Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Li Feng's 'Bureaucracy and the State in Early China' (2009) is a fantastic book on the Western Zhou period (1046 - 771 BCE) government. This study is based almost solely on bronze inscriptions of the period for which he argues convincingly that they CAN be used as primary source material for the nature of the government. Scholars like Lothar von Falkenhausen and Martin Kern have argued that bronze inscriptions must be understood as religious documents, but Li sees the religious, ritual inscriptions as only one type among many: "the bronze inscriptions were cast for an indefinite set of purposes such as the commemoration of administrative and military merits, the facilitation of marriage relationships, religious prayer to ancestral spirits, the recording of family history, the preservation of important treaties or deals of territorial or material exchange, marking their owning families or origins of manufacture (as often on weapons and tools), and so on." (14-15)
Regarding whether the bronze inscriptions can be used as reliable sources of Western Zhou HISTORY, he writes, "Although the purpose of these [just discussed] commemorative inscriptions was to record and communicate historical events that their owners considered important, they might not always record history as it was. Instead, they only record what their composers think the history is or should be and how they want it to be remembered, as is true of all kind of historical documents ..." (20)
After giving an account of the previous Dynasty's government, the Shang, he goes on to discuss briefly the history of the Western Zhou and then the nature of the Western Zhou government, specifically the bureaucracy that developed throughout early, middle and late portions of the Western Zhou period. (If one is familiar with the traditional account of the early Zhou Dynasty one might be surprised that they seemed to constantly be at war with someone.)
Li prefers "delegatory kin-ordered settlement state" as a description of Western Zhou government, as opposed to feudal, city-state, territorial state, segmentary state and settlement-state, which have been proposed by others (294-7).
Overall, the scholarship employed in this work is top-notch and the writing is not difficult to understand which makes it a great resource for anyone interested in either Western Zhou history or its government system.
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Ancient Chinese society developed a sophisticated and complex bureaucracy which is still in operation today and which had its pristine form in the government of the Western Zhou from 1045 to 771 BC. Li Feng, one of the leading scholars of the period, explores and interprets the origins and operational characteristics of that bureaucracy on the basis of the contemporaneous inscriptions of royal edicts cast onto bronze vessels, many of which have been discovered quite recently in archaeological explorations. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority. The discussion is accompanied by illustrations of the bronze vessels and their inscriptions, together with full references to their discovery and current ownership. The book also discusses the theory of bureaucracy and criticizes the various models of early-archaic states on the basis of close reading of the inscriptions.
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