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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

These papers explore the late imperial Chinese state-society relationship by examining how the Qing state (1644-1912) intervened to resolve local crises, and how local communities shaped policy implementation. The Qing state regularly confronted crises big and small: foreign incursions and drug smuggling, ethnic tensions and petty conflicts. The papers in this panel tell stories that illuminate such crises and the state interventions that followed. These encounters lay bare the diverse ways the state generated authority, projected power, and constructed legitimacy. Local crises also reveal the deep power of communities in shaping state power and exploiting official policies and networks. By focusing on human trafficking, missionary conflicts, the drug trade and the legal conflicts around suicide, these papers show local communities creating and reacting to crisis situations with effects well beyond the local.

This panel also rethinks the value of local history. These disparate local stories help us understand the Qing in general, raising methodological questions about the place of local histories within The Big Story. What can be learned by using small stories to tell big ones? We show that local experiences of crisis illuminate how the Qing state interfaced with communities, families, businesses and religious groups. The expansive bureaucracy that was the Qing state took its unique shape out of interactions with local communities and through confronting isolated crises across the empire. The papers in this panel and the ensuing discussion are coordinated to further our understanding of how this took place.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Peter Dewitt Thilly, Colby College

Chair

• Peter Dewitt Thilly, Colby College

Individual Presentations

• The Family in Crisis: Human Trafficking, Ethnic Tensions, and the Law in Late Qing Xunhua, Gansu - Wes Chaney, Stanford University

• Crisis as Opportunity: Lineage, State and Opium in Southern Fujian, 1832-1839 - Peter Dewitt Thilly, Colby College

• Converts, Gentry, Paoge and the State: Missionary Cases (jiao’an) in Late Qing Sichuan - Xiaowei Zheng, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Suicides and Settlements: Social Bonds and the Market in Late Qing Sichuan - Quinn Javers, University of California, Davis

Discussant

• Eugenio Menegon, Boston University