The Everlasting Empire (25 page)

In this situation, the officials could not fulfill their responsibilities without reliance on members of local society. It is against this background that the social proximity between the elites and the officials became particularly important. The elite members were natural allies of the magistrate. Having a similar educational background, speaking the uniform “officials’ language” (“Mandarin”), and having the right to access the magistrate directly, they were the obvious choice when magistrates needed advice or allies in times of need. The elite members, many of whom were either related to officials or themselves potential officeholders, were also close to the magistrate culturally and ideologically; and many of them were genuinely imbued with public-mindedness and willingness to serve the community. It was only natural that officials utilized this spirit and mobilized the elites to perform a variety of administrative, economic, and even judicial tasks on the local level, alleviating the pressure on the officialdom.

Local elites were ideal intermediaries between the state and the local society: they acted as voluntary aides to the magistrate, performing their tasks out of sheer commitment to their lofty moral goals, or—according to a more cynical interpretation—out of the need to preserve their exalted status in the local community. They were instrumental in such fields as education, welfare, public works, local security, moral instruction to the community, and resolution of local conflicts. They could run a local school, a Confucian temple, a charitable granary; gather the villagers for

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periodic ritual performances and instruct them to behave morally; control their neighbors and kin; train a local militia unit; and initiate construction or maintenance of roads, bridges, dams, irrigation ditches, and other public facilities in their localities. Although the practical involvement of the elites in these and other matters differed considerably over time and space, their overall contribution to local prosperity, social order, and cultural life is undeniable. The bureaucracy came to appreciate it, knowing that efficient cooperation with the elites in a variety of educational and philanthropic projects could bring about remarkable benefits to society.

From the elites’ point of view, cooperation with the magistrate was also the default strategy. Not only could it safeguard them from potentially abusive treatment by the state apparatus, but it also brought about many important social advantages. As many researchers have noted, the social power of the elite in their communities derived not only from their economic affluence and cultural prestige but also from their role as mediators between the state and the commoners.
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Smooth relations with officials were an important asset, which could, if properly applied, protect the villagers from litigation and from excessive taxation, help them to attain government support in the wake of natural disasters, and benefit them in a variety of other ways. For a local elite member, ties with the magistrate were, therefore, instrumental for preserving his elite status.

In addition to institutional and social factors, ideology also played a role in cementing the magistrate’s ties with the local elites. This topic has been partly addressed in the previous section and will be discussed again in the next; here I shall focus on a single ideological incentive for increased reliance on the elites: namely, the persistent desire of Chinese thinkers and statesmen to attain political order through minimal coercion. The ideal of spontaneous moral transformation of the people (
jiaohua
), as exemplified in this chapter’s epigraph, supported the endorsement of semiautonomous communities run by morally upright local leaders. Moreover, the notion of an autonomous social unit was embedded in the Confucian view of the family as the basic social cell, in which harmony and internal hierarchy coexisted “naturally” and were not imposed from outside. With the renewed proliferation of lineage organizations since the Song dynasty, the lineage rather than the nuclear family was widely considered to be the ideal self-governing unit, one that enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy. Not a few thinkers and statesmen considered it appropriate to expand the autonomy of the lineage to a broader community, such as a village or, rarely, the whole canton (
xiang
, a subcounty unit that usually comprised a township and several villages around it). Insofar as these communities were headed by respectable local literati, their autonomy and cohesion were deemed conducive to the

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preservation of the sociopolitical order and not threatening to state authority.
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While all the factors described above encouraged the officials to deepen their cooperation with and reliance upon the local elites, there were equally compelling reasons to be less enthusiastic about this cooperation and to view the elites’ power in general with deep suspicion. Most fundamentally, there was a persistent conflict of economic interests between the elites and the state apparatus. While the officials were normatively inclined to increase state revenues—most specifically through ensuring that nobody avoided taxation, that all the arable land was properly registered, and that most peasants possessed enough land to pay their taxes—from the elites’ point of view this represented a threat to their fundamental economic interests. As officials knew very well, many elite members routinely utilized their amicable ties with the magistrates to avoid full taxation of their assets; or, worse, bullied weaker members of the community, grabbing their lands and turning them into bond servants. These “local bullies and evil gentry” were disruptive both to the state’s fiscal needs and to the very social order that the officials had to preserve; and their actions undermined the foundations of the normally amicable ties between the elites and the magistrates.

Writings by officials, and by many conscientious elite members, provide a reader with an almost endless repertoire of tricks used by unscrupulous local elites to empower themselves economically: from underreporting the acreage of their landholdings to false registrations of private fields as charitable estates; from utilizing community granaries for commercial needs to impoverishing the peasants through exorbitant interest rates on the all-important loans; from violent seizing of neighbors’ plots to socially abusive behavior. These men could utilize lineage solidarity for such disruptive goals as persistent litigations, tax resistance, or assaults on neighboring communities. Even seemingly innocent irrigation projects could hide malicious motives, enabling the local strongmen to appropriate an unfairly large portion of the much-needed water, or to build dams to expand their arable lands at the expense of increasing flood danger further downstream.
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The persistent problem of local bullies meant that the elite could not be entirely entrusted with local affairs, but should be closely watched and disciplined when necessary. It was for this reason that,
pace
Zhu Xi, many officials viewed the elites’ voluntary actions from below with deep suspicion. However, discarding the elites’ support and subduing them was not a viable option either. At times, individual magistrates, such as Hai Rui (d. 1587), whom we encountered in the previous chapter, could courageously assault local bullies; but such activism could backfire and in any case was unsustainable in the long term. First, local elites often had suf

