I Development of the gentry-state
In 206 B.C. Liu Chi assumed the title of Emperor and gave his
dynasty the name of the Han Dynasty. After his death he was given as
emperor the name of Kao Tsu.[4] The period of the Han dynasty may be
described as the beginning of the Chinese Middle Ages, while that of
the Ch'in dynasty represents the transition from antiquity to the
Middle Ages; for under the Han dynasty we meet in China with a new form
of state, the “gentry state”. The feudalism of ancient times has come
definitely to its end.
[Footnote 4: From then on, every emperor was given after his death
an official name as emperor, under which he appears in the Chinese
sources. We have adopted the original or the official name according to
which of the two has come into the more general use in Western books.]
Emperor Kao Tsu came from eastern China, and his family seems to
have been a peasant family; in any case it did not belong to the old
nobility. After his destruction of his strongest rival, the removal of
the kings who had made themselves independent in the last years of the
Ch'in dynasty was a relatively easy task for the new autocrat, although
these struggles occupied the greater part of his reign. A much more
difficult question, however, faced him: How was the empire to be
governed? Kao Tsu's old friends and fellow-countrymen, who had helped
him into power, had been rewarded by appointment as generals or high
officials. Gradually he got rid of those who had been his best
comrades, as so many upstart rulers have done before and after him in
every country in the world. An emperor does not like to be reminded of
a very humble past, and he is liable also to fear the rivalry of men
who formerly were his equals. It is evident that little attention was
paid to theories of administration; policy was determined mainly by
practical considerations. Kao Tsu allowed many laws and regulations to
remain in force, including the prohibition of Confucianist writings. On
the other hand, he reverted to the allocation of fiefs, though not to
old noble families but to his relatives and some of his closest
adherents, generally men of inferior social standing. Thus a mixed
administration came into being: part of the empire was governed by new
feudal princes, and another part split up into provinces and
prefectures and placed directly under the central power through its
officials.
But whence came the officials? Kao Tsu and his supporters, as
farmers from eastern China, looked down upon the trading population to
which farmers always regard themselves as superior. The merchants were
ignored as potential officials although they had often enough held
official appointments under the former dynasty. The second group from
which officials had been drawn under the Ch'in was that of the army
officers, but their military functions had now, of course, fallen to
Kao Tsu's soldiers. The emperor had little faith, however, in the
loyalty of officers, even of his own, and apart from that he would have
had first to create a new administrative organization for them.
Accordingly he turned to another class which had come into existence,
the class later called the gentry, which in practice had the
power already in its hands.
The term “gentry” has no direct parallel in Chinese texts; the later
terms “shen-shih” and “chin-shen” do not quite cover this concept. The
basic unit of the gentry class are families, not individuals. Such
families often derive their origin from branches of the Chou nobility.
But other gentry families were of different and more recent origin in
respect to land ownership. Some late Chou and Ch'in officials of
non-noble origin had become wealthy and had acquired land; the same was
true for wealthy merchants and finally, some non-noble farmers who were
successful in one or another way, bought additional land reaching the
size of large holdings. All “gentry” families owned substantial estates
in the provinces which they leased to tenants on a kind of contract
basis. The tenants, therefore, cannot be called “serfs” although their
factual position often was not different from the position of serfs.
The rents of these tenants, usually about half the gross produce, are
the basis of the livelihood of the gentry. One part of a gentry family
normally lives in the country on a small home farm in order to be able
to collect the rents. If the family can acquire more land and if this
new land is too far away from the home farm to make collection of rents
easy, a new home farm is set up under the control of another branch of
the family. But the original home remains to be regarded as the real
family centre.
In a typical gentry family, another branch of the family is in the
capital or in a provincial administrative centre in official positions.
These officials at the same time are the most highly educated members
of the family and are often called the “literati”. There are also
always individual family members who are not interested in official
careers or who failed in their careers and live as free “literati"
either in the big cities or on the home farms. It seems, to judge from
much later sources, that the families assisted their most able members
to enter the official careers, while those individuals who were less
able were used in the administration of the farms. This system in
combination with the strong familism of the Chinese, gave a double
security to the gentry families. If difficulties arose in the estates
either by attacks of bandits or by war or other catastrophes, the
family members in official positions could use their influence and
power to restore the property in the provinces. If, on the other hand,
the family members in official positions lost their positions or even
their lives by displeasing the court, the home branch could always find
ways to remain untouched and could, in a generation or two, recruit new
members and regain power and influence in the government. Thus, as
families, the gentry was secure, although failures could occur to
individuals. There are many gentry families who remained in the ruling
elite for many centuries, some over more than a thousand years,
weathering all vicissitudes of life. Some authors believe that Chinese
leading families generally pass through a three-or four-generation
cycle: a family member by his official position is able to acquire much
land, and his family moves upward. He is able to give the best
education and other facilities to his sons who lead a good life. But
either these sons or the grandsons are spoiled and lazy; they begin to
lose their property and status. The family moves downward, until in the
fourth or fifth generation a new rise begins. Actual study of families
seems to indicate that this is not true. The main branch of the family
retains its position over centuries. But some of the branch families,
created often by the less able family members, show a tendency towards
downward social mobility.
It is clear from the above that a gentry family should be interested
in having a fair number of children. The more sons they have, the more
positions of power the family can occupy and thus, the more secure it
will be; the more daughters they have, the more “political” marriages
they can conclude, i.e. marriages with sons of other gentry families in
positions of influence. Therefore, gentry families in China tend to be,
on the average, larger than ordinary families, while in our Western
countries the leading families usually were smaller than the lower
class families. This means that gentry families produced more children
than was necessary to replenish the available leading positions; thus,
some family members had to get into lower positions and had to lose
status. In view of this situation it was very difficult for lower class
families to achieve access into this gentry group. In European
countries the leading elite did not quite replenish their ranks
in the next generation, so that there was always some chance for the
lower classes to move up into leading ranks. The gentry society was,
therefore, a comparably stable society with little upward social
mobility but with some downward mobility. As a whole and for reasons of
gentry self-interest, the gentry stood for stability and against
change.
The gentry members in the bureaucracy collaborated closely with one
another because they were tied together by bonds of blood or marriage.
It was easy for them to find good tutors for their children, because a
pupil owed a debt of gratitude to his teacher and a child from a gentry
family could later on nicely repay this debt; often, these teachers
themselves were members of other gentry families. It was easy for sons
of the gentry to get into official positions, because the people who
had to recommend them for office were often related to them or knew the
position of their family. In Han time, local officials had the duty to
recommend young able men; if these men turned out to be good, the
officials were rewarded, if not they were blamed or even punished. An
official took less of a chance, if he recommended a son of an
influential family, and he obliged such a candidate so that he could
later count on his help if he himself should come into difficulties.
When, towards the end of the second century B.C., a kind of examination
system was introduced, this attitude was not basically changed.
The country branch of the family by the fact that it controlled
large tracts of land, supplied also the logical tax collectors: they
had the standing and power required for this job. Even if they were
appointed in areas other than their home country (a rule which later
was usually applied), they knew the gentry families of the other
district or were related to them and got their support by appointing
their members as their assistants.
Gentry society continued from Kao Tsu's time to 1948, but it went
through a number of phases of development and changed considerably in
time. We will later outline some of the most important changes. In
general the number of politically leading gentry families was around
one hundred (texts often speak of “the hundred families” in this time)
and they were concentrated in the capital; the most important home
seats of these families in Han time were close to the capital and east
of it or in the plains of eastern China, at that time the main centre
of grain production.
We regard roughly the first one thousand years of “Gentry Society"
as the period of the Chinese “Middle Ages", beginning with the Han
dynasty; the preceding time of the Ch'in was considered as a period of
transition, a time in which the feudal period of “Antiquity” came to a
formal end and a new organization of society began to become visible.
Even those authors who do not accept a sociological classification of
periods and many authors who use Marxist categories, believe that with
Ch'in and Han a new era in Chinese history began.
2 Situation of the Hsiung-nu empire; its relation to the Han
empire. Incorporation of South China
In the time of the Ch'in dynasty there had already come into
unpleasant prominence north of the Chinese frontier the tribal union,
then relatively small, of the Hsiung-nu. Since then, the Hsiung-nu
empire had destroyed the federation of the Yueeh-chih tribes (some of
which seem to have been of Indo-European language stock) and
incorporated their people into their own federation; they had conquered
also the less well organized eastern pastoral tribes, the Tung-hu and
thus had become a formidable power. Everything goes to show that it had
close relations with the territories of northern China. Many Chinese
seem to have migrated to the Hsiung-nu empire, where they were welcome
as artisans and probably also as farmers; but above all they were
needed for the staffing of a new state administration. The scriveners
in the newly introduced state secretariat were Chinese and wrote
Chinese, for at that time the Hsiung-nu apparently had no written
language. There were Chinese serving as administrators and court
officials, and even as instructors in the army administration, teaching
the art of warfare against non-nomads. But what was the purpose of all
this? Mao Tun, the second ruler of the Hsiung-nu, and his first
successors undoubtedly intended ultimately to conquer China, exactly as
many other northern peoples after them planned to do, and a few of them
did. The main purpose of this was always to bring large numbers of
peasants under the rule of the nomad rulers and so to solve, once for
all, the problem of the provision of additional winter food. Everything
that was needed, and everything that seemed to be worth trying to get
as they grew more civilized, would thus be obtained better and more
regularly than by raids or by tedious commercial negotiations. But if
China was to be conquered and ruled there must exist a state
organization of equal authority to hers; the Hsiung-nu ruler must
himself come forward as Son of Heaven and develop a court ceremonial
similar to that of a Chinese emperor. Thus the basis of the
organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay in its rivalry with the
neighbouring China; but the details naturally corresponded to the
special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system. The young Hsiung-nu
feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal state not only in
depending on a nomad economy with only supplementary agriculture, but
also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of nobility and
another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed further
below. Similar to the Chou state, the Hsiung-nu state contained,
especially around the ruler, an element of court bureaucracy which,
however, never developed far enough to replace the basically feudal
character of administration.
Thus Kao Tsu was faced in Mao Tun not with a mere nomad chieftain
but with the most dangerous of enemies, and Kao Tsu's policy had to be
directed to preventing any interference of the Hsiung-nu in North
Chinese affairs, and above all to preventing alliances between
Hsiung-nu and Chinese. Hsiung-nu alone, with their technique of
horsemen's warfare, would scarcely have been equal to the permanent
conquest of the fortified towns of the north and the Great Wall,
although they controlled a population which may have been in excess of
2,000,000 people. But they might have succeeded with Chinese aid.
Actually a Chinese opponent of Kao Tsu had already come to terms with
Mao Tun, and in 200 B.C. Kao Tsu was very near suffering disaster in
northern Shansi, as a result of which China would have come under the
rule of the Hsiung-nu. But it did not come to that, and Mao Tun made no
further attempt, although the opportunity came several times.
Apparently the policy adopted by his court was not imperialistic but
national, in the uncorrupted sense of the word. It was realized that a
country so thickly populated as China could only be administered from a
centre within China. The Hsiung-nu would thus have had to abandon their
home territory and rule in China itself. That would have meant
abandoning the flocks, abandoning nomad life, and turning into Chinese.
The main supporters of the national policy, the first principle of
which was loyalty to the old ways of life, seem to have been the tribal
chieftains. Mao Tun fell in with their view, and the Hsiung-nu
maintained their state as long as they adhered to that principle—for
some seven hundred years. Other nomad peoples, Toba, Mongols, and
Manchus, followed the opposite policy, and before long they were caught
in the mechanism of the much more highly developed Chinese economy and
culture, and each of them disappeared from the political scene in the
course of a century or so.
The national line of policy of the Hsiung-nu did not at all mean an
end of hostilities and raids on Chinese territory, so that Kao Tsu
declared himself ready to give the Hsiung-nu the foodstuffs and
clothing materials they needed if they would make an end of their
raids. A treaty to this effect was concluded, and sealed by the
marriage of a Chinese princess with Mao Tun. This was the first
international treaty in the Far East between two independent powers
mutually recognized as equals, and the forms of international diplomacy
developed in this time remained the standard forms for the next
thousand years. The agreement was renewed at the accession of each new
ruler, but was never adhered to entirely by either side. The needs of
the Hsiung-nu increased with the expansion of their empire and the
growing luxury of their court; the Chinese, on the other hand, wanted
to give as little as possible, and no doubt they did all they could to
cheat the Hsiung-nu. Thus, in spite of the treaties the Hsiung-nu raids
went on. With China's progressive consolidation, the voluntary
immigration of Chinese into the Hsiung-nu empire came to an end, and
the Hsiung-nu actually began to kidnap Chinese subjects. These were the
main features of the relations between Chinese and Hsiung-nu almost
until 100 B.C.
In the extreme south, around the present-day Canton, another
independent empire had been formed in the years of transition, under
the leadership of a Chinese. The narrow basis of this realm was no
doubt provided by the trading colonies, but the indigenous population
of Yueeh tribes was insufficiently civilized for the building up of a
state that could have maintained itself against China. Kao Tsu sent a
diplomatic mission to the ruler of this state, and invited him to place
himself under Chinese suzerainty (196 B.C.). The ruler realized that he
could offer no serious resistance, while the existing circumstances
guaranteed him virtual independence and he yielded to Kao Tsu without a
struggle.
3 Brief feudal reaction. Consolidation of the gentry
Kao Tsu died in 195 B.C. From then to 179 the actual ruler was his
widow, the empress Lue, while children were officially styled emperors.
The empress tried to remove all the representatives of the emperor's
family and to replace them with members of her own family. To secure
her position she revived the feudal system, but she met with strong
resistance from the dynasty and its supporters who already belonged in
many cases to the new gentry, and who did not want to find their
position jeopardized by the creation of new feudal lords.
On the death of the empress her opponents rose, under the leadership
of Kao Tsu's family. Every member of the empress's family was
exterminated, and a son of Kao Tsu, known later under the name of Wen
Ti (Emperor Wen), came to the throne. He reigned from 179 to 157 B.C.
Under him there were still many fiefs, but with the limitation which
the emperor Kao Tsu had laid down shortly before his death: only
members of the imperial family should receive fiefs, to which the title
of King was attached. Thus all the more important fiefs were in the
hands of the imperial family, though this did not mean that rivalries
came to an end.
On the whole Wen Ti's period of rule passed in comparative peace.
For the first time since the beginning of Chinese history, great areas
of continuous territory were under unified rule, without unending
internal warfare such as had existed under Shih Huang-ti and Kao Tsu.
The creation of so extensive a region of peace produced great economic
advance. The burdens that had lain on the peasant population were
reduced, especially since under Wen Ti the court was very frugal. The
population grew and cultivated fresh land, so that production increased
and with it the exchange of goods. The most outstanding sign of this
was the abandonment of restrictions on the minting of copper coin, in
order to prevent deflation through insufficiency of payment media. As a
consequence more taxes were brought in, partly in kind, partly in coin,
and this increased the power of the central government. The new gentry
streamed into the towns, their standard of living rose, and they made
themselves more and more into a class apart from the general
population. As people free from material cares, they were able to
devote themselves to scholarship. They went back to the old writings
and studied them once more. They even began to identify themselves with
the nobles of feudal times, to adopt the rules of good behaviour and
the ceremonial described in the Confucianist books, and very gradually,
as time went on, to make these their textbooks of good form. From this
point the Confucianist ideals first began to penetrate the official
class recruited from the gentry, and then the state organization
itself. It was expected that an official should be versed in
Confucianism, and schools were set up for Confucianist education.
Around 100 B.C. this led to the introduction of the examination system,
which gradually became the one method of selection of new officials.
The system underwent many changes, but remained in operation in
principle until 1904. The object of the examinations was not to test
job efficiency but command of the ideals of the gentry and knowledge of
the literature inculcating them: this was regarded as sufficient
qualification for any position in the service of the state.
In theory this path to training of character and to admission to the
state service was open to every “respectable” citizen. Of the
traditional four “classes” of Chinese society, only the first two,
officials (shih) and farmers (nung) were always regarded
as fully “respectable” (liang-min). Members of the other two
classes, artisans (kung) and merchants (shang), were
under numerous restrictions. Below these were classes of “lowly people"
(ch'ien-min) and below these the slaves which were not part of
society proper. The privileges and obligations of these categories were
soon legally fixed. In practice, during the first thousand years of the
existence of the examination system no peasant had a chance to become
an official by means of the examinations. In the Han period the
provincial officials had to propose suitable young persons for
examination, and so for admission to the state service, as was already
mentioned. In addition, schools had been instituted for the sons of
officials; it is interesting to note that there were, again and again,
complaints about the low level of instruction in these schools.
Nevertheless, through these schools all sons of officials, whatever
their capacity or lack of capacity, could become officials in their
turn. In spite of its weaknesses, the system had its good side. It
inoculated a class of people with ideals that were unquestionably of
high ethical value. The Confucian moral system gave a Chinese official
or any member of the gentry a spiritual attitude and an outward bearing
which in their best representatives has always commanded respect, an
integrity that has always preserved its possessors, and in consequence
Chinese society as a whole, from moral collapse, from spiritual
nihilism, and has thus contributed to the preservation of Chinese
cultural values in spite of all foreign conquerors.
In the time of Wen Ti and especially of his successors, the revival
at court of the Confucianist ritual and of the earlier Heaven-worship
proceeded steadily. The sacrifices supposed to have been performed in
ancient times, the ritual supposed to have been prescribed for the
emperor in the past, all this was reintroduced. Obviously much of it
was spurious: much of the old texts had been lost, and when fragments
were found they were arbitrarily completed. Moreover, the old writing
was difficult to read and difficult to understand; thus various things
were read into the texts without justification. The new Confucians who
came forward as experts in the moral code were very different men from
their predecessors; above all, like all their contemporaries, they were
strongly influenced by the shamanistic magic that had developed in the
Ch'in period.
