Dai’s Political Education

This section provides a sketch of Dai’s early life and education. Its first purpose is to introduce him to the reader. Dai Zhaochen was born into an elite Jiangsu family, which provided him with an entrée into officialdom. He spent his youth preparing for the examinations and learning from his relatives. In reconstructing Dai’s background, this section also underlines the importance of lineage networks of family learning and secretarial offices for the transmission of policy ideas in the late Qing.

Dai was born into a family of successful officials, many of whom had purchased their degrees. According to their genealogy, compiled in 1837 and then again in 1862, Dai’s family traced its origins to the Yuan Dynasty. By the eighteenth century, the family had settled in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, at the heart of the wealthy Yangtze Delta region.Footnote ¹⁸ The genealogy elliptically refers to them as farmers and gives no detail on the occupations or lives of most members. In the Qianlong reign (1736–1795), a few Dai men began winning official positions. The preface describes this as the moment when the Dai began studying letters and the martial arts. Dai’s great-great-uncles served as officers in the Green Standard army. Numerous other relatives served in civil posts, notably as county magistrates.

The pinnacle of the family’s official success was Zhaochen’s great-uncle Dai Sanxi 戴三錫 (1758–1830, 1793 jinshi Footnote ¹⁹). Sanxi first rose to national attention (receiving an imperial audience), when he caught a Sichuan sect leader during a routine baojia inspection.Footnote ²⁰ During his subsequent tenure, which included nearly a decade as Sichuan governor, Sanxi submitted over 3,000 memorials. He recommended Liu Heng 劉衡 (1776–1841) as Ba County 巴縣 magistrate, a post from which Liu would pen some of the most famous administrative handbooks of the late Qing.Footnote ²¹ While outlining the extent of Sanxi’s reputation and network would require a more extended discussion, we get some sense of his significance from an editorial comment at the end of He Changling’s 賀長齡 (1785–1848) official biography. Changling, the editors conclude, lacked the martial abilities to stabilize a frontier territory. Sanxi, by contrast, “worked hard on civil affairs” and “was effective at governing” (during his long tenure on the Sichuan frontier.Footnote ²² We have no definitive evidence that Zhaochen ever lived with his great-uncle, but Zhaochen’s father and younger brother Dai Pan 戴盤 (b. 1813) worked in Sanxi’s Sichuan offices briefly in 1833 and 1839, and Zhaochen would likely have heard something of their trip, even if he did not go himself.Footnote ²³ Moreover, Sanxi’s fame would likely have opened doors for his younger relative, and Zhaochen did reprint Sanxi’s primer when he served in Guangdong, suggesting that he had read at least some of Sanxi’s official papers.Footnote ²⁴

Examination failure punctuated Dai’s early life. Despite his allegedly precocious ability to memorize the classics, he never succeeded in the civil service examations.Footnote ²⁵ Dai would go on to fail the provincial examinations five times. Even after entering the bureaucracy, Dai said that he “had no learning whatsoever.”Footnote ²⁶ Writing the preface to A Record of Learning decades later, Dai would sidestep the question of classical literacy, writing that he had studied the classics and histories and that officials must know them fluently.Footnote ²⁷

As Dai’s classical studies stalled, he turned to more practical reading. In 1833 his uncle Dai Yuli 戴於禮 (n.d.) was appointed as magistrate of Leiyang 耒陽 County, Hunan,Footnote ²⁸ and Dai followed him there. Dai’s biography is then silent on how he spent the remainder of the 1830s. He probably studied and worked. His son Dai Xieyuan 戴燮元 was born in 1837.Footnote ²⁹ According to Xieyuan, Zhaochen continued his studies in Hunan while also “reading examination papers from the local academy.” According to his biography, Dai spent his free time “discussing useful knowledge” and developed a “will to order the world” (you jingshi zhi 有經世志).Footnote ³⁰ Scholars have long noted the importance of familial traditions of learning in the intellectual history of late imperial China, and the Dai family exemplified that dynamic.Footnote ³¹ During these first several decades of Dai’s life, he learned about governance from a dense network of male relatives and their friends and colleagues.

In the 1840s and 50s, Dai cut his teeth on some of the most technically complex systems of the Qing state. He purchased his first appointment, in 1841, as an administrative clerk (zhishi 知事) in the Liang Huai 兩淮 salt administration, a recent site of reform by statecraft luminary Tao Shu 陶澍(1779–1839).Footnote ³² There, he distinguished himself both by rooting out corrupt practices and by his martial valor during the Opium War. After the war, Dai stayed and reformed salt transportation logistics, stove management, monopoly pricing, and merchant–government relations. At the same time, he was able to “live close to home, with lots of relatives and friends” with whom he “discussed county-level governance.”Footnote ³³ Tao Shu himself died before Dai’s arrival, but Dai’s first published book received a preface from Xu Qiaolin 許喬林 (1775?–1852), one of the editors of Tao’s collected works and of the Brief Gazetteer of Huaibei Salt-Ticket Administration (Huai bei piao yan zhilüe 淮北票鹽志略).Footnote ³⁴

