This recent addition to the Harvard East Asian monograph series is a modestly proportioned work with a provocative argument and an ambitiously sweeping chronological scope. In this revision of her PhD dissertation, Patricia Thornton considers three historically separate efforts on the part of Chinese central governments to reform local administration. The first of these occurred in the eighteenth century, the second from the late 1920s to the early 1930s during the Nanjing decade of the republican period, and the third during the 1960s in the period preceding the Cultural Revolution. Each case represented an attempt by the central government to address the interrelated issues of revenue collection, local political corruption, and social stability at the local level. In each case Thornton examines the objectives of central leaders as they sought to reform local administration. She then evaluates local official and nonofficial responses to those actions in order to evaluate the degree to which the original objectives were achieved.
Thornton's ultimate concern is to challenge our understanding of the very nature of the Chinese state as it has reconstituted itself over the centuries and to refute the applicability to China of theories derived from Western European historical experience that emphasize the historical inseparability of war waging and state making. Thornton argues that “in the Chinese case, military mobilization played only a supporting role in the state-making process” (209), and proposes an alternative model that stresses the essential role in Chinese state making of the normative authority to determine what is moral, to implement social control, and to define what constitutes state and nonstate actors. This is, to say the least, a boldly conceived agenda. It is a testament to the author's insight and intelligence that, in the end, readers need not buy all that is offered to still get much from this book.
The first of the reforms discussed is the late-imperial reform of the mid-Qing Yongzheng emperor who ruled from 1722 to 1735. As is well known, Yongzheng's reign was marked by his assertive attempt to reform imperial government, increase central-government control, stabilize government finances, and standardize bureaucratic practices. Thornton is particularly interested in Yongzheng's attempt to reform the administration of Chinese districts, which represented the lowest level of direct central rule in late-imperial China. It was this level of government that most directly interfaced with Chinese local society, and it was the district magistrate who oversaw the collection of the land tax upon which the state fisc primarily rested. Yongzheng's reforms at this level have not been ignored by earlier studies, but Thornton's comparative framework highlights new aspects of this story, and her skillful use of primary sources ranging from local gazetteers to routine memorials to the Grand Secretariat (Neige tiben) does much to flesh out her arguments with concrete historical examples.
It is widely understood that the elimination of corruption and the promotion of “virtuous” conduct among the empire's officials, including district magistrates, was a central goal of the Yongzheng reforms. Thornton emphasizes that Yongzheng was motivated not only by his desire to eliminate corruption-induced deficits in the state's tax haul, but concurrently to create a “state of virtue” (40) that would more perfectly extend control over normative morality at the local level. While Thornton touches on the strains produced within the bureaucratic system by the financial and punitive demands of the reform, her more suggestive finding is that the reforms also failed at the normative level. Using accounts from local gazetteers as unofficial expressions of localist discourse, Thorton shows that at least in some places localist critics of the central government contested definitions of corruption, and in certain cases championed as “virtuous” magistrates who had been officially chastised for behaving in ways that deviated from state directives. On the normative level then, Thornton argues, this late-imperial reform failed even before its ultimate abrogation by Yongzheng's son, the Qianlong emperor, upon succeeding his father to the throne.
During the twentieth century the Nationalist and Communist states were each in turn confronted with the age-old interconnected problems of local corruption, revenue collection inefficiencies, and social unrest (both real and potential) at the local level. Armed with new technologies of governance and power, and directed by new definitions of what constituted virtue and an ideal society, each regime set out to address these problems in different ways and with different results. The nationalist regime of the Nanjing decade began with the expressed intention of establishing corruption-free local administration. It also sought to mobilize the populace in order to build a self-governing citizenry and a strong republican state. Over the course of the decade-long reform, those original goals were substantially redefined, and in the end the reform must, by any measure, be considered a failure. Thornton suggests this lack of success was in large part due to the Nationalist state's failure to “discipline itself” (126), and she elucidates the complex array of factors that contributed to that failure. Some of these were consequences of the reforms themselves, such as localist umbrage at the increased exactions demanded by the sprawling bureaucracy generated by the reform initiative and the blurring of state/nonstate lines induced by the corporatist tendency to extend official and semi-official status to subcounty elites. The latter trend when coupled with the entrenched corruption among these officials undermined the state's ability to project itself as moral arbiter. Contingent developments, as well, such as the communist challenge to nationalist rule, additionally complicated the matter and led to a redefinition by the state as to what constituted the ultimate threat to social stability, which resulted in a shift in targeting from economic to political crimes.
