THE THREE GRAND INSTITUTIONS

The hub of the central government was comprised of three organizations: the Grand Secretariat (neige), the Grand Council (junjichu), and the Office of Conferences and Political Affairs (huiyi

zhengwuchu). The Grand Secretariat was set up in the early seventeenth century as an imitation of the six

offset the growing influence of the Grand Secretariat and to ensure the emperor’s control of politics. Both institutions existed until the end of the Qing. The Office of Conferences and Political Affairs was founded in 1901 as an important step of the New Politics reform, and the office was the leading organ of the government in dealing with new issues that occurred during the last decade of the dynasty. In addition to the three institutions, a set of ministries and departments were established to handle affairs in various realms of Qing politics.

The Grand Secretariat was founded in 1658. Its predecessor was the three Interior Courts (nei sanyuan) founded in 1636 by Hong Taiji to take charge of education, recording history, and official

paperwork of the Later Jin. The basic task of the Grand Secretariat was to process memorials submitted by officials in the empire. The secretariat was divided into a set of departments and offices dealing with specific duties. Among the subdivisions were the Manchu Hall (Manbentang) in charge of documents

written in Manchu, the Chinese Office (Hanbenfang) handling documents in Chinese, and Mongolian

Office (Menggufang) dealing with paperwork submitted by officials in Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang

(Meng and Wang 2003: 431-432). The Chinese Office was the most important among the three ethnicity- based subdivisions in terms of the sheer volume of work.

The general working procedure of the Grand Secretariat was: the secretariat read the memorial and gave a tentative opinion, then submitted them to the emperor. The emperor would write his instructions on the memorial and return it to the secretariat, which in turn would forward the memorial with the emperor’s instructions to the appropriate ministries and departments within the central government, for instance, the six ministries (Zhongliang). In practice, however, the memorial had to go through multiple offices within the Grand Secretariat before it reached the final appropriate ministry.

To free himself from dealing with the enormous amount of routine tasks and to ensure his direct control of important affairs and the officials, the Kangxi emperor created the South Study to handle important issues in a confidential manner. The emperor selected a small number of officials by himself, gave orders to them directly, and established a secret channel to receive personal reports from officials in the provinces. After the Yongzheng emperor came to the throne, he first created the secret Office of

Military Supplies (junxufang) in 1726; then, in 1729, he reorganized the office into the Bureau of Military

Affairs (junjichu), which is often translated as the Grand Council since it dealt not only military issues,

but politics in general.

The council had a chief minister and several ministers, who were appointed by the emperor himself and reported directly to the emperor. The council functioned on the basis of secret memorials submitted by officials in the central government and in the provinces. Unlike documents submitted to the Grand Secretariat that had to go through multiple layers of the bureaucracy before they were finally processed, memorials submitted to the Grand Council went directly to the emperor. In addition, unlike the

documents submitted to the Grand Secretariat, which were open to officials at various levels of the bureaucracy, documents submitted to the Grand Council were kept highly confidential and only the ministers had access to them. Finally, unlike the Grand Secretariat, which employed a large number of clerks dealing with documentation, the Grand Council hired no clerks in order to further ensure efficiency and confidentiality (Meng and Wang 2003: 436). After the establishment of the Grand Council, the Grand Secretariat became an organ specialized in dealing with everyday tasks. The Grand Council, or secret politics in a more general sense, was unique to the Qing. It was the product of dictatorial emperorship when it reached its summit in the Qing.

In the wake of the Boxers Uprising, Cixi issued an edict in the name of the Guangxu emperor on January 29, 1901, proclaiming that the court was ready to conduct sweeping reforms and urging officials to submit proposals. The edict heralded the beginning of the New Politics. On April 21 Guangxu

announced the establishment of the Office of Supervision and Administration of Political Affairs (duban zhengwuchu). Prince Qing and powerful officials such as Li Hongzhang were appointed as members of

the new office. On Novemeber 9, 1906, the office was renamed the Office of Conferences and Political Affairs (huiyi zhengwuchu), and was placed under the jurisdiction of the Grand Secretariat (Meng and

Wang 2003: 442-443). Although officially the office was designated as a subordinate unit of the Grand Secretariat, in practice the office was parallel to the Grand Secretariat and the Grand Council in terms of

political influence, for the office was staffed with members of the two other institutions and ministers of