The imperial system of China was thus a monarchy in the proper sense of the word, with none of the parvenu features suggested by the etymology of the word _imperial_. As the preeminent leader in an organic society, the emperor held a position comparable with that of other family heads.
His authority could rival that of a father but not excel it; among all the families of the Chinese Empire the imperial stood forth as a family.
Second, the emperor was the chief dignitary in the social life of the Chinese world. He was not unlike the British monarchs, providing a model of formal propriety and elegance in setting the fashions of the decade.
The physical isolation of most of the emperors prevented them from playing this role with widespread effectiveness, but it was a part of their function. Third, the emperor bore the relation to the Empire which the outstanding villager bore to the village. It was he of whom men talked; his behavior commanded greatest interest; his future conduct was a constant source of speculation. Apart from his role as a formal dignitary, he occupied the more immediate position of most conspicuous person, of the first member of society. He had the human accountability of a leader and was to be praised or blamed for his actions in the histories and by his subjects. In the normal routine, the emperor himself was not to govern; but he selected and supervised his ministers, who did and who consequently bore the odium for evil deeds.
Fourth, the emperor himself was the ultimate examiner of scholars. He thus had contact with the most successful of the civil service candidates and completed their examination. These examinations served the emperor as a means of selecting advisers who upon further testing became ministers. The Forest of Pencils (_Han Lin_, the Imperial Academy) was within his jurisdiction, and the emperor was supposed to be enough of a scholar to check the most important of the doc.u.ments of state. The myth of intellectual supremacy is suggested by the fact that the chief implement of the imperial office was a red pencil. The imperial symbolism did not stop here. Fifth, the quasi-religious hierarchy of the Chinese, competing with Buddhism and the superst.i.tions of popular Taoism for the support of the people, centered on the performance of certain rites in the propitiation of fortune and the honoring of the dead. To this were added the cult rituals of Confucianism. The Confucian temples, with tablets bearing the names of worthies, served as the visible demonstration of the ideological power wielded by the scholars over the populace, and of the emperor over the scholars.
Sixth, the emperor had the more definitely religious status referred to in his t.i.tle _Son of Heaven_. He was the intermediate figure between the will of Heaven and mankind. In him were summarized and epitomized the virtues or the evils of the generation; he had to represent mankind in its best light to all supernatural forces or agencies. Upon his conduct of worship depended the good or ill will of the deities and hence weather, crops, life and death. Conversely, he was responsible to mankind for the misbehavior of nature, and an earthquake, a two-headed calf, or any other monstrous occurrence was blamed on his disturbance of the routine of things. The order which enveloped the Confucian society was conceived not merely as a set of traditional and moral man-made customs but as a type of behavior which fitted in with the life of the natural world. In the eyes of the Chinese, perturbations in the world of men soon produced consequent natural calamities. Lastly, the Chinese emperor was the autocrat of the administration. His action, however, was limited by various customary devices; for example, while the countersignature of a minister was not needed on an edict, the emperor was supposed not to take the initiative but to secure the wisest suggestions and adopt them. Practical considerations rendered a stable bureaucracy impervious to constant intermeddling of the emperor, although the effect of imperial action was not negligible.
The administrative outline of Chinese government from the establishment of the Empire by the Ch"in Shih Huang Ti in 221 B. C. to its overthrow by Sun Yat-sen and his followers in 1911 varied from dynasty to dynasty and ruler to ruler. Nevertheless, certain general characteristics were common to the whole period. The government operated as the chief implementation of the emperor"s power over the people. The people maintained its social organizations, but none of these developed office hierarchies comparable to that of the government. The government alone served as the connecting link between the ideologically unified Chinese world as a whole and its many separate parts. The T"ang dynasty (A. D.
620-906) provided an exceptionally clear articulation of the Empire, which not only compelled the admiration and imitation of later ages but even served as a model for state governments on the periphery of the Chinese world. In the great Taikwa Reforms of 645, the j.a.panese made a heroic attempt to adapt the T"ang form of government to dissimilar conditions; the scheme worked on paper but failed to recast the fundamental mold of j.a.panese society, which remained feudal.
