Make a List, Check It Twice: Bureaucratic Surveillance in the Early Chinese Empires

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, governed their lands and peoples using an army of bureaucrats who were responsible for, among other things, creating a vast quantity of administrative documents. Of particular interest to the state was the population—the governments kept population registries, updated annually, which not only provided them with relevant information for taxation and labor obligations but also served to tie individuals to their place of registration, preventing them from moving about the empire or taking on new identities. Recently excavated documents have revealed the extent of the states’ attempts to track the population and enforce compliance with laws. This paper shows that the creation and maintenance of these physical records was a fundamental part of state population surveillance. The documents, census records and administrative lists, usually written on wooden boards and created with the assistance of the population, were visible examples of the state’s monitoring of the population. Not only did the state have information about the people but the people knew that the state was watching, and that the extensive documentation would make it difficult for anyone to escape state surveillance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38713.0