State and Society in Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract

Communist China has broken with the Chinese cultural tradition, which it attacks and condemns. This break was prepared in part by the transformation of China during the declining years of imperial rule and in Republican times. But whereas this period was marked by the disintegration and disappearance of old institutions and some uncertainty about things to come, a new, rigid doctrine and social structure are now being introduced to integrate a new society within a totalitarian state. The old values have been discarded, but some of the organizational patterns of the past have been carried over, or have reappeared in the new system. The Communists are attempting to impose their system on Chinese society through the agency of an ideologically oriented elite which not only holds official position in government but also controls society itself. The degree of success which this system achieves may depend in part on the extent to which Chinese society has been prepared by its tradition to accept a centralized bureaucratic state working through a trained elite. In addition to helping us to assess the degree of preconditioning in China for Communist rule, an analytical study of imperial China may provide us with a greater understanding of the social and political techniques which a bureaucratic state employs, and which become of such special importance for a totalitarian government. What, then, were the key features of the imperial state and society which the Communists have retained or replaced in their own way, and what was the role played by the educated elite of the past?The imperial state aimed at a strong control over Chinese society. The struggle to keep an all-powerful central rule was the dominant concern of every Chinese dynasty. The center of all authority was the emperor and the court, the embodiment of the interests of the state. Serving the emperor was a group of officials, small in number compared with the size of the country and the population, and with the importance of the functions to be carried out. These officials represented the interests of the state as a whole—its concern with the well-being or acquiescence of all groups of the population. The last Chinese dynasty had in addition special support from a group which served the state without being a part of Chinese society. The Manchus had come as conquerors from the frontier of the Chinese empire, with their forces militarily organized into units known as “banners.” When the Manchu dynasty was set up, the Manchu banners were kept apart from the Chinese people and the bannermen remained an inner core of dynastic supporters used both as a military force and in key official positions. But these bannermen were only a small group, largely unqualified for the complex tasks of Chinese administration, and thus the Manchu dynasty, like its predecessors, had to recruit its state administration from Chinese society.