Impersonating a Police Officer in Qing China
This draft centers on the common impersonations of Yamen runners and constables. There have been numerous records that indicate impersonators and exploring their schemes. The first chapter explores the “role of the Qing policeman” and the groups and ranks of each person. All the members of the police were responsible of reporting criminal activities to the heads as well to the government. The failure to do so would result in punishment. The rest of the story goes on to talk about the ranks of other officers but since the draft is pretty much centered on the constables, let’s skip ahead and talk about who they were. The constables were known to be the poorest and most despised of the people in the police force. Many considered them to be criminal like. Sources come to tell how “constables, thieves and bandits were pretty much all the same people” However, the role of the constable was a powerful one since they had the authority to extort a victim, ransack their homes for interrogation purposes, and force a confession from a person. The next chapter focuses on the “Police Imposter’s”. It starts off with a case that was reported about a young boy named Liu who is unemployed and had been planning to serve as a constable, one day he sees a thief and decides to go over and accuse him of his crime. He tells the thief that he is a constable and puts the thief in shackles and takes him to his friends place upon further interrogation. The story goes on to say how the boy Liu interrogates and beats the thief up and on the 5th day sees that he has died. Frightened upon getting caught, he flees away from the crime scene, but in the end he is caught and sentenced to decapitation for murder. In the Draft the writer raised a lot of good questions like “How could you identify one to be a constable”. The story never told about how the appearance of a constable was like and how they would