The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. [pg 044] It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar class, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded—except in rare instances—on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was assured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government assistance. The educational system also served as the substitute for a nobility. Hereditary class distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.[45] In a society [pg 045] which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful nobility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order.
The scholars, once they had passed the examinations, were given either subsistence allowances or posts, according to the rank which they had secured in the tests. (This was, of course, the theory; in actuality bribery and nepotism played rôles varying with the time and the locality.) They made up the administration of the civilized world. They were not only the officials but the literati.
It would be impossible even to enumerate the many posts and types of organization in the administration of imperial China.[46] Its most conspicuous features may be enumerated as follows: China consisted of half a million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, each to a large extent autonomous.[47] These were divided among, roughly, two thousand hsien, in each of which an over-burdened District Magistrate sought to carry out all the recognized functions of government in so far as they applied to his locality. He did this largely by negotiation with the [pg 046] leaders of the social groups in his bailiwick, the heads of families, the elders of villages, the functionaries of hui. He was supervised by a variety of travelling prefects and superintendents, but the next officer above him who possessed a high degree of independence was the viceroy or governor—whichever type happened to rule the province or group of provinces. Except for their non-hereditability, these last offices were to all intents and purposes satrapies. The enormous extent of the Chinese civilized world, the difficulty of communicating with the capital, the cumbersomeness of the administrative organization, the rivalry and unfriendliness between the inhabitants of various provinces—all these encouraged independence of a high degree. If Chinese society was divided into largely autonomous communes, the Chinese political system was made up of largely autonomous provinces. Everywhere there was elasticity.
At the top of the whole structure stood the Emperor. In the mystical doctrines which Confucianism transmitted from the animism of the feudal ages of China, the Emperor was the intermediary between the forces of nature and mankind. The Son of Heaven became the chief ritualist; in more sophisticated times he was the patron of civilization to the scholars, and the object of supernatural veneration to the uneducated. His function was to provide a constant pattern of propriety. He was to act as chief of the scholars. To the scholars the ideology was recognized as an ideology, albeit the most exact one; to the common people it was an objective reality of thought and value. As the dictates of reason were not subject to change, the power and the functions of the Emperor were delimited; he was not, therefore, responsible to himself alone. He was responsible to reason, which the people could enforce when the Emperor failed. Popular intervention was regarded as de jure in proportion to its effectiveness de facto. The Imperial structure might be called, [pg 047] in Western terms, the constitutionalism of common sense.[48] The Dragon Throne did not enjoy the mysterious and awful prestige which surrounds the modern Tenno of Nippon; although sublime in the Confucian theory, it was, even in the theory, at the mercy of its subjects, who were themselves the arbiters of reason. There was no authority higher than reason; and no reason beyond the reason discovered and made manifest in the ages of antiquity.
The Impact of the West.
Mere physical shock could not derange the old Chinese society as easily as it might some other, dependent for its stability upon complex, fragile political mechanisms. China was over-run many times by barbarians; the continuity of its civilization was undisturbed. Each group of conquerors added to the racial composition of the Chinese, but contributed little to the culture. The Ch'in, the Mongols, the Manchus—all ruled China as Chinese rulers.
This strength of the Chinese society—in contrast to the Roman—must not, however, lead us to suppose that there were any extraordinary virtues in the Chinese social organization that made Chinese civilization indestructible. On the contrary, the continued life of the Chinese society may be ascribed, among others, to four conditions acting definitely and overwhelmingly in its favor: China's greater physical extent, homogeneity, wealth, and culture.
No barbarian conqueror, with the possible exception of the Mongol, would have been a match for an orderly and [pg 048] united China. Without exception, the barbarian incursions occurred in times of social and political disorder and weakness. That this is no freakish coincidence, may be shown by the contrast between China and any of the peripheral realms. None approached China in extent, in heaviness of population. Conquest of China was always conquest by sufferance of the Chinese.
Second, China's neighbors were divided among themselves. There was never any coalition extensive enough to present a genuine threat to a thriving China. The Chinese, in spite of diversities of spoken language, were united—so far as they were literate—by a common writing and literature; the common ideology had, moreover, fostered an extreme sympathy of thought and behavior among the Chinese. Persons speaking mutually unintelligible dialects, of different racial composition, and in completely different economic and geographical environments displayed—and, for all that, still display in modern times—an uncanny uniformity of social conditioning. China faced barbarians on many fronts; China was coördinated, homogeneous; the barbarians of North and South did not, in all probability, know anything of each other's existence, except what they heard from the Chinese.