Let’s borrow/steal the three level model from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.1 The society portrayed in the novel is divided into three groups: Inner Party, Outer Party, Proles. The fictitious book within the book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, claims that “revolutions” can be modeled as the middle layer (Outer Party) recruiting the lowest layer (Proles) to overthrow the highest (Inner Party), which ends with the middle and highest swapping places and the lowest staying at the bottom.
We will steal this 1984 terminology to model the fall of Hàn in “Party” terms, and then maybe also argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s vision of a permanent “Inner Party” without threat of being overthrown is too pessimistic/optimistic, depending on what you consider a good or bad outcome.
Inner, Outer, and Prole during Hàn
The matches aren’t perfect due to the differing proportions, but we can still attempt an approximate matching of the three levels to the society of late Hàn: the Proles are the common peasantry and basically everyone without a position in or connection to the central Imperial bureaucracy (~95.8%), the Outer Party are the lower gentry and local elites who serve in the local-level support staff and the lowest level positions in the central bureaucracy (~4%), and the Inner Party is the upper gentry that staffs the higher level positions of the central bureaucracy (~0.2%).
There’s a fun bonus in here from stealing the model: the Emperor is Big Brother. If you’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four, you’ll know that (spoilers?) it actually does not matter at all if Big Brother is a real person or not. His importance is as a symbol to coordinate activity within the Party. So it was with the Emperor, especially in those final decades of Hàn, when the Emperor really was only a symbol of legitimacy to fight over, who did little actual ruling himself.
Step 1: Inner Party Dis-cohesion
I’ve mentioned two of the greatest families of Later Hàn, the Yuán clan of Rǔnán and Yáng clan of Hóngnóng, who in our three level model would be long established Inner Party members. But there’s a family I haven’t mentioned yet: the Liáng of Āndìng.2
Some of you are probably saying: “Huh, I don’t remember many famous Liáng mentioned in all the Three Kingdoms stories I’ve heard.” There’s a reason for that. They were, to use 1984 terminology, purged from the Inner Party.
After four generations as a great family, the Liáng clan was so well-established that its patriarch, Liáng Jì, was effectively in control of the empire, deciding who of the Imperial Liú family should be enthroned as the next Emperor whenever the current puppet child Emperor of Hàn died under suspicious circumstances.3 Then one of the enthroned Emperors, Liú Zhì (posthumously Emperor Huán), decided that he didn’t quite like the idea of staying Liáng Jì’s puppet. Most of the established great families of the “Inner Party” were already long-time clients and allies of the Liáng clan, however, so to make his move, Emperor Huán had to find some new friends: he enlisted the help of eunuch servants of the Imperial Palace to mobilize the Imperial guard and purge the Liáng clan.4
Oh yeah, I’m sure many of you with prior experience with Three Kingdoms stories are thinking, “Hey, I remember mentions of Emperors Huán and Líng; those are the Emperors who ruined the Hàn Empire by empowering eunuchs.” Well, there’s a reason why the eunuchs came to power, and it wasn’t just because some “idiot” Emperor decided “hey, why don’t I just ruin my own empire” for no reason.
In 1984 terminology, Big Brother got afraid a faction within the Inner Party was getting too powerful, and recruited a bunch of new members into the Inner Party to have enough backing to purge the dangerous faction.
Of course, the older members of the Inner Party didn’t like having their power diluted or even threatened by a bunch of new members who were, to add to the humiliation, literal eunuchs. So politics got partisan and very ugly during the reign of Emperor Huán and his adopted successor Emperor Líng (Liú Hóng),5 which led to the outright proscription of certain factions of the elite gentry families. The emergency of putting down the Huángjīn “Yellow Scarves”6 ended the proscription, showing that the eunuch and gentry factions of the “Inner Party” could still come together in extraordinary situations, but the underlying enmity between the factions remained.
