Chapter 3, “Inner versus Outer – The Politics of Political Space,” reviews the spatial dynamics of the Song court that are reflected in the conceptual and spatial dichotomy between inner and outer (nei/wai 內/外) and posits the inner and outer courts as competing and separate political and administrative centers of imperial technocratic versus Confucian institutionalist governance. Most critical was the intermediate, overlapping space where the emperor served as the sanctioned conduit between these two administrative spheres of Song governance. This chapter counters the contention that “the Song had no inner court,” which is itself merely a modern extension of the rhetorical claim that the Song monarchs succeeded in curtailing the political reach of the affinal kinsmen, female bureaucrats, and eunuchs who administered the mechanics and politics of the inner court. On the contrary, this chapter concludes that over the course of the dynasty court administration shifted progressively away from outer towards the imperial palace’s inner space and thus accorded more control over vital governmental functions to the non-literati operatives of the inner court.

Chapter 10, “‘Us against Them’ – The Southern Song, 1162–1182,” reviews scholarship on the nature of Emperor Xiaozong’s rule and presents a detailed political history of these two decades. This chapter maps the two forces that Zhu Xi describes as locked in perpetual political conflict – “Confucian literati” and “the close” – onto the technocratic–Confucian model to identify the principal actors on each side. Prominent among the former were officials with Confucian daoxue sympathies like Chen Junqing 陳俊卿 (1113–1186), Zhou Bida 周必大 (1126–1204), and Zhao Ruyu 趙汝愚 (1140–1196), who led a series of successive institutionalist administrations, most notably Chen Junqing’s coalition of Fujian and Sichuan literati between 1167 and 1169. Prominent among “the close” were Zeng Di 曾覿 (1109–1180) and affinal kinsmen Qian Duanli 錢端禮 (1109–1177) and Zhang Yue 張說 (d. 1180). This narrative demonstrates that Xiaozong attempted to create a balanced administration that utilized leadership from both groups. Largely due to Confucian recalcitrance, his attempts were unsuccessful, and senior leadership, as reflected in the membership of the Council of State, alternated back and forth between the two groups during these two decades. Finally, after 1181, Xiaozong tapped several “centrists,” Wang Huai 王淮 (1126–1189) and Liang Kejia 梁克家 (1128–1187), officials with sterling literati credentials, but few Confucian convictions, who were willing to work with the technocrats to achieve the balanced governance he desired.

This book began with a review of two divergent perspectives on the general character of the Song state: (1) that the Song was an unmatched era of benevolent governance and (2) that it was merely another exploitative, autocratic dynasty, like many others in the region’s long history. I have argued that whereas – obviously – neither perspective is fully accurate, neither is yet totally wrong. My previous book,The Making of Song Dynasty History, identified the genesis of both perspectives in elements of the historiography that grew from Song governance itself. Structures of Governance has taken a step further and attempted to reconceptualize this perceived divergence.

Chapter 8, “The Confucian Challenge,” focuses on how the Qingli (1041–1049) reformers sought to strengthen existing agencies and procedures and build new ones that would transform Confucian principles into an active Confucian institutionalism – a functioning administrative system. The advent of a strident Confucianism among a small subset of officials in the 1020s and 1030s directly challenged the ecumenical premises and administrative practices of the Song founders. I focus on how committed Confucian literati worked through four institutions – the Secretariat (Zhongshu 中書), the Censorate (Yushitai御史臺), the Bureau of Policy Criticism (Jianyuan 諫院), and the Academies and Institutes (guan’ge 館閣) – to create a new conception of Song “shared governance” (gongzhi tianxia 共治天下). These efforts attempted to replace the earlier notion of personal loyalty to the ruler with a broader concept of loyalty to principles and practices often described as the “essential body of the state” (guoti 國體) or as “public, or impartial, opinion” (gonglun 共論). The moral attainments of Confucian education replaced raw “talent” as a basic qualification for office. The notion of guoti gave preference to ordered hierarchies of offices, each with a defined relationship to the other.

Chapter 4, “Collective versus Unilateral Decision Making,” explores an important aspect of the changing dynamic between inner and outer political space, namely, the relationship between the two functioning information systems of bureaucratic communication and documentary control that were headquartered in these two political spaces. Centered around the inner court, the “imperial channel,” under the sole authority of the emperor, issued “inner directives” (neijiang/yubi 內降/御筆). In contrast, the “public channel,” centered in the outer court, worked through a complex process of consultation and document processing that, in theory, offered multiple opportunities for input from officials of the Secretariat and remonstrance agencies. A review of the interaction between these two parallel, competing systems of communication affords a window into the complexities of the daily, practical dynamic between these two centers of Song governance.

