China

The clerical staff

The norms for the clerks were even lower, especially in local government. Some 300 clerks in a large prefecture or nearly 100 in a small one were placed under the supervision of a few officials. The clerks had numerous dealings with various other elements in the community, whereas the officials, being outsiders, rarely had direct contacts. Holding practically lifelong tenure after benefiting from the cumulative experience of their fathers and uncles before them, the clerks knew how to operate the local administrative machinery far better than did the officials, who served only brief terms before moving elsewhere. Clerks often received inadequate salaries and were expected to support themselves with “gifts” from those needing their services. The clerks under honest, strict, and hardworking magistrates would recoil, but only briefly, because such magistrates would soon either gain promotion for their remarkable reputations, or their strict insistence on clean government would become intolerable to their superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and influential elements in the community who had connections with high circles. Though all bureaucrats complained of clerical abuses, many connived with the clerks, and none had a viable alternative to the existing situation. One significant suggestion was to replace the clerks with the oversupply of examination candidates and degree holders, who presumably had more moral scruples. But that solution had no chance of being considered, because it implied a downgrading of the status of those who considered themselves to be either potential or actual members of the ruling class.

The law did place definite limits on clerical misbehaviour. But when a clerk was caught in his wrongdoing, he knew enough to save himself—taking flight before arrest, getting a similar job elsewhere under a different name, defending himself through time-consuming procedures, appealing for leniency in sentencing, requesting a review, or applying for clemency on the occasion of imperial celebrations. What prevented clerical abuses from getting worse was not so much official enforcement of legal limits as it was the social convention in the community. For themselves as well as for their descendants, the clerks could ill afford to overstep the socially acceptable limits.

The net result of a large bureaucracy and its supporting clerical staff, accommodating one another in various defaults, malfunctions, and misconduct within loose limits, was a declining tax yield, tax evasion by those who befriended colluding officials and clerks, and an undue shift of the tax burden onto those least able to pay.