The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China by Michael Szonyi

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China by Michael Szonyi Kenneth M. Swope The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China by Michael Szonyi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 303. $35.00 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. At its heart, this book is a social history of an institution viewed through a local prism. The institution under consideration is the hereditary military system of the Ming dynasty. Much maligned by both contemporaneous and later historians, this complex institution was intimately intertwined with Ming society at all levels, and it impacted far more [End Page 278] individuals than has generally been appreciated. The Art of Being Governed is the first book in English to explore the social, economic, political, and even religious ramifications of this state of affairs. The book is of tremendous value not only to Ming historians but also to others more generally interested in the evolution of state-society relations in imperial China. In essence, the author wants to examine how military institutions influenced the lives of local people, focusing on the southeastern coast, most specifically Fujian and, to a lesser extent, Guangdong. The study is framed around two basic questions. First, how did ordinary people deal with obligations to provide manpower to the army? Second, what were the broader consequences of their behavior? Szonyi uses genealogies, contracts, and stone inscriptions on temples and gravestones, in conjunction with standard military and population registers, local gazetteers, and official histories, to investigate the ways that common folk reacted to state initiatives and obligations as well as how they created and seized opportunities to advance their own interests while legally meeting their obligations. He bolsters this research with fieldwork and even interviews with contemporary descendants of people he profiles in the book. Borrowing techniques from microhistory and consciously drawing upon the works of Michel Foucault and James Scott, Szonyi adapts the notion of "everyday politics" from Ben Kerkvliet (pp. 7–8) to argue that individuals acquired and transmitted political skills and competencies—an art of being governed. In other words, people learned how to both work within and manipulate the Ming military conscription system. Each family designated as a military household was obligated to provide one able-bodied male for service per generation. Szonyi creates a typology of family strategies that were adopted to deal with these military obligations, which ran the gamut from concentrating service to certain family lines to compensating others for meeting the obligation. Of course, these strategies could overlap and change over time. The author deliberately avoids focusing on more extreme strategies, such as desertion and turning to banditry, both due to a dearth of records (since clan genealogies tend to omit these details) and his interest in seeing how the system actually functioned at the local level. Overall, Szonyi finds that people sought to maximize the advantages of military registration and increase the predictability of their [End Page 279] obligations via multilevel calibrations and calculations (p. 61). He concludes that "long before the systematic efforts of modern state regimes penetrated society, ordinary Chinese people had developed a sophisticated economy of state interaction, a system of managing state exactions and expectations" (p. 62). This analysis should come as little surprise to most serious social historians of the Ming. But the details of how these strategies of engagement unfolded within this sphere is of great use and interest to historians of not only the Ming but also other early modern polities, even though little is offered in the way of potential comparisons herein. Moreover, to his credit, Szonyi also realizes that the Ming state and its officials recognized what was going on; they were both flexible and adaptable in allowing for a certain degree of negotiation, so long as the state's needs were being met and its goals were realized. The picture that emerges is one of a dynamic state that is far different from the tradition-bound, ossified imperial colossus posited by Ray Huang a generation ago.1 In terms of the institutional side of things, Szonyi draws heavily upon the pioneering works of Yu Zhijia 于志嘉 and Wang Yuquan 王毓铨.2 While...