Meritocracy and Dynasticism in China

该项目旨在调查前现代中国两种相互竞争的“Herrschaft”正当化模式：一种是凭借能力，另一种是凭借血统。它基于这样一种假设，即君主统治的主要制度，例如抗议或法庭会议，可以被视为平衡这两种合法要求的机制，并平衡精英官僚机构和统治机构的利益。重点是在早期中华帝国的精英和王朝招聘原则的应用，以及篡夺制度，这是受这些原则的影响。在公元的第一个千年里，篡夺使精英精英能够定期取代王朝统治者，并通过标准化的仪式程序重新调整两种使统治合法化的方式。相应的合法化战略也可以由诸如性别或性别认同等方面来决定。该项目采用“精英统治”的概念，旨在研究中国早期君主统治的制度结构。为此，我们将中国的篡夺案件与罗马古代和拉丁中世纪的相应过程进行比较。因此，该项目还试图将政治科学领域的最新研究置于背景之下，这些研究与精英统治有关，建立在中国古代政治概念的基础上，以便提出西方自由民主的替代方案。

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.