This study of the reality of imperial administration takes a new look at Chinese modernity. It shows that the Qing state had sufficient resources to overcome the challenge of modernization and that Beijing still served as a model and standard for the rest of the country.
It may seem self-evident that Chinese modernity as it was constructed after the fall of the empire and the founding of the Republic in 1912 was initially urban. However, the definition of the framework of this “ golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie » (Marie-Claire Bergère) was not obvious at the turn of the XXe century. Considering the city as an autonomous administrative entity was a new idea in China which took hold during the short but intense period of reforms which preceded the fall of the Qing dynasty. Seeking to understand the modernization of the Chinese state through that of the city, Luca Gabbiani tackles a little-treated aspect of this process.
If many works of political and social history questioning the nature of this modernization take the Chinese city as their setting, few in fact seek to anchor this problem in the concrete reality of an administration which nevertheless played a decisive role. Luca Gabbiani is thus part of the lineage of two historiographical schools well represented in France: that which seeks to study urban society in modern and contemporary China on the one hand, that of the long history of the Chinese State ( Pierre-Étienne Will in particular) on the other hand.
The choice of the framework for this monograph is judicious in more than one way. By moving away from the key places of Chinese modernity – Shanghai first and foremost – to focus on the imperial capital, the core of a political system whose decline it symbolized, the author calls into question a certain number of agreed theses . It does this by relying on solid work in the archives which gives pride of place to raw sources that are little or never exploited. These often give a more accurate picture of bureaucratic reality than the published sources on which the author also relies.
Through the case of Beijing, Luca Gabbiani demonstrates that the existence of a truly urban government in China did not appear with modernity but that there was a coherent tradition in this area. This is particularly true for Beijing which was, depending on the era, privileged or handicapped by its status as capital.
The weight of imperial supervision
Placed “ in the shadow of the heavenly mandate » entrusted to the Qing dynasty, Beijing gave the centrality of “ imperial fact » (p. 23) a physical reality as much, the author tells us, by its spatial organization as by its population. Organized along a north-south axis, the city was divided into two quadrilaterals. To the north, the inner city (also known as the Tartar city) housed in its center the Forbidden City, itself located in the heart of the imperial city. To the south, the outer city (or Chinese city). Each of these towns within the city was delimited by high walls pierced with twenty gates organizing the movements of a population estimated at more than 500,000 people in the middle of the XVIIe century and almost 800,000 at the end of the XIXe century (p. 61). This structuring of urban space through which the Manchu State exposed itself in all its power, contributed to forging a “ urban habit » (p. 45) particularly among the Pekingese.
Following their victory over the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Manchu invaders imposed strict spatial segregation between the victors – members of the Eight Banners composed of the Manchus and their allies who settled in the inner city – and the Chinese population already present which was pushed back into the outer city. If this ban left its mark, it did not prevent a gradual return to diversity in the inner city through, in particular, Chinese merchants. Intended to occupy positions in the administration or the army, the members of the Banners could not, in fact, exercise an activity linked to commerce.
This dependence of more than half of the inhabitants on public subsidies made the involvement of the State in daily life much more significant in Beijing than in the rest of the empire where “ the state apparatus had only a very limited number of official representatives with regard to the territory and the population to be governed » (p. 10). This involvement was particularly visible in the economy of the city which benefited from the grain tributes transported from the southern provinces on the Grand Canal. Paid as emoluments to civil servants and soldiers, a large part of these grains were resold, thus supplying the private market.
Made up of three major authorities (the gendarmerie, the censorships of the five districts and the metropolitan prefecture of Shuntian), the local administration took advantage of its proximity to the central administration, particularly for its financing. Describing three areas of competence of this administration – security, maintenance of urban infrastructure and public assistance – Luca Gabbiani shows that, despite the cumbersomeness of a sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus that is often redundant and the more or less great mobilization of staff administrative, Beijing benefited until the first third of the XIXe century of urban government of unparalleled quality in China.
