[Part 7 Bureaucracy vs Aristocracy] China Governance History
Levenson’s indispensable study of political institutions in Confucian China
Joseph R. Levenson wrote:
CHAPTER III
The Evolution of the Confucian Bureaucratic Personality
1. ARISTOCRACY, MONARCHY, BUREAUCRACY:
A TRIO IN THREE MOVEMENTS
The ‘Doctrine of the Mean’ is one of the ‘Four Books’, familiar to Confucian-trained officials from the Southern Sung period to the end of Ch’ing, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth. The metaphysical aim for dead centre, ‘the still point of the turning world’, where harmony had its Confucian apotheosis, was politically true. Since the officials’ culture favoured the study of history, they were well acquainted with the Chou period of local aristocracies and the subsequent Ch’in period, that famous burst of the utterly despotic. And it was the genius of Confucian bureaucracy (though not always its achievement) to be, poised between the poles of local and central power, magnetized to both, and resisting in its values the final claims of either. If one speaks one-sidedly of Confucian (bureaucratic)–monarchical tension as the major motif in imperial Chinese history, this is because aristocracy in the technical sense, with its perquisites and hereditary status, though never dying, generally languished. But the aristocratic ideal, as a rival for Confucianism to banish—in part by resistance and in part by pre-emption—fixed the bureaucracy’s location as surely as the royal reality on the other side of the centre.
Consider the perennial question of alienability of land. At least sporadically, both Chou nobility and later monarchs tried to impair it, the former in a spirit of feudal inequality, the latter in pursuit of an anti-feudal despotic egalitarianism. By and large the bureaucracy, public officials with private interests, set itself against this expression of both an ultimate resistance to the public power and its ultimate pretension. In the main, bureaucracy defended the right to alienate (and its corollary, to accumulate by purchase), a right that was just as opposed to a power-inhibiting feudalism’s premise, as it was to the most extreme of a power-seeking monarch’s desiderata.
And on the same intermediate line, Confucianists favoured undivided large-family holdings—social expression of the ‘harmony’ which Confucianists as philosophers so incessantly commended. This was equidistant from feudal primogeniture, on the one hand, and the centralizers’ policy (against the threat of local concentrations) of pressing for fragmentation by exacting dues progressively according to the number of a household’s adult males.
When cultural rather than economic values come under review, Confucianist and aristocrat clash just as vividly. Both agree that there is something about a soldier, but not on what it is. The Confucianist, after all, is the eternal civilian. In The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, after Ts’ao Ts’ao has some of his stalwarts do wonderful martial feats, he summons a few tame scholars whom he keeps around, ‘stuffed with learning’, to produce their tricks. They snap to attention on the spot with some canned Confucian poesy in praise of their warlike patron. Here, in a form of literature which Confucianists on duty never approved of, in a setting of the decay of the Han, the first of the bureaucratic, centralizing dynasties which ‘established’ Confucianism, this flash of contempt for the Confucian higher life exposes it appropriately against the counter-value of military prowess.
In feudal Chou China, men were thought of in four categories, in descending order of esteem: shih, nung, kung, shang—warrior, farmer, artisan, merchant. By the middle of the first millennium, B.C., with feudalism crumbling, the warrior-class of shih was losing power and inferiors were rising. When supremacy finally passed to a bureaucracy of the Confucian persuasion, the four categories were still retained (an example of what Confucianists meant by their ‘perpetuation of feudal values’, while really they created anew), but shih, designating precisely the power group, changed its connotation, from military to literary.
It was characteristically Confucian on the one hand to retain the old term, as a traditional piety, and on the other hand to ‘moralize’ it (as Confucius did to chun, prince, or as Mencius to the kung of kung-t’ien, which had the sense of ‘noble’s’ field in the Shih-ching, the ‘Book of Songs’, but ‘public’ field in Mencius’ picture of the ‘well-field’ system). To moralize it was to ‘civilize’ it, quite literally. Wen-hua, the Confucianists’ ‘civilization’, was plainly an enshrinement of the civil; wen, letters, and wu, arms, always remained in antithesis. Right at the end of Confucian history, in the early twentieth century, a Chinese nationalist and former Confucianist, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1873–1929), admired the evolution (as he saw it) in Japan of self-transcending feudal loyalties to national loyalties, and deplored the Confucian extinction of shih as devotees of wu, the capture of the title, shih, by pacific literati. He said that wu-shih tao, the ‘way of the warrior’ (in Japanese the bushido of modern chauvinists and mediaeval aristocrats), had flourished up to the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period, dwindled to knight-errantry by the beginning of Han (the beginning of Confucian ascendancy), and soon was nothing.
