CONFLICT, COMMUNITY AND CRIME IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE SICHUAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY QUINN DOYLE JAVERS MAY 2012 © 2012 by Quinn Doyle Javers. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gr339jp1011 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Matthew Sommer, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Karen Wigen I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Christian Henriot Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Abstract The 350 legal cases from the ming’an [“cases of unnatural death”] category of the Ba County archive that survive from the final decade of the nineteenth century create a textured picture of social life and state-society relations at the grassroots near the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Close analysis of these cases enhances our understanding of the lives of ordinary people in the last decades of the old regime by untangling the webs of social relations, practices, and norms that bound people together and gave their actions meaning. At the same time, this study illuminates the role that local courts played, even at the end of the dynasty, in settling disputes and in enforcing the normative forms of authority that underpinned social order. In order to take full advantage of these rich archival materials, the manuscript has adopted a number of historical lenses. Chapter One introduces the social geography of the county, emphasizing the social use of rivers and roads. The chapter concludes with a look at legal cases for which claimants drew their own maps and submitted them to the court as evidence. Chapter Two examines both female and male suicide. The female suicides that take took place in Ba County were not heroic acts of martyrdom for the sake of elite values, but desperate and pathetic acts applauded by no-one. Instead, the chapter focuses on the social webs that these cases expose. Turning to male suicide, a topic iv largely untouched by previous scholarship on China, the local archive again reveals webs of connections and expectations that bound actors, notably those between employer and employee. Chapter Three considers homicide and, like the chapter on suicide, interrogates these cases as sources for social history. The chapter explores economically motivated violence, particularly the role of debt and its collection as well as land disputes. It then briefly compares homicide rates in Ba County with those in other parts of China as well as Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, in an effort to determine how violent this society was. Chapter Four considers the role of false accusations and false testimony in the legal culture of late Qing Sichuan. Untruths formed a strategy deployed by a wide range of individuals in order to compel the court to hear their grievances. They also formed an integral part of the larger legal culture and thus illuminate the driving role that common people had in animating this culture. Chapter Five exposes ritualized processes of local disputation. Key here are lists of damaged or stolen objects compiled by litigants and submitted to the court as part of claims for restitution. These acts of property destruction reveal another aspect of violence’s social life, as an emotive performance drawing on shared scripts. Together, these chapters offer a vivid and unprecedented picture of life in late- Qing China. This study employs death to illuminate the webs of social life in the county. Despite the frequent opacity of the actual event (suicide, homicide or other violence), these acts explode into view the surrounding social connections and cleavages, revealing how both death and violence were instrumental in local life. v Acknowledgements I have incurred many debts while writing this dissertation. Foremost among them is to Matt Sommer, who has been an exceptional mentor and guide throughout my time at graduate school, and even before. I am deeply honored to be his first student to finish (although he may not have always felt the same). Kären Wigen has also been inspirational. Her keen, critical eye, and rigor continue to strengthen my work, and her intellectual passions have joyfully infected my own thinking. I was enormously lucky that Christian Henriot sojourned in the Bay Area during a good part of my graduate studies. Our interactions, in class and outside, have sharpened my thinking and quickened my enthusiasm. The years spent researching and writing of this project were supported by a number of institutions. While writing the dissertation in California, I was funded by the History Department’s Weter Dissertation Fellowships and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center. While in Sichuan, I was supported by Fulbright IIE fellowship and a Dissertation Grant in Chinese Studies from Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. I would also like to thank the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford for a number of small grants. A host of individuals lubricated my way through my years at graduate school. In Sichuan, I would like to thank Li Zan and Zhao Weini at Sichuan University Law vi School for being such wonderful hosts, guides, and mentors. Also at Sichuan University, I thank Zhou Haifeng and Ning Kai for all their help. The staff at the Sichuan Provincial Archive has my deepest thanks for their assistance. I’d also like to thank Maura Dykstra for being a friendly face at the archive (and beyond). The owners of the yibin ranmian shop behind the archive have my cheers – their noodles still haunt my dreams. At Stanford, my appreciation to Tom Mullaney and Mark Lewis for their thoughtful comments on my research, and to Richard Roberts for his sage advice. Philip Thai, Ying Hu, Meiyu Hsieh, Sayoko Sakakibara and Brigid Vance formed a wonderful and rigorous cohort of dissertators, and improved my writing and thinking enormously. Renana Keidar and Aviv Mezer were instrumental in my escape from Stanford. Alex Bay, Stephen Whiteman, Eddie Vazquez and Pierre Fuller made nights more fun and mornings more difficult. I’d also like to thank Josh Chin and David Winning who were there in the beginning. Finally, I would like to thank my family, particularly Ron and Eileen Javers, my brother Eamon as well as Mick and Joanne Pateman, for the their love and support. My boys, Cullen and Cormac, made grad school much more fun, and gave me good reasons to leave it. To Sophie, what can I say: I remain “looped in the loops of her hair.” Always. vii Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgments vii Note on Conversions and Conventions x Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Spatial Aspects of Social Life 18 Chapter 2. Suicide and Social Practices 66 Chapter 3. Killers Among Us: Homicide and Its Social Context 111 Chapter 4. The Logic of Lies: “False Accusation” and Legal Culture 153 Chapter 5. Objects, Conflict and Routine Violence 188 Conclusion 221 Character List 228 Bibliography 231 viii Note on Conversions and Conventions: Length: 10 fen= 1 cun; 10 cun= 1 chi (12.5 inches) Capacity: 10 ge= sheng (32 fl oz); 10 sheng= 1 dou; 10 dou= 1 shi/dan Weight: 16 liang= 1 jin (20.9 oz); 120 jin= 1 dan/shi Area and Distance: 1 mu= 1/6 acre; 1 li= 1/3 mile Monetary units: 1 liang = 1 “tael,” a unit of silver currency used in large transactions; 1 wen = 1 “cash,” a unit of currency in copper coin (the nominal exchange rate was 1 tael= 1,000 cash, but the actual market rate in nineteenth-century Sichuan varied from 800-1,800 cash) and; 1 chuan = 1 “string” of cash conventionally = 1,000 cash, although the actual number of coins per string varied in practice. Chinese documents rarely mention women by their given names and instead identify woman by her husband’s surname followed by her surname followed by the term shi. So, Liu Mou Shi is Mrs. Liu née Mou. During the Qing, age was counted in sui. An individual was one sui at birth and aged a sui every year at New Year. The difference between sui and Western “years old” was one to two years. ix Midway through February, in an alley in the center of the city, some garbagemen found another dead woman. She was about thirty and dressed in a black skirt and low- cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to death, although contusions from multiple blows were visible about her face and abdomen. In her purse was a ticket for the nine a.m. bus to Tucson, a bus she would never catch. Also found were a lipstick powder, eyeliner, Kleenex, a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and a package of condoms.