The three most striking features of the Chinese bureaucracy were: (1) the central administrative organization; (2) the operation of civil service examinations and the use of administrative supervision; (3) the integration of government operation on the imperial, regional, and local levels. The metropolitan administrative organization under the T"ang dynasty was headed by the emperor. But the intricate regularity of the hierarchy beneath him was such as to preclude imperial autocratic caprice. The outline of the hierarchical organization was as follows:[6]
THE THRONE
THE GRAND COUNCIL
The Departments:
_a._ Department of Ministerial Coordination 1. Ministry of Administrators 2. Ministry of Finance 3. Ministry of Rites 4. Ministry of War 5. Ministry of Justice 6. Ministry of Public Works _b._ The Imperial Chancery _c._ The Grand Secretariat
The Tribunal of Censors
Imperial Commissioners
Provinces (10) and _Governments-General_ (at the frontiers) Prefectures Subprefectures Townships Villages
The general structure of Chinese administration differed little from that of preceding ages, and has not changed markedly during the following centuries. Later developments strengthened the provinces, at the expense of both the central government and the local areas; earlier conditions had tolerated a much greater extent of feudal establishments.
Nevertheless, the six ministries may have been established as early as about 1000 B. C., and remained a feature of Chinese government until 1906.
The Grand Council met daily. It was composed of grand ministers, who--in the phrase of Baron des Rotours--"under the T"ang held in their hands the government of the Empire."[7] The emperor"s chief power lay in appointing the council members, to whom fell the greater share of governing in fact. Directly under the Grand Council there were the three departments. The Department of Ministerial Coordination served as an administrative center and clearinghouse for the work of the separate ministries under it. The names of the ministries are self-explanatory.
The Ministry of Administrators was in charge of the examination system and the arrangement of the offices in the bureaucracy. The Ministry of Rites, by an extension of its protocol features, was in charge of the reception of foreign ("barbarian") princes and amba.s.sadors, and emissaries. The other two departments provided one of the most ingenious systems of checks and balances to be found in any const.i.tutional scheme.
The Imperial Chancery received all communications from the various parts of the Empire. Since most of the governing was carried out by means of written orders, instructions, and requests for reports, the Chancery occupied an important place. But the function of drafting replies to such communications, preparing manifestoes, or issuing ordinances was in the hands of the Grand Secretariat. Thus the Chancery was prevented from exerting an outside influence, while it was impossible for the Secretariat to receive any communication directly. As a final check, all outgoing doc.u.ments of state had to pa.s.s through the Chancery to receive the official seal, without which they were invalid. Thus any item of government business was routed first through the Chancery for registration and cla.s.sification, then to the Secretariat for reply, and back to the Chancery for what amounted to countersignature (by seal).[8]
Yet the Secretariat was no mere drafting agency for the Chancery.
The Tribunal of Censors occupied a position not unlike that of the great independent establishments of the United States government. It was directed by a president and two vice-presidents, and concerned itself with ferreting out and exposing irregularities and abuses in the administration. The morale of the censorate varied from time to time, but at its optimum efficiency it was a formidable and significant inst.i.tution. Han Confucianism provided the general background from which the organization rose to effectiveness.
This sophisticated and rationally designed central bureaucracy was supplemented by regional administrations. Under the T"ang the regional establishments were a source of trouble to the government. The Empire was divided into provinces, but the provincial administrations were superseded by Imperial Commissioners whenever an emergency arose. Later dynasties placed the provincial system on a more stable basis, which resulted in genuine and geographically sound regionalism. The provincial governments were replicas in miniature of the central; their heads might be regarded as appointive and removable satraps whose authority was a smaller reproduction of the power of the emperor. It was not until the Ming dynasty (A. D. 1368-1643) that the provinces took on their modern form. The provincial governments were a source of great strength to China in that they made possible a quasi-federal government. In the Ch"ing period no officer was eligible to a post in his native province;[9] this custom had considerable centripetal effect and offset the danger that populace and officials, united by common sympathies, might revolt or secede.[10]
Another feature to be noted about the Chinese government under the Empire was the examination and civil service system. The T"ang dynasty provided for three major types of examination: (1) The _chu_ corresponded most closely to a modern academic degree, and allowed the candidate to qualify in any one of a number of subjects, including the cla.s.sics, law, and mathematics. (2) The _hsuan_ was the special examination necessary for appointment to a post in the bureaucracy; it was both written and oral and included the personal history of the candidate. (3) The _k"ao_, an in-service examination, consisted of annual reports on the performance of all officers in the Empire. They were transmitted to the Bureau for Examination of Merits in the Ministry of Administrators on a schedule varying with the distance of the office from the capital. There were five points on which to report: virtue and justice; integrity and circ.u.mspection; equity and impartiality; diligence and activity; and one of twenty-seven special talents suitable to the particular office in question. The grades received on these reports determined the advancement or demotion of the officer, in accordance with an elaborate and exact schedule.[11] All three examinations provided the administrative form for the close relation between the government and the scholastic elite. The _chu_, with its emphasis on the cla.s.sics, framed the content of all curriculums. The _hsuan_, with its oral examination and personal record, made the prospective candidate careful in observing the customs. The _k"ao_ kept up the morale and efficiency of the bureaucracy, while the ominous Tribunal of Censors was present to guard against abuse of the system.
