Meritocracy and Dynasticism in China

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The project aims to investigate two competing modes of justifying ‘Herrschaft’ in premodern China: one by virtue of competence, the other by virtue of descent. It rests on the assumption that the main institutions of monarchic rule, e. g. remonstrance or court conferences, can be conceived of as mechanisms to equilibrate these two legitimatory claims and to balance the interests of the meritocratic bureaucracy and the ruling house. The focus is on the application of meritocratic and dynastic principles of recruitment in the early Chinese Empire as well as on the institution of usurpation, which was influenced by these principles. During the first millennium AD, usurpation enabled meritocratic elites to regularly replace the dynastic ruler and realign the two ways of legitimizing rule once again by means of a standardized ritual programme. The corresponding legitimation strategies could also be shaped by aspects such as gender or gender identity. Employing the concept of ‘meritocracy’, the project aims to investigate the institutional structure of monarchic rule in early China. For this purpose, Chinese cases of usurpation are to be compared with corresponding processes in Roman antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. Thereby, the project also seeks to contextualize recent research in the field of political science, which, with reference to meritocratic rule, builds on ancient Chinese political concepts in order to propose alternatives to Western liberal democracy.