Example One: Straw Man Fallacy and Ridicule

Straw man argumentation is the reviewer's cornerstone bad-faith tactic. One long, elaborate example of this fallacy is the entire four-paragraph section titled “Censorial Duties in the Provinces” (12–13), which spends roughly two pages outlining the early Qing dissolution of roaming censors in the provinces. The reason that the reviewer elaborates this history appears to be an insistence that the book overlooks these early institutional innovations, incorrectly attributing the integration of censorial duties into the provincial bureaucracy solely to the Yongzheng reign. However, the book makes no such claim.

This section so fundamentally misrepresents the portion of the book being discussed (108–115, from what I can discern) that it is impossible to even identify which of my claims the author is arguing against. All of the facts and claims presented in this section of the review as corrections are already explicitly acknowledged in the text of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine (44n18 and 108–109).

After purporting to refute an argument that the book does not make, the reviewer offers an alternative explanation for the phenomena being discussed by pronouncing that “Yongzheng Emperor's solution to the problem … was not to standardize documentary streams of routine reporting, but rather to expand the coverage of the non-routine, secretive palace memorial system—a system with which Dykstra is apparently unfamiliar” (13).

This statement exemplifies two defining tactics of the review. First, ridicule. Every graduate student with even just a sub-field exam in Qing history is aware of the existence of the palace memorial system. Accusing me of being unfamiliar with it is absurd. It is a ridiculous and cheap insult that fails to actually impugn my credibility (since nobody could genuinely doubt that I have heard of the palace memorial system), but succeeds in setting a tone of ridicule that makes a series of jokes about my ineptitude and incompetence possible, where straightforward and direct accusations would have been immediately dismissed by discerning readers.

Second, the reviewer proclaims triumph over their own straw man by pointing out that other explanations for the eighteenth-century evolution of the Qing administration exist. To which I say: yes. The Qing operated one of the largest and most sophisticated bureaucracies in the early modern world. A full understanding of the history of the empire must take many facets into account, and the palace memorial system is one. But the fact that the development of this system of secret communication has been invoked by other historians to explain several features of Qing governance does not mean that other subjects, such as the en masse incorporation of in-province reporting into empire-wide routines of scrutiny, should not be studied. The reviewer is certainly entitled to their opinion that the palace memorial system explains every question that they have about the history of Qing administration. But it does not answer all of my questions, which is why I wrote Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine.

This combination of straw man argumentation and ridicule is the bread-and-butter offensive strategy of the reviewer (who, in another example of this tactic on page 5 of the review, concludes from a typo on page 164 of the book that I do not know how to distinguish between the executive and legislative branches of the United States government). We will see this combination deployed again in the examples to come.

Although this tactic repeatedly invokes the authority of established research in the field to lodge claims of error and incompetence, these straw man fallacies and bursts of ridicule offer no critical engagement whatsoever with the arguments of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine. The reviewer's effort to invalidate rather than engage my research leads us away from dialogue or debate.

Example Two: Whataboutism

Another commonly used tactic of the review is whataboutism: the demand that I cannot be granted enough credibility to say anything without having demonstrated expertise about everything. For example, in the section “Problems and Overall Assessment” (3) the reviewer raises the concern that I do not fully and precisely describe the location of all of the component parts of the Qing central archive from the fall of the dynasty until the second half of the twentieth century. The accusations in this section suggest that, like a chain of custody for evidence in a police investigation, I should be required to account for the exact location of every imperial dossier from the fall of the dynasty until the present day if I would like scholars to treat anything I say about the history of early Qing archival practices as valid.

What is the reviewer's basis for making such an extraordinary demand? It is certainly not any claim that I have made. The prologue of the book does not pretend to provide a comprehensive survey of the provenance of the Qing imperial archives. On the contrary, this section of the introduction sketches the twentieth-century history of the Qing archive to argue that this period was an aberration in a much longer history of state control over archival documents.

The insistence that I should fully recite the provenance and possession of every document that was preserved, lost, re-acquired, collected, collated, digitized, indexed, and later made available (or made unavailable) for study before being able to say anything about the history of the Qing archive constitutes an unreasonable demand that I demonstrate expertise in affairs that are not my subject of study before being allowed to contribute my own research observations to a larger conversation. Like the straw man fallacy and ridicule noted in the first example, this tactic of whataboutism prevents academic engagement rather than promoting it.

Example Three: Misrepresentation

While the two examples above, if the reader takes the most generous possible position, may be attributed to the reviewer's failure to closely read and understand the arguments of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, the third example (11–12) shows the extent to which the claims of the review rely upon active misrepresentations of the arguments explicitly made in the book. Importantly, in this example and the other instances like it, it is the reviewer's incorrect characterization of what was and was not said in the book that serves as the foundation of false accusations of academic misconduct.

The most flagrant example of the reviewer's failure to seriously grapple with the claims of my work as it was written is their insistence that the summary memorials I describe “seem to exist only in Dykstra's imagination; she offers no proof that the paperwork that provincial administrations submitted to the central ministries had indeed proliferated during the Qianlong reign” (11). To be clear, the documentary phenomena I discuss are not discoveries of my own, but commonly observed features of Qing administration to which I am applying a new analytical language. I do not claim to have discovered that the Qianlong era witnessed an exponential growth in the size and frequency of reports; this is simply a known fact. This section of the book, then, was not trying to prove something that everyone knows. It merely uses the summary memorials of the eighteenth century as an example to illustrate how these “reports of reports” (158) both reflect and obscure the increasingly sophisticated routinizing information-gathering standards mandated by the central court.

In making the accusation that I have hallucinated or invented historical materials, the reviewer ignores the three pages of the book (157–159) that describe the methods and reasoning by which I reconstructed the reporting processes and digitization choices that led first to the creation of “mega-memorial” packets and then to their disambiguation into single digitized documents no longer linked to their original bundles. The reviewer's claim that these documents exist only in my imagination is made by expressly ignoring my recapitulation of this reconstruction of archival practices and failing to engage my transparent explanation of the reasoning behind it. Actively ignoring the text of a book under review to lodge false accusations is not simply a failure to engage work in an academic manner. It is dissembling.

Example Four: Translation Quibbles

Now that we have noted some of the most common tactics of the review—straw man argumentation, substituting ridicule for rigor, whataboutism, and misrepresentation—we will delve into two longer, more involved examples to show how these elements combine with other questionable choices of the reviewer to convey the appearance of academic authority without the substance of it.

The first example (13-15) tackles one of the most prominent themes of the review: quibbles about translation. This section will examine one of the passages critiqued by the reviewer to make two main points. First, that the reviewer's chastising remarks cannot be mistaken for justified condescension because the reviewer's own attempts to correct my translations introduce multiple errors. Second, that the review fails to shed any light on fundamental problems of translating Qing administrative texts because it chooses not to engage worthwhile questions about method and convention, instead launching false or frivolous accusations. Like the examples discussed above, the reviewer emphasizes minor technical issues for cheap (usually hollow) victories at the cost of neglecting interesting and substantial discussion. Opportunities for thoughtful critique are passed over so that a few underwhelming quibbles can serve as fodder for innuendos of wrongdoing where no proof of such exists.

I have broken down the passage discussed on pages 13 to 15 of the review into five tables so that my original rendering and my own corrections to that original rendering are documented in the leftmost column. The middle column, “Original,” contains the Chinese text of the source as produced in the review (minus the emphasis added by the reviewer). The final column, “Review,” quotes the reviewer's comments (Table 1).

Table 1. Differences of Translation, Section One

The reviewer accuses me of “adding … words” to “change … the tone of the text” (14) by specifically pointing out my use of the terms “every,” “all,” and “each.” The reviewer is here suggesting that I have introduced content not in the original by translating a sentence-opening condition—the terms fan (in each case) and yi ying (every)—at the beginning of each object it qualifies. Other translators may have made other decisions, but my decision to carry over a condition applying to all elements of the sentence by reiterating it before each individual instance of those objects is valid. Furthermore, I do not believe that so minimal a choice of wording could do much to influence a reader's understanding. This quibble is especially minor.

