Institutionalization of Tribal Force: The Temporal and Spatial Reboot of Authoritative Institutions-Effective Governance Volume 8 - Issue 3

Tianye Jin¹ and Chang Li^2*

• ¹School of Humanities and Law, Northeastern University, China
• ²School of International Relations, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China

Received:June 19, 2023;   Published: June 23, 2023

Corresponding author:Chang Li, School of International Relations, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China

DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2023.08.000287

 

Abstract PDF

The Absence of “Authority” and the “Deep” Closure

Both the typological restructuring and the occurrences excavation only bring to light the obscured structures of authority-institutional-effective governance. However, there is still a blind spot: the typological logic and occurrence mechanism of “authority-in-depth” seem to be difficult to find an exact correspondence in authority-institutional-effective governance. However, in the typological sense, the deepening effect produced by “movement-based governance” is always in fluctuation and does not settle into a stable order. Even if, according to Zhou Xueguang, the authority of the Christmases that drive the “movement” is conventionalized into the organizational facilities of the party system, this conventionalization and cascading often means the loss of the in-depth effect, i.e., “bureaucracy” and “formalism. “formalism”. The only way to regain the effect of penetration is to resort to the repeated empowerment of the “movement”. At the same time, the deep effect of “campaign governance” seems to be entirely driven by authoritative power configurations, without the space for “interstices” to emerge, in an occurrent sense.

The absence of the typology of “authoritative depth” means that Zhou does not believe that there is an authoritative configuration of power that can stably produce a deep order. In his view, the only stable order is the local spontaneous order represented by effective governance and the regularized hierarchical order represented by authoritative institutions. The stability of both orders presupposes a certain equilibrium cycle. Authoritarian institutions and effective governance, though occasionally in conflict, can still each be in their place, ensuring the independence of each other’s lowest line. Although they fluctuate periodically, the autonomy of the local order is not completely swallowed by the hierarchical organization, and the authority of the hierarchical organization is not completely subverted by the local order. This equilibrium cycle can be sustained because it is set in a closed field where there is no “gap” to accommodate the “emergence” of a new order. Zhou equates authoritative power allocation with a closed bureaucratic organization, and the penetrating effect of authoritative allocation is also closed within the organization, without any “gap” to accommodate the stabilization and order of the penetrating effect. In other words, it is the occurrent closure that leads to the absence of typology.

Institutionalization of Tribal Force: the “Intermittent” and “External” Institutions of Authority - Effective Governance

The fundamental reason for the loss of authority and the obscuring of the emergence of gaps lies in the closed and balanced circular picture behind the authority system and effective governance. It is under this picture that the empirical object of Zhou’s discussion is limited to the late Chinese empire and the period of “governance and pacification” represented by contemporary China. The first step to recover the missing typological logic of “deep authority” and open the gap in its genesis is to select new empirical cases and restart the stagnant spatio-temporal picture of authoritative institutions - effective governance. There are two main requirements for restarting space-time:

a. To find the interruption point of the equilibrium cycle in time.

b. To find the outside of the closed field in space.

This paper attempts to do so in the case of “tribal institutionalization of force”.

What is the “institutionalization of clan force”? Yan Buk points out that when a dynasty collapses and authority is lost, a military group wins power, absorbs and institutionalizes uncontrolled violence, and reestablishes authoritarian centralization, while large-scale military activities, military organizations, and military groups also greatly increase the concentration of domination and subordination in social life, increasing the degree of institutional organization and centralization. In Chinese history, this regime that could absorb violence and institutionalize it was often established by northern nomadic tribes. Yan Buke refers to this role of tribal force of northern nomadic groups in strengthening and activating centralized autocracy as the institutionalization of tribal force. The great unified empires established by the Sui and Yuan dynasties, which put an end to the long division between the “two northern and southern dynasties,” were a manifestation of this role.

