[Part 9 Permanently Totalitarian] China History Governance
Étienne Balazs’ resolute 'Civilization & Bureaucracy' remains an influential book
Étienne Balazs wrote:
Significant Aspects of Chinese Society
When taking a bird's-eye view of the vast stretch of China's history, one is struck by the persistence and stability of one enduring feature of Chinese society that might be called officialism, the most conspicuous sign of which was the uninterrupted continuity of a ruling class of scholar-officials. From the founding of the empire by Ch'in Shih-huang in the third century B.C. right up until its end in 1912, and even beyond, it was always this class of well brought up "gentlemen" who presided over China's destinies and who recorded the events of her history. There is no area of Chinese civilization, from its basic institutions to the remotest other-worldly regions of its mythology, and including its literature and art, where the influence of these scholar-officials is not immediately discernible. How should this dominant social group, peculiar to China and unknown in other societies, be defined ? As an estate, or a caste, or a class?
The first thing that strikes one about this social stratum is the precarious position of its members individually, contrasted with their continuous existence as a social class. Even the highest officials were, as individuals, at the mercy of the absolute and despotic state, and were liable to disappear suddenly from view. Any one of them might be minister one day, and consigned to a dungeon the next; yet within the same state that had condemned him as an individual, the body of officials as a whole continued, undisturbed, to play its part. The twenty-four official histories, a massive monument to the reign of the bureaucracy, contain innumerable examples of capital punishment meted out to officials, or of their being "granted permission”—that is, required — to commit suicide. It may be said in passing that if the statistics of these symptomatic occurrences were to be compiled, they might well be illuminating.
In my opinion, it is justifiable to define the officials as a class if account is taken of their economic basis (salaries and ownership of land), their uniform style of life, and their traditionalist outlook. Their upbringing, monopoly of education, notions of honor, and above all their character of literati, which distinguished them so sharply from the illiterate masses, might weight the scales toward regarding them as a caste or as a closed intellectual aristocracy. On the other hand, the institution of literary examinations for selecting officials did introduce a limited amount of free competition into the methods by which the ruling class perpetuated itself, in spite of the fact that its supposedly democratic nature was a mere legend fostered by the officials themselves in order to conceal their monopoly. It is this factor, reminiscent of the way in which the English aristocracy maintained its position by co-opting commoners, that militates against the idea of a closed caste.
The problem of determining the structure of Chinese society is further complicated by certain features in Chinese history that partake of the nature of feudalism. I refer, of course, not to the feudalism of classical times under the Chou, previous to the emergence of a bureaucratic society, but to regressive forms of feudalism that occurred from time to time at later periods, and notably to the important role of the aristocracy during the Middle Ages, when they clung tenaciously to their latifundia and their privileges.
The ambiguities of Confucianism present an even greater difficulty. Originating in the feudal society of ancient times, Confucianism began by expressing the mentality of the feudal lords, but later it changed into a system that became the organizing power behind the scholar-officials and gave full expression to their interests, ideas, and ideals. As a result of this metamorphosis, however, certain contradictory features developed. Confucianism was used as a means of defending the interests of the gentry, and the subtlety, not to say duplicity, with which this was done has deceived many a scholar. Confucianists kept up a tenacious struggle for democracy, but for democracy within the aristocracy— an exclusive privilege for the ruling class-and were authoritarian to an extreme degree in their relations with other classes. They were opportunist, conservative, and traditionalist; these characteristics went hand in hand with certain demagogic traits, although when they spoke of the min, the people, what they really meant was the po-hsing, the "Hundred Families”. It is thus easy for the unwitting to be led astray.
The Chinese Communists, as the result of a line laid down during the struggle for power within the Russian Bolshevik Party in the years between 1926 and 1936, now have a summary philosophy of history which, though useless as a means for understanding the past, is helpful for justifying their aims. According to them, the former regime in China was purely and simply a feudal one. This is a thesis which, if a certain mechanical interpretation of Marxist doctrine is accepted, provides transparent justification for both the bourgeois revolution and the agrarian reform.
