The Spatial Structure of Ming Local Administration

Vol. 6, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1985 THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF MING LOCAL ADMINISTRATION Timothy Brook* This is an essay on the spatial characteristics of local administrative geography in Ming China. Its focus is on the units that were used to parcellize territory and to group people below the level of the county. Its purpose is to identify them in relation to four distinct but interrelated systems: the subcounty administrative system of cantons, townships, and wards; the lijia; the baojia; and the rural covenant system. AU formed precise hierarchies, for a carefully stepped dispersal of jurisdiction was necessary for the efficiency of the overall system, both in funneling resources to the center and in maintaining adequate surveillance over the people. These hierarchical systems were often parallel with each other, the boundaries of one set of units often replicating those of the others. This study finds that these units constituted a systematic and integrated structure of civil administration in the Ming period.1 The structure has continued, with limited modification, into the twentieth century. Previous investigations of Ming administration have usually stopped at the county level and not proceeded further down into the less clearly understood realms of local society. Just as a prefectural magistrate's jurisdiction was organized in terms of the counties in his prefecture, so a county magistrate's jurisdiction was affected by the multi-level structure of administrative units below the county. Keeping subcounty units in order was recognized as a major component of good administration.2 This was especially the case with regard to fiscal matters. Similarly, nonofficial activities within a county-informal political organization, social structure, landholding, marketing, and religious observance, to 'For their comments and encouragements, I wish to thank Charles Hucker, James Lee, Margaret Taylor, and Bin Wong. 'The military administration of the Ming, which covered vast regions on the periphery of China proper, requires a separate study. Some of the more important units are listed in Zhang Tingyu, 1972:882. 2Huizhoufuzhi, 1566:1.30a. 2 Timothy Brook mention a few-could not help but be affected by the administrative units within which events occurred, especially in those common cases in which boundaries had not changed for several centuries. The Ming inherited many of its units, boundaries, and unit names from previous dynasties, but social and demographic factors contributed to their being used in new ways. Demographic changes, for instance, were influential in the scaling down of administrative jurisdictions from higher to lower levels between the Tang and the Ming. The county became the principal focus of local government in the Song, replacing higher-level prefectures, in response to population increase (Hartwell, 1982:396). This was a major shift in the organization of political jurisdiction in imperial China. Another shift came in the Ming, when townships , two steps below the county on the administrative ladder, began to serve as the principal foci of governmental and quasi-governmental functions and activities. The logic pressing these functions down to a lower level of the structure appears also to have been demographic. The difference in the Ming case is that the unit of emerging importance was not staffed by a centrally appointed official. County magistrates in the Ming thought and worked in terms of townships, but they had many townships to oversee. Authority at the township level was exercised extragovernmentally, which meant that functions and activities critical to the structure of local communities fell into the hands of the local elites (and, from the mid-sixteenth century forward, the gentry), not local officials. This downward shift, among other factors, facilitated the emergence of local gentry dominance in the late Ming and Qing. Previous studies dealing with administrative hierarchies in the local context have made a distinction between such hierarchies and the "actual" structure of village society. This distinction is usually spoken of in terms of "artificial" versus "natural" communities (Liang, 1956), or "administrative villages" versus "real, historical, social villages" (Tsurumi, 1984:273,n.l). Ira Lapidus (1975:28-31), in an essay contrasting the interpretive emphases of China historians with those of students of Islam, has suggested that this dichotomy is partly the by-product of a historiography that sees China as a functionally integrated...