The Autumn Assizes: Mercy and Leniency During the Qianlong Reign

While studies of Qing law have proliferated in recent decades, the role of mercy and leniency in Qing legal thought and practice has received little attention in either Western or Chinese historical scholarship. This is the case in spite of the fact that European and American perceptions regarding the cruelty and ruthlessness of Chinese law have played a decisive role in shaping Sino-Western relations over the past two centuries. In an effort to highlight the important place that Qing law reserved for mercy and leniency, this MA thesis specifically aims reevaluate the Autumn Assizes, the final stage in the elaborate Qing review system for capital cases, during which the emperor confirmed or altered the sentences of all who had been condemned to death. To accomplish this I rely on 52 imperial edicts from the Qianlong period concerning the Assizes.
In the first section I attempt to interrogate and expand conceptions of the juridical criteria significant to capital case decisions during the Qing. T'ung-Tsu Ch'ü (1965), Bodde and Morris (1967), and other early Western scholars of Qing law emphasized the vital importance of status and familial relations to the verdicts reached by Qing officials and rulers. Without denying that such relationships indeed held a crucial position in determining the outcomes of cases, I argue that Qing authorities additionally made consistent use of a number of other juridical standards and criteria. These included the perceived brutality of a crime, the extent and nature of pre-meditation and intent, evidence of regret or reform on the part of a criminal, and the broader social and administrative implications of verdicts.
I then turn to a description and analysis of the relationship between the Qing emperor and the law as depicted in imperial edicts on the Autumn Assizes. I propose that his technically unrestrained power notwithstanding, the Qianlong Emperor generally took pains when issuing his opinions on capital cases to emphasize his respect for the Qing Code and to mostly align his verdicts with existing statutes rather than adjudicating in a more ad hoc fashion. However, there were situations in which the emperor did in fact employ his powers in a more openly arbitrary manner. Such cases usually featured circumstances that impinged on officially mandated moral and societal norms or which threatened social stability.
As proposed by Phillip Kuhn (1990), the ongoing tension between sovereign and bureaucracy constituted one of the central loci of Qing politics. Imperial edicts frequently critiqued officials for supposedly erroneous judgments and many capital cases in fact involved officials who had been accused of various forms of corruption. I argue in Section Three that when read carefully, edicts on the Assizes open up a new vantage point from which to understand the conflicts that could arise between monarch and official, albeit from the former’s point of view. The Assizes provided an important means for the Qianlong emperor to assert the primacy of his own understandings of the law and to castigate and strike fear in the official class when he saw fit.
In the conclusion I suggest that future research should devote more attention to the full range of Qing juridical criteria I outlined in Section One. I argue that the reasons for the majority of the Qianlong emperor’s judgments in the Assizes remaining close to the Qing Code may have included his awareness of the havoc that a highly arbitrary legal system had wrought on the Ming, his desire to maintain bureaucratic loyalty by demonstrating respect for the law, as well as filial piety towards his own ancestors who were the progenitors of the statutes. Scholars should additionally focus on chronological shifts in the Assizes as well as other practices related to mercy and leniency over the full course of the Qing.