Imperial supervision, however, proved to be a handicap when the authority of the state was violently contested during the great revolts which struck China in the second half of the XIXe century. By occupying the provinces of the Blue River basin where a large part of the grain production and tax revenues came from, the Taiping (1850-1864) brought about “ the collapse of the financial base on which the functioning of Beijing’s urban government was based » (p. 160). This sudden reduction in state revenue was accompanied by a serious monetary crisis caused by the disruption in the supply of minerals used for the production of money.
Profiting until then from imperial supervision, the members of the Banners were severely affected by this crisis. More broadly, it is the general functioning of urban government in Beijing which is suffering from these upheavals. This change is visible in the way in which the terrible flood of the city in 1890 was managed, which the author compares with a similar disaster which occurred in 1801 during which the state’s investment in relief for victims and in reconstruction was particularly remarkable. This example illustrates “ the considerable scale of the reduction in the intervention capacities of the authorities between the start and the end of the XIXe century » (p. 172). This crisis, however, contributed to strengthening the cohesion of the urban community on which the modernization policy initiated at the beginning of the XXe century.
The city as a laboratory of state modernization
Internal revolts and repeated humiliations by the imperialist powers caused the weakening of the authority and legitimacy of the Chinese imperial regime in the second half of the XIXe century. The desire for reform among the literate elites came up against, particularly during the Hundred Days Reform (1898), the immobility of the central power led by the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). The latter finally had to resolve to reform the State following the fiasco of the Boxer Rebellion which resulted in the capture of Beijing in August 1900.
During the first decade of XXe century, known as the period of new policies » (xinzheng), “ almost all spheres of intervention of public authorities were restructured, from the judicial system to the armed forces, from transport to industry, including commerce, communications, post, taxation, police and education » (p. 180). Describing in detail the reorganization of the institutional architecture in Beijing, the author focuses on the exemplary case of the police whose modernization, inspired in particular by the Japanese model, initially took place at the level of large cities before it is not attached to the central administration. Now placed at the head of the urban government, this civil body helped to erase in the capital, including the division into two “ cities » was removed, the imprint of “ imperial fact » (p. 193).
The desire to modernize the city is visible in the numerous regulations, particularly health regulations, which were then enacted in Beijing – although these undoubtedly testify more to the openness of the local administration to Western standards than to a radical change in the daily practices of the population. Furthermore, the tax reform gave rise to an unprecedented dialogue between administration and citizens, a sign according to the author of a “ major turning point in the administrative practices of city officials and in their conceptions of urban government » (p. 200).
The municipalization of the Beijing government undertaken during this period resulted in the creation of a municipal council in 1914. More broadly, “ the joint xinzheng » (p. 238) laid the foundations for the modernization of the Chinese state pursued, not without great difficulties, by the republican regime from 1912. In this regard, Luca Gabbiani underlines the continuity which existed not only between the reforms of the 1900s and the Republican period – an already well-studied point in modern Chinese history – but also between these reforms and the state system that they transformed.
This continuity was embodied by the body of civil servants. Of course, members of the civil service in Beijing were subject to new selection criteria, which did not go without causing serious dissension. But, in fact, it was generally the agents of the imperial administration already in place who were responsible for implementing these reforms. The image of a bureaucracy plagued by corruption and of a regime doomed to disappear must therefore be nuanced. The period xinzheng thus provides proof, according to the author, that the Qing state had sufficient resources to overcome the challenge of modernization. Far from having played a marginal role during this period, Beijing once again served “ of model and standard to the rest of the country » (p. 234). This putting into perspective constitutes, without doubt, the most significant contribution of this work.
The revolution of 1911 was therefore not inevitable. The fall of the empire was nevertheless facilitated by the very reforms which were to save the imperial institution because they contributed to “ undermine the ideological foundations of the regime » (p. 237). It is therefore possible to envisage the first phase of modernization in China as a long process stretching from the mid-1860s to the mid-1930s and whose period xinzheng would be the pivot. This modernization took the city as its framework, leaving unresolved the rural question which the Communist Party of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) was able to take up. Thus extending the recent work of historians of Republican China, Luca Gabbiani sheds light on the link that unites this first modernization to that experienced by China since the 1980s. A modernization that is above all urban.