The Everlasting Empire (27 page)

State-elite cooperation also had far-reaching ideological and cultural consequences, which further contributed to overall stability and the empire’s longevity. In particular, the examination system, initiated primarily as a means of attracting elite members to government service, became an exceptionally powerful means of imposing common values and cultural patterns on society at large. Aside from enhancing the legitimacy of the political system, the imperial examinations helped spread the culture of the literati throughout the proprietary classes, enhancing the cultural cohesiveness of the upper strata to the extent that “the late imperial gentry elite was arguably the most unified (though not uniform) elite in the world.”
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This cultural unity at the elite level contributed to the successful integration of the empire’s heterogeneous population and further strengthened the hegemonic position of the imperial political ideology.

In addition to these economic, political, and cultural benefits, the empire’s sophisticated means of co-opting the elites may have contributed to the imperial bureaucracy’s vitality. As noted above, devolution of state power to the elites did not result in the bureaucracy’s atrophy. Insofar as officials were aware of the need to control the elites’ activities, especially those connected to fiscal matters, they remained vigilant and did not allow elite voluntarism to become a full-scale substitute for government policies. On the contrary, officials tended to monitor and coordinate a variety of elite-run welfare, public works, and educational projects; and when successful cooperation was attained, the results were often remarkable.
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The specific forms of cooperation varied considerably from one

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locality to another, requiring a high degree of flexibility and adaptability on the part of the government bureaucrats. This in turn enhanced the general flexibility of the imperial administrative system, preventing its ossification in bureaucratic routine.

The above observations leave no doubt that successful co-optation of local elites became one of the major pillars of the empire’s longevity. Yet it is important to note the manifold negative aspects of this co-optation. Reliance on the elites decreased the state’s ability to penetrate local society and to tap its resources. Whether this penetration would have been harmful or beneficial to the lower strata is debatable, as we cannot determine which kind of exploitation was worse: that by officials or that by local bullies. Yet from the point of view of the imperial center, the negative effects of power devolution are undeniable. Having become addicted to cooperation with the elite, the imperial officialdom was gradually but irreversibly losing its ability to dictate to society its rules of the game, especially in terms of ensuring the state’s fiscal interests. Combating the vested interests of rich landowners, who happened to belong to the same stratum as the officials themselves, was difficult—if not impossible—save under an exceptionally assertive and determined government. The perennial cycle of the government’s aggravating impoverishment under any lengthy dynasty is clearly related to the elite’s ability to shield its wealth by minimizing transfers to the state’s coffers.

The negative impact of the elite’s power on the dynastic cycle is obvious. As noted by Ray Huang, the moment of a dynasty’s establishment was the only time in its history when “basic tax laws were proclaimed by dynastic founders and enforced with the sword. An aggressive fiscal policy had a greater chance of success during a dynastic turnover than at any other time. Once conditions were stable, the population would resist change.”
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This generally correct observation can be slightly modified. At its establishment, the new dynastic regime was not greatly obliged to preserve the vested interests of local elites, aside from those associated with its immediate supporters. Yet as time passed and the elites were successfully incorporated into the officialdom, the likelihood diminished that the government would vigorously pursue tax reforms at the expense of rich landowners. No less than popular resistance, it was the power of local elites, whose representatives permeated the bureaucracy and whose collaboration was crucial for any magistrate’s success, that thwarted attempts to reallocate wealth once the dynastic power was stabilized. The difficulty, not to say inability, almost any lengthy dynasty confronted in the effort to initiate substantial reforms may explain the positive role played by mass popular uprisings, discussed in the next chapter. Without violent shattering of local elites and of their symbiosis with the officials, considerable reallocation of wealth might have been simply impossible.

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Moving from the individual dynasty as an analytical unit toward even broader generalization, we may address now the much-debated issue of the elites’ negative impact on China’s path to modernity. Nowadays we no longer subscribe to the once-popular branding of late imperial elites as obstinate and parochial; nor do we consider the term “stagnation” to be justifiable with regard to late imperial China; even the very supposition that there was a uniform path toward a singularly acceptable “modernity” is no longer considered valid.
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This said, we cannot ignore the fact that beginning in the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth, the Chinese empire and the Republic that inherited it (19121949) fared badly in dealing with domestic (primarily demographic) and external (primarily Western and Japanese) challenges. In particular, its notorious inability to mobilize sufficient material and human resources for industrialization and warfare was the primary factor that led first the Qing empire and then the Chinese Republic through generations of “national humiliation.”

I believe that this sad state of affairs has much to do with the power of the elites—although not necessarily in the same ways as was perceived decades ago by Western and many Chinese observers. The problem was neither ideological backwardness nor the supposed parochialism of the elites, but, rather, more essentially, the very structure of the late imperial state. Having opted to maximize stability through relegation of many of the state’s tasks to the elites, the empire’s architects, particularly the architects of the late imperial state, had yielded the possibility of restoring the assertive state typical of the Warring States period. As has been discussed, under the Warring States and the short-lived Qin dynasty China acted in a very “modern” way, as bureaucracy penetrated the entire society and the entire population was successfully mobilized for “agriculture and warfare”—two pillars of the state’s prosperity, as defined by the great Qin reformer Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE). Not incidentally, during that period local elites played no role in the social fabric and possibly did not exist as such.

