宋代編管制度考

Abstract

Bian-guan 編管, registered control, was one of the new penalties created by the Song dynasty. As Professor Brian E. McKnight has pointed out in his "Law and Order in Sung China" , this form of punishment was less serious than registration in units of the provincial armies, a penalty known pei-jun 配軍. But McKnight's description of the features of the bian-guan system includes some inaccuracies, and he has overlooked other important features. Regrettably, McKnight appears to have made no reference to the thesis on the general history of imprisonment in China by Professor Shuzo Shiga. This paper attempts to correct some misunderstandings in the earlier research about the bian-guan system and to clarify the penal system itself. The criminals sentenced to bian-guan were to be registered as convicts by the local authorities in the registry for control. They were not assigned to barracks but controlled on the basis of the registry. This is one of the most important features of the bian-guan system. The convicts had to report regularly to the local authorities, with certain exceptions, such as officials and ladies, who had been granted a title from the emperor. It has been supposed that registered control was a punishment mainly for officials, but this is not correct. Although there is much historical evidence of officials having been sentenced to this punishment, this fact should be understood as a product of historiographical distortion due to the focus on officials in the historical record. Bian-guan was not essentially a matter of enforced removal to the frontier. It indeed had an aspect of enforced removal of the convicts, but their destination was not always the frontiers of the empire. Actually, the most frequent examples of bian-guan appearing in Qing-yuan tiao-fa shi-lei 慶元條法事類, which was a codex the Southern-Song dynasty, are cases of registered control that were to be conducted in a neighboring prefecture to the hometown of the convicts. Enforced removal to the frontier was conceived as a way to vary the punishment. Forced labor was not an essential element of the bian-guan system. Only convicts who were sentenced to bian-guan and who were also sentenced to "exile", liu-xing 流刑, which during the Song period was replaced by a beating with a heavy stick and forced labor for one year were required to do force labor. This was a distinct difference between bian-guan and pei-jun, because the criminals sentenced to pei-jun were absolved from forced labor when they were sentenced to pei-jun as an additional punishment. Registered control was a form of punishment with a fixed term. The convicts sentenced to bian-guan could go back to their hometown after six years, even if they had no chance of receiving amnesty. If they had been punished as relatives of the offender 緣坐, they were never permitted to go back home, but they were not considered convicts after six years and were no longer strictly controlled by the local authorities. Registered control and distant exile 配流 seem to be very similar penalties, and they have much in common as punishments, particularly given the fact that exile to remote regions might be an aspect of bian-guan. For this reason, the characters 竄 and 流sometimes appear in place of bian-guan in some historical records from the Song period. But this does not mean that the punishments were the same. The expression pei-liu bian-guan ren 配流編管人indicates a person sentenced to both punishments, in other words, subject to registered control in his place of exile.