Rule Through the Rise of Local Elites

The final major change in the Han sociopolitical order was the rise of a new form of elite that combined a commitment to imperial service with strong bases in their localities.²⁴ Unlike the sanctification of the emperor, the end of universal military service, the extension of the Han world, and the institutionalization of the state canon, the development of this new style of elite was actively opposed by the early imperial governments.

However, in the long run it proved to be probably the most important change, the one which allowed the imperial system to survive the downfall of individual dynasties and thereby become an enduring political structure.

As was noted earlier, the competing polities of the Warring States era had radically reduced the power of the old nobility, and the Qin dynasty had completed the process of eliminating the old elites through the policy of moving them to the capital. There had been a revival of powerful local families during the civil war that toppled the Qin and in the early Han, but the high taxes and aforementioned special agents of Emperor Wu had dealt them a mortal blow. By the first century bce the great families who had dominated local society in the early decades of the Han had largely vanished. However, at the same time that Emperor Wu was destroying the last vestiges of earlier elites, his policies were creating a new form of local power.

First, his confiscatory anti-merchant policies persuaded many men to use their wealth from trade to buy land. Likewise, men who attained high offices at court or in local government earned large sums of money that they channeled into land as a means of turning fleeting abundance into more lasting wealth. The increased taxes of Emperor Wu, such as the payments for commutation of military service, increasingly pushed poorer peasants into the arms of moneylenders and ultimately into bankruptcy.

This gradually forced them to sell their land cheaply to those with ready cash, for whom they would then work as tenants. In the last century bce the government attempted to limit the concentration of landholding and prevent small-scale freeholders from becoming tenants. This was less out of compassion for the peasantry—whom the state mercilessly squeezed—than out of a desire to maintain its source of taxes and service. Wang Mang tried to nationalize all land and abolish slavery to halt the concentration of land ownership and the rise of locally powerful families, but his defeat ended the government’s resistance to landlordism. By the end of the Western Han, local society had come to be dominated by powerful families who combined the ownership of substantial landholdings worked by sharecropping tenants, the aspiration for state service, and money-making activities in the form of small-scale craft production and moneylending. As the study of the state canon increasingly became a possible route to power, such families also began to emphasize such study, which would also enhance their prestige among their neighbors, and they also cultivated local influence through a conspicuous charity toward poorer neighbors that assimilated basic aspects of what had hitherto been an imperial practice.²⁵ Although it was not universal, many locally eminent families also controlled cults devoted to local natural features, such as mountains, or to powerful local spirits or heroes.

There were three primary reasons for the state’s acceptance, particularly under the Eastern Han, of the existence of such landlords and of their local influence. First, the Eastern Han was established by a coalition of large landowners who had led the revolt against Wang Mang, a coalition that included the founding emperor himself. Second, with the abolition of universal military service, the direct control of individual peasant households had ceased to be the basis of state power, and the court’s concern for the preservation of a free peasantry had largely vanished.

Moreover, the eastern-dominated court was hostile to the military traditions of the Guanzhong region, with which the maintenance and mobilization of the peasantry had been particularly identified.

Third, whereas earlier local elites had been detached from and often hostile to the state, many of the new landlords had risen to wealth and eminence through state service. Moreover, their increasing focus on the state canon also facilitated a greater emphasis on familial virtues, and on the ideal of the family as the basis of the state order that had been asserted by the Confucian scholars who had been the primary transmitters of the canonical texts. The state’s increasing use of recommendations to recruit officials also gave such families every hope of maintaining access to office. Entry to the imperial academy, such as appointment as clerks or gentleman attendants, or to the other avenues to office, came through recommendations solicited from eminent local families known to the central court or to local officials. Consequently, families that dominated their communities through land ownership and conspicuous charity—and who increasingly adopted Confucian values and traditions of study that emphasized the family—were able to assure themselves of continued access to office through their control of such recommendations. Their links to the imperial state also served to enhance their status, as opposed to wealthy neighbors who lacked such connections.

Moreover, recurrent access to office and the income therefrom was crucial to the ability of families to maintain their local bases. With the earlier disappearance of the nobility, the practice of primogeniture had become an imperial prerogative. All commoner families practiced partible inheritance, i.e., the division of the father's property between the sons. Indeed, wealthy families usually practiced the division of property while the father was still alive. Consequently, the great families did not build up huge estates worked by hired labor, which was also not economically efficient in an agricultural system based on the intensive application of well-timed, highly skilled labor, nor did they keep their lands as single blocks.

