6 - Agents of Technocracy

Summary

Chapter 6, “Agents of Technocracy,” begins with the premise that the Song founders inherited a robust system of technocratic governance that had evolved after the collapse of Tang centralized authority in the middle of the eighth century. Its features included the rise of “commissions” (shizhi 使職) to replace the fossilized Three Departments (Sansheng 三省) structure of early Tang as well as inner court control over imperial decision making, financial administration, and security. The Song founders succeeded in coordinating these structures, all the while preserving many of their essential elements in a centralized and much strengthened monarchy. This chapter features the first detailed, English-language studies of the principal non-literati, non-Confucian groups that were vital to this imperial technocratic governance – the female members of the monarchy, including the empresses and the palace female bureaucracy, the eunuchs, the military servitors, and clerks. This chapter seeks to by-pass the aspersions that traditional historiography has cast upon these groups in order to examine their internal dynamics and to describe their administrative functions and their place within larger Song political culture.