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ficient connections within the officialdom to arrange the impeachment or at least the replacement of an excessively interventionist magistrate (as in the case of Hai Rui, among others).
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Second, a confrontational attitude on the magistrate’s part would tremendously hinder his abilities to utilize the elites for successful performance of his manifold tasks. Third, and most significantly, the social and cultural proximity between the officials and local elites made prolonged action of the former against the latter highly unlikely. Some of the emperors were well aware of possible connivance between the bureaucrats and elite members, and launched periodic campaigns against it (more on this below). Nonetheless, such campaigns could only discipline the elites and the officials for the time being, without altering the fundamental workings of the bureaucracy, which prescribed the utilization of the elites’ power rather than its suppression. To understand the imperial government’s fundamental incapability of adopting a harsh course against the elites’ power, we should turn to the activities of one of the most resolute monarchs ever, the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang. A former rebel, who rose from the very bottom of society (after his parents died during an epidemic, he spent some time as a Buddhist novice and a wandering monk), Zhu Yuanzhang was exceptionally attentive to the plight of the commoners and also deeply suspicious of the literary elite, especially the members of his bureaucracy. Having come to power after the Yuan dynasty government’s prolonged period of deterioration and decades of civil war, Zhu Yuanzhang was determined to restore political order through harsh measures, if needed. He declared:

Formerly, when I was among the people, I saw that many of the pro-
vincial and county officials did not pity the people. Everywhere there
was corruption and lust, debauchery and neglect of affairs and the
people were miserable. I saw these things and I conceived a great ha-
tred for the officials in my heart. Therefore, now there are severe laws
to stamp out this sort of thing and those officials who are avaricious
and who harm the people are punished without mercy.
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Zhu Yuanzhang’s distrust of the literati and his conviction that only strict disciplinary measures would prevent their abuses brought about some of the bloodiest repressive campaigns in Chinese history against corrupt and allegedly subversive officials. Amid these reprisals, many powerful elite families were targeted as well: countless estates were confiscated and their land redistributed to petty landholders. Zhu Yuanzhang also acted resolutely to reimpose imperial order in the localities. He created a variety of subcounty administrative units, initiated a series of population and land surveys, adjusted taxation, and vehemently punished alleged corruption. All these measures were intended to reinvigorate the

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imperial state after decades of malfunctioning, and to lay the foundation for a lasting and perfect sociopolitical and moral order. They were also intended to put an end to abuses perpetrated by the elites, abuses that had plagued Yuan society.
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It is tempting to view Zhu Yuanzhang, as many scholars have done, as a precursor to Mao Zedong: a rebel-turned-emperor, who remained the champion of the masses, detested the upper strata, and aimed at destroying the elites’ power.
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It is certainly true that Zhu’s attitude toward the elites was much harsher than that of most other emperors; and his oppressive measures may have contributed directly to the massive personnel changes among the elites in the early Ming dynasty.
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This is only one side of the story, though. Zhu Yuanzhang never tried to build a regime in which the imperial state would eliminate the elites’ power altogether. He shared the belief of most contemporaneous statesmen in the advantages of small government and sought to reduce administrative costs by minimizing the number of officials on the payroll. Thus, instead of increasing the size of the bureaucracy, he preferred to see the newly created subcounty units run by local wealthy landowners, village elders, and other community leaders, who were largely independent of the magistrates and could even supervise and punish the magistrates and the clerks. Community heads had a broad variety of tasks: from supervising taxation to providing local security, maintaining community schools and community granaries, dealing with local crimes, and, most importantly, providing moral leadership, encouraging good behavior, and shaming miscreants, whose names were to be published on purpose-built kiosks in the villages. The system is so much at odds with bureaucratic activism, and appears so indebted to Zhu Xi’s vision, that Peter Bol plainly interpreted it as a codification of the Neo-Confucian program.
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Zhu Yuanzhang’s village policies underwent many twists and turns, but their general trend remained consistent: he favored community autonomy and tried to insulate communities from the intrusive state apparatus. Thus while in the short term his policies may have undermined the power of elite members, they also created extraordinarily favorable conditions for the reemergence of new powerful elites soon after Zhu Yuanzhang’s death. The intrinsic weakness of the regular bureaucracy left a sociopolitical vacuum at the lower administrative levels, which was duly filled in by new generations of local elites. The Ming dynasty gradually but irreversibly transformed itself from the elites’ nightmare into their paradise. In particular, tax exemptions granted to degree holders and to imperial students proved exceptionally favorable to the restoration of the elite’s economic power, as many peasants consigned their lands to local elite members to escape corvée obligations. By the sixteenth century the renewed power of the elites and their unruliness became the major cause

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of the dynasty’s decline, with officials powerless to do anything but complain bitterly about the machinations of the elites and about troublemaking degree holders.
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The regime that began with an attempt to reinvigorate the imperial state ended with much weaker centralized control than ever before.

Zhu Yuanzhang’s reforms may be judged a misguided attempt to preserve a powerful state amid overall bureaucratic budget and personnel cuts; but they may be read differently, as a reassertion of the increasingly symbiotic relations between the state and the bearers of societal power in local communities. The resemblance of these reforms to Zhu Xi’s policies is not incidental: voluntary action from below and state activism from above were increasingly viewed as mutually supportive rather than mutually exclusive. Thus, in the second half of the Ming dynasty, when the system established by the founder lost its vitality, it was the turn of petty officials and elite members to respond by reinvigorating voluntary activities, such as community compacts, the
baojia
system, and the like, which, in turn, closely resembled Zhu Yuanzhang’s initiatives.
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From this perspective, Zhu Yuanzhang’s efforts can be seen as a costly experiment in disciplining local elites rather than a real attempt to replace them altogether.