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

This book challenges the prevailing paradigm of the social and political history of middle imperial China (roughly the tenth through the fourteenth centuries), which sees a shift from an imperial court-centered “professional elite” in the Northern Song (960–1126) to a “local elite” in the Southern Song (1127–1279). Focusing on the relationship between the state and scholarly elites during the Southern Song and Yuan (1279–1367) dynasties in the southeastern coastal region of Mingzhou (the modern city of Ningbo), Lee argues that local governance occurred through negotiation between government officials and elite families whose claims to prestige and authority relied on both economic prosperity and cultural achievement. In contrast to views that posit the weakening of the bureaucratic state as a corollary to the growth of local-elite activism between the Northern and Southern Song periods, Lee emphasizes the overlap between state and local-elite interests, viewing the interactions between them as the defining feature of local governance.

Lee adopts the term “negotiated power” to characterize local governance as a dynamic process that shifted according to the problems faced, rather than being a “zero-sum” competition (as he puts it) between the power of the Chinese state and that of local elites. Although the collapse of the Southern Song and the advent of Mongol rule in the Yuan brought a dramatically different ruling group to power, like most contemporary historians of imperial China, Lee’s perspective on state-society relations is not confined by the boundaries of dynastic periodization. He thus sees continuity as well as change in the contours of local governance in Mingzhou across the dynastic transition from Southern Song to Yuan.

One could argue that a case study such as this one cannot be the basis for wider claims about the Chinese imperial state and its role at the local level, but the regional focus of Lee’s study is particularly rich, in terms of both material prosperity and the serendipitous survival of historical sources. Mingzhou was an important port for maritime trade as well as for cultural exchanges with other parts of East Asia, and local families grew wealthy in part through commercial profits. Local histories compiled during the Southern Song and Yuan eras are extant, as are numerous collected writings of local scholars and officials. These documentary riches provided Lee with evidence sufficient to trace family histories (including marriages and burials), along with detailed narratives concerning contentious local-governance issues, such as water control, and community organization. Lee uses these materials to “highlight social elites’ connectedness to the state rather than their separation from it, and to show that the presence of the state, rather than its absence,” characterized state–society relations during the Southern Song and Yuan periods (3).

Lee places his study in the broader context of efforts to re-examine the role of the state, citing Skocpol’s notion of “bringing the state back in” (8).¹ He provides a working definition of the “state” in a commonsensical way as “government,” and “society” as “nongovernmental sectors represented by local elites” (9–10). But Lee’s definitions are less important than his point that the distinction between “state” and “society” is not “rigidly dichotomous.” He suggests a useful analogy to describe the relationship between the state and elites in middle imperial China—that between a university administration and its faculty. All officials (university administrators) were members of the scholarly elite (university faculty), but not every member of the scholarly elite was an official (11). The point of the analogy is to show the absurdity of viewing these two groups as ontologically different, and therefore to drive home the idea that governance is produced by interactions between the groups as they respond to and resolve problems. There is no static authority, nor is there an absolute and fixed character to either “state” or “society.”

Although Lee exaggerates the degree to...