Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China by Sukhee Lee (review)

In Negotiated Power, Sukhee Lee offers a fascinating, detailed study of local society in Mingzhou 明州 (modern-day Ningbo 寧波) during the Song and Yuan dynasties, based on an extensive survey of a wide variety of sources, including local gazetteers, literary collections of local authors, and tomb epitaphs. Lee's particular focus is on the relationship between the state and local elites. As such, his book constitutes the latest response to the Hartwell-Hymes localization thesis, which describes the entrenchment in the provinces—over the course of the Song dynasty—of the elite families producing the top bureaucrats, in conjunction with a relative retreat of the state from the active management of local society. Some readers may feel that the book would have benefited from being framed more as a complication of Hymes and Hartwell than as an attempted debunking. Nevertheless, Negotiated Power stands as a valuable contribution to the field, especially insofar as it helps to clarify the evolving nature of the interface between the state bureaucracy and the dominant families of Mingzhou.

The book is divided into four substantive chapters. Chapter One ("Elites, Locality, and the State") examines social mobility and family strategies among the Mingzhou elite. As one would predict on the basis of the work of Robert Hymes and others, the local elite included both officeholders and nonofficeholders. The percentage of officeholders in the Southern Song seems to have been higher than in other prefectures of China, undoubtedly a result of Mingzhou's proximity to the capital at Hangzhou. Although some branches of the most important families remained influential over successive generations, other branches declined, such that, by the early Yuan, a sixth-generation descendant of the twelfth-century chief minister Shi Hao 史浩 ended up in slavery. Lee finds more interprefectural marriages in Southern Song Mingzhou than Hymes found in Jiangxi in the same period (28% of Southern Song elite marriages in Mingzhou were interprefectural, if one excludes those involving "directly adjacent" counties). To reconcile his data with that of Hymes, the author makes the intriguing suggestion that marrying locally—an important indicator of local entrenchment—may have been practiced more widely in the late Southern Song than in the early Southern Song. Alternatively, if one met marriage partners as a consequence of bureaucratic postings (as Lee demonstrates was sometimes the case), the Mingzhou marriage pattern may have constituted the natural outcome of a greater rate of officeholding. Chapter One also includes an interesting discussion of guanhu 官戶 ("officeholding household"), a status that provided a family with legal and tax privileges. As predicted by the localization model, even after the dramatic increase in competition for bureaucratic posts prevented most elite families from specializing in government service, such elites still strove to maintain some ties to the state, as one crucial element of a now more diversified family strategy.

Chapters Two ("Local Governance in Southern Song Mingzhou") and Three ("Cooperation and Tension: Revisiting Local Activism") shift focus from elite mobility and survival strategies to the ways the state exerted authority at the local level. Lee specifically takes issue with the idea that the state retreated from local society after the Jurchen invasion. Though this issue has been addressed in some recent Chinese scholarship—by Bao Weimin 包偉民, for example—it has rarely been dealt with in the English-language literature (perhaps reflecting North American skepticism that statism could have unleashed the cultural and economic vitality witnessed in the Southern Song). Lee seems to exaggerate the claims of the localization model when asserting that it posits a "nearly moribund system of local government" (p. 19) and a "vacuum of power in local society" (p. 149). Nevertheless, the author's overall point is important. As he demonstrates, prefectural authorities in Mingzhou had ample funds to maintain local security forces, to manage water resources, and to construct or repair government buildings. Though locals sometimes took the initiative to...