In the late 1960s Frank Abagnale survived by passing himself off as a professional -- a doctor, a lawyer, a pilot. He forged the necessary documents to pass scrutiny, wrote many bad checks, and wasn’t caught until a former girlfriend turned him in (biography.com). After a short stint in prison, Abagnale ended up working for the FBI, where he was an expert on all the fraudulent ways he had been successful. His autobiography, "Catch Me If You Can," was turned into a movie and then a Broadway musical.
Two centuries before Abagnale created his first fake ID, forgery and impersonations were common in China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912). People turned to these crimes, says Mark McNicholas, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, for the same reasons Abagnale did -- money, travel and prestige. But in China, a government system was in place that made such offenses easier to commit. McNicholas explores this system in his new book, "Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State" (University of Washington Press, January 2016).
During the Qing years the Chinese government, in addition to naming people to government posts, practiced a system that had already been in place for hundreds of years. The “contribution-for-rank (juanna) system” involved the government selling access to jobs as well as official or honorary titles, even religious ones. These official designations could make all the difference in employment status, ease of travel, and amount of money earned. They could also bring a person prestige on the local level. For those people who did not have the resources to pay for such positions, turning to fraud in one form or another was the only way to have access to these opportunities.
McNicholas did not set out to become a “true crime” writer. After a world cultures class in high school, he decided to major in East Asian studies. With a bachelor’s degree from Penn State, attending University Park campus, he then completed his graduate work in Chinese history at the University of California–Berkeley. Once he began studying the criminal element of the Qing dynasty for his dissertation, his course was set, as he said, “discovering and recovering the past.” His research focuses on “common people and their interaction with the state,” and his dissertation (which became his book) explored the crimes of forging official documents and impersonating an official or other government agent. Although largely absent from traditional histories, these crimes survive in case records in the Qing archives in China and Taiwan.
For impersonation, the roles most commonly assumed were policeman, secret investigator from the capital, expectant official (that is, one who had passed the exams and was awaiting appointment to a post), or recent appointee proceeding to his post in the provinces. The occasional brave and foolish soul even had the nerve to impersonate a deceased appointee and report for duty in his place.
Listening to McNicholas list the types of documents that could be forged, one gets the idea that the possibilities were limitless. To avoid being caught not paying taxes, someone might forge tax receipts to show taxes paid when they hadn’t been. If a traveler was impersonating a government official and had the right documents, he would be able to stay in government hostels free of charge. Fake vouchers could be used to draw soldiers’ rations. Some forgeries were more sinister, McNicholas says, such as arrest warrants that police impersonators could use “to shake people down.”
The government practice of allowing proxy applications for purchasing a title opened the door to more fraud. A person could offer to go to the capitol to obtain documents for someone who could not make the trip himself. If a proxy was so inclined he could take the payment and leave town, never to return, or take the payment and pretend to go process the application, but instead produce false documents for the unwitting customer.
A major part of the forgery was recreating the official seal stamp that authenticated the document. Official seals were made of metal, wood, or stone. A seal bore the name of the government office or the official’s title, and of course the characters had to be carved backwards so they would read correctly when stamped on the paper. Inks were made by mixing various dyes, oils, and powders.
The most popular license was that for the “imperial university student” (jiansheng) and many people were willing to pay for it. This license could open doors to good government jobs and promotions. In an article published in the journal Late Imperial China, McNicholas relates the tale of Wang Wenjun, who was given a vice magistrate position based on his claim to be a jiansheng. However, he could not produce the requisite paperwork (he said he had “lost it in a fire”) and his fraud was discovered. Often, McNicholas says, the perpetrators were “frustrated scholars who had failed the civil service exams and couldn’t obtain official posts. That tells us something about the times. And there were very few women involved—I have found not a single female fraudster.”
When a criminal was caught, he could be subject to one of a number of levels of investigation and punishment. “There was a sophisticated judicial structure,” McNicholas explains. “The big crimes went to the capital for review, and the Qing Code prescribed punishments on sliding scales depending upon the seriousness of the offense.” What made a crime “big”? Any crime for which the statutory sentence exceeded penal servitude was automatically sent to Beijing for final review—and forging government documents or impersonating an official met the criteria. The authorities considered all the details, such as “how much work he put into it. Did he carve and stamp the seal or simply draw it?” The amount of labor really mattered. The number of victims and amount of money obtained were also important factors.
Sentences varied with the specific circumstances of a given case, but in general the punishments for seal forgery ranged from death by beheading or strangulation to life exile, three years’ penal servitude, or a flogging of a hundred strokes with a heavy bamboo club. Impersonation brought slightly lower sentences, from strangulation down to a simple (but potentially fatal) flogging. “Seal forgery was seen as much worse than impersonation, and often incurred a death sentence.”
Most perpetrators were small-time operators looking for some quick cash or free travel accommodations. Why such heavy sentences, then? In the eyes of the state these were grave political transgressions, symbolic usurpations of official authority. In fact, the law code had very little to say about marketplace fraud and other common deceptions; the state was mainly interested in punishing political fraud, to protect its own prerogatives.
With his first book about to be published, McNicholas is working on a new project that also involves common people colliding with the Qing state, but in a very different area. In the course of archival research in Beijing he discovered another kind of crime: submitting policy advice to the emperor. In a democracy, offering a few suggestions to the head of state is hardly news for the police blotter, but in imperial China this was a major “no-no.” In normal circumstances only officials of a certain rank were permitted to communicate with the emperor. And yet the archives contain scores of case records on lowly scholars from the provinces who dared to submit advice to the throne. What possessed them to do it, what did they propose, and how did the state respond? These cases open a new window on political culture in traditional China and will give McNicholas much to explore.
This story was originally published in Penn State Altoona’s Research and Teaching magazine.