Discerning the Public from the Private:
A Lexicon of Political Corruption During the Nanjing Decade

Patricia M. Thornton
University of California, Berkeley

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."⁽¹⁾

Of the numerous problems which plagued the Nationalist government throughout the Nanjing decade, few have been more often noted by both Western and Chinese historians as political corruption. Lloyd Eastman, in his assessment of Nationalist rule during this period, concluded that "the regime continued to be, even at the end of the Nanjing decade, a clumsy and uncertain instrument of national renewal," crippled by a civil bureaucracy which remained "inefficient and corrupt".⁽²⁾ In 1935, Lin Yutang commented, "The commonest conjugation in Chinese grammar is that of the verb `to squeeze': `I squeeze, you squeeze, he squeezes, we squeeze, you squeeze, they squeeze.' It is a regular verb."⁽³⁾ Even Jiang Jieshi himself admitted of the Guomindang (GMD) in 1930 that "not only is it impossible to find a single party headquarters which administers to and works for the welfare of the people, but all are stigmatized for the most reprehensible practices, such as corruption, bribery and scrambling for power."⁽⁴⁾

To be certain, the proliferation of official and semi-official salaried posts at the county and sub-county levels during the Republican era contributed to this trend by greatly increasing the number of potential sites and opportunities for politically unethical behavior on the part of local leaders. Prior to 1911 Qing laws pertaining to political corruption in practice applied not much farther down the administrative hierarchy than the county magistrate; crimes committed by lower level functionaries fell outside of the jurisdiction of imperial law, and were generally handled by the magistrate himself, who was held accountable for policing his own employees. His failure to do so sometimes resulted in disciplinary action taken against him either by his own superiors or by officials in the imperial censorial system. The wrongdoings of yamen underlings, when discovered by their superiors, were generally treated as criminal matters, to be handled, if at all, as the magistrate saw fit.⁽⁵⁾ "Public crimes" (gongzui), on the other hand, in theory could only be committed by a ranked official (pinguan) who held a salaried official post, and therefore excluded the activities of sub-county level officials except in a few cases.⁽⁶⁾

During the Republican period, the conceptual boundary between what might be considered "public" offenses, as opposed to "private" ones, shifted considerably, resulting in a potentially larger sphere of legal jurisdiction for the Nationalist state.⁽⁷⁾ Over the course of the Nanjing decade, the numbers of government employees who found their conduct increasingly scrutinized by state and party officials rose sharply. This numeric rise was due in part to the proliferation of county and sub-county level posts under Nationalist rule, particularly following the institution of the County Organization Law in 1928 and the reforms associated with the Rural Reconstruction movement. The further reclassification of all such officials as "public servants" (gongwuyuan) brought numerous county- and sub-county level posts under the umbrella of administrative laws and penalties set by the Internal Administration Department of the Nanjing regime.⁽⁸⁾

Furthermore, this enlarged scope of jurisdiction did not confine itself merely to regulating the performance of public servants, but expanded during the early years of the Nanjing decade to include the activities of local elites who served in semi-official, and sometimes non-official, capacities as well. The introduction of several pieces of legislation in the years that followed gave the GMD state broad latitude in defining corruption and those who could be accused of associated crimes, allowing the Nationalist government to target certain groups of individuals whose goals were perceived to be at odds with the state.

This essay will explore some political implications of these shifting legal boundaries during the Nanjing decade through the manner in which political corruption was defined and punished by Nationalist officials. I will begin with a brief overview of some of the legal and institutional reforms which represented the locus of the Nationalist government's attempts to control corruption among its state and party officials. The essay will then turn to analysis of corruption charges leveled against local officials during the Nanjing decade--and in particular to some of the terms used to describe politically unethical behavior--in an attempt to elucidate how Nationalist officials conceptualized such offenses, as well as how they understood the responsibility of the central state to local communities. Finally, I will conclude with a look at some of the special social categories created by Nationalist legislation, which became associated during the Nanjing decade with the problem of political corruption. In brief, I will argue that the administrative and institutional "state-building" reforms of the Nanjing decade greatly expanded the interface between state and society with respect to local politics in areas under GMD control, and did so in such a way that the very notion of political behavior was radically expanded and redefined to include the activities of individuals and groups which had not previously existed as such under imperial rule. The notion of corruption, which under the former regime primarily denoted the self-aggrandizing practices of certain members of the official class, was initially used by the GMD during this period to describe the activities of groups under attack during its attempt to purge (qingdang) its ranks in 1927. But over the course of the Nanjing decade it was increasingly associated with individuals and groups who were perceived by the Nationalist leadership as non-compliant with the goals of the state. Thus, whereas "corruption" had traditionally referred to a host of problems which existed primarily within the state but fed parasitically on common social resources, the term under Nationalist rule was increasingly used to denote groups and activities beyond the boundaries of state control, but which were considered deleterious to the goals of the GMD state.

Efforts to control and combat corruption in Republican China began as early as the third year of the republic, when the first set of regulations against official corruption was passed by presidential proclamation. According to this set of regulations, the collection of illegal bribes totaling more than five hundred yuan was punishable by death; official engrossment totaling more than a thousand yuan which did not involve transgressions of the law was punishable by life imprisonment. Siphoning off and absconding with more than five thousand yuan of public moneys was also punishable by death.⁽⁹⁾ This set of laws was revised in 1921, calling for prison sentences for government employees convicted of demanding or receiving bribes, or other usurious (buzheng liyi) behavior. Government employees convicted of illegal and corrupt practices were to receive prison terms up to life imprisonment; court officials were to face even more severe penalties, and those caught absconding with public funds in excess of five thousand yuan were to face at least life imprisonment.⁽¹⁰⁾

The Nationalist leadership replaced these early laws in the mid-1920s as part of the overall effort to restructure existing legal and judicial procedures. Even before the newly established Nationalist government moved its capital to Nanjing, the GMD leadership in Guangdong produced several key pieces of legislation pertaining to the discipline, control, and punishment of public servants. In January of 1925, Nationalist leaders issued an order mandating that all civil servants employed by the state take an oath prior to the onset of their period of service; those found to be in violation of the terms of the oath faced dismissal, reduction in rank, reduction in salary, or suspension from office.⁽¹¹⁾ An April 1928 version of this order mandated that all government employees participate in a public ceremony in which, raising their right hands and facing the national flag, they solemnly devoted themselves to their public duty, specifically denouncing "the pursuit of private gain, corrupt practices and the acceptance of bribes."⁽¹²⁾ According to law, civil servants could be disciplined either for violations of the civil service oath or for violations or negligence of the law.⁽¹³⁾

