Podcast Episode 8: Yuhua Wang

Transcript

Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 8 with Yuhua Wang

Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

(Recorded 04/25/2023)

[00:00:06.46] LARRY BOBO: Welcome to another episode of Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo. My name is Larry Bobo, and I am Dean of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. My guest is Yuhua Wang, professor of Government here at Harvard. Welcome, Yuhua. Thanks for joining me.
[00:00:23.93] YUHUA WANG: Thank you so much, Dean Bobo.
[00:00:26.05] LARRY BOBO: We are going to be talking about your new book published by Princeton University Press in October entitled, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development.
[00:00:39.10] Let me say at the top, that I find this a really engrossing and impressive work. Particularly impressive, I think, is the broad ambition that you set for this project. And indeed, you begin by saying this is your dream work.
[00:00:57.46] And what did you mean by that? And in what sense was this a great personal ambition for you?
[00:01:03.73] YUHUA WANG: Well, it’s nice to hear this from the dean, I guess. I’m glad that you like it. Yeah, I had always been interested in history even before I started working on this book.
[00:01:15.04] I did my undergrad in China at Peking University. And then the way college admissions work in China is you need to apply for a major even when you are in high school. So I had no idea what I wanted to study.
[00:01:30.52] But I knew from all the classes I took in high school, I knew I had a heart in history. So I wanted to study history in college. But then so I applied for history as my first priority, first preference in my college education. Sorry. My college application.
[00:01:47.29] But then in China, they also have the national entrance exam, which will give you a grade. And then that grade will determine which major you can get in. So I was not able to get in my first major, which is history.
[00:02:01.99] And then in that case, the university will have the authority to randomly assign me to a major, which is political science. So I was actually randomly assigned to political science and then–
[00:02:14.47] LARRY BOBO: Then that worked out well.
[00:02:15.76] YUHUA WANG: I know. I know. This is quite a surprise. I didn’t expect actually to become a political scientist because political science in China is quite ideologically-driven. I was not quite interested in political science when I was in college.
[00:02:29.08] But they always have this soft spot for history. So I took a lot of history classes in the history department. And then also later on, I became a political scientist, but always like to read history, pay attention to what the historians are doing.
[00:02:44.08] So in 2014, when I sent the manuscript of my first book, which was on China’s legal system to the publisher, I thought I’m done with my first book, what’s the next? And then I thought maybe this is the time to combine my real interest with my profession. So to combine history with political science.
[00:03:06.37] So I thought maybe I can start studying Chinese history, and then to answer some of the biggest questions in political science, which is, for example, state buildings. I want to use the case of China to illuminate the case of state building.
[00:03:19.72] LARRY BOBO: That’s fantastic. And part of what I mean by the ambition of the work, at least, as I look at it is, indeed, that disciplinary-come-theoretical breadth that you bring to this project. Because it’s not just history, it’s not just political science, but you have also substantially folded in sociology and economics as well. At least those economists who think of themselves as political economists, right? I mean, they resonate throughout the book.
[00:03:47.29] YUHUA WANG: Yeah, exactly. I really benefited from other perspectives from different disciplines. From sociology, for example, I actually self-taught myself social network analysis. I got the syllabus from one of your colleagues, actually, in the sociology department Peter Marsden.
[00:04:03.76] And then I studied how to do social network analysis that also benefited a lot from economists because they also have been studying economic history for a long time. So I read both fields. And then I think I learned a lot from both fields.
[00:04:22.37] LARRY BOBO: Well, and you deploy it very, very effectively and in a highly sophisticated manner. Something we’ll turn to in a moment. But one of the other things that struck me in terms of the broad ambition of the work is the time scale at which you’ve decided to operate that you are essentially tackling a 2000-year period beginning almost at the dawn of the Common Era marching right up to the early 20th century.
[00:04:50.36] YUHUA WANG: Yeah. It’s really started with some frustration actually with the work that I read when I was preparing for this book. I write a lot of historians work. They are fantastic, but they all focus on a specific dynasty, or a specific locality within a very short period of time.
[00:05:09.59] I think it makes sense because they want to get enough archival materials as much as possible. So they want to focus on a short period of time. But then after reading maybe 100 books, I still left with the impression that I don’t have this bigger picture of what China looked like in the last 2000 years.
[00:05:27.05] How the Chinese state was formed, how the Chinese state developed over time. So that’s the motivation of this project that is I really want to get a bigger picture, an overview of what China looked like for a long period of time.