Wen Ti's reign had brought economic advance and prosperity;
intellectually it had been a period of renaissance, but like every such
period it did not simply resuscitate what was old, but filled the
ancient moulds with an entirely new content. Socially the period had
witnessed the consolidation of the new upper class, the gentry, who
copied the mode of life of the old nobility. This is seen most clearly
in the field of law. In the time of the Legalists the first steps had
been taken in the codification of the criminal law. They clearly
intended these laws to serve equally for all classes of the people. The
Ch'in code which was supposedly Li K'uei's code, was used in the Han
period, and was extensively elaborated by Siao Ho (died 193 B.C.) and
others. This code consisted of two volumes of the chief laws for grave
cases, one of mixed laws for the less serious cases, and six volumes on
the imposition of penalties. In the Han period “decisions” were added,
so that about A.D. 200 the code had grown to 26,272 paragraphs with
over 17,000,000 words. The collection then consisted of 960 volumes.
This colossal code has been continually revised, abbreviated, or
expanded, and under its last name of “Collected Statues of the Manchu
Dynasty” it retained its validity down to the present century.
Alongside this collection there was another book that came to be
regarded and used as a book of precedences. The great Confucianist
philosopher Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B.C.), a firm supporter of the
ideology of the new gentry class, declared that the classic
Confucianist writings, and especially the book Ch'un-ch'iu,
“Annals of Spring and Autumn", attributed to Confucius himself, were
essentially books of legal decisions. They contained “cases” and
Confucius's decisions of them. Consequently any case at law that might
arise could be decided by analogy with the cases contained in “Annals
of Spring and Autumn”. Only an educated person, of course, a member of
the gentry, could claim that his action should be judged by the
decisions of Confucius and not by the code compiled for the common
people, for Confucius had expressly stated that his rules were intended
only for the upper class. Thus, right down to modern times an educated
person could be judged under regulations different from those
applicable to the common people, or if judged on the basis of the laws,
he had to expect a special treatment. The principle of the “equality
before the law” which the Legalists had advocated and which fitted well
into the absolutistic, totalitarian system of the Ch'in, had been
attacked by the feudal nobility at that time and was attacked by the
new gentry of the Han time. Legalist thinking remained an important
undercurrent for many centuries to come, but application of the
equalitarian principle was from now on never seriously considered.
Against the growing influence of the officials belonging to the
gentry there came a last reaction. It came as a reply to the attempt of
a representative of the gentry to deprive the feudal princes of the
whole of their power. In the time of Wen Ti's successor a number of
feudal kings formed an alliance against the emperor, and even invited
the Hsiung-nu to join them. The Hsiung-nu did not do so, because they
saw that the rising had no prospect of success, and it was quelled.
After that the feudal princes were steadily deprived of rights. They
were divided into two classes, and only privileged ones were permitted
to live in the capital, the others being required to remain in their
domains. At first, the area was controlled by a “minister” of the
prince, an official of the state; later the area remained under normal
administration and the feudal prince kept only an empty title; the tax
income of a certain number of families of an area was assigned to him
and transmitted to him by normal administrative channels. Often, the
number of assigned families was fictional in that the actual income was
from far fewer families. This system differs from the Near Eastern
system in which also no actual enforcement took place, but where
deserving men were granted the right to collect themselves the taxes of
a certain area with certain numbers of families.
Soon after this the whole government was given the shape which it
continued to have until A.D. 220, and which formed the point of
departure for all later forms of government. At the head of the state
was the emperor, in theory the holder of absolute power in the state
restricted only by his responsibility towards “Heaven", i.e. he had to
follow and to enforce the basic rules of morality, otherwise “Heaven"
would withdraw its “mandate", the legitimation of the emperor's rule,
and would indicate this withdrawal by sending natural catastrophes.
Time and again we find emperors publicly accusing themselves for their
faults when such catastrophes occurred; and to draw the emperor's
attention to actual or made-up calamities or celestial irregularities
was one way to criticize an emperor and to force him to change his
behaviour. There are two other indications which show that Chinese
emperors—excepting a few individual cases—at least in the first ten
centuries of gentry society were not despots: it can be proved that in
some fields the responsibility for governmental action did not lie with
the emperor but with some of his ministers. Secondly, the emperor was
bound by the law code: he could not change it nor abolish it. We know
of cases in which the ruler disregarded the code, but then tried to
“defend” his arbitrary action. Each new dynasty developed a new law
code, usually changing only details of the punishment, not the basic
regulations. Rulers could issue additional “regulations", but these,
too, had to be in the spirit of the general code and the existing moral
norms. This situation has some similarity to the situation in Muslim
countries. At the ruler's side were three counsellors who had, however,
no active functions. The real conduct of policy lay in the hands of the
“chancellor", or of one of the “nine ministers”. Unlike the practice
with which we are familiar in the West, the activities of the
ministries (one of them being the court secretariat) were concerned
primarily with the imperial palace. As, however, the court secretariat,
one of the nine ministries, was at the same time a sort of imperial
statistical office, in which all economic, financial, and military
statistical material was assembled, decisions on issues of critical
importance for the whole country could and did come from it. The court,
through the Ministry of Supplies, operated mines and workshops in the
provinces and organized the labour service for public constructions.
The court also controlled centrally the conscription for the general
military service. Beside the ministries there was an extensive
administration of the capital with its military guards. The various
parts of the country, including the lands given as fiefs to princes,
had a local administration, entirely independent of the central
government and more or less elaborated according to their size. The
regional administration was loosely associated with the central
government through a sort of primitive ministry of the interior, and
similarly the Chinese representatives in the protectorates, that is to
say the foreign states which had submitted to Chinese protective
overlordship, were loosely united with a sort of foreign ministry in
the central government. When a rising or a local war broke out, that
was the affair of the officer of the region concerned. If the regional
troops were insufficient, those of the adjoining regions were drawn
upon; if even these were insufficient, a real “state of war” came into
being; that is to say, the emperor appointed eight generals-in-chief,
mobilized the imperial troops, and intervened. This imperial army then
had authority over the regional and feudal troops, the troops of the
protectorates, the guards of the capital, and those of the imperial
palace. At the end of the war the imperial army was demobilized and the
generals-in-chief were transferred to other posts.
In all this there gradually developed a division into civil and
military administration. A number of regions would make up a province
with a military governor, who was in a sense the representative of the
imperial army, and who was supposed to come into activity only in the
event of war.
This administration of the Han period lacked the tight organization
that would make precise functioning possible. On the other hand, an
extremely important institution had already come into existence in a
primitive form. As central statistical authority, the court secretariat
had a special position within the ministries and supervised the
administration of the other offices. Thus there existed alongside the
executive a means of independent supervision of it, and the resulting
rivalry enabled the emperor or the chancellor to detect and eliminate
irregularities. Later, in the system of the T'ang period (A.D.
618-906), this institution developed into an independent censorship,
and the system was given a new form as a “State and Court Secretariat",
in which the whole executive was comprised and unified. Towards the end
of the T'ang period the permanent state of war necessitated the
permanent commissioning of the imperial generals-in-chief and of the
military governors, and as a result there came into existence a “Privy
Council of State", which gradually took over functions of the
executive. The system of administration in the Han and in the T'ang
period is shown in the following table:
Han epoch T'ang epoch
1. Emperor 1. Emperor
2. Three counsellors to the emperor 2. Three counsellors and three
(with no active functions) assistants (with no active
functions)
3. Eight supreme generals (only 3. Generals and Governors-General
appointed in time of war) (only appointed in time of
war; but in practice
continuously in office)
4. —————————————- 4. (a) State secretariat
(1) Central secretariat
(2) Secretariat of the Crown
(3) Secretariat of the Palace
and imperial historical
commission
(b) Emperor's Secretariat
(1) Private Archives
(2) Court Adjutants' Office
(3) Harem administration
5. Court administration 5. Court administration
(Ministries) (Ministries)
(1) Ministry for state (1) Ministry for state
sacrifices sacrifices
(2) Ministry for imperial (2) Ministry for imperial
coaches and horses coaches and horses
(3) Ministry for justice at (3) Ministry for justice at
court court
(4) Ministry for receptions (4) Ministry for receptions
(i.e. foreign affairs)
(5) Ministry for ancestors' (5) Ministry for ancestors'
temples temples
(6) Ministry for supplies to (6) Ministry for supplies to
the court the court
(7) Ministry for the harem (7) Economic and financial
Ministry
(8) Ministry for the palace (8) Ministry for the payment
guards of salaries
(9) Ministry for the court (9) Ministry for armament
(state secretariat) and magazines
6. Administration of the 6. Administration of the
capital: capital:
(1) Crown prince's palace (1) Crown prince's palace
(2) Security service for the (2) Palace guards and guards'
capital office
(3) Capital administration: (3) Arms production department
(a) Guards of the capital
(b) Guards of the city gates
(c) Building department
(4) Labour service department
(5) Building department
(6) Transport department
(7) Department for education
(of sons of officials!)
7. Ministry of the Interior 7. Ministry of the Interior
(Provincial administration) (Provincial administration)
8. Foreign Ministry 8. —————————————-
9. Censorship (Audit council)
There is no denying that according to our standard this whole system
was still elementary and “personal", that is to say, attached to the
emperor's person—though it should not be overlooked that we ourselves
are not yet far from a similar phase of development. To this day the
titles of not a few of the highest officers of state—the Lord Privy
Seal, for instance—recall that in the past their offices were
conceived as concerned purely with the personal service of the monarch.