In spite of this, the reviewer uses this choice of mine to claim that I have falsified the contents of this source text to make it “sound like an urgent, passionate command” (14). But the problem with this accusation is that my book repeatedly and explicitly disavows an interest in ferreting out the motivations or feelings of individual historical actors in shaping the evolution of the empire of routine.

In the introduction to Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, I warn readers that my quest to highlight routine over innovation requires me to frame the principle-agent problems of empire in aggregate rather than as millions of single choices made by tens of thousands of actors over the course of a century. This leads me to posit that, while each actor has his own ambitions and intentions, each individual's agency aggregates in a field of textual representation bounded by the demands of standardization and legibility. As I explain:

As I summarize earlier in the introductory chapter, “Although the narrative of administrative transformation at the heart of this story is full of the cat-and-mouse games played by some historical actors in their attempts to monitor and curtail the actions of others, the proper subject of this story is the mousetrap itself” (5).

Having explicitly stated that the narrative of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine is not concerned with any particular individual rationale for institutional change, what motivation could I possibly have to modify texts so that they give a false impression of the passions of the Yongzheng emperor? The answer is: none. I have no motivation to have modified the original text to suggest what the reviewer claims I am suggesting. This is a minor quibble used by the reviewer to fuel an insupportable claim. An accusation as serious as fraudulently characterizing historical texts to suit an argument should not be levied without certain proof. Here there is none at all.

Table 2 provides a rough translation of the section of the passage that I elide from the middle of my translation. I offer this text and a tentative translation merely for the sake of completeness, in case its contents bear on readers’ interpretations of related points.

Table 2. Additional Text

The review makes the following claim about the text featured in Table 3: “Dykstra misreads a string of sentences in the middle of the passage, making her translation contradict the meaning of the original” (14). The reviewer is correct that I have missed a subtlety that changes the translation of the passage. I took the verb tuo (脫) in the sense of “to separate from or leave,” rather than the more accurate “to be entrusted to” in this case, and neng (能) as “to be able” instead of “to be permitted,” which is the proper sense here. In Table 3 I have modified my original translation by striking out the less accurate portions of the original and producing, in bold text, my own emendation. The change makes no difference to the argument being made in the book, but the reviewer's rendering of this clause is closer to the original.

Table 3. Differences of Translation, Section Two

The reviewer's translation of this passage, however, introduces new errors. The subject of this command is the archive. It is a statement with multiple clauses that spans the first and second tables, concluding only with the phrase “各有典守之官稽查引據.” Failing to have correctly parsed the sentence, the reviewer has inserted an unaccounted-for “we” in their translation. This “we” is credited with having “strictly closed off the archived case files.” Because “we” denied the ministries access to their own archives, ministerial officials are supposed—in the reviewer's translation—to be relying on clerks for access because, for some unspecified reason, clerks are able to access the sealed archives that officials cannot themselves access.

The reviewer's translation paints a nonsensical picture by inserting actors and assigning them agency beyond the scope of the text.

On the basis of their own inaccurate translation, the reviewer claims that “By omitting crucial information” in this passage about the Yongzheng emperor's motivations for this reform “in the original text, Dykstra distorts the meaning and purpose of this policy to make it fit her story” (14–15). The reviewer is once more accusing me of committing academic malfeasance by modifying materials to suit a thesis that the book explicitly disavows. This is an insupportable claim.

In Table 4, I have amended my original translation of this section of the passage based on the recommendation of one of the scholars who volunteered their time to double-check my work, to apply the qualifier “new and old” (xinjiu 新舊) to modify the incoming and outgoing officials, rather than the archival dossiers. The reviewer missed this mistake, instead accusing me of two errors that spring from their own ignorance.

Table 4. Differences of Translation, Section Three

First, the reviewer asks which of these words mean “audit.” The answer is “jiaopan (交盤).” This common administrative term is short for jiaodai pancha (交代盤查) and means “to interrogate and examine [upon the] transfer of office.” Audit is the most common translation of this term.

Second, the reviewer asks why I translated “shuo tang” (說堂) as “read it aloud before his superiors,” where no character meaning “superior” can be found in the sentence. Indeed, none of the words for “superior” appear in the text. A word-for-word rendering would read something like: each (各)—provide (具)—pledge (甘結)—proclaim (說)—hall (堂), which, if we translate it simply, would read “prepare a pledge and proclaim it in the hall.”

