Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China

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The Ch'ing dynasty was ailing--so concluded a number of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Chinese scholar-officials. They wrote with concern about what they perceived to be vitally threatening problems: rapidly increasing population exerting inflationary pressure on prices of land and services and limiting opportunities for upward social mobility, the beginning of a down-ward slide in the standard of living, commercialization of all aspects of life, and military and bureaucratic decay. Although these phenomena did not undermine the fundamental stability of the dynasty until perhaps the 1820s, by 1800 it is already clear that in the minds of these writers something was amiss. Their growing anxiety occasioned around this time a significant shift in political thinking.