The Short Life of a Statutory Label: War Mobilization and Underclass Migration in Eighteenth-Century Sichuan

Abstract

Abstract: During the Qianlong period, both Qing state documents and the local sources in Sichuan preserved increased records of "guolu," a label referring to a type of crime-prone, male, underclass migrants in Sichuan. Amid active policy discussions of the guolu problem, the Qing state first added a guolu substatute to the Qing Code in 1758 and later tried to eliminate guolu as a statutory category after a large incident in 1781. This article traces the trajectory of the statutory category of guolu and analyzes how the Qing state's strategy of managing underclass migrants in Sichuan transformed during the eighteenth century. In particular, this article contextualizes the legislative and policy turns within the socioeconomic impacts of the two Jinchuan Wars (1747<en>1749; 1771<en>1776), which significantly reshaped the scale of underclass mobility in Sichuan and scholar-officials' perceptions of underclass migrants. Influenced by the labor-intensive military supply and the socioeconomic impacts of warfare, the Qing state's policies on guolu criminality and underclass mobility transformed from the exclusion of targeted groups to the accommodation of nonagrarian means of livelihood and networks. The case of guolu suggests that the eighteenth-century Qing state was also developing policies of cooption and mobilization, in addition to statutory vilification, to tackle the quickly expanding scale of underclass mobility. Through this case, this article calls attention to the military perspective as a key to understanding the interactions among underclass criminality, judicial discourse, and bureaucratic process in Qing China.