In September of 1926, reversing the imperial tradition of providing preferential treatment for officials under the law, the Nationalist government issued yet another set of regulations mandating more severe punishments for Guomindang members who violated the civil service oath, increasing the penalty over that for non-party members by one degree. According to this piece of legislation, party members found guilty of counter-revolutionary and subversive activities, of manipulating public finances in order to profit themselves or others, or of embezzling public funds in excess of a thousand yuan were all eligible for the death penalty. In addition, party workers found guilty of disobeying party principles and violating the law were to be permanently expelled from the party. Non-party members who knew of party members who had committed crimes but failed to report them were to be turned over to the police and handled in accordance with police regulations. Party members who failed to report such crimes were to have full-scale criminal investigations launched against them, and faced punishment in accordance with the regulations of the penal code.⁽¹⁴⁾

However, the centerpiece of the Nanjing government's anti-corruption efforts remained the Control Yuan (Jiancha Yuan). Prior to the establishment of the Nationalist capital in Nanjing in April of 1927, the 1925 charter for the new Five-Power government contained a draft of the organizational principles of the Control Yuan. According to these preliminary drafts, the Control Yuan was charged with the duty of investigating the activities of all Nationalist government officials, and particularly the manner in which and reasons for which taxes and fees were collected. This original set of organizational laws was amended in September of 1926, broadening the range and scope the Control Yuan's powers by granting it more leeway in the assignment of disciplinary measures, permitting Control Yuan officials to arrest public officials guilty of offenses, allowing them to file charges against officials accused by private citizens of crimes, and lastly, permitting the Yuan to pursue cases that it determined fell within its jurisdiction.⁽¹⁵⁾ Yet it was not until May of 1928, with the promulgation of laws pertaining to the impeachment of public servants, that Control Yuan officials were legally able to take up impeachment cases. Even then, because impeachment by the Control Yuan constituted only a political, and not legal, judgment with respect to the official involved, most disciplinary actions taken during the Nanjing decade involved other disciplinary bodies as well. The conduct of provincial civil servants was reviewed by provincial disciplinary commissions; high level dignitaries and members of the Control Yuan were to be disciplined by the Central Executive Committee of the GMD; political appointees, such as ministers and vice-ministers, were to be supervised by the Disciplinary Committee of the National Government.⁽¹⁶⁾ Furthermore, the Control Yuan was only permitted to pursue cases and mete out punishments defined by the Civil Servants Disciplinary Law. The possible punishments defined by this law included dishonorable discharge from office, demotion in rank, reductions in salary, suspension from duty, assignment of demerits, and issuance of reprimands. The law also maintained fairly strict limits on each category of disciplinary action, which Control Yuan officials were required to observe. For example, in the case of dishonorable discharge, Control Yuan officials could only strip an offender of the office he was convicted of abusing, not of all the public posts he might hold; an official found guilty of a crime could only be reduced by one rank; and salary reductions were limited to an amount between one-tenth and one-third of the official's monthly salary.⁽¹⁷⁾

However, most civil servants who were accused of political corruption during the Nanjing decade found their cases reviewed by the Commission of Disciplinary Action against Public Servants (Zhongyang gongwuyuan chengjie weiyuanhui), which was founded in June 1931 under the auspices of the Judicial Yuan. The Disciplinary Commission based its judgments on materials prepared by Control Yuan officials, police officials, colleagues of the official concerned, and the testimony of the accused. Because the Disciplinary Commission often considered the findings of ordinary courts against civil servants in assessing punishment, there was often a considerable time lag between the commission of a crime and disciplinary measures meted out by the Commission, which were also, of course, strictly limited by the provisions of the Civil Servants Disciplinary Law. According to the records of disciplinary action hearings located in the archive of the Control Yuan, most extant corruption cases from this period were acted upon by the Commission either between the years of 1931 and 1933, or between 1937 and 1939 (following the 1937 temporary decree which granted the Control Yuan the power of rectification, which greatly facilitated the process of disciplining civil officials).⁽¹⁸⁾ However, the misdeeds of these accused officials span the entire length of the Nanjing decade, with many cases taking years to be brought to justice. Furthermore, many accused officials absconded before the Disciplinary Commission took up their cases, so it is highly unlikely that many of these crimes were ever punished.

During the Qing dynasty, local magistrates were convicted of a wide range of corrupt and illegal practices, and the routine memorials of the Board of Punishments reflects a fair degree of latitude in the labeling of such crimes. Many of these verdicts were drawn directly from the categories used by the Board of Civil Office in their triennial personnel reviews. According to the "great reckoning" (daji) system, incompetent or corrupt magistrates were classified under one of eight legal categories (bafa) for which an official could be impeached.⁽¹⁹⁾ These categories included avarice (tan), cruelty (ku), nonfeasance of duty (piruan wuwei), impropriety (bujin), old age (nianlao), infirmity (youji), instability (fuzao), and incompetence (caili buji).⁽²⁰⁾ Board of Punishment impeachment cases often employed variations or combinations of these terms to describe the crimes of magistrates under investigation, although the memorializing officials certainly did not limit themselves to these categories. Among the extant routine memorials from the Yongzheng reign, by far the most common reason cited for the impeachment of magistrates is simply arrears (kuikong), either the failure of the magistrate in question to supply the required amount for his county's taxes to the central government on time, or debits in the county granary.⁽²¹⁾

By contrast with the relatively wide-ranging charges leveled against corrupt magistrates during the Qing, the majority of cases remaining in the archive of the Control Yuan for the Nanjing decade carry designations which appear to be more formalized. While the constitution of the Control Yuan granted this body disciplinary and impeachment jurisdiction with respect to the "behavior of (public) officials, the evaluation of tax collection [methods] and the purposes for which [such moneys] are used," the majority of officials named in these cases were simply charged with illegal acts (wanfa or weifa), delinquency (shizhi), malfeasance (duzhi), or some combination thereof.⁽²²⁾ Republican law defined crimes of delinquency as those involving "acts which violate the rules and regulations governing the terms of service, or [other] improper measures," whereas malfeasance was more directly associated with violations of the penal law code and deliberate misconduct in office.⁽²³⁾ The penal code statutes pertaining to official malfeasance specify the following illegal behaviors as grounds for disciplinary action: demanding and/or receiving bribes, the abuse of one's authority as a civil servant to arrest or detain private citizens, the use of force or threat of force in the extraction of a criminal confession, the intentional arrest and/or punishment of an innocent person for a crime they did not commit, mistreatment of prisoners, deliberately levying taxes and fines not authorized by the government or withholding collected public moneys or goods from the central government, abandonment or neglect of one's official duties and causing calamities that result from such negligence, the obstruction of an official investigation, the disclosure of state secrets or articles or information pertaining to national defense, and the extension of one's privileges of office to allow, aid, or abet criminal activities.⁽²⁴⁾

