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The later Nan Song emperors preferred not to take on the awesome burden of managing the huge and complex bureaucracy. Most of them were concerned chiefly with security and the status quo. The Nan Song court delegated a tremendous amount of power and thus had a series of dominant chief councillors, but none of them ever was a potential usurper. No bureaucrat during the Song era had a political base, a hereditary hold, or a personal following in any geographic area. In addition, the size of the bureaucracy and fluidity of its composition precluded anyone from controlling it. The tenure of chief councillor essentially depended on the sanction of the emperor. At times even the chief councillor had to reaffirm his loyalty along with other bureaucrats. Loyalty in absolutist terms being another name for submission, the court, bureaucratized as it was, retained its supreme position beyond challenge.
Nevertheless, the history of Nan Song politics had much to do with powerful chief councillors, increasingly so as time went on. Gaozong at first had a rapid succession of ranking ministers, but none of them measured up to the difficult task at hand: seeking external security by maintaining peace with the northern empire and maintaining internal security by undermining the power of leading generals. Only the chief councillor Qin Kui did both; moreover, he increased tax revenue, strengthening the fiscal base of the court and enriching the private imperial treasury. For these merits, he was given full support to impose tight control over the bureaucracy as long as he lived. Powerful as he was, he avoided doing anything that might arouse imperial suspicion. He had many dissident scholar-officials banished from court, but only with imperial sanction. He accommodated many bureaucrats, even those who neither opposed nor followed him, but he made many of them jealous of his great power and of the rapid promotions he gave to his son and grandson. Qin Kui failed, however, to properly assess the wiles of his bureaucratized master, who turned out to be the more skillful politician. Upon Qin Kui’s death, the emperor shifted all blame to him and recalled from banishment some of his opponents, thus restoring in time a balance in the bureaucracy.
After his voluntary abdication, Gaozong retained his power by using Xiaozong more or less as a chief councillor. Xiaozong subsequently failed to find a firm hand among his successive ministers, and the great burden on himself was probably one reason that he chose to abdicate. His son, Guangzong, showed symptoms of mental illness, was unresponsive to bureaucratic consensus, and was dominated by his consort. He turned against Xiaozong and even refused to perform state funeral rites when the retired emperor died—an unprecedented default that shocked the court. The solution was equally unprecedented: the empress dowager, the palace personnel, and the ranking ministers agreed to force his abdication and oversee the accession of Ningzong. Through the crisis, Han Tuozhou, who renewed the war against the Juchen, moved rapidly into power. Related originally to the empress dowager and again to a new consort, he received deferential treatment from Ningzong. He was made chief councillor but found it hard to control many bureaucrats who objected to his lack of scholarly qualifications, questioned his political ability, and criticized his nepotistic appointments. Reacting to the hostility, he made first a crucial mistake and then a fatal one. First, he banned a particular school of Confucian idealists, led by Zhu Xi (see below The rise of Neo-Confucianism). This proved unpopular, even among neutral scholar-officials. After he rescinded the ban, he attempted to recruit support and to reunite the bureaucracy by initiating the war against the Juchen. After its defeat in the war, the Song executed him as a sacrifice in its search for peace.
Shi Miyuan emerged as the dominant chief councillor. He came from a bureaucratic family background and understood the gentle approach and the importance of accommodating various kinds of bureaucrats in order to achieve a political balance. Promoting on merit and refraining from nepotism, he restored stability. He also recognized that the ideological prestige the followers of Zhu Xi had won had become a political factor, and he appointed some of their prominent leaders to highly respectable posts but without giving them real power. Like the emperors he served, Shi wanted to have both authority and a good political image. Ningzong had no son, and the chief councillor helped him adopt two heirs. When the emperor died without designating an heir apparent, Shi Miyuan arbitrarily decided in favor of the younger one, which was contrary to the normal order of succession but had the backing of palace-connected personnel.
Both Lizong (reigned 1224/25–1264) and his successor Duzong (reigned 1264/65–1274) indulged excessively in pleasure, though much of it was carefully concealed from the public. Shortly after the death of Shi Miyuan, the role of chief councillor went to Jia Sidao, who, though he was denounced in history, actually deserves much credit. He dismissed many incompetents from the palace, court, bureaucracy, and army and curbed excessive corruption by instituting minor administrative reforms. His strict accounting made the generals personally liable for misappropriation of funds. A system of public fields was introduced, which cut into the concentration of landownership by requisitioning at a low price one-third of large estates beyond certain sizes and using the income for army expenditures when the government faced external danger and fiscal deficit. These measures, however, hurt the influential elements of the ruling class, making Jia unpopular. He too had failed to practice the gentle approach. He was denounced by those who had defected to the enemy and later reconciled their guilt by placing the blame on him.
Except in name, the several dominant chief councillors were nearly actual rulers by proxy. They ran the civil administration, supervised both state finance and military affairs, and controlled most scholar-officials by some varying combination of gentle accommodation and high-handed pressure. The emperors, however, kept their separate imperial treasury—from which the government in deficit had to borrow funds—and their private intelligence systems to check on the chief councillors. Moreover, potential competitors always existed in the bureaucracy, ready to criticize the chief councillors whenever state affairs went badly enough to displease or disturb the emperors. The chief councillors had enormous power only by virtue of the imperial trust, and that lasted only as long as things went tolerably well.
