Empire strikes back - the Chinese imperial bureaucracy is alive and well

Lately I have been going through Chinese history not through the lens of social scientists that I usually wear, but the good old traditional Chinese historiography that I admittedly never took seriously until now.

My social scientist self can say that this neglect is for very good reasons. Serious history is not about the personality quirks of this emperor or that minister. These are mere contingencies of elite politics. It is the broader changes at societal scale that matter: the emergence of the bureaucratic state, the fall of the hereditary aristocracy, the rise of kinship organizations, and the like. As Francis Bacon noted, there are those acute minds that dwell on the particular and discursive minds that seek general patterns. I have always put myself in the latter camp.

Only after this recent bout of catch-up did I realize how much the details matter. Not only do these details truly fill the abstraction of institutional rules writ large, they also are ultimately the raw data for finding general patterns. And boy did I learn from this.

My dawning realization, perhaps very belated, is as follows: by Song dynasty at the latest, the core of the Chinese bureaucracy’s modus operandi, incentive structure, and organizational culture has survived to the present day. The only main institutional change was the incorporation of the party to the state and the removal of the ritual functions, and even for those the Communist Party has the Nationalist Party to thank.

That is, the scholar-official system of the imperial state not only endured an expressly anti-monarchical republican revolution, but also the infamous Cultural Revolution with the stated goal of eradicating pre-communist values and traditions. How can this be?

Politician-bureaucrat synthesis. The officials are the same as the politicians. This is a product of the total dominance of the imperial state. No other source of legitimate political power exists independently of the imperial state.

The Chinese bureaucracy is fractal. Lower level administrative units have the same structure as higher level ones. This began in Qin as well. At the national (國), regional (郡) and local (縣) levels, the administration was divided between an administrative head, a military head, and an inspector to hold other officials accountable to the emperor. This latter office is another key feature of the Chinese state.