by Kevin Reilly
The Han Empire was considerably larger than its predecessor. Yet in the northwest, Liu Bang had to accept a stalemate with the Xion-gnu nomads of the grasslands. Like the Roman standoff with the tribes of its north, the Han Empire had to continually negotiate its relationship with the peoples of the steppe, sometimes supplying them with wives and tribute and sometimes gaining horses, captives, new technologies, and foreign ideas.
Empire and Dynastic Succession . Like the firing of a diviner’s tortoise shell, the death of Liu Bang revealed the cracks in an emperor’s best-laid plans. How to institute a system of succession over an empire? Once the Romans abandoned the system of election and senatorial selection, they also had to find a way of ensuring continuity. Succession in Rome sometimes depended on adopted heirs, and some dynasties died out for want of an heir. Chinese emperors, who kept concubines and allowed multiple marriages, had the opposite problem: too many potential heirs. Liu Bang designated a son by his wife Lu as his successor, assuming that she would protect the youth until he reached maturity. But such a plan worked only as long as the designated son lived, the mother-protector desired no power for herself or others, and there were no other ambitious sons or mothers who could make a claim to the crown. Rarely did all these ducks line up in a row. In the case of Liu Bang, his chosen successor died early. The empress Lu continued to govern as guardian of another son, an infant, and then another. Before she herself died in 180 BCE, however, she had appointed many of her own family members to important positions and, it is said, assassinated four of Liu Bang’s sons who had stronger claims to the throne but were children of other mothers. When the empress Lu died, imperial officials removed her family members from office and raised one of Liu Bang’s sons of a courtesan as the next Han emperor.
The continuation of the Han dynasty in some form for 400 years must be considered quite an accomplishment given the push and pull of innumerable wives, courtesans, their families, old landed nobles, court officials, and military leaders. By comparison, the first 200 years of the Roman Empire saw five dynasties, and the last 200 years saw many more. What made the Chinese Empire more stable than the Roman? Indeed, what made it possible for the Chinese Empire to continue into the twentieth century, almost 2,000 years after the Western Roman Empire had disappeared?
The Mandate of Heaven . One reason Chinese dynasties enjoyed such longevity was the acceptance of the idea that the emperor, his family, and his entire administration served with the “mandate” or approval of heaven. According to this idea, which originated in the efforts of the early unifiers of the Zhou dynasty (1100-256 BCE) to establish their legitimacy and was enshrined in Confucian philosophy, everything in the world was part of the moral and physical order ordained by heaven. This conviction, less demanding than a belief in a providential God, offered more direction than a Roman belief in quarreling deities. In one sense, the idea was a version of the traditional conservative: “what is, ought to be.” In practice, however, it provided a framework for counseling obedience in good times and change in times of crisis. That is because the indicator of heaven’s mandate was the general peace and security of the realm. Times of military defeat, natural crisis, or bad government signaled that the mandate had been lifted and would be conferred on another family.
A Government of Experts . Another reason for the staying power of the Chinese state was the creation of a permanent government—the court officials who helped an emperor govern and remained to ensure his succession and a bureaucracy that implemented the law and the wishes of the emperor from the palace grounds to the smallest county seat or municipality.
The Chinese invention of the world’s first civil service system more than 2,000 years ago—and about 2,000 years before it was borrowed by European and North American state builders—can be viewed in different ways. Western eyes glaze over at the idea of bureaucracy. Eyebrows arch at the mention of a permanent government. But the idea of “a government of experts” throws a rosier light. Nevertheless, expertise took on a very different meaning for the Han Chinese than the word evokes today. In modern technological society, expertise is technical and practical. That view was not unknown in Han China; in fact, we have noticed the practical bent of Han legalists. But under the stewardship of the Han emperor Wu (r. 140-87 BCE), the legalists were routed, and Confucian learning became the source of learning for civil service and state administration.
The Confucian idea of expertise was closer to that of Plato—and to that of the nineteenth-century Western leaders trained in the Greek and Latin classics—than to today’s idea of technical training. In a word, the Confucian idea of expertise was gentlemanly behavior: humanity, righteousness, benevolence, and morality. If these were not qualities likely to create a state from feuding families, they were qualities that might ensure honest and fair governance once the forces of disintegration had been overcome. A modern technocrat (or Qin legalist) might be excused for thinking that gentlemanly behavior could not be taught. The emperor Wu understood, as did Confucius himself, that humanity and fair-mindedness were habits of mind nurtured by the study of the past and the canon of classical literature. He also, no doubt, recognized that any classical tradition would ground his government with a set of shared principles and a common vocabulary.
In 136 BCE, shortly after he came to power at the age of 15, Emperor Wu reserved all academic appointments for specialists in the five great Zhou era books thought to be edited by Confucius. These books—The Book of Changes, The Book of Documents, The Book of Songs, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals—became the basis of a Confucian education and the core reading list of the developing civil service exams that came into widespread use in later centuries. In 124 BCE, the emperor appointed students to study with Confucian scholars and established an imperial academy to train future government officials. Then he established similar schools at the county and local levels to staff the lower levels of government workers.