Indeed the largest estates described in Han records are less than a tenth the size of a substantial Roman estate or that of a major medieval monastery. Instead of expanding unitary estates, they divided land among their sons, who worked it themselves or had it worked in small plots by sharecroppers. The powerful families thus sought primarily not to amass land and wealth, but rather to use these assets to build up extensive networks of kin, clients, and neighbors whose loyalties they could command. Merchants who had shifted their wealth into land followed the same courses of action, so often the same family would run an estate, market the products of that estate or engage in moneylending, provide charity to poorer neighbors, and give sons a Confucian education in the hope of securing offices at court.

No longer based on the extraction of service from the peasantry, the state now secured its foundations on the loyalty of the powerful landlord families who looked to it as their armed protector and a source of profitable appointments. Such families also supported the imperial order because their participation in it increased their status, distinguishing them from other local competitors who relied entirely on economic power to assert their authority. Consequently, the new style of elite families would have used their local power to defend the state order in their own communities, which reduced the state's reliance on its bureaucracy for the maintenance of order and loyalty in the myriad small communities that formed the empire.

The pivotal social role of this new style of elite families was also reflected in the complete transformation of the language of honor and shame that had hitherto defined the ideal human type in China. While the pre-imperial discourse on honor had focused on military prowess, the Warring States elaborated praise for scholars as well as heroic clients and bravos willing to kill or die for their patron or their own reputation, and early imperial thinkers had linked the ruler and his officials into a single complex in which both sides relied upon exalting the status of the other for the sake of their own prestige, Eastern Han society created a range of practices to celebrate the honor of this new style of elite family.^[601]

The most important such innovation was the emergence of the funerary inscription as both a major literary genre and a fundamental element of newly public funerary ritual.^[602] In terms of the latter, the stele were generally placed outside the gate of the tomb or group of tombs, where they were publicly accessible to be read by as wide an audience as possible.

They were often erected within a few years of the death, in which case they could be read by all those assembled for the funeral, although sometimes they were not erected for decades. As inscriptions carved in stone, they were intended to hand the memory of the deceased, and the pious emotions of his relatives, down through the centuries in the same manner that written histories and artificial mountains could eternalize the glory of rulers and their ministers.

In terms of their contents, the inscriptions also emphasized the public role of the family and celebrated their glory. The language was often hyperbolic and highly formulaic in its praises, often identifying the deceased (even secondary wives or deceased children) with great historical exemplars. Testimonies to the grief and devotion of the mourners also sought to glorify them in terms of the virtues that now defined elite kin. One particularly striking feature of such accounts of mourning was that they much more often were devoted to mothers than to fathers, indicating that the conventional piety that had defined a lineage was less important than the intimate, emotional ties that made up a nuclear family, or a uterine alliance of one mother and her sons.^[603] Celebrations of deceased men often insisted on their public lives as leaders of their community, or as moral exemplars to their neighbors or as conspicuously charitable. Finally, the back of steles often listed large groups of neighbors, clients, or colleagues who contributed money for the erection of the stele, thus marking the act as a communal, public performance.

In addition to the emergence of the inscribed funeral stele as a means of making private affairs more public through the medium of collective honor, the same project was also accomplished in the realm of the visual arts. The idealized life and virtues of the local elite, as well as many of the historical or mythical exemplars whom they claimed as a pattern, were depicted on the walls of tombs (which would have been displayed at the time of interment) and in surface shrines commemorating individuals, their families, and their lineages.

In this manner the full range of resources that had previously served to exalt rulers, their kin, and their officials were brought into the service of the local elites who shaped their communities and drew them into the empire.^[604]

This pattern of relying on the local influence of families who aspired to imperial office, and who actively espoused the familial and literary virtues based on the state's canon, was of major historical significance for three reasons. First, it provided the model for all subsequent empires that emerged in continental East Asia. The patterns of recruiting the members of such families varied: from Han recommendations, through hereditary entry-level posts under the Northern and Southern Dynasties, through the mix of inherited privilege and examination as a special “fast track” under the Tang, to the pure examination system of the late imperial period. However, the pattern of combining bureaucratic administration with the support of eminent families acting as the primary links between local society and the court remained fundamental to all the imperial formations in this area of the world.

Second, this pattern of the combined reliance on bureaucrats and eminent local families was fundamental to what was previously described as the “victory of Han Confucianism,” and more broadly to the dominance of later Chinese thought and society by those proclaiming allegiance to the traditions associated with Confucius.^[605] Recent scholars have with reason challenged the idea that in the Han dynasty there was a recognized philosophical system identified as “Confucianism” that became the guiding state ideology. However, it remains true that the dominant philosophical model of the late Warring States era state, conventionally identified as “legalism,” had advocated a polity based on the universal mobilization of the peasantry for military and labor services, a mobilization based on direct administration of individual peasant households. The central texts of this tradition had also insisted that loyalty to the state must surpass loyalty to one' s parents, as marked by the insistence that a son should legally denounce his father for any violation of the law. The abandonment of universal military service, and the related shift from a state based on the bureaucratic administration of all households to one based on the loyalty of powerful households, was philosophically expressed in the relative downgrading of the theorists of statecraft as defined by the late Warring States model, and the embracing of the texts associated with Confucius and his self-proclaimed followers. This shift was also marked by the greater insistence that the family was the foundation of the state, that learning to be loyal to one's father was the necessary first step to learning to be loyal to the ruler, and that consequently sons should not denounce their fathers for crimes.^[606] In this way, a loosely defined “Confucianism” did provide an intellectual justification for the new type of state that emerged in the Eastern Han, and that became the pattern for all later East Asian empires.