In one point, however, the Han administrative set-up was quite modern:
it already had a clear separation between the emperor's private
treasury and the state treasury; laws determined which of the two
received certain taxes and which had to make certain payments. This
separation, which in Europe occurred not until the late Middle Ages, in
China was abolished at the end of the Han Dynasty.
The picture changes considerably to the advantage of the Chinese as
soon as we consider the provincial administration. The governor of a
province, and each of his district officers or prefects, had a staff
often of more than a hundred officials. These officials were drawn from
the province or prefecture and from the personal friends of the
administrator, and they were appointed by the governor or the prefect.
The staff was made up of officials responsible for communications with
the central or provincial administration (private secretary,
controller, finance officer), and a group of officials who carried on
the actual local administration. There were departments for transport,
finance, education, justice, medicine (hygiene), economic and military
affairs, market control, and presents (which had to be made to the
higher officials at the New Year and on other occasions). In addition
to these offices, organized in a quite modern style, there was an
office for advising the governor and another for drafting official
documents and letters.
The interesting feature of this system is that the provincial
administration was de facto independent of the central
administration, and that the governor and even his prefects could rule
like kings in their regions, appointing and discharging as they chose.
This was a vestige of feudalism, but on the other hand it was a healthy
check against excessive centralization. It is thanks to this system
that even the collapse of the central power or the cutting off of a
part of the empire did not bring the collapse of the country. In a
remote frontier town like Tunhuang, on the border of Turkestan, the
life of the local Chinese went on undisturbed whether communication
with the capital was maintained or was broken through invasions by
foreigners. The official sent from the centre would be liable at any
time to be transferred elsewhere; and he had to depend on the practical
knowledge of his subordinates, the members of the local families of the
gentry. These officials had the local government in their hands, and
carried on the administration of places like Tunhuang through a
thousand years and more. The Hsin family, for instance, was living
there in 50 B.C. and was still there in A.D. 950; and so were the Yin,
Ling-hu, Li, and K'ang families.
All the officials of the various offices or Ministries were
appointed under the state examination system, but they had no special
professional training; only for the more important subordinate posts
were there specialists, such as jurists, physicians, and so on. A
change came towards the end of the T'ang period, when a Department of
Commerce and Monopolies was set up; only specialists were appointed to
it, and it was placed directly under the emperor. Except for this, any
official could be transferred from any ministry to any other without
regard to his experience.
4 Turkestan policy. End of the Hsiung-nu empire
In the two decades between 160 and 140 B.C. there had been further
trouble with the Hsiung-nu, though there was no large-scale fighting.
There was a fundamental change of policy under the next emperor, Wu (or
Wu Ti, 141-86 B.C.). The Chinese entered for the first time upon an
active policy against the Hsiung-nu. There seem to have been several
reasons for this policy, and several objectives. The raids of the
Hsiung-nu from the Ordos region and from northern Shansi had shown
themselves to be a direct menace to the capital and to its extremely
important hinterland. Northern Shansi is mountainous, with deep
ravines. A considerable army on horseback could penetrate some distance
to the south before attracting attention. Northern Shensi and the Ordos
region are steppe country, in which there were very few Chinese
settlements and through which an army of horsemen could advance very
quickly. It was therefore determined to push back the Hsiung-nu far
enough to remove this threat. It was also of importance to break the
power of the Hsiung-nu in the province of Kansu, and to separate them
as far as possible from the Tibetans living in that region, to prevent
any union between those two dangerous adversaries. A third point of
importance was the safeguarding of caravan routes. The state, and
especially the capital, had grown rich through Wen Ti's policy. Goods
streamed into the capital from all quarters. Commerce with central Asia
had particularly increased, bringing the products of the Middle East to
China. The caravan routes passed through western Shensi and Kansu to
eastern Turkestan, but at that time the Hsiung-nu dominated the
approaches to Turkestan and were in a position to divert the trade to
themselves or cut it off. The commerce brought profit not only to the
caravan traders, most of whom were probably foreigners, but to the
officials in the provinces and prefectures through which the routes
passed. Thus the officials in western China were interested in the
trade routes being brought under direct control, so that the caravans
could arrive regularly and be immune from robbery. Finally, the Chinese
government may well have regarded it as little to its honour to be
still paying dues to the Hsiung-nu and sending princesses to their
rulers, now that China was incomparably wealthier and stronger than at
the time when that policy of appeasement had begun.
[Illustration: Map 3. China in the struggle with the Huns or Hsiung
Nu (roughly 128-100 B.C.)]
The first active step taken was to try, in 133 B.C., to capture the
head of the Hsiung-nu state, who was called a shan-yue but the
shan-yue saw through the plan and escaped. There followed a period
of continuous fighting until 119 B.C. The Chinese made countless
attacks, without lasting success. But the Hsiung-nu were weakened, one
sign of this being that there were dissensions after the death of the
shan-yue Chuen-ch'en, and in 127 B.C. his son went over to the
Chinese. Finally the Chinese altered their tactics, advancing in 119
B.C. with a strong army of cavalry, which suffered enormous losses but
inflicted serious loss on the Hsiung-nu. After that the Hsiung-nu
withdrew farther to the north, and the Chinese settled peasants in the
important region of Kansu.
Meanwhile, in 125 B.C., the famous Chang Ch'ien had returned. He had
been sent in 138 to conclude an alliance with the Yueeh-chih against
the Hsiung-nu. The Yueeh-chih had formerly been neighbours of the
Hsiung-nu as far as the Ala Shan region, but owing to defeat by the
Hsiung-nu their remnants had migrated to western Turkestan. Chang
Ch'ien had followed them. Politically he had no success, but he brought
back accurate information about the countries in the far west,
concerning which nothing had been known beyond the vague reports of
merchants. Now it was learnt whence the foreign goods came and whither
the Chinese goods went. Chang Ch'ien's reports (which are one of the
principal sources for the history of central Asia at that remote time)
strengthened the desire to enter into direct and assured commercial
relations with those distant countries. The government evidently
thought of getting this commerce into its own hands. The way to do this
was to impose “tribute” on the countries concerned. The idea was that
the missions bringing the annual “tribute” would be a sort of state
bartering commissions. The state laid under tribute must supply
specified goods at its own cost, and received in return Chinese
produce, the value of which was to be roughly equal to the “tribute”.
Thus Chang Ch'ien's reports had the result that, after the first
successes against the Hsiung-nu, there was increased interest in a
central Asian policy. The greatest military success were the campaigns
of General Li Kuang-li to Ferghana in 104 and 102 B.C. The result of
the campaigns was to bring under tribute all the small states in the
Tarim basin and some of the states of western Turkestan. From now on
not only foreign consumer goods came freely into China, but with them a
great number of other things, notably plants such as grape, peach,
pomegranate.
In 108 B.C. the western part of Korea was also conquered. Korea was
already an important transit region for the trade with Japan. Thus this
trade also came under the direct influence of the Chinese government.
Although this conquest represented a peril to the eastern flank of the
Hsiung-nu, it did not by any means mean that they were conquered. The
Hsiung-nu while weakened evaded the Chinese pressure, but in 104 B.C.
and again in 91 they inflicted defeats on the Chinese. The Hsiung-nu
were indirectly threatened by Chinese foreign policy, for the Chinese
concluded an alliance with old enemies of the Hsiung-nu, the Wu-sun, in
the north of the Tarim basin. This made the Tarim basin secure for the
Chinese, and threatened the Hsiung-nu with a new danger in their rear.
Finally the Chinese did all they could through intrigue, espionage, and
sabotage to promote disunity and disorder within the Hsiung-nu, though
it cannot be seen from the Chinese accounts how far the Chinese were
responsible for the actual conflicts and the continual changes of
shan-yue. Hostilities against the Hsiung-nu continued incessantly,
after the death of Wu Ti, under his successor, so that the Hsiung-nu
were further weakened. In consequence of this it was possible to rouse
against them other tribes who until then had been dependent on
them—the Ting-ling in the north and the Wu-huan in the east. The
internal difficulties of the Hsiung-nu increased further.
Wu Ti's active policy had not been directed only against the
Hsiung-nu. After heavy fighting he brought southern China, with the
region round Canton, and the south-eastern coast, firmly under Chinese
dominion—in this case again on account of trade interests. No doubt
there were already considerable colonies of foreign merchants in Canton
and other coastal towns, trading in Indian and Middle East goods. The
traders seem often to have been Sogdians. The southern wars gave Wu Ti
the control of the revenues from this commerce. He tried several times
to advance through Yuennan in order to secure a better land route to
India, but these attempts failed. Nevertheless, Chinese influence
became stronger in the south-west.
In spite of his long rule, Wu Ti did not leave an adult heir, as the
crown prince was executed, with many other persons, shortly before Wu
Ti's death. The crown prince had been implicated in an alleged attempt
by a large group of people to remove the emperor by various sorts of
magic. It is difficult to determine today what lay behind this affair;
probably it was a struggle between two cliques of the gentry. Thus a
regency council had to be set up for the young heir to the throne; it
included a member of a Hsiung-nu tribe. The actual government was in
the hands of a general and his clique until the death of the heir to
the throne, and at the beginning of his successor's reign.
