Soulstealers

The Common People: Fantasies of Power:

As an overture to China's modern age, the soulstealing panic strikes one particularly sour note to the observer of Chinese society: the widespread release of social hostility in the form of score-settling. ... Once the state campaign against sorcery began in earnest, there arose splendid opportunities for ordinary people to settle scores or to enrich themselves. Here was a loaded weapon thrown into the street, one that could as well be used by the weak as by the strong, by the scoundrel as by the honest man. Malicious imputation of "soulstealing" was a sudden accession of power in a society where social power, for ordinary people, was scarce. To anyone oppressed by tyrannical kinsmen or grasping creditors, it offered relief. To anyone who feared prosecution, it offered a shield. To anyone who needed quick cash, it offered rewards. To the envious it offered redress; to the bully, power; and to the sadist, pleasure. ... In such an "impacted society" men would come to doubt that they could better their circumstances either by work or by study. Such conditions were made less tolerable by a corrupted and unresponsive judicial system, through which no commoner had reason to hope for redress. In such a world, sorcery was both a fantasy of power and a potential addition to every man's power. Even if soulstealing was never really attempted, it was widely believed that anyone with the right "techniques" could conjure power out of the shadow world by stealing another's soul-force. This fantasy was both fearsome and titillating. Its obverse was the real windfall of power that could be acquired by labeling someone a soulstealer, or by threatening to do so. Both sorcery and accusations of sorcery were projections of powerlessness. ... Labeling someone a soulstealer could be done by anyone, in high station or low. Indeed, the scapegoating of monks and beggars involved a certain collusion between monarch and commoner. ... The impacted society into which this power was injected resembles in one respect twentieth-century America's "zero-sum" society described by Lester Thurow. Both societies find that their major problems can no longer be solved by increased production, but now require "loss allocation." ... In Thurow's late industrial America, the sense of betrayal is sharpened by the very faith in progress and economic growth that led the West to believe that all difficulties must yield to human effort, with benefit to some and no loss to anyone. ... In these conditions emerged the politics of the impacted society. In late imperial China, most people lacked the access to political power that would have enabled them to compete, one interest against another, for social resources. Merely to form groups to promote particular social interests was, for ordinary subjects, politically dangerous. In time, such power would be sought outside the old imperial system; the results would be rebellion and revolution. 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 score-settling (the impacted society's most pervasive form of social aggression) is still a prominent part of Chinese life.

The Bureaucracy: Two Cheers:

Yet in certain extraordinary cases, it was evidently still possible for the highest officials to curb such power by invoking a superior code under which all human governments might be judged. To do so required that they regard themselves as something more than servants of a particular regime. Such self-confidence could persist only among men who believed themselves to be certified carriers of a cultural tradition. In late imperial politics, such gumption was scarce enough, even at the highest levels of ministerial power. It became scarcer yet after the empire collapsed, a century and a half later, along with the social and intellectual systems that nourished that elite self-confidence. Nobody mourns the old Chinese bureaucracy. The social harm it did, even by the standards of its day, went well beyond the crushed ankles of helpless vagrants. Yet its nature impeded zealotry of any sort, whether for good or for ill. Without that great sheet-anchor, China yaws wildly in the storm. Without a workable alternative, leaders can manipulate mass fears and turn them with terrible force against the deviants and scapegoats of our own day-anyone vulner- able to labeling, either for his social origins or his exotic beliefs-with none to stand between.

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.