From Administrative Integration to Political Integration: The Recommendation System and Local Practices of the Ming Dynasty

Abstract

The recommendation approach to official selection was so popular in the early Ming Dynasty that it became an ancestral rule, which was given the legitimacy to be practiced throughout the Ming Dynasty. Since then, the drawbacks of recommendation had gradually emerged, but as one of the means of selecting talents, it was still parallel with the system of official selection and appointment administered by the Ministry of Personnel. In the middle Ming Dynasty, the power of recommendation was gradually transferred from the capital officials serving in central government agencies to the Ministry of Personnel, and it became gradually institutionalized to recommend and appoint the virtuous and capable from across the country. In the late Ming Dynasty, there were more and more cases of recommendation initiated by the local governments, which resulted from the top-down integration of local political and cultural resources by the imperial government through administrative means since the early Ming Dynasty. The change from the dominance of the imperial court to the initiative of local governments in the recommendation practice shows that the central government had gone through a process from administrative integration to political integration in integrating local resources. During this process, the imperial power, as the fundamental driving force to maintain the existence of the state and the operation of the government, as well as the cohesion of local governments, had always been the main force in achieving political integration.

Keywords

the Ming Dynasty / recommendation / selection of officials / administrative integration / political integration

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