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 documents 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 superstitions 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 title 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 ambassadors, and emissaries. The other two departments provided one of the most ingenious systems of checks and balances to be found in any constitutional 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 documents of state had to pass 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 classification, 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.