In fact, however, aristocracy as a serious contender with Confucian bureaucracy in its own right—not just as an imperial auxiliary—seems not to have been silenced conclusively until the Sung period (960–1279). The Sung, in this way, too, as in others, was one of the great watersheds in Chinese history. With Sung, both the institutions of bureaucracy and the formulations of Confucianism were highly elaborated, and they were such as to spell effective triumph for wen over wu.
Previously T’ang (618–906) had seen the link forged, with the examination system, between intellectual life and bureaucratic power, and heard the last cry of the men-t’i, ‘social notables’, as they felt themselves cordoned off. Li Te-yu (787–849), for example, hated the chin-shih, high degree-holders, the new men rising through the bureaucratic channel. He said defiantly that since his grandfather’s time as minister (at the end of the reign of Hsuan-tsung, mid-eighth century, just before the An Lu-shan rebellion), the family had not acquired literature and classics, for these had no relation to skills and practicality. The great officials of the court, he said, ought to be drawn from the kung-ch’ing, the aristocratic lineages.
In such a statement, aristocracy’s discomfiture is plain to see. The menace of Confucian bureaucracy seems confirmed by the pitch of aristocratic resentment. But more than that, it is the aristocrat’s ‘bureaucratized’ self-image that marks so clearly the lowering of his estate. He offers himself as a superior brand of official, knowing practical statecraft—a monarch’s man, that is, no longer someone with the typically fierce aristocratic resistance to an autocrat’s infringement on nobility’s prerogatives. Indeed, the crown had so nearly triumphed over the classical pretensions of aristocracy that the pattern of three has rearranged itself.
Aristocracy had been an impediment, in Chou times, during most of the first millennium, B.C., to centralized authority. And though aristocracy was blighted by the autocratic Ch’in, it was seriously revived from the third century A.D., in the post-Han period of hollow dynasties and military conquests. Stricken by T’ang, it moved to the side of monarchy. Bureaucracy, the Ch’in-Han and later the T’ang instrument of anti-feudal monarchy, now confronted the crown directly; after helping to clear the field of the crown’s rivals, it held the field itself as the only remaining countervailing force.
The monarch, served to such good effect by bureaucracy that aristocracy was tamed, repelled bureaucracy in some degree by his now unbalanced power. And Confucianists, who owed their corporate existence to imperial sponsorship in the teeth of aristocracy’s hostility, took up the role of resistance when the aristocrats’ teeth were blunted. Aristocrats, now the monarch’s creatures, sounded more and more like kept men, while Confucian officials strained to get out of the monarchy’s keeping. And so while some aristocrats became Confucian enough to see themselves in a bureaucratic context, but approached a monarch’s non-Confucian ideal of a bureaucracy of means, Confucianists took on some aristocratic colour, conceived of themselves as ends in themselves, and set out to prise open the imperial clutch.
There are a series of steps in the minuet thus described. I should like to examine them one by one.
2. BUREAUCRACY AS THE MONARCH’S TOOL TO CHECK ARISTOCRACY
It is a commonplace that feudal aristocratic status was based on private possession of essentially public powers, private exercise of public executive functions. The anti-feudal ‘public’ is the state (a community, as Weber defined it, that successfully claims monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a territory), or the public is the prince who makes the state by expropriating the ‘autonomous’ and ‘private’ bearers of executive power. As Montesquieu put it flatly, ‘abolish the privileges of the lords, the clergy and cities in a monarchy, and you will soon have a popular state, or else a despotic government’.
