The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy

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This important study is central to an understanding of the organizational heritage with which the process of political modernization began in China. Based on far-ranging research into Chinese primary sources, Thomas Metzger’s study challenges conventional views of Ch’ing despotism and of the Ch’ing bureaucracy as tradition-bound and rigid. The author stresses the flexibility of Ch’ing organizational efforts and describes these efforts as shaped by a mixture of functional and dysfunctional elements.