This phase of Dai’s career ended in 1849 when his father died, and he returned home for mourning. Afterwards, in 1852, he was appointed as magistrate of Mi’le 彌勒 County in eastern Yunnan. Although he was already in his forties, Dai begged off. Perhaps Yunnan was too far. Perhaps he wanted to stay closer to his aging mother, as his son later suggested. Or perhaps it was he who lobbied the Anhui Governor, Manchu bannerman Fuji 福濟 (1811–1875), to let him stay and address the growing rebellion in the Lower Yangtze Delta.Footnote ³⁵ Regardless, it was a consequential decision. In the 1850s, he worked under Fuji, and probably came to know Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), then in charge of Fuji’s staff.Footnote ³⁶ Dai helped manage population registration, military rations, boats, and donations for Qing armies in Anhui and Jiangsu, particularly using his experience in the salt monopoly to generate funding.Footnote ³⁷ These were bureaucratically intractable and technically complex tasks. It was his ability to handle them—and probably the professional connections he made in doing so—which led to his recommendation for the post of prefect.Footnote ³⁸

In the 1860s, Dai served four tenures as prefect. The prefect occupied a strategic position in Qing administration coordinating problems which, although still local in scope, were too strategic or complex for county magistrates to resolve themselves. This earned them a much higher official rank than magistrates (4b vs. 7a).Footnote ³⁹ In 1861, Dai was appointed to Dengzhou 登州, Shandong. After a leave of absence to mourn the death of his mother, Dai was sent to Lianzhou 廉州, Guangdong in 1864.Footnote ⁴⁰ He spent the remainder of the decade in Guangdong, serving first in Qiongzhou 瓊州 (on today’s Hainan Island) (1867) and then in Guangzhou 廣州 (1869).Footnote ⁴¹ As Dai gained seniority and experience, he received increasingly difficult and important jobs. Dengzhou was rated as strategic and complex, while Guangzhou, which was wealthy, unruly, and strategically important, was rated as strategic, complex, strenuous, and difficult.Footnote ⁴² These promotions suggest that his superiors thought Dai well-suited to local administration on the challenging maritime frontier.

Localizing Defense Policy in Dengzhou

Dai’s formal official career began in 1861 in Shandong, at a time when rebellion was still raging across much of the empire. As scholars have long noted, Qing officials developed numerous policies for suppressing and defending against it.Footnote ⁴³ They fortified villages, emptied rural areas of supplies and people, organized militias, and hired mercenaries. In doing so, they came to increasingly rely on leadership and funding from local elites. This section describes how Dai adapted these preexisting policy blueprints when he served in Dengzhou. After reviewing his success in warding off Nian rebels, it compares his policies with related texts included in A Record of Learning. In this case, statecraft learning provided specific blueprints for Dai to follow and a lesson in how to localize them.

Upon his arrival that spring, Dai began preparing for a siege.Footnote ⁴⁴ He solicited over 15,000 taels of silver in donations (including 400 taels from his own purse) to repair the Dengzhou city wall.Footnote ⁴⁵ He required militiamen to close the gates and question entrants, and city dwellers to stockpile food and firewood. Meanwhile, he called on clerks, gentry, soldiers, and braves to defend the gates. Citing a popular and apt metaphor, he said that “unity of will is like a wall.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Dai wanted tuanlian militias to facilitate this defense,Footnote ⁴⁷ but he quickly realized that most people were too poor and busy for training. As a result, he was forced to hire wage laborers as paid mercenaries:

Craftsmen and shop clerks, presumably employed in flexible ways in more urban settings, made better soldiers than farmers tied to their fields. But creating a dispersed network of local defenders also raised the question of geography. Dai explained:

In addition to the questions of transportation and profession, there was the question of urgency. Even if people were loyal to the Qing government at a local level, how could they be convinced to bear the expenses of regular military practice? The costs of training were obvious, unlike their benefits. Perhaps as a response, Dai offered his subjects the possibility of more vibrant political participation:

Here, Dai assumed the presence of a “right” and “correct” view, and of various local figures who would help bring it to light through structured dialogue in official channels.

Amidst this mobilization, Dai tried to determine which of his subjects were trustworthy.Footnote ⁴⁹ Before the attack, Dai had distinguished between “outsider people attending the fairs,” who needed to be investigated but had legitimate reasons to enter the city, and true “vagrants and bandits” who needed to be “removed from the jurisdiction” entirely. Among the travelers were bandits, who gambled, told fortunes, and caused trouble. Likewise, he only thought that a portion of local elites were qualified to lead troops. As a class, this group was seen as much less susceptible to bribery than yamen clerks.Footnote ⁵⁰ But who among the elites were qualified to lead? Dai’s writings do not provide details on their backgrounds, but he does highlight the qualities that they needed. Writing before he had served as an official, Dai emphasized wisdom.Footnote ⁵¹ Now, his criteria were more concrete: he wanted people “familiar with the geography and sentiments” of the locality. If they were to be reciting the Sacred Edict, they needed clear pronunciation.Footnote ⁵²

