False Economy - Alan Beattie [79]
However, certain aspects of Confucian thought proved helpful for one group in society to entrench its power against another. In China, that group was the state bureaucracy. It is a commonplace worn to cliche that Chinese society is riddled with bureaucrats, something that the takeover of the country by state communism in the twentieth century did nothing to diminish. Perhaps less understood is just why the administrative culture is so pervasive. The modern concept of being Chinese is in itself an intrinsically bureaucratic creation.
The Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the population of modern China, are that peculiar anomaly—an ethnically heterogeneous ethnicity. Their identity was created, or imposed, during the Han dynasty (206 b.c. to a.d. 220), the period when China officially became a Confucian state. Though there are different spoken versions of the Chinese language, the Chinese characters used are the same. Bureaucrats writing down people's names managed to assimilate a diverse group of ethnicities and tribes into a nationality that came to regard itself as a single people.
The role of state bureaucrats in recording and regulating the economy was already established by the time of the Han dynasty. The reference manuals of a low-level bureaucrat of the Qin dynasty, which preceded the Han, suggest that the regime maintained almost field-by-field records for the crops being grown throughout the empire, the details written on small strips of bamboo and carefully collated and stored. Some even suggest that the accumulated wisdom and practice of the bureaucrats in China play the role that religion does in other countries. Even if this is going too far, the influence handed to the bureaucracy by hardwiring their authority into the very nature of national identity gave them a great deal of power.
In the beginning, administrative skill may well have been good for China's economic development. As we saw with the spread of paddy rice farming, civil servants collected, stored, and disseminated useful information. Bureaucrats were chosen largely on grounds of competence, not family influence. China's famous and grueling system of civil service examinations, a system that began in the seventh century, was designed to ensure that the state was run by the best talent available.
But this class of bureaucrats (mandarins) was not about to countenance threats to its own preeminence, and the unified system of examinations created a powerful drive toward consensus of purpose, philosophy, and interest within the state. Bureaucrats were frequently the enemies of merchants and entrepreneurs, since they had the potential to create rival bases of power and wealth. In the case of China, the mandarins feared and despised both soldiers and merchants and did their best to control both of them. The Chinese mandarinate found it easier to get away with this than others might have. The size and relative geographical isolation of China allowed it to be self-contained and self-sufficient in a way that European regimes were not.
The state's relationship to the creation of wealth was predatory. China's decision to curtail trade was a deliberate one, taken by a relatively strong and centralized state. It came from those who were threatened by the disruption that growth and trade might bring. The precepts of Confucianism might have helped them to legitimize their approach, but they were acting in their own (fairly brutal) self-interest.
It has often been in the interest of those running a state to limit economic growth in order to diminish threats to their own status. Religion is often one of the tools they use. But the very same religions can play a diametrically opposite role: that of drawing