Conservative apologists for aristocratic institutions have always made much of this connection between autocracy and a ‘public’s’ obliteration of rank and its privileges. What makes despotism characteristically arbitrary is the despot’s ability to raise and lower his subjects at will. The infinite power of such a sovereign depends on basic equality beneath the throne, so that no guaranteed distinctions exist between men to spoil the infinite malleability of the body politic. Orwell speaks of ‘an idea almost as old as history’, the idea of King and the common people in a sort of alliance against the upper classes. In the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany (1525), for example, the readiness to attribute real authority to the Holy Roman Emperor was identical with the passion for destroying aristocracy.
World history yields many plain illustrations of this model issue between sovereign and aristocracy. In the later Roman Empire in the West, the aristocratic Senate saw in such a bureaucratizing emperor as Valentinian I (364–75) only a proletarian’s hatred for his betters. For while members of the senatorial party, as incipient feudalists, were building estates by sheltering fugitives from the tax rolls and sequestering their lands, the emperor tried to preserve his central power by bureaucratically undercutting this protection racket of the great lords. The new imperial institution of defensor plebis was meant to guarantee the poor peasant a free legal defence. Naturally, with such a policy, Valentinian pushed senators well into the background when he staffed his bureaucracy; he could pit only special aides against the senatorial oligarchy, cohorts who leaned on him alone, because he made them.
If effective monarchy was one that bureaucratically encroached on aristocracy, enfeebled monarchy spoke for the centralizers’ failure to impinge on private powers. Thus, reflecting Valentinian’s ill success and the fading of the Roman imperium, the imperial post of ‘vicar of the city’ (fourth-sixth century) failed to remain a counterpoise to the senatorial ‘prefect of the city’. And as the supremacy of the great senatorial landholders became more and more unmistakable, subverting the imperial social order, the central government tried to survive by binding subjects to their home places and inherited lots in life—by freezing social mobility. This was the cure that guaranteed demise. This, the exertion of a spurious despotic power, was the sacrifice of the purest power of unharassed autocracy: the power to co-opt whom it pleases and raze the defences of class.
Such was the power claimed naturally by a monarch with truly oecumenical pretensions. The ‘lawbook of Melfi’ of the dazzling Hohenstaufen Frederick II (1194–1250) has been styled ‘the birth certificate of modern bureaucracy’. Flashing briefly to the heights of rulership he drew men to his service not with the beneficium, a fief to possess, but with the officium, a service to fulfil. Non-transferable and non-hereditary, office was his alone to give, his to repossess, graced with his grace. He made officers from any rank, and no considerations of rank could mitigate the power of his omnipresent hand—his bureaucracy.
Byzantium, which filtered Roman imperial conceptions through to Frederick, did the same for Russian czars. In the sixteenth century Ivan IV (‘The Terrible’) flouted old Kievan aristocratic ideas and sapped the position of the noble boyars with a band of faithful servants, the Oprichnina, chosen without regard to class, for Ivan called all his subjects ‘slaves’. The boyars recovered sufficiently by the next century to stand off, weakly, the new régime of the Romanovs—social privileges retained, but political power unreplenished. And here we have a suggestion of the ‘Sun King’s’ arrangement in contemporary France, a tactic fateful for the future of French monarchy and provocative to the observer of Chinese.