[00:05:40.19] LARRY BOBO: Fabulous. And it’s part of what makes the book, I think, so impactful at least in my own eyes. And I suspect that of many others. But there’s a third ambition here. I believe driving what you have done in the rise and fall of imperial China. And that really is to, in a serious fashion, write China into our theories of the state.
[00:06:04.44] As you say early on in the book, quote, “The literature treats the European model of state development as the benchmark, and asks why states and other regions have failed to follow suit.” And you were, in many respects, out to correct that pattern of engagement.
[00:06:24.74] YUHUA WANG: Exactly. That’s another frustration I had when I was reading the literature. In the social sciences, the literature on state development and state formation has been very Eurocentric. They look at Europe, and then they try to generate some generalizable stories about state formation.
[00:06:48.46] And then the problem of that is there are many other world regions, and they also have a long history. They have a very different trajectory of state development compared with Europe. But also, I think the assumption in the literature that I was reading assumes that every other country in the developing world will follow whatever European countries has been doing.
[00:07:16.35] That is every other country in Latin America, for example, in Asia, in the Middle East will become Europe once they become a more developed state. I think that assumption is so wrong.
[00:07:31.11] We know that every country has its own trajectory. And then especially for the country that– I’m interested in China. China has a long– over 3,000 years of recorded history.
[00:07:42.99] And then China had a very early state in terms of bureaucracy, the hierarchy, so on, and so forth. So I think there needs to be a story about China. And then I think there’s a potential contribution that they can make by telling the story of China.
[00:07:59.46] LARRY BOBO: And another implication of what you’re doing here, your intellectual project and contribution is that China is not just another case, it’s not just that you’re now applying these other models to China, but China is an important case in its own right.
[00:08:19.02] And moreover, as you have worked with it, positions us to develop some broad generally consequential reformulations of core theoretical ideas about the state, right?
[00:08:30.81] YUHUA WANG: Now, what’s my ambition? Because previous scholars have focused on either international war in the making of states, or the role of political institutions, like parliament.
[00:08:46.34] But then I really think that we need to pay attention to the social structure in which the ideas are embedded. And then we need to look at the incentives, the behavior, the actions that the elites, and also the masses are taking depending on what type of social structure they are embedded in. I sound like a sociologist.
[00:09:04.85] LARRY BOBO: I was just about to ask you. So is it that a heretical position within political science to say we need to be more sociological about how we understand–
[00:09:13.56] YUHUA WANG: Well, we do have a long tradition in political science. We called political sociology. My colleagues say this college poll is a leading scholar in that camp.
[00:09:25.05] And then people have been paying attention to society, social structure, social networks in politics. But I think it hasn’t become the mainstream of political science. So I do think that I was taking quite a different approach when I started this book.
[00:09:43.30] LARRY BOBO: And you launch with what is also an empirical puzzle. And the way you phrase the puzzle is, why is it that some emperors who were quite short lived in terms of their time in power often ruled what we’re very strong state structures while a number of very long-lasting emperors govern comparatively weak state structures? And so what does it take to build an answer then to that puzzle?
[00:10:15.31] YUHUA WANG: Exactly. I started with some observations. And I was reading history. And then that fact struck me while I was reading, for example, China, there was a Tang dynasty in China from the 7th century to the 9th century. And then it is probably the strongest dynasty in Chinese history.
[00:10:37.13] And also, Tang China was probably the strongest country in the world at the time was the superpower at the time. I think according to some of the recent estimates, China occupied over 1/4 of the global GDP. So this is a global superpower, even stronger relatively than what the US is today. Because the US, I think, the GDP of the USA occupies only 1/16 of the global GDP.
[00:11:02.94] So Tang China was a superpower. But then when I was reading Tang history, I was very surprised to see that many of the Tang emperors were assassinated. They were deposed. They were forced to commit suicide.
[00:11:15.68] Among the 12 late Tang emperors, five of them were deposed by the EB’s. And that was quite a surprise to see that. So I started to wonder why we see this contradiction that is in such a strong empire, where the government could control the society, they have a strong military, they can fight beautifully, they can collect a lot of taxes. But then the rulers were so vulnerable.
[00:11:41.57] And then I continue to read history– and for example, the last dynasty of Chinese history, which is the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty is exactly the opposite. The Qing dynasty is the last dynasty of imperial China after that dynastic rule collapsed in China.
[00:12:00.20] The Qing state was very weak. They didn’t have a very strong army. They couldn’t even fight with foreign enemies when the Opium War started. For example, they just couldn’t fight with the British.
