Supervising Censors And The Late Qing Situation

The imperial official system was an important part of the Chinese traditional supervision system, which had certain functions in checking and balancing the ruling clique, promoting the honesty of officials, and the stability of political order to a certain extent. However, undeniably, as the supervision institution of the Qing Dynasty, its function became much more decadent than the previous generation. Especially to the Late Qing Dynasty, its function had been weakened greatly.This thesis studies the supervising censors of the Late Qing Dynasty as a whole, takes their impeachments of the dignitaries as the basic clue, generalizes their important characteristics and main areas of activity in the political situation of the Late Qing Dynasty, discusses the actual effects of legal supervision during the period of social transition, studies the impacts of their remarks on the government and the public opinions, and analyzes their psychological state and living conditions.The reason why I chose the Late Qing Dynasty is that the government had to face lots of problems in and out of the country,such as : social unrest, political instability, especially the official corruption; at the same time, a large number of new things emerged, social transformation was increasingly obvious, which makes a representative period to examine the supervising officials.The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter I is the monitoring system and supervisory officials of the Qing Dynasty, which mainly introduces the basic profiles of supervision system in Qing Dynasty, its organizational structure, administration, examinations, supervisory officials' educational backgrounds. Chapter II deeply studies the case that JiangChunlin impeached YiKuang with a crime in 1910 .And describes the supervisory officials' condemnations of the dignitaries because of their pursuing personal gain with the losses of the public. Chapter III is about the complex social metaphor behind the important impeachment cases, it analyzes the reasons behind the supervisory officials' failures, their complex relationship with dignitaries, and their own developments. The final part concludes that the seemingly sophisticated legal system is not only unable to eliminate corruption among the officials in Qing Dynasty, but also unable to save the destiny of the Qing Dynasty: the traditional imperial official system can't operate effectively any longer.Overall, China's imperial official system have ever developed and renewed itself during the course of systematization so as to meet the needs of the feudal political situation, and, it was different from the ones in West European countries, and the ones in other ancient civilizations during the same period: it reached the crest. However, it should be noted that its progress was too simple and slow. In most of time, only in the early establishment of a dynasty,supervisory legislation and its implementation would remain good in the best condition, and the supervisory legal was very strict when it supervised and punished the officials. Nevertheless, when it came to the decadent period, the supervisory law became very lax, and the law enforcement also lacked continuity of time and space, and the legal seriousness, so that it couldn't get rid of the circular contrail from lifeful to temporizational and broken down. Despite of its maturity, it couldn't get rid of periodical rate of history.The weakened role of the supervising censors in the Late Qing Dynasty facilitated the dignitaries to band together for selfish purposes. Several impeachment cases that occurred in the Late Qing Dynasty is the supervisory officials' attempts that tried to delay the decline of the Qing Dynasty, but quite ironically, it itself became the object the new policy of Late Qing dynasty tried to remove. When the dignitaries refused the constitutionality so as to get rid of the restrictions, the people wakened and conflicted with the dignitaries whose rights were boundless. Ultimately, the Revolution of 1911 ended the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for 200 years, and China had failed to move towards the ranks of modern society that is ruled by law.