Abstract
In this article, we look at the emergence of the minjie (civilian lands) in Jilin’s Shuangchengpu region and the beginning of changes to the late Qing dynasty ban on Chinese immigration to the Northeast, outlining the process of the mutual formation of local government administrative practices and central government institutions. From 1777 on, the Qing court began to levy fines on the cultivation of civilian land in the Northeast. But, beginning in 1815, after the settlement of Shuangchengpu, the income from banner lands in that area proved insufficient to support the cost of running the local government. As a result, the Jilin governor, Fu Jun, defied Qing court policy, using lower rents to attract civilian settlers to lease official lands (especially those classified as gongzu, hengchan, and suique lands) and become tenants. By various means, Fu Jun was able to force the Qing court to accept this change in its policy and thereby establish a minjie in Shuangchengpu. This institutional tax reform had a major impact on the lifting of the Northeast immigration ban in late Qing China. In this article, we examine civil administrative practices in Shuangchengpu and find that the local government there frequently violated imperial regulations. However, in most cases, these violations were limited in scale, and imperial regulations still retained authority. All the same, we suggest that when institutional regulations formed by the central government proved a hindrance to the development of local society, local magistrates would institute new administrative practices so as to diffuse the effect of these regulations. Thus, new local policies came into being as a result of the struggles between local governments and central institutions, and subsequent changes in imperial institutional and legal practice might have originated from the accumulation of minor changes caused by these struggles. Local governments and central government institutions often had contradictory agendas, and, in the sometimes intense collisions that occurred between the two, change and adaptation was a mutually reinforcing process.
Keywords
late Qing dynasty, local governments, imperial institutions, Shuangchengpu, minjie (civilian lands)
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