Chapter 1 examines the bipolarity of junzi 君子 (gentlemen) versus xiaoren 小人 (petty men) as a fundamental contrast of Song political discourse. Many historians of Song understand these terms in their original moral context from the Zhou-era Confucian classics and therefore dismiss this distinction as antiquated philosophical rhetoric. But the eleventh-century Confucian resurgence, led by Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu, brought these ancient constructs once again to the center of political theory and practice. The chapter explains how the junzi/xiaoren contrast quickly came to define the eleventh-century Confucians’ view of themselves as a self-identifying political group committed to governing through institutionalist principles, and how this junzi/xiaoren dichotomy became the center of a Confucian political rhetoric that defined its opposition as those who did not support this vision. Lastly, the duty of the emperor to govern by distinguishing between junzi and xiaoren among his officials became a fundament tenet of Confucian institutionalism.

Chapter 9, “What Zhu Xi Told the Emperor,” begins Part III of this book and transitions from constructing the technocratic–Confucian continuum model to applying that model to analyze the first twenty years of the reign of Emperor Xiaozong 孝宗 (1127–1194; r. 1162–1189). This chapter presents a close reading of memorials by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) to Emperor Xiaozong that critique his regime as a polity divided literally into “two states – us against them.” The alliance that Zhu Xi claims as his own consists of activist Confucian officials, whose senior leaders are jinshi graduates from a variety of regional centers of literati culture. Many are daoxue (Learning of the Way) scholars and support the movement’s political agendas. As their nemesis, Zhu Xi describes powerful coalitions led by officials he calls “the close” (jinxi 近習), literally “the near and familiar,” often equated to the court “favorites” of Western tradition. The term refers to officials whose careers derive from their close physical proximity to the emperor; these might be personal retainers, family, affinal kinsmen, or eunuchs. They are capital residents without jinshi degrees, or with jinshi decrees conferred by imperial decree. These connections afforded them both formal and informal access to the inner court bureaucracy.

Chapter 5, “The Technocratic–Confucian Continuum,” establishes a working definition of the technocratic versus Confucian approaches to governance and completes the basic construction of three model types, termed “imperial technocracy,” “Confucian institutionalism,” and the “technocratic–Confucian continuum.” As applied to Song, I use the term “technocracy” to designate a wide range of functionaries who held positions that required specialized knowledge often acquired through family training or guilds (military servitors, clerks, artisans) or through specialized programs of service (eunuchs, female officials) rather than through the “presented scholar” (jinshi 進士) examination system, and who retained these positions for life. Although different from each other, these groups shared a distinctively non-literati, non-Confucian political culture. “Confucian institutionalism” is governance advocated and practiced by officials who (1) had entered service through the jinshi exam system, (2) were committed to a Confucian belief system, and (3) supported a system of established institutions and regulations that they believed would advance a governance that manifested those beliefs. The basic distinction therefore between technocratic and Confucian governance is between primacy given either to technocratic competence or to the belief system that supposedly undergirded Song institutions. The “technocratic–Confucian continuum” envisions the entirety of Song political culture along a continuum that comprised these two poles.

Chapter 11, “Deeper Structures of Song Governance,” argues that the perennial task of imperial governance was to forge a functional union of the state’s inner and outer capacities by converging the technocratic and literati foci of governance. There were two models for achieving this goal. The institutionalist model, favored by committed Confucians because it depended on a fixed system of hierarchically ordered agencies administered by the civil bureaucracy, was administratively complex, difficult to maintain, and inherently unstable. The other alternative was an informal alliance between a powerful, often the sole, chief councilor, acting as imperial surrogate, and the senior empress, as de facto leaders respectively of the outer and inner courts. This union, by bridging the inner/outer divide, harnessed the full range of inner/outer state capacity and enabled the creation of fluid, ad hoc agencies that could span this divide to achieve specific, targeted administrative tasks. The four great autocrats of Southern Song – Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155), Han Tuozhou 韓侂冑 (1152–1207), Shi Miyuan 史彌遠 (1164–1233), and Jia Sidao 賈似道 (1213–1275) – all fit this pattern. This chapter concludes with some suggestions for how this technocratic–Confucian continuum model of the deeper structure of Song governance may apply to other dynasties during the Chinese imperial period.