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21 chapter 1 The Burdens of History: Pre-Qing Territorial Government In China, as in most early modern empires, provinces as administrative units were created from the earlier military jurisdictions through which territories had been conquered and controlled. The situation in China was unique in that the military jurisdictions that gave rise to provinces had much longer and more daunting histories than did military jurisdictions elsewhere. This history was both a burden and an opportunity. In the Chinese metaphor, historical records offer opportunities when they serve as mirrors of the past, reflecting the dangers and values of various institutional arrangements, and when they demonstrate the advantages of certain territorial divisions. Consciousness of history could be a burden when certain courses of action were determined to be historical dead ends and history constrained the exploration of roads not taken. Knowing history too well, the Chinese were in a sense condemned to repeat it, or rather to repeat the actions that they believed its lessons taught. Imperial Chinese governments never had difficulty delegating authority to territorial subordinates. nearly a century before the first Chinese dynasty, the redoubtable Shang yang (d. 338 bce) laid the foundation for subsequent imperial rule by replacing feudal lords with centrally appointed officials.1 Lord Shang created territorial units known as “commanderies” (jun) and subsequently supplemented them with “counties” (xian). Together, these became the basic building blocks of Chinese empires. Inserting an intermediate layer of officials was more difficult, as it evoked fears of deceit and double-dealing at the central level and specters of harsh oppression at the local level. There were probably many reasons why stable provincial governments eluded the Chinese, but two phenomena were both recurrent and telling. First, Chinese imperial regimes initially turned to provinces as units of military administration, only to find institutions with weak ties to the center and local leaders who were willing to put regional—even personal—interests ahead of those of the central government. The rebellions that ensued were read all too often as a caution against precisely the sort of institution building that would have made provinces effective supports for the central government. The rebellion of An Lushan during the eighth century is probably the most famous example of this cycle. 22 The Burdens of History The second had less to do with historical contingency than with political vision and philosophy. In classical Chinese visions of the just political order, the middleman was suspect. early Chinese political thinkers such as Shen Buhai and Han Feizi may have developed, as Herrlee Creel has argued, a theory of bureaucracy .2 However, early Chinese thinking about bureaucracy was marked by an enormous interest in the problem of the ruler’s control of officialdom and concerned itself primarily with “impersonal, objective mechanisms for limiting the power of officials and subordinating them to the ruler.”3 As Jack Dull has pointed out, in earliest times there was an order in China that is conventionally called “feudal,” but there was no tradition of feudal subinfeudation. This means there was no way in which an imperial subordinate could legitimately exact from an inferior the same obligations he owed to the emperor.4 As the imperial system evolved out of the ancient feudal order, much more emphasis was placed on the loyalty that all officials owed to the center than to the more nuanced obligations officials owed to one another. There was simply little speculation about the duties of a subordinate who served by supervising lower-ranking officials or about the lower-ranking appointee who served, not a sagely emperor, but that emperor’s all-too-human delegate. The most effective model for delegation came ironically not from China itself, but from empires of the steppe, such as the Mongol yuan (1279–1368), in which delegation of authority over a wider territorial scope was crucial for maintaining order. But “order” meant something different for the yuan than it had for traditional Chinese regimes, and the yuan produced a fairly loosely integrated regime that rested on an unholy combination of trust, distrust, and disorganization. It fell to the final two imperial governments of China, the Ming and, particularly , the Qing, to integrate the values of sedentary empires into the institutions of nomadic regimes. The first emperor of the Ming, Zhu yuanzhang (r. 1368–98), borrowed yuan boundaries and appointed Chinese-style officials to oversee what he envisioned as the rather circumscribed role of the central state within them. Seeking greater security, his successors appointed coordinators of military...

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