Given the incredibly limited sources, specifically bronze inscriptions, the difficulties of establishing a picture of ancient Chinese society are more than numerous. Sinologist Li Feng takes on the challenge of reconstructing bureaucratic offices in his article “‘Offices’ in Bronze Inscriptions and Western Zhou Government Administration.” Through an understanding of artifacts from those offices, he paints a picture of a highly developed bureaucratic administration in the Zhou kingdom with a complex system of roles, responsibilities, and interactions both internal and external. Lothar von Falkenhausen, in his “Review of Li Feng, Bureaucracy and the State,” criticizes Li’s approach and results extensively. Falkenhausen takes issue with Li’s sources, methods, and results, all of which he argues are overly simplistic. This paper will analyze three of Falkenhausen’s specific critiques of “‘Offices’ in Bronze Inscriptions and Western Zhou Government Administration”: firstly, the unrepresentative nature of Li’s sources, secondly, the article’s “anachronistic” belief in a separation of powers between the bureaucracy and the royal household, and thirdly, the article’s misunderstanding of the links between families and the bureaucratic system.
Falkenhausen’s first and most ubiquitous critique of Li’s work regards the value of the sources Li works with. Falkenhausen says, “due to the nature of the inscribed medium—ritual vessels that had high material value and were monopolized by an elite by means of sumptuary rules—it is likely that the record is skewed toward the higher end of the administrative hierarchy. The lower offices, in other words, are probably severely underrepresented.” (Falkenhausen, 274) This is a problem that we have discussed before in class, and one that all paleographers must face: what gets written down and saved almost always pertains specifically to the elite of the society. These elites were more literate, and had more reasons to make use of writing, than did their lower-class counterparts. So, what does the writing of elites tell us? It tells us how the elites lived, but not how everyone lived. But the problem becomes even more specific in Li’s case. As the title of Li’s article suggests, he set out to analyze the bureaucratic offices of the Zhou government. Yet, the offices Li discusses on pages 11-13 are all high-ranking ones. Most of the individual officers Li describes, such as Zhai Zhong, had direct and regular contact with the king. (Li, 11) Are we to assume that, extrapolating from this, all officers had intimate contact with the king? Of course not: as Falkenhausen says, the content Li focuses on is limited, in that it simply does not even represent the vast majority of the offices, let alone society as a whole.
This connects us directly to a related point that Falkenhausen makes on Li’s “dataism.” “Dataism,” Falkenhausen says, is “the fallacy of reconstructing past realities exclusively from those data that happen to be available, without any sustaining theoretical framework.” (Falkenhausen, 275) Falkenhausen’s point here is apt. We see very little self-reflection or self-criticism from Li throughout this article. Li mentions that “we do not know how the Zhou officials worked at the local level with their subordinates, peasants, or slaves, but we do know a fair amount about the administrative personnel.” (Li, 15) He makes this statement rather casually and does not return to it, but this is a key shortcoming of historical work that he glazes over. We do not know what the officials actually did? This seems like concerning news. Li goes on to give some more examples of officials working with the king. But, as administrators, the vast majority of officials in the Zhou government were responsible primarily for administrating the kingdom at a local level, not for dealing with the king. That we do not know what or how the officials performed in their everyday jobs says that we do not know much at all. And Li as a historian should be responsible for relaying that information as well: the sources we have are exceptionally biased toward the absolute top level of the government, and for the most part say very little about Zhou society on a grander scale[ES1] .
Falkenhausen also makes the point that Li’s discussion of the relationships between the bureaucratic government and the royal dynasty is often confused or unclear. He critiques Li’s reference to a “separation of civil administrative authority from the exercise of royal sovereign power,” saying that “the Western Zhou had no notion of ‘civil authority’ or ‘sovereign power’ as we know them from early modern Europe (where… ‘civil was meaningful in opposition to such terms as ‘ecclesiastic’ and ‘military.’).” (Falkenhausen, 277) Li perpetuates this anachronistic dichotomy in his article; for example, he pinpoints the official Shi Yu as being a “civil administrator” because Yu had authority over the general “collective… of ren ‘people.’” (Li, 20) But what is Li setting this up in opposition to? He does not specify[ES2] . And moreover, even if he did, it would not make sense to do so, in part because Li’s “civil” authority in ancient China was entirely derived from sovereign power. Additionally, Li states that we know Shi Yu was a civil administrator because he was “commanded to govern civilians.” (Li, 23) But the Zhou world is not the 21st century—the distinction we have today between civilians and professional soldiers did not exist then[ES3] . To base an argument off of a concept that did not exist for millennia after the Zhou period is most certainly anachronistic. It says very little about the officials Li analyzes that they administered people. Of course, they did, but all his sources still do not tell us the specifics.
