THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY XIANBEI STATES TO THE REUNIFICATION OF THE CHINESE EMPIRE

The autocratic state in China was largely a product of the antagonism between the agrarian and pastoral economies. The pastoralists, who required the supplementary income from border agriculture and trade as well as from raids of their more wealthy farming neighbors, constituted a consistent threat to the stability of the agrarian society. This threat, backed by the pastoralists' advantage in mounted warfare, could be effectively countered only by forcing them away from the marginal lands along the border and on into full mounted nomadism on the steppe. This task required a thorough mobilization of the agrarian society's wealth into the hands of a centralized administration.; When the imperial court was so undermined by the competing powers of large landholding clans that it could no longer provide such centralized rule, it lost the ability to resist the nomads. This had happened by 317 A. D., and then the only force capable of restoring an autocratic regime, above localized interests, was with the nomads.; The migration from the steppe to North China entailed a move from a society in which political organization was contained in kinship relations to one which required the maintaining of a state structure. Most of the early foreign regimes were little more than military occupations which tended to last no longer than their strongmen lived. The Murong, A Xianbei people, however, were markedly more successful. They established their Former Yan state in the Northeast, insulated from the chaos of the Central Plain. By using a marriage alliance with another Xianbei group, the Duan, they were able to maintain a stable succession over a number of generations. Since they themselves represented the threat from the steppe, foreign regimes in China had to be based on some such kinship device, rather than on a bureaucratic structure.; Another Xianbei group, the Tuoba, succeeded in establishing over all of North China, by the mid-fifth century, what the Murong had established in the isolated Northeast. The first step in the process was extending their dominance over all peoples on the steppe--something no other pretender to rule in China had accomplished. This control gave the Tuoba the advantage of being the last steppe people (in the fourth/fifth century) to migrate into North China. As the Tuoba gained their initial foothold in the Central Plain--by defeating the Murong and seizing the bulk of the Former Yan's territory--they forced the recalcitrant pastoralists back out onto the open steppe, under the leadership of the Rouran. The sharp distinction between the agrarian and pastoral economies, which had broken down with the decline of the Chinese empire, was thus redrawn.; During the half century it took for the Tuoba to extend their Northern Wei state across North China, they based their rule on the Compatriot (guo ren) community. This community was composed of the steppe peoples who had submitted to Tuoba leadership, by choice or by force, and whose loyalties were maintained through marriage ties and distribution of seized booty. This latter was decisive, since it precluded the need for establishing regularized systems for official salaries or tax collection, and thus allowed personal ties to dominate. But it could only last as long as the state had territories and peoples to conquer. When these had been exhausted, the structure of Compatriot privileges began to fall victim to the growing need to rationalize; to sinify the Northern Wei. The culmination of this process came with the rule of Xiao Wendi, whose reforms both undercut Tuoba dominance and laid the foundations for a restored Chinese empire.