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TALONS AND TEETH: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty. By Bradly W. Reed. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press. 2000. xxiii, 318 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 0-804 3758-4.
Before Bradly Reed's Talons and Teeth, scholars generally accepted the official view that magistrates were the end of organized administrative functioning, and magistrate underlings-yamen clerks and runners-performed essential duties, but operated in a self-interested and ad hoc manner. In part, this view was due to the prejudice against clerks and runners, most often labeled as corrupt vermin by local elite and central government sources because they operated outside of the official bureaucracy and independently of the tradition of government by moral suasion. With the opening of county archives, however, a fuller picture of local yamen administration is available.
Reed is the first to use county archives to seriously examine yamen clerks and runners as the people responsible for systematic local administration. While acknowledging that clerks and runners were at times true to their rapacious reputation,...