A Scholar of the Song
Assistant Professor of History Zoe Shan Lin wins an important fellowship to continue her research into medieval China
For Zoe Shan Lin, there’s nothing distant or remote about the history of China during the Southern Song dynasty, a period marked by advancements in printing and other forms of technology, increased urbanization, and the growth of a sophisticated centralized bureaucracy.
The assistant professor of history has a knack for combing through government documents and other primary sources from the 12th and 13th centuries to find the hidden, human side to the story of the Southern Song.
Recently, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation have recognized her work, awarding her a major long-term fellowship that supports emerging scholars. Lin is one of eight recent Ph.D.s from the U.S. and Canada to receive the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies. The award provides up to $45,000 to allow recipients to take a leave from their university and college responsibilities in order to advance scholarly research and writing projects.
“Zoe’s colleagues in the History Department are absolutely thrilled that her research has been recognized by as significant an institution as the American Council of Learned Societies,” said Sarah Duff, associate professor and chair of the History Department. “We are so proud of Zoe, and are wildly excited for the book that this fellowship will help her to write.”
An up-close view
Lin will spend the spring semester working on her first book, Playing with Rules: Human Mechanisms, Political Negotiation, and Local Sustenance, 1127-1279, which looks at the human, or non-institutional, mechanisms of political communication and decision-making in Southern Song China. Having this time to finish researching and writing means a lot to her, and she appreciates both the fellowship funding agencies and Colby for making it possible.
“To take a semester off, it takes a lot of resources, and I have super supportive colleagues, chair, and also dean to support the implementation of this fellowship,” she said. “I feel very, very grateful for the resources we have at Colby.”
Lin has also enjoyed learning more from the American Council of Learned Societies about how to present her work to the public more broadly, not just to scholars who are already well-versed in aspects of her field of research. To do this, she’s designing a role-playing game in which students can play the part of a county magistrate, emperor, or official of the neighboring jurisdiction in order to get an inside view of this chapter of medieval China.
“One thing I always want in my teaching is to teach the particularities and complexities of a certain case or system,” she said. “It’s easy to make moral judgments, to say, ‘This is so backward and different from us,’ and then walk away. But it’s important to actually understand what is going on there so that you can better engage with the differences.”
A unique historic period
The Song Dynasty was an imperial dynasty that ruled China from 960 to 1279. Because of a geopolitical crisis that happened in 1127, when the regime lost control of the northern half of the territory and had to flee to the south, historians divide the period into two parts: the Northern Song and the Southern Song.
Lin’s research focuses on the Southern Song period.
“This geopolitical crisis brought a huge change to how the Song Dynasty functioned,” she said. “I got interested in the Song period because of all the economic, political, and social changes that happened.”
A complex economy and large, sophisticated bureaucracy had evolved in China during the Northern Song, and the dynasty needed a competent and educated scholar-official class to keep things running smoothly.
Officials instituted a civil examination process to make sure there would be enough trained bureaucrats, and through this, a talented person, even if they did not come from a wealthy or influential family, could pass the exam and raise their own fortunes as they joined the ranks of bureaucratic officials.
“It was an opening up of social mobility,” Lin said.
‘One thing I always want in my teaching is to teach the particularities and complexities of a certain case or system. It’s easy to make moral judgments, to say, “This is so backward and different from us,” and then walk away. But it’s important to actually understand what is going on there so that you can better engage with the differences.’
Zoe Shan Lin, Assistant Professor of History
Changes in the Southern Song
In the Southern Song, new dynamics emerged in both the state and society. One of those had to do with the increased importance of those who were educated but unable to secure official titles. Despite that, these elites took active roles in local affairs, sometimes filling gaps left by the state. It was an important development, Lin said.
“In the study of the Song Dynasty, there is a prevailing notion that the Southern Song is a time when the state retreated, and societal power started to grow independently from the state,” she said. “It grew into something that showed signs of civil society, which scholars studying late imperial China have often traced back to the Song. In terms of the 13th century, I think at that time it was quite unique.”
Meanwhile, the central government was constantly wary of conquest by northern rivals like the Jurchens and then the Mongols, and focused primarily on raising enough money to fund a strong military. The constant need for taxes led to a more fiscally centralized state that required many levels of local officials to make sure money kept flowing from the people to the dynasty.
This created a dilemma for local officials, who had to navigate the competing pressures of the state and society—a key focus of Lin’s research.
Traditionally, the central government was responsible for taking care of the people, including providing famine relief and organizing defense militias. During the Southern Song, however, the state pulled back from some aspects of local government while still continuing to require local officials to collect taxes and manage local welfare. The professor examined how local officials balanced demands from the state with the needs of local communities, ultimately discovering a better understanding of how the state actually functioned. This sheds new light on state–society relations in the Southern Song.
“I aim to shift the focus to local officials to reveal how these critical players in local administration got things done,” Lin said. “I want to unpack the nitty-gritty of state functioning rather than treating the state as a monolithic, abstract entity that simply retreated from localities.”
Working the system
Lin and other Song Dynasty scholars have been able to learn a lot about this time period because it coincided with the development of printing technology. People intentionally preserved their personal letters and other writings by publishing them in printed books for their descendants.
Still, it’s not a complete record. Sometimes what was saved documented how the government was supposed to function—not what actually happened.
“What I’m trying to do is look at how it actually functioned,” she said. “That’s where I got started. I knew the story couldn’t simply be just the retreat of the state and the rise of the local elite. It must be more complicated than that.”
That’s exactly what she found when she dug into the record. As these local officials worked to serve both the centralized state government and their local communities, they had to creatively find ways to work the system and their networks to achieve the best possible outcome in any given situation.
Lin came up with a hypothesis for how they did this, which in her book she calls ‘‘extra-procedural maneuvers.’
“It means that they developed something on the side of the formal institution, but without confronting the existing institutional arrangement,” the professor said. “They would subtly find opportunities to activate the untold flexibility within the system. Or sometimes, what they would do is ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”
A less monolithic state
For example, if local officials needed timely famine relief, they would simply open the granaries and distribute grain to the hungry populace. At the same time, they would send a message to the government offering apologies for their actions, asking to be punished for what they had done.
“And they knew that the central government would not punish them. These were the hidden rules that people knew,” Lin said. “Another example of extra-procedural maneuvers was using personal connections to help facilitate negotiations over officials’ businesses.”
It took both insider knowledge and individual initiative to be able to play the bureaucratic game successfully, something that continues to resonate in China today.
“Divided interests and the use of networks are still a very important part of political and institutional functioning of the state,” Lin said.
According to Duff, Lin’s research on the Song Dynasty bureaucrats is important both for what it reveals about individual relationships with the state in China during this period and for people’s understanding of what constitutes state authority.
“When we pay attention to the people who actually do the work of running the state, it begins to look far less monolithic and, indeed, powerful,” Duff said.