What Louis XIV did after the various rebellious actions of the Fronde (the nobles’ and the parlements’, 1648–53) was to bring new men to power, but to separate actual power from apparent grandeur. He meant to preserve a politically shorn but socially splendid aristocracy so that its political sup-planter, the king’s bureaucracy, should be cut off from the social dignity which could make it aristocratic itself, and thus a potential rival, not a tool. The very model of an autocrat speaks in Louis’ words: ‘…it was not in my interest to seek men of more eminent station because ... it was important that the public should know, from the rank of those whom I chose to serve me, that I had no intention of sharing my power with them. (It was also important) that they themselves, conscious of what they were, should conceive no higher aspirations than those which I chose to permit.’ Louis’ ‘intendants’, their very title a new creation, took over the government of the countryside from a nobility either soothingly sinecured (the ‘sleeping abbots’, et al.) or ineffectually rustic or emptily grand at Versailles, where the king and his bourgeois ministers left only something of war and something of diplomacy to the heirs of feudal greatness. Before Richelieu, the centralizing genius behind Louis’ achievement, the king demanded fidelity; after (an important nuance) he exacted submission. The Duc de Saint-Simon complained that Louis surrounded himself with nothing but ‘vile bourgeois’. Saint-Simon, of course, was in favour of an aristocratic reaction against royal absolutism (and especially against the bureaucratic secretaries of state, whom he described as monsters devouring the noblesse). But reluctantly he ascribed the failure of the Regent’s aristocratically weighted ‘Polysynodie’, in the first years after Louis XIV, to the emptiness of a nobility good for nothing but getting itself killed in war. That was the Richelieu effect: the monarchy absolute, nobility dissolute, and its autonomous powers dissolved.
This refers primarily to the noblesse d’épee, the old ‘nobility of the sword’. The newer noblesse de robe was still to be heard from, leading the movement in the eighteenth century for aristocratic revival, and I shall take note of this soon. But the initial attempt (though it proved abortive) to make the king omnipotent remains highly suggestive. The conception of an aristocracy still in being, but sterile and ornamental, has a part in a logic of absolutism. And the logic applies in other lands as well.
In Prussia the French emphases were altered but the triumvirate was there; monarchy, bureaucracy, and aristocracy still confronted each other. Frederick William I, in the first half of the eighteenth century, looked for ministers, he said, who were ordinary persons (or, indeed, ‘yapping little dogs’), less intent on their honour than aristocrats, who might refuse him blind obedience. The Hohenzollerns eventually softened their approach and compromised between a Junker aristocratic ‘private law state’ (a spoils system of patronage appointment) and a dynastic bureaucratized ‘public law state’ (merit appointment of experts). Still, though the monarch never pushed the bureaucratic attack on the nobles to a logical culmination, the hereditary noble ‘officier’ and the upstart royal ‘commissaire’ were distinguishable types, which had their distinctive relations with the monarch. The government of Frederick William I, like that of Louis XIV, had an unmistakably bourgeois impulse in it, and this accorded with the basic character of the ancien régime. It was a character formed by the accommodation of aristocracy to absolute monarchy, an accommodation whereby aristocratic social privilege was preserved, while the nobility was politically transformed. These civil relations of aristocracy and monarch reflected a power-shift in military relations—from the feudal nobility’s abhorrence of the emerging monarch’s ‘public’ armed forces, to the monarch’s refurbishing of the status-honour of nobles, in their new personae as the members of his officer corps. As they were his, they were damaged in their aristocratic licence; but as they were officers, they were still aristocratic.
What those aristocratic-bureaucratic-monarchical relations involved (as surely in China as in the western examples) was tension between a centralizing power and vested interests. Some of the latter were feudal-aristocratic; impeding a monarchy’s rise or expediting its fall; and some were bureaucratic, new, and of the monarch’s own contriving as he asserted himself against the aristocracy. Resolutions differed from place to place, but everywhere the tension was an autocrat’s concern.
When Ch’in united the Chinese Empire against the feudal hierarchies, which were territorially and jurisdictionally divisive, and when it determined to stave off re-feudalization, it had an appropriate motto, an anti-hierarchical one: ‘When fathers and elder brothers possess the Empire, younger sons and brothers are low common men.’ Han emperors acted decisively on a Confucianist’s advice to dilute the ranks of nobles of the Liu (the imperial) family, and drain their strength; it was a strength which had served the Han against nobles ‘of different surnames’, but which central authority had to fear when the rivals common to all the Lius were duly vanquished. An early T’ang hereditary aristocracy, flourishing in its natural environment of military conquest, was deliberately subverted by Empress Wu (684–705), who conjured up a royal, rival class of literati from an ‘open’ examination system. And a thousand years later the Ch’ing Emperor Yung-cheng (1722–35) showed the same penchant of autocrats for levelling up, this time from the bottom: he ordered that various local pariah peoples—the Shansi lo-hu, descendants of families with a criminal stigma; Chekiang to-min, ‘fallen people’, and chiu-hsing yü-hu, the endogamous ‘fishing people of the nine surnames’; Anhui shih-p’u, ‘slaves’—be officially treated without distinction from others of better standing. This is a standard type of anti-feudal measure, part of a programme to flatten status barriers against effective central power (like Meiji dismissal of the legal disabilities of Japanese pariahs, the tokushu buraku, ‘special villages’ of eta).
