Читать книгу Circulating the Code - Ting Zhang - Страница 11

When the Kangxi emperor died in 1722, his fourth son, known as the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–1735), ascended the throne. Unlike his father, who admired small government and lax regulations, the Yongzheng emperor sought to build an efficient bureaucracy based on solid revenue and effective laws and regulations.⁴¹ He soon found the contradiction between the old substatutes in the Code and newly established substatutes intolerable. Only one month after ascending the throne, he issued an imperial edict to provincial judicial commissioners, criticizing the corruption and malpractice prevalent in the legal system. One of the important reasons for the corruption, the emperor pointed out in this edict, was the lack of clarity of the laws: “Sometimes, two different substatutes [and thus two different penalties] can be applied to the same crime. Then officials can manipulate this situation for personal gain. In this way, how can people get any justice?”⁴² Therefore, when an official brought up the issue of integrating the Code and current substatutes as well as publishing a complete book of the laws, the emperor quickly approved. The compilation process formally started in 1723. The revision process was smooth and fast. In 1725 the manuscript was finished.⁴³

The Yongzheng Code was a considerable improvement on the Shunzhi Code. For one thing, it incorporated “collected commentaries”—including various private and official annotations and explanations to the statutes and substatutes—into the Code. It also finished the process of integrating the Substatutes in Current Use into the Code, realizing the half-century-long dream of Qing legislators. In the Yongzheng Code, the editors reduced the number of statutes from 459 to 436, but they increased the number of substatutes from 449 to 824. They also divided these substatutes into three categories: original substatutes (321 old substatutes in the Shunzhi Code), newly enacted substatutes (299 substatutes established in the Kangxi period), and imperially approved substatutes (204 new substatutes established in the late Kangxi and early Yongzheng periods).⁴⁴ The Yongzheng Code, in other words, was a “complete book” for all important up-to-date statutes and substatutes for the Qing legal system, designed to serve as a “definitive edition” of the Qing legal code for all to observe.

In the year of his ascendance to the throne, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795) decided to revise the Code to incorporate new substatutes, delete outdated ones, and modify some laws he deemed too strict. The emperor organized a new Commission on Statutes (Lüliguan) to undertake the revision.⁴⁵ After five years of revision, in 1740, the commission submitted the final manuscript and received the emperor’s endorsement. This revision turned out to be an important modification of the Code: it established the basic structure and content of the imperially authorized editions of the Code that did not change again until the late Qing legal reforms in the early twentieth century and included three major revisions. First, the editors systematically removed the “collected commentaries” that had been added to the Yongzheng Code, explaining that these commentaries often originated in commercially published law books and lacked authority and reliability, which would easily lead to complication and confusion. Second, although the number of statutes did not change, the number of substatutes increased from 824 to 1042. The new substatutes were drawn mainly from the new substatutes of the Board of Punishments from 1727 to 1739. Third, the Qianlong Code rearranged the sequence of many substatutes. It abolished the time-based labels that had been added to the substatutes in the Yongzheng Code. All the substatutes in the Qianlong Code were thus organized according to their content.⁴⁶

During the revision process, a new standard for future revisions of the Code was established. Substatutes promulgated after the revision was finished would be revised and compiled every three years. The Commission on Statutes was assigned to do the work, which included examining the imperial edicts and officials’ memorials related to the administration of justice, selecting and editing them into substatutes; collating the old and new substatutes and omitting the outdated and redundant ones; listing the substatutes that should be added, changed, moved, and omitted; and compiling them into a manuscript and sending it to the Wuyingdian to print.⁴⁷ The books of these new substatutes were named The Expanded Substatutes of the Great Qing Code (Da Qing lü xuzuan tiaoli or Da Qing lü zuanxiu tiaoli). The Expanded Substatutes later became an important channel whereby officials got access to up-to-date laws. In 1746, after the second compilation of the Expanded Substatutes, the Qianlong emperor deemed that every three years was too frequent to revise the substatutes and changed the interval to five years.⁴⁸ Henceforth, the substatutes were revised at roughly five-year intervals. From 1743 to 1870, the year of the last imperial revision, the substatutes were revised at least twenty-three times.

TABLE 1.1. Dates of Revisions after 1740

No.		Date		No.		Date		No.		Date
1		1743 (Qianlong 8)		9		1783 (Qianlong 48)		17		1825 (Daoguang 5)
2		1746 (Qianlong 11)		10		1790 (Qianlong 55)		18		1830 (Daoguang 10)
3		1751 (Qianlong 16)		11		1795 (Qianlong 60)		19		1835 (Daoguang 15)
4		1756 (Qianlong 21)		12		1802 (Jiaqing 7)		20		1840 (Daoguang 20)
5		1761 (Qianlong 26)		13		1805 (Jiaqing 10)		21		1845 (Daoguang 25)
6		1768 (Qianlong 33)		14		1810 (Jiaqing 15)		22		1852 (Xianfeng 2)
7		1773 (Qianlong 38)		15		1815 (Jiaqing 20)		23		1870 (Tongzhi 9)
8		1778 (Qianlong 43)		16		1821 (Daoguang 1)

Sources: Data from extant imperial editions of the Great Qing Code and the Expanded Substatutes and indexes of legal books, such as Zhongguo falü tushu zongmu.

Note: Boldface indicates major revisions when the complete book of the Code was revised and printed; other years are the ordinary revisions, when only the Expanded Substatutes was compiled. Dates generally refer to when the revisions were finished and the manuscripts were sent to the Wuyingdian for printing.

As seen in table 1.1, until 1852 revision of the substatutes was undertaken at fairly regular five-year intervals: eighteen editions of the Expanded Substatutes and four editions of the Code were published in this 110-year period. The Qing court suspended and neglected the Code revisions after the Taiping War (1850–64) started, when the court was preoccupied with military concerns. The court formally resumed the revision process in 1863 when it was about to win the war and started trying to reestablish law and order. Seven years later, in 1870, the Commission on Statutes finally submitted the draft of the Code for printing. This turned out to be the last major revision of the Code before the late Qing legal reforms.⁴⁹ The product of this revision, the Tongzhi Code of 1870, was the last imperially authorized edition of the Code published in the Qing.