The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China by Michael Szonyi (review)

Where does one go to find everyday politics? One might conceivably climb to the very highest levels of government for that, but not here. Szonyi descends to the very lowest level for which documentary and other evidence survives, because he wants to use that evidence to advance some interesting insights into the depth of the impact a pre-modern state like Ming China (1368–1644) actually had upon the people it ruled.

The author spent time in several rural communities along the coast of Fujian province, and coaxed the local people to show him the sights, share with him their written genealogies (kept over the centuries), and talk with him. Most useful for the author's purposes were those lineages that were hereditary military households in Ming times. Generally, the Ming system from its beginning designated certain families as liable for ensuring that one able-bodied man was always on duty—not at home, but together with his wife and children, in a special military settlement called a guard. Those back home had to designate which of their menfolk should serve, and then supply his needs. This could be a prologue to a military history of China, or an analysis of how this system, kept up until the end of the Ming, met or failed to meet the need to secure China from internal rebellion or external aggression. But that is not the aim of the book.

The author interprets the evidence, culled from some forty-one genealogies, to show the deep impress the Ming military registration and recruitment system had upon the families and lineages caught up in it. The basic rules came down from on high, but the ways in which the people accepted the rules, and over the years adjusted to them, created powerful patterns of local social observances and interactions that long outlasted the Ming itself, and the formal demise of the whole guards system. Even now, people in Fujian whose ancestors were hereditary military identify themselves with that long defunct status. And many of the peculiarities of the customs and rituals of local village life can be shown to have their origin there as well.

After his meticulous examination of the Fujian genealogies, the author leaps into the empyrean of the comparative history of late pre-modern empires. Were the Ottoman, Mughal, or Ming simply superficial despotisms? And were their underpinnings totally eroded in the tidal wave of modern times? Or were they strong enough to leave distinctive traces behind?

Szonyi argues that even in the absence of modern means of communication and surveillance, the Ming founders imposed upon the realm a self-perpetuating system of military recruitment in the form of the hereditary Guards and Battalions (weisuo) system. But the ground-level means by which the system actually worked had to be outsourced to the participating households. It was their responses to this exogenous imposition, not so much the imposition itself that left behind those ineradicable traces of community formation and identity. The Ming state set the rules, and it did provide the judicial means for enforcing contracts and settling disputes. Much of the rest of the operational details were left to the families and lineages themselves to work out. The presumption that modernity has destroyed every last pillar of the late imperial past cannot be sustained.

It could be argued that forty-one Fujian genealogies are too small a sample size to sustain conclusions applicable to all of China in Ming times and since. After all, there were, roughly speaking, some 493 Ming guards centres, each with some 5,600 men on duty plus their immediate families—theoretically nearly 3,000,000 military families in all. How many of them have maintained documents like those in Fujian? It is possible that beyond Fujian, the evidence for a permanent residue of Ming military influences may be slim to nil. However, if one looks beyond the military to...