7 - The Northern Song Technocratic State

Summary

Chapter 7, “The Northern Song Technocratic State,” surveys the history of technocratic governance during the Northern Song period (960–1127). The early Song emperors adapted Five Dynasties’ institutional features and wedded them to their own utilitarian and eclectic ideology to achieve the “Great Peace” (Taiping 太平), a project whose achievement Emperor Zhenzong 真宗 (968–1022; r. 997–1022) proclaimed at the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth in 1008. Simultaneously under Zhenzong, the major administrative and financial structures of the Song technocratic state attained their early maturity. This chapter contains an extended discussion of imperial Daoism, demonstrating how the monarchy utilized Daoist religious ideas to legitimize the emperor’s position as a supreme political leader with unique, unilateral decision-making authority. The rise of Confucian institutionalism in the 1020s and 1030s challenged these claims and sought to move away from the founders’ vertical conception of the state as an extended “private” family toward a more horizontal conception of the state as a “public” body or system of interdependent political actors, of which the emperor was but one component. These two visions of the state co-existed in tension through the middle of the eleventh century. This chapter concludes by examining how Emperor Huizong 徽宗 (1082–1135; r. 1100–1125) returned again to imperial Daoism to justify a renewed and more autocratic system of unified vertical control.