REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 133administration, like the use of recommendation in recruitment, the granting of
local autonomy to a few feudal lords and the district magistrates of the central
administration, after the fall of the Later Han dynasty major changes were intro-
duced into Chinese social and political organization. The most prominent was
the emergence of a social aristocracy and the dominant role it played in imme-
diate successor states to the Han in the third century, the Wei (220-65) and Chin
(265-420) dynasties, and the Northern and Southern dynasties after 304. This
period in Chinese history was of crucial importance to Yu Hyongwon because
it enabled him to illustrate some of the major defects of aristocracy, particularly
its perversion of the classical model of recruitment.
Pedigree and Aristocracy in China, 220-589The general disruption that accompanied the fall of the Later Han transformed
social conditions in the third century and interrupted the trend toward the ratio-
nalization and bureaucratization of recruitment procedures. Yu noted that even
after the fall of the Later Han dynasty, Chu-ko Liang, ruler of the the Shu-Han
dynasty, in 223 was able to appoint officials on the basis of talent rather than
rank, and in Wei and Chin times (third century A.D.) magistrates and city offi-
cials appointed by the Ministry of Personnel (Li-pu) were allowed to hire their
own subordinates on the basis of village recommendation.37
This perpetuation of selection by talent stemmed from the introduction of two
new institutions that were established as means of official recruitment in the state
of Wei (220-65). Under the nine ranks (chiu-p'in) established in 220, aspirants
for office in local communities who passed an investigation of their merits were
assigned one of nine local ranks that made them eligible for a post in the cen-
tral bureaucracy.'s A new post called the Chung-cheng was established to eval-
uate candidates at the local level and recommend them to the Personnel Bureau
(Ssu-t'u fu) at the capita\.39 The post of Chung-cheng was created at the local
level because it was felt that the Bureau of Personnel at the capital was too remote
from the villages to determine the quality of candidates for office. Since many
villages contained new settlers who had migrated from other areas because of
political strife, the stationing of official talent scouts in the provinces was a rea-
sonable way to deal with the effects of social dislocation. At the same time, the
decentralization of recommendation approximated the ancient ideal of locating
evaluation and recruitment procedures in the local community. Although the
Chung-cheng was assigned to the commandery (chun) and not the village, he
was still a lot closer to the grass roots than the capital bureaucrats. Furthermore,
the assignment of rank to individuals under the nine-rank system was supposed
to place a mark of status on men of virtue, fulfilling another of the ancient ideals.
Despite the noble objectives of the new institutions, as time passed the Chung-
cheng eventually conferred rank without respect to an individual's moral qual-
ities, a practice undoubtedly caused by the growth of hereditary aristocracy during
the Northern and Southern dynasties (to the Sui reunification in 589). For both