VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 2
Why the Enfeoffment of Power Runs a Cycle of Centuries
Last section set a question. The enfeoffment of power, why exactly the band of two or three centuries? Why not fifty years, and why not a thousand? This section answers it. The answer is four problems that cannot be dodged. These four pick no dynasty and no culture. So long as it is the enfeoffment of power, not one can be escaped.
First see clearly that the span of dynasties is not chance but a regularity. From Xia to Qing, four thousand years, dozens of dynasties. List the more stable ones. Xia about four hundred years and more, Shang about five hundred and more, Zhou about eight hundred (though only the early Western Zhou, two or three centuries, could truly command the lords), Han four hundred (in two halves, Western and Eastern), Tang nearly three hundred, Song over three hundred, Ming two hundred seventy-six, Qing two hundred sixty-eight. Set aside the short transitional dynasties like Qin, Sui, and the Five Dynasties, and even the long-lived ones mostly land at two or three centuries. The West is the same. The Roman Republic about five hundred years, the Roman Empire about five hundred, though effective rule was two or three centuries followed by a slow decline. Byzantium a thousand years in name, but a major internal reorganization every century or two. The Ottomans about six hundred. The British Empire about three hundred from rise to decline. The Soviet Union only seventy. Put the numbers together and the great majority of major political bodies hold a stable span of two or three centuries. This is not chance, it is a regularity. This section makes clear where the regularity comes from.
The first problem: ability cannot pass down a bloodline. The enfeoffment of power must have an able living person in the seat, governing, using people, deciding, meeting the unexpected, and let any one of these fail and the enfeoffment shakes. But one thing cannot be dodged: ability cannot pass down a bloodline. A founding ruler is usually forged in the fire of war and politics, having faced real opponents and real defeat. But his son is born inside the palace, ringed by attendants from childhood, having faced no real opponent. The second generation may still do, the father's word and example still near. The third generation begins to drift, the founding ministers gone, hearing from childhood only that he is most brilliant, and slowly he believes it. By the fourth and fifth, the one on the throne often lives wholly in the small world of the palace, knowing nothing of the real one. The position can pass down a bloodline, ability cannot. Every dynasty walks the same curve, strong at founding, steady in consolidation, sliding in the middle, past saving at the end. The Han went from the ability of Liu Bang, to the consolidation of Wen and Jing, to the expansion under Wu, and then weaker and weaker, until by Huan and Ling it was past saving. Tang, Song, Ming, Qing, every curve the same. Why so consistent? Because the founding ability, passed to the third and fourth generation, thins out, while the power stays where it is, and a person of thinned ability sitting on enormous power must run into trouble. This is the first problem.
The second problem: power magnifies private wants. First say what private wants are. Private wants are not selfishness. They are the reasonable concern everyone has for their own good, wanting to eat a little better, live a little better, see their family well, be respected. This is ordinary human feeling, not a moral defect. But power is an amplifier. An ordinary person who wants to eat better spends a little more on good food. A person with power who wants to eat better may draw on the treasury and keep hundreds of cooks. An ordinary person who wants respect hopes for a kind word from a neighbor. A person with power who wants respect may draw on the whole court's rites and the historian's brush to cast himself as the ruler of the ages. Power does not create the private want, but it magnifies the private want everyone already has, ten times, a hundred times. And the magnified want the person in the position often does not notice, because everyone around goes along with him, the voices of opposition pressed down, so that he hears only praise, and his sense of what counts as too much slowly blurs. The Emperor Wu of Han in his late years loved grandeur and made war year on year. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang in his late years sank into ease and drew on the An Lushan rebellion. The Wanli emperor of Ming held no court for decades and gave himself to gathering wealth. These emperors were not bad in their early years. The position slowly changed them. This is not the problem of one person's character, it is the regularity of power itself. Anyone seated in that position for long goes through this quiet reshaping by power. This is the second problem.