The academy and examination system produced a more practical and professional class of officials. Before the classic texts were emphasized by Emperor Wu, Confucian officials behaved more like priests than scholars. In 208 BCE, a group of Confucian scholars who traveled to seek work in the camp of a Qin rebel dressed in their long robes and carried the ritual vessels of the Confucian family for their job interviews. Some two centuries later, an observer remarked about a similar group of Confucian job seekers that “there were none who did not carry in their arms or on their backs stacks of texts, when they gathered like clouds in the capital.”17
Many trainees were still accepted on the recommendation of patrons from important families (and took the exam only to determine their placement), but the impact of the civil service system was to deprive the great families of much of their influence. Emperor Wu undermined the role of the large families in other ways as well. In 127 BCE, he ended the practice of elder sons inheriting entire estates, forcing them to be broken down and inherited equally. Like his predecessors, he also required the leaders of some families to live near the capital and required the members of some families to move apart from each other. He also broke with the practice of appointing the heads of noble families as important officials, choosing instead to make his own appointments.
Salt and Iron . The debate between Confu-cians and legalists did not end with a Con-fucian victory under Emperor Wu. Rather, it simmered beneath the surface throughout the Han dynasty, rising to the surface most famously in the “Salt and Iron Debates” of 81 BCE. Salt and iron were government monopolies under the Han. The mining and production of salt and iron, especially salt, provided the government with a considerable income to supplement variable tax returns, which had declined from one-fifteenth to one-thirtieth of agricultural produce.
Confucians generally opposed state monopolies, while legalists supported them. Despite the role the Confucian bureaucracy played in strengthening the state, Confucian scholars remained suspicious of economic activity, whether private or government sponsored, and they were
particularly critical of strong governments. Ultimately, the faith of Confucians in moral example and gentlemanly behavior made them more sympathetic to the interests of feudalism than of centralized government.
Both sides in the debate posed as the defender of the poor against the large landowners. The government minister argued the legalist view that government regulations protected the less powerful:
When the magistrates set up standard weights and measures, the people obtain what they desire. Even a lad only five feet tall may be sent to the market and no one could cheat him. If now the monopolies be removed, then aggressive persons would control the use and engross the profits. . . . This would serve to nourish the powerful and depress the weak, and the nation’s wealth would be hoarded by thieves.
The Confucian scholars argued that monopolies destroyed the well-being of the average farmer:
Life and death for the farmers lie in their implements of iron. . . . But when the magistrates establish monopolies and standardize, then iron implements lose their availability, . . . the farmer is exhausted in the fields, and grass and weeds are not kept down. . . . As I see it, a single magistrate damages a thousand hamlets.18
In the end, the Han dynasty kept the salt and iron monopolies and passed them on to later dynasties as part of a tradition in China of strong, centralized government directed by an autocratic emperor and administered by a trained civil service. Confucianism became a ruling orthodoxy, its classics cribbed for exams and mined for political solutions, but its ideas often were ignored by those whose main goal was to strengthen the state. In this respect, the fate of Confucianism was not unlike that of Christianity and Buddhism in later states: its principles were ignored, while it was enshrined as the official religion.
Did China benefit from state monopolies in salt and iron? Government sponsorship of mining supported an advanced technology of drilling and iron smelting. Han dynasty ironworkers learned to smelt iron at such high temperatures that they could remove almost all the carbon, in effect creating steel, a breakthrough not reached in Europe until the eighteenth century. Whether private initiative (the Roman model) or government sponsorship (as in China) supported greater innovation or increased revenues is still debated today. Government direction had the disadvantage of sometimes stifling new approaches but the advantage of state financing and institutional memory. Government ownership provided more income than taxation of private companies—as long as the government companies were run efficiently and honestly. In general, thanks to Confucian training, Chinese standards of government administration were almost Ciceronian.
Palace, Consort Families, and Taxes . The underlying weakness of the Chinese Empire—like the Roman—was the independent wealth and power of noble families and the growth of the large estates. Both empires faced a continuing struggle to assert central authority over potential opponents. Chinese emperors, we have seen, relied on periodic reshuffling of the nobility, a civil service system, and government monopolies. The central government, even an emperor, could not function without taxes, and as noble families flexed their muscles, they found ways of avoiding taxes. The upkeep of the imperial court, the expense of the army, and keeping the peace with the Xiongnu in the north all put a constant drain on the state treasury.