Every detail was precise, well ordered, explicit, to a degree that would delight present-day industrial personnel managers. Formulation was refined and impressive. In fact the T"ang laws, although their part in Chinese life was less than a Westerner might expect, were a code of such force and appeal that the j.a.panese and the Annamese used them as a model for their juridical systems.[12]
The decline of particular dynasties in China--caused by poor economic policy, demoralization of the court, corruption of the bureaucracy, laxity in the examinations, oppression of the farmers--did not effect great alterations in the structure of government. With the centuries the Chinese government settled into more and more definitive form.
Unfortunately, the Manchu government (1644-1911)[13] had sunk into administrative demoralization when the full force of the Western impact was felt. In the early nineteenth century a British observer wrote of an imperial official:
The late _tungling_ [gendarmerie commander] w.a.n.king, degraded last year for connecting himself with a magician whose confessions went to implicate a large number of n.o.bles and public servants, was a Reader at the Cla.s.sical Feasts, Manchu President of the Board of Civil Office, Revisor-General of the Veritable Records of the Reign, a Superior of the Academy, Supervisor of the Household, t"utung of a Banner [military division], superintendent of the Gymnasium in the Ning-shan Palace, and of the Treasuries of the Board of Revenue, and Visitor of the 17 Granaries in the City, and at Tungchau.[14]
When such conditions of indifference toward sharply defined hierarchic ethics began to be common among the bureaucracy, the end of the dynasty was near. The Chinese Empire had remained intact even when it had fallen into the hands of Tartars, Mongols, and Manchus. It had returned to the bases of its former greatness, and the administrative machinery created since the day of the Shih Huang Ti continued for twenty centuries. With the decrepitude of the Manchu dynasty, and the simultaneous collision with the Western world, the old political system broke and had to be reshaped into new forms. Nevertheless, even in the Republican era techniques of the T"ang have reappeared in the administration of government services.
Underneath all shifts there remained a series of social groupings which were affected far less than were the broad and conspicuous central regimes. They have existed since the times before organized government, and may well be sufficiently strong to set the conditions under which any government or any race of rulers will succeed or fail in China.
_Family, Village, and Hui_
The ideological control in old China operated through those groups most closely attached to the individual. The government was not one of them.
The fundamental strength of Chinese society rests upon the cohesion and power of three outstanding quasi-political agencies: the family system, the village and district, and the _hui_ (a.s.sociations, leagues, societies or guilds.)[15] The family was an intricate structure, "composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the natural family, the economic family, the religious family, and the sib."[16] The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The economic family commonly extended through several degrees of kinship, and may have included from thirty to one hundred individuals, who formed a single economic unit, living collectively. The religious family was an aggregate of economic families; it would be difficult to give any specified number of const.i.tuent families as an average. This unit provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of ancestors and maintained an ancestral shrine where the genealogical records were kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern times. The sib resembled the clan as found in the West; its role was determined by the immediate environment. In some cases, especially in the South, the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one or more sibs dominated whole communities. In the greater part of China it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite the various local religious families which const.i.tuted it.
Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality of the human race. It oriented the individual not only philosophically but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant heights of n.o.bility or falling into the degradation of a slavery in which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by outsiders and against the menace of his own potential follies. It was largely through the family system, with its religious as well as economic and social foundation, that the Chinese counteracted undesirable mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole.
Stability thus obtained a clear and undeniable purpose--the continued generation of the human race through the continuity of innumerable families, each determined upon survival. A materialistic interpretation would point out the need for cheap and plentiful human labor in maintaining the agrarian economy of China, and reduce the rationale of the system to a mere web of justifications.