From its second inception under the Han dynasty, the empire opted for a less efficient but also much less costly mode of administration: minimization of government activism and relegation of power to local elites. This system was contested at times, especially when a plethora of new domestic and external challenges required that the central government be financially and administratively strengthened, as was the case under Han Emperor Wu, and again, much later, during the Northern Song dynasty. Yet the system of governmental minimalism was repeatedly resurrected, and it peaked under Zhu Yuanzhang, whose experiments with maintaining only a skeletal administration and relegating much power to local communities has been mentioned above. These arrangements, reaffirmed

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under the Qing dynasty, laid the foundations for the late imperial order as a whole, and in the long term they strengthened the state’s addiction to the elite’s support.
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China did not become stagnant in the aftermath of Zhu Yuanzhang; to the contrary, many important adjustments and modifications to his model were made both under the Ming and, more successfully, under the Qing dynasty. Yet while these adjustments were sufficient to deal with malfunctions in certain fields, they were inadequate to tackle the nineteenthcentury crisis. The combination of external and domestic challenges required a complete systemic overhaul, possibly a reversion to the Warring States model, but on a much larger scale. For the elites such a reversion would have meant political annihilation; and it is not surprising, then, that while some elite members audaciously proposed profound renovation of the state, the majority procrastinated, having found no feasible way to preserve their and their family’s status under the new conditions. That the imperial leaders found it difficult to propose substantial reform in these circumstances comes as no surprise.

In the final analysis, the fate of local elites in the late imperial period resembles the fate of the Tang aristocracy. Back then, the symbiosis between the dynasty and the aristocrats was so strong that the collapse of the former marked the demise of the latter. Similarly, late imperial elites failed to navigate successfully in the wake of dynastic collapse. In the past they had learned how to survive powerful uprisings that decimated the elite families but never targeted the economic, administrative, and ideological foundations of elite power in general. Now, the situation differed. Having lost their major asset—intimate ties with the imperial officials— the elites remained powerless. Being identified, justifiably or not, as part of the despicable ancien régime, they were shattered by the Republican Revolution of 1911, and then eliminated by the most powerful and thorough political upheaval that China has ever encountered: the Communist Revolution. They had outlived the empire that cherished them by slightly more than one generation.

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CHAPTER 5
The People

The ruler is a boat; commoners are the water. The water can
carry the boat; the water can capsize the boat.

—
Xunzi

THE WORDS OF XUNZI (ca. 310–230 BCE) cited in the epigraph proved to be prophetic. Prior to his age, China witnessed no popular uprisings that left an imprint in historical texts, but shortly after his death a huge rebellion toppled the first imperial dynasty, Qin (221–207 BCE). Since then mass uprisings have recurred repeatedly in Chinese history, bringing an end to several major dynasties and severely crippling others. The scope, frequency, ferocity, and political impact of these uprisings dwarf any comparable insurrections elsewhere in the premodern world.

Twenty-two centuries after Xunzi, British interpreter and intelligence officer Thomas Meadows, who lived in China during the early stages of the Taiping uprising (1850–1864)—arguably the single most devastating civil war in human history—wrote
The Chinese and their Rebellions
. Meadows, an astute and sympathetic commentator on China’s past and present, made several interesting observations. First, he averred that “o/
all the nations that attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious?
Second, he argued that Chinese government is not despotic but autocratic; this autocracy is, however, qualified by the right to rebel: “The Chinese people have no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation, they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting or stopping supplies. They have therefore the right of rebellion. Rebellion is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate, and constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration.” Third, rebellion, in Meadows’s eyes, was “a chief element of a national stability … the storm that clears and invigorates a political atmosphere.” Meadows concluded that the doctrine of righteous rebellion constitutes one of the three major pillars (together with the principles of moral government and of meritocracy) of “the unequalled duration and constant increase of the Chinese people, as one and the same nation.”
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Meadows’s observations, even if somewhat outdated and naive for a modern reader, shall serve as a departure point for my discussion in this

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chapter. In particular, I want to explore the reasons for the recurrence of large-scale popular uprisings throughout imperial history. Further, how does the idea of rebellion correlate with fundamental principles of Chinese political culture, such as monarchism and intellectual elitism? And why did the rebellions serve—at least in Meadows’s eyes, but surely not only in his—to support rather than disrupt the empire’s longevity? These questions will be related to the broader issue of the political role of the “people,” here referring primarily, although not exclusively, to the lower strata, in the Chinese imperial enterprise.

In answering these questions, I intend to focus on ideological and social factors that both legitimated rebellions and also enabled their accommodation within the imperial enterprise. This perspective inevitably leads me to reject the dichotomous division of imperial society into “rebels and their enemies,” to paraphrase Philip Kuhn’s famous book title, or into supporters of “orthodoxy” and of “heterodoxy.”
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This does not mean, of course, that I intend to ignore the rebellions’ disruptiveness, or to downplay their clearly pronounced class overtones, especially the bitter struggle of the have-nots against the elites.
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Yet I shall try to show that, while terribly destructive in the short term, the rebellions remained firmly rooted in the imperial political tradition. To a certain extent they can even be seen as a by-product of this tradition, or, more precisely, of intrinsic tensions between the ostensible respect for the commoners in Chinese political culture and their exclusion from political processes, and between hierarchic and egalitarian mind-sets. There was sufficient overlap between the rebels’ ideology and the establishment worldview, and between the social composition of the rebel leadership and of their opponents, to support both the rebellions’ legitimacy and their eventual co-optation into the imperial order.