Personnel Management in China's Early Imperial Period: Toward an Integrative Approach to Early Chinese History

Chinese archaeology over the past decades has unearthed many new sources in the form of walled sites, cemeteries, roads, elaborately furnished tombs, but also much new textual material. Archaeologists have widely used Sima Qian’s Shiji, a history of China from the beginning of time until c.100 BCE, to interpret the new archaeological finds, even as revisionist scholars blame Shiji for having created an almost inescapable narrative of a “national” essence that was transmitted from dynasty to dynasty. This paper will ask whether and how to meet revisionist critiques leveled against Shiji and other transmitted texts while also embracing the traditional sources in all their richness, that is, as more than repositories of historical facts. This challenge can only be met by throwing at all our sources the full toolkit of history.

This paper will use an example from China’s early imperial period to clarify this position. Newly published archaeological texts have revealed the existence of an elaborate and intricate system that governed the recruitment and career management of imperial officials. This system allowed the regime to recruit local knowledge holders and engage them in the imperial project, while offering the local men it engaged the prospect of potentially transformative geographical and social mobility. In Shiji, however, this system is barely mentioned, and, when it is mentioned, it is ridiculed as not able to produce worthy men for office. Seeking to explain this remarkable silence, the paper will yield insights into both the elaborate HR operations of the early Chinese bureaucracy and the attitudes towards these recruits that prevailed in court circles and led to this system being ignored as a worthy topic of historical investigation. Utilizing new approaches and new sources to challenge longstanding interpretive traditions will help integrate early Chinese history into a global history of antiquity.