VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 3
Why Centralized Authority Works
Last section covered how the First Emperor made centralized authority into an institution. This section answers a sharp question: once this institution was set up, on what did it win? Why, for the twenty-two hundred years after, was nearly every contest of great states a victory of centralized authority over scattered politics? We will see that this is not the credit of any one ruler, it is a structural law, and behind it lie three mechanisms.
A reader of history notices one thing: in any age, in any region, so long as it is centralized authority against scattered politics, the result is nearly always that centralized authority wins. Set the samples of this law together. The Qin destroying the six states, the Qin a centralized authority after a century of reform, the six states east of the mountains scattered among themselves and unable to form unified action, the Qin defeating them one by one in ten years. The Han unifying the realm, Liu Bang moving step by step toward centralized authority, while Xiang Yu parceled the realm out among eighteen lord-kings, and the lords fought each other, none under another's command, and Liu Bang broke them one by one. Emperor Jing of Han putting down the rebellion of the seven kingdoms, the seven joining to revolt, and Jing appointing Zhou Yafu to lead the central army, who beat the coalition of the seven in three months, after which the Han turned wholly toward centralized authority. The Sui unifying the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Sui a centralized-authority regime, the Chen of the south scattered within, Emperor Wen sending an army south and destroying Chen in a year. The Tang defeating the Eastern Turks, the great Tang a centralized authority, the Eastern Turks at bottom a tribal alliance scattered within, the Tang army capturing the khan in one campaign, the Eastern Turks dissolving. The Qing unifying China, the Qing a relatively concentrated military-political body when it entered the pass, the central authority of the late Ming already dissolved and the localities each going their own way, the Qing army breaking them one by one. Put these samples together, and in any age, in any concrete situation, centralized authority against scattered politics, centralized authority wins. This is not the chance of one dynasty, nor the credit of one ruler, it is a structural law. Why is this law so consistent? The answer is in three mechanisms.
Start from the most basic mechanism, concentrating strength to do great things. In any age there are things that can be done only by mobilizing the whole country's resources. In the military, a great war needs hundreds of thousands of soldiers plus years of grain plus the logistics of a national mobilization, a scale centralized authority can reach and scattered politics cannot. In engineering, the Great Wall, the canal, the imperial highways, each a work of hundreds of thousands of people and decades, the Qin able to do it and scattered politics unable in centuries. In disaster relief, a great disaster needs grain and manpower gathered from the whole country, which centralized authority can mobilize while scattered politics leaves each place struggling alone. Understand one thing: the ability to do great things has no necessary relation to a group's scale, technical level, or cultural height, it depends mainly on whether strength can be concentrated. When the Qin built the Great Wall and the highways, its technical level and cultural height were not ahead of the contemporary Greeks and Romans, yet the Qin could mobilize over a million people to build them, which the city-states of Greece and Rome could not. When the Ming sent Zheng He to the western seas, the gap in technology from Europe was not great, yet the Ming could mobilize over two hundred great ships and near thirty thousand people, which no one country of Europe could. Today China can complete tens of thousands of kilometers of high-speed rail in a decade, the technology much the same across countries, yet China can mobilize resources of this scale and other countries cannot. Concentrating strength to do great things is the root advantage of centralized authority over scattered politics.
The second mechanism, the speed of meeting an outside shock. Any group meets outside shocks, war, invasion, disaster, crisis, technical change. Meeting these shocks needs a fast reaction, and the reaction speed of centralized authority is several orders faster than that of scattered politics. Centralized authority, one order, the whole country's army mobilized, the whole country's resources gathered, the whole country acting as one. Scattered politics, each place judging for itself, deciding for itself, the discussion and coordination often taking months or even years, and by the time the localities reach consensus the outside shock has already torn the group apart. History shows this again and again. In the time of Emperor Wu of Han the centralized authority was complete, able to organize a large-scale counterattack against the Xiongnu across decades, the Xiongnu a tribal alliance, losing step by step against a unified Han army. In the time of Emperor Taizong of Tang the Tang army put down the Eastern Turks in one campaign and the Western Turks in another. Turn it around: the Song valued the civil over the military and weakened its centralized authority, its reaction speed slow, beaten many times, the Southern Song in the end holding only a corner. In the middle and late Ming the centralized authority weakened, and coastal raiders harassed widely, until local commanders organized their own armies to press them down for a time. Reaction speed is the core advantage of centralized authority, and any scattered politics facing a concentrated shock is broken piece by piece, which is why every group that would survive long turns in the end to centralized authority, because if you do not concentrate, you are eliminated by a concentrated rival.
The third mechanism, the efficiency of integrating inner resources. Inside any group there are rich regions and poor ones, years of harvest and years of famine, advanced fields and backward ones. How to move the surplus of the rich to the poor, the store of a good year to a bad one, the technology of an advanced field to a backward one, is the core problem of governing. Centralized authority can do it, through taxation, allocation, migration, and the spread of technology, integrating the whole country's resources across different regions, times, and fields, raising the efficiency of the whole. Scattered politics cannot, each place's resources cycling locally, the surplus of a good year wasted locally, the shortfall of a bad year trapped locally, the poor region forever poor. In history, Emperor Wu of Han's equalized transport and price stabilization moved goods among regions through central regulation, evened prices, and built up the treasury. The Tang's canal transport moved the grain of the south through the canal to Chang'an, supporting the central region as the political center. The Ming and Qing's tax allocation had the developed south support the northwestern border defense. Today the tax of developed regions is transferred through the center to less developed ones, the east aiding the west, all ways a modern centralized authority integrates resources. Without centralized authority there is no integration of resources, the regional gap inside a group widening without end, in the end turning into inner division or conflict, which is also the structural reason why some unions without a true centralized authority meet great difficulty in integrating resources.
