淸代地方官の病死・病氣休養について : 人事管理に關する一考察

Abstract

In this paper I propose to examine the everyday problems of personnel management through an analysis of the procedural documents concerned with recuperation and death from illness of local government officials, who composed the greatest number of bureaucrats. Management of the problems of sickness and death by illness was a relatively frequent, common matter in the sphere of personnel management, and for this reason it better reflects the realities of local government administration and personnel management of local Officials than the regular hiring of new local officials or the da ji 大計, conducted every three years. This topic is therefore an extremely important issue in the study of local government administration and the bureaucratic system. The point of this paper is to illuminate how local officials or their families petitioned or reported on their misfortunes and how those petitions and reports were processed by their bureaucratic superiors through an attempt at reconstructing these documents. Clarifying these documents can undoubtedly illuminate how the Qing bureaucratic personnel system was related to the contemporary system of governmental administration. In this paper, I have relied on official government files in reconstructing the documents related to the illness and recuperation of local officials in an attempt to explain the policies taken regarding local officials, and their families, who were stricken by such misfortune. In short, the death from illness or recuperation by local officials, and the ameliorative measures ordered to lower-ranking local officials required set forms of procedures and documentation. These bureaucratic procedures involved common features, such as the submission of petitions or reports of death from the stricken bureaucrats or their families, the inspections and submission of an affidavit 印結 by their superiors, the creation of management proposals and inspection of related documents by the provincial administrative commissioner 布政使, and the directive 題咨 of the governor 督撫. This complex trail of personnel administrative documentation was indispensable in maintaining the smooth functioning of daily government administration. Additionally, these documents allow us to confirm the existence of an orderly system of internal links between local government offices. In this manner we are able to understand how personnel management supported the execution of the administration of justice 刑名and land taxes 錢糧 on the local level in terms of bureaucratic administration. In the conclusion of this paper, I point out that the internal links between local government offices was a function of authority delegated to them rather than merely based on the hierarchical relations within administrative institutions. All local government offices thus did not necessarily possess equal degrees of authority in judicial or personnel administration. The fact that same degree of authority was not allotted in every field by a permanent and fixed vertical relationship between local government offices is undoubtedly an important principle in any consideration of the Qing system of local government administration. The problem of the authority of the local government offices can be understood as a key to further study of local political administration.