[00:12:09.53] And then they were not able to collect a lot of taxes. The government was weak. But then the two emperors sat on their Thrones for decades. Two of them sat on the throne for more than 60 years. Very, very long. They are probably two of the longest reigning monarchs in world history.
[00:12:31.86] And so that contradiction really motivated me to think about how to explain this, how do you explain the contradiction between the fate of the rulers, and then the fate of the Chinese government. And then I searched for different answers. Certainly, I started with the conventional wisdom. Maybe war, maybe conflict, maybe climate, maybe geography, and then maybe culture.
[00:12:52.88] But then the problem is many of those things don’t change, right? Geography, culture, many of the popular arguments that previous scholars settled down. Do not change very much over time. So how do we explain, for example, such a big change from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing dynasty?
[00:13:08.45] And then we have to look at something that changed over time. And then so I started going to the archives, and then reading historians work. And then gradually, this is a very slow process.
[00:13:19.38] So gradually, after maybe two years or three years, I realized that many of the materials point to the same direction, that is we need to pay attention to the social structure of the elites, and then how it change over time, and then also what incentives the social structure gave to the elites in different dynasties.
[00:13:40.92] LARRY BOBO: And that leads you to begin to formulate an analytical framework, right? An analytical framework, where you say we really need to be thinking in terms of state development. This dynamic process in which states may be defined in terms of different levels of strength and forms of organization. So maybe I could get you to sharpen for me what you mean by each of those things.
[00:14:11.39] State development. What are the elements of a strong state, and what are some of the key differences in form that matter in your assessment.
[00:14:22.11] YUHUA WANG: Right. When I started this, the terminologies that people often use are state formation or State Building. I don’t like either of those terms because I feel they sound like final. State formation means, once the state is formed, the story is over. State Building the same in state disputes.
[00:14:42.11] But then what I see in Chinese history is the constant change of both the form, and also the strength of the state, and then over a long period of time. And then changing all the time is very fluid. It’s very dynamic.
[00:14:54.24] So that’s why I prefer to use the word of state development in this book. And then by state development, I really focus on two things. One is the form of the state. And then by form of the state, I mean, one is the relationship between the ruler, and then the elites.
[00:15:12.89] Whether the ruler is one among equals. For example, we’re talking about an emperor. But the emperor has some power. But then the emperor is really not much more powerful than other elites. This is one form, right?
[00:15:27.34] The other form is the emperor is just much more powerful than other elites. And this is dominant. The other dimension of State form is the relationship between state and society. So whether the state can dominate the society.
[00:15:40.87] For example, in terms of public goods provision, national defense is the state playing a leading role in those functions. For example, state army, the leading army in defending the country, or actually the state has to collaborate with the society in national defense or public supervision.
[00:16:02.03] In many dynasties in China, the Chinese state had to collaborate with the local gentry class, the so-called local landowning elites in providing public goods, and also, in defending the country. And then so that’s the dimensions I’m looking at.
[00:16:19.19] So whether in terms of the relationship between the ruler and the elites, and also the relationship between the state and society. So those are the two dimensions I’m looking at in terms of the form of the state.
[00:16:29.48] But then I’m also interested in the strength of the state, which is called by political scientists as state capacity. So the capacity of the state to implement its official goals. And then usually, we think of state capacity as a function in which the state can transform its resources to policies.
[00:16:52.25] For example, if the state wants to achieve certain goals, for example, conscription or education, whether the government can use the resources that they have to achieve the goals they want to achieve. So those things are what we call state capacity.
[00:17:08.15] So what I am interested in this book is to explain both. So the change of the form of the state. So the relationship between the ruler and the elites, the relationship between state and society, but also the changes in the strength of the state in terms of whether the state can use its resources to achieve its goals.
[00:17:27.91] LARRY BOBO: OK. Great. But indulge me for one moment here. And that’s to help sharpen the distinction, which you’ve already done a lot to help me understand better than just my first run through the book of the distinction between state and society, and particularly, if you could unpack that term society.
[00:17:47.05] Are we talking about institutions that are more at the mezzo level, or are they really– I mean, are we talking families, communities. It sounds as, though, you’re often talking a little bit above that level when you’re saying society, and how it is distinct from state.
[00:18:06.52] YUHUA WANG: Right. Well, I define society as a web of relations. It’s really a network I think. And then, in the book, I really focus on the local elite families and their relationship with each other. So that’s my focus of the book.
[00:18:25.86] LARRY BOBO: And so then a critical aspect of the argument you construct is, indeed, then about the elite social terrain. And the way, in particular, in which the elites very proximate to the national government, the central or highest level of government connect to one another, and connect to the leader, the ruling figure.
