Making Parliament Work: Parliamentary Impeachment in Late Qing China

Qixuan Yang, Yale University

For modern legislatures, control over bureaucratic appointments is a critical prerogative for effective law-making, as threat of dismissal or alternative appointment induce members of the executive branch to comply with parliament's resolution. This prerogative, however, is not necessarily codified or actively practiced in an authoritarian regime. An autocrat might introduce a parliament to co-opt elites, but not hand over the appointment or dismissal power to them. The first Chinese parliaments in late Qing Empire (1909 - 1911) at provincial and local level, however, impeached several public officials from local to central level with some success.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 23. Power, Order, and Institutional Change in Premodern China and Korea