Rebellion, crime and violence in Qing China, 1722–1911: A topic modeling approach

Abstract

Banditry and unrest in eighteenth and nineteenth century China have attracted substantial attention from several generations of researchers. Often, they apply particular ontologies a priori to the source base. Given their reliance on state documents, these studies are subject to the perspectives of record-keepers and their theories of violence. It is particularly difficult to apply fixed definitions to concepts like “banditry” and “unrest”—a problem that applies as much to modern researchers as to our historical informants. To better view the nature of violence in the Qing Dynasty—as routine crime, and as rebellion and unrest—it is important to develop a model of how administrators understood it. Therefore, rather than assuming a fixed set of categories, this study models Qing administrators’ typologies of violence based on the frequencies of term co-occurrence. Based on the term groupings in the model, five topics relate to violent unrest. Each topic accounts for a particular statistical pattern of word use corresponding to patterns of occurrence, observation and recording of related phenomena. These groupings give some insight into the “crime rates” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more importantly, these groupings cast light on their understandings of crime, rebellion and unrest.