[00:18:53.71] But then part of what you’re interested in there, of course, as you say, are the networks, the degree of interconnection among these elites. And not just their interpersonal or familial interconnection, but also their geographic span, how they’re organized in geographic space. And you end up identifying three ideal type elite social network arrangements.
[00:19:27.73] One a star-shaped, another one more of a bow tie shape, and another more of a circular shape. And that each of those end up being bound up with, or connected to the evolution of a particular mode of governance.
[00:19:48.19] YUHUA WANG: Exactly. So the three ideal types include the star network, and then the bow tie network, and then what I call a ring network. So in the star network, the elites in the national government. So we are looking at politicians who are working the capitol.
[00:20:07.64] In the star network, the central politicians are connected with each other with social ties. And in the book, I focus on intermarriages. So someone’s daughter is married to someone else’s son. And then I would count that as connected.
[00:20:22.55] And then also at the same time, like you mentioned, I also pay attention to the geographic span of their network. That is whether the central politicians can use the marriage ties to connect with the local elite families that are located in different geographic locations in the country, right?
[00:20:41.75] And then in the star network, the key characteristic of the star network is the dispersed geographic network that the central politicians have. That is every central politician is able to use marriage ties to connect with local families located in different geographic locations in the north, in the south, in the west, in the east. And then that’s the star network.
[00:21:06.41] And in the bow tie network, the central politicians are not connected with each other. Their sons and daughters are not intermarried with each other. Therefore, there’s a bow tie and there’s a gap in the middle of the bow tie.
[00:21:19.01] But at the same time, each of the central politicians is connected with the local elite families located in only one geographic location. For example, this central politician, his daughters, or his sons married to the families only in the west. And then the other politician married only in the east. And then that makes the bow tie network.
[00:21:40.91] And then the last one is the ring network. And then in the ring network, there’s no connections between the central politicians. There are just scattered dots, but also, they don’t have any connections with the local elite families. So there’s the doubting in the center.
[00:21:57.53] And then the elite family is in different corners of the empire are connected with each other. For example, their local families, they marry each other, but they do not have connections with the central politicians.
[00:22:11.52] LARRY BOBO: And those different configurations of elite networks and geography play a big part in structuring what you term the sovereigns dilemma. So what is the sovereigns dilemma?
[00:22:25.30] YUHUA WANG: Yeah. The sovereigns dilemma is the idea that for a ruler, if you want to maximize your own power, you have to fragment the elites. Because if you have a coherent elite, they will be able to take collective action to depose you. So to stay in power, the ruler needs to have a fragmented elites.
[00:22:49.39] But then as a consequence, when you have a fragmented elites, the elites will have trouble getting together to make policies, to make the country stronger. So therefore, if you think about– for every ruler, they have two goals, right? One is to have a lot of personal power. They want to consolidate their own monarchical power. The other goal is to have a strong government that they can collect of tax taxes, but also, defend their own country.
[00:23:15.91] The argument is the dilemma is they cannot achieve both goals at the same time. Because if you want to have a strong country, you’ll need to have a coherent elite. But then we have a coherent elite, they will assassinate you, right?
[00:23:29.05] And then you cannot stay in power for a very, very long time. So you can either stay in power for a very long time, or you can have a very strong government, but you cannot have both. That’s the dilemma.
[00:23:40.41] LARRY BOBO: And so before we turn to how that then ties into different modes of governance and the duration that the each enjoyed, let me point out one of the things that I found most remarkable and impressive, really compelling about the book, and that is that you end up drawing upon, and indeed, creating some very unique data sources to do this work. That is you’re not just crafting an analytical narrative, but fundamentally, your argument is resting upon some new very strong empirical quantitative work.
[00:24:22.26] And you end up extracting very creative new powerful revealing sources of data. I mean, you’re drawing on or creating, I guess, a data source on all of the Chinese emperors, longitudinal, and geo reference data on some 7,000 plus military conflicts. Geo reference data on over you know $50,000, or more records for a 1,000-year period of a genealogical character.
[00:25:04.34] And working through other biographical data sets on elites marriage records, kinship patterns. And coding, I mean, coding information off of. And I was totally unfamiliar with this until your book tomb epitaphs for elite figures. Talk to me about that as an aspect of your endeavor here, as an aspect of you as a scholar with a problem, with a curiosity, with the training. Then going into the archive, and saying, how do I pull together the facts that speak to the puzzle while I’m trying to put together?