When Emperor Líng died in late 189, the gentry factions placed pressure on the empress’s brother and new regent Hé Jìn,7 to take advantage of the succession to purge the eunuchs completely. His sister, the now dowager-empress, refused, wishing to keep the eunuch faction around as a counter-balance to the gentry clan factions. The Hé clan, after all, was not a long-established great gentry clan (by one account they were descended from butchers8); they had only come to power through connections with eunuch factions. But Hé Jìn was committed to allying with gentry factions, and decided to bolster his own position by a show of force: he summoned frontier generals and their troops to come to the capital, including a certain Dǒng Zhuó.
Swinging back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, this is what the novel gets wrong, or at least inaccurate, about the possibility of an Inner Party staying in power indefinitely by keeping the Outer Party under constant surveillance. The Inner Party needs to be internally loyal to itself, which means it has to maintain surveillance on itself on top of constant surveillance on the Outer. But there is always going to be Inner Party members who see and grab chances to take more power by back-stabbing other Inner Party members, and this often involves recruiting new members into the Inner Party from the Outer Party as reinforcements for their power plays. Internal loyalty doesn’t last when there is power to be stolen, and as a result internal factions within the Inner Party form. One day, the Inner Party is too divided against itself to properly keep up the surveillance. Some Inner Party members start recruiting more and more people from the Outer Party or even Proles to bolster the strength of their own factions against rival Inner Party factions.
One day, a certain Outer Party member gets invited into the Inner Party, a certain Outer Party member who doesn’t understand how the Party really works, a certain Outer Party member who doesn’t get the joke, and ends up breaking something really important.
Step 2: Big Brother Falls
As rumors of the impeding purge spread, the eunuch factions led a preemptive strike, assassinating Hé Jìn. The gentry factions struck back by attacking the Imperial Palace; Hé Jìn’s ally Yuán Shào (of the great Yuán clan of Rǔnán) led troops to slaughter over two thousand people inside the Palace, wiping out the eunuchs and killing some beardless men by mistake. The young Emperor Liú Biàn and his younger half-brother Liú Xié fled the Palace and the city in the confusion, but as they were found and returned to the city, they were intercepted by Dǒng Zhuó.9 The government officials ordered Dǒng Zhuó to withdraw his army, but Dǒng Zhuó responded that, seeing as how terribly the “Inner Party” government officials had just bungled everything, with the capital city burning and the Emperor himself driven out of it, none of them had any right to be trying to to boss him around. Dǒng Zhuó led his troops into the city, put himself in charge of the government, and, rather controversially, deposed Liú Biàn and enthroned Liú Xié (posthumously Emperor Xiàn).10 One might speculate that as Liú Biàn was around eighteen and Liú Xié around nine, enthroning to the younger brother was intended to make a regency situation easier to enforce. Another speculation would be that the move was aimed at preventing a rival faction forming around the dowager empress Hé, who was the birth mother of Biàn but not Xié. The dowager empress Hé was indeed killed mere days after her birth son was deposed.
In 1984 terminology, Dǒng Zhuó was an Outer Party member invited into the Inner Party to help fight in an Inner Party squabble but, upon seeing the turmoil in the Inner Party, thought to take over by seizing control of Big Brother himself. It didn’t work. Outer Party members don’t always get the joke of how the Party actually works.
Big Brother’s real power comes from being a symbol. A physical Big Brother has neither the time nor resources to monitor every last member of the Inner Party; the Party has to monitor itself. Big Brother is a symbol reminding the Inner Party members how to monitor each other in the right way to keep everything running smoothly. If things ever get to the point where a large enough number of Party members are disgusted enough about the situation to defect, they can defect quite easily by just rejecting Big Brother at the same time.
The Party members of Hàn, both Inner and Outer, both in the capital and out in the provinces, didn’t like the idea of this upstart Dǒng Zhuó just walking in and putting himself in charge (men like Liáng Jì at least had the sense to follow established protocol in taking power, thus protecting Big Brother’s status as a unifying symbol). So elite Party members across the Empire declared Zhuó’s control of the government illegitimate, and since his control came from the fact that his troops were occupying the capital, they started raising their own troops to forcefully remove him.
