Kaitong: Opening the Sluices to Official Corruption in Late-Qing Fiction

• In Event: Corruption in the Qing Dynasty: Practice, Prosecution, and Perceptions

Abstract

In many examples of mid- to late-Qing vernacular fiction, bureaucratic corruption is a bit like the weather—unpredictable, but virtually inevitable. Some of these works, such as those of the popular heroic court-case (xiayi gongan) genre, follow Shuihu zhuan and other late-Ming examples in pitting heroic magistrates and their martial allies against treasonous bureaucratic conspiracies. In late-Qing social satires like Guanchang xianxingji and Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang, however, corruption takes on a more cosmopolitan hue, as the byproduct of the opening up of China to the West. Beleaguered by the intransigent demands of missionaries, foreign diplomats, mining engineers, or military officers, dispirited yamen officials fall prey to novel temptations. Under the slogan of “opening up” (kaitong), they conflate their attempts to eat with a fork, shake hands, or mouth a few foreign phrases, with the granting of lucrative concessions to foreign mining companies, publishers, and other interests. Sooner or later these officials cast any lingering moral scruples aside, and even if their venality results in firing or demotion, localities continue to suffer the consequences long after they have departed. This paper analyzes the juxtaposition of corruption with westernization in several representative works of ca. 1895-1910. I argue that, while certainly critical of traditional bureaucratic norms and often explicitly in favor of reform, their authors invoke a conservative, even nostalgic ideal of traditional probity that disappeared beneath the rising tide of practices and ideas coming from abroad.

Author

• Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco