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Abstract
This paper attempts an overview of an issue in statecraftthat Chinese scholars debated for more than two and a half millennia. The debate was over the respective merits of the enfeoffment system (fengjian) over the prefecture and county system (junxian) as a basic structure for administering the empire. Under the enfeoffment system, the emperor gave power to his close relatives or high officials to govern the provinces, sometimes on a hereditary basis. The junxian system featured centralized appointment of local prefects and magistrates, who were to hold office usually for not more than four years in a locality and who could not serve in their own home districts. Up to the mid-Tang, the argument was conducted mainly within the court and in terms of the respective advantages each system gave to the stability of the reigning dynasty. From the ninth century on, the issue was considered more widely, to take into account the quality of government each system provided at local level. In the final centuries of the dynastic era, some scholars used the fengjian issue to argue for enfeoffment as a means to develop local autonomy and freedom from an often corrupt and dysfunctional central government. The paper concludes that, for the late medieval period at least, more research in the political record is needed in order to arrive at a more fine-grained understanding of how and why emperors and civil officials took the positions they did.
Keywords: centralization, devolution, fengjian, feudalism, junxian, local society, provinces
JEL classification: H11, H77, N45, Z10
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1. Introduction
There are many ways in which one might analyze the issue of devolution in Chinese history. At the level of political principle, and at one extreme, advocacy of independence from the political centre was seen as a form of treason, and classed as one of the most heinous crimes in the penal code. In the official view of history, enshrined in the series of twenty-four dynastic histories, the "master narrative" for the Chinese empire, it is rather the periods of effective central government control that form the main thread of the narrative. The periods of greatest success in this narrative include the pax sinica period of the middle decades of the eighteenth...