But when you decide to defect from the Party, you’re not only rejecting the situation that caused the defection, you’re implicitly rejecting the symbol of Big Brother too, even if you try very hard to pretend that you’re not. “That’s not really Big Brother” breaks the unifying power of the Big Brother symbol no matter how hard you claim to be loyal to the “real Big Brother,” because all of a sudden, “your Big Brother” and “that other guy’s Big Brother” aren’t necessarily the same thing anymore. You can’t coordinate with the other guy. When everybody in the Party has a different idea of what “Big Brother” is, then Big Brother doesn’t work as the unifying symbol making the Party run anymore. The Party isn’t unified anymore. The Party breaks up.
Step 3: Party members start their own Parties
As armies rose in the east, Dǒng Zhuó evacuated the Emperor further west. Neither side was able to destroy the other, and it quickly became clear to everyone that the “Old Party” was over. Former Party members had to start forming new Parties amid the chaos.
This is what much of the early stages of the fall of Hàn were about: warlords trying to build functional mini-states within the collapsing larger state, and then conquering one another. In 1984 terms, they were talented former Old Party members, both Inner and Outer, trying to rally together other former Party members and recruit talented Proles into efforts to build their own version of a New Party, and all these fledgling New Parties set about attacking and conquering one another.
And the most successful of these New Parties turned out to be mostly led by former Outer Party members.
The Cáo family of Pèi had managed to make it from the upper Proles into the Party through Cáo Téng using the eunuch fast-track, and was in the middle of trying to break into the Inner Party through Cáo Sōng and Cáo Cāo at the time of the collapse, but they were not yet fully accepted as long term Inner Party members (as the saying goes, it takes three generations to make a gentleman). When the fighting began, Cáo Cāo got his start as an ally of long-standing Inner Party member Yuán Shào.
The Liú family of Zhuó was an Outer Party family, and Liú Bèi was trying to work his way up within the Party, but he was not an accepted Inner Party member at the time of the collapse. In the early days of the civil war, Liú Bèi had to rely on more Inner-ish allies such as Gōngsūn Zàn and later Táo Qiān.
The Sūn family of Wú was an upper Prole/lower Outer Party family that was making headway within the Party through Sūn Jiān using a military service fast-track, with Sūn Jiān himself even starting to chip away at Inner Party entry by gaining mid-level centrally appointed bureaucracy positions. But at the time of the outbreak of war, Sūn Jiān had to align himself with long-standing Inner Party member Yuán Shù.
Proles, no matter how talented, tend to have trouble with Party building due to lack of actual experience with Party dynamics. Many of them have to instead join already forming New Parties led by former Party members. Some warlords of more Prole-ish origins like Zhāng Yān11 knew when to “cash out” and submit to more powerful rising New Parties. Other Prole-ish warlords like Lǚ Bù12 did not, to disastrous personal consequences.
On the other end, Inner Party members tend to be too stuck in the Old Party mindset, too out of touch to see how the world outside has changed and what a New Party needs to keep and needs to change in order to adapt. Warlords like Yuán Shào and Yuán Shù started out strong, only to be eclipsed and destroyed by more energetic and innovative rivals, many of whom had even started under their patronage.13
However, just because the first generation of leadership in the New Parties tend to be from the middle level Outer Party members of the Old Party system, doesn’t mean that they tend to stay there…
Step 4: In the long run…
This is another potential inaccuracy with how Nineteen Eighty-Four describes things: revolutions are not really so simple as “middle” and “high” switching places.
