With such a vast territory to govern, the Chinese state could not, and did not, depend solely or even mainly on physical coercion for the exercise of its rule. [233] It would have been neither feasible nor viable – the resources required being too enormous. In comparison with Japan, indeed, the military remained strikingly absent from Chinese life – at least until the early twentieth century. Instead, the power of the state has rested primarily on consent reinforced by forms of coercion. The Chinese state went to great lengths, in both the Ming and Qing periods, to inculcate in the population a sense of shared values and culture based on Confucian principles. Here was another contrast with Europe, where such matters were not considered to be the responsibility of the state and, until the late nineteenth century, were left in the hands of the Church. [234] The Chinese state saw moral instruction, amongst both the common people and the elites, as both desirable in itself and also as a means of exercising social control. For the elites, the state required that the Confucian classics be taught in schools as well as in preparation for the imperial exams. It promoted lectures for the common people on the virtues of Confucian behaviour, and imperial edicts frequently adopted a moral tone on issues such as social hierarchy and the payment of taxes. The state also sought to promote the worship of particular deities, while at the same time discouraging those which it saw as potential sources of social unrest. [235] On these matters, it was, with the exception of religious control, many centuries in advance of European states, which only began to concern themselves with such questions after the emergence of the modern nation-state and concomitant nationalism in the late nineteenth century. As the historian Bin Wong suggests: ‘From a Chinese perspective, the lack of concern for education and moral indoctrination in Europe constitutes a basic limitation on European rule, no less important than the absence of representative political institutions in China.’ [236] The same can be said of the manner in which the Chinese state, as a matter of course, engaged in surveillance of the population – by registration and other means – in order to be better able to anticipate sources of dissatisfaction and potential unrest. [237] A crucial mechanism in the exercise of social control was the clans or lineages, which were – and remain, even – far more important in China than they generally were in Europe. These were huge extended kinship groups, which traced their origins back to a common male ancestor (at the time of the 1949 Revolution there were still fewer than 500 surnames in China), [238] and were based on formal membership. They enjoyed huge authority, with the power of expulsion and the consequent threat of social ostracism. [239]
The imperial state was mindful of the importance of good governance and the need for restraint. This notion of good governance was intimately linked to the Confucian tradition, with its stress on the moral responsibility of the rulers: a continuing feature of imperial rule, for example, was a recognition that taxes needed to be kept low so that peasants would prosper, harmony would be promoted, resistance and rebellion avoided. [240] Nor was there a complete absence of accountability: imperial rule was always haunted by the possibility that the mandate of Heaven, and therefore its right to rule, might be withdrawn. During the Zhou dynasty (1100-256 BC) emperors claimed for the first time that their sanction to govern came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven (
