Abstract

Qing statecraft was characterized by a kind of institutionalized hypocrisy. Many aspects of Qing governance have been condemned – both during the dynasty and since – as irrational, aberrant, or corrupt. But these very aspects were key to how that government actually worked. The land tax and other official revenue sources were insufficient to finance operations; nor did nominal salaries cover more than a fraction of officials’ real incomes and expenses. For this reason, Qing government at all levels depended on informal sources of revenue, as well as informal personnel employed in excess of centrally mandated quotas, even though most of this technically constituted “corruption.” Similarly, much of the judicial system was outsourced to private parties who operated in a gray zone to advise both litigants and magistrates and even to publish the law; and given the limited reach of the state, social order depended in practice on the extra-judicial community regulation of a wide range of transactions and relationships, many of which were nominally prohibited. Emperors and officials alike employed a pious, self-serving discourse to condemn what actually constituted routine features of the system upon which they all depended, while corruption laws were enforced only occasionally, when an emperor decided to assert himself arbitrarily in order to cow his subordinates. Far from dysfunctional, however, the Qing government worked quite well until the late nineteenth century, when it finally faced unprecedented problems that it could not solve.

Bio

Prof. Matthew SOMMER earned his BA in Political Science from Swarthmore College in 1983, his MA in International Studies: China from the University of Washington in 1987 and his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994. He was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 2000 before joining Stanford University in 2002. He is currently the Bowman Family Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.

Prof. Sommer is a social and legal historian of China in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and family, with original legal case records from local and central archives in China serving as the main source for his work. His first book, “Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China” (Stanford UP, 2000), was recently published in a Chinese translation (Guangxi Normal UP, 2023) that sold more than 40,000 copies in its first year and was ranked by Douban.com as one of the year’s ten best books in History and Culture. His second book, “Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions” (U of California P, 2015), was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award for the best book on non-US legal history in English published in 2014-15. His third book, “The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China” (Columbia UP, 2024), won the LGBTQ+ History Association’s John Boswell Prize (co-winner for 2023-24).

Prof. Sommer has served on the editorial boards of Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Journal of Chinese History and Modern China. He is an elected founding member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Chinese Law and History.

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