The family was equaled if not excelled in importance by the village.[17]
Had the family been the only vital social grouping, it might have been impossible for democratic processes to develop in China. The family pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the influence of villages in Chinese life mitigated the familistic tendencies of government. It would have been heresy to revolt against an unrighteous father; but there was nothing to prevent the deposition of an evil village elder. In times of contentment, the emperor was the father of the society; at other times he might be looked upon as a fellow villager subject to the criticism of the people. The village was the largest working unit of local self-government; it, and the groups within it, such as the sib, was almost completely autonomous and subject to outside interference only in very rare cases. At the same time, the village was the smallest unit of district organization. The District Magistrate, as the government officer in charge of a district containing from one to twenty villages, relied on the village leaders in performing the duties imposed upon him. Village government was at times very democratic.[18]
Next in importance was the _hui_. It was in all probability the last to appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, this a.s.sociation emerged from the Chinese propensity toward cooperation.
Paralleling and supplementing family and village, the _hui_ won for itself an unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The _hui_ may be cla.s.sified into six categories[19]: (1) fraternal societies; (2) insurance groups; (3) economic guilds; (4) religious societies; (5) political societies; and (6) militia and vigilante organizations. The _hui_ made up the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and offered vocational education to men not destined for literature and administration. Under such names as the Triad and the Lotus the _hui_ provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever resentment was ripe.
The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, villages, and _hui_, comprised the whole "known world." Its strength was inexhaustible. Having no one nerve center, the world society could not be destroyed by the inroads of barbarians or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The Confucian ideology continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation from tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government continued side by side, even though dynasties fell and the country was overrun by conquerors. The absence of any rigid organization of legal authority facilitated survival, while a certain minimum of order could be maintained even in the absence of an emperor or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.
The governmental superstructure kept the Chinese world together in a formal manner; it did not give it vitality. The family, the village, and the _hui_ were fit subjects for imperial attention, but the emperor could not remove his sanction from their existence and thereby annihilate them. No precarious legal personality was attributed to the family, the village, and the _hui_, which could be extirpated by a mere edict. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland clan of the MacGregor--"the proscribed name"--without liquidating the members of the clan _in toto_. In China the emperor could wipe out a family by ma.s.sacre, but it was practically impossible for him to destroy an organization without destroying all its members. On the whole, however, the government of China pursued its three main ends--the maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the realm against barbarians (military affairs) and against adverse forces of nature (public works), and the collection of funds for the fulfilment of these functions (revenue).
_Governmental Changes Foreshadowing the Republic_
The pressure of the West compelled the Chinese government to define more clearly than ever before its own boundaries, its relations with the va.s.sal states, and its lines of contact with the Chinese people. By the Treaty of Nerchinsk, negotiated in 1689 with Russia, the Chinese tried to demarcate their land frontier. The va.s.sal nations presented a crucial problem. The Chinese failed to make explicit their quasi suzerainty in terms comprehensible to Western jurisprudence. At the same time they followed a policy of brisk exaggeration of territorial rights alternating with outright disclaimer of responsibility. The scope of government itself was affected by new functions which arose with the coming of the Westerners. The tax system was expanded. The development of an imperial customs service with Western personnel and Western methods of accounting provided the government with a source of large revenue. The demands that Western states be given adequate consideration in the transaction of business led to the establishment in 1860 of the Foreign Office (_Tsung-li Yamen_), a new inst.i.tution which modified the traditional administrative pattern.
In addition, the Western states introduced their own type of government into China through the demand that their citizens be subject only to the law with which they were familiar at home. In dealing with Westerners the Chinese had at first employed a code far more Draconic than the provisions of Chinese penal practice. After many years of irritation the Western powers, under the leadership of Great Britain, secured extraterritorial privileges for their citizens. Extraterritoriality placed Westerners in China solely under the jurisdiction of their respective national representatives. If an American today were to shoot down the Dalai Lama in Tibet, he could be tried legally only in the United States Court in Shanghai--although it is improbable that the Tibetans would insist upon juridical niceties. Apart from the guarantee of personal immunity from Chinese law for their citizens, wherever they might be in China, the Western powers, through a long series of special arrangements and actual usage, obtained certain footholds on Chinese soil where even Chinese were under Western rule. These areas were known as _concessions_ and _settlements_, and the cities of their location as the _treaty ports_. Both the presence of Westerners subject only to Western law throughout the Empire, and of areas where Western governance was paramount, taught the Chinese the lesson of strong government.