Third, this pattern of relying on local elites who were differentially co-opted into the imperial order—rather than a uniform, bureaucratic administration—was a characteristic of virtually all pre-modern empires, particularly the large, land-based ones. It was impossible for any pre-modern polity to safely extract sufficient income from a society based largely on agriculture and to employ enough bureaucrats to administer geographic entities on such a large scale. Consequently, these empires all relied on some version of a “hub-and-spoke” model in which diverse local entities— many of them ethnically distinct, as noted earlier—were vertically integrated into an overarching structure under an imperial court. The elites who controlled these local groups were attached to the court through a mixture of force and negotiation, a mixture that could vary across space and time. The court, for its part, worked to minimize any horizontal connections between the elites, so that it could maintain its position as the necessary “broker” holding all the social actors together. The elites, on the other hand, in pursuing their own interests would link up at the regional level whenever the state's power was no longer sufficient to offer security and income.

In addition to allowing a polity to extend its writ over vast areas at relatively low cost, this model permitted great flexibility in the state's structure that enabled constant changes over time, making possible the extraordinary longevity of many imperial states. This longevity could also be extended by the fact that when the central court weakened, the local elite intermediaries who remained committed to some form of imperial order from which they could draw benefits would, while acting on their own behalf, continue to strive for the preservation of the old empire, or the founding of a new one that would perform similar functions.^[607]

Thus by the late first century ce, the Eastern Han court seemed to have successfully created a new style of polity adapted to the fact of world empire. Active emperors had completed the sacralization of their position with the cult of Heaven and the feng and shan sacrifices. While the peasant armies of the Warring States were all but forgotten, the Han court maintained preeminence in the interior through a crack, professional army based in camps near the capital. At the frontier, convict garrisons manned watchtowers and forts while armies of professional cavalrymen and their barbarian allies eliminated the once redoubtable Xiongnu. (In 88 ce the Han dynasty official Song Yi, as recorded in Fan Ye's Book of the Later Han, remarked, “Now the Xianbi are obedient and bring in heads of the Xiongnu numbered by the tens of thousands; China enjoys this great achievement yet the common people know none of its toil. In this way the success of the Han has reached its pinnacle.”) Tied to the state canon and imperial academy, a form of loosely defined Confucianism was generally accepted as the highest truth, particularly by the powerful families who were the beneficiaries of its general intellectual tendencies. These families, in turn, who dominated their localities through wealth and conspicuous charity, were drawn into the state order with the promise of offices gained by traditions of study or exemplary moral virtue, the control of recommendations, and the prestige that derived from belonging to a higher political order. They also evinced a commitment to the hierarchical and familial values that had been enunciated in the texts linked to Confucius and his followers. These features of the Han state—emperorship defined by cosmic ritual; military power based on professional armies, convicts, and non-Chinese in a generally demilitarized society; the state as defender of a cultural order increasingly identified with familial virtues; and links between the imperial apparatus and local society maintained through the agency of powerful families combining local eminence with aspirations to court service—remained fundamental to the later history of empire in East Asia. They were also, as demonstrated in various expositions of empire as a political type, variants of fundamental traits that appeared in most of the great, continental empires.

Bibliography

Ban, G. 1962. Han shu. Beijing.

Barkey, K. 2008. Empire of Difference. Cambridge.

Bodde, D. 1986. “The State and Empire of Ch'in.” In M. Loewe, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, 20-102. Cambridge.

Brashier, K. 1997. Evoking the Ancestor: The Stele Hymn of the Eastern Han Dynasty. PhD diss., Cambridge University.

Brashier, K. 2005. “Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Stelae.” In M. Kern, ed., Text and Ritual in Early China, 249-284. Seattle, WA.

Brashier, K. 2011. Ancestral Memory in Early China. Cambridge, MA.

Brashier, K. 2014. Public Memory in Early China. Cambridge, MA.

Brennan, T C., and Hsing I-t. 2010. “The Eternal City and the City of Eternal Peace.” In M. Nylan and M. Loewe, eds., China’s Early Empires: A Re-appraisal, 186-212. Cambridge.