These preparations came to the fore that fall, when Nian rebels laid siege to Dengzhou city for forty days. Dai successfully defended the city, even though his mother died midway through the siege.Footnote ⁵³ This success was recorded in more detail than any other moment in Dai’s official career. It won him and his subordinates recommendation and promotion.Footnote ⁵⁴ And it was memorialized in the county and prefectural gazetteers and in a detailed narrative written by Dai’s son.Footnote ⁵⁵

In fact, most of Dai’s defense policies in Dengzhou followed the prescriptions of earlier officials. A Record of Learning contained several pieces touching on tuanlian. The first, by Liu Heng, was introductory: it outlined how gentry would lead local people to keep watch at key spots and raise the call for help as needed.Footnote ⁵⁶ The second, by Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤 (1759–1826), a Hunan jingshi luminary, focused on defending against coastal pirates by using tuanlian militias to cut off their food supplies on the mainland. Yan embodied the principle of adapting to local conditions, but his program was otherwise quite different from Dai’s. The third was more specifically similar to Dai’s program. In it, Gong Jinghan 龔景瀚 (1747–1802) used tuanlian to “strengthen the walls and clear the countryside.” The Collected Statecraft Writings included this piece, which provided the clearest blueprint for tuanlian organization in Dai’s Record of Learning. Through fortification, militia organizing, and stockpiling, Gong argued, counties and prefectures could defend themselves without large contingents of government troops. When Dai initially proposed repairing the wall, he explicitly used Gong’s phrase, explaining that sturdy walls would give rural settlers refuge in case of attack.Footnote ⁵⁷

Dai followed Gong’s advice to mobilize his subjects according to their ability and availability. For both men, gentry leadership was one circumscribed part of a larger mobilization. As we saw above, Dai saw limits to gentry leadership, both political (trustworthiness) and practical (knowledge of local conditions). Gong likewise advocated “choosing those from well-off families, with upright character and understanding of how to do things, either literati or elders, to serve as heads of forts.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, the key qualifications for leadership were ethics and ability more than literati status per se. Moreover, both men saw a continued leading role for government officials in supervising these civilians: Gong advocated organizing tuanlian at a prefectural level, just as Dai in fact did. Third, Green Standard troops retained a vital role. For Gong, they were to train and supervise militiamen; in Dai’s case, they served alongside militiamen in defending Dengzhou. Finally, in both cases, it was the laboring poor and not agricultural peasants who would fortify and defend the city. Both systems mobilized ad hoc coalitions of Qing subjects.

Throughout his career, Dai appealed to local suitability as a principle in evaluating policy proposals. Explaining his tuanlian program to his superiors, Dai wrote that since “the characteristics of each prefecture are different, and I have not yet travelled through my jurisdiction, I do not dare make unsupported proposals. Probably, when organizing tuanlian militias, it is nothing but adjusting according to time and practicing according to place” (Ge fu qingxing bu tong, bi fu wei jing qinli, yi bu gan xuanni. Dadi tuanlian zhi fa, buwai yu yin shi zhiyi, xiang di zhiyi 各府情形不同, 俾府未經親歷, 亦不敢懸擬。大抵團練之法, 不外於因時制宜、相地制宜).Footnote ⁵⁹ “Governing according to local conditions” (yin di zhiyi 因地制宜) was a cardinal principle of Qing governance.Footnote ⁶⁰ Dai’s great-uncle Sanxi’s official biography had lauded his ability to govern according to place, using the same set phrase.Footnote ⁶¹ And Zhaochen experience’s in salt and river administration had likewise taught him the importance of local variation. He mostly excluded general advice on these two topics from his Record of Learning, writing in the editorial notes (fanli 凡例) that for salt-making and hydrology, “one must proceed according to place and time, and one cannot describe them completely in books.”Footnote ⁶² One of the few pieces on hydrology was from Huang Liuhong 黃六鴻 (b. 1633); it provided a schematic guide to the regional variation of hydrological systems.Footnote ⁶³ Notwithstanding his short appointments, Dai exemplified a sensitive imperial approach to the “politics of difference”: he sought out “local and situated knowledge,” used it to “apply the rules of thumb” in official discourse to his jurisdictions and achieved “practical success” as a result.Footnote ⁶⁴

Simplifying Baojia Registration in Lianzhou

After a leave of mourning (c. 1862–1864), Dai was appointed in Guangdong, where he would serve for the rest of the decade. As his son later noted, “Guangdong is a place that links together China and the outside, and there are very many foreign languages and customs. Excited [by them], the people listen and follow them; when they get anxious, they revolt.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The prime example of this mixture of foreign ideas and local customs was of course the Taiping Rebellion, launched not far away in eastern Guangxi and ongoing at the start of Dai’s tenure in Guangdong. More generally, the Qing bureaucracy rated all three of the prefectures in which Dai served as challenging posts: Lianzhou bordered Vietnam; Qiongzhou had an indigenous Li population, and Guangzhou was a hub of global trade.Footnote ⁶⁶ Lianzhou and Qiongzhou saw fierce resistance to the imposition of the commercial tax in the early 1860s.Footnote ⁶⁷ Local militarization and political “reconstruction” were ongoing during Dai’s tenure.Footnote ⁶⁸