The third problem: a web of interests necessarily forms around the position. The enfeoffment of power is not one ruler alone, it is the ruler plus the whole court. In the court are ministers, consort kin, eunuchs, close attendants, local officials, army commanders, each with private wants of their own, and power is quietly reshaping each of them too. And the officials knit into a web of interests among themselves. Superiors promote inferiors, inferiors flatter superiors, those of the same exam year, the same district, the same teacher form factions, and marriage ties and old friendships bind the web tighter. Over time the whole court becomes a mutual-protection community of interest, officials sheltering officials. One official takes a bribe, his superior will not investigate, because the superior takes bribes too. Another reports it, and the rest join to squeeze out the one who reported. The upright officials grow fewer and fewer, and those who remain either fall silent or are pushed out. In the end the whole bureaucracy runs for itself, no longer for the state, and the state becomes the cash machine of the bureaucracy. In the middle and late stages of every dynasty this web almost without exception knits itself. The clean order of the founding changes shape within decades. The emperor wishes to set things right and finds the whole system resisting. He wishes to raise up new people and finds the new people quickly assimilated. He wishes to remove a few and finds that when one batch is removed another rises. History has rulers who tried to set things right, Zhu Yuanzhang cutting down the founding officials, the Yongzheng emperor cleaning up the officialdom, and these had a short-term effect, but so long as the enfeoffment of power itself remained, the web of interests knit itself again and again. Setting things right is a local repair, it cannot remove the root. This is the third problem.
The fourth problem: the person in the position and the group grow ever further apart. Keep the enfeoffment of power going long enough, and the person in the position and the group being governed grow ever further apart. At the founding, ruler and people are close. Liu Bang was himself a village patrol officer, Zhu Yuanzhang had himself begged for food, and they knew what days the common people lived. By the second and third generation the distance opens, the emperor born in the palace, knowing the people's life only from books. By the middle and late stages, between emperor and people lie layer on layer of officials, of memorials, of a dressed-up scene of peace, so the emperor believes all under heaven is at peace while the people are already seething with resentment. Again and again history shows the same scene. The emperor asks his ministers how things are among the people, the ministers answer that all under heaven is at peace, the emperor believes it, and then one year a famine comes, the people rise, and the emperor discovers the peace he was told of was all false, and it is already too late. The person in the position lives in a carefully decorated world, and the higher and the longer he sits, the more false what he sees, while the group being governed lives in the real one, and their pain cannot reach up. The distance widens until, one day, it snaps. This is the fourth problem.
Now, with the four problems set out, return to the opening question. Why must the enfeoffment of power run a cycle of centuries? The answer is in the stacking of the four. First, ability cannot pass down a bloodline, so each generation is less than the last. Second, power magnifies private wants, so the person is slowly changed by the position. Third, a web of interests necessarily forms, so the bureaucracy slowly becomes a self-serving system. Fourth, the person and the group grow ever further apart, so problems accumulate unseen until they burst. Stack these four and any dynasty finds it hard to hold past two or three centuries.
Why exactly two or three centuries? Because from the first generation to the second, the founding energy is still there and the institutions still bite. From the third to the fourth, the slide begins but inertia still holds. From the fifth to the seventh, the four problems accumulate to a point, and the dynasty enters crisis. From the eighth to the tenth, the crisis bursts and the dynasty collapses. Count each generation as twenty or thirty years, and ten generations is two or three centuries. That is the span of most dynasties. But remember the paradox of last section. A dynasty collapses, but the form of enfeoffment that is the dynasty does not vanish, the next dynasty rises and runs the same cycle again. So on the larger scale, the enfeoffment endures, the cycle endures, the problems endure, and only the concrete dynasty that bears the problems changes.
So here is the position this section lays down. We turned the reason the enfeoffment of power runs a cycle of centuries into four problems: ability cannot pass down a bloodline, power magnifies private wants, a web of interests knits around the position, and the person in the position and the group grow ever further apart. The four stack, each generation twenty or thirty years, and by the eighth to tenth the crisis bursts and the dynasty collapses. That is where the band of two or three centuries comes from. These four problems are the inner regularity of the form itself, not the tragedy of one dynasty, and not the character flaw of one emperor.
But you will at once think of the opposite question. If the enfeoffment of power cannot escape these four problems, then the enfeoffment of faith and culture, those classics and teachings and traditions, why are they not troubled by the same four? Why does a classic not age, not grow greedy, not knit a web of interests, not lose touch with its readers? The next section crosses to the other side and looks at why the classics can last thousands of years.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.