Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

[draft]

Introduction: Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

At a time when mental illness is gaining governmental and popular attention in mainland

China (Chang and Kleinman 2002; People’s Daily 2002), Vivian Ng’s Madness in Late

Imperial China (1990) remains the most visible English-language text that attempts to

locate it in the medical, legal, and social narratives of the period.1 It is also a text to

which the last decade and a half of writing on the topic usually responds. For these

reasons it may serve as an entry-point and foil into considerations of methodology and

madness in the study of late imperial China. As I proceed, I will also take note of

relevant English-language literature.

Ng argues that throughout the Qing, the conception of “madness” moved from a

realm of medical discourses to one of state-sponsored2 surveillance and confinement.

She contrasts this with the European experience as told by Foucault (1965, 1973) where

madness travelled in the reverse direction, from deviance to illness. However, it appears

that the transformation she charts is less a historical process than an artefact of the

interaction of theory and evidence in her work. Furthermore, critics reviewing Ng’s book

incompletely address this problem by centring their criticisms on alternate textual

interpretations of the place held by madness in Chinese medical and legal sources. While

they do make important corrections to her study, serious problems are left unchallenged.

1
Although Chui’s chapter “Insanity in Late Imperial China: A Legal Case Study” (1981) makes many
similar arguments, it is cited far less often than Ng’s book.
2
Unlike the west, most of the surveillance and confinement was carried out by family and village
elites, and was shaped by their response to state dictates. This will be elaborated on below.

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

We can understand the responses to Ng’s work in relation to the study of madness

in Chinese history. There are three basic approaches to consider. One applies modern

psychiatric aetiologies to history, usually from a clinician’s perspective, studying illness

to improve the potential for treatment. Findings include epidemiological data and

theories on how mental illness, taken as an objective medical category, manifests

differently in the Chinese cultural context.3 Research includes, for example, studies on

the somatization of mental illness in the Chinese cultural context (Yen, Lin, and Robins

2000). Most of this work focuses on the 20th century and is not widely utilized by less

medically orientated historians (interestingly, Arthur Kleinman [1992], a well-known

medical anthropologist writing from this perspective, gave Ng’s work a very positive

review).

The second is a largely textual approach to historical documents related to

madness (Chui 1986; Sivin 1995). A common thread is to understand madness’ place

within a broader medical-cultural cosmology through an analysis of medical texts; until

recently, this approach was dominant in Chinese scholarship (Chen 2003, 7-8). Chen

(2002), in the only literature review of the field, excludes from this group similarly

textual approaches to law. I believe that their methodological similarity makes a good

case for their inclusion. These two approaches have difficulty linking the aetiologies of

modern psychiatry and traditional Chinese medicine to social conditions. Instead, the

3
Classic studies include Kao (1979) and T’ien (1985), both in Chen (2003). The most recent volume
is probably Lin, Tseng and Yeh (1995).

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

former adds data into pre-existing medical categories,4 while the latter forgoes this

entirely and focuses on textual analysis.

The newest approach, perhaps beginning with Foucault’s noteworthy study of

madness in European history (1965), consists of a strong rejection of the first approach

by infusing the second with observations on social context. Called the ‘social history of

medicine,’ this school attempts to link social and economic factors with medical

discourse (see also Lee 1999; Pearson 1995 is influenced by this approach). Although

this approach contains the most promise, it sometimes flounders in attempting to

convincingly link social context with changing responses to madness. Work by Lee

(1999) and Shapiro (1997, in Chen 2003) are examples of this approach put to good use,

while Ng and Foucault remind us of its problems.5 Often they end up presenting

‘snapshots’ of various historical moments, leaving the reader to guess as to both the

representativeness of the evidence, and if the relationships between social context and

discourse exist as they describe.6

In this paper I will make initial efforts to bring together scholarship on madness in

Chinese history with work being done on social and legal history that, while focusing on

different topics, has much to offer methodologically. First, I will outline the relationship

between evidence and argument in Ng’s work. Second, I will discuss the criticisms of

4
It does, in theory, have the potential to build comparative studies around this unique human
constant—if only we possessed an advanced enough biological understanding and of mental illness.
5
Shapiro’s (1997; as cited in Chen 2003) dissertation on insane institutions in the urban China of the
1930s, falls outside the temporal scope of my present study and deals with institutions heavily
influenced by 20th century western psychiatry (Messner 2003). Chen (2003, 13) seems to group
Messner’s work on three centuries of changes in Chinese medical discourses (2000) as having a social
history component. The work, Medizinische Diskurse zu Irreisein in China (1600-1930), seems to be
without an English translation.
6
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) has been criticized heavily in this regard. See Midelfort
(1980, 254; as cited in Skull 1989, 17-18).

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

Ng and how they miss important errors in her work. Finally, I will discuss an approach

to social history (Huang 1996, Sommer 2000) that contains promise for the study of

madness in late imperial China.