Why did I determine that these pledges were read in front of superiors? The word “hall” (tang 堂), here, refers to a space inside of a yamen where official business is handled. Since the decree requires that both the incoming and outgoing official must present these pledges and announce their contents in an official hall, it struck me as common sense that this scene wasn't being played out between the incoming and outgoing officials, alone. Someone had to receive these pledges. That someone should be a superior official. I presumed (and still do) that the pledges were handed over and their contents recited in the hall of whatever superior officer(s) received them. We may yet learn that my assumption was wrong, but my original translation remains most likely, not least because the formal drafts of case files pertaining to the transfer of office would be archived (cun'an 存案)—the last two words of the passage—in superior offices. It stands to reason, until we uncover evidence to the contrary, that this edict requires officials to take their pledges and registers to a superior office to submit them while making a formal declaration.

Table 5 does not include my own translation because the final sentences of this passage are not translated in the book. The reviewer claims that this text supports their own theory about the motivations of the Yongzheng emperor (which revolves around the employment of clerks). But the reviewer has inserted the word “scribes” into their translation although the original text is not specifically about these actors, being instead a general statement about malfeasance.

Table 5. Differences of Translation, Section Four

The reviewer then demands to know “Why would Dykstra focus on a pledge during office transfers?” (14). The short answer to this question is that the transfer of office is the subject of that section of the book. But further, in this passage we can clearly see that the transfer of office procedures is mentioned not once, but twice (although admittedly one of these mentions uses the term jiaopan, with which the reviewer is apparently unfamiliar).

I do not consider spotting minor errors in a translation to be proof of academic excellence. But if the reviewer wants to impugn my credibility on the basis of their own translations, those translations should be accurate.

This is my first claim regarding the reviewer's arguments about translation: that the reviewer is not expert enough to serve as arbiter of the quality of my renderings. The second claim is even more important. The reviewer's very definition of quality is not compelling. Differences of translation are not points to be racked up in a winner-takes-all game of expertise. The translations offered in the book were not presented as exacting character-for-character renderings and there is no reason they should be judged as such. Nothing is proven by simply demonstrating that the passages quoted in my book are not the most literal translations possible. Perhaps the problems of translation raised in this review could have been much more productively critiqued as the product of the choice I made to not render the texts as closely as possible to their literal, surface meaning. This is a choice that I still stand by, but it is a choice with a trade-off that a skilled reviewer could have teased out some of the surrounding nuance to offer up for readers’ contemplation. Instead of a rewarding discussion about the types of precision or equivalence desirable in translating administrative regulations, however, the reviewer merely picks at unimportant details to introduce their own misreading.

As this quibble-by-quibble review of just one passage illustrates, the translation of these administrative texts is a technical art whose practice relies upon a combination of linguistic precision as well as basic and sometimes provisional understandings of administrative processes, in addition to a dose of common sense (which, in spite of the name, is never commonly held). I can be accused of not treating my texts with enough precision to extract every subtle detail from the characters assembled. Be that as it may, I would assert that even though multiple of my translations might contain mistakes if they are evaluated on their merit as precise literal renderings (which is not the spirit in which they were offered), the reviewer has, once more, passed up a chance for interesting intellectual engagement to take a few pot shots.

Example Five: Smoke and Mirrors

The first four examples each highlighted specific tactics, fallacies, and types of error found throughout the review. This fifth and final example will take a different approach. Instead of demonstrating one particular trait using a specific example, it surveys a roughly three-page section of the review to demonstrate how these already highlighted features combine into a profusion of misleading claims. This section will show how, while the accusations of the review might initially seem overwhelming, what appears at first sight to be a remarkable amount of evidence of error can be revealed, upon closer examination, as nothing more than smoke and mirrors. For this purpose, we will examine the section titled “Archival Turn in the Provincial and Local Administrations,” (15-18) which, in spite of its length, contains not a single substantive critique.