Thornton lastly considers the set of Maoist reform movements, known individually as the “Four Cleans,” “The Socialist Education Movement,” and the “Big Four Cleans,” which were directed toward local administration in the period following the disastrous economic meltdown and horrific famine of the Great Leap Forward of 1958–61. The challenge for the government was to find a way to simultaneously revive the economy and to address the demoralization of the populace following the debacle of the failed utopian–socialist Great Leap experiment. That some of the very measures taken to revive the economy such as the revival of private plots and limited rural free markets potentially served to undermine socialist notions of morality further complicated the task. The reform movement sought to reaffirm people's faith in socialism and attack what was perceived to be rising corruption among rural leaders. The story of the shifting aims and contending approaches to the reforms is more familiarly seen either “from above” through the lens of the growing rift between Mao and other central-government leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, or “from below” and more anecdotally through memoirs and peasant accounts. Thornton's theoried analysis of the penetration of local communities by centrally directed work teams is therefore instructive, as is her account of local responses, the shifting definitions of corruption, and the ultimate failure of the reform to successfully counteract corruption, or to establish the long sought after state-directed moral local society, that has in one form or another been the dream of Chinese states for centuries. As Thornton eloquently puts it, “The Maoist party-state managed to weave a complex web linking compliance, complicity, and presumed consent down to the level of the individual. Having effectively ensnared civil society, the Maoist party-state sporadically expended enormous efforts to reanimate it under the auspices of a normative agenda that over time, carried less and less weight with the majority in whose interest it presumed to rule” (200–201).
The problem of rampant political corruption at the local (as well as other levels) is one the Chinese central state is still far from solving. In a system lacking external checks to local administration, such as an independent press, or judiciary, the state is still left with few tools beyond sporadically applied punishment of corrupt officials and repeated calls for all officials to behave morally. Thornton briefly touches on the contemporary situation and contrasts it to the periods of more aggressive state-directed reforms she has focused on, but the contemporary situation is not her primary concern. Future work on post-Mao corruption, however, should draw valuable insight from this work.
Disciplining the State provides a valuable comparative context to our understanding of the relationship between the Chinese central state, local administration, local political corruption, and the state imperative to impose a moral order over local society. Thornton's work offers so much that it seems almost unfair to ask if it offers all that it claims to, but the question must nevertheless be asked. Does this slim work overturn theories of state making that stress the centrality of war making? Not by itself.
Thornton's focus on state making at the liminal fringe of the central/local divide leaves unexamined Chinese statemaking as it existed on other frontiers. For the Qing period most notability one such frontier was the Central Asian one as the state aggressively expanded imperial rule across vast new territories. When this important sphere of state-making activity is brought into the equation, the Yongzheng's efforts to impose a normative standard of morality at the local level seem less central to the overall Qing state-making project, and theories that stress the centrality of war making seem correspondingly more relevant. This is made convincingly clear, for example, in Peter Purdue's recent work, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005), especially in his chapter “State Building in Europe and Asia.” War making was obviously an essential function of the Nationalist and Communist states as well. That Thornton did not address these areas is understandable, but her findings on the nature of the Chinese state need to be weighed in the balance of studies that do. Disciplining the State provides new and compelling insight into the Chinese state's evolving interaction with local administration and local society. Thornton convincingly demonstrates the importance of moral regulation and social control in that interaction, but in focusing on the normative process of Chinese state making she depreciates the central importance of the exercise of coercive power in other spheres of state making. Thornton deepens our understanding of the Chinese state, even if she doesn't redefine it, and for that the book is highly recommended.