As this is a paper on Chinese social history, I will attempt to avoid the ongoing

debates between poststructuralist and biomedical ontologies of mental illness. Although

the term “madness” is associated more with Foucault and notions of socially constructed

images of deviance, I opt to use it without ontological content. Veronica Pearson, writing

in a gendered analysis of mental illness in contemporary China, observes that

[d]ifferences in mental health between men and women may be seen as a

reflection of their position in the social world or as biologically determined or as
an interaction between the two. Whatever the causes the consequences are real
and some of these consequences are very obviously man-made. (Pearson 1995,
1159)

I share Pearson’s views. I assume that madness is ubiquitous in human societies, and

regardless of the potential historical continuities derived from biology, its significance for

historians lies in the ‘man-made’ elements given form by social practice. In the reputed

words of the English Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee, involuntarily confined to the

Bethlem asylum: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they

outvoted me” (Porter 2002, 88).

Ng’s Madness in Late Imperial China: Evidence and Argument

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

After a brief summary of the milieu of the Manchu conquest and the establishment of the

Qing Dynasty (largely drawing on, as Sivin [1992] comments, Wakeman [1985]), Ng

begins her study with an overview of “madness in Chinese culture” (1990, 25-62). Here

she delineates folk beliefs—which often located madness in the supernatural—from

medical approaches. In the latter case, a general category of “madness” was explained

and treated through the physiological systems of the time, largely in terms of yinyang

imbalances. For this claim, Ng draws on evidence from the aetiologies and ‘case files’

on madness present in the Qing encyclopaedia (Qinding gujin tushu jicheng).

As presented in Ng’s text, madness was represented with terms like dian, largely

referring to depressive states, and kuang to manic ones.7 During the late imperial

period—and quite unlike the same time in European history—explanations of madness

were sometimes diametrically opposed (although still originating from the same

explanatory system): for example, the one school saw madness largely resulting from a

lack of heat, and another from its overabundance. Ng characterizes these medical

approaches as locating madness in sickness and thus avoiding notions of blame or

deviance toward the mad.

Extant alongside the medical approaches were, however, a series of folk beliefs

that saw madness as a combination of retribution for sins and possession. Here Ng

presents brief selections from the Guobao Wenjian Lu (Anthology of Tales of

7
There are competing, as well as additional, definitions of madness that have been presented
elsewhere. Chen (2003, 15-16) provides a comprehensive list of benign and criminal terminology,
Schneider (1980, as cited in Sivin 1992, 1262) provides a detailed discussion of kuang in ancient
China, T’ien (1985) offers more specific aetiological subtypes created by specific practitioners (such
as kuangyan and zhanyan; translated as nonsense talk and delirium talk, respectively) and alerts us to
some anachronistic translations (i.e. dian to mean epilepsy) by Chinese psychiatrists.

5
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

Retribution) and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi (Stories From a Strange Studio). The

categories employed in explaining madness were not mutually exclusive, as the families

of the ill could be seen taking a highly pragmatic approach to treatment, using both

religious and medical approaches based on their own experiences and estimations of

success.8 Although these sources present a very ‘demonic’ perspective of madness, Ng

takes the general cultural approach to madness more in line with the medical sources, and

argues that by the Qing, “although madness was a strange illness, it was not unfamiliar”

(1990, 62) in Chinese culture.

Since there were no new medical discoveries that could account for the new

emphasis on criminality and deviance taken by the Qing state, she turns to the state—and

specifically, the courts—for answers. Here, her evidence is gathered from collections of

cases published as reference materials for sentencing. Most are from the Xingan huilan

(Conspectus of penal cases) [HAXL] and the Xingan huilan xupian (its supplement)

[XAHLXB]. Additional material originates in earlier collections such as the Lian

chuangji (Collection of legal precedents), Chengan zhiyi (Queries on leading cases),

Chengan xinpian (New collection of leading cases), and other collections from the Board

of Punishments, the Statutes Commission, and provincial judicial offices. She admits

that these cases were preserved for instrumental reasons, and were thus “particularly

unusual or problematic” to those in charge of addressing them; Ng argues that their value

8
Although not addressed in this paper, better uses of social history to study madness might include a
treatment of the Zhiguai (tales of the strange) as Huntington (2005) has done, using cases of ghosts
causing suicides to cast light not only on the personal experience of madness, but common reactions to
its perceived source in difficult family life.

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

lies in allowing us to “observe the fascinating world of Qing law in action” (Ng 1990, xi-

xii).

Ng locates a watershed in a 1731 memorial submitted to the Yongzheng emperor

from the Sichuan governor. The governor, responding to what was widely perceived as a

law and order problem in Sichuan, took a recent multiple homicide by an insane man as a

cue to introduce in his province a policy of mandatory registration and confinement of the

mad. In theory, if families could not provide secure holding areas for their insane, then

the responsibility fell on neighbours, kin, or local constables. Specifying penalties for

non-compliance, formally involving magistrates in enforcement, and defining

government jail as the place of incarceration if families failed to do so was the thrust of

the first substatute, created in 1740.

