaty Status

The movement to abolish the unequal treaties was the cause célèbre of Chinese nationalism after the First World War. It was an extension of the late Qing movement to retrieve the rights and interests (shouhui liquan yundong) that had been lost to the powers over the decades. Whereas the quintessence of the late Qing campaign was economic nationalism and the means it employed peaceful, the post-war drive was highly political and at times accompanied by a degree of violence. The Chinese determination, strengthened by Germany's and Austria's relinquishment of their treaty status, was a bond that united the whole nation from Beijing to Guangzhou (Canton) despite their domestic political differences.

From “Nourish the People” to “Sacrifice for the Nation”: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Jean Edgerton-Tarpley
Keyword(s):  
North China ◽  
Yellow River ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
River Flood ◽  
Nationalist Government ◽  
Desperate Attempt

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62.

Land Transaction and Its Impact on Society and Economy in Imperial China: An Exchange with “Dian and the System of Land-Rights Transaction under the Qing” by Long Denggao et al.

Rural China ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gang Lin
Keyword(s):  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Critical Determinant ◽  
Market Prices ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Land Relations ◽  
Land Transaction ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Land Transactions

This article challenges the view that land transactions in China from the Song to the late Qing periods became increasingly marketized and effective in resource allocation. In traditional China, the land was never a commodity in the ordinary sense; it served as the very basic means of survival and production for peasants while functioning as the most critical determinant shaping the sustainability of the environment for the survival of humankind. Neither market transactions nor any means external or internal to the state were effective enough in regulating either the total demand or the total supply of the land in China and alleviating the tension in man-to-land relations. Land transactions in imperial China were very different by nature and in terms of their social and economic impact from the received wisdom in Western economic theories, which assumes the decisive roles of supply and demand in shaping market prices and the patterns of production in the commodity economy.

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