I believe that a careful study of the material circumstances, the social ties, the mode of life, and the ideology of the scholar-officials would enable the following conclusion to be drawn. The social position of the literati did not depend on their upbringing, their hereditary privileges, their territorial possessions, or their personal or family wealth. On the contrary, all these various features of their social position — important as they were in maintaining it — stemmed, in the last analysis, from the function the literati performed within the society as a whole. This function was an indispensable one for the maintenance of a large-scale agrarian society composed of individual cells — peasant families, living by subsistence agriculture, and scattered over an immense territory that was physically undifferentiated — which would have disintegrated into hopeless anarchy without the presence of a solid hierarchy of administrators given discretionary powers by a central government. Every attempt to replace a system of centralized government administered by officials who could be dispatched or recalled at any moment to or from the farthest corner of the empire, by a feudal system administered locally by the landed aristocracy, always led, in China as elsewhere, to particularism. But Chinese particularism, instead of leading to the formation of separate nations as it did in the West, broke down almost immediately, not so much because of the splitting up of sovereignty as because it meant the collapse of all the institutions that were a sine qua non for public security, production, exchange, an ordered life, or, indeed, quite simply for life of any kind.
Among those institutions that could not even have come into existence, let alone be maintained, without the constant, active participation of officials in every department, I shall single out for mention only the most important. These were : the calendar, indispensable for agricultural operations ; the control of rivers and of transport and irrigation canals, and the construction of dikes, necessary in the battle against the twin catastrophes of flood and drought; the stocking of reserves in the public granaries against famine (and, as we know, periodic famine was the common fate of all agricultural societies until the threshold of the twentieth century) ; uniform weights and measures and a uniform currency as guarantee of a regular system of exchange; the organization of defense against the perpetual attacks of the barbarian nomads; finally, the education, training, recruitment, and reproduction of elites.
It can easily be seen that all these tasks have one feature in common: while none is directly productive, each is indispensable for maintaining production, or at least contributes toward doing so. To a major extent, they obliged the administration to carry out large-scale public works and maintain command of a large labor force. Neglect of any single one of such tasks adversely affected the efficient functioning of the social system as a whole.
Another common and important feature of official duties was their political character. They did not require any detailed, specialized knowledge. What they did require was worldly wisdom and savoir faire, and a level of general education that admitted the usefulness of a certain amount of rudimentary knowledge about technical matters together with the fine art of being able to manage people; or, it might be better to say, these duties called on aptitude — acquired through experience — for planning and directing public works and being in command of the technicians, experts, and specialists. The social system did not permit its elite to narrow their personalities by specialization. To know the classics by heart and have a smattering of music, to master the rules of polite behavior and acquire a polished literary style, to be something of a calligrapher and an occasional writer of verse-these were the kinds of accomplishment considered likely to contribute more to the exercise of social and political functions than would training in some profession or study of the exact sciences ; and these were indeed both the outstanding virtues and the outstanding defects of Chinese civilization when compared with the later stages of our own. Hence arose the amiable dilettantism of the chun-tzu, the gentleman who, in whatever situation he might find himself, had to act as the representative of a privileged governing elite.
There are two further, and somewhat unpleasant, aspects of officialism which, if less alluring to study, nevertheless have much greater bearing on our own twentieth century. They are corruption and totalitarianism.
Corruption, which is widespread in all impoverished and backward countries (or, more exactly, throughout the pre-industrial world), was endemic in a country where the servants of the state often had nothing to live on but their very meager salaries. The required attitude of obedience to superiors made it impossible for officials to demand higher salaries, and in the absence of any control over their activities from below it was inevitable that they should purloin from society what the state failed to provide. According to the usual pattern, a Chinese official entered upon his duties only after spending long years in study and passing many examinations; he then established relations with protectors, incurred debts to get himself appointed, and then proceeded to extract the amount he had spent on preparing himself for his career from the people he administered — and extracted both principal and interest. The degree of his rapacity would be dictated not only by the length of time he had had to wait for his appointment and the number of relations he had to support and of kin to satisfy or repay, but also by the precariousness of his position.
It is here that another vital institution of Chinese society played a decisive role: the institution of the extended family and the clan. Protectionism and nepotism exist in all latitudes, but nowhere have they found more fertile soil than in China. This less admirable side of officialism was encouraged and sanctioned by Confucian doctrine, which taught that the interests of the family took precedence over those of the state. Almost all the discussions between the Legalists (fa-chia) and the Confucianists turned upon the question : which should have priority, the family or the state?
The Confucianist emphasis on the family may make it seem contradictory to speak of the totalitarian tendencies of the Confucianist state. But the contradiction is only apparent. If by totalitarianism is meant total control by the state and its executives, the officials, then it can indeed be said that Chinese society was to a high degree totalitarian. In this as in so many other things, the Confucianists supplanted the state-minded Legalists only to carry out even more rigorously the doctrines they had preached. State control and state intervention existed here long before these activities became common technical terms. No private undertaking nor any aspect of public life could escape official regulation. In the first place there was a whole series of state monopolies - the large trading monopolies in goods for mass consumption (salt, iron, tea, wines, and spirits) and the monopoly in foreign trade - which supplied the major portion of the tax revenue. There was also the monopoly in education, jealously guarded. There was to all intents and purposes a monopoly in literature (I was on the point of saying a press monopoly), for any writings from unofficial sources that had not undergone state censorship had little hope of reaching the public. But the tentacles of the state Moloch, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, extended far beyond that. There were regulations for dress, for the dimensions of public and private buildings, for festivals, for music, for what colors to wear; regulations for birth, and regulations for death. This welfare state superintended, to the minutest detail, every step its subjects took from the cradle to the grave. It was a regime of red tape and petty fuss — yards and yards of tape and never-ending fuss.
Chinese ingenuity and inventiveness, which have provided so many of the amenities of life, such as silk, tea, porcelain, paper, and printing, would no doubt have continued to enrich China and would probably have brought it to the threshold of the industrial age, if they had not been stifled by state control. It was the state that killed technological invention in China. Not only in the sense that it crushed abovo anything that went against or gave the appearance of going against its own interests, but also because of the customary attitudes so firmly implanted for reasons of state. An atmosphere of routine, traditionalism, and immobility, in which any innovation or initiative not demanded and sanctioned in advance is regarded with suspicion, hardly conduces to the spirit of free research.
It might be thought that collective responsibility, another characteristic feature of imperial China, would be a natural corollary of its family system. But we know this is not the case, because we have seen with horror how in a recent totalitarian system innocent people were made responsible for real or imaginary crimes committed by relatives, and no such type of family as the Chinese extended family existed there. In China it appears to have been the more ferocious upholders of the idea of state control who introduced the theory and practice of intimidation through collective responsibility, against the wishes of the Confucianists. It remains true, however, that after the Chinese state had become completely Confucianized, it continued to use this terrible weapon against potential internal enemies.
These, then, are one or two important aspects of Chinese society, consideration of which may help us to understand China's history. They have at the same time a very great theoretical interest for those who are concerned with the structure of modern society. It is no doubt obvious that in speaking about the social and economic problems of a no longer existing Confucianist state run by scholar-officials, I have unavoidably touched on many a question concerning a totalitarian and bureaucratic society that had not yet come into existence, or is only now coming into existence, in China and elsewhere …
China as a Permanently Bureaucratic Society
The image the West has had of China has changed from time to time, and no doubt will change again. Of course an image to some extent reflects the viewpoint of the observer, thus distorting the reality that lies behind it. First impressions, however, are usually correct, and this holds true when two civilizations first come into contact just as much as when two people meet for the first time. Upon familiarity, individual features will become more sharply defined, or some may become blurred, but the general impression of the first encounter will be found to be valid.
The first image of China formed in the West, if we discount the rationalist wisdom with which the eighteenth-century “philosophers” clothed it, was that of a mandarinate. A strange society it seemed — bizarre, even, for it lacked so many of the constituent elements of Western society at that time, such as the Church and the nobility — yet a society in which, because of the preponderant role of its “philosophers”, everything was well ordered and the wheels of an omnipotent state turned without a hitch. The impressions of the first observers, to whom the rule of the all-powerful scholar-officials seemed the distinctive feature of the world — a world sui generis — that had newly been discovered, were fully in accord with reality.
Since the time of the first encounter, study of the scholar-officials has gone on uninterruptedly. Sometimes it has been undertaken with the conscious intention of investigating the essential features of the mandarinate, how it came into being, its history, and the conditions under which it operated; more often, even when sinologists thought they were confining their researches to Chinese language, literature, philosophy, or art, they were in fact studying the distinctive products of this one particular social stratum.