Additionally, Li’s work displays a general confusion of the notion of dynastic royalty versus the government. Much of Li’s work runs under the assumption that the “state” was fundamentally separate from the Zhou royalty. But is this distinction valid? Falkenhausen says it is not. He points specifically to Li’s concept of “state-managed property,” which he says “in a Western Zhou context seems ill-founded and possibly anachronistic… Li fails to consider an alternative: at the embryonic stages of the bureaucracy documented by the bronze inscriptions, official service—like military service—may have been financed by the participating [dynastic] lineages.” (Falkenhausen 89) Thus, Li’s belief in the separation of powers is incorrect. Perhaps he does not consider the Zhou bureaucracy to be quite as “embryonic” as Falkenhausen says. But this leads him to analyze the bureaucracy in a fallacious context because he ignores the profound link it has to the royal domain. He points, for example, to previous scholarship by Cho-yun Hsu, who argued that “officials with the same title zai ‘Steward’ might have separately handled either the internal affairs of the royal household or the external affairs of the government.” (Li, 2) While Li says in a footnote that he disagrees, it is because he believes zai only handled the internal affairs. (Li, 2) He does not question the fundamental separation of internal and external affairs, nor the distinction between the “royal household” and the government. But in Zhou society, what was the government but an extension of the royal household[ES4] ? The government was sponsored, manned, and developed by the royal family. A separation of powers is, as Falkenhausen says, anachronistic. And it perpetuates a deep misunderstanding of Zhou bureaucracy to set it in opposition to the king’s own domain. How can we seek to understand the bureaucracy if we do not understand its roots?
The final critique of Li’s article discussed in this paper is that of the importance (or lack thereof) of family with regard to bureaucratic appointments and relationships. Li discusses in great detail the role of the youzhe, or the senior mentor of a bureaucratic appointee, in establishing that appointee as an officer. Falkenhausen criticizes Li for interpreting “the closeness of the Youzhe and their charges as a measure of the professionalization of the Zhou royal administration,” saying instead that “more plausibly, the pattern visible in our small sample size reflects the custom of handing down offices… within families.” (Falkenhausen, 281) This is problematic because, as we have seen earlier, Li predicates these beliefs on the assumption that the Zhou bureaucracy was more developed and less embryonic than it actually was. Li extrapolates from the “systematization” that be belies the “youzhe-appointee relationship exhibits” to argue that the whole Zhou government was “largely rule-governed.” (Li, 30) But if we are to believe Falkenhausen, the youzhe-appointee relationship was not nearly as systematic or centralized as Li believes. In fact, the relationship was often based not on any systematic benefit but instead simply on kinship ties[ES5] . Li’s perfect, detached bureaucracy was in fact much more nepotistic than he believes, once again creating a misunderstanding of the very fundamentals of that bureaucracy. Continuing along this strain, Falkenhausen also points to Li’s neglect of the possibility of widespread nepotism within the bureaucracy. According to Falkenhausen, “Li’s argument breaks down as soon as one admits the possibility that a candidate for office might receive a leg up from a brother or an uncle already in government service. “(Falkenhausen, 283) At least according to Falkenhausen, this seems to have been quite a common occurrence. But Li argues that the organization of the bureaucracy was based entirely on merit and not on family ties, once again showing his anachronistic overestimation of bureaucratic development. The bureaucracy during the Western Zhou was an extension of the royal household, and of noble families. It was not analogous to modern bureaucracy, but a unique and very early form of an only slightly comparable institution.
What can we really say the Zhou bureaucracy was? Li wants us to say it was systematic, meritocratic, and detached from kinship structures[ES6] . Falkenhausen says this is a misinterpretation of the sources. Li wants us to say that there existed a separation of powers—as we may find in the British government, for instance—between the administrative branch and the royal house. According to Falkenhausen, this is unprovable at best and probably dangerously anachronistic, given the omnipotence of the Chinese king in all manners of administration. Finally, the article wants to make all these claims while relying on sources from only the most elite of offices. This may be because sources from all levels of the bureaucracy have not survived to the 21st century, but Falkenhausen says this is no excuse. If the sources are not representative, then one cannot try to represent history with them. So what can we say about the Zhou with these sources? The answer, it seems, is very little. Or, more accurately, very little beyond what they tell us explicitly[ES7] . Li’s article makes a number of assumptions and extrapolations of unproven aspects of the Zhou state best on pieces of information that we do know. But the information we do know is so biased that extrapolating from it should be impossible. In the end, can we even rely on what the sources tell us explicitly? We can learn from them, but we cannot rely on them.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “History of Ancient China” at the University of Chicago, April 2017
Haus Lilienfeld 