The Everlasting Empire by Yuri Pines

Author:Yuri Pines [Pines, Yuri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Ancient, Political Science, Asia, History & Theory, China
ISBN: 9780691134956
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

preservation of the sociopolitical order and not threatening to state authority.41

While all the factors described above encouraged the officials to deepen their cooperation with and reliance upon the local elites, there were equally compelling reasons to be less enthusiastic about this cooperation and to view the elites’ power in general with deep suspicion. Most fundamentally, there was a persistent conflict of economic interests between the elites and the state apparatus. While the officials were normatively inclined to increase state revenues—most specifically through ensuring that nobody avoided taxation, that all the arable land was properly registered, and that most peasants possessed enough land to pay their taxes—from the elites’ point of view this represented a threat to their fundamental economic interests. As officials knew very well, many elite members routinely utilized their amicable ties with the magistrates to avoid full taxation of their assets; or, worse, bullied weaker members of the community, grabbing their lands and turning them into bond servants. These “local bullies and evil gentry” were disruptive both to the state’s fiscal needs and to the very social order that the officials had to preserve; and their actions undermined the foundations of the normally amicable ties between the elites and the magistrates.

Writings by officials, and by many conscientious elite members, provide a reader with an almost endless repertoire of tricks used by unscrupulous local elites to empower themselves economically: from underreporting the acreage of their landholdings to false registrations of private fields as charitable estates; from utilizing community granaries for commercial needs to impoverishing the peasants through exorbitant interest rates on the all-important loans; from violent seizing of neighbors’ plots to socially abusive behavior. These men could utilize lineage solidarity for such disruptive goals as persistent litigations, tax resistance, or assaults on neighboring communities. Even seemingly innocent irrigation projects could hide malicious motives, enabling the local strongmen to appropriate an unfairly large portion of the much-needed water, or to build dams to expand their arable lands at the expense of increasing flood danger further downstream.42

The persistent problem of local bullies meant that the elite could not be entirely entrusted with local affairs, but should be closely watched and disciplined when necessary. It was for this reason that, pace Zhu Xi, many officials viewed the elites’ voluntary actions from below with deep suspicion. However, discarding the elites’ support and subduing them was not a viable option either. At times, individual magistrates, such as Hai Rui (d. 1587), whom we encountered in the previous chapter, could courageously assault local bullies; but such activism could backfire and in any case was unsustainable in the long term. First, local elites often had suf

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