The first quibble spans the second and third paragraphs of the section. The reviewer claims that I have inadequately proved a documentary proliferation in the provinces for having given only one example in a sentence that explicitly claims to offer only a single example (“A 1723 regulation, for example, required that personnel hired in gubernatorial yamen be documented with pledges from their superior officials,” 121, emphasis added). Like the instance of whataboutism in Example Two, here the reviewer is making an extraordinary demand for proof where the text is merely offering an example.

At the conclusion of the third paragraph, the reviewer further accuses me of having “simply added” content to the regulation under discussion because “the original text never mentions ‘pledges from their superior officials.’” (15) This portion employs the tactics reviewed in Example Four: the reviewer uses a small quibble related to translation to introduce a much larger claim that I have tampered with evidence.

It is true that the command contains neither the term ganjie (甘結) nor the term baojie (保結), which are the phrases most commonly translated as “pledge.” The practice to which I am referring is the filing of registers with central ministries by the recommenders (tuijianzhe 舉薦者) of yamen underlings. If a reader takes issue with glossing this practice as filing “pledges from superior officials,” the text of the passage might be rewritten as something like “be documented with reports from their superior officials.” Regardless of which translation someone may prefer, the point being made in the text of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine remains the same: the Yongzheng administration was requiring more documentation of administrative actions and personnel in the provinces.

The fourth paragraph is spent correcting an error (my translating “Every time a banditry case is encountered” where I should have translated “In each case when a suspect is transported from a neighboring province”) which was a simple mistake that in no way alters the point being made. The reviewer makes extraneous remarks about how I have “mistranslated a passage in a way that supports [my] claims” (15) but, as discussed above in Example Four, the reviewer's claim pertains to the motivations for the regulation and does not bear on the arguments made in the book.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs of the section accuse me of failing to understand that local protocols for the transfer of office (jiaodai 交代) predate the Yongzheng era, and failing to understand that these procedures could be extremely rigorous even before the eighteenth century. In fact, the point of this section of the book is that “Many innovations from [the Yongzheng] period required the documentation or formalization of local standards for administrative processes that were not determined or supervised by the central state.” (Uncertainty, 121) The argument is about a proliferation of standardizing central regulations about local reports, not the invention of rigorous transfer procedures at the local level, which I explicitly remark already existed prior to the Yongzheng era (124–125). This entire section of the review purports to disprove something I never claim by introducing facts that are already attested to in the text of the book. This is yet another example of the straw man fallacy.

The eighth paragraph of this section is another example of ridicule substituting for rigorous engagement. The reviewer quotes what they describe as “most puzzling paragraphs in the book,” (17) accusing me of taking “artistic liberty” when I write that:

To this claim, the review responds with a series of pointed questions:

Rather than addressing a substantive issue for critique, the reviewer merely poses a series of misdirecting questions. Some are completely beyond the matter at hand; others are the main subject of discussion in the entire second half of the book.

I stand by my assertion that filing reports on local conditions made each and every one of the claims in those reports subject to scrutiny. Being held accountable for reports is quite distinct from the question of whether or not magistrates went to extraordinary lengths to ensure their accuracy (although many did, in spite of the fact that the reviewer finds this ridiculous).

The last several paragraphs of this section of the review illustrate two basic features of the quibble-to-innuendo cycle. First is whataboutism: the reviewer complains that in a sentence in the book summarizing several changes in the eighteenth century, I should have offered citations to more materials (specifically, to materials from the nineteenth century and later) to illustrate the assertion being made. The aims of the quibble-to-innuendo cycle are accomplished by turning a minor complaint into a sinister plot or a scandalous failure. Not every sentence in every history book contains references to every phenomenon discussed in the sentence, least of all the synoptic statements at the beginnings and endings of sections and chapters. A summarizing sentence without references is a common occurrence. It is not a smoking gun.

Furthermore, even if multiple references to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals could be useful to readers, the fact that those citations are not attached to the sentence does not invalidate its claims, and certainly does not support the reviewer's accusation that the book “builds major claims almost entirely on misrepresented sources.” (18) Here, as elsewhere, the reviewer demands that I prove every single statement I make to earn the privilege of offering my observations. This bad-faith assumption defines the review: it sets standards for dialogue so high that it refuses, rather than promotes, debate.