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Authors: Yuri Pines

Tags: #General, #History, #Ancient, #Political Science, #Asia, #History & Theory, #China

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In theory, the Chinese emperor was the single most powerful human being in the world. His exaltedness was, above all, symbolic: by the mere fact of his singularity, the emperor personified the supreme principle of the realm’s unity, while in his capacity as the “Son of Heaven,” he acted as the sole mediator with and representative of the highest deity, Heaven. The emperor presided over the elaborate system of state rituals and performed (personally or through substitutes) manifold sacrifices through which he supposedly ensured his subjects’ well-being. His sacredness was conceived of as “matching” (
pei
) Heaven itself; hence he could promote or demote any deity or abolish any cult. He was venerated as the supreme regulator of time and space: years were counted according to his reign

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titles, and the annual ritual calendar was invalid without his approval. Elaborate rites elevated him to superhuman heights; his body and his paraphernalia were considered sacrosanct and any harm to them regarded as the gravest crime; even his personal name was tabooed. The emperor’s august presence was disseminated throughout society down to its lowest levels through a variety of ceremonies, legends, and even proverbs.
2
The institution of emperorship was the ritual pivot of the Chinese polity from 221 BCE until the early twentieth century; during that lengthy period China without an emperor was as inconceivable as the Catholic Church without a pope.

The symbolic importance of the emperor was duly matched by the magnitude of real power that he was expected to hold. The emperor was the chief administrator, legislator, and judge of the realm; he was its commander in chief, supreme pontiff, and top educator; he was the nominal possessor of all the property “within the seas”; no important decision or major appointment could be valid without his explicit approval. There were no institutional limitations to his power; no group enjoyed legal autonomy from his will; and the official discourse often referred to him as a superhuman Sage (
sheng
), postulating the emperor’s moral and intellectual, in addition to political, superiority over his subjects. Few if any monarchs in human history could rival the theoretical power of their Chinese counterparts.
3

In the eyes of many Western observers, such as Montesquieu (16891755), the hugeness of the Chinese emperor’s power turned him into the paradigmatic “oriental despot”; and this view eventually gained prominence in China as well, with the advent of republicanism in the early twentieth century.
4
There is no doubt that there was significant despotic potential in the institution of the emperorship, and that at times it was fully realized; yet, as I shall show below, reducing the Chinese empire to a millennia-long tyranny would be far too simplistic. First, the emperor’s whims were normally checked—with varying degrees of success—by the members of the powerful and self-aware bureaucratic stratum, who could employ such means as moral suasion, active or passive noncompliance, or even veiled threats of rebellion to discourage the monarch from abusing his power. Second, and more significant, the imperial bureaucrats developed a subtle and yet efficient system of “checks and balances” through which they were able to direct all but the most strongwilled monarchs toward collégial modes of decision making and relegation of power to the ministers. Quite surprisingly, the supposedly omnipotent monarch was more often than not reduced to a nullity, a rubber stamp in the hands of his nominal aides, a person with limited impact even on his family affairs, to say nothing of the concerns of “All-under-Heaven.”

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In retrospect, Chinese emperorship appears as a curious construction that combined the principle of the monarch’s limitless power with multifarious attempts to prevent this power from damaging the sociopolitical fabric. This coexistence of two conflicting impulses was maintained through a subtle and yet discernible bifurcation between the monarchy as an institution and the monarch as an individual. Institutionally speaking, the emperor was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent—in other words, all but divine. Personally, however, it was tacitly recognized that his abilities might be limited and his morality flawed, and that his individual input in political processes should therefore remain circumscribed. The solution was not neat: the complete depersonalization of the emperor was neither practical nor desirable, and the precise degree of tolerable intervention by the emperor in everyday administration was never agreed upon. Nonetheless, amid continuous tension, the Chinese variant of “checks and balances” proved to be viable enough to survive for more than two millennia, occasional malfunctions notwithstanding.

 

THE EMERGENCE OF MONARCHISM

Like the idea of the unity of “All-under-Heaven,” the notion of an omnipotent monarch is often traced to the earliest stages of China’s political history. As early as the Shang period, the kings were exceptionally influential political players, leading the armies, initiating public works, maintaining friendly ties with neighboring polities, and—arguably most important of all—performing a variety of divinations and sacrificial rituals to ascertain the deities’ attitudes toward royal undertakings and to ensure their support through appropriate offerings. In the Shang, as in many primordial polities elsewhere, there was no clear demarcation between “the state” and its leader: the king was his polity’s sole center of gravity. To maintain their authority, the Shang kings had to travel continuously throughout their realm, personally displaying their majesty to subjects and allies alike. The importance of the king’s personal abilities for the proper maintenance of the realm may explain the Shang’s complex system of lateral succession (passing the throne from an elder to a younger brother and then back to the elder brother’s son), which ensured that the throne was occupied by a mature leader. Arguably, more than any later monarchs in China’s history, the Shang kings could proclaim, “L’État c’est Moi” (I am the State).
5

It would be tempting to draw a direct line from the Shang kings to later emperors and to claim that monarchism has been an essential feature of Chinese civilization since time immemorial; but this assertion would run counter to historical evidence. Actually, as time passed and a more sophisticated state apparatus came into existence, the king’s per

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sonal impact on political affairs declined. The political and military significance of the kings from the middle to late Western Zhou period appears markedly lesser than that of their Shang and early Western Zhou predecessors; even in religious terms the kings lost part of their power, as they no longer held a monopoly on performing divination. Nonetheless, the idea of the rulers’ preferential access to the divine, and of their ability to mediate between the superhuman Powers and the community of the living, remained intact. Adopting the proud title of “Sons of Heaven,” the Zhou kings claimed that they ruled by Heaven’s Decree (or Mandate), and maintained the exclusive right to perform sacrifices to this supreme deity. In addition, they had preferential access to the deified ancestors of the ruling clan, whose support was essential for the living kin. Rulers on the lower levels of the Zhou sociopolitical pyramid similarly possessed supreme pontifical power within their communities.
6

In these supreme, exclusive, lifelong, and nondispersible pontifical powers of the community’s leader, it is not difficult to identify the foundations of the monarchistic mind-set that became characteristic of Chinese civilization for millennia to come. Yet in the short term, the rulers’ preferential access to the supramundane powers did not suffice to ensure their earthly authority. As described in the previous chapter, the Springsand-Autumns period was marked by progressive disintegration of the sociopolitical order, and nowhere was this process manifested with greater clarity than in the sovereigns’ declining power. First, the authority of the Sons of Heaven was eclipsed by regional lords; then these lords were in turn challenged by powerful aristocrats, who appropriated most of the military, economic, and administrative power in the regional states. As the lords’ religious prestige could no longer ensure their effective authority, many of them were assassinated, expelled, or otherwise humiliated by their nominal underlings. The plight of regional lords is exemplified by the offer made in 544 BCE by the ousted Lord Xian of Wei to the local potentate Ning Xi: “If you let me return [to Wei], all the administration will be in the hands of the Ning lineage, while I shall [only control the] sacrifices.”
7
In dire straits, a lord was apparently willing to embrace the position of a ritual figurehead!

The aggravating deterioration of the ruler’s power during the sixthfifth centuries BCE contributed to what turned into the deepest systemic crisis in China’s long history. Most polities throughout the Zhou world became entangled in a web of debilitating power struggles between powerful nobles and the lords, among aristocratic lineages, and among rival branches within some of these lineages, in addition to endless wars with foreign powers. Weakened rulers were unable to rein in the forces of disintegration, which threatened the very survival of the polity. In 453 BCE, the crisis reached its nadir, as one of the richest and militarily most sue

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cessful states of the Springs-and-Autumns period, Jin, disintegrated and was divided among three major ministerial lineages. Yet this collapse of the erstwhile superpower marked the turning point in preimperial history. The “scheming ministers” who dissolved the state of Jin—heads of the Wei, Han, and Zhao lineages—were determined to avoid the mistake of their mother state and to prevent further disintegration. They were the first to launch a series of reforms aimed at solidifying the ruler’s authority, weakening alternative loci of power, and establishing centralized control over the localities. These successful reforms were emulated and deepened in other polities, bringing about an entirely new entity, which Mark E. Lewis aptly names a “ruler-centered state.”
8

It is not my intention here to analyze the practical aspects of the resurrection of politically potent rulership during the Warring States period, as this analysis has been successfully performed elsewhere.
9
What is important for our discussion, however, is that the administrative and social reforms were paralleled by a deep ideological transformation, namely, the advent of the ideology of monarchism. Thinkers of various convictions put forward a variety of ideas to bolster the ruler’s authority. Thus ritual specialists, associated with Confucius and his followers, emphasized the importance of preserving the exclusive ritual prerogatives of the rulers on each of the levels of the Zhou sociopolitical pyramid, and facilitated the widening of sumptuary distinctions between the ruler and his underlings. Moralistic thinkers from Mozi to Mengzi promoted the idea that the ruler should serve as the ultimate source of moral inspiration for his subjects; and while criticizing current immoral sovereigns, they unhesitantly adopted the view that universal morality could prevail only in a strictly ruler-centered political order. Other thinkers provided metaphysical underpinnings for the ruler’s exaltedness: they averred that the ruler’s superiority, like that of Heaven above, reflects fundamental cosmic laws; hence, while an individual ruler or even a dynasty may be replaced, the monarchic political order remains inviolable. Thinkers’ arguments differed, and so did their practical proposals, but all of them—from the staunchly authoritarian Han Feizi (d. 233 BCE) to the relentless critic of the reigning lords, Mengzi—agreed that monarchy was the only conceivable political system, and that only the monarch could represent the common good of his subjects and constrain divisive private interests. It is their consensus, violated only by a radical critic of organized society, Zhuangzi (d. ca. 280 BCE), that turned monarchism into a perennial feature of Chinese political culture.
10

Of the manifold ideological developments during the period under discussion the one that deserves utmost attention is the strong authoritarian trend in administrative thought of the Warring States period. Amid a great variety of divergent and at times mutually exclusive admin

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istrative proposals, not a single one was put forth to impose institutional limitations on the ruler’s power. While most thinkers urged the ruler to consult his aides, and none considered the sovereign’s decisions to be intrinsically infallible, it was nonetheless universally agreed that the ruler should have the final say on any matter of importance, and that nobody should have the right to overrule his decisions. Thus, despite the strong self-confidence of the intellectuals of the Warring States period (see chapter 3), and despite their widespread dissatisfaction with current rulers, none of these proud thinkers ever suggested a kind of “constitutional monarchy” with a “council of worthies” routinely approving or disapproving the ruler’s policies. We find no ideas of oligarchy or of other collective modes of rulership; strict monarchism remains the singularly acceptable mode of rule.

This consensus during what was surely the most creative period in the history of Chinese political thought is indicative of the depth of the thinkers’ commitment to the principle of monarchism. Their aversion to decentralization and fear of the coexistence of competing loci of power— either in an individual state, or, as discussed in the previous chapter, in the entire subcelestial realm—brought them to the conviction that only under a single omnipotent sovereign would the political system become truly sustainable. Like the army, the state should be structured by an unbreakable chain of command headed by an unquestioned leader, and as in the army, preserving the leader’s authority is essential, even when the leader’s individual abilities can be questioned. Numerous texts of that period reiterate: “Oneness [of the ruler] brings orderly rule; doubleness brings chaos.”
11
The first of the epigraphs heading this chapter succinctly presents this view.

BOOK: The Everlasting Empire
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