Brown, M. 2003. “Mothers and Sons in Warring States and Han China.” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 5, no. 2: 137-169.

Brown, M. 2007. The Politics of Mourning in Early China. Albany, NY.

Chu, T'ung-tsu. 1965. Law and Society in Traditional China. Paris.

Chu, T'ung-tsu. 1972. Han Social Structure. Seattle, WA.

Di Cosmo, N. 2004. Ancient China and Its Enemies. Cambridge.

Dubs, H., ed. 1944. The History ofthe Former Han, Vol. 2. Baltimore, MD.

Duverger, M., ed. 1980. Le Concept d’empire. Paris.

Ebrey, P. B. 1986. “The Economic and Social History of Later Han.” In M. Lowe, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, 608-648. Cambridge.

Hsieh, M. 2012. Viewing the Han Empire from the Edge. PhD diss. Stanford University.

Kern, M. 2000. The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang. New Haven, CT.

Kramers, R. P. 1986. “The Development ofthe Confucian Schools.” In M. Loewe, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, 747-765. Cambridge.

Lewis, M. E. 1999. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany, NY.

Lewis, M. E. 2000. “The Han Abolition of Universal Military Service.” In Hans van de Ven, ed., Warfare in Chinese History, 33-76. Leiden.

Lewis, M. E. 2006. The Construction of Space in Early China. Albany, NY.

Lewis, M. E. 2007. The Early Chinese Empires. Cambridge, MA.

Lewis, M. E. 2009a. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire. Cambridge, MA.

Lewis, M. E. 2009b. “Gift Circulation and Charity in the Han and Roman Empires.” In W Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, 121-136. Oxford.

Lewis, M. E. 2012. “Mothers and Sons in Early Imperial China.” Extreme Orient Extreme Occident, Special Issue: 245-275.

Lewis, M. E. 2015. “Public Spaces of Cities in the Roman and Han Empires.” In W Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome, 204-229. Oxford.

Lewis, M. E. 2017. “Honor and Shame in Han China.” In F. J. Vervaet, H. J. Kim, and S. Adali, eds., Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge.

Lewis, M. E. Forthcoming. Honor and Shame in Early China. Cambridge

Liu, C., M. Nylan, and A. Barbieri-Low, eds. 2005. Recarving China’s Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture ofthe “Wu Family Shrines.” New Haven, CT.

Loewe, M. 1986. “The Former Han Dynasty.” In M. Loewe, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, 103-222. Cambridge.

Loewe, M. 2004. The Men Who Governed Han China: Companion to A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods. Leiden.

Loewe, M. 2015. “Liu Xiang and Liu Xin.” In M. Nylan and G. Vankeerberghen, eds., Changan 26 BCE, 369-389. Seattle, WA.

Norena, C. F. 2015.“Chang'an and Rome: Structural Parallels and the Logics of Urban Form.” In M. Nylan and G. Vankeerberghen, eds., Changan 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China, 75-98. Seattle, WA.

Norena, C. F. 2015b. “Urban Systems in the Han and Roman Empires: State Power and Social Control.” In W. Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome, 181-203. Stanford, CA.

Nylan, M. 2005. “Toward an Archaeology of Writing: Text, Ritual, and the Culture of Public Display in the Classical Period (475 B.C.E.-220 C.E.).” In M. Kern, ed., Text and Ritual in Early China, 3-49. Seattle, WA.

Nylan, M. 2011. Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China. New Haven, CT.

Pines, Y. 2014. “The Messianic Emperor: A New Look at Qin's Place in Chinese History.” In Y. Pines, L. v. Falkenhausen, G. Shelach, and R. D. S. Yates, eds., Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, 258-279. Berkeley, CA.

Sanft, C. 2013. Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty. Albany, NY.

Shelach, G. 2014. “Collapse or Transformation? Anthropological and Achaeological Perspectives on the Fall of Qin.” In Y. Pines, L. v. Falkenhausen, G. Shelach, and R. D. S. Yates, eds., Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, 113-138. Berkeley, CA.

Sima, Q. 1959. Shi ji. Beijing.

Tregear, T R. 1965. A Geography of China. Chicago.

Tuan, Y.-f. 1969. China. Chicago.

Wang Y-c. 1949. “An Outline of the Central Government of the Former Han Dynasty.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12: 134-187.

Watson, B., ed. 1993. Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty. New York.

Wiens, H. 1952. Chinas March to the Tropics. Washington, DC.

Wu, H. 1989. The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford, CA.

Wu, H. 1995. Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture. Stanford, CA.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Rule Through the Rise of Local Elites

More on the topic Rule Through the Rise of Local Elites: