On the Civil Transformation of the Southern Tang (937–976)

This article aims to elaborate on the efforts made by Xu Zhigao and his descendants to implement a new practice that recruited local literati to positions of power as well as the extent to which the practice helped facilitate civil transformation and civil administration for their regime. One important way to achieve civil transformation was to bureaucratize the local administration, which involved staffing the mechanism with civil officials. After succeeding in the civil service examinations, local literati of humble origin could take advantage of this possibility for prosperity and honor their families by means of becoming part of the bureaucracy. However, the life span of the Southern Tang was limited to only thirty-nine years. Except for the relatively low number of those who successfully passed the civil service examinations, most of the meritorious officials and official families still considered relying on the protection privilege to be the ideal way to launch the bureaucratic careers of their descendants. Therefore, although the civil service examinations may have exerted some positive impact on civil transformation and civil administration, the advantages did not last long enough to thoroughly change the administrative feature of the Southern Tang.