So began what Ng calls the “the great confinement” (1990, 66), referencing her

comparison to Foucault’s (1965) work on Europe. More legal changes followed

throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly substatutes of the 1731 memorial that

became law. Clauses were added so that local authorities would have to confirm that the

families were capable of physically confining their insane.9 It became increasingly

difficult for those jailed due to criminal charges related to insanity to secure their

freedom, as they had to wait longer periods, in jail, while their recovery was confirmed.

In addition to the emphasis on confinement, the extent that madness would lead to

a lesser sentence than otherwise (in connection with a notion of reduced responsibility)

also changed. During the late 17th century the insane who murdered someone below

9
However, there was still no penalty for non-compliance: so long as the insane did not commit any
crimes, family members would not be punished for not reporting and confining them.

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

them on the social hierarchy would be only fined 12.42 taels, but by the 19th century they

could expect to receive a potential but not certain death sentence (strangulation after the

assizes was a likely charge). Ng notes how the Qing jurists paid a great deal of attention

to how notions of reduced responsibility were articulated through the multiple hierarchies

of Chinese society. Men murdering younger brothers and women murdering their

husbands, for example, were treated very differently. Extenuating circumstances, such as

whether or not a convicted murder was an only son (and thus the only hope of continuing

a family line), would often alter sentencing. Multiple homicides were another case, and

in fact, one in which insanity (by the late 18th century) was sometimes not enough to

produce a mitigated sentence.

In sum, Ng’s picture of a traditional medical model of madness originates with

her depiction of Chinese culture, which she defines through sources such as the Qing

encyclopaedia. Although she presents evidence of very different (and perhaps

‘demonic’) folk beliefs, she does not allow them to characterize Chinese culture. She

makes several references to legal evidence that are unclear on their own and simply

substantiate these points: beginning in the Han and elaborated in the Tang was the notion

that the insane should be subject to lighter sentences due to, presumably, “diminished

responsibility”. When she moves to characterize the Qing, she depends on the legal

documentation noted above.

Considering Extant Critiques: Eurocentricism and Criminalization

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

Ng’s documentation of the state’s harsher punishments of the mad and greater emphasis

on confinement is accepted. However, her work has drawn criticism in reviews from

Sivin (1992) and Furth (1992), as well as in commentary by Alford and Wu (2002) and

Chen (2003).

Sivin’s main criticism (1992) is that Ng has found it too easy to assume a discrete

category of “madness” in late imperial China, when it is doubtful that one existed as it

did in the west. Here, Ng’s largest problem is that she is forced to argue that “the social

classification of a single entity changed” when speaking of a transition from illness to

deviance. As an example of what he sees as her poor categorization, Sivin points to how

she collapses the category of “emotionally-induced illness” under madness, which was

thought of as separate from the physiological system and was often treated with what we

might today call ‘talk therapy’. Chen agrees with this critique, emphasizing that Ng did

not consult with medical sources beyond the Qing encyclopaedia (2003, 12-13).10

Furth echoes Sivin’s comments by arguing that without a western cultural

construction of madness, Chinese culture had little space for “the notion of a

psychologically fixed ‘deviant’ personality,” adding too that Ng is unconvincing that the

cultural conception of madness was in the process of change. In this light, Furth also

claims that madness was less central in sentencing criminals than Ng believes, pointing

instead to the maintenance of ritual relationships and social order (1992, 769).

Furth goes on to broadly characterize Ng’s work as relying on “Eurocentric

paradigms concerning patterns of change” (1992, 769) due to Ng’s uncritical reliance on

10
Chen also notes that, contrary to Ng’s claims, medical experts did assist the state in defining
madness (2003, 13).

9
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

European historical sociology. This point is furthered in a brief article by Alford and Wu

(2002), who note that the M’Naghten rule and mens rea were far less prevalent than Ng

believes, firmly locate her project in locating in Chinese law “key features associated

with the treatment of [madness] in the modern west” (2002, 190). Rather than seeing

“value,” as Ng does, in the abbreviated and selected condition of the XAHL and

XAHLXB, they note that the sources’ “rather stripped-down nature” hinder efforts to learn

about Qing law.11 This critique is similar to Ng and Furth in that they use a textual

analysis to evaluate law (rather than medicine), and look to it and it alone for the ability

to make “definite statements about the legal construction and treatment” of madness.

Together, these critiques assess Ng’s textual analysis of medical and legal texts,

suggesting that her subsequent claims regarding historical change sit on unstable

empirical and theoretical grounds.12 There is a general overemphasis on discourse,

visible in the questions asked about if there was a discrete concept of madness in China,

if the M’Naughton Rule13 was really present as Ng thought, and whether any of this—

including the historical movement she sought to trace—is “eurocentric”.

