VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1
Enfeoffment Is the Political Institution
This is the first chapter of Volume IV, and the first chapter of Part One as well. The ground of the whole volume is laid here. In this chapter we start from a name given to a three-year-old child, and talk about something insulted for a long time but in truth neutral: enfeoffment. Three sections do one job. They take those frightening words, political institution, all the way down to the plainest ground, and set up one sentence: political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment. The first section starts from that name and makes clear what enfeoffment is, and that it runs from below. The second walks into a pride of lions and makes clear that a position is lifted up by the group, second by second, and sets down five life-level laws. The third comes down to the human world and lays out the two oldest kinds of enfeoffment, enfeoffing land and enfeoffing office.
Section One starts from a very small picture. The nineteen sixties, a kindergarten classroom in Guangzhou. The teacher gives a child a little past three, surnamed Lei, a name to be called by, Little Lei. Decades pass, and the people who know him call him that still. A name is given by a group of people together. The day that group stops calling it, the name is gone. Then the camera pulls back to the grass. The lion king, grown old, is beaten without fail. There is only replacement, never succession. People added one more layer, succession, and drew the cycle out from a few years to a few centuries, and still could not step out of the circle. Last, the section takes apart the name, the institution of enfeoffment, and sees that it is the underlying skeleton every political institution shares. Then Han Feizi and Guanzi drive in the first layer of the ground: a position is set by people, not handed down by Heaven; a politics rises when it moves with the will of the people, and falls when it moves against it. Han Feizi says, "When I speak of the power of position, I speak of what people set up." Guanzi says, "A politics rises when it moves with the will of the people; a politics falls when it moves against the will of the people."
Section Two fixes its eye on that word, lifting, and puts the hardest question: when a man declares himself king, does it count? A young male lion roars across the plain and declares himself king, and the females turn and walk off. He is only a male lion standing alone, roaring. People are the same. Chen Sheng was raised up as King of Zhangchu by some six hundred conscript soldiers. Later he was killed in an internal turn by his own charioteer, and the charioteer announced he was taking the force. The other commanders did not accept him, and the charioteer too was killed almost at once. A position lives in the group's acceptance. Withdraw the acceptance, and the position vanishes. Enfeoffment is not only the moment of becoming a lord. It happens every second. A coronation is the same. Hold these eight words: ceremony confirms acceptance, ceremony does not create it. The will of the people Guanzi spoke of is exactly this acceptance. In Duke Huan of Qi's old age the acceptance drained, and when he died his body lay on its bed sixty-seven days before anyone laid it out. Step by step, the section sets down five life-level laws: a position must exist, a position must be accepted, acceptance is dynamic, when acceptance drains past a point the position vanishes, and a new position necessarily arises.
Section Three comes down to the human world and looks at the two oldest and most common shapes of enfeoffment. The enfeoffment of land hands a stretch of land to a family, and the position passes down the bloodline. King Wu of Zhou beat the last Shang king. The realm was too large, so he and the Duke of Zhou parceled it out. Lu went to the Duke of Zhou's son, Qi to Taigong. Its good is truly good: clear succession, local self-rule, cultural accumulation, meeting the outside foe. Its bad is truly bad: the lords breaking away, the three houses seizing power in Lu, the states swallowing one another, the Son of Heaven hollowed out. The enfeoffment of office began with the Qin, which abolished enfeoffment and set up commanderies and counties. The office belongs to the state, the person flows, and this skeleton ran for over two thousand years. It is efficient and heads off breakaway, but when the center falls the whole system falls with it. Here too stability and brittleness are two faces of one thing. The Northern Song's forces were not weak, its treasury not empty, yet when the Jin charged in, ministers were still debating peace or war in the hall, and Kaifeng fell. Both kinds of enfeoffment still turn inside those five laws, and neither is absolutely above the other.
What this chapter sets firm is the first brick of the whole volume: political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment, enfeoffment runs from below, and the position is lifted up by the group. But the enfeoffment of land and the enfeoffment of office are both still enfeoffment handed down from above. The next chapter turns the other way. It looks first at every common person at the very bottom, and how, with the one vote in hand, he lifts a position up. Then it covers military enfeoffment, dynastic enfeoffment, and party enfeoffment, and walks all six kinds together past the five laws.
Chapter contents
Section One. Starting from a name
Section Two. The lion king and the pride, a position the group lifts up
Section Three. Enfeoffing land and enfeoffing office
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.