We can understand only what we already know, and, what is more, we can become genuinely interested only in something that touches us personally … The fact is that we have only recently become aware of certain aspects of China that seem to be permanent features …
… You may paste on labels (Antiquity, Early or Late Middle Ages, Modern Times); you may cut it up into longer or shorter slices; but, whatever you do, you cannot conjure away the sheer length of time the Chinese Empire lasted, founded in 221 B.C . and still surviving at the beginning of the twentieth century, or deny the permanence of the imperial institutions and the perenniality of certain phenomena such as Confucianism, which endured in spite of successive metamorphoses. Explanations may differ, interpretations contradict each other, but the underlying reality persists, a majestic mountain of solid, incontrovertible fact.
Now, it seems to me that the only valid method for letting light into this solid mass of historical fact is to seek out the causes of continuity — that is, try to discover the specific and significant features of Chinese social structure. I shall have to confine myself to discussing the social structure of imperial China, for it would take me far beyond the limits of the present essay to make comparisons with earlier periods, however interesting and instructive that might be. And I can only point out the more striking of its distinctive features, since anything approaching a complete description of the social structure of imperial China would require not an essay but several large tomes.
What, then, were its most striking features ?
1. In the first place, China was a large agrarian society, highly developed but using traditional techniques, and established on a subcontinent that lacks any marked geographical articulation . Its cells, scattered over an immense territory whose main arteries were a system of waterways, existed in an economic autarchy that made each of them an individual unit, and isolated each unit from every other. These cells were the peasant families that composed the overwhelming majority of the population. They were self-sufficient; but without the system of economic exchanges and the organizational framework imposed from above, they would have disintegrated irremediably into their component particles, into an anarchy that would have made impossible not only the distribution, but also the production of goods, and indeed the maintenance of life itself. It was, in other words, a pre-industrial, nonmaritime society, based on a peasant subsistence economy.
2. This society was bureaucratic because the social pyramid — which rested on a broad peasant base, with intermediate strata consisting of a merchant class and an artisan class, both of them numerically small, lacking in autonomy, of inferior status, and regarded with scant respect — was capped and characterized by its apex: the mandarinate.
3. The class of scholar-officials (or mandarins), numerically infinitesimal but omnipotent by reason of their strength, influence, position, and prestige, held all the power and owned the largest amount of land. This class possessed every privilege, above all the privilege of reproducing itself, because of its monopoly of education. But the incomparable prestige enjoyed by the intelligentsia had nothing to do with such a risky and possibly ephemeral thing as the ownership of land; nor was it conferred by heredity, which after all can be interrupted; nor was it due solely to its exclusive enjoyment of the benefits of education. This unproductive elite drew its strength from the function it performed — the socially necessary, indeed indispensable, function of coordinating and supervising the productive labor of others so as to make the whole social organism work. All mediating and administrative functions were carried out by the scholar-officials. They prepared the calendar, they organized transport and exchange, they supervised the construction of roads, canals, dikes, and dams; they were in charge of all public works, especially those aimed at forestalling droughts and floods; they built up reserves against famine, and encouraged every kind of irrigation project. Their social role was at one and the same time that of architect, engineer, teacher, administrator, and ruler. Yet these “managers” before their time were firmly against any form of specialization. There was only one profession they recognized: that of governing …
4. Being specialists in the handling of men and experts in the political art of governing, the scholar-officials were the embodiment of the state, which was created in their image — a hierarchical, authoritarian state, paternalistic yet tyrannical; a tentacular welfare state; a totalitarian Moloch of a state. The word "totalitarian" has a modern ring to it, but it serves very well to describe the scholar-officials' state if it is understood to mean that the state has complete control over all activities of social life, absolute domination at all levels. The state in China was a managerial, an interventionist state-hence the enduring appeal of Taoism, which was opposed to state intervention. Nothing escaped official regimentation. Trade, mining, building, ritual, music, schools, in fact the whole of public life and a great deal of private life as well, were subjected to it.