[00:25:41.24] Well, I should really thank the dynastic government in China, which documented all the biographies, the Chinese imperial government. Even 2000 years ago, did a really good job at documenting events, and also key persons in the government. So that’s how I found the data.
[00:26:00.35] But I think in terms of the data sources, there’s a story about this that is– about 15 years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I was working on my dissertation, which was on contemporary China. But I went to China to do field work. I went to the city of Xi’an. It is one of the oldest capitals of China.
[00:26:25.64] And I went to downtown Xi’an. And there’s a museum there. The museum had an amazing collection of tomb stones. Some of them are from 1,000 years ago. Some of them are from hundreds of years ago.
[00:26:38.39] And then I was wondering in the museum, and then I was reading what’s carved on the tombstone. And then it really struck me that how much information we can actually get from that piece of limestone. And then usually, they will have a lengthy geology carved on the tombstone, which survives over 100 years, over 1,000 years.
[00:27:02.49] And then so that impression, that trip was a long time ago. I was not working on this book at the time. But then when I was starting to work on this book, that image of that tombstone suddenly came to my mind.
[00:27:17.27] And then to remind me actually, I can maybe spend some time collecting data from the tomb epitaphs. And then that’s how I started this project. So about eight years ago, I started very systematically collecting data from the archives, including the tomb epitaphs.
[00:27:34.34] And then many of them are actually documented are digitized by the Chinese government. So I was able to collect the data very systematically. But then also, the Chinese dynastic government, every dynasty had the habit of writing the history of the previous dynasty because they want to learn what went wrong with their predecessors. They want to avoid the same fate. So they did a the really good job at documenting all the key events, and also the people.
[00:28:00.78] LARRY BOBO: Very good. But it is one of the more exciting aspects of the work you’ve done here.
[00:28:34.58] In the core part of your argument, you sketch out basically three great epochs or phases of Chinese state development. And maybe it would be helpful for us to talk a bit through each of those. One of them, you characterize as state strengthening under oligarchy, which really is, in some respects, exemplified by the Tang dynasty. So what do you see as the defining characteristics of it? And what in the end proved to be vulnerabilities that open it to a big transition in effect to a new mode of state organization?
[00:29:19.64] YUHUA WANG: Right. This is the beginning of the story in the book. This is the dynasty that started in the seventh century and ended in the ninth century called the Tang dynasty. What we saw in the Tang dynasty is, on the one hand, a very strong government, right?
[00:29:37.64] They were able to collect a lot of taxation. They had a very strong standing army. They were able to expand the Chinese territories to the west to the south.
[00:29:48.89] But then, on the other hand, the time powers like we mentioned before were very vulnerable to elite assassinations rebellions and so forth. And then that’s something I would try to explain what happened in that dynasty. And then what I figured from both my data analysis, but also from the archival work is in the Tang dynasty, there was a group of aristocratic families, no more than 200 families maybe.
[00:30:19.67] And then they for generations monopolized positions in the central government. Their sons, their grandsons, they keep getting the top positions in the government. And then they also leave in the capital because they all have to work in the capital, so they all move their houses to the capital area, and then leave there.
[00:30:40.41] So what we have in the Tang dynasty is a concentration of a very close-knit network of noble families who lived in a very concentrated geographic location, and then also who formed a very close-knit marriage network. So their sons and daughters married with each other. Not also only with each other, they don’t marry people outside the aristocracy.
[00:31:07.49] And then so what ended up having in the Tang dynasty was this very well-connected meritocratic network of 200 families, where they trust each other, they can coordinate, they can take collective action when they try to, for example, depose the emperors, they were able to do this, but also at the same time, because of their coordination, because of their trust with each other, they were also able to push for policies that make the Chinese government stronger.
[00:31:44.74] For example, in the book, I talk about there was this one tax reform in the eighth century, which was very, very difficult. It’s about imposing higher taxes on the landowners. And then most of the aristocratic families owned a lot of land.
[00:31:59.05] And then we are talking about the politicians making a policy actually to tax them more, which is quite surprising. And then the argument is because they have connections with families all over the country, because they marry local families all over the country, they can actually benefit from a strong central government, because a strong central government can protect their family interests that are scattered in the whole empire.
[00:32:27.01] And then that’s why the reform succeeded very smoothly. But then, at the same time, the coherence of the autocratic families also made the Tang rulers very vulnerable.
