The rise and fall of imperial China: The social origins of state development. By YuhuaWang. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2022. 352pp. $28.99 (paper)
本书通过分析中国政治精英的社会网络结构（星型、领结型、环型），解释了中华帝国在第二个千年中财政能力长期下降的原因，对研究国家能力、历史社会学和比较政治学的学者具有重要参考价值。
In The Rise and Fall of Imperial China, Yuhua Wang provides an original, rigorous, and highly persuasive account that links the capacity and stability of nations to the social structure of their political elites. Wang anchors his analysis on the longue durée of imperial China. The book successfully addresses a fundamental puzzle of Chinese history: the gradual decline of the Chinese state's extractive capacity over the second millennium CE and the fact that the late imperial state was generally weaker than in medieval times. To establish this puzzle, Chapter 2 presents temporal patterns from multiple datasets that Wang collects by triangulating across different historical sources. China's state capacity, measured by per capita taxation or taxation as a share of GDP, experienced a long-term decline over the second millennium. The comparison with England (Figure 2.9) is important. Variations in taxation level might not reflect changing capacity but simply different policy choices. Yet, Wang shows that from the late 17th century onward, China's fiscal extraction had remained several times smaller than that of England, no matter what policy orientation dominated Westminster. Taxation measures for different Chinese dynasties, derived from sources that vary in quality and coverage, pose challenges in comparability. Yet, Wang also collects interesting data on fiscal policies, revealing increasingly “state-weakening” policies since about 1000 CE. No matter how one looks at it, the decline of the Chinese state couldn't be clearer. In recent years, scholars from different disciplines have increasingly noted the weakening of fiscal capacity in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911). But Wang is the first to document stylized facts over the very long run. His effort also precedes and is corroborated by the newest research from measurement specialists in economic history (Guan et al., 2022). China's late imperial state capacity decline has gradually become the new consensus, if not stable knowledge, that any historian doing cutting-edge research on East Asia needs to acknowledge. Wang's work is a major driver of this fascinating interdisciplinary development. Wang's theory centers on “elite social terrain” (p. 7), comprising ‘star,’ ‘bowtie,’ and ‘ring’ networks. In a star network, national officials form social ties (e.g., marriage) across regions, creating networks for each person that cover distant parts of the country. In a bowtie network, officials form ties only within their hometown, resulting in localized networks. In a ring network, officials don't connect with local social groups or each other. The theory presents a “sovereign's dilemma” (p. 13): In the star network, political elites prefer a strong state because everyone has geographically encompassing family interests, but centrally-networked elites threaten ruler survival. In the bowtie network, political elites don't favor state-building, as a strong state could hurt local family interests. In the meantime, the absence of cross-regional networks reduces elite coordination against the ruler. The ring network is unstable and prone to state collapse. Wang integrates insights from earlier social science thinkers, but the resulting framework is entirely novel. The network-based theory bridges and transcends generations of past literature on state capacity and state-society relations. Another strength of Wang's framework is its ability to incorporate both endogenous and external forces in explaining a country's state development. Elite networks endogenously evolve and occasionally are reshaped by rulers' choices in critical junctures. But they are also products of exogenous shocks such as, as emphasized in the book, climate change and, as I should note, economic development. In the Chinese case, elite social networks evolved from a “star” to a “bowtie” in the 11th century, localizing further over time and eventually dissolving into a “ring,” accounting for China's fiscal decline. The empirical sections are equally impressive. Wang marshals a diverse array of evidence from meticulously collected microdata. Chapter 5 demonstrates how elite social terrains made and broke a 12th-century state-building reform by exploiting variations in the geographic size of government officials' networks. This highly innovative use of historical data provides concrete evidence for the mechanisms at work. Chapter 6 shifts our focus to policy implementation, highlighting how localist interests in the 16th century slowed down the enforcement of a major fiscal policy. Wang's painstaking effort to digitize an astounding 51,200 genealogy books comes to fruition in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 micro-founds the “bowtie network” by examining the formation of lineage organizations. In contrast, Chapter 8 studies how the mid-19th century empowerment of lineage