Yung-cheng, however, and the Ch’ing dynasty were on the far side of the great divide, the Sung. In that earlier period, though outside lords’ were already effectively extinguished and the weight was shifting definitively toward bureaucracy and autocracy, the emperor could still seem poised (and sometimes paralysed) between his aristocratic near relations and his bureaucratic aides. But by early Ch’ing there could be no question of the emperor in the middle. He was at one of the poles, and though Yung-cheng had an aristocracy around him, he owned it. Confucian bureaucracy, the guarantor of the harmlessness of nobles, had long since been the status group whose solidarity autocrats had to melt. And formal aristocracy, gratifyingly choked off by bureaucracy as a major threat to the monarch, was fanned into life as part of the flame to be turned against its stifler.
3. ARISTOCRACY AS THE MONARCH’S TOOL TO CHECK BUREAUCRACY
The founder of the Ming dynasty in 1368, an autocratic centralizer with the best of them, nevertheless, with his eyes wide open, provided for enfeoffment of imperial princes. He hardly intended to let it get out of hand, and regular bureaucrats were to supervise the princes’ troops and communications. Then, presumably safely subject to the centre and incapable of disintegrative mischief, they were supposed to be converted to the centre’s support. The main threat in the early Ming was Mongol. But what the monarch cared about was defence against infringement of the imperial power in any case, by invader or official. Enfeoffment, hopefully controlled, so that by itself it should breed no rivals to the throne, was a dynastic response to eccentric forces from any rival quarter. The Ch’ing, too, had an aristocracy of their own as an anchor against the bureaucratic drift. The Manchu conquest meant that villas of the Ming imperial family nobility and much other land lay abandoned, without owners. Part of it was taken over by the Ch’ing imperial house, part was given to deserving officials and the like who had come with the winners from Manchuria. In 1650 the dynasty established a regular system of land allotment to various grades of feudal notables, from ch’in-wang, hereditary princes (8 so, every so being 180 mou or about 27 acres) down to feng-en chiang-chun (60 mou). This scale applied to subsequent ennoblements. The lands were all hereditary and inalienable.
This feudal conception, so much at odds with the predominant social practice, was clearly meant to invest the imperial house with an aristocratic bulwark, shored up against the solvent forces of the general Confucian society. Yet, to render the aristocrats themselves harmless, the dynasty used a Confucian technique, an examination system, and controlled them bureaucratically. The rules called for tests in archery and the Manchu language, to be administered four times annually by the ‘Court of the Imperial Clan’ to not yet enfeoffed or not yet adult sons of nobles; and in the examination in the first month of winter, overseen by a specially appointed imperial high official, not only sons but the lesser nobles, too (with fiefs ranging down from 240 mou) were subject to the trial.
How effective, really, could these Ming and Ch’ing aristocracies be as checks on the regular officialdom? They were so hedged in themselves that they were hardly impressive as restraints in the world outside. Rather than putting a positive curb on Confucian bureaucracy, they represented, perhaps, the monarch’s attempt to withdraw, for associates of his own, some stores of strength from the field open to official depredations. To cut down actively on the latter and thus preserve his power, the monarch needed private bureaucratic agents more than aristocratic consumers. These agents should form a personal corps, depending on him for honour and place, therefore approaching the despotic ideal in bureaucracy: a set of instruments. This was just the ideal which Confucianists resisted—once the eclipse of aristocracy had made them and their honour less dependent on the throne.