[00:32:40.94] LARRY BOBO: And so what then precipitates a big transformation or a move to the next dominant mode of organizing? And I know this is a segment, where you talk a lot about the influence of external shocks and effect to the social system, where change in climate can produce different sets of vulnerabilities for both opportunities, resources, and vulnerabilities for a state. And that has some bearing on the vulnerability to external actors, or I would presume just as well internal sources of rebellion or contestation.
[00:33:26.21] YUHUA WANG: Right. So the temperature in the northern hemisphere fluctuated dramatically in the last 2000 years. And then what I found in my data is that there is a very strong correlation between temperature anomalies and then the frequency of mass rebellions. And then usually, in the cold years, famine was more likely, and then peasants were more likely to rebel.
[00:33:51.50] And then in the late Tang dynasty, China had one of the coldest years in the last 2000 years. And then there was a large scale mass rebellion called the Wantai rebellion. It’s named after the leader of Wantai.
[00:34:05.54] Wantai was a salt merchant. And then he led the rebellion against the Tang dynasty because there was drought, there was famine, and then probably, because of the geographic concentration of the aristocratic families, so they all leaving the capital area. That concentration made them very vulnerable to rebellions. Because when the rebels conquered the capital city, the rebels were able to physically kill all of the aristocratic families simply because they were all there. They were all in the same city at the same time.
[00:34:39.46] So their vulnerability really came from their concentration. And then that really ended the era of the star network. That is this whole star network, where the central leads are connected with each other, but also the central leads were able to connect with the local families ended during the rebellion, where they were all killed.
[00:35:01.21] And then that led to the next phase of Chinese history. And starting in the 10th century, and this is called the Song dynasty. When the Song emperors came to power, they realized the challenge was, how should we recruit bureaucrats since now we don’t have an aristocracy to choose from? Before the Song is very easy, you just choose the sons and grandsons from those 200 families.
[00:35:30.35] But starting in the 10th century, the emperors need to figure out a new way to choose bureaucrats. And then they started to systematically use a great Chinese invention. This is the Imperial civil service examination systems.
[00:35:43.43] And then the exam started in the 7th century, but then was not systematically used because there was this nobility, who didn’t the exams. And then so the exams were not relied upon before the Song dynasty. But starting in the 10th century, the Song emperors started to systematically rely on the Civil service exams to choose bureaucrats.
[00:36:07.76] And then that institutional change had a major impact on the social structure of the Chinese elites that is since the Song dynasty onward. Because of the importance of education, because of the importance of investment in education, local families started to hold land.
[00:36:29.91] They started to stay in one place. They started to hold land in one place. They started to be able to generate income from the land that they are holding in the hope that they can use the income to invest in their sons and grandsons education, so that they can take the Civil service examination system to become bureaucrats, and then to generate more income.
[00:36:51.94] So land holding became a very important characteristic of the Chinese elite starting in the 10th century. And then that means starting from that time on, the Chinese elites need to stay in one place. They are tied to one locality.
[00:37:06.93] And then their land holding incentivize them to build connections with the local neighbors because they want to protect their land in that place, and they want to build their powerhouse in that locality. So this is what the historians called the local list term of Chinese elites. That is from the Tang times when the elites, there are centralized, they all stay in the capital, they connect with families all over the country to the Song dynasty, where the elites stay in one place, they build marriage networks with their local neighbors rather than people from far away.
[00:37:41.83] And then that dramatically changed the incentives, the worldview of Chinese elites. And in the book, I argue that even though the sons and grandsons is gender bias, they don’t have women in the Civil service exam. So only men can take the exams. Their sons and grandsons can take the exams.
[00:38:04.02] Sometimes they can succeed they go to the Capitol to work in the national government. But their interests are tied to the locality, where their families are. And then they care about their local interests, they care about their families.
[00:38:17.26] Their preference when they make policies is to direct the resources of the central government to their own localities to make sure their families can benefit from those resources. So that dramatically change the behavior of the Chinese elites in the Song dynasty. And then I talk about some reforms in the– [STAMMERS]
[00:38:39.63] Sorry. There was one reform in the 11th century. There was another reform in the 17th century, imposed reforms. The central politicians were not thinking about the interests of the central government. They were actually paying more attention to the local interest. So they actually want to block those reforms that were designed to strengthen the national government.
[00:39:02.32] LARRY BOBO: And this then also becomes an era in which rulers, the central figure have greater durability, greater longevity.
[00:39:11.50] YUHUA WANG: Exactly. This is because when the sons and grandsons of the local landowning elites go to the Capitol to work, they don’t know each other because they all marry locally. They know their local neighbors, but they don’t know other people who come to the capital to work with them. And then so therefore, I show that their networks are much more fragmented starting in the Song dynasty.
