Social Origins of Chinese Imperial State Development
- Book: The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development. Yuhua Wang. 2023
URL = https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691215167/the-rise-and-fall-of-imperial-china
Description
"China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building.
Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall.
Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development."
Discussion
Mark Jacobsen:
"The bulk of the book applies this framework to China’s state development over the past 13 centuries. During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), an aristocratic elite ruled China. A tight-knit marriage network connected elites to social groups across the country, forming a star network. Elites leveraged state strength to protect their widespread interests, but their very centralization left them vulnerable to central rebellion.
A ninth-century-CE rebellion destroyed the aristocracy, created a vacuum, and shifted China’s elite social terrain into a more fragmented bowtie network. Under the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties (960–1644 CE), elites lacked the interconnections of the earlier Tang Dynasty and represented a host of local interests. Emperors played fractionalized elites against each other, undercutting state strength even as they solidified their own rule. When the Opium Wars of 1830–1860 weakened the state’s ability to quell violence and supply public goods, fragmentation accelerated, and elite social relations shifted to resemble a ring network. The state permitted elites to form private militias to tame the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which accelerated the collapse of the state into warlordism.
Wang buttresses this narrative with dazzling empirical work. He draws on a wide range of preexisting quantitative data sources such as a Chinese catalogue of historical wars, Chinese Academy of Sciences temperature data (to justify a claim about climate change and conflict), and a biographical dataset of major Chinese officials. He also makes impressive use of his own original datasets. Wang has geolocated historical Chinese officials using tombstone epitaphs, digitized and geocoded more than 50,000 genealogies, and built a dataset of 282 Chinese emperors from 221 BCE to 1912 CE. He employs extended analytic narratives that show a deep command of Chinese history, as well as regression, geospatial, and network analyses. Despite the depth and breadth of cutting-edge quantitative work, the book remains approachable to a general audience; most quantitative work is partitioned in a substantial appendix."