5. There are still other reasons for speaking of a totalitarian state. In the first place, there was a secret-police atmosphere of mutual suspicion, in which everyone kept watch on everyone else. Then there was the arbitrary character of justice. In the eyes of the authorities, every accused person was assumed to be guilty. Terror was instilled by the principle of collective responsibility (which, contrary to what one might suppose, had no connection with the Confucianist ideal of the family), making every subject shake in his shoes, and the scholar-officials most of all, for, although they ruled the state, they were also its servants. I should like to add that this last point is only apparently contradictory. The truth is that in all totalitarian societies it is a fundamental principle that public interest comes before private interests, and that reasons of state take priority over the rights of the individual human being. The inevitable corollary is that an official in his capacity as a representative of the state is sacrosanct, but as an individual he is nothing.
A final totalitarian characteristic was the state's tendency to clamp down immediately on any form of private enterprise (and this in the long run kills not only initiative but even the slightest attempts at innovation) , or, if it did not succeed in putting a stop to it in time, to take over and nationalize it. Did it not frequently happen during the course of Chinese history that the scholar-officials, although hostile to all inventions, nevertheless gathered in the fruits of other people’s ingenuity? I need mention only three examples of inventions that met this fate : paper, invented by a eunuch; printing, used by the Buddhists as a medium for religious propaganda ; and the bill of exchange, an expedient of private businessmen …
6. The scholar-officials and their state found in the Confucianist doctrine an ideology that suited them perfectly. In ancient times, Confucianism had expressed the ideals of those former members of the feudal aristocracy who had formed a new social stratum of revolutionary intelligentsia, but in Han times (206 B.C. — A.D. 220) , shortly after the foundation of the empire, it became a state doctrine. The virtues preached by Confucianism were exactly suited to the new hierarchical state: respect, humility, docility, obedience, submission, and subordination to elders and betters. In comparison with the usefulness of virtues such as these, ancestor worship and the cult of the family were no more than additional, though welcome, features. Moreover, the new elite found it convenient to adopt the Confucian nonreligious, rationalist outlook. Mysticism was usually a cloak for subversive tendencies, and the scholar-officials, anxious above all to maintain the position they had won, felt that it was something to be guarded against. Prudence dictated that they should remain soberly realistic and down to earth. Prudence also dictated that the new Confucianism should be conformist and traditionalist in character: strict adherence to orthodox doctrines was the surest defense against the pressures of other social groups. Thus the contradiction between the rationalism of early Confucianism and the traditionalism of its later development created a tension within the mandarinate which can be explained by the play of interests — of vital interests — within the society as a whole. The conflict of interests also explains the contradiction between, on the one hand, the claims to be a democracy (claims real enough as far as internal relations within the group of scholar-officials were concerned), and, on the other, the actual existence of an oligarchy — the contradiction, that is, between the two poles of Confucianist political doctrine …
… [The] continuity of Confucianism depended entirely upon the continued existence of the scholar-officials’ centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratic state. Whenever this state was at bay, whenever the scholar-officials had to let other actors take the center of the stage (never for long), the Confucianists went into retirement and kept quiet, taking cover in order to prepare a triumphant return …
… Returning to the question of continuity, let us attempt a summary answer to the problem, for to understand in detail why bureaucratic society lasted so long in China would require deep and prolonged study. There can surely be no other ruling class to compare with the mandarinate for capacity to survive, wealth of experience, and success in the art of governing. It is true that as rulers they cost the Chinese people dear. The strait jacket into which the scholar-officials forced the amorphous body of China was agonizingly uncomfortable, and inflicted innumerable frustrations and sufferings. Yet this costly contraption served a necessary purpose. It was the price paid for the homogeneity, long duration, and vitality of Chinese civilization …
Tradition and Revolution in China
What were the factors that were responsible for the continuity of one of the most stable social structures ever known ? This question must be asked, in view of the fact that the old order lasted for over two thousand years — if the abolition of the ancient form of feudalism by Ch'in Shih-huang in the third century s.c. is taken as the beginning of the period occupied by the Chinese Empire, and the irruption of Western civilization in the nineteenth century as the end. Convenient though it is to make vague generalizations, it would nevertheless be simplifying in the extreme if, by omitting every detail that might detract from such a generalization, one were to say that Chinese society never changed and always followed the same pattern. The only excuse for doing so would be to facilitate comprehension of the essential otherness of the old China, in order to distinguish it both from the West and from the new China. It would be a device for taking a mental stance that might provide a point of departure …
