The Family in Crisis: Human Trafficking, Ethnic Tensions, and the Law in Late Qing Xunhua, Gansu

• In Event: Crisis and Intervention: Local Histories of State and Society in Qing China

Abstract

This paper investigates war’s impact on individual families and the resulting post-bellum disputes in one small corner of the Sino-Tibetan border, Xunhua Subprefecture. More specifically, the paper details fights over the abduction and sale of women and children. The “Great Muslim Rebellion” tore families apart and sent survivors fleeing to remote mountains. Female bodies proved especially vulnerable to the violence, as women were not only killed but kidnapped and trafficked. Official histories and male poets lionized those who perished—pure, “jade”-like women and chaste martyrs—but reconstruction-era archives reveal the distance between these literati fantasies and social realities. Even in the best of times, widows remarried and poor peasants sold their wives and daughters to survive. War and hunger made such calculations all the more tenable. And yet, in the immediate post-war years, narratives about these unions diverged; what was a legitimate marriage to one (often Muslim) party could also be viewed by the other as compelled under the threat of violence or forced conversion.

Re-conquering Qing authorities intervened in these crises by ordering the return of kidnapped women and children and by opening up a space, the rebuilt Xunhua yamen, for contestations over war-era marriages. The ensuing cases reveal how litigants used official regulations for their own ends, but also how state efforts to bring peace failed to mask the increasingly ethnic hatreds unleashed by the violence. Attention both to individual family tragedies and village-level dynamics enable us to uncover the uniquely local experiences of war.

Author

• Wes Chaney, Stanford University