State Evolution and Governance in Ancient China
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- ISBN 9781041290711
- Weight: 780g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 03 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book employs the analytical framework of "relational superposition" to explain the continuity, breakthroughs, and repetitions of Chinese state evolution.
Specifically, it elucidates how, after Qin Shi Huang’s unification of China, the ancient Chinese state and its governance transcended the dominance of kinship relations and shifted to territorial relations. This shift formed a super-large territorial state. Sustaining this state was an imperial system that included new institutional factors, such as centralized power represented by imperial authority, the prefecture-county bureaucracy, and the household-official system. Factors associated with the long-standing kinship system reemerged in new forms within the imperial system. Simultaneously, the imperial state reproduced relationships between itself and mandarins, scholar-officials, peasants, merchants, and soldiers that evolved through interaction. Consisting of 13 chapters, the book explores the process of state formation and governance, as well as the dominant underlying relationships from the unification of China by Qin Shi Huang to the late Qing Dynasty, through thematic discussions.
The book will be valuable for scholars and students of political science, history, and sociology.
Xu Yong, Distinguished Professor of the "Changjiang Scholar" Program in Liberal Arts under the Ministry of Education; Senior Professor at Central China Normal University; specializes in research on Chinese politics and grassroots governance; author of Nationalisation, Peasantry and Rural Integration in China, among other works. Former Convener of the Political Science Discipline Review Group of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, Member of the Social Sciences Division of the Ministry of Education's Social Science Committee, among other positions.
