Abstract

This article examines the Qing government policies toward accumulated unresolved litigation cases during the Jiaqing period in the early nineteenth century. The problem of the backlog of unresolved cases had already emerged during the previous Qianlong reign. In response, the court under Qianlong urged the general surveillance circuits and prefects to tighten their supervision over local magistrates requiring them to enforce timely resolution of cases. It might be fair to say that, however, that the Qianlong reign is marked more by the systematization of the regulations regarding the punishment of litigation masters, rather than by the strengthening of the regulations enforcing swift resolution of cases. In contrast, during the reign of the subsequent Jiaqing emperor, the phe‒ nomenon of unresolved legal cases became a critical issue that engulfed both the court and provincial officials. At this time, the breakdown of bureaucratic discipline took on a heightened importance, as the emperor interpreted the accumulation of unresolved cases as resulting from such breakdown. In other words, according to the emperor, legal cases were not resolved in timely manner as local officials lacked the competence in closing cases quickly and impartially. During the Jiaqing reign, capital appeals increased dramatically, which also caused the appeals to local and regional levels above county to grow. As a result, not only newly received cases but also appealed cases aggravated the administrative burdens of local officials. The Jiaqing emperor viewed that the increase of appealed cases was a reflection of the decay of the bureaucratic discipline. This renewed imperial attention to the deterioration of bureaucratic morality was a prominentcharacteristic of the reign of Jiaqing, a feature that demarcated his reign from his father’s, especially the latter half of Qianlong’s rule. Until Qianlong, the Qing state prioritized bringing gentry behavior under proper state control, while from Jiaqing the emperors understood declining state of local administration largely stemming from bureaucratic corruption. Local officials’ delayed handling of legal cases, in imperial view, was a symptom that summarily featured this official malpractice. This reorientation in imperial attitude is closely intertwined with the greater state reliance on local elites’ financial and administrative roles, a phenomenon that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Despite Jiaqing’s efforts to discipline local bureaucracy, the problem of unresolved cases did not cease to exist. Around the year 1807 when the numbers of such cases within each province were reported to the emperor, Jiaqing gradually moved in the direction of taking more seriously the problem of illicit intervention of litigation masters. This signified that the emperor now began to perceive that disciplining bureaucracy alone would not ameliorate the problem and more rigorous measures against litigation masters needed to be taken to prevent unnecessary cases instigated by the masters. In short, while Jiaqing placed emphasis on improving bureaucratic discipline in the first half of his reign, he endeavored to punish litigation instigators with comparable enthusiasm (in addition to his continuous efforts to improve bureaucracy) in the second half of his rule. The realization that unresolved cases could not be liquidated without eliminating the pettifoggers lay at this policy shift. This double‒emphasis on both the improvement of bureaucratic discipline and the arrest and punishment of pettifoggers continued throughout the subsequent Daoguang reign.