Obviously, malfeasance carries the implication of willful wrongdoing, as opposed to dereliction of duty or negligence (shizhi). However, despite the rather elaborate legal provisions describing official malfeasance, in practice these terms seem to be used interchangeably in Control Yuan documents. Cases in which magistrates clearly collaborated with others in far-flung extortion schemes with the obvious intent to defraud both the public and their superiors sometimes carried the charge of dereliction of duty; in other cases, magistrates and their underlings convicted of non-pernicious procedural violations were sometimes charged with malfeasance. The matter of which term was invoked in a particular document often appears to have been a question of style, and does not necessarily reflect the substance of such charges. For example, in 1938 Li Yu, who served as magistrate of Shouchang county in Zhejiang from 1934-35, was convicted of "illegal acts and dereliction of duty" (wanfa shizhi) for permitting relatives and friends from his home village in Hunan to collect illegal taxes from business owners and supposed partial payments on land taxes from those in Shouchang county who were unable to pay their taxes in full. Land owners who paid a portion of their taxes to these collectors were issued "temporary" receipts from one of the magistrate's accomplices, who absconded with the collected moneys. Magistrate Yu subsequently declared the "temporary" receipts part of a series of private transactions that were unrelated to tax collection, and therefore null and void. Although the report of the Control Yuan investigator assigned to the case strongly suggested that Magistrate Yu had pocketed nearly half of the money collected by his friends and relatives in this manner, and that he had further willfully and deliberately obstructed the investigation that followed, Yu was not charged under the statutes pertaining to malfeasance.⁽²⁵⁾ In another case, a disgruntled citizen wrote a letter in 1937 accusing Magistrate Zhong Shijie of Zhejiang's Fenshui County of negligence in attending to matters of civil air defense. The report of the investigating Control Yuan official found that Magistrate Zhong, unable to locate sufficient funds within the county budget to purchase the requisite technology, appointed a local blind man with the surname of Qiu to serve as the official air raid warning system for the county solely on the basis of his highly developed hearing ability. Mr. Qiu was to be supervised by one of his neighbors, an individual who had no practical experience in or knowledge of military air defense tactics, who was summarily appointed to serve as the Director of the county Air Raid Warning Office. The investigating official pointed out that no one else in the relatively desolate, remote county had any such experience either, and recommended that the charges against Magistrate Zhong be dropped. However, the prosecuting Control Yuan officials charged Zhong with malfeasance, overruling the investigative report. The Disciplinary Commission heard the case and decided to assign Magistrate Zhong two demerits for his unorthodox handling of civil air defense.⁽²⁶⁾

Not all cases presented to the Disciplinary Commission during the Nanjing decade charged magistrates with dereliction of duty or malfeasance. Numerous officials were charged with extortion of moneys from the public, or with avaricious or corrupt behavior (tanwu, tanlan or tanmo). These crimes generally involved the siphoning off of public funds, extortion attempts against private citizens, or the illegal sale of public or government goods.⁽²⁷⁾ However, the charge of corruption (tanwu) in particular seems to be associated with the general abuse of one's office, and is not necessarily concerned with the theft or embezzlement of capital. For example, in 1935, the Hebei Leting county magistrate, Zhu Yi, was found guilty of "corruption and transgressing the law" (tanwu weifa) along with six of his subordinates. The notice of impeachment lists four violations as the reasons for his dismissal: his failure to investigate the case of Tian Junren, who was kidnapped by bandits from his home--only eight doors away from the county public security office--and held for ransom for more than two months before Magistrate Zhu instructed the chief of public security to begin an investigation into the affair; bungling the investigation of an incident in which thieves murdered a local man; mishandling a case in which a member of the local militia was accused of raping and murdering a young village girl; and allowing an innocent man to die in prison, where he was being held for a crime that he did not commit solely on the strength of a spurious accusation made by a local village chief.⁽²⁸⁾

In the category of nonfeasance of duty, officials were often charged with "carelessness and dereliction of duty" (shurong shizhi), or "neglecting their duties" (feishi zhiwu), or simply negligence (nizhi). However, at times the application of such charges again seems haphazard. For example, in 1938, He Xiaoyi, then magistrate of Hebei's Yanshan county, was charged with "transgressing the law and negligence" (weifa nizhi). The investigation report reveals that in during the winter of 1935, Magistrate He colluded with the chief of the county's public security force (gongandui duichang) to extort money from five known opium addicts residing in the county seat. The two received amounts ranging from fifty to eight hundred and thirty yuan from each of the five addicts by threatening them with immediate arrest unless the payments were made. Magistrate He went on to demand ten yuan from each of the county's village chiefs (xiangzhang), threatening them with immediate dismissal if they did not pay. He collected between five and six hundred yuan in this manner and then proceeded to sell the office of village chief to at least four people when the previous chiefs were unwilling or unable to pay the ten yuan fee. The only suggestion of negligence in the investigate report is that the sale of offices to the four village chiefs may in fact have been a practice engaged in by the former magistrate of Yanshan county, and thus the investigator (perhaps sardonically) raised the possibility that Magistrate He may not have been aware of the illegality of his actions.⁽²⁹⁾

As under the Qing, corrupt Republican era magistrates guilty of more pernicious crimes were sometimes accused of having harmed the public good. During the Nanjing decade, corruption cases occasionally gave as grounds for disciplinary action the fact that the official in question had endangered the welfare of the people. Thus, in some cases, corrupt officials were charged with "transgressing the law and bringing disaster upon the people" (weifa yangmin), "dereliction of duty and harming the public" (duzhi haimin), "gouging and harassing the people" (kejuan raomin) or "corruption and tyrannizing the public" (tanwu nüemin), charges which were also not uncommon at the height of the Qing. By and large, such cases stemmed from accusations that the officials in question levied excessive or illegal taxes or fees, and then resorted to force or the threat of force in order to ensure payment. Alternatively, officials were accused of tyrannizing or "bringing injury to" the public (nüemin, or haimin) when they repeatedly mishandled criminal investigations, particularly murder cases. In a few rare cases, public servants during the Nanjing decade faced disciplinary action on the grounds that they showed "no respect for human life," or that they "treated human life as grass" (caojian renming), a phrase also often used in Qing documents to describe rapacious officials. In one 1935 case, the Hunan Suining county magistrate, Yu Ruyu, was said to have taken one of his ward heads (quzhang), and had him repeatedly punished and rewarded according to his whims (shanzuo weifu), and not as a result of his performance as ward head. Furthermore, on one of his circuits through the county, Magistrate Yu seized a poor unfortunate named Huang Ying, a local country bumpkin (xiangyu), after his name arose in the context of a criminal investigation. Apparently in the course of the interrogation of Huang and the village blacksmith, Magistrate Yu was overcome with rage, and personally beat both men to death with his bare fists. Neither man had anything to do with the crime in question. The Disciplinary Commission moved to transfer the case of Magistrate Yu to a military tribunal for criminal prosecution.⁽³⁰⁾