Therefore, in the last analysis not ‘princes’ and ‘dukes’ but eunuchs and simple Manchus became the centralizer’s tools. Indeed, even a millennium and a half before the Manchu era, Han emperors were feeling pushed to marshal a ‘third force’, in this instance eunuchs, to weigh against the Confucian element, and the scholars were duly recording disapproval. They disapproved less of the T’ang practice of appointing eunuchs to check on the deviationism of military commanders—the latter were no great favourites either in Confucian circles. Still, the lesson was the same: eunuchs, despised by literati, were used by the emperor personally to guard his central power. However (to make the comparison more immediate), at the Ch’ing courts, even the relatively indulgent Empress Dowager’s, eunuchs were markedly fewer and more strictly restrained than under the Ming. This suggests again what we have already suggested, that eunuchs and Manchus, in the Sino-foreign, Ming and Ch’ing dynastic sequence, were functionally equivalent. For by themselves Manchus would play the role of auxiliaries well enough, outsiders thrown back on the monarch who made them—made them both in spite and because of the literati’s resentment.
And what was the nature of this resentment? Of all things, it had a certain aristocratic air about it, as befitted a self-regarding group’s contempt for mere dependants, the men from nowhere who needed a monarch to guarantee their rise. If this sounds like a Han or T’ang aristocratic resentment of the Confucianists themselves, it is no accident. When the older, vital aristocrats went down as the Chinese imperial power became transcendent, the Confucianists’ self-regard became the monarch’s concern—for would they be loyal to him?—and the Confucianists’ self-regard withered the newer recruits to the monarch’s loyal coterie.
4. THE CONFUCIAN BUREAUCRACY’S RESISTANCE
That the literati felt lofty enough to scorn this sort of coterie confirms the fact that a monarch needed to own such objects of scorn. That is, aristocracy was no longer lofty enough itself in social prestige to monopolize it, and so divorce it (like Versailles from Louis XIV’s intendants) from the officials’ political functions. The officials, accordingly, were not so bound to the crown. Failing any serious competition from a rival elite (feudal aristocracy being so curtailed), feeling no social gaucherie in comparison, Confucian officials could have an aristocratic pride of their own, unvitiated by the self-doubts of the arriviste—theirs was the circle where climbers yearned to arrive. They themselves, functionaries though they were, set the tone of culture instead of facing the scorn of the functionless, like the late Bourbon politically stripped aristocrats, who dismissed local government as-the province of clowns and clerks. Chinese emperors could neither deprive bureaucracy initially of that formidable combination, prestige and executive function, nor dangle before it subsequently, as prizes (and seeds of obligation), titles conveying lustre from a truly noble estate, beyond bureaucracy.
Prussian kings eventually did the latter. Since the Junkers had by no means utterly succumbed to Frederick William I’s ‘yapping little dogs’, the ‘von’ was still precious enough for the nouveaux to covet—while the king was both autocratic enough to give it, and not quite autocratic enough to banish the need or obliterate the glory of the gift. Bureaucratic ‘nobles of ascent’ began to meet feudal ‘nobles of descent’, with the latter now constrained to join the bureaucratic endeavour, and ultimately even to mingle with commoners on the basis of Bildung, a new cultural bond. Bildung, an amorphous but deep feeling for an inner moral and intellectual cultivation, impaired the monarch’s ability to impose himself as master and impose on officials the character of tools. Old nobility, to some extent cut down to bureaucratic stature, preserved and spread some aristocratic resistance to the centre; and new bureaucratic nobility, for all its dynastic and anti-aristocratic origins, became set in reaction against royal autocracy and competition in government service. As a Konigsberg colleague of Kant remarked in 1799: ‘The Prussian state, far from being an unlimited monarchy, is but a thinly veiled aristocracy—this aristocracy rules the country in undisguised form as a bureaucracy.’
Confucianists came to their resistance by a different road. In Prussia there was some degree of devolution of aristocracy to bureaucracy. But the hybrid form at the end of the (pre-Napoleonic) process—an intellectualized conception of aristocracy—was remarkably like the Chinese amalgam. Seeing the process as evolution towards rather than devolution from aristocracy, we may read the hybrid the other (and even more clumsy) way round, ‘aristocratized intellectualism’, but the Prussian analogy is surely compelling. The future statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, writing in 1789 and after about how ‘one forms oneself’ (‘man bildet sich’), prized freedom and anti-despotic self-mastery, general culture over useful knowledge. He felt contempt for the philistine who lived to work and worked toward material goals, and he stood for things and states of mind valuable in themselves, for men who were more than things, for ends over means. A Confucian ‘Bildung’, infused with the same spirit of anti-vocational, humanistic amateur ideal, had the same implications of tension with autocracy.