[00:39:37.94] And then they were not able to coordinate with each other. They were not able to trust each other. They were not able to take collective actions, even though they try to maybe to undermine the power of the monarchs, but they were not able to
[00:39:53.44] LARRY BOBO: And so you termed this the state maintaining under partnership form of state development. But it, too, runs into a challenge that opens it to a moment of collapse and transition. So what is it that then takes us to the state weakening under warlordism form of organization.
[00:40:22.15] YUHUA WANG: Right. So for a long time from the Song dynasty, which is the 10th century to the early Qing dynasty, which is about 18th century, for about 800 years, China was quite stable. It was very peaceful. The government was able to collaborate with the local landowning elites in providing public goods. For example, local irrigation, roads, education, dikes, and so forth.
[00:40:48.07] But also in defense. That is when there were mass rebellions, but also occasionally when there were foreign enemies, the Chinese government was able to mobilize the local landowning elites, and then to fight with the foreign enemies using the private militia. So that has been working really well for about 800 years.
[00:41:08.88] But unfortunately, what happened is with the Industrial Revolution Europe became stronger, and then now Europe’s weapons technologies were far more advanced than China’s, at the same time, in the 18th century, 19th century. And then so in the 19th century, China started to encounter the stronger for in the world, right?
[00:41:35.46] So the Opium War, for example, happened in the mid-19th century. And then Japan also became stronger in the 19th century. So China started to face a stronger world. So the traditional mode in which the Chinese government was able to maintain, this collaboration with the local landowning elites worked until that point. That until the 19th century.
[00:42:01.23] This model of a collaboration with the society could work. But then with a stronger foreign enemy with the west coming into China, the Chinese government was no longer able to, for example, fund a stronger army. They didn’t have a strong national standing army, but also they didn’t have the financial resources to provide public goods to mobilize the society to defend the country.
[00:42:29.55] And then that’s when things went wrong. So in the 19th century, after the Opium War, after a mass rebellion in China is called the Taiping Rebellion. Because the Qing government was so weak, during the rebellion, they had to delegate the local defense to local landowning elites. And then the local communities realized that they can no longer rely on the central government. So they all formed their own private militia.
[00:42:56.55] So during the Taiping Rebellion is really the local private militias led by the local Gentry class, which defended the country, which fought with the Taiping rebels. But that’s a turning point in Chinese history. Because once the central government delegated the defense responsibility to the local elites, it really–
[00:43:23.16] What happened is what Max Weber called the Chinese government really lost the monopoly over violence. So the Chinese government lost the control of the means over violence to the local elites. And then that led to the formation of what I call a ring network. That is local elites in the rebellion started to form those coalitions, they start to connect with each other, but then also, the central government started to lose the connection with the society, they lose the connections with the local families. And then you start to see a ring type network in the late teen era.
[00:43:58.90] LARRY BOBO: And that brings us, in some respects, up to the end of the historic era. That’s the focus of your analysis here. But I want to draw out at least two, maybe three other strands from where you’ve taken us in this story, which is maybe, first, to go back to the issue of theories of the state and theories of state development, and maybe get you now in the light of this information and this argument to talk about how your work now really recasts how we should be thinking about state development.
[00:44:43.69] YUHUA WANG: The traditional wisdom on this is, based on the European story, is you can get a strong state and a strong ruler at the same time. This is what happened in Europe. According to research that the European rulers were able to stay in power for a very, very long time starting in the 15th century, 16th century, 17th century, they enjoyed the stability.
[00:45:11.88] But at the same time, the European states also got stronger in terms of taxation, the power to mobilize societies, and so forth. And then the argument about why that happened in Europe is all focused on political institutions. That is they argue parliament. For example, representative institutions. Enabled the ruler to negotiate with the elites, so that the elites didn’t have to kill the rulers to achieve their goals, right?
[00:45:38.04] Then the rulers can enjoy stability, but also, the rulers were able to make a credible commitment to the elites to collect taxes. And that’s why we see these two things happening together in a stronger ruler also a stronger government. That’s the conventional wisdom, right?
[00:45:54.31] But the other way what I want to show in this book is that’s not universal. It’s not happening in other places. And then using the case of China, I try to say that sometimes these two things can contradict each other.
[00:46:07.36] That is when you have a strong ruler, you need to have a weak government. When you have a strong government, you have a weaker ruler. So I think that’s something that I really find very, very surprising in the Chinese story.
