Simply, the Dissertation

Probably the biggest struggle of preparing job documents has been working out how to explain my dissertation succinctly and compellingly to readers who, in many cases, have very little knowledge about Chinese history. I’ve also had to confront how terms or ideas that are familiar to me can be stumbling blocks when readers encounter them for the first time in a genre of writing in which there simply isn’t room to explain what I mean by everything. My latest strategy for confronting this challenge has been to write a summary of what my dissertation is and why it matters that provides necessary background information and avoids terms that would be unfamiliar to scholars in other fields. It’s still too long to use for job documents—which is OK, because I thought if it as more of an exercise than a finished product—but it’s about the right length for a blog post. So, I hope you enjoy and learn a little bit more about the dissertation that is the only thing standing between me and a PhD. Feel free to shoot me questions at dknorr[@]uchicago.edu.

My dissertation shows how the movement of people from one place to another shaped urban life in Jinan, an administrative center in north China, from the seventeenth to early twentieth century (the Qing Dynasty). We usually associate mobility in this period with merchants moving around to conduct trade. However, there were far fewer commercial opportunities in Jinan—and this part of China more generally—than the cities that historians have given the most attention. Nevertheless, Jinan’s status as the capital of a province with a population around 30 million people put it at the center of a variety of networks that moved people and goods through the city.

One of the most important of these networks was the system by which officials were appointed to administer parts of the empire. During this period, the “rule of avoidance” prohibited men from taking up posts in their home province. As a result, each region’s powerful, centrally-appointed officials had to come from somewhere else. The government shuffled officials around to new posts frequently and prohibited them from permanently relocating to places where they served as officials, making mobility a constant feature of this system. We usually assume that this created a clear division between the state—represented by these transient officials—and local society, which included people of various classes, at the top of which was “the elite.” (What it meant to be a member of the elite varied widely across China, but it often—including in Jinan—entailed some mix of owning land, being educated, serving as an official, and earning money through commerce.) The elite helped officials govern in a variety of ways, like informing them about local conditions, but we usually think of them as distinct from the state.

In addition to officials from other provinces, people from within Jinan’s own province moved to or traveled through the city for a variety of reasons. For example, the civil service examination system forced anyone seeking a provincial degree to come to Jinan to take the exams that were held there every three years. In addition to people, different types of material goods passed through Jinan. One type of good was salt, which was subject to a government monopoly that required all salt shipped to the western half of the province was supposed to be inspected in Jinan. This made Jinan a gathering point for both the salt itself and the merchants who held licenses to participate in this trade. Jinan’s political importance made protecting it essential during times of war, like a series of rebellions in the 1850s and 1860s. This too required moving people and resources into and through Jinan. Jinan became even more strategically important after Germany gained the right to construct a railroad between Jinan and Qingdao, its colony on the coast, in the early twentieth century. This forced Jinan’s officials and elite to devise new ways to manage the flow of foreigners and their economic interests in the city.

Jinan’s elite class depended on their city’s centrality to these political systems to maintain their social status. They did this by forming relationships with officials and other powerful people who passed through the city, thereby enhancing their own reputation and career prospects (chapters 1-2), by participating in projects that benefited Jinan and received financial support from the government (chapters 3-4), and by leveraging their relationships with officials and the perceived importance of their city to oppose the intrusion of foreign interests (chapters 5-6). In other words, the opportunities available to members of Jinan’s “local society” were very much intertwined with the state and types of mobility that the government mandated or at least encouraged. Scholars have seen many other instances of what we often call the “interpenetration” of state and society, but that concept does not do justice to what happened in Jinan. Instead, the same forms of movement that were essential to the operation of the state were also responsible for making Jinan’s local society what it was. I argue, then, that we should understand the formation of local communities and the operation of larger political entities as processes that are at root mutually dependent, not fundamentally autonomous from each other.

Why does this matter?

This perspective on the relationship between the state and local communities offers a new way to solve the riddle of why the Qing Dynasty fell when it did. We used to think that as the Qing state faced crisis after crisis from the mid-nineteenth century on, it grew increasingly weak and had to depend more and more on local elites to perform basic functions. In the process, these elites became more powerful, grew increasingly frustrated with the state, and eventually joined with people who wanted to overthrow it and found a Republic, which happened in 1912. This gives us an image of state and society as opposing forces, competing with each other for power, which is very different from what I describe in Jinan. Instead, my dissertation gives us an example of a case where urban elites both helped the Qing survive the crises of the mid-nineteenth century and remained loyal to the dynasty even while others rebelled. This helps explain how the Qing held on for as long as it did and—as we’ve been more ready to acknowledge in recent years—actually accomplished quite a bit. My research is also relevant to areas where the elite did eventually turn against the Qing because it shows that this was not a natural outcome of state and society being fundamentally opposing forces.

My dissertation also challenges how we think about the relationship between mobility, local communities, and larger political entities. We usually assume that movements of people pose a challenge to both government power and the cohesion of local communities. This is especially true for empires, which, unlike nation-states govern different groups of people according to their own sets of rules and delegate responsibility for things like collecting taxes to local groups. In theory, this kind of system requires keeping people in the places where their own rules can be applied to them most easily. Despite being like an empire in many ways, I argue that the Qing Dynasty depended on various kinds of movement, some of which contradicted a strictly empire-like logic. As a provincial capital, Jinan was a place where these different forms of mobility intersected and were managed to maintain the fragile balance of the imperial system.

Finally, the fact that movement was so important to a city in north China is significant in itself. Because commerce was much more developed in the south, our understandings of urban commerce, mobility, and southern cities have been closely linked. Meanwhile, we’ve overlooked how mobility—driven by government systems—provided resources for elites in northern cities. Because the ratio of administrative centers to cities was significantly higher in the north than the south, I think that what I’ve discovered about the importance of mobility to urban life in Jinan could be true of cities in the region.

Leave a Reply