As in Dengzhou, Dai drew on the defense policies which Qing provincial officials had developed in the preceding decades. Specifically, in response to rebellion in the mountains of neighboring Guangxi,Footnote ⁶⁹ he refashioned the baojia system of household registration. The military threat in Dengzhou had been so pressing that Dai immediately began preparing for an attack. In Lianzhou, he had time for the more laborious and fundamental task of household registration. In implementing baojia, he followed the general Qing trend of registering a wider range of socially marginal peoples. Interestingly, however, he advocated a very simple system of registers. This section thus shows Dai evaluating multiple possible policies and choosing between them. It moves our discussion from the problem of adapting prefabricated policy blueprints into the more complex realm of evaluating between them using abstract principles of good governance.

A Record of Learning anthologized around ten pieces on baojia. Pieces like that by Wang Huizu defended the institution against its detractors. Lu Huiyu 陸會禹 described baojia’s historical origins. Yang Mingshi 楊名時 (1661–1736) and Tong Guoqi 佟國器 (d. 1660) described how to use baojia to deal with various politically contentious groups. Peng Peng 彭鵬 (1637–1704) offered a typical account of how clerks used baojia to extort money from Qing subjects. Most of these pieces were from the early Qing and addressed fundamental features of baojia unchanged in the preceding century. Two of them offered specific recommendations on implementation. The first, by the noted provincial official Yu Chenglong 于成龍 (1617–1684), was based particularly on his experience governing Huangzhou in eastern Hubei, a jurisdiction punctuated by Yangtze River tributaries, as it was being conquered by the Qing.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Huangzhou, Yu devised a detailed program of patrol boats, bridges, locks, night watches and logbooks coordinated through baojia. Although his piece could have been relevant in coastal Guangdong, the baojia regulations which Dai included in his Lianzhou administrative papers were much less detailed.Footnote ⁷¹

The second was “An Essay on the Baojia Statutes and Substatutes” (“Lun baojia shili shu” 論保甲實例書) by Zhang Huiyan 張惠言 (1761–1802), a piece also anthologized in the Collected Statecraft Writings. In it, Zhang launched a fundamentalist critique of the Qing approach to baojia. He praised Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 (1472–1529) baojia system for not requiring officials to supervise the maintenance of ten-household placards. According to Zhang, this supervision was a later addition and an unnecessary burden on communities.Footnote ⁷² He instead recommended doing away with official registers (often called circulating registersFootnote ⁷³) as an additional layer on top of household placards. In ten points, Zhang argued that this government supervision and registration was expensive, useless, and burdensome.

In doing so, he contravened a widespread desire for more precise and frequent inspections.Footnote ⁷⁴ The nineteenth-century programs anthologized in Xu Dong’s 徐棟 (1792–1865) seminal Book of Baojia (Baojia shu 保甲書, 1837) and by its 1869 redaction Essentials from the Book of Baojia (Baojia shu jiyao 保甲書輯要) required even more effort. They called, for instance, for updated information on women and children, workers and migrants, and other people who were not male household heads. Registration and inspection were supposed to be frequent and detailed. For example, the ten-point program by Zong Jichen 宗稷辰 (1788?–1867), who wrote a preface for Dai’s first collection of administrative papers, prompted a national discussion of baojia policy in 1851.Footnote ⁷⁵ Zong proposed a remarkably detailed registration procedure. He emphasized the need to give experienced magistrates ample time to complete initial registration, which “above all needs to be detailed.”

Dai’s baojia program required less effort. In Dengzhou, he had only required baojia placard heads (pai zhang 牌長) to report the aggregate populations of their streets.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Lianzhou, Dai issued a proclamation and an associated set of regulations outlining his program.Footnote ⁷⁷ It organized households into the classical decimal units (here called placards) but eliminated the hundred- and thousand-household units common in Qing baojia programs. Dai instructed placard heads to report directly to the tuanlian bureaus, bypassing other levels of the baojia hierarchy.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, Dai’s reporting requirements were less detailed and frequent. Under them, placard heads were to report the names of household heads and the number of their members. But Dai explicitly noted that they did not need to record the names or ages of any of the other household members. And unless there was a death or the placard had been physically damaged, placard heads did not need to regularly update household placards. Dai was spurning the centralized, frequent registration advocated by many other Qing baojia practitioners. He, like Zhang, wanted a program that was “simple and easily done [i.e. practicable].”Footnote ⁷⁹