There is, to be sure, an important debate on whether or not there was ever a

conception of madness in China reaching the degree of separation from other illnesses

found in the west. However, the criminalization of behaviour labelled as mad does not

require the existence, in medical theory, of such a level of aetiological discreteness. Ng,

11
They further note how, in these legal sources, deliberations on madness did go beyond homicide
(these and other observations will be addressed below).
12
Derk Bodde, in his influential and early study on insanity in Chinese law (1980), came to similar
conclusions, noting that madness was seen as a minor mitigating factor in determining guilt.
13
This was the first systematic application of a concept of mitigated responsibility for the insane; it
depended on the identification of mental illness in physiology and not moral perversion.

10
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

after all, saw the explanations for madness as heterodox, and used medical theory to show

that it was not unfamiliar in Chinese culture.

One of Ng’s primary goals was to show the Qing moving toward a notions of

reduced responsibility that would have a determining effect on sentencing the mad,

looking to parallels with the famous M’Naghten rule. However, deliberations on the

relationship between agency and criminal responsibility not something for which the west

can claim sole authorship. I believe it is fair to see Ng’s use of the M’Naghten rule as an

illustrative device. After all, the broader movement from illness to deviance she tracks is

viewed, at best, with ambivalence by western scholarship (see Shorter 1997). In the

“Western paradigm of historical progress in the law” identified by Sommer to emphasize

“the development of individual rights, contractual obligation, and constitutional limits to

government power,” the medicalization of madness—despite issues of involuntary

confinement—has been received positively.14 Notions of deviance, and especially those

of demonic possession (also present in China), are not associated with the Enlightenment

or “a linear progress toward a better, freer, more scientifically advanced future” (Sommer

2000, 2). Even Foucault, the famous critic of the medicalization of madness in the west,

seems to acquiesce on this point.

None of this is to say that Ng’s critics are wrong. They are correct in their

observations, and do point to real problems in Ng’s study. However, if we simply

reconceptualize ‘madness’ as a more general physiological condition, and remove

references from specific European legal categories, the major problems with Ng’s work

14
By this I mean public perception, and most academia lying outside critical sociology and
anthropology. See Conrad (1992) for a discussion on these debates.

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

will still go unchallenged. Namely, that Ng accepts the Qing’s representation of the mad

as a real threat to social order, who justified their own criminalization. Ng imagines the

shift from illness to deviance/criminalization as the state’s response to an extant problem,

which she largely accepts at face value. By looking at legal and medical texts without

attending to the practices that constructed them, she takes for granted the actual process

of labelling deviance and criminalizing madness. Thus, while Ng does have problems

with her conception of madness, it is not in comparative (or eurocentric) aetiology but in

her uncritical understanding of madness and the Qing’s reaction to it, itself a product of

how she uses as evidence text and social practice.

Elsewhere, Ng is indignant about the moral failures of Qing rape laws, for it is

easy for scholars to identify unjust (but not necessarily hypocritical) representations when

they differ greatly from comparatively progressive visions of the present (Ng 1986, in

Sommer 2000, 66). We may consider the reaction, for example, if scholarship on

sexuality in late imperial China took seriously the idea that single women were,

objectively, such a threat to social order. The Qing’s take on madness, however, blends

in well with present-day social visions, and for this reason they are much harder to spot.

Ng thus describes a situation in which the Qing’s punitive response to madness is

a natural response to objective social conditions.

The transformation of madness from illness to criminal deviance generated the

need to formulate new laws that specifically addressed crimes committed by the
insane—the newly recognized class of malefactors. As a result, Qing jurists were
compelled to broach an issue that had hitherto not been given particular attention,
that of criminal responsibility of the insane. (1990, 79)

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

Thus, the “transformation of madness from illness to criminal deviance” was responsible

for the creation of new, more punitive laws—but these laws are also Ng’s evidence for

the transformation of madness. Since she is clear that there were no new medical

discoveries to justify the change in attitude and law, the only way out of this tautology—

given the evidence Ng presents—is to assume that the law’s punitive turn “was a product

of the government’s concern for public safety, and not prejudice against madness itself”

(1990, 170-171). That is, it was a response to a very real threat to social order.

Describing madness in Late Imperial China from the perspective of Qing jurists is

not an approach we can call “eurocentric”.15 Nonetheless, it is here, if anywhere, that

European social theory over-determines Ng’s study.16 Although she lists Andrew Scull

and Foucault as her influences (and Chen [2003] summarizes Madness in Late Imperial

China as such), I believe her method is better traced to Foucault alone and the

poststructuralist emphasis on discourse.