At this time came the end of the Hsiung-nu empire—a foreign event
of the utmost importance. As a result of the continual disastrous wars
against the Chinese, in which not only many men but, especially, large
quantities of cattle fell into Chinese hands, the livelihood of the
Hsiung-nu was seriously threatened; their troubles were increased by
plagues and by unusually severe winters. To these troubles were added
political difficulties, including unsettled questions in regard to the
succession to the throne. The result of all this was that the Hsiung-nu
could no longer offer effective military resistance to the Chinese.
There were a number of shan-yue ruling contemporaneously as
rivals, and one of them had to yield to the Chinese in 58 B.C.; in 51
he came as a vassal to the Chinese court. The collapse of the Hsiung-nu
empire was complete. After 58 B.C. the Chinese were freed from all
danger from that quarter and were able, for a time, to impose their
authority in Central Asia.
5 Impoverishment. Cliques. End of the Dynasty
In other respects the Chinese were not doing as well as might have
been assumed. The wars carried on by Wu Ti and his successors had been
ruinous. The maintenance of large armies of occupation in the new
regions, especially in Turkestan, also meant a permanent drain on the
national funds. There was a special need for horses, for the people of
the steppes could only be fought by means of cavalry. As the Hsiung-nu
were supplying no horses, and the campaigns were not producing horses
enough as booty, the peasants had to rear horses for the government.
Additional horses were bought at very high prices, and apart from this
the general financing of the wars necessitated increased taxation of
the peasants, a burden on agriculture no less serious than was the
enrolment of many peasants for military service. Finally, the new
external trade did not by any means bring the advantages that had been
hoped for. The tribute missions brought tribute but, to begin with,
this meant an obligation to give presents in return; moreover, these
missions had to be fed and housed in the capital, often for months, as
the official receptions took place only on New Year's Day. Their
maintenance entailed much expense, and meanwhile the members of the
missions traded privately with the inhabitants and the merchants of the
capital, buying things they needed and selling things they had brought
in addition to the tribute. The tribute itself consisted mainly of
“precious articles", which meant strange or rare things of no practical
value. The emperor made use of them as elements of personal luxury, or
made presents of some of them to deserving officials. The gifts offered
by the Chinese in return consisted mainly of silk. Silk was received by
the government as a part of the tax payments and formed an important
element of the revenue of the state. It now went abroad without
bringing in any corresponding return. The private trade carried on by
the members of the missions was equally unserviceable to the Chinese.
It, too, took from them goods of economic value, silk and gold, which
went abroad in exchange for luxury articles of little or no economic
importance, such as glass, precious stones, or stud horses, which in no
way benefited the general population. Thus in this last century B.C.
China's economic situation grew steadily and fairly rapidly worse. The
peasants, more heavily taxed than ever, were impoverished, and yet the
exchequer became not fuller but emptier, so that gold began even to be
no longer available for payments. Wu Ti was aware of the situation and
called different groups together to discuss the problems of economics.
Under the name “Discussions on Salt and Iron” the gist of these talks
is preserved and shows that one group under the leadership of Sang
Hung-yang (143-80 B.C.) was business-oriented and thinking in economic
terms, while their opponents, mainly Confucianists, regarded the
situation mainly as a moral crisis. Sang proposed an “equable
transportation” and a “standardization” system and favoured other state
monopolies and controls; these ideas were taken up later and continued
to be discussed, again and again.
Already under Wu Ti there had been signs of a development which now
appeared constantly in Chinese history. Among the new gentry, families
entered into alliances with each other, sealed their mutual allegiance
by matrimonial unions, and so formed large cliques. Each clique made it
its concern to get the most important government positions into its
hands, so that it should itself control the government. Under Wu Ti,
for example, almost all the important generals had belonged to a
certain clique, which remained dominant under his two successors. Two
of the chief means of attaining power were for such a clique to give
the emperor a girl from its ranks as wife, and to see to it that all
the eunuchs around the emperor should be persons dependent on the
clique. Eunuchs came generally from the poorer classes; they were
launched at court by members of the great cliques, or quite openly
presented to the emperor.
The chief influence of the cliques lay, however, in the selection of
officials. It is not surprising that the officials recommended only
sons of people in their own clique—their family or its closest
associates. On top of all this, the examiners were in most cases
themselves members of the same families to which the provincial
officials belonged. Thus it was made doubly certain that only those
candidates who were to the liking of the dominant group among the
gentry should pass.
Surrounded by these cliques, the emperors became in most cases
powerless figureheads. At times energetic rulers were able to play off
various cliques against each other, and so to acquire personal power;
but the weaker emperors found themselves entirely in the hands of
cliques. Not a few emperors in China were removed by cliques which they
had attempted to resist; and various dynasties were brought to their
end by the cliques; this was the fate of the Han dynasty.
The beginning of its fall came with the activities of the widow of
the emperor Yuean Ti. She virtually ruled in the name of her
eighteen-year-old son, the emperor Ch'eng Ti (32-7 B.C.), and placed
all her brothers, and also her nephew, Wang Mang, in the principal
government posts. They succeeded at first in either removing the
strongest of the other cliques or bringing them into dependence. Within
the Wang family the nephew Wang Mang steadily advanced, securing direct
supporters even in some branches of the imperial family; these
personages declared their readiness to join him in removing the
existing line of the imperial house. When Ch'eng Ti died without issue,
a young nephew of his (Ai Ti, 6-1 B.C.) was placed on the throne by
Wang Mang, and during this period the power of the Wangs and their
allies grew further, until all their opponents had been removed and the
influence of the imperial family very greatly reduced. When Ai Ti died,
Wang Mang placed an eight-year-old boy on the throne, himself acting as
regent; four years later the boy fell ill and died, probably with Wang
Mang's aid. Wang Mang now chose a one-year-old baby, but soon after he
felt that the time had come for officially assuming the rulership. In
A.D. 8 he dethroned the baby, ostensibly at Heaven's command, and
declared himself emperor and first of the Hsin (“new") dynasty. All the
members of the old imperial family in the capital were removed from
office and degraded to commoners, with the exception of those who had
already been supporting Wang Mang. Only those members who held
unimportant posts at a distance remained untouched.
Wang Mang's “usurpation” is unusual from two points of view. First,
he paid great attention to public opinion and induced large masses of
the population to write petitions to the court asking the Han ruler to
abdicate; he even fabricated “heavenly omina” in his own favour and
against the Han dynasty in order to get wide support even from
intellectuals. Secondly, he inaugurated a formal abdication ceremony,
culminating in the transfer of the imperial seal to himself. This
ceremony became standard for the next centuries. The seal was made of a
precious stone, once presented to the Ch'in dynasty ruler before he
ascended the throne. From now on, the possessor of this seal was the
legitimate ruler.
6 The pseudo-socialistic dictatorship. Revolt of the “Red
Eyebrows”
Wang Mang's dynasty lasted only from A.D. 9 to 23; but it was one of
the most stirring periods of Chinese history. It is difficult to
evaluate Wang Mang, because all we know about him stems from sources
hostile towards him. Yet we gain the impression that some of his
innovations, such as the legalization of enthronement through the
transfer of the seal; the changes in the administration of provinces
and in the bureaucratic set-up in the capital; and even some of his
economic measures were so highly regarded that they were retained or
reintroduced, although this happened in some instances centuries later
and without mentioning Wang Mang's name. But most of his policies and
actions were certainly neither accepted nor acceptable. He made use of
every conceivable resource in order to secure power to his clique. As
far as possible he avoided using open force, and resorted to a
high-level propaganda. Confucianism, the philosophic basis of the power
of the gentry, served him as a bait; he made use of the so-called “old
character school” for his purposes. When, after the holocaust of books,
it was desired to collect the ancient classics again, texts were found
under strange circumstances in the walls of Confucius's house; they
were written in an archaic script. The people who occupied themselves
with these books were called the old character school. The texts came
under suspicion; most scholars had little belief in their genuineness.
Wang Mang, however, and his creatures energetically supported the cult
of these ancient writings. The texts were edited and issued, and in the
process, as can now be seen, certain things were smuggled into them
that fitted in well with Wang Mang's intentions. He even had other
texts reissued with falsifications. He now represented himself in all
his actions as a man who did with the utmost precision the things which
the books reported of rulers or ministers of ancient times. As regent
he had declared that his model was the brother of the first emperor of
the Chou dynasty; as emperor he took for his exemplar one of the
mythical emperors of ancient China; of his new laws he claimed that
they were simply revivals of decrees of the golden age. In all this he
appealed to the authority of literature that had been tampered with to
suit his aims. Actually, such laws had never before been customary;
either Wang Mang completely misinterpreted passages in an ancient text
to suit his purpose, or he had dicta that suited him smuggled into the
text. There can be no question that Wang Mang and his accomplices began
by deliberately falsifying and deceiving. However, as time went on, he
probably began to believe in his own frauds.