This choice reflected Dai’s larger commitment to practicability. Murat Dağli has critiqued historians who use ‘pragmatism’ to understand Ottoman politics.Footnote ⁸⁰ He has argued that ‘pragmatism’ covers the power relations which shape politics under a blanket called necessity. While I sympathize with Dağli’s critique, I also think that Dai was genuinely committed to making policy that worked. This was evident in his choices as well as his frequent use of adjectives such as simple (jian 簡), convenient (bian 便), and doable (ke 可) or “easily done” (yi xing 易行). The first product of Dai’s engagement with the statecraft tradition was a short magistrate handbook titled Modest Opinions about the Search for Good Government (Qiu zhi guanjian 求治管見, 1849, literally Views on the Pursuit of Governance, seen [narrowly as] through a tube). Its preface twice claimed that it was even more “practical and useful” (qieshi youyong 切實有用) than Wang Huizu’s classic Personal Views on Learning Government (Xue zhi yi shuo 學治臆說). Dai’s handbook, published before he had served as a prefect, harped on professional decorum, the virtue of making incremental improvements, and the importance of humility. It provided a list of “dos” and “don’ts” in a concise format, denouncing corruption and arguing for a limited use of torture, more generous famine relief, and careful management of one’s subordinates. These were standard fare for Qing official handbooks, and Dai’s text was unremarkable. Indeed, one preface claimed that “its thinking seems shallow, and its language seems simple, but its opinions are precise and appropriate for governance.”Footnote ⁸¹ For A Record of Learning, he likewise selected “apposite and applicable” essays, while leaving aside those “profound opinions” which were not practicable.Footnote ⁸² For Dai, simplicity and practicability were cardinal virtues of decision-making, in addition to being rhetorical devices used to justify those decisions.

Above, I have surveyed cases in which Dai streamlined bureaucratic procedures and empowered local elites and common people to maintain political order. In Dengzhou, he worked within the limits imposed by local socioeconomic conditions to put together a fighting force to defend his prefecture. In Lianzhou, he advocated for a simplified form of baojia to avoid the costs, inconveniences, and corruption of more detailed household registration. In both cases, his policies echoed specific provisions found in A Record of Learning. While his tuanlian policy in Dengzhou fit well within a contemporary trend, his baojia policy in Lianzhou differed more from prevailing discourse. This latter case shows Dai relying on a more general principle to compare conflicting policy ideas. It suggests that Dai had a larger set of principles informing his use of the policy blueprints in the Collected Statecraft Writings.

Debating Ethnic Conflict in Qiongzhou

By 1867, when Dai was transferred to Qiongzhou, he had accumulated nearly two decades of experience in local governance and published A Record of Learning as a mark of his ascent into officialdom. Correspondingly, his policies in Qiongzhou departed more significantly from common Qing bureaucratic practice. In Qiongzhou, Dai formed a strong opinion on ethnic conflict and thus implicitly took a stand in a wider debate about the issue. This section reflects on that departure, opening the way towards a larger discussion of definition in the conclusion.

In the late Qing, Qiongzhou prefecture was a place of commerce and conflict. The island had been identified as one of the treaty ports to be opened in the wake of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. But the opening was delayed by nearly two decades, as the British evaluated the prospects for trade against the costs of opening a consulate.Footnote ⁸³ In 1872, an English newspaper reviewed the mercantile opportunities of the newly opened (1858) treaty port of Haikou, at the north end of the island. It described Haikou’s position in regional trade networks, through which merchants sold products like sugar and oil. Indeed, Qiongzhou merchants would build a dozen guild halls in Malaysia before the end of the Qing.Footnote ⁸⁴ The reviewer saw little opportunity for foreigners to participate in these trade arrangements.

At the same time, the island’s interior saw continual ethnic strife. As Dai wrote to his superiors upon his arrival in Qiongzhou, “it is surrounded by the sea, and inhabited by the Li, and so since ancient times has attached importance to both prevention and defense.”Footnote ⁸⁵ One estimate counts eighty-five instances of Han–Li conflict in the Qing, or about one every three years.Footnote ⁸⁶ They began in the seventeenth century, when Li people resisted Qing conquest and helped Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (1624–1662) in his brief time on Hainan.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the early eighteenth century, the Qing court acknowledged these issues in allowing Qiongzhou subjects to own firearms, a rare exception to a strict prohibition.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Qing court typically characterized the Li as barbarous. One typical account, that of the imperially commissioned Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (Zhigong tu 職貢圖), was that “their nature is violent and ferocious, and they periodically kill with impunity.”Footnote ⁸⁹ An 1806 memorial from the governor-general claimed that Li and Han people were living harmoniously, but he nonetheless described the Li as brutish and concluded that registering them through the island’s baojia system was unrealistic.Footnote ⁹⁰ After 1840, as Li unrest became more frequent, the Qing attitude hardened further, tilting from pacifying towards suppressing.Footnote ⁹¹ There had been an armed conflict three months before Dai arrived, and there would be another four months into his term.

