CHAPTER 16
Reforming the Central Bureaucracy
~e purpose ofYu's treatment of bureaucratic organization was summarized in
a brief paragraph at the end of his essay on the subject that the task of the mid-
dle-dynastic period was to reduce the trend toward the increase of officials by
the proclivity of emperors to exercise their power to create posts. Emperor T'ai-
tsung at the beginning of the T'ang dynasty had proclaimed that he could rule
the empire and "sufficiently accommodate the outstanding and talented men of
the empire" with a staff of only 730 men, but by the end of the T'ang, the prob-
lem of superfluous officials had thrown the system into confusion. Emperor T'ai-
tsu of the Ming also began his dynasty by cutting down on posts and making
the creation of new ones a crime, but the Ming suffered the same problem that
had plagued earlier dynasties. 1
PROLIFERATION AND COMPLEXITY IN POST-HAN CHINA
The Chou ModelYu derived the fundamental principles of bureaucratic organization from his treat-
ment of classical texts, subsequent commentaries, and post-classical Chinese
bureaucratic history. The first of these could be described as the principle of econ-
omy, by which organization was to be kept simple and the number of offices
reduced to a minimum necessary for the achievement of necessary tasks. This
concept was closely tied to a second principle, the rational division of labor in
government affairs to eliminate all duplication or overlap, a procedure often
referred to by the phrase "establishing offlces and dividing up responsibilities"
(solgwan-bunjik). Yu applied this principle to his own time and called for elim-
ination of all superfluous positions.
Yu believed that the founders of the Chou dynasty had adhered to the princi-
ple of simplicity established by the sage emperors of remote antiquity, Yao and
Shun, who were able to govern their empires with but one hundred officials.
Even when matters became more complex in the Hsia and Shang dynasties (late
612