Foucault believed that to understand madness in history we must “renounce the

convenience of terminal truths, and never let ourselves be guided by what we may know

of madness” (1965, ix). In other words, we must resist contemporary theories when

studying historical madness in order to understand it on its own terms. However, this

stand against anachronism can too easily become an identification with and valorization

of the most agreeable historical narrative. Foucault may have done so by default, as he

15
If we must find a suspect attitude in her approach, we begin with the “fair and humane treatment of
the criminally insane” (1990, 171).
16
I am indebted to Esherick (1998) for the idea that the over-reliance on narrative may itself be
‘eurocentric’.

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Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

was extremely critical of the construction of madness as deviance and then illness, and

had nowhere to turn except an idyllic pre-asylum age that probably did not exist.17 Ng,

meanwhile, took better to the deviance model and gravitated toward the Qing jurists.

Attempts to link changes in discourse and social phenomenon can, and have, work

out for the better. Lee, for example, consciously writes from Foucault’s poststructuralist

project and the assumption that “psychiatric disease categories are not isolatable things-

in-themselves, but products of vested interests, political strategies, and ambivalent social

practices.” She links the westernization of psychiatric aetiology in China with “China’s

open door policy, the hegemony of DSM18 discourse, the depoliticization of experience,

and the transnational commercialization of suffering” (1999, 349). Crucially, Lee links

her two variables by addressing concrete social relationships. She explains, for instance,

the efforts of pharmaceutical corporations to convince Chinese doctors of new disease

categories, as well as the doctors’ reactions.

Lee’s ability to actually link changes in the economy with those in medical

discourses moderates her poststructuralist approach. For this reason, her approach is very

different. Ng and Foucault, by contrast, make the same link between discourse and

society but do not adequately link the two, often simply displaying temporal correlation.

For example, Foucault begins Madness and Civilization describing the “Ship of Fools,”

apparently produced when European cities would banish their madmen to sail from port

to port. Foucault took this to be a concrete historical event, and drew heavily on it in his

17
Shorter (1997, 4) is extremely critical of Foucault’s understanding of the “world before psychiatry”.
18
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is produced by the American
Psychiatric Association (APA 2000) and represents the dominant western aetiology and (largely
pharmacological) treatment guidelines for mental illness.

14
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

characterization of pre-Renaissance Europe. However, it the “Ship of Fools” was a

literary metaphor and probably nothing more (Midelfort 1980, 254; in Skull 1989, 17-

18).

Social History and Legal Sources: Rethinking Madness

Linking medical and legal discourses with social practices permits us to isolate the

Qing’s “idealized representations of itself”—as well as its representations of the mad—

from broader and more ethnographic accounts of madness, law, and society (Huang 1996,

17, in Sommer 2000, 24).

In 1797, Feng Shi screamed as she drew a chopping knife on her husband; two

years later Woman Li began experiencing “fits of madness” and by 1806 she had killed

her husband with an iron burner (Huang 1996, 20; Ng 1990, 138-140). We do not know

the full circumstances of each case. However, through a comparison of the two we can

see how our approach to legal sources (as well as their breadth) limits or extends our

insights.

Li, apparently, suffered a fit of madness, thought her husband to be a demon, and

beat him to death in bed. By the time of the trial she had regained her sanity. We know

little else about the immediate circumstances, or Li’s life. Instead, the case’s location in

the XAHL ensures that we have a detailed look at the legal reasoning involved; we are

treated to extended deliberations between the Emperor and the Board of Punishments

regarding the degree to which a potential precedent involving murder by a younger

brother might apply to this case involving another social inferior, a wife. The Emperor

15
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

was obviously concerned about leniency for a single peasant woman, and the Board of

Punishments was no less committed to equity for her under the law.

Another angle taken is to illuminate the social context that may have driven Li to

murder her husband. Research on mental illness in contemporary and historical China

frequently looks to social suffering as a major causal element, a belief also reflected in

mainstream opinion (People’s Daily 2004; Philips, Liu, and Zhang 1999; Pearson 1995).

Suicide and madness are often conflated as two indexes for suffering. If these

assumptions are accepted, then there is a wealth of information on female suffering in

late imperial and 20th century China.

Pearson (1996) makes these arguments, citing Wolf’s (1975) work linking

suffering and suicide in early 20th century Taiwan and Croll’s (1978) similar study on the

mainland. One common line of research is into China’s extremely high rate of rural

female suicides during their late teens and early twenties, suggestive of a relationship

with marriage. While a lack of prior information makes it impossible to know the

historical direction of this trend, Pearson identifies a major cause in the intolerable

conditions of rural female life. She provides three case studies in which behaviour

identified as “mental illness” first by families (usually husbands) and later confirmed as

such by doctors. Phillips, Liu, and Zhang (1999) also provide a set of case studies,

drawing a more complex causal picture, but still ultimately a social one.