Having covered the three mechanisms, a deeper layer: centralized authority is not only the governance of the present, it is the arrangement for a thousand years hence, which scattered politics cannot do. To make this layer clear, look at a stretch of Chinese history rarely discussed as a model of political institution, the Qin campaign to the far south. Only two years after unifying China, the First Emperor made a decision many ministers did not understand, sending a great army south against the many peoples of the far south. The far south then, that is today's Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hainan, was in the eyes of people of the central plain a distant wilderness, hot and humid, high mountains and dense forests, its many peoples living scattered with no unified government. This land was some two thousand kilometers from Xianyang, and to campaign against it cost enormously with an extremely limited short-term economic return, and many ministers opposed it, on the ground that a distant campaign wearing out the troops was not worth the gain. But the First Emperor held firm. This holding firm changed the map of East Asia for the twenty-two hundred years after. The Qin army's advance south was hard, through five or six years of war and heavy losses, the first commanders dying in battle and soldiers dying in the tens of thousands, and at last the far south was pacified and three commanderies set up. Then the First Emperor did the most crucial thing of this section, he did not let the southern army withdraw. By the usual logic of campaign then, after pacifying a land one left a small garrison for a nominal hold and withdrew the main army to the central plain. But the First Emperor made the opposite decision: the soldiers who went south garrisoned and settled on the spot, forbidden to withdraw, some five hundred thousand people were moved from the central plain to the far south to make their homes, migrants from the central plain and the local peoples were encouraged to intermarry and form a new population structure, and the Ling Canal was built, connecting the Yangtze water system with the Pearl River water system, giving the far south and the central plain a permanent water route. This whole arrangement together set some million people of the central plain rooting in the far south, and through several generations of intermarriage and blending, the population, culture, economy, and politics of the far south gradually integrated with the central plain.
This is the real thing in the thousand-year view of centralized authority. The First Emperor considered not only the present, not only the governance of this one generation, he considered whether all the Chinese to come could hold this land, and what he meant to do was not occupation but an institutional, permanent belonging. The proof is that this arrangement changed the twenty-two hundred years after profoundly. The Qin fell, the far south did not leave. The Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing fell one after another, and the far south did not leave. Through five great north-south divisions, through countless changes of dynasty, the far south never again left the Chinese map. This is the root difference between centralized authority and scattered politics, scattered politics able to think only of this generation, this year, this one campaign, centralized authority able to think of twenty-two hundred years hence and make an institutional arrangement across countless generations. This is the highest reach of the statesman, not to hold more land, but to arrange the foundation well for the people of a thousand years hence, and this thousand-year view only centralized authority can hold, because only it has a continuous institutional endurance and the power to carry out a policy across generations.
Cut the camera to the West. Medieval Europe was long scattered, a triangle of feudal lord plus church power plus royal power, and from the political angle Europe never truly formed a state. Since the modern age, Louis the Fourteenth of France moved toward centralized authority by cutting the power of the nobles, building a standing army, and reforming finance, becoming the first true centralized great state of Europe. Britain gradually formed a centralized authority and became the world's hegemon. Prussia unified Germany through a policy of iron and blood and completed its centralized authority. Why did every great state of the modern West turn toward centralized authority? Because scattered politics, meeting a challenge, was broken at once by a centralized-authority rival, and by the modern age any state that did not turn to centralized authority was at once overtaken or even swallowed by a neighbor that did. Samples swallowed or declined in the modern age: the Holy Roman Empire, an empire in name but in fact made of several hundred scattered principalities, in the end dissolved. Some republics prosperous in commerce for near a thousand years but scattered in political structure, swallowed. Some federations long without a true centralized authority, partitioned. The core law of modern European history, scattered politics moving toward decline and the centralized great state toward strength, is the same law as the Qin destroying the six states, only eighteen hundred to two thousand years later in time. Europe took nearly two thousand years to walk the road the Chinese ancestors had already walked twenty-two hundred years before. This reveals one thing: any civilization must in the end turn toward centralized authority, or be eliminated when facing a centralized-authority rival.
So here is the position this section lays down. We set one layer firm: the victory of centralized authority over scattered politics that appears again and again in history is not chance, it is a law, and behind it lie three mechanisms, concentrating strength to do great things, the speed of meeting an outside shock, and the efficiency of integrating inner resources. The Qin campaign south into the far south is a living sample of the thousand-year view of centralized authority, one decision twenty-two hundred years ago bringing the far south permanently into the Chinese map, and after five north-south divisions and countless changes of dynasty, the far south never again leaving. This is the root difference between centralized authority and scattered politics, centralized authority able to make an institutional, permanent arrangement for the people of a thousand years hence, scattered politics able to think only of this generation. The world today is proof too, nearly every great state a centralized-authority state, a law the First Emperor left twenty-two hundred years ago, still running today.
By here you may ask: since centralized authority is so effective, should not every state concentrate with all its might and make itself as large as possible? What in the end is centralized authority for? Does it have an ultimate goal? The next chapter is about that goal, called expansion, the ultimate pursuit of every political institution. But this matter of expansion most needs both sides laid out, because it made civilizations and also ran up a deep debt of blood. The next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.