VOLUME V, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 2
The Several Forms of Scarce Resources
The previous section set the root proposition firmly, law is a tool the strong build to hold scarce resources alone. But the word scarcity sounds as though it only counts when food or land runs short. This section takes it apart. Scarcity is not one kind, it is four, material, positional, relational, and cultural, each one more hidden than the last, each one running deeper than the last.
One. First Set Out the Four Kinds
The first kind, material resources, land, food, water, minerals, shelter, since a person living must first eat, dress, and have a roof, and this kind is the most concrete and the most visible. The second kind, positional resources, power, office, title, admission, since a dynasty has only one chief minister, and a position is naturally limited by its own nature. The third kind, relational resources, marriage, offspring, trust, connections, since a person needs not only to live but to have company and descendants. The fourth kind, cultural resources, education, knowledge, reputation, the right to speak, and this kind is the most intangible, and yet the most stubborn of all.
Notice one thing. The further down this list you go, the less each kind looks like scarcity at all, and the more it hides behind fine-sounding words, and yet its force in deciding a life is not one bit smaller than land, not by any measure.
Two. The First Kind, Material, the Most Direct
A person must eat to live, and to eat there must be land, and if land falls short, food falls short, and if food falls short, contest follows. Around 700 BC, Guan Zhong named this layer plainly.
One must first enrich the people. When the people are rich, they are easy to govern. When the people are poor, they are hard to govern. Guan Zhong, Guanzi, On Governing the State.
He has a more familiar line too, when the granaries are full, people know propriety, when clothing and food are sufficient, people know honor and shame, the stomach must be filled first before there is any point speaking of ritual and duty. Laozi speaks from the other end.
A hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 9.
A house piled with gold and jade cannot, in the end, be kept safe. He also says, the people starve because those above them consume too much in taxes, that when the people go hungry, it is because those above are eating too much of the harvest through tax. Guan Zhong speaks to the trouble of lacking, Laozi to the trouble of overflowing, one from each end, both laid out for later generations to see. The largest single item of material scarcity is land, and dynasty after dynasty legislated for it, one law after another, from the well-field system to the merging of the head tax into the land tax, and in the West, from Roman land law to the English enclosures, a long thread saved for the next section to dig into fully. Material scarcity is the most visible kind, so its law is also the plainest, field law, tax law, mining law, water law, all written out in plain black and white.
Three. The Second Kind, Position, Crueler Than Material
Why crueler. Because material output can grow, and growing output can ease the shortage, but position cannot. A dynasty has only one chief minister, a county only one magistrate, and however high the grain is piled, the chief minister is still only one person. Position is limited by its own nature, and cannot be duplicated.
The finest and most lasting tool the ancestors ever built for this kind of scarcity was the imperial examination. It rose under the Sui dynasty and matured through the Ming and Qing, running thirteen hundred years. It carried two remarkable sides at once. On one side, it truly opened a road, letting a poor family's son study and sit for the examination and, step by step, become an official, and Fan Zhongyan, as a boy so poor he chopped his porridge into pieces and ate it cold, rose in the end to become a vice chief councillor, which was no empty tale. On the other side, it pulled the contest for position out of the battlefield and into the examination hall, so that a position once fought for only with soldiers could now be fought for with a single essay, sparing the ruling power an enormous amount of blood and chaos. Today the tool has changed its name, but not its root. The college entrance exam, the civil service exam, every kind of professional license, are all a filter built for the scarcity of position, the form has changed, but the root of building one gate to keep most people outside has not.
Four. The Third Kind, Relations, the Most Hidden and Yet the Most Personal
A person needs not only food, clothing, and position, but also companionship. Marriage is the largest item of relational scarcity. The Rites of Zhou held that people of the same surname should not marry, which on its surface guarded against inbreeding, but looked at closely, turned marriage into a tool of political alliance, the Zhou royal house of the Ji surname intermarrying, generation after generation, with the lords of the Jiang surname, so that a web of marriage ties was itself a map of political power. By the Han dynasty there was also the practice of marrying princesses off to secure peace, sending women of the royal clan out in exchange for calm on the frontier. All of this was law built as a tool for relational scarcity.