organizations further entrenched localist interests, thus accelerating China's state collapse via a “ring network.” What makes Wang's theory even more convincing is that China, in many aspects, is actually a “difficult case” in the language of comparative methodology. Due to China's large geographic size, as the Tang Dynasty aristocrats relocated to the capitals, maintaining connections with their original home bases in the periphery was challenging for the resulting “star network.” Similarly, as the Sui & Tang rulers unified the whole of China, they found themselves in a position to recruit not just aristocrats from their northwestern (Guanlong) power base but from regions across the northeast and south as well. This dramatic expansion of the “selectorate” could have meant an increase in ruler power from pre-Tang to the Tang. Wang's account remains empirically robust at a macro level (Figure 2.10 on ruler deposition in particular) despite these idiosyncratic features, making the theory all the more persuasive. One could appreciate just how sharp the “sovereign's dilemma” is by examining an “easier” case, Korea since the Koryo Dynasty. In a territory much smaller than China's, the centralized yangban aristocracy actively worked to have a weak ruler but a strong state. Historian John B. Duncan even argues that because the centralized aristocracy grew too impatient with the weak state in late Koryo, they launched a coup to install the Choson Dynasty, where the new rulers were expected to help them restore state strength (Duncan, 2014). Three features make this book an instant classic. First, while numerous books in the past also sought to explain the (near) entirety of Chinese macro history, Wang's work is the first to combine macro narrative with micro-quantitative evidence. It thus creates a new genre. Second, unlike many social science studies that use quantitative historical data merely to remake claims already made by historians for decades, this book's findings go beyond historians’ understanding of history. The book draws inspiration from historians' works on the renowned ‘Tang-Song Transition’ thesis. However, it skillfully integrates both the “absolutist turn” and the “localist turn” from historical literature into a unifying theory of state-building that both social scientists and historians will appreciate as new. It is thus social science history at its very best. More importantly, the book serves as a role model for those studying comparative politics using China as a case. We often hear the complaint among ourselves that ‘China is too unique and thus not generalizable!’ However, our persistent struggle to find a few features of Chinese politics that are remotely ‘similar’ to those in other countries may be misguided. This book demonstrates that studying China for its importance in its own right is a viable approach because generalization often occurs at a more meso level. While many heroes, villains, and institutions in Wang's tale are unique—such as reformers, emperors, and imperial exams—the underlying elite social terrains are universal. This book opens exciting avenues for further research. As often seen in human history, many places in the developing world feature a weak central government that coexists with strong local powerholders. This scenario is somewhere between bowtie and ring networks. What are the conditions under which powerholders would accept state-building in their localities? State-building in late-fifth century China, under the Northern Wei dynasty, succeeded because ambitious rulers incorporated such powerholders into the national bureaucracy as stakeholders in the new state. The transformation of local elites into a centralized aristocracy, a direct biological precursor to the 7 – 9th-century star network in Wang's narrative, shows that rulers sometimes could reshape elite social terrains so that elites would develop state-strengthening preferences. What are the conditions that mitigate the sovereign's dilemma so that rulers would actually prefer a state-building elite? In Northern Wei, the rulers were “foreign” conquerors. Interestingly, the European example of a star network used in Wang's book is England after the Norman Conquest, which was also “foreign.” Conquests could be state-building opportunities. Conquerors, under different conditions, could dominate, incorporate, or merely co-opt the local elites by leaving things as they are. Their choices have implications for elite social terrains and, therefore, state-building. Finally, the book partially attributes the tension between despotic and infrastructural state capacity to elite social terrains. It does seem that even contemporary China, with the shackles of localized gentry long removed, remains in a high despotic but low infrastructural power category. What are the other reasons for this enduring phenomenon? Overall, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China is a landmark in the interdisciplinary literature on state-building and state capacity. Anyone interested in history should read this book. Anyone not interested in history should definitely read this book.