As far as we know, Dai stepped into this tense situation with little experience dealing with the problem of ethnic difference. Nonetheless, he quickly developed a strong opinion on the situation, articulated in “A Discussion of Governing the Li.” It expanded on the assessment of the situation which Dai sent to his superiors when he assumed office. In that initial survey, Dai argued that rapacious Han moneylenders caused Li uprisings, clerks and Green Standard troops exacerbated them through violence and extortion, and incompetent officials allowed them to swell.Footnote ⁹² Dai began his “Discussion” from a more macroscopic perspective. He listed quotations from Ming and Qing texts compiled in the Daoguang Qiongzhou Prefectural Gazetteer (Qiongzhou fu zhi 瓊州府志), which documented repeatedly both dynasties’ failures to “pacify” the Li.Footnote ⁹³ Dai dismissed military suppression as a solution because it had failed at great cost to the government. In the historical record, he found a different lesson: “although it is said that the character of the Li is difficult to domesticate, their uprisings cannot be said to have no reason.” He continued:

In our terms, Dai argued that what appeared as a matter of ethnic difference (the notion that the Li people were naturally unruly) was in fact a reasonable response to political and economic exploitation. Dai concluded that “the harm done to the Qiongzhou people by the Li has a distant origin.”Footnote ⁹⁵ What his contemporaries might have seen as an external problem (the presence of a strange, foreign people), Dai recast as a problem internal to the Qing political system. The Green Standard officerFootnote ⁹⁶ Hong Yunzhang had exhorted the Li people, and their violence in response was just an understandable retaliation. His solution flowed from this diagnosis:

Here we have a mix of classic Qing ethnic policy (“using both kindness and force”Footnote ⁹⁷) and an indictment of prior officials’ approach to the Li people. Dai suggested that the standard policy of suppression and magnanimity was not wrong so much as irrelevant. The Li people, like those anonymous vagrants drifting into local fairs, were beyond his control. Instead, he tried to control Qing subjects through registration, surveillance, and militarization using systems like baojia and tuanlian.

How are we to understand Dai’s approach to ethnic governance? His Record of Learning, by my reading, contains only one piece addressing the issue, a letter from the seasoned Qing bureaucrat Cheng Hanzhang 程含章 (1762–1832).Footnote ⁹⁸ Cheng begins from what he calls the greatest risk to a local official: that “above and below are separated, and their feelings are not in sync.” He goes on to attack the description of people as crafty (diao 刁) or savage (man 蠻), writing that these behaviors were often the result of punishments meted out by officials who failed to sympathize with their real needs. Continuing in an idealistic and high-handed tone, Cheng urges his readers to understand the people’s feelings and to be sensitive to them. Dai’s study of Qiongzhou’s history, his appreciation for the frustration of the Li people, and his appeal to sincerity and virtue all reflected Cheng’s ethos. Theirs was a moral approach to ethnic governance, which assumed a universal human nature. If local officials treated the Li with sincerity and fairness, they argued, the Li would be transformed into law-abiding Qing subjects.

Dai’s view resonated with at least one comment by the reigning Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862–1875), but it does not seem to have influenced the court’s response to the Li uprisings. In the spring of 1870, an edict condemned so-called Li bandits as “uncouth and set in their ways.” That fall, another edict responding to a memorial from the provincial government in Guangdong raised the possibility that the current Li disturbance was a result of mismanagement by the local officials. This explanation echoed Dai’s argument and contrasted with the earlier edict. By year-end, however, the Qing court had turned away from this position. A third edict instructed the Guangdong governor Žuilin 瑞麟 (1809–1874), then also governor-general, to “completely annihilate” the remaining rebels, to “tear them up by the roots.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Official corruption, as far as the court was concerned, was no excuse for killing an official, and did not explain away the fundamental barbarity of the Li.

Li’s position also contrasted sharply with what seems to have been a broader statecraft trend in the Late Qing towards forced ethnic assimilation. As Eric Schluessel has shown, Zuo Zongtang’s Hunan Army undertook a thoroughgoing program of ethnic assimilation in Late Qing Xinjiang. Likewise, in 1880s Guangdong, then-governor Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), aggressively sought to assimilate the Li through charity schools.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Dai’s program, by contrast, was less forceful. He acknowledged the challenges of heterodoxy and ethnic difference and was aware of foreign influence. But he did not seek to eliminate these problems from the social environment. Perhaps this was because he lacked the power, and perhaps it was because he lacked the inclination. In either case, Dai was stretching the limits of his influence and reaching the end of his career.

How Dai Was Forgotten

These sorts of practical, localized policies won Dai numerous accolades. Literati, clerks, and local students wrote Dai commendatory compilations in each place where he served.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The first compilation from Dengzhou is no longer extant, but the evidence cited above speaks to Dai’s popularity there. In Lianzhou, local students wrote him dozens of fawning poems and (we are told) trailed him to his next post.Footnote ¹⁰² In Qiongzhou, according to Pierre-Étienne Will, “the local instructor (xundao 訓導) … and a large number of students, detail[ed] in flowery language Dai’s good policies … He is said to have succeeded with almost supernatural authority and efficiency and acquired considerable popularity.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Perhaps this is why the editors of the Republican gazetteer for Qiongshan 瓊山 county in Qiongzhou mistakenly wrote that Dai had attained the status of jinshi. Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While the contents of these compilations tell us little about Dai’s policies, their number and length speak to his reputation.

