Reimagining Statecraft: Texts, Knowledge, and Praxis of Governance in Middle-Period China (ca.1127-1400)

Abstract

The dissertation examines the literati reconceptualization of statecraft, or the art of governance for the common good, during the twelfth to the fourteenth century China. The period witnessed an intellectual crisis in which literati, who remained invested in the political order, lost confidence in the central government’s commitment to governing for the common good and faced diminishing opportunities to influence central decision-making. The well-studied Daoxue movement proposed one solution which saw individual moral enlightenment as the foundation of political order. This project focuses on an alternative epistemic tradition I call institutional statecraft, which rejected the Daoxue moralism and sought instead to align the logic of the state apparatus with moral purposes and integrate communal institutions into the realm of governance. The first half of the dissertation demonstrates the formation of the institutional statecraft tradition in Southern Song. Chapter One traces literati’s active engagement with state power in local administration. As a conscious polemical stance against moral statecraft, the position gained momentum through the literati social practices of benefiting the locale via innovative fiscal measures. Chapter Two argues that the polemical stance developed into a paradigm of institutional statecraft learning with its distinct interpretive approach, textual foundation, and purpose. The second half of the dissertation illustrates the shifting boundary of the tradition as a more diffuse movement through Yuan into early Ming. Chapter Three draws attention to the rising interest in law, which had often been dismissed as too technical in Song literati culture, as another domain embodying universal moral principles and thus constituting a legitimate subject of statecraft learning. Chapter Four examines literati efforts to define communal institutions not as the antithesis of state power but as integral to a singular political order. I argue that by the end of the fourteenth century, this diffuse movement culminated in a reimagining of statecraft that assigned roles to both centralized state power and decentralized communal institutions. The localist turn thus had the unintended effect of expanding the conceptual scope of the state beyond the formal boundaries of the state apparatus, offering a blueprint of institutional statecraft that could be enacted by both the monarch from above and the literati from below.