Infrastructure of Invisibility: Public Mortuary in Modern China

Abstract

Since 1860s, Municipal Council and western assessors in Mixed Court, had constantly been intervening Qing's district magistrate's jurisdiction over Chinese subject and treaty-unrepresented foreigners in Shanghai settlement. Foucauldian techniques, death registration and anatomy-based forensic medicine, were central to western governmentality and extraterritoriality in 19th-century Shanghai. Scientific modernity constituted a sense of West superiority over China’s criminal justice and forensic inquest—standardized external postmortem examination guided by Washing Away of Wrongs. Indeed, the western physician and coroner kept demanding to take over crucial inquests in settlement for alleged public health and judiciary efficiency consideration till 1900s. The 19th-century English beleaguered coronership in home, however, Qing and British flexible multi-ethics governances, complicate our understanding of the Western forensic modernity in Shanghai settlement. Most importantly, despite western physician had proven the strength of autopsy in detecting pathological cause of unnatural death—revealing “fact” to Qing officials. However, the efficacy of inquest lied more in exhibiting the “truth” and leading to “justice”, than scientific “fact” alien to indigenous knowledge in modern China. Truth and justice were not only linked to measurement of penalty by Qing Code, but also history-rooted and locally perceived ideas requiring consensus among participants in litigation. Only with interrogating relatives of deceased, and prestigious members in local communities, and referring to body evidence stipulated in official diagram of inquest, the manslaughter litigation can be adjudicated with less appeal. Traditional inquest was by no mean a single “technique”, but a set of “technology” embedded in sociotechnical system which was hard to accommodate a radically different forensic medicine. Modern forensic medicine had never prevailed over traditional practices in Shanghai, until 1920s when laboratories and modern mortuary for isolating furious and desperate relatives of deceased, new criminal justice aiming for abolishing extraterritoriality, and social discourse pursuing scientific fact, transformed the landscape of Washing-Injustice-Away technology.