Читать книгу Circulating the Code - Ting Zhang - Страница 15

In his classic study of the laws and administrative regulations of the Qing bureaucracy, Thomas Metzger argues that Qing law books were “written in a straightforward style full of fairly loose but still clear expressions.” He also points out that a weakness of these law books was that compilers usually failed to categorize the contents and to pull together “all information having practical bearing on a topic.” As for the compilation and distribution of the Qing law books, he distinguished the penal law (the Code and the Expanded Substatutes) from the administrative laws, arguing that regular revisions and publications of the Code were efficient and facilitated judicial procedure, in contrast with irregular revisions of various administrative regulations, which to some extent impeded administration. He also pointed out that “there was bound to be a huge gap between publication and the bureaucracy’s output of cases as a whole,” but he admitted that “to what extent the amount of compilation kept up with the need is not clear.”⁸⁷

Metzger based his research mainly on books of administrative regulations. Careful examination of the publication and distribution of the imperial editions of Code and the Expanded Substatutes sheds new light on the topic. First, it is difficult to discuss the Qing period as a whole in terms of the publication and distribution of law books. The mid-Qing central government efficiently published and distributed high-quality editions of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes, but the work was slow and quality low in the early and late Qing period. Second, the Code and the Expanded Substatutes were indeed clear in their contents. Editors made efforts to compile precise legal information in these books and organize it in an easy-to-understand way so that officials could understand what had changed in the laws when they received and read an updated edition of the Expanded Substatutes. But the accumulation of updated substatutes and their separation from the Code created confusion, which could result in disorder in judicial administration. Further, readers must have suffered from the significant decline of printing quality after the Qianlong period, which sometimes made the texts in the Code and the Expanded Substatutes rather difficult to read. Third, careful examination of the distribution of the imperially authorized editions of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes indicates that there was a gap between the official publication of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes and demand for these books among officials. Subprovincial government officials, including circuit intendants, prefects, and county magistrates, who usually needed to deal with legal cases on daily bases, could not receive imperial editions of the Code. Officials complained that it was difficult for them to get access to these books; people outside the bureaucracy had a much harder time getting them.

The last imperially authorized edition of the Code was published by the Wuyingdian in 1870. Because of the persistent financial crisis in the late Qing, the court found it could spare no funds to maintain such a lavish publishing institution as the Wuyingdian. At the same time, the state publishing sector was gradually taken over by the newly rising provincial publishing bureaus, established by high provincial officials as a means of cultural restoration after the Taiping rebellion. As a final blow, in 1869 a huge fire broke out in the Wuyingdian, destroying many old woodblocks and printing presses. Soon after that, the publishing activities in the Wuyingdian were formally ended.