Charges of harming the public or tyrannizing the people were markedly different from charges involving the national interest, or cases of treachery or collaboration with enemies of the republic, a few of which were heard by the Disciplinary Commission during the Nanjing decade. For example, in 1931, Wang Zhengting, Director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau, was found guilty in three successive Disciplinary Commission hearings of "betraying the Party, negligence, humiliating the nation and forfeiting its sovereignty" (beidang nizhi sangquan ruguo); "dereliction of duty and harming the national interest" (shizhi wuguo); and "wildly betraying the country and fawning on foreign powers" (sangxin bingkuang maiguo meiwai). The exact nature of Wang's activities cannot be determined from the impeachment documents alone, but he was accused in 1931 of having seriously endangered the future of the GMD branch office established by overseas Chinese living in Malaysia, of conspiring with Japanese capitalists to create a monopoly on the sale of flour to China, and of generally hindering the progress of foreign affairs.⁽³¹⁾ Similarly, Zhang Xueliang, who served as a commanding officer for Nationalist forces along the northeastern frontier was accused in May 1932 of "dereliction of duty and forfeiting the sovereignty of the nation" (shizhi ruguo) when he abandoned his official duties and surrendered some of the territory then under his supervision.⁽³²⁾ In cases of officials accused of "betrayal of the national interest" or "collaboration with foreign powers" the disciplinary organ was invariably the national government; public servants found guilty of such crimes were immediately stripped of their rank and were deemed ineligible for public service in the future, although even more severe punishments were likely to be dispensed after the Control Yuan had closed the cases. Thus, the welfare of the public or the people on the one hand, and the interests of the nation were, by and large, considered distinct categories in the context of political corruption.

However, in many cases, the distinction between acts which were considered injurious to the nation (wuguo) and those injurious to the people (haimin) was not nearly as clear. In the period of party reorganization and internal dissension that gripped the GMD in the months and years following the death of Sun Zhongshan, and particularly during the Northern Expedition and party purification movement of 1927, several pieces of legislation were passed which implicitly embraced a very different understanding of political behavior than that upon which the imperial legal system was based. Although the National Revolutionary Armies (NRA) that embarked upon the Northern Expedition specifically targeted warlord forces and their collaborators, in the political turmoil of the late 1920s, "local bullies," "evil gentry," and "counterrevolutionaries," and their collaborators all came under attack for their role in undermining the public interest. In both central government documents and common parlance such groups came to be associated with unethical conduct, social crime, and particularly with political corruption. Beginning with the move to purify the party's ranks, and continuing throughout the Nanjing decade and even into the 1940s, such terms appeared frequently in corruption charges to describe the collaborators, and perhaps the instigators of, deviant acts among local level officials.

Many of the early corruption cases jointly handled by the Control Yuan and the Disciplinary Commission have their roots in the years immediately preceding the Nationalist government's move to Nanjing. As the Northern Expedition forces swept through the Chinese countryside in the late 1920s, county and sub-county level officials found themselves under attack by Nationalist and Communist forces alike. Upon taking control of the local government offices, the leaders of the NRA most often ordered the resignation of the existing public servants of the county and an immediate transfer of funds and offices to the Political Department of the NRA, which then appointed a provisional government to oversee the establishment of new county government organizations.⁽³³⁾ Those who were displaced generally complied with NRA commands with little resistance. In a few counties, however, local forces retaliated and attacked the newcomers, resisting the transfer of power. In other cases, divided NRA forces apparently attacked one another in bids to control new appointments within a locale.⁽³⁴⁾

Many county and sub-county officials were subsequently accused of various political crimes and wrongdoings and put on trial, either by way of a provisional local judicial system or through the established provincial courts. Those who had conspired with deposed warlords were wise to withdraw along with the warlord forces; those who did not were treated harshly by the NRA forces, and faced criminal prosecution under the newly promulgated statutes which mandated the death penalty for counterrevolutionary crimes, including that of collaboration with warlord forces.⁽³⁵⁾ In early 1927, the Wuhan regime pushed through a set of judicial reforms which called upon basic level people's courts to establish auxiliary judicial organs in order to assist in handling the burgeoning numbers of local criminal cases which surfaced in the wake of the NRA sweep.⁽³⁶⁾ While the provisional local courts (tebie xingshi difang linshi fating) that initially handled the bulk of such complaints were abolished by the Nanjing government in January 1929, a number of these cases went untried until they were handed over to the Disciplinary Commission of the Judicial Yuan a few years later.⁽³⁷⁾

Beginning with the 1927 party purge which immediately preceded the founding of the Nanjing regime, the GMD leadership called local party branches to investigate and then collectively eliminate "Communists, local bullies and evil gentry (tuhao lieshen), corrupt officials and [their] venal underlings (tanguan wuli), and [all] reactionary, opportunistic, corrupt and evil elements" from their ranks.⁽³⁸⁾ On August 18, 1927, the Nationalist government, having secured Nanjing as its capital, amended the penal code by mandating the punishment of "local bullies and evil gentry" in order to "develop the spirit of Party rule and safeguard the public interest." The regulations targeting "local bullies and evil gentry" specified eleven types of behavior which were punishable under the new law: deceiving and oppressing the common people to the point of death, debilitation, disability or injury; using violence or intimidation against the weak or orphaned in order to force them into marriage; depriving another of personal freedom in order to confiscate his property; charging usurious interest; abetting in the unauthorized use of opium; instigating litigation by manufacturing criminal accusations in an attempt to strip another of his property; attempting to coerce government officials in their handling of criminal cases; stirring up trouble and assembling mobs for purposes detrimental to the public good or national reconstruction; fabricating evidence or allegations, or inciting hoodlums to plot against innocent citizens; excessively relying on one's influence in order to engage in the usurious purchase or sale of real estate or personal goods; and, lastly, the unauthorized occupation of public facilities, encroachment on public property or the misuse of an official title in order to collect public moneys or property in order to enrich oneself.⁽³⁹⁾

Philip Kuhn has noted that a local bully (tuhao) in Qing times was "a man of wealth, usually landed wealth, generally but not necessarily literate, but with no formal degree status, whose community power was exercised in coercive and illegal ways;" the term evil gentry (lieshen), on the other hand, "was a local degree-holder who broke the law so flagrantly and consistently that he could not cover it up." By late 1920s, Kuhn notes, these terms came to be associated with certain members of the rural elite who were often involved in sub-county administration; such individuals were to be distinguished from "the more cultivated and leisured stratum of urban elite" (shenshi or shishen). In addition, whereas a local bully was more likely to be involved in outright armed political resistance and the more violent forms of criminal behavior, evil gentry tended to gravitate toward "usury, pettifogging (baosong), and engrossment of taxes (baocao or baolan)."⁽⁴⁰⁾ In his research on local elites in Jiangsu during this period, Bradley Kent Geisert concluded that the campaign against "local bullies and evil gentry" became a weapon in a larger intra-elite war over who was to rule the countryside in the aftermath of Jiang Jieshi's 1927 purge; thus, such terms carried a heavy political charge, and became "a bludgeon that any type of combatant could swing."⁽⁴¹⁾

