and the Ming, that the formal educational system can promote cultural tradi-
tionalism and rote learning rather than innovation.
In the later Han this effort at autocratic state control of the economy, never
entirely successful, increasingly broke down. Peasant farmers generally became
debtors and tenants of large private estates. State monopolies, which had been
operated through the intermediaries of franchised merchants, were transferred
to local administration and eventually into private hands. The centralized
bureaucracy continued in existence, perhaps even expanded, but exerted less
control. Power struggles went on among the patrimonial household staff, the
court aristocracy, and the various factions of central and local administrators;
something like an educated gentry stratum was forming as education ex-
panded, but its effective control was small. After 100 c.e. government revenues
fell, and the government became incapable of providing disaster relief in the
countryside. Peasant uprisings were organized around religious movements,
using the cultural capital of the anti-Confucian opposition, and giving shape
to an incipient Taoist church. When the military resources of the large estates
surpassed that of the central government, the state broke apart.
The “medieval” period of the next 400 years was one of political fragmen-
tation. At first there were the warring Three Kingdoms, then a brief reunifica-
tion under the Chin dynasty (265–316). The old Han capital at Loyang saw
an upsurge of intellectual life at this time, somewhat misleadingly labeled
“Neo-Taoist”; its carriers were the court nobility and what remained of a
Confucian gentry or officialdom. The functions of the bureaucracy must have
been nominal. The money economy largely disappeared; economic control was
in the hands of the large estates, and the ruler’s private estates near the capital
provided most of his resources. The landed magnates collected their own armed
retainers, including nomadic tribes recruited as mercenaries. When these mili-
tary forces formed their own opportunistic alliances, the nominally centralized
state was again destroyed. In this way armies of Huns took north China in
309–316, with considerable devastation and loss of population. Many Chinese
fled to the south, where an independent state was maintained until China was
reunified by the Sui dynasty in 589. South China underwent considerable
economic development, but the military and administrative power of the
central government was weak, and economic control was in the hands of large
autarkic estates. There were uprisings and civil wars throughout the period,
and five nominal changes of dynasty. North China, by contrast, was frequently
divided among warring states built on tribal coalitions of Huns, Turks, Mon-
gols, or Tibetans. There was one period of fairly considerable unification in
the north, from about 440 to 530, when the Toba (Turkish) Empire subjugated
most of the other northern states.
The overall process was not so much a conquest of China by ethnic aliens160 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths