Introduction

This book explores the complex relationship between eunuchs and the emperors who ruled them, during the first 150 years of Qing rule. Eunuchs (such as the notorious Wei Zhongxian) have been blamed for the falls of dynasties, which writers since ancient times attributed to their great skill at flattery, which they used to slowly usurp power. As essentially yin (feminine) beings, they, along with women, were considered to be dangerous when allowed to take part in government affairs. These same writers warned rulers repeatedly of the dangers of trusting eunuchs. This chapter introduces these clichéd notions of the dynastic cycle and eunuchs’ place in it. It also considers issues of eunuch biology and identity.

Chinese History as a Constructed Continuity

The continuity of Chinese history, through the unfolding of the ‘dynastic cycle’ of its successive imperial regimes, has been taken as one of the great truisms of discourse on China. Yet assertions of cultural continuity in China have emerged in recent research much more as tendentious fictions, cultural artefacts themselves designed to stitch together disparate elements over time—the daotong or ‘Transmission of the Way’ proposed by Neo-Confucians, is one good example. And looking at Chinese history as a sequence of political powers, the transmission of what was seen as a form of imperium, zhengtong, or ‘Correct Succession’, has also long been considered as technically problematic. The modern scholar Rao Zongyi has a well-researched monograph on these debates that deserves to be better known, especially as history as an element in Chinese identity is now coming to assume an increased contemporary importance.

Periodization and Major Inflection Points

Periodization is a function of a virtual literary historical story, organizing selective evidence to support a particular narrative of change. In the Chinese case, the contested variable is the degree to which literary history has autonomy or is one kind of document in a unified narrative of political and cultural history. For macroperiods, technological change is essential, namely, the gradual spread of paper during the second and third centuries ce and the larger adoption of an already existing technology of printing in the tenth century. Large decline and revival narratives were popular, and interpreting literary history in the context of the dynastic cycle became the norm.

A DYNAMIC MODEL OF TAXATION, CORRUPTION, AND PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN THE DYNASTIC CYCLE: THE CASE OF IMPERIAL CHINA

This paper develops a stochastic growth model that reproduces the main stylized facts of Imperial China's dynastic cycle—in particular, the time path of taxation, public spending, and corruption and their attendant impacts on production and income distribution. In this model, the emperor uses part of his tax income to finance the building of public capital and administrative institutions. This “institutional capital” enhances the productivity of the economy and limits extortion by the county magistrates. The dynastic cycle is driven by random shocks to the authority of the emperor and his central administration, which change the efficiency of institutional capital.

SARAH ALLAN,BURIED IDEAS: LEGENDS OF ABDICATION AND IDEAL GOVERNMENT IN EARLY CHINESE BAMBOO-SLIP MANUSCRIPTS: A REVIEW ARTICLE

Buried Ideasis a major contribution to the study of early China, and of ancient civilizations in general. It analyzes four important, recently discovered texts that in some manner deal with the idea that the position of the ruler should be transferred by voluntary abdication from one sage to another. In addition to analyzing in detail the arguments of these texts and their relations to the received tradition, it also provides a useful introductory survey of the current state of the study of Chu-script bamboo-slip texts, facilitates direct confrontation with these texts for anyone who desires to pursue them, demonstrates—in association with her earlier monographs—how newly discovered texts have transformed our understanding of early China, offers insights into the origins and deep structure of the Chinese modeling of history as a dynastic cycle/sequence, and shows how working across generic boundaries both improves our understanding of ancient China, and allows more insightful comparisons with other early civilizations.