While social stressors may contribute, statistically, to the incidence of madness, I

do not believe we have the authority to assume correlation to be causation in individual

cases like those available in Ng’s study. It is problematic to link broad and rather

unconnected sets of data on madness and social life, without a good way to identify their

16
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

actual interactions. One reason is that we do not know enough about ‘madness’ to say,

deductively, that it simply follows from social pressures—and indeed, the last two

decades of research points more to organic factors.19 The studies on social determinants

cited here do not refer to the countless individuals who experience similar life events and

do not become mad, or those who lapse into insanity without an identifiable reason.20

Our major difficulty lies in linking variables at the micro-level, where phenomena

like madness, society, and law interact. That is, we can know of Li’s case, come to an

understanding of her probable social context, and analyze medical and legal texts, but

scholars have usually not been successful directly connect them in historical instances.

The longstanding inability to do this kind of research helps create the imperfect choices

available to scholars of madness and history: ‘social histories’ that create only tenuous

links between society and discourse, textual analysis in which none of this is even

attempted, or a reliance on modern psychiatric aetiologies.

However, new research should allow us to link all of this together, or, at least, do

a far better job than previous scholarship. By peering into rich ethnographic detail at

nodal-points of law, society, and madness, we no longer depend so greatly on theoretical

abstractions and empirical generalities. Instead of basing research on broader

assumptions about the nature of madness or law and hypothesizing the way they interact,

19
Here I am thinking of the wealth of evidence pointing to the role played by biology in mental illness
(i.e. Mills et al 2005; Tkachev et al. 2003), and our ability to find reasonably consistent rates of mental
illness in most societies (Cross-cultural communication can often make measurement in other contexts
challenging; see Phillips [1998]).
20
One reason the information on social suffering is difficult to use is because it is being applied to the
samples of legal cases defined above. We largely know only of completed murders, and, thanks to
Alford and Wu (2002), (still) an extremely small set of non-violent crimes. This will be elaborated on
below.

17
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

we can begin, inductively, to look at how these interactions actually occurred through the

kind of evidence available in places like the Ba County Archives.

Returning to the second case, Feng Shi was purchased at a price reached in

agreement with her mother. However, her buyer, Guan Zhongshen, wished to relocate

her and rebuffed the women’s requests that he pay extra to do so. As Huang documents,

Arguments between the two came to a head, and Feng apparently wielded a
chopping knife as she yelled and screamed. Guan had no sooner managed to
overpower her and tie her up when the neighbours came rushing to her aid against
the outsider and hauled him off to the county yamen. (Huang 2001, 20)

This presentation has the benefit of explaining the immediate context of the event, and

giving us a reason for Feng’s behaviour. However, we are still unsure how madness was

represented in court and why, for example, Feng was not considered mad—perhaps it

was the fact Guan was not injured or killed that separated her case from Li’s. If this were

a XAHL case, this information would be all that we might learn from the incident.

However, this case is from the Ba County Archives archives, where cases typically carry

far broader data. The question posed—of why some and not others might be labelled

mad—could be given a better hearing.

Perhaps the most exciting possibility in this respect are the testimonies of the mad

that I gather to exist, based on what we know about the legal position of madness, the

operation of a magistrate’s court, and what is contained in the archives. Qing legal

practice had strong enough a notion of mitigated responsibility that the sanity of an

offender was a relevant factor in sentencing. The magistrate’s interrogation was a

18
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

common method of distinguishing the truly mad from malingerers hoping for reduced

punishment. Even in the XAHL cases, special note was made as to whether or not

criminals who were apparently insane during their crimes had maintained incoherence,

returned to rational speech, or were thought to be faking madness. In Ba County cases,

interrogations were recorded “strung together in the form of a monologue in the ‘voice’

of the witness” and the actual questions unmentioned. Although prompted, these

testimonies would present a view of the common, illiterate mad that has no parallel (that I

am aware of) in English history, where the topic has been studied for decades. The

opportunities for analyzing the intersection of official legal principles, medical discourses

(which were, to some extent, involved in juridical matters21), and popular attitudes

toward madness should be substantial.

Furthermore, extant research in social and legal history has already yielded

information beneficial to our understanding of madness. We might consider, for

example, changes in sexual regulation that occurred around the time of the Qing’s

renewed emphasis on confinement of the insane. Sommer identifies the Yongzheng reign

(1725-35) as a “watershed in the regulation of sexuality, when the age-old paradigm of

status performance yielded to a new one, gender performance.” New legislation

prohibited prostitution, regulated sexual relations between masters and servile women,

mildly criminalized consensual, illicit sexual intercourse, further criminalized

21
Preliminary research by Chen (2003, 13) indicates that “physicians seem not ‘absent’ in the legal
system” and a conference paper by Simonis (2002, in Chen 2003, 13) suggests they were involved.
Ng, meanwhile, assumes that they were uninvolved. It seems likely that the medical discourses of the
time—despite Ng’s separation of them from legal evidence—helped justify juridical approaches by
locating illness outside of social context and seeking to re-integrate the individual within it. Ng’s
methodological move from medical to legal sources was what created the appearance of the shift from
illness to deviance, and yet it seems both bodies of evidence tell the same story.