Wang Mang's great series of certain laws has brought him the name of
“the first Socialist on the throne of China”. But closer consideration
reveals that these measures, ostensibly and especially aimed at the
good of the poor, were in reality devised simply in order to fill the
imperial exchequer and to consolidate the imperial power. When we read
of the turning over of great landed estates to the state, do we not
imagine that we are faced with a modern land reform? But this applied
only to the wealthiest of all the landowners, who were to be deprived
in this way of their power. The prohibition of private slave-owning had
a similar purpose, the state reserving to itself the right to keep
slaves. Moreover, landless peasants were to receive land to till, at
the expense of those who possessed too much. This admirable law,
however, was not intended seriously to be carried into effect. Instead,
the setting up of a system of state credits for peasants held out the
promise, in spite of rather reduced interest rates, of important
revenue. The peasants had never been in a position to pay back their
private debts together with the usurious interest, but there were at
least opportunities of coming to terms with a private usurer, whereas
the state proved a merciless creditor. It could dispossess the peasant,
and either turn his property into a state farm, convey it to another
owner, or make the peasant a state slave. Thus this measure worked
against the interest of the peasants, as did the state monopoly of the
exploitation of mountains and lakes. “Mountains and lakes” meant the
uncultivated land around settlements, the “village commons", where
people collected firewood or went fishing. They now had to pay money
for fishing rights and for the right to collect wood, money for the
emperor's exchequer. The same purpose lay behind the wine, salt, and
iron tool monopolies. Enormous revenues came to the state from the
monopoly of minting coin, when old metal coin of full value was called
in and exchanged for debased coin. Another modern-sounding institution,
that of the “equalization offices", was supposed to buy cheap goods in
times of plenty in order to sell them to the people in times of
scarcity at similarly low prices, so preventing want and also
preventing excessive price fluctuations. In actual fact these state
offices formed a new source of profit, buying cheaply and selling as
dearly as possible.
Thus the character of these laws was in no way socialistic; nor,
however, did they provide an El Dorado for the state finances, for Wang
Mang's officials turned all the laws to their private advantage. The
revenues rarely reached the capital; they vanished into the pockets of
subordinate officials. The result was a further serious lowering of the
level of existence of the peasant population, with no addition to the
financial resources of the state. Yet Wang Mang had great need of
money, because he attached importance to display and because he was
planning a new war. He aimed at the final destruction of the Hsiung-nu,
so that access to central Asia should no longer be precarious and it
should thus be possible to reduce the expense of the military
administration of Turkestan. The war would also distract popular
attention from the troubles at home. By way of preparation for war,
Wang Mang sent a mission to the Hsiung-nu with dishonouring proposals,
including changes in the name of the Hsiung-nu and in the title of the
shan-yue. The name Hsiung-nu was to be given the insulting change
of Hsiang-nu, meaning “subjugated slaves”. The result was that risings
of the Hsiung-nu took place, whereupon Wang Mang commanded that the
whole of their country should be partitioned among fifteen shan-yue
and declared the country to be a Chinese province. Since this
declaration had no practical result, it robbed Wang Mang of the
increased prestige he had sought and only further infuriated the
Hsiung-nu. Wang Mang concentrated a vast army on the frontier.
Meanwhile he lost the whole of the possessions in Turkestan.
But before Wang Mang's campaign against the Hsiung-nu could begin,
the difficulties at home grew steadily worse. In A.D. 12 Wang Mang felt
obliged to abrogate all his reform legislation because it could not be
carried into effect; and the economic situation proved more lamentable
than ever. There were continual risings, which culminated in A.D. 18 in
a great popular insurrection, a genuine revolutionary rising of the
peasants, whose distress had grown beyond bearing through Wang Mang's
ill-judged measures. The rebels called themselves “Red Eyebrows”; they
had painted their eyebrows red by way of badge and in order to bind
their members indissolubly to their movement. The nucleus of this
rising was a secret society. Such secret societies, usually are
harmless, but may, in emergency situations, become an immensely
effective instrument in the hands of the rural population. The secret
societies then organize the peasants, in order to achieve a forcible
settlement of the matter in dispute. Occasionally, however, the
movement grows far beyond its leaders' original objective and becomes a
popular revolutionary movement, directed against the whole ruling
class. That is what happened on this occasion. Vast swarms of peasants
marched to the capital, killing all officials and people of position on
their way. The troops sent against them by Wang Mang either went over
to the Red Eyebrows or copied them, plundering wherever they could and
killing officials. Owing to the appalling mass murders and the
fighting, the forces placed by Wang Mang along the frontier against the
Hsiung-nu received no reinforcements and, instead of attacking the
Hsiung-nu, themselves went over to plundering, so that ultimately the
army simply disintegrated. Fortunately for China, the shan-yue
of the time did not take advantage of his opportunity, perhaps because
his position within the Hsiung-nu empire was too insecure.
Scarcely had the popular rising begun when descendants of the
deposed Han dynasty appeared and tried to secure the support of the
upper class. They came forward as fighters against the usurper Wang
Mang and as defenders of the old social order against the revolutionary
masses. But the armies which these Han princes were able to collect
were no better than those of the other sides. They, too, consisted of
poor and hungry peasants, whose aim was to get money or goods by
robbery; they too, plundered and murdered more than they fought.
However, one prince by the name of Liu Hsiu gradually gained the
upper hand. The basis of his power was the district of Nanyang in
Honan, one of the wealthiest agricultural centres of China at that time
and also the centre of iron and steel production. The big landowners,
the gentry of Nanyang, joined him, and the prince's party conquered the
capital. Wang Mang, placing entire faith in his sanctity, did not flee;
he sat in his robes in the throne-room and recited the ancient
writings, convinced that he would overcome his adversaries by the power
of his words. But a soldier cut off his head (A.D. 22). The skull was
kept for two hundred years in the imperial treasury. The fighting,
nevertheless, went on. Various branches of the prince's party fought
one another, and all of them fought the Red Eyebrows. In those years
millions of men came to their end. Finally, in A.D. 24, Liu Hsiu
prevailed, becoming the first emperor of the second Han dynasty, also
called the Later Han dynasty; his name as emperor was Kuang-wu Ti (A.D.
25-57).
7 Reaction and Restoration: the Later Han dynasty
Within the country the period that followed was one of reaction and
restoration. The massacres of the preceding years had so reduced the
population that there was land enough for the peasants who remained
alive. Moreover, their lords and the moneylenders of the towns were
generally no longer alive, so that many peasants had become free of
debt. The government was transferred from Sian to Loyang, in the
present province of Honan. This brought the capital nearer to the great
wheat-producing regions, so that the transport of grain and other taxes
in kind to the capital was cheapened. Soon this cleared foundation was
covered by a new stratum, a very sparse one, of great landowners who
were supporters and members of the new imperial house, largely
descendants of the landowners of the earlier Han period. At first they
were not much in evidence, but they gained power more and more rapidly.
In spite of this, the first half-century of the Later Han period was
one of good conditions on the land and economic recovery.
8 Hsiung-nu policy
In foreign policy the first period of the Later Han dynasty was one
of extraordinary success, both in the extreme south and in the question
of the Hsiung-nu. During the period of Wang Mang's rule and the
fighting connected with it, there had been extensive migration to the
south and south-west. Considerable regions of Chinese settlement had
come into existence in Yuennan and even in Annam and Tongking, and a
series of campaigns under General Ma Yuan (14 B.C.-A.D. 49) now added
these regions to the territory of the empire. These wars were carried
on with relatively small forces, as previously in the Canton region,
the natives being unable to offer serious resistance owing to their
inferiority in equipment and civilization. The hot climate, however, to
which the Chinese soldiers were unused, was hard for them to endure.
The Hsiung-nu, in spite of internal difficulties, had regained
considerable influence in Turkestan during the reign of Wang Mang. But
the king of the city state of Yarkand had increased his power by
shrewdly playing off Chinese and Hsiung-nu against each other, so that
before long he was able to attack the Hsiung-nu. The small states in
Turkestan, however, regarded the overlordship of the distant China as
preferable to that of Yarkand or the Hsiung-nu both of whom, being
nearer, were able to bring their power more effectively into play.
Accordingly many of the small states appealed for Chinese aid. Kuang-wu
Ti met this appeal with a blank refusal, implying that order had only
just been restored in China and that he now simply had not the
resources for a campaign in Turkestan. Thus, the king of Yarkand was
able to extend his power over the remainder of the small states of
Turkestan, since the Hsiung-nu had been obliged to withdraw. Kuang-wu
Ti had several frontier wars with the Hsiung-nu without any decisive
result. But in the years around A.D. 45 the Hsiung-nu had suffered
several severe droughts and also great plagues of locusts, so that they
had lost a large part of their cattle. They were no longer able to
assert themselves in Turkestan and at the same time to fight the
Chinese in the south and the Hsien-pi and the Wu-huan in the east.
These two peoples, apparently largely of Mongol origin, had been
subject in the past to Hsiung-nu overlordship. They had spread steadily
in the territories bordering Manchuria and Mongolia, beyond the eastern
frontier of the Hsiung-nu empire. Living there in relative peace and at
the same time in possession of very fertile pasturage, these two
peoples had grown in strength. And since the great political collapse
of 58 B.C. the Hsiung-nu had not only lost their best pasturage in the
north of the provinces of Shensi and Shansi, but had largely grown used
to living in co-operation with the Chinese. They had become much more
accustomed to trade with China, exchanging animals for textiles and
grain, than to warfare, so that in the end they were defeated by the
Hsien-pi and Wu-huan, who had held to the older form of purely warlike
nomad life. Weakened by famine and by the wars against Wu-huan and
Hsien-pi, the Hsiung-nu split into two, one section withdrawing to the
north.