Compared with the equilibrium picture of contemporary China and the late Chinese empire represented by the Ming and Qing dynasties, the “institutionalization of tribal force” in the Wei, Jin and North-South dynasties helps to recover the lost typology and genesis of authority-institutional and effective governance. First, the time period is shifted from “ruling peace” to “ruling chaos”, and the “institutionalization of force” is used as a clue to retrieve the typological logic of authority in depth. Similar to “war creates the state and the state initiates war,” the “institutionalization of tribal force” also shows an interconstruction process of institutionalized violence. “Large-scale military activities, military organizations, and military communities” increase “the degree of institutional organization and intensity of centralization,” that is, the reinforcement of the institution of authority by coercion. The strengthening of authority brings deeper effectiveness. The effectiveness of governance resulting from this strengthening and rebuilding of authority is undeniable: it brought bureaucracy back to its rationalization, re-established the relationship between state and society, and most importantly - overcame rivals and created a grand unified order. Secondly, it shifted the field from the “Middle Kingdom” to the “nomadic”, with the “clan” as the pivot, opening up the space for the emergence of interstitial happenings. The role of “force” in strengthening authority and establishing deeper effects must be mediated by the nomadic tribal power in the north. Only the nomadic pastoralists in the periphery of the central civilization could combine the strengths of both the sedentary empire and the nomadic tribes, using “force” to strengthen authority and stabilize the penetrating effect into order. Based on the above reasons, the following section will focus on the case of “institutionalization of tribal force” and use “force” and “tribe” as a breakthrough to reopen the space and time of authority-institutional-effective governance lock-in. The typological logic of authority penetration and the mechanism of gap emergence are shown.

The Recovery of Lost Types: The “Institutionalization of Force” of “Authority in Depth”

Compared with contemporary studies of state governance, which focus on central-territorial interaction and modern state formation, which emphasize state-society interaction, the “institutionalization of tribal force” can better demonstrate the institutional logic of “deep authority” in Chinese state governance. The governance mechanism corresponding to “deep authority” is the authoritative hierarchical organization that overcomes the principal-agent problem brought about by scale and produces deep governance effects. In the literature on state-building, the laying down of the modern administrative hierarchy is indeed closely related to the deepening of state power, but the pre-modern imperial household bureaucracy did not achieve complete rationalization and thus did not complete organizational integration. The institutionalization of tribal force is a demonstration of the institutional logic of the “deepening of authority” from both the direction of principalagent relations and the social relations of the state. The so-called institutionalization of force is a process in which tribal compulsory military authority penetrates into society to establish direct rule and penetrates into the organization to reshape the chain of agency.

From a macroscopic perspective of state social relations, the logic of “deep authority” is expressed in the process of establishing direct rule by the heterogeneous imperial power through the military authority of the military nobility and the armed people of the state, penetrating the barrier of indirect rule of the gentry. Due to logistical constraints, most traditional empires used indirect rule to reduce administrative burdens [1], and the governance paradox of authoritative institutions - effective governance was thus created. A typical example of indirect rule is Wei and Jin scholar politics. Since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the gentry clans emerged and gradually monopolized the power to organize the selection of officials and local control. The Southern emperors, whose authority had been eclipsed, had to cooperate with these clans in order to achieve “effectiveness” in governance. But the imperial power of the northern dynasty, backed by strong military authority, was sufficient to clear the indirectness of rule and achieve deeper governance.

The foreign imperial power of the Northern Dynasty retained a strong military autocratic authority. When Shi Xuan, the prince of Shi Hu of the Later Zhao Dynasty, was hunting, he “made a long siege, a hundred miles on each side. He drove the birds and beasts to their places at nightfall and made the civil and military stand on their knees and guard the siege with torches and fires like daylight”. The scene of “the civil and military are kneeling” is in stark contrast to Emperor Jin Yuandi’s introduction of Wang Gui “to the royal bed”. Unlike the political pattern of the southern dynasty where the imperial power and the gatekeepers “shared the world”, there was a clear master-slave relationship between the northern imperial power and the Han clans. “The so-called ‘autocracy’ was originally a system that treated the relationship between the monarch and his subjects as a ‘master-slave’ relationship.” And the strong authoritarian authority of the Northern Dynasty’s foreign imperial power came from the support of the state people’s armed and military nobility: the state people’s armed supported by their own free people formed the military basis of the authoritarian imperial power; the military nobility, mainly the imperial relatives, occupied high positions and vaulted over the imperial power.

Under the ruling structure of the foreign imperial power, the state armed forces, and the military nobility, it was difficult for the Shi to maintain their aristocratic independence. Although most of the Sixteen Kingdoms did their best to absorb the Han clans and recognize the privileges of the northern gentry, the rank and file of the Northern Wei clans were more often determined by the imperial power and based on the official titles of the dynasty. Unlike the Southern clans, which were perched on top of all social classes, the Northern clans, as the conquered, could not resist the power of the foreign emperor. In order to survive and develop, they could only attach themselves to the imperial power and actively integrate themselves into the established ruling structure. This active attachment and absorption was manifested in the re-bureaucratization of the clans. Thus, in the process of institutionalizing clan force, imperial power, which relied on military authority, suppressed the indirect agency of the gatekeepers and established direct rule.

From the perspective of meso-principal-agent relations, the logic of “deep authority” unfolds as a reshaping of agency relations within the organization. Even though the heterogeneous imperial power of the Northern dynasty was able to achieve a certain degree of direct rule by relying on military authority, this rule still had to be carried out through a principal-agent system. In order to establish the most effective mode of governance, rulers would use the appropriate types of agency relations under different structures of state social relations. These agency relationships can be categorized into incentive patterns, monitoring capabilities, and the employment of agents. Different organizational administrative systems can be understood as different combinations of incentive, control, and employment systems. In the case of the “institutionalization of clan force,” the institutional logic of “deep authority” unfolds in the organization, i.e., the ruler’s attempt to establish direct rule, precisely from the reinforcement of incentives behind the substitution of merit for status, the expansion of control due to the extension of the administrative system, and the expansion of control due to the re-bureaucratization of the clan.

First of all, incentives are the driving force of agency relations, and the reshaping of agency relations in the sense of “deep authority” is first manifested in the reinforcement of incentives brought by merit instead of status in the organization. If the scholarly politics of the Wei and Jin dynasties, which continued into the Southern dynasties, was based on the status of the clan, then the military aristocracy of the Northern dynasties, in the process of “institutionalization of clan force”, was based on the strong incentive of merit, especially military merit. The conventional incentive in the commission-agent relationship is the hierarchical arrangement within the organization, which is shown in the hierarchical arrangement in the Northern and Southern Dynasties as the eighteen classes of the Southern Liang Dynasty based on the nine official grades and the eighteen grades of the Northern Wei Dynasty. The two seem to be similar, but in fact they are different. The eighteen classes of the system set the level of “official” by the level of “class”, which indicated the qualification of the corresponding official position, and these qualifications depended on the origin and rank. Compared with the conventional civil grades, the military ranks of the Northern Dynasty had a more distinctive connotation of meritocracy. Military competition itself would lead to an instrumental rational way of thinking (Zhao, 2015), and the merit of the chaotic world was naturally based on military merit. The number of “general” was originally a military position, and the motivation of morale in times of war required timely rewards and punishments. The various general numbers developed into military ranks, and then applied to civilian positions. Therefore, the military number itself originated from the merit system, not from the special preferential treatment of the scholarly gentry. Although the military numbers of the Southern Dynasty were also meritbased, the access to “Qingpin” through the military numbers was narrower in the whole grade structure, and it was the “Menpin” and “status” that were linked to the It was the civil number that was decisive, and it was very difficult for military generals to obtain a civil number.

The situation in the northern dynasty was just the opposite. Due to the martial spirit of the nomadic tribes and the tradition of military politics, the rulers gave equal importance to both civil and military affairs, and judged the value of civil and military affairs not by the preference of the clan but by the merits of their contribution to the state. For example, in the Southern Dynasty, if a bureaucrat had several official titles, the title was usually preceded by the civil title and followed by the military title. The Northern Dynasty, however, was preceded by a military number and followed by a civil number. During the transformation of the Northern Wei Dynasty into the Eastern and Western Wei Dynasties, the gentry of Luoyang suffered a severe blow, and a large number of new military officials came into the ruling class. At this time, there was a “double award” system of the military number, that is, when the court rewarded the military service of soldiers with rank, in addition to awarding a military number, it also awarded a military number. The “double award” system meant that the rising military aristocracy tried to break through the ancient “civil and military” order of taste, and the incentive mode of agency relationship in the organization changed from the weak incentive of status system to the strong incentive of merit system.

Secondly, monitoring capacity is the guarantee of agency relationship control. The reshaping of the agency relationship in the sense of “deeper authority” is followed by the enhancement of organizational monitoring capacity and the expansion of the monitoring system. The core problem of all principal-agent relationships comes from information asymmetry. Information asymmetry leads to the problem of control of the principal over the agent. Monitoring is the main means to make the asymmetrical information “symmetrical” again and to re-establish the principal’s control over the agent. In contrast to the Southern dynasty’s preferential treatment of the scholarly clans, the Northern heterogeneous regime, with its military authority, adopted harsher surveillance measures over the bureaucracy. Later Zhao emperor Shi Hu legislated against private discussion of imperial affairs and mutual prosecution within the court, and the roads below the level of the public ministers were so blinded that they dared not talk to each other. Hu Sanshou commented, “ Shi Hu’s law was not as severe as King Li’s slander and Qin Shi Huang’s ban on talking. “ In addition to the monitoring measures of the central court, the Northern Dynasty also strengthened its monitoring ability through the expansion and extension of the local administrative system, represented by the Three Chiefs system of the Northern Dynasty. The Three Chiefs system was generally treated as a household supervision system and a township system established in the process of state penetration into society, but the monitoring function of the Three Chiefs system was more prominent in states, counties, and counties. The Northern Wei Emperor Dao Wu set up local officials in the second year of Tianci (405), “ The states set up three assassins, the counties set up three sheriffs, and the counties set up three magistrates “. Of the three local governors, two were Han Chinese, one of whom was sent from the Shangshu or Zhongshu provinces. The two officials of different origins practiced “counter-governance”, i.e. shared governance and supervision of each other; the third was a Xianbei, who played a supervisory role. In this sense, the military authority of the heterogeneous imperial power was extended over a wide range of local administrative areas through two central-territorial and Hu-Han lines of control.

Finally, the type of agent is the key to the maintenance of the agency relationship. The reshaping of the agency relationship in the sense of “deeper authority” is finally manifested in the specialization of the organization’s hiring agents. The control problems caused by information asymmetry are also influenced by the type of agent. The professional bureaucrats, who were evaluated on the basis of merit, were more compatible in terms of incentives than the “stratospheric” gentry clans. The re-bureaucratization of the northern clan was carried out under the arbitrary authority of the heterogeneous imperial power. Specifically, the military authority of the imperial power in the north reshaped the scholar bureaucrats in three ways: form of choice, power status, and cultural perception.

a. The examination-based selection of officers ensured the performance level of agents. War pressures prompted a shift in the shape of incentives within the organization from status to merit. The question is, although bureaucracy is performance-oriented, how to measure the level of performance of bureaucratic governance at the section level compared to the clear criteria of victory and defeat obtained from the results of military competition? Along with the development of bureaucratic organizations, the examination system in the Han and Wei Dynasties developed three directions of selecting bureaucrats, namely, “virtue-based”, “ability-based”, and “literature-based”. When social differentiation was not yet developed, most of the criteria for evaluating an individual’s ability were his or her degree of compliance with moral norms. Due to the homogeneity of “filial piety” and “loyalty” in Confucian ethics, the ancient dynasty’s “virtue-based selection” was often expressed as “filial piety-based selection The ancient dynasty’s “virtue for people” was often expressed as “filial piety for people”, such as the Han Dynasty’s filial piety. With the development of professional division of labor and social differentiation, different jobs required different professional skills, and “taking people by their ability” became an important path to select and investigate grammar officials. In the early years of the Eastern Han dynasty, even the filial piety section had to “give a test to the job” to test whether they were “well versed in official duties”. The Emperor Zhang of Han also issued an edict requiring that “ the countryside election, must be tired of merit “, and criticized the state and county “assassins and guardians” of the filial incumbent, Maocai “neither can show”. The method of “trial job” means to prove the ability of bureaucrats through actual performance of governance.

However, the lack of universal and clear criteria for both virtues and officials’ abilities made the actual certification depend on the personal recommendation of the sheriff. In other words, the problem of information asymmetry in the principal-agent relationship was still present in both the “virtue-based” and the “ability-based” selection processes. In this sense, a formal written examination could send a more complete signal of the agent’s performance level to the principal. Therefore, the examination system was also reformed during the reign of Emperor Shun of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Yangjia, by having the public government lead the examination of the filial candidates in the field of economics and arts, and “the students tested the family law, and the clerks were taught the paperwork”. Below the Wei and Jin dynasties, compared to the Southern dynasties, the spirit of “selection and appointment” was more popular in the Northern dynasties. On the one hand, the examination competition became the regular system for selecting central officials in the Northern Dynasty. In Northern Wei, Emperor Xiaozhuang and Emperor Jiemin had political chaos due to the struggle with Erzhurong, but the court still strictly conducted examinations when selecting the general servant and the general servant; on the other hand, the scale of examinations also expanded as never before. In the Northern Wei Dynasty, Emperor Xiaoming selected the imperial historian, and the number of candidates could reach more than 800; in the Northern Qi Dynasty, Emperor Wenxuan once selected officials from the two eastern and western provinces, and the number of candidates reached 2,000 to 3,000. This scale was unprecedented in the Eastern Jin and Southern Dynasties and even the Han Dynasty. Under the influence of the Northern Dynasty’s military and aristocratic politics, which emphasized the rule of officials and the culture of “emphasis on merit”, the examinations of “taking people by literature” became an important means of distinguishing the performance level of bureaucrats, and became the precursor of the imperial examination system in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.

b. The civilian power structure ensures the dependence of the agent. Control issues in principal-agent relationships are not only related to the organizational form, but are also influenced by the power structure between the principal and the agent, i.e., the agent’s dependence. Weber noticed that the more dependent an agent is, the higher the degree of obedience to the principal’s orders [2]. Employing agents on the basis of higher social status (e.g., nobility) decreases their dependence, while employing foreigners or slaves increases it. And under the military oppression and merit orientation of the heterogeneous imperial power of the Northern dynasty, the relationship between gentry and the selection of officials was no longer solid. In the Northern dynasty, the position of the most important official, which had been monopolized by the Southern clan, became open to all kinds of people. In the Northern Dynasty, warriors could also serve as secretary-general and secretary-general, which were regarded by the Southern cultural clans as their starting families. Likewise, most of the Jiangzuo Zhongzheng were served by famous scholars, but in the Northern Dynasty, many lowly officials and servants, “Fanlou vulgar” people, and even eunuchs, who were regarded as sluts by the Han, began to “venture into the Qingliu” and occupy the post of Zhongzheng. As the Western Wei “six edicts” said: “If you get one of them, you can start to raise him as a minister!”