Nor was this all. The British-Chinese treaty of Nanking (1842) and that with the United States (1844) both contained provisions relating to the protection of the life and property of foreigners. The imperial government found itself pledged to the fulfillment of a policy which collided directly with the xenophobia engendered by ideological control.
The enforcement of these provisions, half-hearted as it was, involved constantly increasing imperial intervention in regional affairs, although the issues arising between the central government and the provincial authorities were settled through negotiation rather than enforceable commands.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the gradual transformation in China gave rise to a reform movement carried forward by a group of const.i.tutional monarchists. One of their leaders, K"ang Yu-wei, became in 1898 the tutor of the young Emperor Kuang Hsu. The summer of that year witnessed a steady stream of edicts which ultimately might have made China under the leadership of the throne as progressive as j.a.pan.
The reforms aimed primarily at efficiency and modernization, and partially at the parliamentarization of the regime. The young Emperor, however, was soon checked by Yuan Shih-k"ai, his leading military adviser, and outmaneuvered by the reactionary Empress Dowager. He spent the rest of his life in actual imprisonment, and the Six Geniuses--as the reformers behind his policy were called--were exiled or executed.
One of those who were put to death was the poet Tan Shih-tung, a man of great skill in the cla.s.sical literature and of ambitious visions for the future, who might, had the Hundred Days succeeded, have lived to be a guardian of the throne in a modern Chinese Empire. Just before his execution he wrote the following poem, calling forth the memory of Chiang-ch"ing and Tou-keng, upright men of the past, and comparing his faith with the mountain range of Kuang-leng:
LAST SONG FROM PRISON
_Prison door facing me--thoughts of Chiang-ch"ing-- I could die easily, if like Tou-keng ...
Laughing and alone, I lift the knife to heaven: I die but leave behind hopes higher than Kuang-leng!_[20]
Reform, indeed, could not be downed. The Manchu dynasty itself began to tread cautiously in the footsteps of j.a.pan. In 1905 an agency was set up for the purpose of studying various foreign forms of government and of making recommendations for the modernization of the imperial government.
In 1908 a draft const.i.tution, very similar to the const.i.tution of the j.a.panese Empire, was approved. A nine-year program, from 1908 to 1916 inclusive, was to lead to const.i.tutional, parliamentary monarchy--if parliamentary monarchy be regarded merely as a monarchy with a parliament appended. The principle of cabinet responsibility to parliament was not established, and from the very beginning the Manchus, less wise than the ruling house in j.a.pan, not only failed to grant sufficient powers on paper but began packing the quasi-parliamentary inst.i.tutions before they were set up. Hand-picked, the preliminary National a.s.sembly which met in 1909 began wrangling with the Throne.[21]
The old Empress Dowager had died in the preceding year; so had the imprisoned Emperor Kuang Hsu. The new Emperor was an infant, and the court was little more than a gathering of bewildered Manchu princes listening to the advice of the eunuchs and palace officials.[22] Reform from above, had there been a single man of will and courage to take charge of it, might have had considerable chances of success. But while the Manchus tinkered with the superstructure of government, the foundations of society were washing away beneath their feet. More was involved than the improvement of administrative technique and the illusion of popular representation. A political and social revolution was in the making. Sun Yat-sen was the man who, more than any other single person, shaped its course.
In 1893 Sun had gone north to advocate reform and present a pet.i.tion to Li Hung-chang, an eminent imperial statesman.[23] The mission failed. In 1897 Sun was willing to speak openly of revolution. He refrained, however, from advocating a republic before Western audiences, even though his party was committed to it. He wrote in his book _Kidnapped in London_:
The prime essence of the movement was the establishment of a form of const.i.tutional government to supplement the old-fashioned, corrupt, and worn-out system under which China is groaning.
It is unnecessary to enter into details as to what form of rule obtains in China at present. It may be summed up, however, in a few words. The people have no say whatever in the management of Imperial, National, or even Munic.i.p.al affairs. The mandarins, or local magistrates, have full power of adjudication, from which there is no appeal. Their word is law, and they have full scope to practice their machinations with irresponsibility, and every officer may fatten himself with impunity. Extortion by officials is an inst.i.tution; it is the condition on which they take office; and it is only when the bleeder is a bungler that the government steps in with pretended benevolence to ameliorate but more often to complete the depletion....