Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty . By Ho-fung Hung . New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi+253. $50.00 (original) (raw)

Punishment of Examination Riots in the Early to Mid-Qing Period

Late Imperial China 32 no.2, 2011

The examination boycott (or riot), known as bakao or zukao, was one of the strategies employed by Ming and Qing examination elites to express their discontent and threaten local officials. When apprentice candidates (tongsheng) or licentiates (shengyuan) gathered for an examination administered by local officials or provincial education commissioners, they would try to force the officials to accede to their demands by withdrawing from the examination. 2 The term examination candidates or elites used in this article refers to these apprentice candidates or lower-level degree-holders. Bakao action appeared often in the late Ming and early Qing periods, and was deemed a serious threat to local administration by early Qing emperors. It was not until the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns, however, that the alarming surge in examination riots was dealt a serious setback. These two emperors reprimanded and severely punished the examination candidates as well as the magistrates who made conciliatory gestures toward those involved in these examination boycotts. This article attempts to further our understanding of the disciplinary measures directed toward collective protests from the early to mid-Qing period, with a particular focus on the government's policies concerning examination boycotts. This paper argues that the Qing government's approach to these 1 The research for this paper has benefitted from the support provided by the National Science Council in Taiwan (

“Insinuation, Insult and Invective: The Thresholds of Power and Protest in Modern China.”

Comparative Studies in History and Society 44: 3 (July, 2002), pp. 597-619.

Abstract: The presentation of crude, derisive or mocking poetic couplets emerged as a distinct mode of contention in modern Chinese history, one which continues to be deployed throughout the countryside to articulate social and political dissent. Like the libelous ballads made popular in Jacobean England and the pernicious gossip of the medieval peasantry, the potency of this form of protest rests in the power of public censure to impose a collective moral standard within a community. Derisive doorway couplets have often been used during periods of popular contention either to intimidate authorities or to insure group solidarity between participants engaged in collective acts against the state. By tracing the trajectory of this particular practice from custom to contention, I aim to demonstrate the rich variety of forms that belong wholly neither to the realm of compliance nor to protest. Instead, I suggest that the very threshold of dissent can be read as a site of political struggle in which inchoate interests and embryonic identities may be tested and tempered prior to more overt forms of collective action.