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Aug 4, 2015 · An imperial bureaucracy is a government administration constituted to carry out imperial policies in all regions of the empire. One prominent example of such a bureaucracy is the one that China adopted during the Han Dynasty.
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- Overview
- The clerical staff
Regular posts in the Nan Song civil service numbered about 20,000, without counting numerous sinecures, temporary commissions, and a slightly larger number of military officers. Besides eliminating most patronage privileges—by which high officials were entitled to obtain an official title for a son or other family member—the court occasionally considered a general reduction in the size of the bureaucracy, although vested interests always opposed it. Those who entered government service seldom dropped out or were thrown out. Meanwhile, new candidates waiting for offices came in waves from state examinations, extra examinations on special occasions, graduation from the National Academy, and special recommendations and unusual sponsorship; others gained official titles because their families contributed to famine relief or military expenditures. Thus, the ever-increasing supply of candidates far exceeded the vacancies.
According to Confucian theory, any prosperity that made possible more books in print, more schools, and a better-educated elite was all for the good. But the original Confucian ideal intended to have the elite serve the society in general and the community in particular rather than flood the bureaucracy. Rising educational standards made the competition at examinations harder and perhaps raised the average quality of degree holders.
Families with members in the bureaucracy responded in part by successfully increasing the importance of other avenues of entrance into government service, especially the “protection” privilege that allowed high officials to secure official rank for their protégés (usually junior family members). People outside the civil service responded by altering their goals and values and by reducing the stress on the importance of entering the bureaucracy. It was not accidental that Neo-Confucian academies spread during the era, emphasizing moral self-development—not success in examinations—as the proper goal of education.
During the Song period, increased emphasis was placed on morals and ethics and a continuous development of the law. The early Song had adopted a legal code almost wholly traceable to an earlier Tang code, but Song circumstances differed from those of the Tang. As a result, there was a huge output of legislation in the form of imperial edicts and approved memorials that took precedence over the newly adopted code and soon largely displaced it in many areas of law. Song legal bureaucrats periodically compiled and edited the results of this outpouring of new laws. The new rules not only altered the content of the (largely criminal) sphere covered by the code but also legislated in the areas of administrative, commercial, property, sumptuary, and ritual law. There were literally hundreds of compilations of various sorts of laws.
Perhaps as a result of the growth of this legal tangle from the late Bei Song onward, magistrates made increasing use of precedents, decisions by the central legal authorities on individual cases, in reaching legal decisions. The government sought to help its officials by instituting a variety of devices to encourage officials and prospective officials to learn the law and to certify that those in office did have some familiarity with things legal. There was an increase in the writing and publication of other sorts of works concerned with the law, including casebooks and the world’s oldest extant book on forensic medicine. Despite the appearance of such works, which were intended to help them, officials were under strong pressure to rule in a conservative way and to avoid rocking the boat.
Many scholar-officials sought simply to keep things quiet and maintain the appearance that there was no serious trouble. The bureaucratic style was to follow the accustomed ways in accordance with proper procedure, find expedient solutions based upon certain principles in spirit, make reasonable compromises after due consideration of all sides, and achieve smooth reconciliations of divergent views. To protect one’s own career record it was essential to engage in time-consuming consultations with all appropriate offices and to report to all concerned authorities so that everyone else would have a share of responsibility. Anyone who criticized the bureaucratic style would be going against the prevalent mode of operation—namely, mutual accommodation. Even the emperor adopted the bureaucratic style.
The norms for the clerks were even lower, especially in local government. Some 300 clerks in a large prefecture or nearly 100 in a small one were placed under the supervision of a few officials. The clerks had numerous dealings with various other elements in the community, whereas the officials, being outsiders, rarely had direct contacts. Holding practically lifelong tenure after benefiting from the cumulative experience of their fathers and uncles before them, the clerks knew how to operate the local administrative machinery far better than did the officials, who served only brief terms before moving elsewhere. Clerks often received inadequate salaries and were expected to support themselves with “gifts” from those needing their services. The clerks under honest, strict, and hardworking magistrates would recoil, but only briefly, because such magistrates would soon either gain promotion for their remarkable reputations, or their strict insistence on clean government would become intolerable to their superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and influential elements in the community who had connections with high circles. Though all bureaucrats complained of clerical abuses, many connived with the clerks, and none had a viable alternative to the existing situation. One significant suggestion was to replace the clerks with the oversupply of examination candidates and degree holders, who presumably had more moral scruples. But that solution had no chance of being considered, because it implied a downgrading of the status of those who considered themselves to be either potential or actual members of the ruling class.
The law did place definite limits on clerical misbehaviour. But when a clerk was caught in his wrongdoing, he knew enough to save himself—taking flight before arrest, getting a similar job elsewhere under a different name, defending himself through time-consuming procedures, appealing for leniency in sentencing, requesting a review, or applying for clemency on the occasion of imperial celebrations. What prevented clerical abuses from getting worse was not so much official enforcement of legal limits as it was the social convention in the community. For themselves as well as for their descendants, the clerks could ill afford to overstep the socially acceptable limits.
How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy.
Feb 8, 2019 · The civil service examinations of Imperial China allowed the state to find the best candidates to staff the vast bureaucracy that governed China from the Han Dynasty onwards (206 BCE - 220 CE). The exams were a means for a young male of any class to enter that bureaucracy and so become a part of the gentry class of scholar-officials.
- Mark Cartwright
Summary. Dynasty and ‘Empire’ in Chinese History. Max Weber, in his writing on China, referred to a unitary Chinese empire, one that lasted more than two thousand years. This reflected the common nineteenth-century European view of Asia as static and unchanging.
- Patricia Ebrey
- 2016
How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and...
In the ancient world, ruling a large-scale, multi-lingual and pluri-ethnic political entity—an ‘empire’—caused multiple challenges for government, even in periods without external threat or internal strife. How are extensive territories handled? How is long-distance communication organized?
