6. Army Board or Ministry of War (instituted 1906).[34]
7. Board of Judicature.
8. Board of Agriculture, Works and Commerce (instituted 1903).
9. Board of dependencies.
10. Board of Education (instituted 1903).
11. Board of Communications (instituted 1906).
Each board has one president and two vice-presidents, with the exception of the Wai-wu Pu, which has a comptroller-general and two presidents, and the Boards of War and Education, each of which has a comptroller-general in addition to the president. According to the decree of 1906 no distinction, in filling up the various boards, is to be made between Manchu and Chinese.
Besides the boards named there are other departments of state, some of them not limited to any one branch of the public service. The more important are those that follow:—
The Censorate (Tu Ch‘a Yuen).—An institution peculiar to China. The constitution provides a paid body of men whose duty it is to inform the emperor of all facts affecting the welfare of the people and the conduct of government, and in particular to keep an eye on the malfeasance of his officers. These men are termed Yü shih (imperial recorder), generally translated censors. Their office has existed since the 3rd century B.C. The body consists of two presidents, a Chinese and a Manchu, 24 supervising censors attached to the ministries at Peking, and 56 censors, divided into fifteen divisions, each division taking a particular province or area, so as to embrace the whole eighteen provinces, besides one metropolitan division. The censors are privileged to animadvert on the conduct even of the emperor himself; to censure the manner in which all other officials perform or neglect their duties and to denounce them to the throne. They receive appeals made to the emperor, either by the people against the officials or by subordinate officials against their superiors. They exercise, in accord with the Board of Justice, an oversight over all criminal cases and give their opinion whenever the death penalty is to be pronounced. They superintend the working of the different boards and are sometimes sent to various places as imperial inspectors, hence they are called êrh mu kuan (the eyes and ears of the emperor). The censors exercise their office at times with great boldness;[35] their advice if unpalatable may be disregarded and the censor in question degraded. The system of the censorate lends itself to espionage and to bribery, and it is said to be more powerful for mischief than for good. With the growth in influence of the native press the institution appears to lose its raison d’être.
The grand court of revision (Ta-li sze) or Court of Cassation exercises, in conjunction with the Board of Justice and the Censorate, a general supervision over the administration of the criminal law. These bodies are styled collectively San-fah sze (the Three High Justices).