Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period/Hao Shuo
HAO Shuo 郝碩 (T. 冀軒), d. 1784, member of the Chinese Bordered Yellow Banner, and official who was active in the cause of the literary inquisition, was a native of Pa-chou, Chihli. His father, Hao Yü-lin 郝玉麟 (T. 敬亭, d. 1745), a member of the Chinese Bordered White Banner, distinguished himself in military service in Yunnan and was given the minor hereditary rank of Ch'i-tu-yü 騎都尉. He was promoted to be a member of the Chinese Bordered Yellow Banner in 1734 while he was governor-general of Fukien and Chekiang. Involved in 1739 in a bribery case, he was degraded and was in 1740 made a junior vice-president of the Board of Punishments. He resigned the following year, but shortly thereafter was involved in a yet more serious bribery case with a Manchu official in consequence of which he was deprived of all titles.
Hao Shuo's career was not unlike that of his father. Inheriting his father's rank of Ch'i-itu-yü, he was appointed captain in his Banner in 1753. He became successively second class secretary of the Board of Revenue (1756), senior secretary of the same, intendant of the Têng-Lai-Ch'ing Circuit in Shantung (1762), provincial judge in Chekiang (1770), assistant director of military supplies in the Chin-ch'uan War (see under A-kuei), and financial commissioner of Chekiang (1774). In 1775, as earnest of the emperor's regard for his sincerity and loyalty he was granted the privilege of wearing the peacock plumes, and two years later (February 1777) was promoted to be governor of Shantung.
Meanwhile the literary inquisition under Emperor Kao-tsung was gathering headway in all the provinces. In Kiangsi the governor, Hai-ch'êng 海成, a Manchu, though sufficiently energetic in the cause to draw praise from the Emperor in an edict dated January 21, 1777, was to prove derelict ten months later and was summarily removed and disgraced (see under Wang Hsi-hou). Hao Shuo was put in his place. There he remained for seven years, years in which he became possibly the most efficient book inquisitor in all China. Although Kiangsi was not outstanding as a centre of scholarship during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no province except Kiangsu had as many authors whose productions were censored or put to the torch during the latter half of Ch'ien-lung's reign. The responsibility for this seems to rest indubitably with the governor, spurred on as he was by the memory of his predecessor's sudden fall from favor, and the emperor's flattery. The end came suddenly on June 5, 1784 when he was summoned to the capital, accused of exacting money from his subordinates. He confessed in full to the bill of complaints made against him. The Grand Secretaries and the ministers of the nine Boards and Courts who tried his case, held that he deserved harsher punishment than Kuo-t'ai (see under Ch'ien Fêng), Manchu governor of Shantung from 1777 to 1782, who had likewise overtaxed his people, and whose case runs through many pages of the Tung-hua lu. They therefore recommended execution in the market place. The emperor, however, commuted this sentence to death by his own hand.
[1/345/6a; 11/36/33b; Tung-hua lu 99/11b; L. C. Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung, pp. 157-166.]