The institution of the emperor was stronger, his rule more absolute, in China than in Rome. As a consequence, it was sometimes possible for the emperor to readjust the balance between large landowners and the poor. In 7 BCE, the emperor proposed to limit all large estates to 500 acres and 200 slaves. The effort did not succeed, however. Instead, the noble families were able to depose the emperor, but a revolt in 9 CE brought the popular leader Wang Mang to establish, briefly it turned out, a new dynasty on behalf of the poor. Wang Mang divided the large estates, distributed land to the poor, and ended slavery. It was the sort of radical redistribution that populist leaders in Rome had attempted without success. In Rome, the principate of Augustus and the subsequent empire were established to ensure the continued dominance of the senatorial nobility. In China, there were times when a powerful emperor could shake up the nobility, but the era of Wang Mang was short lived. The aggrieved families regrouped, killed Wang Mang in 23 CE, and placed an heir of Han on the throne two years later. For the next 200 years, a renewed Han dynasty, called now the “Eastern Han” because it moved its capital east from Chang’an to Luoyang, ruled under the watchful eye of the great families.
While the institution of the emperor remained strong in China, individual emperors were not. The palace was manipulated by the in-laws of the harem, the great families who competed to place their daughters as consorts of the emperor so that they could become mothers of future emperors. Like the empress Lu, these dowager empresses could supervise the reigns of their minor children, appointing family members to lucrative positions throughout the realm. The families were able to undercut the civil service examination system, which did not revive until another strong dynasty came along 500 years later. But another force manipulated the throne, often pulling in the opposite direction from the great consort families. These were the castrated captives made palace officials, protectors of the harem, and loyal advisers to the emperor. In Luoyang, there were probably 10,000 harem women and eunuchs at the palace out of a city population approaching half a million.
Rome, by contrast, numbered about a million in the city, but the palace—like the bureaucracy—was a much smaller affair. The two competing forces of Chinese administration—palace eunuchs versus the civil service—were virtually absent in Rome. Some Roman emperors bought eunuchs for their personal company, and at least one contemporary observer charged that these companions ran the empire, but the Romans never castrated young men for political service. Both harems and eunuchs were viewed by the Romans as examples of Persian or Oriental decadence. Instead, the Roman Empire relied to an unusual degree on slaves and soldiers. Slavery was much more pervasive in Rome than it was in China. By some estimates, slaves constituted only 1 percent of the population of Luoyang but 40 percent of the population of Rome. Both empires relied on soldiers, of course, but the military played a far greater political role in Rome than it did in China. Romans traditions of citizen-soldiers continued long beyond the actual practice in the prestige of soldiering, an occupation later despised in China. From the end of the Roman republic, the military was the training ground for citizenship, politics, and imperial rule—the equivalent almost of the Chinese civil service.
Strains of Empire . From the third century BCE to the third century CE, the Roman and Chinese empires faced the same external and internal strains. Externally, there were the nomadic pastoral peoples that each “civilization” termed “barbarians.” In general, the Chinese were more successful at turning the threat of the Xiongnu into a trading relationship, allowing them to deploy troops elsewhere. By contrast, the Romans became increasingly anchored on military posts and garrison cities along its borders.
The internal strain between the emperor and wealthy noble families was also similar in both Rome and China. In both empires, the rich got richer and paid less in taxes. Roman agriculture became a world of huge estates worked by armies of slaves. Chinese estates became counties of dependent laborers.
In both Rome and China, these problems were linked by the need of the agriculturalists to supply soldiers. In Rome, the solution was to extend citizenship since it traditionally required military service. In China, soldiers were conscripted from independent cultivators. Thus, periodically Roman emperors extended citizenship, and Chinese emperors redistributed land. But few emperors were strong enough to make such changes conclusive and permanent. In the end, both empires lost out to the families and the “barbarians.”
The breakdown of state control was far more thorough and long lasting in the Western Roman Empire than it was in China. The period of disunity lasted about 350 years in China until 589 CE, when a general for the northern Zhou reconquered the south. In western Europe, efforts at reestablishing the Roman Empire by the Catho
lic Church or by kings like Charlemagne in 800 CE proved short lived. Indeed, despite the best efforts of European kings, a single European or Mediterranean empire was never revived. The Chinese Empire, however, was restored by Sui Wendi (r. 581-604 CE), and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire was reorganized by Justinian (r. 527-565 CE).
Conclusion
Such is the power of a classical culture. A Chinese tradition of government bureaucracy, centralized administration, and a highly trained and tested civil service, enabling a new leader to pick up the baton, continues today. Rituals of ancestor worship, respect for the family, filial piety, and Confucian principles of morality, passed on from generations of parents to children, inform Chinese film and television in the twenty-first century.
The European and Western inheritance of Greece and Rome continues as well. The autonomy of cities, the rule of law, the citizen-soldier, patriotism, the primacy of the individual and the state over the family and tribe, faith in reason and science over ritual and superstition, and the conviction that people are equal and life should be fair despite all evidence to the contrary—these are the legacies of a Greco-Roman classical age. So perhaps are military heroes, generals as presidents, private entrepreneurialism as a religion, limited governments, and universal ambitions.