Other groups were also targeted for prosecution by regulations passed within the same time period. In legislation passed by the Wuhan regime in March of 1927, counterrevolutionaries faced punishments ranging from brief incarceration to life imprisonment or, in many cases, the death penalty, for "plotting to overthrow the Nationalist government or undermining the national revolution" and "conspiring to use foreign forces or cooperating with warlords" in the attempt to subvert the policies of the national revolution. A year later, the Nationalist government based in Nanjing revised those measures to define counterrevolutionaries as persons "plotting to overthrow the Guomindang and the Nationalist state or destroying the Three People's Principles and moreover inciting violence." If such crimes also involved collaboration foreign imperialists, those guilty incurred the death penalty. The revised "Provisional Articles for the Punishment of Counter-Revolutionaries" also mandated prison terms for "propagandizing ideologies not consistent with the Three People's Principles and not beneficial to the national revolution.".⁽⁴²⁾ According to an October 1928 proclamation of the Nationalist government, members of the Communist Party who willingly surrendered themselves to Nationalist authorities were to receive a reduced sentence under the counter-revolutionary crimes statutes, and if they agreed to name fellow Communist Party members, they were to forego punishment altogether.⁽⁴³⁾ In 1931 an additional amendment was made to the penal code calling for punishments to be leveled against those seeking to disrupt the public order, to distribute anti-government propaganda, or to incite members of the military to violate the terms of their service, abandon their posts, or collaborate with insurgent forces.⁽⁴⁴⁾

The ferment which resulted from the prosecution of such elements has been documented elsewhere.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Needless to say, the above additions to the penal code led to a flurry of allegations and arrests, which prompted the Nationalist government to quickly follow up with a new set of laws designed to curb spurious complaints. In March of 1928 a new round of punishments were promised for those who loosely applied the terms counterrevolutionary, local bully, or evil gentry in filing criminal complaints. The new laws further warned against hasty processing of such cases and instructed public officials to evaluate such allegations carefully to ascertain that the complaints were indeed valid and not motivated by personal gain.⁽⁴⁶⁾

Yet accusations against local bullies and evil gentry in particular continued to appear throughout the remainder of the Republican period, both in state documents and in public complaints, strongly suggesting that such concepts did indeed play a key role in shaping popular notions of political behavior, and specifically political corruption, during this period. Yu Youren, the first president of the Control Yuan, indicated in his 1931 inaugural address that he regarded "local bullies and evil gentry" as one of the primary sources of political corruption among civil servants; but the eradication of the warlord forces which had previously "brought calamity down upon the nation and disasters upon the people" had in fact not brought an end to such problems. To the contrary, he noted, if the military efforts of the Nationalist troops were not followed up by political methods to "sweep out" the "filth" caused by "corrupt officials and their rapacious underlings," then all of the military sacrifices of the previous year would have been in vain.⁽⁴⁷⁾

The impeachment cases of the Control Yuan from this period carry numerous references to various local bullies and evil gentry who either attempted to obstruct the investigations of Control Yuan officials or who acted in concert to achieve their ends with unscrupulous public servants. In many cases, these individuals were involved in crimes ranging from simple thuggery to tax extortion schemes. For example, the supplementary investigative report contained in the 1932 case of Anhui Suxian Magistrate Chen Jiting names a group of at least six people, collectively referred to as "tulie," involved in extracting enormous sums of money in the guise of a special opium tax from poppy farmers in Su county. In October of the same year, the Gansu Ningyang county magistrate, Zhang Wenquan and two county department heads (kezhang) were found guilty of collaborating with a local evil gentry (lieshen, huaishen) in the attempt to extort money from rural taxpayers. The four went together to rural villages in the county demanding payment, beating to death two men who would not or could not hand over the requisite sum.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The 1936 investigation of a Sha'anxi Chenggu County magistrate revealed evidence that one of his underlings, a department head, had accepted a bribe offered by an evil gentry surnamed Wang, who raped another man's wife and then accused an innocent man of the crime.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The term was also often used in corruption cases to refer to private individuals who held only semi-official posts--and therefore did not formally qualify as "public servants" and could not be punished under the Control Yuan's disciplinary regulations--but whose activities nonetheless exacted a negative toll on local government operations. As Kuhn pointed out, such individuals were often found in local self-government posts throughout the sub-county administrative system, and so had some government funds or public goods at their disposal.⁽⁵⁰⁾ In such cases, the boundary between straightforward criminal activity and political corruption is less clear. For example, one Henan magistrate was disciplined in 1936 when it was discovered that he was secretly harboring evil gentry He Shichang. He, who served as the head of a village protection squad, was found by Control Yuan investigators to have been a known opium addict who had amassed a gang of thugs supposedly for his own protection, but who in fact appear to have assisted him in "forcibly extorting money from the people, swindling them out of their property, and pursuing private ends in the name of public duty" (jiagong jisi).⁽⁵¹⁾ In other cases, officials were disciplined for failing to "discern the public from the private" (gongsi bufen), either in their own affairs or in the affairs of their underlings. In one such case, Qu Shuxun, the 1936 magistrate of Suxian in Anhui, heard two separate plaints that his underlings had overcharged two residents on their land taxes and then attempted to conceal their crime by providing them with falsified receipts. Magistrate Qu decided to put the plaints together and handle them privately as one case; however, an irate local resident contacted the Control Yuan to demand an investigation of Magistrate Qu on the grounds that one of the county tax collectors, with the knowledge of the magistrate, had accepted bribes from the local evil gentry, and that Magistrate Qu had "often failed to separate the public from the private." The Disciplinary Commission decided that although the evidence was not conclusive, Magistrate Qu had indeed failed to discern the boundaries between public and private, and reduced his monthly salary by ten percent for three months.⁽⁵²⁾

