UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Complicated Matters: Commercial Dispute Resolution in Qing Chongqing from 1750 to 1911 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21w3t3tx Author Dykstra, Maura Dominique Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Complicated Matters: Commercial Dispute Resolution in Qing Chongqing from 1750 to 1911 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Maura Dominique Dykstra 2014 © Copyright by Maura Dominique Dykstra 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Complicated Matters: Commercial Dispute Resolution in Qing Chongqing from 1750 to 1911 by Maura Dominique Dykstra Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor R. Bin Wong, Chair This dissertation offers a historical analysis of commercial dispute resolution practices in the Chinese port city of Chongqing from the middle of the eighteenth century until the Republican Revolution of 1911. It reconstructs the dispute mediation behaviors of more than three thousand individuals in over four thousand legal documents from more than three hundred legal cases preserved in the Qing Ba County magistrate archives. One of the central propositions of this work is that the adjudication of commercial disputes in the Qing magistrate’s yamen cannot be understood without an appreciation for the fractal and complicated instruments of authority and communication used to govern the jurisdiction. For this reason, additional administrative documents from the archives and an array of other printed primary sources were used to reconstruct the history of the city’s administration as a background to understanding changing mediation patterns over time. The first result of this approach is a revision of the historical administrative profile of the city itself: this dissertation argues that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Chongqing and its environs were still only in the process of being incorporated into the Qing administration. This allows the researcher to document the implementation of two critical Qing institutions – the collective responsibility system of administrative intermediaries and the licensed brokerage system of economic mediation – in the city and to evaluate how these institutions played a role in the administration’s efforts to establish a legal ii order in the market of the city. The historical reconstruction of the implementation of these systems and their impact on eighteenth-century patterns of dispute mediation in the first three chapters of this dissertation allows for a new perspective on the role of administrative and economic systems of responsibility in governing the late imperial Chinese city and defining obligations in the courts of the Qing Empire. The growth of institutions of administrative and economic responsibility at the local level in the eighteenth century is juxtaposed, in the fourth and fifth chapters, against several local institutions that arose in Chongqing over the course of the nineteenth century. The reconstruction of the administrative transformation that led up to the creation of these institutions provides grounds for a new argument about how the parameters and constraints of eighteenth-century state-building had implications for nineteenth- century approaches to administration and governance. The conclusion of this historical survey of Chongqing’s nineteenth century is that, although the era has been widely associated with dynastic crisis and administrative decline, the institutions that emerged over the course of the era offered new and dynamic solutions to the problem of how to administer the city’s market. The final three chapters of the dissertation show how the historical trends discussed in the first five chapters played out in the magistrate’s court by presenting a focused analysis of a subset of 107 commercial cases. Court behaviors are considered from the perspective of the magistrate, the litigant, and the administrative and economic intermediaries who participated in dispute resolution. This exploration demonstrates, first, that the world of imperial justice combined both legal and administrative forms of authority for the resolution of disputes whose accusations fell beyond the boundaries of explicit imperial sanctions (as the majority of commercial cases did). It then explains why, in order to adjudicate these cases, magistrates were required to depend on processes of mediation and negotiation that occurred outside of the courtroom in order to resolve disputes. It illustrates how this system allowed the local officials of the empire to adjudicate commercial disputes in a way that permitted a wide range of flexibility about the creation and content of commercial agreements. iii The dissertation further documents how non-court processes of agreement and dispute mediation became more closely and predictably tied to court mediation efforts over the period under study, and how this led to a crisis of authority in the late nineteenth century. The eighth and final chapter explains how this crisis – which emerged from the explicit policy of legal ambiguity adopted for the handling of commercial disputes – was addressed in the course of several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reforms, which altered the legal and political framework of collaboration and communication between the state and its administrative intermediaries. The dissertation concludes with the argument that the early twentieth-century reforms discussed in the last chapter are more than instances of legal and institutional borrowing from western nations (as they have been most commonly represented in earlier scholarship). It supports the recent conclusions of other scholars, who have argued that these reforms are the key to understanding the creation of the modern Chinese state, by documenting precisely how and why the institutional innovations of this era were responsible of the nationalization of justice. This finding suggests that China’s early twentieth-century reforms and should be considered the culmination of imperial institutional history, and that – for this reason – the history of the modern Chinese cannot be considered independently of its imperial legacy. iv The dissertation of Maura Dominique Dykstra is approved. Richard von Glahn Jack Chen R. Bin Wong, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 v This work is dedicated to Frank Garosi … for inviting me to play the game. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DISSERTATION ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x CIRRICULUM VITAE xv INTRODUCTION: WHY COMPLICATED MATTERS 1 CHAPTER 1: Chongqing’s place in the first two millennia of the Chinese Empire (316 BCE -1796 CE) Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 20 Chongqing’s Spatial Qualities .............................................................................................. 23 Chongqing’s Entry into the Chinese Political Sphere ........................................................... 25 Growth on the Margins ......................................................................................................... 34 Imperial Expansion and Military Consolidation ................................................................... 37 From Military Stronghold to Center of Immigration and Expansion ................................... 45 Total War in Sichuan ............................................................................................................ 47 The Fallow Field: Sichuan in the Early Qing ....................................................................... 51 Sichuan as a Qing Military Theater in the Era of Westward Expansion .............................. 55 The Yongzheng Reforms ...................................................................................................... 57 The Chongqing Market from 1700 to 1800 .......................................................................... 65 Demobilization ...................................................................................................................... 69 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 71 CHAPTER 2: Collective responsibility and the creation of a legal order in early Qing Chongqing (1725-1800) Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 73 Trivial Matters and Chinese Law .......................................................................................... 77 Collective Responsibility ...................................................................................................... 80 Collective Responsibility in Early Commercial Disputes .................................................... 93 Expanded Uses of Collective Responsibility ........................................................................ 103 Complicated Matters ............................................................................................................. 116 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 120 CHAPTER 3: Intermediaries, agency, and transitive responsibility in the court of Chongqing