Look inside the family, and one husband with one wife and several concubines, with a sharp line drawn between the legitimate and the secondary, cut relations cleanly apart. There was only ever one principal wife, while concubines could be several, and children born of concubines were secondary and could not inherit the main line. In Dream of the Red Chamber, Concubine Zhao and her son Jia Huan stand as a living sample pressed out by exactly this law, Concubine Zhao, a concubine of Baoyu's father, held a position in the Jia household lower than even a senior maid, and Jia Huan, shunned and looked down upon for being born of a concubine, and Cao Xueqin says nothing outright, he only lays the positions out and lets the reader see for himself. One law of relations, working inside a single family, was enough to press out two entirely different lives. Today marriage's open rules have loosened, but relational scarcity has not disappeared, it has only shifted from the position of the concubine to the difficulty of finding a suitable match, from matching families of equal standing to the unspoken rules of household registration, education, and income.
Five. The Fourth Kind, Culture, the Most Invisible, and Yet the Strongest Force in Deciding a Life
Material scarcity can ease as output rises. Positional scarcity can expand as institutions loosen. Relational scarcity can be reorganized as attitudes change. Cultural scarcity alone, once held by one group, can persist for a hundred years, a thousand years, more stubborn than any of the other three.
Around 500 BC, Confucius spoke of teaching without regard to social class, and in an age when fewer than five people in a hundred could read, this was a remarkable loosening. But it too carried a condition, a student had to bring a bundle of dried meat as tuition, and whoever could afford even that was already not the very bottom of society, so among Confucius's disciples there were both poor and wealthy, yet almost no true farmers or slaves. Teaching without regard to class was a loosening relative to aristocratic monopoly, not a full opening, and Confucius himself understood that measure clearly, it was later generations who blew it up larger than it was. Cultural scarcity is the hardest of all to see through, because it wears the coat of educational fairness and open knowledge, and yet from the Han dynasty's imperial academy admitting only the sons of officials, to the Ming and Qing dynasties' successful examination candidates coming mostly from a handful of wealthy prefectures in the south, to today's good schools tied to housing in the right district, one single thread runs through all of it, cultural resources naturally gather toward those who already have plenty. Law, in name, is unified across the whole country. In practice, whichever family already holds books, renowned teachers, and generations of accumulation, that family's children get there first.
Six. String the Four Kinds Together and Look
Material, everyone can see it, and its law is the plainest. Position, one layer deeper, still visible, and its law grows more refined. Relations, deeper still, and most people live inside it without ever realizing they are framed by a law of relations. Culture, the deepest of all, and most people never see through it in an entire lifetime, because its coat is the most handsome of any.
The four kinds grow more hidden one after another, and yet at the root they are the same one root, insufficient output, scarce resources, the strong legislating to hold them alone, and the weak left to accept it, resist it, or step outside it. Whether across a thousand years or three thousand, East or West, this root has never changed, only the kind of scarcity and the coat law wears over it have changed.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the twenty-seventh layer. Scarcity is not one kind, it is four, material, positional, relational, and cultural. Material is the most concrete, culture the most intangible, and yet the intangible kind carries a force in deciding a life not one bit smaller than the concrete kind, and in fact often larger, because it hides the deepest and is the hardest for anyone to recognize as scarcity worth resisting at all.
See these four kinds clearly, and turning back to any law or any rule around you, a reader can ask first, which kind of scarcity does this actually frame. Answer that clearly, and you already understand half of whom that law was made for and whom it favors.
The next section turns to how the strong legislate to hold things alone, the line of land. It digs specifically into the largest and most concrete of the four kinds, land, running China's road from the well-field system to the merging of the head tax into the land tax, and the West's road from Roman land law to the English enclosures, watching how the strong changed names and coats generation after generation, while the root of holding it alone never once changed. Carry this layer, that scarcity comes in four kinds, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Three. The Strong Write Law to Hold It Alone, the Line of Land.