What Bildung meant, and what Confucian cultivation meant, was the achievement and vindication of a kind of prestige which was not the monarch’s to confer. In an unmitigated despotism, the government employee is the most vulnerable of men, totally insecure in his legal status and social standing. But a Confucian official, non-vocationally educated, was no mere ‘employee’. He might be summarily retired, even executed, or he might retire in self-abnegation, but his dignity and social status were not destroyed; for regular official position was taken as a sign of a quality (high culture, not simply professional expertise) which existed irrespective of the holding of office. The Confucianist brought it to office, not office (as the monarch’s gift) to him. And if a monarch lacks the sole power to confer prestige, he cannot enslave his bureaucracy by threatening to withhold it.
Thus, the submergence of true aristocracy gave Confucian bureaucracy something of the latter’s quality. But while officials strained against the monarchy, they needed it, as the guarantor of a central power that had to exist for them to enjoy consuming it. It was an ambiguous position, reflected, perhaps, in the ambiguous status of Mandarin, the Kuan-hua or modern ‘officials’ language’ (being the standard speech of the capital, effectively Peking from fairly early Ming to mid-Republic). During imperial days Mandarin was by no means secure in its prestige, since with the more rapid phonetic changes in the north it had lost ancient distinctions which central and southern dialects had preserved. There were grounds for fastidious—one might say aristocratic—reserve towards this linguistic instrument of the centralizing power. Yet, scholarly sophisticates were, after all, bound up in the bureaucratic system, and Mandarin, from being useful as the officials’ lingua franca, went on to assume an aristocratic tone of its own. It was not exactly a language of the happy few—not with millions of commoners tuned in on its sounds—but it took on the distinction of guild speech (and a proud guild, surely), transcending the provincial associations of common local dialect.
So, in and out of the monarch’s service, drawn to it and drawing back, Confucianists might seem to speak out of both sides of their mouths. And the monarch was just as ambiguous. For he needed them to make good his centralization; then, in turn, to protect it, he had to restrain their ominous appetites.
Therefore, even in flouting Confucian taste, the emperor might pander to it in his covering explanation. For example, after the Yung-lo emperor usurped the throne in 1403, he had his historians libel his ousted nephew as a patron of Buddhists and eunuchs. As it happened, the really active recruiter of monks and eunuchs had been Yung-lo himself, with the autocrat’s feel for the usefulness of a personal force of outsiders, as a check on the orthodox element that he needed to win and needed to keep. Thus, Yung-lo could not just counter Confucianists nakedly with Buddhists and eunuchs; he had to indulge these anti-Confucian coteries, then mask it with a Confucianist’s apology.
This was the monarch’s side of the line of strain. He might resent the hierarchical tone of Confucianism as he resented aristocracy’s, but if he failed to indulge Confucianists in their quasi-aristocratic taste for freedom and status, he risked the ultimate Ch’in fate of bureaucratic and general revulsion. On their side, Confucianists had to acknowledge that if they strained against the centre too successfully, they might deliver themselves as well as the state to a host of brutal Ts’ao Ts’aos. That is why monarchy could be despotically Legalist, military, and yet the patron of Confucianists; why bureaucracy could be aristocratically Confucian, pacifist, and yet the agent of monarchs; why, inclusively, Confucianism persisted not only in tension with monarchy, but in tension within itself.
[MGH: The final 3 pages, taking us to the twentieth century, will be pictures. Routledge’s 1960s books can be so visually stylish in addition to being well-written]
[from] Chapter VIII
The Source:
Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate: Volume 2, The Problem of Monarchial Decay, Routledge 1964, 2005 [Chapter 3 and pp. 114-116]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.