Seizing the Pawn: A Social Network Analysis of Confiscation Practices in Late Imperial Qing China, 1644–1912

Confiscation reveals the legal culture, institutional procedure, and nature of the rule of a state. The Roman, Mughal, and Qing Empires, the European Union and modern nation states have all adopted confiscation practices as a governing tool. They confiscate assets from individuals to achieve a variety of political and economic objectives. In China, two distinct legal traditions on confiscation developed, the central plain rulers in the Song and Ming periods gradually prohibited confiscation practice. The steppe rulers such as the Khitans and the Mongols freely used confiscation to punish their enemies. They viewed their governing objects as their personal assets. In Qing, emperors held a monopoly over confiscation. The literature on Qing confiscation is scarce and does not address the question of how confiscation fits into the practices of Qing governance.

We collected 600 legal cases from more than 4000 memorials housed in six East Asia archives, in which 309 of them provided great details that enabled me to track down the core process and procedures. Our investigation shows that the Qing government combined the confiscation traditions of central plain and that of the steppes. The government maintained confiscations in the borderland areas as a criminal punishment for stealing cattle and for group revenge. But the Qing emperors executed a very cautious approach when ordering confiscation in the inner provinces and to the officials. Based on social network analysis of mapping 309 individuals to the Chinese Biographical Database, the 7,587 kinship relationships show that the Qing government did not confiscate the most well-connected people. The overall modernity score is 0.88, and the network consists of 136 communities. The Qing emperors strategically confiscated related persons, maximizing threat, to warn the rent seekers and maintaining a certain kind of power balance within the bureaucracy.