Qing Imperial Justice? The Case of Li Shiyao

R. Kent Guy

The conflict between justice and consistency is common to many legal orders, everywhere there are instances where criminals guilty of the same crime are justly punished in inconsistent ways, and conversely where con- sistency in sentencing produces unjust results. In an empire where the final decisions in legal cases are made by a single monarch, the issue of justice and inconsistency becomes especially vexed. Is judicial inconsis- tency in such instances a product of a monarch’s personal predilections or an inevitable by-product of the attempt to apply fixed laws to all-too- human contingencies? The desire for justice is surely universal, and the capacity to provide justice is one basis of imperial legitimacy. But the arguments for justice may take very different forms in different cultural contexts. How imperial legal systems worked through this problem high- lighted in vivid terms the character of the legal orders they preserved and the political and cultural constraints that shaped those orders. This paper will argue that in China, justice was due to communities as well as to individuals. In imperial China these issues arose forcefully in the case of Li Shiyao (d. 1788), governor general of Yunnan and Guizhou, who was found guilty in 1780 of extorting money from his subordinates. He was given a sentence that left open the possibility of exoneration. This sentence caused contro- versy, a dispute which the state took particular pains to contain and redi- rect. The debate over the appropriate sentence for Li was occasioned by the fact that one of Li’s predecessors as governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou, Hengwen, had been sentenced to execution for the same crime, extorting money from his subordinates. The prosecutions of both offi- cials were quite well known in official circles, and the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1796) actually encouraged the discussion and even engaged it himself before rendering his verdict. The case presents a vivid example of late-imperial Chinese legal rea- soning, highlighting the concerns of consistency and justice as they were applied in the prosecution of senior officials of the dynasty. The dispute over Li Shiyao’s sentence took place at a particularly significant moment in late-imperial Chinese history, a time when a buoyant economy in many 198 r. kent guy areas of China posed temptations to dynastic officials, and the legal order had not evolved adequate means to deal with the dimensions and direc- tions of corruption. The sections below will first review the case against Li Shiyao and the debate over his punishment. Then, the case will be set in the context of the expectations of the official community, which were shaped by officials’ experience with administrative punishment. Finally, the emperor’s judgment will be assessed, not as an act of capricious- ness but as an effort to address concerns of justice within the official community.

Li Shiyao and Privilege in Eighteenth-Century China

Chinese law was acutely, in some views fatally, sensitive to the social cir- cumstances of the crime and the criminal, and few cases were investigated or prosecuted without a clear sense of family and communal influences. Studies of administrative discipline often ignore such circumstances, influenced by the modernist assumption that an individual became an abstract functionary when appointed to office. But family circumstances crucially affected the Li Shiyao case. Li Shiyao, and other Chinese governors-general inhabited a stratum of Qing official- dom where families were well known and their entitlement to position and privilege well respected. Although most candidate officials entered Qing service through the examination system, climbed a bureaucratic lad- der which in theory led from the lowest official post to the highest, the ten governor-general positions were the highest in the Qing territorial service and were entrusted to men whom the court knew, either through long official service, or other sorts of connections. The crimes and punishments of such men were not ordinary transgressions, although their treatment could not be extraordinary: they were visible and powerful representa- tives of the Son of Heaven. Li Shiyao had a family connection with Qing rule, but it was not one of a unique sort in Qing China.1 At the time of the Qing conquest, in the mid-seventeenth century, a political group calling themselves ‘Manchus,’

1 The foregoing is based on four brief accounts of Li Shiyao’s life: an epitaph prepared by the Qing government on his death (printed in Qing shi lie zhuan 23.12a–23b), a brief reminiscence by a Manchu prince Zhaolian, who served at the court of the Qianlong emperor’s successor (Xiaoting Zalu, 88), a biography prepared in the early twentieth cen- tury by the editors of the Draft History of the Qing, and a 1943 biography in Eminent Chi- nese of the Ch’ing period by Fang Chaoying. The accounts differ systematically in their