As Dai’s career advanced, these successes earned him an enviable reputation among his colleagues. The tone of the prefaces to his three collections of administrative documents became progressively more fawning.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Preface-writers in the first volume acknowledged Dai’s “outstanding political reputation” and that he “was inextricably linked with the people.” In the second, they once again praised Dai’s responsiveness. By the third, they lauded Dai not just for his concrete achievements, but for his general excellence. One writer cited Dai’s ability, his own ignorance, and the amount he learned from the Records. Another waxed poetic, writing that “among those called administrators, many who are good shepherds of the people are not good at governing the army; those diligent at hearing plaints, are perhaps not as good at pacifying [the people].” Dai was celebrated not for his specialization, but for his breadth.

He also left a legacy within his lineage, which by the Guangxu reign had an identifiable tradition of local governance. In 1880, Zhaochen’s nephew Dai Jie 戴杰 republished Modest Opinions about the Search for Good Government along with Liu Heng’s classic Knowledge Acquired from Reading the Law (Du lü xinde 讀律心得). The following year, Jie published his own collection of administrative papers, titled Miscellanea on Learning Government from Respect-and-Simplicity Studio (Jingjiantang xue zhi zalu 敬簡堂學治雜錄), with a preface from Zhaochen’s son Xieyuan.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Even in its title, Jie’s collection echoed the lessons of his uncle Zhaochen: simplicity and humility in the process of learning to govern. Moreover, Jie devoted the latter half of his own preface to the problem of local variation, writing that “in politics, the most important thing is to govern according to local conditions, so while [these policies] were effective in Ling 陵 [county, where Jie served], we cannot know whether they will be effective in other jurisdictions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Within the collection, Jie included several detailed proclamations and a ten-point program for baojia. While Jie referred to it as “simple and easily implemented”, its registration procedures and reporting requirements were in fact much more detailed and burdensome than Zhaochen’s had been. But as Jie himself emphasized, these provisions were written specifically based on current conditions. The larger principles of practicability and localization remained part of what Xieyuan in his preface referred to as the Dai “family learning” (jiaxue 家學).

This reputation and influence were surely part of the reason that his son Xieyuan compiled Zhaochen’s biography “in preparation for one day when it may be chosen as material for state history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But Zhaochen never did receive an official state biography. While we can only speculate on why this may have been the case, it is undeniable that Dai achieved neither the rank and stature of Dai Sanxi nor the wide bureaucratic influence of a handbook author like Liu Heng.

Perhaps one reason was that Dai did not seek to propagate original policy proposals. In the words of his epitaph, written by the eminent Hanlin Academician Li Chenglin 李承霖 (b. 1815), Dai “had no desire to compete with those substance-less writers disconnected from civil affairs.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Dai’s intellectual life began, around 1830, with failure at classical study and his turn towards matters of governance. When it ended, in 1870, Dai had status, prestige, and reputation, but he still fashioned himself as a humble practitioner. This is most evident in the titles of his works themselves. Rather than treatises, he called them records of his experience studying how to be an official and pursuing an official career. For the same reason, Dai explained in the fanli that A Record of Learning remained necessarily incomplete: “when I have seen and heard more, I will compile an additional text to supplement [my findings].” Dai explicitly refused to acknowledge that he could make an intellectual contribution to Qing governance. In the preface to A Record of Public Service, he wrote that “I would not dare say that I have benefited the public. Doing so has just been my heart’s ambition.” Defining “public service,” Dai hid behind a cloud of keywords: diligently working for the “national economy and people’s livelihood,” “promoting the good and suppressing abuses,” “pacifying the interior and repelling external harms,”

Dai’s limited ambitions reflected in part his relatively low office. For example, despite serving on the coast, there is little evidence that he engaged in foreign affairs. When Dengzhou was being opened as a treaty port in the wake of the Second Opium War, the Manchu bannerman in charge of the operation memorialized to suggest ignoring Dai’s recommendations on the matter, saying that although they “accorded with local conditions,” they contradicted the new treaty, perhaps because Dai was not familiar with it.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Like other Qing prefects, Dai had the status to voice his opinion in bureaucratic debates and the power to transform institutions in his jurisdictions, but not the provincial or national platforms to spread them. Although prefects were increasingly allowed to submit secret memorials to the throne in the late Qing, they did so much more sparingly than their superiors.Footnote ¹¹¹ Dai was able to build a reputation in the places where he lived and served, but not able to gain national fame or earn a place in the dynastic historical canon.

But comparing Dai with Yan Ruyi, who also spent most of his career at the sub-provincial level, suggests that it was more than a question of office.Footnote ¹¹² Like Dai, Yan came from a family of officials. And like Dai, he had limited examination success in his youth, only passing the provincial examinations when he was nearly 40. Both men entered the bureaucracy in middle age and spent most of their careers in one province (Yan in Sha’anxi). But the stature they attained differed dramatically. Yan almost immediately established himself as an expert on militia organization and ethnic governance in the mountains of south-central China. He took hardline positions on ethnic assimilation and pushed to restructure the society under his rule. And the result was several original treatises on frontier policy which later became precedents for men like Dai. Historians have likewise focused on figures like Yan—leading figures with strong agendas and clear positions.