19
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

(heterosexual and homosexual) rape, and intensified the chastity cult.22 It was during

moment of reasserted state power that, in 1731, the Emperor deployed throughout the

empire the Sichuan governor-general’s memorial advocating confinement of the mad.

A generalized sense of “anxiety” crept over the high Qing, a prosaic manifestation

of a growing underclass. Chaste women were identified as household guardians,

cosmological buttresses of Qing social order visions. In Europe, a capitalist morality of

increasingly regulated labour meant that the mad—who were not altogether suited for

regimented factory work—had the social, legal, and cultural apparatus turned against

them. It was not the direct functional labour needs of capitalism, but the image of work

as morality and therapy that emerged from capitalism, generated the work houses, and

structured the asylums (Foucault 1965). Likewise, in China, community stability did not

depend on the confinement and surveillance of a few madmen; however, the moral and

cultural climate generated in this very context was what (probably) similarly turned the

Qing’s attention to the mad. (It was, after all, a moral climate that condemned

prostitution for its inclusion of “illicit sex” and not its economic element [Sommer 2000,

304]).

A population now composed of largely free commoners meant renewed state

assertiveness on matters of status performance, in both society and court. In the realm of

sexuality, Sommer explains how

22
The chastity cult is, in turn, implicated in present-day studies in suicide among rural Chinese
females, and is studied in the context of their oft-intolerable social existence (Qin and Mortensen
2001).

20
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

[t]he cumulative thrust… was to extent a uniform standard of sexual morality and
criminal liability to all. This uniform standard, based on rigid interpretation of the
normative marital roles expected of commoners, left less room for variation and
exception than before. Previously tolerated spaces for extramarital sexual
intercourse were eliminated from the law, and the imperial centre mandated that
local officials intensity their surveillance off sexual behaviour and gender roles.
[…] The heightened emphasis on stereotyped gender roles demanded their
performance, sometimes on the stage of the magistrate’s court. (Sommer 2000,
10-11)

Thus, the behaviour of the mad ought to have been inspected “before, during, and after”

the incident (Sommer 2000, 11; Ng 1990, 103), as was the behavior of those who were

caught violating important gender roles. This new form of social regulation, misread as

“emancipation” in past literature, is easier to identify in terms of differences within the

broad continuities discussed by Sommer (2000, 303). As the emphasis on role and not

status brought prostitution into the state’s sights, would the treatment of the mad differ,

too? As ‘every woman became a wife’, we might reflect on how madness could make

this and other role statuses difficult.23

We may turn our attention to definitions of the mad. From a classic Jin medical

text, cited by Ng as representative of Qing conceptions, the term kuangyue appears:

madness composed of both “raging, unpredictable wildness” and “perverting all rules of

propriety and normal behaviour” (Ng 1990, 37). It was common to identify madness in

terms that did not obliquely refer to but specifically identify the violation of social norms.

23
This said, I do not think it is helpful to think of madness as simply a coping mechanism or direct
result of oppression, as I have argued above.

21
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

What is more, these conceptions are what we today call “medicalized”, illnesses treatable

with medical intervention. In the XAHL, the mad are seen running wild in the streets or

sabotaging household harmony, bringing to mind the “rootless rascal” who, serving as an

antithesis of sorts to the chaste woman, were characterized violent, wicked, licentious,

habitually fighting, and, crucially, existing outside the moral and family order (Sommer

2000, 97).

The Qing physician Chen Shiduo (ca. 1687) described those with kuang madness

as such:

A patient who is chronically24 kuang, who brandishes a sharp weapon and

[threatens] to kill people, who insults officials, who does not recognize kinfolk,
who does not know his or her children, who delights in water, [or] who becomes
furious at the sight of food, is suffering from an illness that is caused by an
exhaustion of the energy of the heart. The pathogenic agent, heat, takes
advantage of this exhaustion to invade the body, thereby causing the illness. (Ng
1990, 47)

Chen also discussed ai, idiocy, and huadian (flower madness), a specifically female form

of madness resulting from unrequited love; further research may illuminate connections

between this and sexual regulation.25

24
Throughout medical and legal texts we find many instances, cutting across social roles, to chronic
madness; this does not square with interpretations of madness as (conscious or otherwise) responses to
social difficulties.
25
In Ng’s 05 cases dealing with the criminally insane, there are eight instances of women perpetrating
crime, and at least thirty-three cases of their victimization through either assault, rape, murder, or
kidnapping. These numbers could be even higher; in multiple homicides (such as of families), she
does not systematically disclose the victims’ genders (1990, 173-184).