Given the increased levels of social mobilization and the expansion of local level state offices during this period, it is hardly surprising that the boundaries between public and private were not always easily discerned by Nationalist officials. Cases such as the one cited above suggest that the role of magistrates in the Nationalist administrative structure was also undergoing significant changes during this time period. The development of a modern police force and creation of county Public Security Bureaus (Gongan ju) in 1928, which were originally slated to oversee fire prevention, public health and sanitation, and forestry, as well as to control criminal behavior in the counties, took over some of the traditional duties previously assigned to magistrates, as did the new county court system, the county GMD party bureaus, and the increasingly specialized departments of Nationalist county administration.⁽⁵³⁾ Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that although magistrates in the early years of the Nanjing decade were responsible for carefully screening the political activities of local elites by way of observing the laws on local bullies and evil gentry, the tables turned during the New Life movement, at least in some counties. Interestingly, in a conference held in Zhenjiang on the subject of intensifying the New Life movement in Jiangsu province, central government authorities recommended that local (that is, prefecture, county, and city) promotional associations in general maintain their independence from the yamen of the local magistrates of the regions in question. Among the many reasons given for this strategic decision was the fact that the primary duty of local magistrates was the management of day-to-day affairs of the county, and that such officials were already at that time overburdened with those responsibilities. The duties of the specialized inspection commissions associated with the provincial promotional associations, however, included the pacification of the various locales in their jurisdictions. In certain regions, this required that the specialized inspection commissions be granted equal standing with local magistrates in order to assist them in a "brotherly manner" with this important task. However, this decision granted New Life movement promotional associations the independent right to organize events and activities in the jurisdiction of the magistrate without notifying or otherwise reporting to him.⁽⁵⁴⁾ This mobilization coincided in 1936, during the high tide of the movement, with the Control Yuan's receipt of a record number of public petitions, a number nearly twice that of the previous three years, the vast majority of which were leveled against local magistrates.⁽⁵⁵⁾

Beginning with the period of party reorganization and the movement to purify the party's ranks, the Nationalist regime undertook an ambitious program of state-building, the scope and intensity of which ultimately redefined political behavior in the period of GMD rule. Corruption, which had traditionally denoted certain unethical practices engaged in by predatory officials, came increasingly to be applied to groups and individuals outside the state as well, and to any activities which were perceived to be at odds with the goals of the GMD state. This tendency reached a peak with the New Life movement, which redefined corruption largely as a social problem, the antidote to which was to be found within the unity of the party-state, but which was to be administered by the military.

The driving force behind this increasing politicization appears to have been the Nationalist state itself. In the aftermath of Jiang's April 1927 coup, local communities under Nationalist control found themselves under increasing levels of surveillance directed by authorities based in Nanjing. The role of local level officials in general, and that of magistrates in particular, underwent a gradual transformation in the hands of the Nationalists under Jiang's direction, who apparently envisioned them as cogs in a heavily militarized party-state machine. In 1932 Jiang delivered an address in Hankou on the role of the magistrate in the Nationalist state in which he envisioned a far-flung cooperative web of county-level and sub-county work units (danwei)--including county governments, county public security bureaus, self-government organizations and traditional baojia units, and finally reaching down into every family household--all united with the military in the common cause of "exterminating Communist bandits" in the name of the Nationalist state.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Similarly, Control Yuan President Yu Youren, in a 1931 speech commemorating the founding of the republic, noted that whereas that magistrates had long been called "the parent-official of the people" (qinmin zhi guan), under the new Nanjing leadership they should be known as the "the building-the-foundations-of-party-rule official" (jianzhu dangzhi zhi guan); however, by devotion to party-rule, President Yu at that time apparently meant drumming up additional support for military expeditions in rural counties facing a host of more immediate concerns of their own, including poverty, drought, and famine.⁽⁵⁷⁾ The New Life movement took this mobilization one step farther with hopes that by revitalizing traditional Confucian virtues and disciplining the public into an observance of proper standards of behavior, the moral corruption endemic in Chinese society could be overcome with efforts toward mass militarization (junshihua).

I have attempted briefly to outline the impact of the Nationalist state-building process on traditional notions of political corruption. Clearly, notions of politically ethical behavior are inextricably linked to conceptions of public and private, and the boundary which exists between the two. Implicit in any definition of corruption lies some notion of what constitutes the general public interest, over and against which stands the more particularistic interest of the individual.⁽⁵⁸⁾ For example, Joseph Nye proposed that, "Corruption is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence."⁽⁵⁹⁾ It is therefore not surprising that the dramatic political changes of the Nanjing decade were reflected in political moral discourse. The shifting needs of the GMD state, from the period of party purification to the all-out mobilization for war, seem to have driven the changing legal and judicial uses of the terminology associated with bureaucratic malfeasance; and, rather than relying upon it as a tool to remake itself, the Nationalist Party used it as a means to master Chinese society, to attempt to build a perfectly militarized party-state.

1. Lewis Carroll, "Humpty Dumpty," in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (New York: Macmillan, 1871); reprinted in Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice (New York: Meridian, 1960), p. 269. The author wishes to thank the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange in Taipei and the Institute for Modern History at the Academia Sinica (Nankang, Taiwan) for their generous financial and institutional support. In Beijing, research for this project was conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and would not have been possible without the help of Professor Jiang Tao, as well as the assistance of Yin Tongyun of the Institute for Qing History at National People's University. Assistance at the Number One Historical Archive was provided by Zhu Shuyuan. In Nanjing, the author wishes to thank Chairman Zhang Xianwen and Professor Shen Xiaoyun of the Nanjing University Department of History, and Chen Guizhang and the staff of the Number Two Historical Archive for their assistance. Finally, the author also wishes to thank Professor Zhang Weijen of the Institute for History and Philology, and Professors Hsiung Ping-chen and Huang Ke-wu (Max Huang) of the Institute for Modern History, Academia Sinica, for their advice and assistance in preparing this essay.

2. Lloyd Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Nanking decade, 1927-1937," in The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949, ed. Lloyd Eastman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 49.

3. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York, 1935), p. 182.

4. Jiang Jieshi, in H. G. W. Woodhead, ed., China Year Book, 1931 (Shanghai: North China News and Herald, 1931), p. 541.

5. On the supervision of yamen functionaries and curbing corrupt practices, see Bradley W. Reed, "Money and Justice: Clerks, Runners, and the Magistrate's Court in Late Imperial Sichuan," Modern China, 21:3 (1995): 345-83.

6. For the distinction between public crime (gong zui) and private crime (si zui) during the Qing, see Ch'u T'ung-tsu, Local Government in China under the Ch'ing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 32-33; John R. Watt, The District Magistrate in Late Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 170-71. It is important to note that the legal distinction between public and private crimes involved both the intent and the nature of the crime. This distinction represents one small part of the overarching Qing legal framework which provided special dispensations to degree-holders of the scholar-gentry class. Thus, with respect to this distinction, the category of public (gong) and official (guan) are nearly one and the same, with the Qing legal code specifying punishments for only ranked officials. Thus, only district magistrates (zhixian, zhizhou), sub-magistrates(xiancheng), jail wardens (dianli), inspectors and occasionally high-ranking head clerks with considerable tenure who had been awarded the status of rank were theoretically permitted the privileges of having their wrongdoings classified as public crimes. However, in his discussion of the organic articles of punishment found in the Qing legal code, Thomas Metzger lists a few exceptions which extend the definition to include individuals with official duties, but not with ranked official status. See Thomas A. Metzger, The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative and Communication Aspects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 357-59. Notwithstanding, I found very few cases of disciplinary action and impeachment launched against such individuals during the Yongzheng reign in the archives of the Board of Punishments at the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing. A few cases involving jail wardens were indeed available in the archive.

