R. Kent GUY, Qing Governors and Their Provinces: the Evolution of Ter- Ritorial Administration in China, 1644-1796. a China Program Book

Home , Censorate, China proper, Jiedushi

840 Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 821-868

R. Kent GUY, Qing Governors and Their Provinces: The Evolution of Ter- ritorial Administration in China, 1644-1796. A China Program Book. xii + 446 pp. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-295-99018-7 (hbk.); 978-0-295-99019-4 (pbk.). $80.00 (hbk.) / $45.00 (pbk.).

We do not have to be captives of a Hegelian mindset to recognize that in comparative terms, political structures of imperial China manifested remarkable continuity. In the capital was the emperor surrounded by different versions of an inner and outer court, the same Six Boards with functional responsibilities that ran the bureaucracy since the Tang, the Censorate, and the highest levels of the examination system. G. William Skinner noted many years ago that on the local level, there was remarkable stability in the number of counties, remaining in the 1200-1500 range from the Han dynasty through the Qing.1 But one aspect of Chinese imperial governance that saw great change over time was the middle level of territorial administration: regional governance. Strong regional administrators first emerged with the jiedushi (regional commanders) of the Tang, but they were blamed for the disunity and civil unrest that plagued the late Tang, and the Song rulers abolished all intermediate levels of administration. The term that we now use for province sheng( ) had its origins in an office of the Mongols’ Yuan dynasty, though the jurisdictions were quite different from those that later prevailed. The Ming had a post calledxunfu , the title translated as governor in the Qing period, but the office was a military one, and the incumbents held concurrent central appointments and acted as ‘grand coordinators’ in their regional roles. The provinces that we know in China today, and the post of provincial governor, were products of the Qing dynasty. In the modern era, provinces have been exceptionally stable territorial units, and provincial governors (or party secretaries in contemporary China) have wielded enormous powers. It is thus important to remember that prior to the Qing dynasty and ‘[i]n a world in which history mattered, the provincial governorship had no historical record of success’ (46). This is the key lesson we learn from Kent Guy’s exhaustively detailed study: governors and the provinces they administered are another critical example of the way in which the Manchu rulers of this conquest dynasty fundamentally reshaped the structure of Chinese governance.

1) G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 19.

Guy’s analysis of the establishment and evolution of the provincial governor’s position is structured along two axes, one temporal and one spatial. After a brief background on the evolution of territorial administration, he describes the creation of the eighteen provinces of China proper by 1664, each with a governor (xunfu), lieutenant governor (buzhengshi) and provincial judge (anchashi), all titles derived from the Ming, but whose function as territorial administrators received new institutionali- zation. The following three chapters’ attractive titles (‘The Conundrum of Competence’, ‘The Power of the Unexpected’, and ‘The Imperative of Continuity’) mask a general temporal progression through the reigns of Kangxi (r. 1661-1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735- 1796) respectively. Each is filled with important insights. We learn that prior to 1691, Kangxi stipulated the ethnicity—Manchu, Han, or Chi- nese bannerman—from which the Board of Personnel was to recommend candidates for governor. In the mid-eighteenth century, Qianlong made a concerted effort to appoint more Manchus, reaching a high point in 1750 when Manchus governed provinces 71 percent of the time (147). Also under Qianlong, Grand Council clerkships became an important route to gubernatorial appointment, as the emperor picked bright young men (especially Manchu men) from the council for provincial appointments. We see the system of evaluations that sought to grade governors for talent, stewardship, administrative ability, and vigor, a system that strictly limited the number of ‘outstanding’ assessments, but also seemed to favor sons and relatives of powerful officials. We learn that by the eighteenth century, most governors reached their post through promotion through the ranks, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘the vast majority of those promoted to governor were lieutenant governors’ (67). Although there was a large number of very brief appointments, there were also many longer terms, so that ‘Chinese provinces were governed 50 percent of the time by governors who served for forty months or more, and 70 percent of the time by governors who served more than twenty-seven months’ (88), all of which bespeaks a significant stability of provincial administration. The second half of the book treats in sequence each of the regions of the empire, and the often shifting nature of provincial administration. Thus, we see the military concerns of appointments to North and North- west China, and a shift to Chinese civilian governors in a province like Shaanxi only after the conclusion of the Mongolian wars. Interestingly, Guy includes Sichuan in this region, since prior to the mid-eighteenth