Comments on: Zhou Confucianism? Ming Quality Control?

By: Frog in a Well - The Korea History Group Blog

Frog in a Well - The Korea History Group Blog — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:17:40 +0000

[...] statistics d. criticisms of postmodern epistemology e. wartime rumors and urban legends f. anti-journalistic screeds g. police naming and organization practices Explain your answer in five hundred words or [...]

By: Feiren

Feiren — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:04:03 +0000

The current ROC Constitution included (and still includes) the right to petition when it was ratified in 1947. Not sure about earlier Nationalist constitutions. I would bet the the FT did not check.

The Control Yuan is indeed a modern version of a censorate.

By: Feiren

Feiren — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:02:47 +0000

The current ROC Constitution included (and still includes) the right to petition when it was ratified in 1947. Not sure about earlier Nationalist constitutions. I would bet the the FT did not check.

By: J B

J B — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:45:41 +0000

I am way over my head here, but isn’t the Control Yuan (檢查院) supposed to be the ROC equivalent of a censorate?

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:07:20 +0000

I think we have to distinguish between the normal process of appealing decisions up the chain of command and petitions which go directly to the imperial offices.

One of the things which I’ve always found fascinating is the process of ensuring honesty and diligence on the part of bureaucrats: the petition system is a stopgap, but the (actually ancient) office of the censorate and the vermillion letters of the Qing were both the kind of normal systems of control which the Maoist system has so manifestly lacked. (I know Sun Yatsen did propose keeping the censorate, but I don’t know of Chiang did.)

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:15:47 +0000

There’s no real tradition of petitioning the Emperor, that I know of, before the Meiji; aside from the centuries of irrelevancy, the Emperor isn’t really a strong administrative head, nor are the peasants all that mobile (when they were, they responded to difficulty by absconding, not petitioning). There is a tradition of petitions to daimyo lords, but since the penalty for presenting a petition directly instead of working through the chain of command was death, it’s not what you’d call a common feature of the age. There were some cases where petitions to daimyo were presented through lower magistrates, too.

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:48:28 +0000

Johnathan,

Yes the article is a interesting but a little odd. “Olden times” is not a term most historians use. You may find it odd that they are tracing this back to the Zhou, which is obviously wrong, but then if you go to China and ask about something someone will always trace it back to the Zhou, if not the Xia. Jonathan Ocko wrote an article on the Qing appeal system, at in the first paragraph suggests that a system of commoner appeals goes back to the Sui, although the idea of appealing cases goes back to the Qin at least.

Has anyone done anything on petitioning in Japan? I know some of the Meiji radicals got in trouble for petitioning directly to the emperor, which would suggest that the custom was still alive there, although not the law.

Ocko, Jonathan K. “I’ll Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing.” The Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (May 1988): 291-315.