[00:46:19.42] LARRY BOBO: And there are ways in which it recasts how, we as scholars, those of us in the social sciences, especially say in history, political science, sociology, economics should think about the state and the idea, I guess, that there are other states say in Latin America, or Africa, or the Muslim world, who have not developed yet may just well be on a different alternative path of development. So that it changes our understanding, and it recasts the theoretical understanding we should bring to bear, right?
[00:46:58.71] YUHUA WANG: Yeah. For a long time, policymakers, for example, World Bank, IMF, US government always thought that if those countries in Africa, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, if they can copy the political institutions from the west, they will achieve the same goal. They will achieve the same level of development, right?
[00:47:24.09] And then by political institutions, they mean representative, institutions, democracy, elections, political parties, so on, so forth. But we know that it’s very difficult to transplant those institutions to the developing world. Number 1 reason is the rulers in those countries are not interested in borrowing those institutions because those institutions will constrain their power, right?
[00:47:46.53] And then what I tried to say in the last chapter of the book is we need to look at the path of state development in those countries by its own right. They are very different from Europe. And then maybe even in 1,000 years, they won’t become like a European country. So we should respect that.
[00:48:05.62] And then we should study those countries pass by their own right. And then what I try to emphasize in this book is in addition to the political institutions, we also need to pay attention to the social structure, right? How the society is structured, what type of social networks, the elites are embedded in, and what type of incentives that are having in that type of network. So I think maybe we can have a more fruitful policy discussion when we shift our focus from simply political institutions and then to the society, to how the society is structured.
[00:48:39.22] LARRY BOBO: So how do we extend your work here to the contemporary moment to the current era in thinking about, well, let’s begin with China and the Chinese Communist Party today? And Xi Jinping seeming consolidation of power around him.
[00:49:01.36] YUHUA WANG: Well, hopefully, contemporary China is different from dynastic China. Hopefully, it’s no longer a dynasty. But we never know.
[00:49:10.05] And then China now has a modern party, which is the Chinese Communist Party, which played a very important role in regulating elite relationships, but also elite behaviors. So when we think about contemporary China is very, very different from Imperial China. But I still think since this is the same country we’re looking at, and then China is a continuous civilization, I do think that we can learn a lot from Chinese history to think about where China is headed.
[00:49:43.50] And then one thing that is happening in China right now is we are seeing, again, a strong ruler. That is we are seeing Xi Jinping after taking power in 2012 has been able to centralize power, has been able to consolidate his power, has been able to make himself the core of the leadership, and then he has achieved dominance in the last 10 years.
[00:50:08.79] And then from Chinese history, we know what would happen when you have a strong ruler, who can centralize power. That is from the 2000 years of Chinese history, we know this is a bad thing for the country, right? When you have a strong ruler like what we had in the Qing dynasty, what happened is the rulers will very strategically weaken the elites by fragmenting their networks, by breaking up their connections.
[00:50:35.99] And then we know based on what happened in China, this is a bad outcome for the country. Because once the elites are fragmented, they lose their connections. They are no longer trust, they are no longer able to trust each other, they are no longer able to make policies to make the government stronger.
[00:50:54.05] So we have already seen some of that in today’s China as a result of this personalization, as a result of the centralisation of power. We already see some signs where Chinese elites both at the local level, but also in the central government are not able to coordinate with each other. We see this during the very abrupt unexpected ending of the zero-COVID policy last year. And then it was not expected.
[00:51:21.53] By anyone, people were very surprised. Even hospitals were not prepared. And then you can really see the sudden unexpected change. As a result, maybe of Xi Jinping’s own wailing without consultation with the elites.
[00:51:40.96] And Then maybe the elites were not able to coordinate with each other to slow this down, or make a more well-thought out policy. So I think we already see some consequences of the centralisation of power by Xi Jointing. And then I worry that this will lead to a long-term both physical decline of the government, but also the decline of the Chinese economy in the next 5 or 10 years.
[00:52:14.55] LARRY BOBO: Wow That is really interesting. And it does indicate to me as we’re talking now just how powerful a framework you have brought to thinking through this. And it is going to have real illuminating capacity for understanding the present day. Dynamics
[00:52:31.76] So let me thank you very much, Yhua. This has been a really fascinating conversation for me. And let me come in to all of you listening. The Rise and Fall of imperial China the Social Origins of State Development, which is really a field redefining work. It’s fantastic when we see a scholar still very early in your career taking such a strong position and doing it with such a clear authority. And I want to congratulate you on this remarkable book.
[00:53:07.49] It’s my pleasure, Dean Bobo.
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