The southern Hsiung-nu were compelled to submit to the Chinese in
order to gain security from their other enemies. Thus the Chinese were
able to gain a great success without moving a finger: the Hsiung-nu,
who for centuries had shown themselves again and again to be the most
dangerous enemies of China, were reduced to political insignificance.
About a hundred years earlier the Hsiung-nu empire had suffered defeat;
now half of what remained of it became part of the Chinese state. Its
place was taken by the Hsien-pi and Wu-huan, but at first they were of
much less importance.
In spite of the partition, the northern Hsiung-nu attempted in the
years between A.D. 60 and 70 to regain a sphere of influence in
Turkestan; this seemed the easier for them since the king of Yarkand
had been captured and murdered, and Turkestan was more or less in a
state of confusion. The Chinese did their utmost to play off the
northern against the southern Hsiung-nu and to maintain a political
balance of power in the west and north. So long as there were a number
of small states in Turkestan, of which at least some were friendly to
China, Chinese trade caravans suffered relatively little disturbance on
their journeys. Independent states in Turkestan had proved more
profitable for trade than when a large army of occupation had to be
maintained there. When, however, there appeared to be the danger of a
new union of the two parts of the Hsiung-nu as a restoration of a large
empire also comprising all Turkestan, the Chinese trading monopoly was
endangered. Any great power would secure the best goods for itself, and
there would be no good business remaining for China. For these reasons
a great Chinese campaign was undertaken against Turkestan in A.D. 73
under Tou Ku. Mainly owing to the ability of the Chinese deputy
commander Pan Ch'ao, the whole of Turkestan was quickly conquered.
Meanwhile the emperor Ming Ti (A.D. 58-75) had died, and under the new
emperor Chang Ti (76-88) the “isolationist” party gained the upper hand
against the clique of Tou Ku and Pan Ch'ao: the danger of the
restoration of a Hsiung-nu empire, the isolationists contended, no
longer existed; Turkestan should be left to itself; the small states
would favour trade with China of their own accord. Meanwhile, a
considerable part of Turkestan had fallen away from China, for Chang Ti
sent neither money nor troops to hold the conquered territories. Pan
Ch'ao nevertheless remained in Turkestan (at Kashgar and Khotan) where
he held on amid countless difficulties. Although he reported (A.D. 78)
that the troops could feed themselves in Turkestan and needed neither
supplies nor money from home, no reinforcements of any importance were
sent; only a few hundred or perhaps a thousand men, mostly released
criminals, reached him. Not until A.D. 89 did the Pan Ch'ao clique
return to power when the mother of the young emperor Ho Ti (89-105)
took over the government during his minority: she was a member of the
family of Tou Ku. She was interested in bringing to a successful
conclusion the enterprise which had been started by members of her
family and its followers. In addition, it can be shown that a number of
other members of the “war party” had direct interests in the west,
mainly in form of landed estates. Accordingly, a campaign was started
in 89 under her brother against the northern Hsiung-nu, and it decided
the fate of Turkestan in China's favour. Turkestan remained firmly in
Chinese possession until the death of Pan Ch'ao in 102. Shortly
afterwards heavy fighting broke out again: the Tanguts advanced from
the south in an attempt to cut off Chinese access to Turkestan. The
Chinese drove back the Tanguts and maintained their hold on Turkestan,
though no longer absolutely.
9 Economic situation. Rebellion of the “Yellow Turbans”. Collapse
of the Han dynasty
The economic results of the Turkestan trade in this period were not
so unfavourable as in the earlier Han period. The army of occupation
was incomparably smaller, and under Pan Ch'ao's policy the soldiers
were fed and paid in Turkestan itself, so that the cost to China
remained small. Moreover, the drain on the national income was no
longer serious because, in the intervening period, regular Chinese
settlements had been planted in Turkestan including Chinese merchants,
so that the trade no longer remained entirely in the hands of
foreigners.
In spite of the economic consolidation at the beginning of the Later
Han dynasty, and in spite of the more balanced trade, the political
situation within China steadily worsened from A.D. 80 onwards. Although
the class of great landowners was small, a number of cliques formed
within it, and their mutual struggle for power soon went beyond the
limits of court intrigue. New actors now came upon the stage, namely
the eunuchs. With the economic improvement there had been a general
increase in the luxury at the court of the Han emperors, and the court
steadily increased in size. The many hundred wives and concubines in
the palace made necessary a great army of eunuchs. As they had the ear
of the emperor and so could influence him, the eunuchs formed an
important political factor. For a time the main struggle was between
the group of eunuchs and the group of scholars. The eunuchs served a
particular clique to which some of the emperor's wives belonged. The
scholars, that is to say the ministers, together with members of the
ministries and the administrative staff, served the interests of
another clique. The struggles grew more and more sanguinary in the
middle of the second century A.D. It soon proved that the group with
the firmest hold in the provinces had the advantage, because it was not
easy to control the provinces from a distance. The result was that,
from about A.D. 150, events at court steadily lost importance, the lead
being taken by the generals commanding the provincial troops. It would
carry us too far to give the details of all these struggles. The
provincial generals were at first Ts'ao Ts'ao, Lue Pu, Yuean Shao, and
Sun Ts'e; later came Liu Pei. All were striving to gain control of the
government, and all were engaged in mutual hostilities from about 180
onwards. Each general was also trying to get the emperor into his
hands. Several times the last emperor of the Later Han dynasty, Hsien
Ti (190-220), was captured by one or another of the generals. As the
successful general was usually unable to maintain his hold on the
capital, he dragged the poor emperor with him from place to place until
he finally had to give him up to another general. The point of this
chase after the emperor was that according to the idea introduced
earlier by Wang Mang the first ruler of a new dynasty had to receive
the imperial seals from the last emperor of the previous dynasty. The
last emperor must abdicate in proper form. Accordingly, each general
had to get possession of the emperor to begin with, in order at the
proper time to take over the seals.
By about A.D. 200 the new conditions had more or less crystallized.
There remained only three great parties. The most powerful was that of
Ts'ao Ts'ao, who controlled the north and was able to keep permanent
hold of the emperor. In the west, in the province of Szechwan, Liu Pei
had established himself, and in the south-east Sun Ts'e's brother.
But we must not limit our view to these generals' struggles. At this
time there were two other series of events of equal importance with
those. The incessant struggles of the cliques against each other
continued at the expense of the people, who had to fight them and pay
for them. Thus, after A.D. 150 the distress of the country population
grew beyond all limits. Conditions were as disastrous as in the time of
Wang Mang. And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that
of the so-called “Yellow Turbans”. This was the first of the two
important events. This popular movement had a characteristic which from
now on became typical of all these risings of the people. The
intellectual leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were
members of a particular religious sect. This sect was influenced by
Iranian Mazdaism on the one side and by certain ideas from Lao Tz[)u]
on the other side; and these influences were superimposed on popular
rural as well as, perhaps, local tribal religious beliefs and
superstitions. The sect had roots along the coastal settlements of
Eastern China, where it seems to have gained the support of the
peasantry and their local priests. These priests of the people were
opposed to the representatives of the official religion, that is to say
the officials drawn from the gentry. In small towns and villages the
temples of the gods of the fruits of the field, of the soil, and so on,
were administered by authorized local officials, and these officials
also carried out the prescribed sacrifices. The old temples of the
people were either done away with (we have many edicts of the Han
period concerning the abolition of popular forms of religious worship),
or their worship was converted into an official cult: the all-powerful
gentry extended their domination over religion as well as all else. But
the peasants regarded their local unauthorized priests as their natural
leaders against the gentry and against gentry forms of religion. One
branch, probably the main branch of this movement, developed a
stronghold in Eastern Szechwan province, where its members succeeded to
create a state of their own which retained its independence for a
while. It is the only group which developed real religious communities
in which men and women participated, extensive welfare schemes existed
and class differences were discouraged. It had a real church
organization with dioceses, communal friendship meals and a confession
ritual; in short, real piety developed as it could not develop in the
official religions. After the annihilation of this state, remnants of
the organization can be traced through several centuries, mainly in
central and south China. It may well be that the many “Taoistic” traits
which can be found in the religions of late and present-day Mongolian
and Tibetan tribes, can be derived from this movement of the Yellow
Turbans.
The rising of the Yellow Turbans began in 184; all parties, cliques
and generals alike, were equally afraid of the revolutionaries, since
these were a threat to the gentry as such, and so to all parties.
Consequently a combined army of considerable size was got together and
sent against the rebels. The Yellow Turbans were beaten.
During these struggles it became evident that Ts'ao Ts'ao with his
troops had become the strongest of all the generals. His troops seem to
have consisted not of Chinese soldiers alone, but also of Hsiung-nu. It
is understandable that the annals say nothing about this, and it can
only be inferred from the facts. It appears that in order to reinforce
their armies the generals recruited not only Chinese but foreigners.
