VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 2
The Other Shapes of Enfeoffment
This is the second chapter of Part One. Last chapter we set the skeleton of enfeoffment and its five laws, and covered the two oldest kinds, enfeoffing land and enfeoffing office. This chapter finishes the remaining four shapes: voter enfeoffment, military enfeoffment, dynastic enfeoffment, and party enfeoffment. Three sections. The first looks at two kinds that run in very different directions, one where the people at the very bottom lift a position up from below with their votes, one where a position is won by the obedience of the gun. The second looks at the oldest and the most modern, one that sets the position inside a bloodline to pass down the generations, one that twists scattered people into a single strand and lifts a leader up on a platform. The third turns back, gathers all six kinds together, walks them one by one past the five laws, then says the word enfeoffment fully through, and closes the half of the book that asks what enfeoffment is.
Section One looks first at voter enfeoffment. An office is decided by the ballots of citizens with the right to vote. Its good is truly good. Handover is peaceful, and a country can run dozens of changes of government across decades with not one civil war. The people have a sense of taking part, the person in the position is checked, many views can be held, and a wrong choice can be corrected. Its bad is truly bad too. The voters' judgment has limits, and being good at winning elections is not the same as being good at governing. Then there are money, populism, and short sight, and the rights of minorities cannot be guarded by the arithmetic of ballots alone. In one Alaska town a cat named Stubbs served twenty years as honorary mayor, and this true story forces an honest question: what is the essential difference between an elected human mayor and a cat or a dog? Then military enfeoffment. The Roman legions raised up emperors. Zhao Kuangyin mutinied at Chenqiao and was draped in the yellow robe. Its axis is not the army. It is who commands the gun: general, state, party, money, religious head, family. Six ways to command the gun, and not one of them perfect.
Section Two looks at dynastic enfeoffment and party enfeoffment. Dynastic enfeoffment is the oldest and longest-running enfeoffment people have known, and its good is real. But three sentences turn over its deepest face. The first: even an emperor is a slave. He is sealed in layer on layer, by the ancestors' house-rules, the dying decree, the empress dowager, his tutors, his ministers, the historians, the rules of lineage. He wishes to slip out of the palace tonight for a bowl of street noodles, and he cannot. The second: a great family has its dead leaves. From the rebellion of the seven kingdoms to the nine sons contending for the seat, every round of infighting drained the whole dynasty's vitality. The third is the heaviest: when the avalanche comes, no single snowflake is innocent. Chongzhen worked more than ten hours a day and was frugal to the patch on his dragon robe, but when he took the throne the Ming had already collapsed at the level of the system, and he was only the flake pressed at the very bottom. Party enfeoffment is the most modern enfeoffment. It lifts a leader up by organization, platform, and discipline. It has organizing power and continuity, and it can groom successors and take in society's energy. It also has party strife, factions, self-closing, and the tangle of party and army. Set back inside the five laws, neither kind misses a single one.
Section Three turns back and gathers the six kinds together. First the five laws are brought back just as they were. Then the enfeoffment of land, the enfeoffment of office, voter enfeoffment, military enfeoffment, dynastic enfeoffment, and party enfeoffment walk past them one by one. The ballot is acceptance turned into a count. A mutiny, a defection, is the army withdrawing its acceptance. Six kinds, five laws, not one off, one ruler laid against them all. Their difference is not whether to keep the five laws, but by what means they make the group accept, how wide the range of acceptance, and how violent the shock when acceptance drains. Last, the word enfeoffment is said fully through. In the bronze script the character shows soil below, a tree above, and a hand setting the tree onto the mound of earth. The many mound the earth, the many plant the tree, the many recognize the boundary, and the direction has always run from below to above. The motion of enfeoffment itself is clean and neutral. It can be done well, and it can be done badly.
Through this chapter you will meet one sentence again and again: a thousand differences of form, one skeleton beneath, no kind of enfeoffment advanced and no kind backward. Here Chapters One and Two finish the half of the book that asks what enfeoffment is. But a deeper question has not yet been asked. Does enfeoffment have a lifespan? Why does a dynasty turn over every two or three centuries, while the words of Confucius are still read every day after more than two thousand years? The next chapter walks into the lifespan of enfeoffment.
Chapter contents
Section One. Voter enfeoffment and military enfeoffment
Section Two. Dynastic enfeoffment and party enfeoffment
Section Three. The five laws of enfeoffment
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.