Soulstealers

Though we say that we cannot see the future, its conditions lie all around us. They are as if encrypted. We cannot read them because we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late to use it). But we see their coded fragments and must call them something. Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating. Our dominating passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous one.

Kuhn, Philip A. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990.The event: • During early 1768, in several areas of central and north China, a number of cases of apparent sorcery came to the attention of local officials.• Some cases involved placing an enemy's name on the pilings of a bridge-construction project, so that the blows of the construction-crews' hammers would shatter the soul of the hated person; others involved clipping off the ends of people's queues of hair, so that the stolen hair could be used to summon up spirit forms.Kuhn examines the response to the soulstealing cases by the throne, the provincial bureaucrats, and the general public respectively. The soulstealing them was given voice through different stories from different social roles, each of which expressed the fears of a particular group.Reviewing the cases, senior officials in Chekiang, Kiangsu, and Shantung were inclined to dismiss them as of no long-term importance. Until the Ch'ien-lung Emperor heard about the cases from his sources of information and decided that the combination of queue-cutting with sorcery posed a serious potential threat to the Ch'ing dynasty's stability. In late July 1768 the Emperor ordered a massive campaign in all the provinces in search for the master-plotters behind the scene with larger aims. For several months thereafter he, his Grand Councilors, and the senior provincial officials were involved in a frustrating and wounding ritual of judicial investigations and procedures. In October and November 1768, faced by mounting evidence that the cases had been fabricated, and the embarrassing fact that the confessions of many prisoners were out of tortures by local magistrates and provincial officials, the Emperor brought the matter to an inconclusive close.According to Kuhn, the emperor’s judgment that the combination of queue-cutting with sorcery posed a serious potential threat to the Ch'ing dynasty's stability and the decision to launch a nationwide campaign against it was rooted in his ultimate fear in two parts: • one is the fear for unseen forces of sedition and assimilation. The sorcery cases which involved the symbolism of the queue touched on the sensitive ethnic issues and thus lightened the emperor’s suspicions on sedition. Lurking behind sedition was also the assimilation of the Manchus by the delicate and decadent Chinese practices, especially in the rich and cultured lower Yangtze provinces . ultimately, the throne’s vision centered on threats to Manchu hegemony and to the polity as a whole. o Kuhn traced back to the beginning years of the conquest dynasty, when the queue-growing and forehead shaving practice was forced on the Chinese during 1644 and 1645, which brought about a major change in Chinese self-perception and confidence as well as in outward physical appearance. He also gives some dramatic examples of persecutions of Chinese who refused to shave their heads in the Manchu conquest period.o P.60 as a minority group ruling a great empire, the Manchu monarchy had to express their supremacy in both a cosmopolitan mode (for Kuhn, the cosmopolitan mode was based on the moral precepts of Confucianism; but for new qing historian, there are more than that: the cosmopolitan mode embraces the value systems of all the main peoples that the Qing ruled) and an ethnic mode.o P.64-65. The queue-clipping sorcery cases had touched on the sensitive political issues of the tonsure violation. However, the emperor kept his reaction within the cosmopolitan mode. The rebels were attacking the universal monarchy, not an alien regime. The “ethnic mode”, though vital, had better not to be activated here. The issue was too sensitive to be mentioned even in the secret correspondence between the throne and the high officials.• one lies in the difficulty of breaking through the routinized functionaries of the bureaucracy by the monarchical power. Political crime, in this sense, was utilized by the throne as an opportunity to inject autocratic power into the provincial bureaucracy for more control over the powerful and resourceful elite. “He sees the way that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor handled the soulstealing case as being an example of the Emperor's profound frustrations with his bureaucracy and his deep fear of being himself bureaucratized. Only by arbitrary, almost capricious, insertion of his will into the investigative process could the Emperor shake up his bureaucracy and reassert a fading imperial pre- rogative. By treating the soulstealing crisis as a "political crime" rather than as merely a matter of corruption or incompetence, the Emperor could manipulate, galvanize, and terrorize his too- independent servants.” (chp 9 political crime and bureaucratic monarchy)o p.121-22. Provincial officials should not be considered as only positions in the bureaucracy, but also political appointments. Although most had followed standard tracks into the provincial bureaucracy, their being selected out of a way larger group of qualified candidates and elevated to provincial rank from immediately signaled a special relationship to the throne, a relationship marked by powerful rituals of loyalty and dependence. From such favored servants, the emperor expected not just reliability, but zeal: not merely to report accurately on local events, but to go the extra mile to further his royal objectives. o P.190 the monarch had to regulate his thousands of bureaucratic servants by written codes, to ensure that everyone stuck to the administrative procedures. At the same time, he was concerned to maintain his own distinctive position, his extra-bureaucratic power and autonomy. Consequently, he had to struggle unceasingly to avoid becoming bureaucratized himself.The vision of the common centered on sudden, random death or sickness inflicted by wondering strangers. Here Kuhn toughed upon the flip side the prosperous age and evaluated the possible effects of the much celebrated commercialization and migration of free labor on people’s perceptions on the directions of life and society. (chp2) An unceasing flow of people came with the uneven economic development between core and periphery, between fertile river deltas and mountainous uplands. Migrants and sojourners, merchants and mountebanks, monks and pilgrims, cutpurses and beggars. The stream of travelers had its effects on men’s consciousness and suspicions on wonderers, especially beggars and wondering unordained clergies.In this way, the prosperous age was capable of arousing some somber perceptions, if not of invisible economic threats to survival, then certainly of dangerous strangers on the move.On Social violence:• Kuhn offered examples where itinerant monks and beggars who might be surrounded and savagely beaten by crowds driven wild by terror of soul stealing. this is the realm of what Professor Kuhn bleakly calls 'social nastiness. " Professor Kuhn suggests that this "nastiness" is in some way "an overture to China's modern age" and may reflect an "impacted society" overwhelmed by overpopulation and declining social mobility (pp. 228-29). He is here echoing the opening lines of his book, where he noted that the soulstealers might be a kind of "premonitory shiver" "on the eve of China's tragic modern age" (p. 1). • But violence in local society is something that has now emerged for many times and places o it could be directed against famine refugees and the homeless and helpless, as shown by Pierre-Etienne Will in his Bureaucracyand Famine; o or it could burst out at local religious festivals and opera performances, as Joseph Esherick has vividly shown in TheOriginsoftheBoxerUprisingo there seemed to be deep and terrible frustrations and tensions at the heart of Chinese society for long periods of time (in spence’s review)• also consult: Row’s Hankow book, Sommer’s sex, law and society, etc.

The popular fear was of soul-loss The imperial fear related not to the individual but to the collectivity.

Meanwhile, power was available to most people only in fantasy, or in the occasional opportunity to exploit such free-floating social power as a state campaign against deviants. Only extraordinary circumstances could give the powerless a sudden opportunity to better their lives or to strike at their enemies. Because the empowerment of ordinary people remains, even now, an unmet promise, it is not surprising that scoresettling (the impacted society'S most pervasive form of social aggression) is still a prominent part of Chinese life"