The generals operating in the region of the present-day Peking had
soldiers of the Wu-huan and Hsien-pi, and even of the Ting-ling; Liu
Pei, in the west, made use of Tanguts, and Ts'ao Ts'ao clearly went
farthest of all in this direction; he seems to have been responsible
for settling nineteen tribes of Hsiung-nu in the Chinese province of
Shansi between 180 and 200, in return for their armed aid. In this way
Ts'ao Ts'ao gained permanent power in the empire by means of these
troops, so that immediately after his death his son Ts'ao P'ei, with
the support of powerful allied families, was able to force the emperor
to abdicate and to found a new dynasty, the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220).
This meant, however, that a part of China which for several
centuries had been Chinese was given up to the Hsiung-nu. This was not,
of course, what Ts'ao Ts'ao had intended; he had given the Hsiung-nu
some area of pasturage in Shansi with the idea that they should be
controlled and administered by the officials of the surrounding
district. His plan had been similar to what the Chinese had often done
with success: aliens were admitted into the territory of the empire in
a body, but then the influence of the surrounding administrative
centres was steadily extended over them, until the immigrants
completely lost their own nationality and became Chinese. The nineteen
tribes of Hsiung-nu, however, were much too numerous, and after the
prolonged struggles in China the provincial administration proved much
too weak to be able to carry out the plan. Thus there came into
existence here, within China, a small Hsiung-nu realm ruled by several
shan-yue. This was the second major development, and it became of
the utmost importance to the history of the next four centuries.
10 Literature and Art
With the development of the new class of the gentry in the Han
period, there was an increase in the number of those who were anxious
to participate in what had been in the past an exclusively aristocratic
possession—education. Thus it is by no mere chance that in this period
many encyclopaedias were compiled. Encyclopaedias convey knowledge in
an easily grasped and easily found form. The first compilation of this
sort dates from the third century B.C. It was the work of Lue Pu wei,
the merchant who was prime minister and regent during the minority of
Shih Huang-ti. It contains general information concerning ceremonies,
customs, historic events, and other things the knowledge of which was
part of a general education. Soon afterwards other encyclopaedias
appeared, of which the best known is the Book of the Mountains and Seas
(Shan Hai Ching). This book, arranged according to regions of
the world, contains everything known at the time about geography,
natural philosophy, and the animal and plant world, and also about
popular myths. This tendency to systemization is shown also in the
historical works. The famous Shih Chi, one of our main sources
for Chinese history, is the first historical work of the modern type,
that is to say, built up on a definite plan, and it was also the model
for all later official historiography. Its author, Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien
(born 135 B.C.), and his father, made use of the material in the state
archives and of private documents, old historical and philosophical
books, inscriptions, and the results of their own travels. The
philosophical and historical books of earlier times (with the exception
of those of the nature of chronicles) consisted merely of a few dicta
or reports of particular events, but the Shih Chi is a
compendium of a mass of source-material. The documents were
abbreviated, but the text of the extracts was altered as little as
possible, so that the general result retains in a sense the value of an
original source. In its arrangement the Shih Chi became a model
for all later historians: the first part is in the form of annals, and
there follow tables concerning the occupants of official posts and
fiefs, and then biographies of various important personalities, though
the type of the comprehensive biography did not appear till later. The
Shih Chi also, like later historical works, contains many
monographs dealing with particular fields of knowledge, such as
astronomy, the calendar, music, economics, official dress at court, and
much else. The whole type of construction differs fundamentally from
such works as those of Thucydides or Herodotus. The Chinese historical
works have the advantage that the section of annals gives at once the
events of a particular year, the monographs describe the development of
a particular field of knowledge, and the biographical section offers
information concerning particular personalities. The mental attitude is
that of the gentry: shortly after the time of Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien an
historical department was founded, in which members of the gentry
worked as historians upon the documents prepared by representatives of
the gentry in the various government offices.
In addition to encyclopaedias and historical works, many books of
philosophy were written in the Han period, but most of them offer no
fundamentally new ideas. They were the product of the leisure of rich
members of the gentry, and only three of them are of importance. One is
the work of Tung Chung-shu, already mentioned. The second is a book by
Liu An called Huai-nan Tz[)u]. Prince Liu An occupied himself
with Taoism and allied problems, gathered around him scholars of
different schools, and carried on discussions with them. Many of his
writings are lost, but enough is extant to show that he was one of the
earliest Chinese alchemists. The question has not yet been settled, but
it is probable that alchemy first appeared in China, together with the
cult of the “art” of prolonging life, and was later carried to the
West, where it flourished among the Arabs and in medieval Europe.
The third important book of the Han period was the Lun Heng
(Critique of Opinions) of Wang Ch'ung, which appeared in the first
century of the Christian era. Wang Ch'ung advocated rational thinking
and tried to pave the way for a free natural science, in continuation
of the beginnings which the natural philosophers of the later Chou
period had made. The book analyses reports in ancient literature and
customs of daily life, and shows how much they were influenced by
superstition and by ignorance of the facts of nature. From this
attitude a modern science might have developed, as in Europe towards
the end of the Middle Ages; but the gentry had every reason to play
down this tendency which, with its criticism of all that was
traditional, might have proceeded to an attack on the dominance of the
gentry and their oppression especially of the merchants and artisans.
It is fascinating to observe how it was the needs of the merchants and
seafarers of Asia Minor and Greece that provided the stimulus for the
growth of the classic sciences, and how on the contrary the growth of
Chinese science was stifled because the gentry were so strongly hostile
to commerce and navigation, though both had always existed.
There were great literary innovations in the field of poetry. The
splendour and elegance at the new imperial court of the Han dynasty
attracted many poets who sang the praises of the emperor and his court
and were given official posts and dignities. These praises were in the
form of grandiloquent, overloaded poetry, full of strange similes and
allusions, but with little real feeling. In contrast, the many women
singers and dancers at the court, mostly slaves from southern China,
introduced at the court southern Chinese forms of song and poem, which
were soon adopted and elaborated by poets. Poems and dance songs were
composed which belonged to the finest that Chinese poetry can
show—full of natural feeling, simple in language, moving in content.
Our knowledge of the arts is drawn from two sources—literature, and
the actual discoveries in the excavations. Thus we know that most of
the painting was done on silk, of which plenty came into the market
through the control of silk-producing southern China. Paper had
meanwhile been invented in the second century B.C., by perfecting the
techniques of making bark-cloth and felt. Unfortunately nothing remains
of the actual works that were the first examples of what the Chinese
everywhere were beginning to call “art”. “People", that is to say the
gentry, painted as a social pastime, just as they assembled together
for poetry, discussion, or performances of song and dance; they painted
as an aesthetic pleasure and rarely as a means of earning. We find
philosophic ideas or greetings, emotions, and experiences represented
by paintings—paintings with fanciful or ideal landscapes; paintings
representing life and environment of the cultured class in idealized
form, never naturalistic either in fact or in intention. Until recently
it was an indispensable condition in the Chinese view that an artist
must be “cultured” and be a member of the gentry—distinguished,
unoccupied, wealthy. A man who was paid for his work, for instance for
a portrait for the ancestral cult, was until late time regarded as a
craftsman, not as an artist. Yet, these “craftsmen” have produced in
Han time and even earlier, many works which, in our view, undoubtedly
belong to the realm of art. In the tombs have been found reliefs whose
technique is generally intermediate between simple outline engraving
and intaglio. The lining-in is most frequently executed in scratched
lines. The representations, mostly in strips placed one above another,
are of lively historical scenes, scenes from the life of the dead,
great ritual ceremonies, or adventurous scenes from mythology. Bronze
vessels have representations in inlaid gold and silver, mostly of
animals. The most important documents of the painting of the Han period
have also been found in tombs. We see especially ladies and gentlemen
of society, with richly ornamented, elegant, expensive clothing that is
very reminiscent of the clothing customary to this day in Japan. There
are also artistic representations of human figures on lacquer caskets.
While sculpture was not strongly developed, the architecture of the Han
must have been magnificent and technically highly complex. Sculpture
and temple architecture received a great stimulus with the spread of
Buddhism in China. According to our present knowledge, Buddhism entered
China from the south coast and through Central Asia at latest in the
first century B.C.; it came with foreign merchants from India or
Central Asia. According to Indian customs, Brahmans, the Hindu caste
providing all Hindu priests, could not leave their homes. As merchants
on their trips which lasted often several years, did not want to go
without religious services, they turned to Buddhist priests as well as
to priests of Near Eastern religions. These priests were not prevented
from travelling and used this opportunity for missionary purposes.
Thus, for a long time after the first arrival of Buddhists, the
Buddhist priests in China were foreigners who served foreign merchant
colonies. The depressed conditions of the people in the second century
A.D. drove members of the lower classes into their arms, while the
parts of Indian science which these priests brought with them from
India aroused some interest in certain educated circles. Buddhism,
therefore, undeniably exercised an influence at the end of the Han
dynasty, although no Chinese were priests and few, if any, gentry
members were adherents of the religious teachings.
With the end of the Han period a further epoch of Chinese history
comes to its close. The Han period was that of the final completion and
consolidation of the social order of the gentry. The period that
followed was that of the conflicts of the Chinese with the populations
on their northern borders.