VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 8
An Organized Group Must Have a Decision-Center
Last chapter brought the examination up to today and showed clearly that it is not a Chinese story but a floor shared by all humankind, yet its boundary is the same East and West: the highest position never passes through the examination. Part One covered enfeoffment, how a position comes to be. Part Two covered the examination, who fills the position. But both are still the matter of one position. A real group is a whole structure of thousands of positions. For that structure to coordinate, to pool its strength, to react to the outside world, on what does it rely? On a decision-center. This Part is about the third root structure of political institutions, centralized authority. This chapter has three sections that set this structure up from the ground.
Section One is about centralized authority as a life-level law. Any organized group, from a classroom, a kitchen, and an army to a country, must have a decision-center, or the group scatters. And centralized authority is not the same as one-man dictatorship; the decision-center can be one person, a few people, or a set of mechanisms. It starts from a thought experiment: walk into a classroom, a kitchen, an operating room, an army camp, a company, and at each one ask, who has the say? Even three people moving a table for a moment will form of themselves a hidden decision-center of whom to follow. A board or a parliament is also centralized authority. It is about the existence of the decision-center, not about who alone makes the decision. Without it, a group cannot decide consistently in time, cannot act consistently in execution, cannot meet an outside challenge in concentration, and cannot arbitrate an inner conflict. Han Feizi taught this twenty-three hundred years ago: affairs are in the four quarters but the key is at the center, the sage holding the key and the four quarters coming to serve. Affairs in the four quarters is execution in the localities; the key at the center is decision at the center.
Section Two is about how this law was first set down whole, over twenty-two hundred years ago, by the First Emperor. His five foundations, abolishing the parceling out of the realm and setting up commanderies and counties, setting up the office of emperor, setting up the bureaucracy, unifying standards, and building a road network, became the political blueprint of every great state for the twenty-two hundred years after. This section starts from the year two hundred twenty-one before the common era, a watershed in the political history of humankind. Take the five one at a time. Commandery governors were appointed by the center and moved or replaced after a few years in office. The three lords and nine ministers made up the first central government in the true sense. Writing made one, carts to one track, measures to one system. The imperial highways and the direct road let the capital's orders reach the whole country within a few days. The most crucial moment was that court debate. Li Si said: the sons and kin the Zhou kings had enfeoffed, of the same surname and very many, grew distant as the generations passed and attacked each other like foes, and the Son of Heaven could not stop them. The First Emperor supported Li Si. The Qin lasted only fifteen years from founding to fall, but the institutions of the Qin did not fall. Han Feizi's theory, Li Si's execution, the First Emperor's realization: three ancestors together completed this institutional innovation.
Section Three is about why centralized authority works: three mechanisms, plus a living sample seen across a thousand years, the Qin push south into Lingnan, the far south, to see what let it defeat scattered politics again and again in history. It starts from a run of samples. Xiang Yu parceled the realm out among eighteen lord-kings, and Liu Bang broke them one by one. Zhou Yafu beat the coalition of the seven kingdoms in three months. The three mechanisms are concentrating strength to do great things, the speed of meeting an outside shock, and the efficiency of integrating inner resources. The deepest layer is in the far south. The First Emperor did not let the southern army withdraw. The soldiers garrisoned and settled on the spot, some five hundred thousand people were moved there, and the Ling Canal was built, connecting the Yangtze water system with the Pearl River water system, so that some million people of the central plain took root in the far south. Through five great north-south divisions since, the far south has never again left the Chinese map.
What this chapter sets firm is this: any organized group must have a decision-center, and this is not should have, it is must have. This chapter shows one thing: centralized authority is among the deepest and most solid of China's gifts to the political wisdom of humankind. But since it is so effective, what in the end is it for? The next chapter is about that goal, called expansion. Expansion most needs both sides laid out, because it made civilizations and also ran up a deep debt of blood.
Chapter contents
Section One. The decision-center, one name and two meanings
Section Two. The First Emperor's five foundations
Section Three. Why centralized authority works
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.