Prosecution and Punishment

In the final chapter, the author explores issues related to local vigilante justice as well as hearings and trials at the local level of government of those persons arrested for involvement in banditry and sworn brotherhood activities. This necessarily involves discussions of jails and detention of criminals, magistrates’ hearings, and punishments. The author ends with an analysis of the patterns of prosecutions and punishments and assess the successes and failures of the judicial system in suppressing banditry and brotherhood activities in late imperial Guangdong.

The Reach of the State

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which informs us that the reach of the state stopped at the county yamen, in chapter 4 the author argues that state agencies, particularly subcounty officials, yamen staff, and military personnel, actually penetrated deep into local society and played an indispensable role in law enforcement efforts at the grassroots level. Although there were tensions in the relationship, nonetheless it was to their mutual advantage that state agents and community leaders cooperate to rid the countryside of social disorders caused by bandits. Major conduits for this cooperation were the mutual surveillance (baojia) and local constable (dibao) systems, both of which operated in the nebulous space between state and local society. All of these efforts, I argue, had mixed results for local crime prevention.

Afterword

My research has always focused on what is called history from the bottom up. I believe that in order to understand a society, and its history, we must look at it not only through the eyes and words of the men at the top but also from the perspective of the little guy, both men and women, at the lower end of the social ladder. This sort of history, however, is not easy to get at and involves tedious research using both conventional and unconventional sources as well as innovative methodologies and lots of imagination. I find my clues to the past not only in dusty archives but also in gritty fieldwork in rundown villages and in beach resorts that were areas once inhabited by bandits and pirates. My interests range from the history of crime and the culture of violence to popular religion and local folkways in late imperial south China....

Community Security and Self-Defense

Chapter 5 analyzes local self-regulation and law enforcement efforts. In conjunction with government, local communities also devised various methods for their own security and self-defense. Despite the state’s efforts and accomplishments in reaching down into local communities, the countryside was too vast and populous for state agents to penetrate everywhere. Normally the government preferred not to intervene directly in local affairs, but rather, to do so only indirectly through community lecture (xiangyue) and mutual surveillance (baojia) agents. Occasionally, in times of crises, the state would intervene more directly, such as in cases of famine relief and the suppression of riots and rebellions, but more routine security matters were normally left to each individual community. Rural towns and villages adopted a number of strategies for self-protection against bandits, including walls and other fortifications, guardsmen units, crop-watching associations, and militia. Nonetheless, I also argue that there was a complicated mix of activities in local communities involving both protection and predation.

Networks of Accomplices

Like other types of criminal organizations, bandits also depended on “outside” help to survive. Chapter 9 explores criminal networks. Although Elizabeth Perry and others have argued that bandits were deeply embedded in the structures of local communities, the author contends that the situation was much more complicated and nuanced. Bandit connections to local communities often were through intermediaries or networks of accomplices that included kinsmen and strangers. Bandits and brotherhoods, indeed, were intrinsic components of the local social fabric; they relied on a vast covert network of spies, fences, yamen underlings, soldiers, commoners, and local gentry for support. Bandits also were part of a vast underground culture of violence and vice that rejected the dominant Confucian values upheld by officials and so-called respectable society.

Bandits, Brotherhoods, and Collective Crime

Chapter 8 closely examines criminal activities. Bandits engaged in a large variety of illegal activities. They formed predatory gangs to operate outside the law and used real and implied violence to prey upon and manipulate others. They became involved in what the Qing government regarded as serious crimes, such as robbery, theft, snatching, kidnapping, extortion, murder, and rape. Most of these crimes carried the death penalty. Some gangs, and in particular sworn brotherhoods, also became increasingly involved in organized forms of crime including prostitution, gambling, and opium smuggling. While banditry occurred everywhere in Guangdong, contrary to conventional wisdom, bandits and brotherhoods were most active in the core Canton delta and along major inland trade routes. The archival evidence strongly suggests an underlying economic, not political, basis for banditry and brotherhood activities in late imperial Guangdong.

The Laboring Poor and Banditry

While the archival records reveal little about the psychology of criminals and criminality, they do shed important light on the identities and personal backgrounds of bandits. In Chapter 7 the author examines the social composition of members of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods: age, marital status, geographic mobility, and occupations. Significantly, and contrary to the usual interpretation of banditry in the scholarly literature, the evidence from Guangdong demonstrates that banditry was not merely an occupation of younger men but also of older, more mature adults, many of whom were married with families. Most convicted bandits and brotherhood members came from China’s laboring poor, those individuals who were highly mobile, lived on the fringe of respectable society, and earned only a subsistence living. The fact that such a large number of bandits and brotherhood members were mature working family men suggests that they turned to crime in times of desperation or as a necessary supplement to honest work. Unemployment and chronic underemployment, the author maintains, forced many among the working poor to commit crime; stealing became an important, though normally only occasional, part of their livelihoods and life cycles.

The Structures of Crime

Chapter 6 begins the second part of this study with an examination of the structures of collective crime. The author begins with explanations of the various Chinese terms that have been used in the past to depict what in English is called “banditry” and next move on to present a typology of sworn brotherhood associations common in Guangdong in the mid-Qing period. Much of the remaining discussion focuses on recruitment methods and organizational attributes of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods. Here I consider several types of bandit organizations, such as formal and informal gangs, and the close relationships that sworn brotherhoods had with banditry in Guangdong during that time.

Introduction

The central concerns of this book are crime and law enforcement in Guangdong province in south China during the mid-Qing dynasty, roughly the years from 1760 to 1845. The author’s focus is on bandits, sworn brotherhoods, and local law enforcement. Specifically, this study is divided into three parts: one, preventive measures and protective strategies; two, crimes, criminals, and community; and three, state and local law enforcement. The first part addresses the interactions of state and local communities in developing protective measures against banditry. The second part analyzes the activities, composition, and organization of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods in Guangdong. The third part examines in detail the policies, especially the adoption and application of laws, employed by the Qing government for suppressing these criminal associations and curbing their activities. This study, therefore, focuses on collective predatory crime and the legal responses of the state to those crimes. My purpose is to fill a hiatus in the existing scholarship on Chinese social history by examining mid-Qing Guangdong through the perspective of crime and law enforcement.

An Age of Mounting Disorder

Chapter 2 contextualizes banditry and brotherhood activities in mid-Qing Guangdong with a discussion of geopolitical conditions, escalating ecological crises, and mounting large-scale social disorders in the province.