Costs and Effectiveness:An Examination of the Addition of Lower-RankTusi in Southwestern China during the Qing Dynasty——A case study ofthe old TIAN's territory in Guizhou Province
In the eleventh year of the Yongle era(1413),the court of the Ming Dynasty abolished the pacification superintendencies of the two TIAN families in Sizhou and Sinan,and divided their territory into eight prefectures.From then on until the fall of the Qing Dynasty,this land was under a dual governance system of native chieftains and appointed officials.Over nearly five centuries,the im-perial court never broke the established pattern of the middle and lower-rank Tusi(native chieftains)promoted from the former Tian territories,even though in the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty large-scale reforms were carried out to"gai tu gui liu"(meaning"change native chieftains for appointed officials"),the court continued to add lower-rank native chieftains as the then circumstances required.According to this,it can be proved that within the dual governance system known as"tu liu bing zhi"(joint governance by n-ative chieftains and appointed officials),the local influence of middle and lower-rank native chieftains,or their direct descendants who were converted to appointed officials,did not diminish with the establishment of prefectures and counties.Due to the administrative dif-ficulties faced by appointed officials in the short term,they had to rely on lower-rank native chieftains to assist in tax collection,labor conscription,and the dissemination of education and culture.From this perspective,the Tusi system,as part of the dynastic state's of-ficial system,possessed an irreplaceable scientific,effective,and rational nature compared to the appointed official system.The es-sence of the reform to replace native chieftains with appointed officials,as a structural component,was to punish unlawful native chief-tains according to the law.
Tusi systemgai tu gui liutu liu bing zhireserve and addcost and effectiveness
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