Dai’s ambitions may have also been more moderate because the prospects for reform had dimmed over the course of the century. This article has avoided an extended discussion of the politics of political reconstruction in the 1860s, since Dai’s practices seemed in many ways typical of the period. But perhaps the virtues to which he attached so much importance—simplicity, practicability, suitability to local conditions—reflected the exigencies of his era. Rebuilding a shattered social order with limited fiscal resources forced Qing officials to make do, and local officials in particular lacked the power to initiate large, novel programs of reform.

Dai Zhaochen and “Statecraft”

These speculations on the limits of Dai’s ambition, success, and fame bring us back to the questions with which this essay began. Where should we place Dai within the Qing statecraft tradition? What does his case tell us about its transmission and reception? In other words, what did statecraft mean to Dai Zhaochen? This essay has surveyed Dai’s upbringing and clerkships (c. 1810–1860), arguing that he learned about governance not just from reading, but also from his elder male family members and their colleagues. I then contextualized three of Dai’s policy choices, and argued that Dai found statecraft policy blueprints useful, but that the Collected Statecraft Writings also provided models of their successful use, which Dai adapted according to operating principles such as practicability and suitability to local conditions.Footnote ¹¹³ Dai was an expert because he could sift through this advice and apply it judiciously in real-world contexts.

This argument should prompt us to reconsider the definitions of jingshi currently used by scholars. The first focuses on statecraft as a social movement centered in early-nineteenth-century Hunan. While Dai was adjacent to and aware of this movement, the evidence does not suggest that he was an active participant in it. He did not exchange correspondence with its leading lights; he had no institutional affiliations with its key organs. While he was well-connected and exceptional enough to publish his official papers, Dai nonetheless lived nearer to the edge of this social world than more famous figures like Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–41857). By his own admission, Dai was a recipient of its ideas.

A second definition, often adopted by intellectual historians, sees jingshi as a Confucian commitment to governing. This definition recognizes the fact that the Confucian classics were formative for Qing officials. Yu Ying-shih saw statecraft learning (jingshi zhiyong 經世致用) as a “general trend of Ming–Qing Confucianism.” Like Chang Hao, he considered its impulse to order the world using Confucian morality as a basic feature of late imperial Way Learning (Daoxue 道學)—even “a defining feature of Confucian humanism.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Jingshi in this view was defined by its practitioners’ diligent efforts to govern. The challenge with using this definition is deciding how to measure concepts such as diligence, commitment, and vigor. If every official who left records was definitionally proving his commitment to governance, then this definition becomes too general to provide analytical insight into the relationship between policy writing and Qing governance more generally.

A third definition comes the closest to describing the nature of Dai’s expertise. In recent years, American scholars have often highlighted the intersection between jingshi and technocracy. These scholars have disproven the earlier notion that Qing officials were nothing more than Confucian generalists.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Statecraft bureaucrats, they argue, used technical (i.e., specialized, or mechanical) tools to solve social problems. William Rowe described the technocratic approach of Chen Hongmou.Footnote ¹¹⁶ More recently, scholars of material culture like Chen Kaijun have written about the knowledge practices, writing habits, and impressive sophistication of Qing “technocrats.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ There is no doubt that governing a polity as large and diverse as the Qing was a complex and technical task. And Dai was intimately acquainted with some of its more technical functions, including military finance and the salt monopoly.

At the same time, this definition has its limitations. Benjamin Elman has critiqued the anachronistic valorization of Wei Yuan and the Collected Statecraft Writings as harbingers of modernization.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yang Nianqun has asked if lauding jingshi has become a Eurocentric way of praising proto-economic or proto-scientific aspects of premodern Chinese governance. I think these authors are right to be skeptical of how much importance the Qing bureaucracy attached to technical sophistication. Much of what animated Dai’s governance was adapting and simplifying existing ideas, rather than inventing complicated, technical new solutions to existing problems. In the three cases cited above, Dai repeatedly highlighted the importance of personal morality and interpersonal relations in addition to the specifics of policy. At a more general level, Dai did not describe his goals or achievements in terms of acquiring specific technical knowledge, and he did not try to theorize about governance in terms of a well-articulated philosophy.

Perhaps, then, it is time to set aside statecraft as our primary rubric for discussing governance in late imperial China. Rather than asking whether a given figure ought to be included under its banner, or debating between its many possible definitions, this article has offered some initial methods and hypothesis for the social and intellectual history of policymaking in the Qing period. I have asked some of the classic questions of intellectual history: What were Dai’s intellectual influences, and how did he build upon them? What characterized his policies, both in their technical details and in their rhetorical justifications? What were the principles which helped him discuss, evaluate, and adapt preexisting ideas? I have also tried to understand the social and material contexts in which ideas spread: What were the genres of writing about policy and how did they complement each other? In addition to reading them, how else did officials learn about governance? The case of Dai Zhaochen has raised these questions, questions which I think can guide us towards a deeper understanding not only of how Chinese governance has evolved, but why.