7. The distinction between public and private crime and the preferential dispensations for officials and degree-holders was in fact eliminated altogether when, following the June 1928 Nationalist capture of Beijing, Jiang Jieshi ordered that the Imperial Law Codification Commission (established in 1904) be reorganized into a legislative commission under the direction of Sun Fo, then president of the Legislative Yuan. John C. H. Wu, The Art of Law and Other Essays Juridical and Literary (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933), p. 54.

8. The traditional distinctions between guan and li , and between wenguan (civil officials) and wuguan (military officials), which prevailed under the old imperial system became increasingly cumbersome and outdated by the 1930s, particularly with the introduction of modern police forces at the county level. On the reclassification of sub-county government personnel during the early republic, see Li Guoqi, "Difang zhengzhi zhi gaige" [Reforms in local government], in Zhonghua minguo jianguo shi [The history of nation-building in the Republic of China], ed. Jiaoyubu zhubian, p. 835. For the conceptual and linguistic shift from wenguan to gongwuyuan, see Julia C. Strauss, Wenguan ("Lettered Official"), Gongwuyuan ("Public Servant"), and Ganbu ("Cadre"): The Politics of Labelling State Administrators in Republican China," Indiana East Asian Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 6 (1995).

9. The distinction between the illegal collection of bribes (wanfa zang) and an official's collection of bribes without violations of law (buwanfa zang) is certainly a curious one which bears further investigation. Under this set of anti-corruption laws (Guanli fanzang zhizui tiaoli), the death penalty was to be carried out by firing squad; life imprisonment involved banishment to Xinjiang or other border regions. See Lin Shantian, "Tebie xingfa" [Special penal laws], in Zhonghua minguoshi falu zhi (chu gao) [Legal history of the Republic of China gazette (first draft)], Guoshiguan Zhonghua minguoshi faluzhi bianzhuan weiyuanhui bian (Xindian, Taipei: Guoshiguan, 1994), p. 502.

10. Ibid., p. 502.

11. Wang Yongyin, ed., Zhongguo lianzhengshi [A history of China's honest administration] (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou gujie chubanshe, 1991), p. 269.

12. This version provides two separate oaths, one for civil officials (wenguan), and another for military officials (wuguan). See Guomin Zhengfu fazhihu bianzhuan, Guomin zhengfu xianxing fagui [Current government laws and regulations] (Shanghai, 1929), chpt. 3, p. 9.

13. Ibid., chpt. 3, p. 3.

14. Lin, "Tebie xingfa," p. 505; Shen Guoqing, ed., Zhongwai fanfubai shiyong quanshu [Complete practical manual of Chinese and foreign efforts to fight corruption] (Beijing: Xinhua shuju, 1994), pp. 301-2.

15. Shen, ed., Zhongwai fanfubai shiyong quanshu, pp. 301-2.

16. Ch'ien Tuan-sheng, The Government and Politics of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 259.

17. Guomin Zhengfu fazhihu bianzhuan, Guomin zhengfu xianxing fagui, chpt. 3, pp. 1-3.

18. Ch'ien, Government and Politics of China, p. 273. My survey of the archives of the Control Yuan, now housed at the Number Two Historical Archive in Nanjing, indeed supported this claim.

19. The following discussion is based upon an analysis of routine memorials from the Board of Punishments for the Yongzheng and early Qianlong reigns, now housed at the Number One Historical Archive in Beijing. During the Jiaqing reign, two of these eight legal categories--cruelty and avarice--were removed from the list and officials found guilty of either of these crimes were subject to immediate impeachment. Thus, from Jiaqing onward, the Board of Civil Office list was commonly known as the "six proscriptions" (liufa). See Ch'u, Local Government in China, pp. 33-35.

20. From the Yongzheng Huidian, as cited ibid., p. 34.

21. Magistrates found to be in arrears may have been guilty of embezzling the funds for their own purposes, but often were simply guilty of misappropriation of funds (nuoyong), having temporarily "borrowed" funds from the taxes collected in order to cover more immediate administrative and military expenses.

22. Qian Ruisheng, Minguo zhengzhi shi, (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), shangce, p. 223.

23. Zheng Jingyi, (Zengding zhongyin) Falu daci shu [(Enlarged and reprinted) Dictionary of law] (Taipei, 1972), shangce, pp. 204, 2151.

24. Zhao Chen, ed., Xingfa fenze shiyong [Applied penal statutes], Zhongyang zhengzhi xuexiao jiao faguan xunlianban falu yeshu (Chongqing: Dadong shuju, 1946), Diyi fence, Chapter Four, "Duzhi zui," pp. 38-105.

25. Case file 08-838, Apr. 21, 1938, Jiancha Yuan Dang'an [Control Yuan Archive] (Number Two Historical Archive, Nanjing).

26. Case file 08-843, Feb. 5, 1938, Jiancha Yuan Dang'an.

27. Accepting bribes, or extorting funds from the public is often also referred to, in the former case, as shouhui, huilu, or nahui, and, in the latter case, as lesuo. Embezzlement is most often rendered qintun. "Shaving" money from the government budget, often colloquially translated as "squeezing" public funds, is known as guaqu. See, for example, the 1927 case of the unfortunate Dr. C. J. Pao, Director of the Jiangxi Bureau of Finance, who penned a letter in English to his sweetheart in which he confessed: "I made $1200 last week by squeezing from the tax Sept . . . ." The letter was confiscated by investigating provincial officials under the order of a Shanghai city court, and was promptly translated into Chinese. Dr. Pao was immediately dismissed. See case 1-103, Nationalist Central Government files (Number Two Historical Archives, Nanjing).

28. Yu Junxian, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu [The veritable records of the Control Yuan], vol. 6 (Taipei: Jianchayuan mishu chu, 1981), case #543, pp. 491-2.

29. Case file 08-843, Feb. 5, 1938, Jiancha Yuan Dang'an.

30. Yu, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 6, case #433, pp. 34-35.

31. Ibid., vol. 2, cases #48, #49, and #50, pp. 361-66.

32. Ibid., vol. 3, case #116, pp. 181-85.

33. Donald Jordan notes that the advance agents of the NRA and local GMD party officials collected political intelligence information which helped to decide whether to use the existing leadership or appoint new members following the NRA takeover. Donald A. Jordan, The Northern Expedition: China's National Revolution of 1926-1928 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), p. 249. In his memoirs, Ch'en Li-fu notes that Jiang Jieshi sent numerous party members out to serve in local governments, despite the fact that many of them were apparently extremely reluctant to do so. See Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers, eds., The Storm Clouds Clear over China (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), p. 91.