… Leaders falling by the wayside and upstarts who know how to profit from the occasion are phenomena typical of times of upheaval found in our own history as well as in China's, with this difference only: in China, whether a new dynasty was founded by an adventurer or carried to victory by the peasants, sooner or later it was taken over by the literati, the traditional intelligentsia, who, being both staunchly conservative and experienced as administrators, always brought the revolutionary forces under control, canalized them, tamed them, and rendered them harmless. Whence the awkward paradox that while revolutionary features marked the founding of every new dynasty (and heaven knows the Confucian high priests of history had plenty of difficulty in justifying the unforeseen leaps taken by their god, and in endeavoring to interpret disobedience — post festum and because of exceptional circumstances — as the most sacred of duties), yet the founding of a new dinasty after the fall of an old one, its rise to prosperity and subsequent gradual deterioration, was a pattern that repeated itself so monotonously that it became like a series of ritual gestures where no deviation is permissible, or the movements of a ballet in which the choreography is always the same …
… The complete regimentation of public and private life has a long tradition behind it. State officials and party cadres are as privileged today as the mandarins used to be, and prescribe in as much detail the duties of the ordinary mortal, who has not become any more precious in their eyes. The fountain pen is used instead of the writing brush and the Communists have replaced the Confucianists as the official party, but at bottom it is the same intelligentsia that assumes the indispensable function of direction, command, and administration. Even their mentality often recalls that of the autocratic and authoritarian tyrants of former days.
The stifling of all criticism, the muzzling of opinion, the punishment of the slightest sign of opposition as if it were a crime; threatening the faintest suspicion of heresy with serious penalties, deporting political adversaries to deserted regions, terrorizing kin through the system of collective responsibility, extorting confessions by refined forms of torture and elevating suicide to the level of an act of mercy — all such features of totalitarian power do not need to be borrowed from their neighbor by the Chinese Communists, for all are to be found in abundance in the storehouse of their own national traditions.
On the other hand, what does appear as a surprising novelty are the methods of agitation and propaganda used by the official party for taming the masses. Bringing politics into the daily life of the whole population has radically altered their former habits. Innumerable demonstrations, reunions, marches, committees, meetings, and public trials; theatrical performances, dances, public rejoicings; notices, pamphlets, journals — by every possible means official slogans are constantly drilled into every brain. In this way, what was formerly a sluggish, lethargic, undifferentiated mass of people has been shaken up, wakened up, enlivened, turned topsy-turvy, thus releasing an elemental force that will have incalculable consequences. Equally new, and with potential consequences whose importance it is impossible to exaggerate, is the enforced breakup of the traditional form of the family. It has been slowly disintegrating for the past century, but the
Communists want to push the process to its logical conclusion. If they succeed in transforming family loyalties into submission to the state, and persuade the individual to transfer his allegiance from the family to the state, they will have accomplished one of those memorable feats that change the course of history, for suppression of the clan spirit at the same time removes the main causes of nepotism and corruption. It is, however, too soon to judge whether the official ideology of collectivism and what can only be described as state slavery will be capable of dislodging deeply ingrained attitudes toward the family. Only one thing can be predicted with any certainty, and that is that in China individual liberty is not yet on the program; for the present it remains the cherished inheritance of the West and the secret dream of the Taoist sages.
I should like to conclude with a declaration of faith that our present Russian-American century will be succeeded by a Chinese twenty-first century. All the potential is there. Is this tantamount to saying that the “yellow peril” — that specter invented by a Victorian generation of Malthusians with a bad conscience — will actually eventualize? No. If peril there be, it is not a yellow one. I hope I have succeeded in giving some slight indication of the very different and far more serious nature of the danger that does actually confront us, and that it is not simply a question of what will happen in China, but of what will happen in the world as a whole.
The Source:
Étienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme, translated by H. M. Wright, edited by Arthur F. Wright, New Haven and London, Yale University Press 1964 [pp. 6-21, 152-153, 159-160, 169-170]
[MGH: The exploratory China Governance Series is hereby declared ‘concluded’. Normal tele-communications of various free lines of enquiry will resume soon.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.