VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 8
An Organized Group Must Have a Decision-Center
Part One covered enfeoffment, how a position comes to be. Part Two covered the examination, who fills it. But both are still about a single position. A real group is a whole structure of thousands of positions. What holds it together, pools its strength, and lets it respond to the outside world? A decision-center. This Part is about the third root structure of political institutions, centralized authority. This chapter sets that structure up from the ground in three sections. The first is that centralized authority is a life-level law: any organized group, from a classroom, a kitchen, and an army to a nation, must have a decision-center, or the group scatters, and centralized authority is not the same as one-man rule, since the center can be one person, a few, or a set of mechanisms. The second is that this law was first made whole and set down twenty-two hundred years ago by the First Emperor, whose five foundations, abolishing enfeoffment and establishing commanderies and counties, creating the emperor, building a bureaucracy, unifying the standards, and laying a network of roads, became the political blueprint for every large state for the twenty-two centuries after. The third is why centralized authority works, three mechanisms plus a thousand-year sample, the Qin push south into Lingnan, showing what let it defeat scattered politics again and again through history. This chapter shows one thing: centralized authority is among the deepest and most solid of China's gifts to the political wisdom of humankind.
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.