The Official And Folk Forces In Public Project In Qing Dynasty

The upper Yangtze river waterway played an increasingly important role in copper and lead transport,border control and livelihood trade in the Qing Dynasty.However,due to the influence of natural conditions,its navigable capacity was very limited,so the waterway regulation project was carried out continuously after the reign of emperor Qianlong.The scale of these projects was large or small,or led by the official or by the folk forces,become a typical field to investigate the interaction between the state and society in the Qing Dynasty.In a sense,the history of waterway regulation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze river in the Qing Dynasty was the history of the interaction between the state and society.In this paper,the upper Yangtze river waterway in the Qing Dynasty was taken as the specific research scope of time and space,and the interaction process and relationship connotation between the state and society in the traditional period are highlighted in a multi-dimensional way by investigating the cooperation and game between the government and the folk forces in the waterway regulation project.This paper takes the Jinsha river waterway project in the reign of emperor Qianlong and the Chuanjiang river waterway project in the reign of emperor Jia-dao as the case study.Among them,the Jinsha river waterway project was a national project with distinct political symbolic significance with the special historical background of"Yunnan copper mine to Beijing" in Yong-qian period.Emperor Qianlong,the supreme ruler of the empire,took the lead personally,while officials in yunnan province were responsible for the specifie implementation,which embodied the process of strong national will and passive social adaptation.However,in fact,although the project has been deeply rooted in the yizhai settlements for a long time,it did not lead to the ethnic conflicts that some people in the governlent and opposition feared.On the contrary,it was welcomed by the merchants along the river because of the improvement of the waterway transportation conditions.Although influenced by the national discourse power,the imperial court had a different evaluation on the effectiveness of the project,but from the perspective of actual results and social effects,the project still made great achievements,highlighting the benign interaction between the state and the society.The waterway regulation project of Chuanjiang river,which was promoted by the merchant Li Benzhong’s family during the Jia-dao period,was a prominent case of large-scale public engineering led by the folk forces in the Qing Dynasty.The Li family independently undertook the project funding,project implementation and later maintenance,and the local governments along the sichuan river actively cooperated with the improvement of the construction environment,supervision of the construction process and the inspection and discussion of the project after completion.As a private businessman,Li Benzhong’s family chose to cooperate with local governments to form a community of interests,and was good at using state authority to deter local opposition forces.This complex interaction between the state and society was fully reflected in the case of the ban on the donation of Yin-yang mountain to the government.Specifically,this paper is divided into seven chapters.Chapter one is the beginning of the thesis,which discusses the historical background of waterway regulation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze river in Qing Dynasty.It includes the natural and hydrological conditions of Jinsha river and Chuanjiang river,historical navigation and waterway regulation before Qing Dynasty.The second and third chapters focus on the decision-making,preparation and implementation of Jinsha river waterway project.During the yonggan period,due to the urgent situation of copper mine transportation,yunnan province applied to the court for dredging the jinsha river waterway,which was approved in the early period of qianlong.The project was endowed with a strong political symbolic meaning and became a national project supervised and implemented by emperor qianlong personally,which highlights that"Yunnan copper mine to Beijing "was the core discourse and reason to push the Jinsha river waterway regulation project to take substantive steps.The fourth chapter elaborates the basic process of Hubei merchant Li Benzhong’s family leading the regulation project of Chuanjiang waterway.From the perspective of the relationship between "state" and"society",the interaction between the Li family and the local government was the most worthy to be discussed as a prominent case of the participation of civil forces in local public projects.As far as this point is concerned,the biggest feature of the waterway regulation project was the leading of the folk forces and the cooperation of local governments.The fifth chapter studies the financial problems of Jinsha river and Chuanjiang waterway project.Through the comparison,it can be seen that the two projects had a big difference in the source of funds,expenditure and use,showing the distinct characteristics of the project led by the official and the civil forces respectively.Chapter six focuses on the evaluation of Jinsha river and Chuanjiang river waterway project from the perspective of "state and society".As for the Jinsha river project,the imperial court has undergone a dramatic change from affirming and questioning to investigating and disposing of the project,while the social level had given a positive evaluation.For the Chuanjiang project,officials awarded two awards to show national recognition,while the social level rushed to apply to the local government for le shi,in recognition of good deeds.The seventh chapter takes the case of Li Benzhong’s donation of Yin-yang mountain to the government as a typical case,trying to explore the relationship between the "official","business" and "people" in the traditional society of the Qing Dynasty.After years of tug-of-war,the three parties,including the state government,Li Benzhong and the mountain people,finally succeeded in banning the Yin-yang mountain and ensuring the thoroughness of the governance of the shoal.The interaction between "state" and "society" was highlighted to the extreme.Based on the above analysis,this paper believes that the function of the Qing government in the period of Qian-jia experienced a change from overall strengthening to gradually weakening.In the early years of the reign of emperor Qianlong,the government of the Qing Dynasty actively intervened in the public sphere,and its functions were strengthened in an all-round way.Then,as the national situation changed,the government began to withdraw from public affairs,leaving a vacuum that was filled by the growing folk forces.The merchants represented by Li Benzhong’s family highlighted the rise of the folk power in the "public sphere" in the Qing Dynasty.As an important part of the local elite,the merchant class tends to cooperate with the state power so as to realize its own social value and at the same time to improve the image and status of merchants.From the perspective of history,this change not only indicated the breakthrough of the merchant elite in tradition,but also indicated the limitations of this group.