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Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China. Edited by ROBERT J. ANTONY and JANE KATE LEONARD. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2002. xiii, 333 pp. $24.00 (paper).
This diverse collection of essays seeks to reorient our understanding of political administration in Qing China. The tigers and dogs of the title refer to the concept of the proverbial relarionship between "ferocious superiors and groveling inferiors" (p. 1) that characterized Chinese bureaucracy. The dragon symbolizes the remote but powerful emperor. As the colorful title suggests, this volume seeks to construct a Sino-centric framework for understanding state power in the Qing dynasty. The editors waste no time impugning normative assumptions of Eurocentric models imposed on "unique Chinese realities" (p. 1). Unique is indeed the adjective of choice in the introduction, appearing ten times to describe Chinese administrative styles, historic trajectories, regional administrative problems, and mixtures of bureaucratic element. We are told up front that Qing administration must be understood in terms of various governing environments and a variety of formal bureaucratic, subbureaucratic, and extrabureaucratic elites.
As is the case with many works that aspire to panoptic treatment of complex political and social phenomena, it is easiest to criticize the inevitable gaps in coverage or the uneven adherence to an overarching analytical framework. Conceptually, the suggestion that each essay addresses "crisis management" is also problematic. Did special investigations into corruption, decades-long expansion of subbureaucratic administration, or suppression of ethnie conflict all constitute crisis management? Nevertheless, this volume contains an impressive mélange of scholarship addressing a vertiginous array of administrative problems that Chinese rulers confronted from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Fortunately, many accomplished scholars have contributed detailed and insightful case studies of judicial, fiscal, military, and political administration that outweigh the conceptual shortcomings of the volume.
Several essays address the innovative, often temporary solutions that the Qing court employed to meet the needs of an ever-expanding empire. Explaining the...