Qing Taiwan, Local Governance

As shown in a great many documents, using quasi officials such as xiangyue and baozhang to perform the everyday administration in rural areas has demonstrated the common practice all over China in the Qing dynasty. Yet in respect of details about how this system had run or how it had worked in local society, an absence of records was often seen both in official codes and in local gazetteers. Fortunately, the consecutive releasing of local archives in the Qing dynasty in recent decades makes it possible to have an up-close look at the xiangbao system as a great deal of records of xiangbao are found in archive files.Focusing on archival records from Danshui Subprefecture and Xinzhu County in northern Taiwan from 1776 to 1895, this thesis offers a detailed account and analysis of the role and operation of xiangbao system in the local governance of Taiwan in the Qing dynasty. In the exploration, special effort is made to discuss how this institution had shaped up the power pattern in local society and how it had interacted with formal authorities as well as what factors had contributed to its prevalence all over the country.The dissertation is divided into seven parts as follows. In the opening introduction, an overview of past scholarship on the subject of rural administration is presented with some necessary remarks. Following this, a brief description of the aim of this study and the sources of documents utilized is successively made.Chapter I describes the operation of baojia and lijia, two systems designed by the empire to function as its rural controlling tools. By scrutinizing the efficacy of these two systems, I point out that they had in practice been gradually replaced by the xiangbao institution owing to several fatal drawbacks revealed in applications.ChapterⅡgives a brief introduction of the history of Taiwan and the administration of its rural areas performed by the Qing Empire since the latter incorporated Taiwan into its domain.Chapter III centers on the election procedure and duty of zongli and zhuangzheng, two kinds of semiofficial leaders who had played a vitally important role in rural governance in Taiwan. The delineation comes from records in both archive files and local gazetteers.ChapterⅣexamines the function and role of zongli in local administration. The exploration is made from the interplay between the magistrate, community residents, local gentry and zongli.Chapter V provides several cases of zongli who had for years held their positions. By analyzing the behavior of these people in their tenure, I attempt to generalize several characteristics of xiangbao practice in Taiwan.Finally, I present the practices of local governance in both North China Plain and Ba County, Sichuan Province, evidencing that the xiangbao system, showing regional variations though, had been widely used all over the country in Qing China. Regarding this mode of local governance, I suggest that it was in a large part determined by the empire's highly-centralized monarchy as well as its slim revenue. On one hand, such a way of governance had saved the empire handsome amount of administration costs; on the other hand, it had also considerably impaired the foundation of the empire because of the problems it had caused such as the loosing of rural control, the corruption of the xiangbao staffs, and so on. Even though the governors may be full aware of these side effects of the xiangbao system, little could they do to make a change under the existing fiscal system.