c. The “conceptual system” that favors the rule of law and government ensures the adaptability of agents to the hierarchy. The control of agency relationships in organizations is not only about the rational game between actors and the power structure they are embedded in, but also embedded in cultural perceptions. If the agent believes that the principal has legitimacy, in the agent’s subjective perception the principal has the right to give orders, while the agent is obliged to follow his orders, and the control gap caused by information asymmetry can thus be bridged. In this sense, compared with the Southern dynasty, where the metaphysical and puritanical philosophy of “rule by doing nothing” eroded the legitimacy of the bureaucracy, the Northern dynasty’s emphasis on the science of jurisprudence formed the conceptual basis of the authority of the bureaucracy. The Northern Wei Emperor Xuanwu descended from the Northern Wei dynasty, and “the entry must be the official’s ability, and the promotion is not the study of art. It is because of the small use of swords and pens, counting the day and expecting glory; specializing in the great talent, willing to be in the ugly alley”; after Emperor Xiaoming, “ there are many affairs under the sky, the world competes to get up to the official work, and literature is in great decline “. The status of practical subjects such as law, calligraphy, and arithmetic in the literary and educational system of the Northern Dynasty was also higher than that of the Southern Dynasty. Under the harsh pressure of survival in the north, only mandarins were the agents needed by the rulers.

The Opening of Closure Genesis: The Order of Tribal Interstices Emerges

In the “institutionalization of tribal force,” the “tribes,” especially as “nomadic” tribes, act as such “interstices “in the institutionalization of tribal force. In the “interstices” of the clans, the “compulsory” authoritative configuration of power, which absorbed the bureaucratic organizational techniques of the Middle Empire, created an extensive “system” covering a wide area; The effect of “coercive” deep governance, which continued the nomadic tribal militarized command system and communal network of relations, guaranteed the mobilization capacity of the extended bureaucratic organization. The “coercive” authoritative power configuration is able to emerge in the tribal gap with a stable indepth effect because of the triple orientation of the nomadic tribal gap: the subperipheral spatial gap guaranteed by nomadism; the dualistic Central Plains-Steppe institutional gap; and the plundering-mutual reward exchange gap.

In terms of spatial location, the nomadic nature of nomadic tribes hovered in the “subperiphery” of the empire, providing a buffer space for balancing organizational skills and mobilization capacity. Space has always been a central dimension in understanding state governance. The “empire” and “governance load” in the “logic of imperial governance” are understood in terms of spatial scale. In contrast to closed “empires” or nation-states, world-system theory offers a more interactive perspective around the division of the capitalist globalized production system into centers, peripheries, and semi-peripheries [3]. However, the understanding of “world” as “global” is a recent product. The regional order formed around ancient “empires” also existed as a “world system” consisting of a center, periphery, and subperiphery. Unlike the modern world system theory, which is based on the industrial capitalist division of labor, the differential order of center, periphery, and subperiphery was formed around the military and ideological hegemony of empires. Under the threat of force and civilizational penetration of the “central” empire, the “periphery” located at the borders of the empire is either eliminated or assimilated. Unlike the periphery, which was directly linked to the imperial civilization, or the primitive tribes, which were directly in the barbarian zone, the sub periphery could selectively accept the civilizational system of the core region while avoiding assimilation or degradation [4]. The nomadic tribes, with their indefinite way of life, were located in the “interstices” of the “sub periphery” radiating from the imperial order, and were able to selectively accept imperial indoctrination and institutionalize the deeper effects of tribal force, while maintaining their own civilizational independence.

The spatial gaps in the sub periphery materialized in the process of institutionalization into the gaps in the organizational field, which in turn generated the autonomy of the nomadic empire. The nomadic tribes were located in the “gap” of the Central Plains-Prairie dualistic organization, which provided a space for enforced regularization and institutionalization of movement. The northern nomadic civilization of the Central Plains can be divided into two genealogies: the steppe and the eastern Hu. The Xiongnu, Zoran, and Turkic nomads were often able to maintain only brief grassland-based nomadic regimes, while the Xianbei, Khitan, and Nüjin, with their duality between the Middle Kingdom and the grasslands, or nomadic and agrarian duality, were often able to establish a more solid-state apparatus. In the Middle Kingdomnomadic dichotomy, the monarch, who held both the bureaucracy and the military system, had autonomy in the face of a large “system” [5]. This autonomy is reflected in the monarch’s ability to use the bureaucracy to absorb the destructive nature of tribal force and to institutionalize and regularize it, and to invoke tribal coercion as a means of maintaining a certain distance and tension from the regularity of the bureaucracy. This distance and tension was precisely the source of the monarch’s power to mobilize the bureaucracy and to free himself from the shackles of administrative routine by governing in a sporting manner.