The bureaucratic style
Regular posts in the Nan Song civil service numbered about 20,000, without counting numerous sinecures, temporary commissions, and a slightly larger number of military officers. Besides eliminating most patronage privileges—by which high officials were entitled to obtain an official title for a son or other family member—the court occasionally considered a general reduction in the size of the bureaucracy, although vested interests always opposed it. Those who entered government service seldom dropped out or were thrown out. Meanwhile, new candidates waiting for offices came in waves from state examinations, extra examinations on special occasions, graduation from the National Academy, and special recommendations and unusual sponsorship; others gained official titles because their families contributed to famine relief or military expenditures. Thus, the ever-increasing supply of candidates far exceeded the vacancies.
According to Confucian theory, any prosperity that made possible more books in print, more schools, and a better-educated elite was all for the good. But the original Confucian ideal intended to have the elite serve the society in general and the community in particular rather than flood the bureaucracy. Rising educational standards made the competition at examinations harder and perhaps raised the average quality of degree holders.
Families with members in the bureaucracy responded in part by successfully increasing the importance of other avenues of entrance into government service, especially the “protection” privilege that allowed high officials to secure official rank for their protégés (usually junior family members). People outside the civil service responded by altering their goals and values and by reducing the stress on the importance of entering the bureaucracy. It was not accidental that neo-Confucian academies spread during the era, emphasizing moral self-development—not success in examinations—as the proper goal of education.
During the Song period, increased emphasis was placed on morals and ethics and a continuous development of the law. The early Song had adopted a legal code almost wholly traceable to an earlier Tang code, but Song circumstances differed from those of the Tang. As a result, there was a huge output of legislation in the form of imperial edicts and approved memorials that took precedence over the newly adopted code and soon largely displaced it in many areas of law. Song legal bureaucrats periodically compiled and edited the results of this outpouring of new laws. The new rules not only altered the content of the (largely criminal) sphere covered by the code but also legislated in the areas of administrative, commercial, property, sumptuary, and ritual law. There were literally hundreds of compilations of various sorts of laws.
Perhaps as a result of the growth of this legal tangle from the late Bei Song onward, magistrates made increasing use of precedents, decisions by the central legal authorities on individual cases, in reaching legal decisions. The government sought to help its officials by instituting a variety of devices to encourage officials and prospective officials to learn the law and to certify that those in office did have some familiarity with things legal. There was an increase in the writing and publication of other sorts of works concerned with the law, including casebooks and the world’s oldest extant book on forensic medicine. Despite the appearance of such works, which were intended to help them, officials were under strong pressure to rule in a conservative way and to avoid rocking the boat.
Many scholar-officials sought simply to keep things quiet and maintain the appearance that there was no serious trouble. The bureaucratic style was to follow the accustomed ways in accordance with proper procedure, find expedient solutions based upon certain principles in spirit, make reasonable compromises after due consideration of all sides, and achieve smooth reconciliations of divergent views. To protect one’s own career record it was essential to engage in time-consuming consultations with all appropriate offices and to report to all concerned authorities so that everyone else would have a share of responsibility. Anyone who criticized the bureaucratic style would be going against the prevalent mode of operation—namely, mutual accommodation. Even the emperor adopted the bureaucratic style.
The picture was not entirely bleak. Evasions and deviations notwithstanding, the letter of the laws and the formalities of procedures had to be fulfilled. Definite limits were set on official negligence and misconduct. For example, suppressing evidence or distorting information were punishable offenses. Minor juggling of accounts went on, but outright embezzlement was never permissible. Expensive gifts were customary and even expected, but an undisguised bribe was unacceptable. The refined art of the bureaucratic style was not sophistry and hypocrisy alone; it required a circumspect adherence to the commonly accepted substandard norms, without which the maintenance of government would have been impossible.
The clerical staff
The norms for the clerks were even lower, especially in local government. Some 300 clerks in a large prefecture or nearly 100 in a small one were placed under the supervision of a few officials. The clerks had numerous dealings with various other elements in the community, whereas the officials, being outsiders, rarely had direct contacts. Holding practically lifelong tenure after benefiting from the cumulative experience of their fathers and uncles before them, the clerks knew how to operate the local administrative machinery far better than did the officials, who served only brief terms before moving elsewhere. Clerks often received inadequate salaries and were expected to support themselves with “gifts” from those needing their services. The clerks under honest, strict, and hardworking magistrates would recoil, but only briefly, because such magistrates would soon either gain promotion for their remarkable reputations, or their strict insistence on clean government would become intolerable to their superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and influential elements in the community who had connections with high circles. Though all bureaucrats complained of clerical abuses, many connived with the clerks, and none had a viable alternative to the existing situation. One significant suggestion was to replace the clerks with the oversupply of examination candidates and degree holders, who presumably had more moral scruples. But that solution had no chance of being considered, because it implied a downgrading of the status of those who considered themselves to be either potential or actual members of the ruling class.
The law did place definite limits on clerical misbehavior. But when a clerk was caught in his wrongdoing, he knew enough to save himself—taking flight before arrest, getting a similar job elsewhere under a different name, defending himself through time-consuming procedures, appealing for leniency in sentencing, requesting a review, or applying for clemency on the occasion of imperial celebrations. What prevented clerical abuses from getting worse was not so much official enforcement of legal limits as it was the social convention in the community. For themselves as well as for their descendants, the clerks could ill afford to overstep the socially acceptable limits.
The net result of a large bureaucracy and its supporting clerical staff, accommodating one another in various defaults, malfunctions, and misconduct within loose limits, was a declining tax yield, tax evasion by those who befriended colluding officials and clerks, and an undue shift of the tax burden onto those least able to pay.