22
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

Meanwhile, the Qing understanding of male kuang illness often included a

voracious sexual appetite. Wu Jutong, a famous Qing physician, was recorded as finding

a kuang madman

in a deplorable state. The poor man was stark naked, his wasted body completely
covered with filth and grime. Although his hands and feet were chained and
fettered, he still managed to smash everything within his reach. Besides being
very violent, the patient also had an insatiable sexual appetite, demanding to have
intercourse with a woman every day. He would broadcast his need with screams
and loud wails. His family had no choice but to force his concubines to satisfy his
needs. We concluded that the sick man had too much yang in his system. He
prescribed an extremely bitter medicine to purge the heat from the patient’s
system. This treatment was effective and the patient recovered fully from his long
illness. (Ng 1990, 48)

There are similar instances, such as a male servant who disrobed and ran about screaming

randomly at people, “unable to tell the difference between strangers and kin.” The

problem, it was discovered, that he had been eating too many ‘hot’ foods, and once the

excess heat was purged from his system, he made a full recovery. Even when the case

was suspect—like retribution for past sins or possession—the prescription was usually

from within the same medical cosmology. These examples show how mad behaviour

was implicated in other stigmatized performances.

Historian Edward Shorter remarked that writing a history of madness without

delineating the constituent mental illnesses of it “would be like trying to write a history of

noise that did not distinguish between that made by computers and by tanks” (Shorter

23
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

1997, 48). His point was that, in madness, some forms but not others are constant in

history; as a defender of western psychiatry and biomedical understandings of mental

illness, he seeks to do just this. It is an ambitious goal, for isolating different mental

illnesses in the European historical context must be done with sources that have already

silenced the illiterate (and thus the majority of the) mad: here, doctors, and not the state,

were responsible for the mad. Their case records carry only sparse psychiatric

terminology, and scattered letters written by the odd literate asylum inmates make up

most of the historical record (Reaume 2000).

Shorter’s demand—made in a conscious rejection of Foucault’s and similar

approaches—are particularly worth following in the Chinese context, if not in exactly the

same way. Here, the mechanisms separating (what appears thus far as) medicalized

madness and other forms of deviance are unclear, although the distinction between the

two categories (if it can be made) seems delicate. We do not need to make fine

diagnostic distinctions to investigate the boundaries of madness in the context of law,

culture, and society. Perhaps the cosmology’s ability to locate physical and mental

illnesses within the very structures and ordering principles of the universe is what made it

possible, to draw these fine lines. If this is so, we may wish to reevaluate Ng’s

contrasting of medicine and law (in her comparison of illness vis-à-vis deviance), and

relocate the social connections between them (as Chen [2003] has begun to) alongside the

textual/theoretical—as may be possible with records from the Ba County yamen office.26

26
We may think of another possible difference between madness in China and the west: European
medicine was far more separate from broader conceptions of society (and, of course, the universe
itself). For decades there has been an intense debate over the relationship between conceptions of

24
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

That said, Sommer’s research on sexuality may have vindicated a portion of Ng’s

argument. She claimed that, in the XAHL cases, jurors were quite concerned with

madness itself, more so than others allow. Perhaps madness was a greater focus of

attention than we would expect if unfamiliar with the broader change visible in sexual

regulation. Perhaps Ng was correct that—contra her critics—madness was in the process

of change, if only incomplete in her explanation of how.

We may end these speculations with the case of troubled Yang San of Daxing. A

commoner, he had been in and out of prison on account of his madness (in part because

his father claimed to lack the secure space legally required to hold him at home). At the

request of his father, a magistrate reviewed Yang San’s case and, with some reservation,

determined in 1826 that he had made a full recovery. But not so. Yang relapsed soon

after tasting freedom, and was apprehended joyriding “wildly” about town on a stolen

donkey. The Board of Punishments re-certified him insane and, again a threat, Yang

returned to jail (Ng 1990, 71-72, 178). How close, by degree or kind, did Yang San (a

man with, at least, a father and a family home) come to occupying the status of rogue

male? Might madness have plunged law-abiding and family-centred peasantry into a

category that drew stereotype from the guang gun, itself related to socioeconomic

conditions? If madness did not make them an outsider to family, would they nonetheless

come to occupy the parallel position of moral outsider? Yang was probably never a

violent offender, otherwise he would have not been released so quickly. He likely

represented a far more common kind of madman than those committing multiple

deviance and medicalization (Conrad 1992), and at the outset it appears that this main difference may
be relevant to any China-west comparisons.

25
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

homicides (this is, at least, what we know of the contemporary and historical west). He is

the kind we would hope to find mentioned, but not criminalized, through incidental

connections with Ba County cases.

Ng remarked that Yang reminds us how the “cautious attitude” of the Board of

Punishments toward releasing the mad was “by no means unjustified” (1990, 71). For

Yang San and those who caused only social annoyances, the Board’s position was, by

contemporary western standards, too punitive. In a context where Yang’s madness

challenged the fabric of moral order, it was benevolent.27

27
In this context, the ethnographic evidence of the Ba County Archives may permit a better view of
the popular perceptions of madness and how they related to official stances.

26
Fidler Methodology and Madness in Late Imperial China

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