The deep structure of the “gap”, the organizational field that generates the autonomy of nomadic empires, is the “gap” as a mode of exchange. There are three fundamental forms of exchange in human society: reciprocal payment, violent plunder and commodity exchange. Different forms of exchange correspond to different forms of public organization: reciprocity-community, violent plunder-state and commodity exchange-market. Yet the structure of state governance is often a combination of multiple modes of exchange. The state does not only organize the violent plundering of social surplus, but also assumes the public function of redistribution, extending and opening the boundaries of the organization to society, and achieving the integration of state and society. The basic governance structure of the “Confucian-French state” established in the Chinese empire since the Han Dynasty was a combination of the violent coercion of the legalist hierarchy and the Confucian concept of reciprocal reward, which was institutionalized. In the gap between the two forms of exchange, violent plunder and mutual reward, the state and society are closely integrated, and the integrative power of state governance emerges. As class differences widen and organizational structures solidify, the “gap” closes again: the exchange of mutual reward dissolves the authority within the organization, leading to the aristocratization of the bureaucracy; and the organization gradually closes with the loss of public functions, leading to the suspension of the state. The nomadic tribes, which combined both violent plunder and communal reciprocity, were able to reopen the “gap” between the different modes of exchange within the state.

First, the exchange of violent plundering by nomadic tribes was able to revive the authority of bureaucratic organizations. The dissolution of bureaucratic authority in the Six Dynasties of Wei and Jin was manifested in the aristocratization of bureaucratic identity and the informalization of sectional rules. Under the violent dominance of nomadic clans, the symbolic superiority and economic self-sufficiency of the gatekeepers were limited, and the bureaucrats were accordingly servileized, which reverted to some extent to the professionalism of the bureaucrats. For in Weber’s definition of bureaucracy, bureaucratic specialization was accompanied by the salaried and proletarianization of bureaucrats, i.e., bureaucrats did not occupy the means of production or office space. At the same time, it is under the absolute authority supported by violence that the informal rules of the bureaucracy, moistened by Confucian ethics, can be formalized again. The formalization of hierarchical regulations, especially the explicit culture, presupposes that the state apparatus breaks the aristocratic, localized, and familial system of communal reciprocal rewards. For example, the emergence of explicit codes throughout history has often signaled the disintegration of aristocratic norms in the face of the monarchy.

Second, the nomadic tribal community’s mutually remunerative mode of exchange was able to restructure state-society relations. Because of their nomadic nature, nomadic tribes did not have too much functional differentiation due to settlement, and retained the mutual reward mode of exchange. For the nomadic ruling groups that entered the Middle Kingdom, this mutual reward could be transformed into closed cohesion under the pressure of the risk of domination, but it could also be transformed into open integration in the process of eliminating the risk of domination and military threats. The Northern Wei regime, which maintained the tradition of clan communes, established an equal-field system in which the state allocated land for the people, controlling a large amount of land and population, and then crossed over to the gentry’s dukedoms to grant fields directly to soldiers, penetrating power directly into the grassroots. The interstitial nature of nomadic clans in terms of spatial location, organizational field, and mode of exchange mediated the process of institutionalizing clan force in three ways: the absorption of organizational technology and mobilization capacity, the generation of imperial autonomy, and the integration of state-society relations. Through the mediation of the nomadic clan, the centralized power configuration of “coercive” authority emerged as a stable penetration effect - the coercive penetration coalesced into a stable hierarchical organization while maintaining a deep mobilization capacity.

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