淸代の胥吏と幕友 : 特に雍正朝を中心として

Abstract

With a view to checking corruption and high-handedness of the Government clerks or lower classes of officials, the Ch'ing Government adopted various measures from the very beginning of its rule; for example, the system to shift officials at the Government agency every half year, and the isolation system, which was adopted at such upper agencies as the Governor-Generals', Inspector-Generals', and Adminstrator-Generals' offices to make the clerks reside in the compound of office and keep them out of contact with the outside. In the reign of Emperor Yung-cheng (雍正) the isolation system became practised even at the Provincial Governments. The practice of local officials' presenting confidential reports to the emperor resulted in enhancing the position of their private secretaries and in checking arbitrariness and high-handedness of the clerks. Besides those private secretaries personal servants were often in a position to watch the clerks. One of the largest defects with the clerk system was that the clerks were not on the Government's regular pay-roll. They depended upon a kind of extra tax levied on the sum of regular and additional taxes, but they went so far as to extort various kinds of bribes from the people. The spread of bribery, which was rapidly increasing after the reign of Yung-cheng, tended to accelerate corruption in the administrative system of Ch'ing.