This article elaborates on the claim of this special issue that “bureaucratic actions” are “knowledge practices” that have “the power to both make and break social and material worlds” to question the standard assumption that the Qing state became increasingly corrupt over the course of the long nineteenth century. It examines the evolution of the Qing information regime in one field—prison administration—to elucidate the relationship between information about the Qing state and knowledge of it. By reviewing how processes of enhanced reporting led to greater regulation and scrutiny, the first portion of this article argues that reporting processes that have seemed (both to Qing actors and historians) to be straightforward requests for information led over time to subtle but profound shifts in the epistemological and administrative foundations of the Qing state. It then demonstrates how Qing actors themselves engaged in discourses of corruption that eventually evolved into revolutionary critique and, finally, historiographical commonplace. The article concludes with the suggestion that although an abundance of information about the rise of corruption throughout the Qing administration appears from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, neither historians nor Qing actors themselves have distinguished between the growth of information alone and the growth of corruption itself. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
...MoreArticle Sebastian Felten; Christine von Oertzen (2020) Bureaucracy as Knowledge. Journal for the History of Knowledge.
Book
Martina Siebert;
Chen, Kai Jun;
Dorothy Ko;
(2021)
Making the palace machine work : Mobilizing people, objects, and nature in the Qing Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB451786832/)
Article
Sixiang Wang;
(2020)
Chosŏn’s Office of Interpreters: The Apt Response and the Knowledge Culture of Diplomacy
(/isis/citation/CBB358338782/)
Article
Anna Echterhölter;
(2020)
Shells and Order: Questionnaires on Indigenous Law in German New Guinea
(/isis/citation/CBB475810663/)
Article
Susanne Friedrich;
(2020)
Caveat from the Archive: Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie and Crisis Management
(/isis/citation/CBB746223772/)
Article
Sebastian Felten;
(2020)
Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines
(/isis/citation/CBB056193954/)
Article
John Sabapathy;
(2020)
Making Public Knowledge—Making Knowledge Public: The Territorial, Reparative, Heretical, and Canonization Inquiries of Gui Foucois (ca. 1200–1268)
(/isis/citation/CBB622320506/)
Book
John Krige;
(2019)
How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB105773946/)
Article
Theodore Porter;
(2020)
Revenge of the Humdrum: Bureaucracy as Profession and as a Site of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB941930472/)
Article
Harun Küçük;
(2020)
The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
(/isis/citation/CBB024194457/)
Article
Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane;
(April 2021)
The Codification of Techniques: Between Bureaucracy and the Markets in Early Modern Europe from a Global Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB096724110/)
Article
Ian Matthew Miller;
(October 2017)
Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China
(/isis/citation/CBB019165082/)
Thesis
Buhrman, Kristina Mairi;
(2012)
The Stars and the State: Astronomy, Astrology, and the Politics of Natural Knowledge in Early Medieval Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB001567376/)
Article
Watanabe, Junsei;
(2005)
A Manchu Manuscript on Arithmetic Owned by Tôyô Bunko: “suwan fa yuwan ben bithe”
(/isis/citation/CBB000651327/)
Thesis
Tsing Tsing Crystal Luk;
(2017)
A Study on Daoist's Medical Scripture Yi-dao Huan-yuan in the Qing: The Relationship Between Daoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine from Theories of Healing to Neidan Practice
(/isis/citation/CBB622759630/)
Article
Li, Xinsheng;
Wang, Siming;
(2014)
Introduction and Spread of Pumpkin and Their Influence in the Southeast Coastal Areas of China
(/isis/citation/CBB796942600/)
Article
Li, Zhaohua;
(2006)
An Investigation on the Suanxue Keyi in the Late Qing Dynasty
(/isis/citation/CBB001020787/)
Chapter
Ciyuan Liu;
Xueshun Liu;
(2015)
A Thorough Collation of Astronomical Records in the Twenty-Five Histories of China
(/isis/citation/CBB429199849/)
Article
Mario Cams;
(2018)
Blurring the Boundaries: Integrating Techniques of Land Surveying on the Qing’s Mongolian Frontier
(/isis/citation/CBB111379837/)
Article
Yuda Yang;
Nanny Kim;
(2019)
Texts and Technologies in Chinese Silver Metallurgy, Twelfth to Nineteenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB305546264/)
Book
Jami, Catherine;
(2012)
The Emperor's New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662--1722)
(/isis/citation/CBB001250505/)
Be the first to comment!