34. Bradley Kent Geisert, "Power and Society: The Kuomintang and Local Elites in Kiangsu Province, China, 1924-1937" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1979), pp. 45-47. The primary reason for tensions within the NRA was the fact that many of the ranking members of the Political Department of the NRA were Communists, while staff members and local commanders were primarily Nationalist Party members. See the memoir of Ch'en Li-fu in Chang and Myers, eds., Storm Clouds Clear, p. 62. For the regulations of the Political Departments of the NRA, see C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-Ying How, eds., Documents on Communism, Nationalism and Soviet Advisors in China, 1918-1927 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 200-202.

35. For an example of the NRA's harsh treatment of local officials, see Kuo Mo-juo's published account of his participation in the Political Department of the NRA, "A Poet on the Northern Expedition," Far Eastern Quarterly, 3 (1943-44), pp. 5-36, 144-71, 237-59, and 362-80. The first of the death penalty statutes, the Regulations Concerning Counter-revolutionary Crimes [Fangeming zui tiaoli] was promulgated on March 30, 1927. It was replaced just less than a year later by the Temporary Law against Counter-Revolutionary Crimes [Zhanxing fangeming zhizuifa], which required a death sentence or life imprisonment for any activity "designed to subvert the Guomindang or Nationalist government or destroy the Three Peoples' Principles and incite violence." See Lin, "Tebie xingfa," pp. 505-6.

36. These people's "councilliary" bodies and county and municipal juries were to be staffed by panels of twenty jurists, comprised of four members from each of the following local organizations: the party bureau, the peasants' association, labor union, chamber of commerce and women's bureau. See Shen, Zhongwai fanfubai shiyong quanshu, p. 302. Bradley Kent Geisert dates the establishment of the "special courts" (tezhong xingshi fating) to a directive from the party center in August 1927 based on his reading of Shen bao (2 August 1929, p. 6 and 7 August 1927, p. 8); Bradley Kent Geisert, "From Conflict to Quiescence: The Kuomintang, Party Factionalism and Local Elites in Jiangsu, 1927-31," The China Quarterly 108 (1986), p. 684.

37. Philip A. Kuhn, "Local Self-Government under the Republic," in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 294. For an example of one such case, which was transferred from the Anhui Tongcheng County Provisional Local Court up to the provincial courts in 1929, see the case of Shi Xiangjüe, Secretary of the Legislative Yuan, who in 1931 was disciplined for mishandling the case of local bully and evil gentry Ye Fang. In Yu, Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 1, case #5, pp. 55-63.

38. Zhongguo Guomindang qingdang tiaoli [Regulations on Nationalist Party purification] (May 21, 1927), in Geming Wenxian [Documents of the Chinese Revolution], vol. 69, pp. 182-83.

39. Guomin Zhengfu fazhihu bianzhuan, Guomin zhengfu xianxing fagui, chpt. 9, pp. 42-43.

40. Kuhn, "Local Self-Government," pp. 287-88, 292.

41. Geisert, "From Conflict to Quiescence," p. 689. For examples of the manner in which such charges were employed by warring factions in local politics, see also Guy S. Alitto, "Rural Elites in Transition: China's Cultural Crisis and the Problem of Legitimacy," Select Papers from the Center for Far Eastern Studies, 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978-79); Leonore Barkan, "Patterns of Power: Forty Years of Elite Politics in a Chinese County," in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, ed. Joseph Esherick and Mary B. Rankin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 191-215; Leonore Barkan, "Nationalists, Communists and Local Leaders: Political Dynamics in a Chinese County, 1927-1937," (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1983).

42. Lin, "Tebie xingfa," pp. 505-6; Guomin Zhengfu fazhihu bianzhuan, Guomin zhengfu xianxing fagui, chpt. 9, pp. 41-42. The latter contains only the draft of the regulations as issued by the Nanjing-based regime.

43. Lin "Tebie xingfa," p. 508.

44. See the description of the "Extraordinary Criminal Laws for the Protection of the Republic," ibid., p. 509.

45. See, for example, Alitto, "Rural Elites in Transition" and Barkan, "Patterns of Power," pp. 191-215.

46. See "Zhanxing tezhong xingshi wugao zhizui fa" [Provisional punishments for libelous accusations] in Guomin Zhengfu fazhihu bianzhuan, Guomin zhengfu xianxing fagui, chpt. 9, pp. 43-44.

47. "Yu Yuanchang xuanshi jiuren ci" [The inaugural address of Control Yuan President Yu], Feb. 1931, in Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, ed. Yu, vol. 1, p. 69.

48. See Yu, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 3, cases #142 and #143, pp. 310-14. Suxian Magistrate Cheng Jiting's extortion scam actually resulted in a massive revolt involving poppy farmers in Su County, which Magistrate Chen attempted to crush with military force on the grounds that the protestors were in fact "Communist bandits." See Lucian Bianco, "Peasant Uprisings against Poppy Tax Collection in Suxian and Lingbi (Anhui) in 1932," Republican China, 21:1 (1995): 105.

49. Yu, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 7, case #745, p. 723.

50. Kuhn, "Local Self-Government under the Republic," p. 288.

51. Yu, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 7, case #642, pp. 275-81.

52. Case file 08-903, Dec. 8, 1936, Jiancha Yuan Dang'an.

53. William Wei, "Law and Order: The Role of Guomindang Security Forces in the Suppression of the Communist Bases during the Soviet Period," in Single Sparks: China's Rural Revolutions, ed. Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), p. 41.

54. Text of a 1937 speech delivered at Zhenjiang, reprinted in Zhou Shoucheng and Qiu Youzhen, Xinshenghuo congshushe, Xinshenghuo yundong zhidao [The direction of the New Life movement] (Taipei: Xinshenghuo congshushe, 1967), pp. 203-4.

55. Fu Ch'i-hsüeh, et. al., Zhonghua minguo jianchayuan zhi yanjiu [A study of the Control Yuan of the Republic of China] (Taibei: Qingshui yinshua zhuang, 1967), pp. 220-26.

56. Jiang Jieshi, "Xianzhang shi zhengzhide jiben liliang" [Magistrates are the fundamental political force], July 12, 1932, reprinted in Jiangzongtong yanlun bian [The collected works of President Jiang (Jieshi)], vol. 10, pp. 98-113.

57. In the only example cited by President Yu, a particular Sha'anxi Shen county magistrate had always been described by the local residents as an ideal county official, "diligent, always working in the common interest, and close to the people." When pressed by his superiors in the provincial capital to raise more moneys for military expeditions, he solicited the contributions although the people in his county faced a severe drought and famine. See Yu Youren, Xianchang yu zhuyi" [Magistrates and doctrine], in Yu, ed., Guomin zhengfu jianchayuan shilu, vol. 1, pp. 71-72.

58. James C. Scott, Comparative Political Corruption (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 3.

59. Joseph S. Nye, "Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis," American Political Science Review, 61:2 (1967): 420 (emphasis added).