The Yuán clan of Rǔnán was devastated by the civil war, and yet a branch of the family ended up taking refuge with the growing Wú regime of their former clients of the Sūn clan; a daughter of Yuán Shù became a consort of Sūn Quán, and at one point was even offered the position of Empress, though she declined.14 Meanwhile in Yuán Shào’s branch, though a good number were killed in the wars against the future Wèi regime of the Cáo clan, the lineage survived through Yuán Shào’s son Yuán Xī, whose descendant Yuán Shùjǐ came to prominence as a top level official of the Táng dynasty.15
The Yáng clan of Hóngnóng stayed in prominence through the Hàn-Wèi-Jìn transitions. Though Yáng Biāo, who held the highest offices of Hàn at the time of Cáo Cāo taking custody of the Imperial Court, began as a political enemy of Cáo Cāo, his son Yáng Xiū willingly joined Cáo Cāo’s staff and wielded great power within it, and after the founding of Wèi, Cáo Pī even offered Yáng Biāo high office in the new Wèi bureaucracy, which Yáng Biāo declined, citing his ties to Hàn. Then, after the transition from Wèi to Jìn, Yáng Xiū’s son Xiāo held high office, while another branch of the Yáng clan of Hóngnóng rose to great power through the figure of Yáng Jùn,16 and even after Yáng Jùn was exterminated there was a Yáng Quánqī of another branch of the clan that came to prominence during Eastern Jìn,17 and several other branches rising to power during the Suí and Táng dynasties.18
Not all former Old Inner Party members make their own play for founding a New Party or die from misguided attachment to the Old Party; some do see the way things are changing and attach themselves to rising New Parties founded and led by talented Outer Party upstarts. But then, as the years pass and the New Party starts getting more settled, the old patterns of party politics start to emerge, and the former Old Inner members, with their better understanding of the old patterns, start taking over the New Inner Party.
Middle doesn’t really replace High. Some Middle manage to make the jump into High and some High do get thrown out, but most High get to stay High so long as they know when to defect from the Old Party to the New Party.
And so, though Sīmǎ Fáng may die as a retired Old Inner Party member of Hàn, his son Sīmǎ Yì joins and eventually usurps control of the New Inner Party of Wèi, and Yì’s grandson Yán even gets to become Big Brother for the New New Party of Jìn.
Some Lessons
I am assuming that most readers here are, like me, Proles (If you’re a Party Member, what are you doing reading this? You’ve got more important things to be doing). Well, if you should ever suspect that the empire you’re living in is, heavens forbid, relatively close to a Party collapse scenario,19 the best thing to do is probably to try to figure out who are the most talented Outer Party members nearest you. This may be more difficult than it sounds, as media attention will probably be focusing on Big Brother and Inner Party members all the way to the end. In 189, most eyes were not on relatively minor “Outer Party” figures like Cáo Cāo or Sūn Jiān, but on the Emperor himself and on the top “Inner Party” figures like Yuán Shào and Yuán Shù.
Alternatively, if you are a Prole of some ambition or talent, you may want to try to break into the Outer Party yourself, to be well positioned to rise high into the Inner part of a New Party should the Old Party come crashing down.
But be warned, the New Parties will then have a lot of purges as the members fight over where to draw the new Inner vs Outer line and who gets to be on which side of it. In the longer run, most of the ones on the New Inner side will turn out to have been those who were on the Inner side of the Old Party too. We’ve already talked a bit about Sīmǎ Yì’s bloody purges to seize control of Wèi’s New Party. We should probably talk a bit about the troubles that appeared in the New Parties of Shǔ and Wú at some point as well. More later.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel. I recommend checking it out, if only so that this article will actually make some sense.
See Hòu Hàn shū (HHS) 34 for the Liáng clan.
There is strong circumstantial evidence that the Emperor Zhì, Liú Zuǎn, was poisoned at Liáng Jì’s order. See HHS 6 for the annals of Emperors Shùn, Chōng, and Zhì.
See HHS 7 for the annals of Emperor Huán.
See HHS 8 for the annals of Emperor Líng.
Also “Yellow Turbans” in some older translations, but I personally dislike this rendering as rather misleading given how most people imagine “turbans.” The titular turbans were thin strips of cloth wrapped around the forehead like a headband.
See HHS 69 for Hé Jìn.
See HHS 10 for the Dowager Empress Hé, which mentions their reported linage.
See HHS 72 and SGZ 6 for Dǒng Zhuó.
See HHS 9 for the annals of Emperor Xiàn.
SGZ 8.
SGZ 7, HHS 75.
SGZ 6, HHS 74, HHS 75.
SGZ 49.
See Xīn Táng shū 74, Jiù Táng shū 91, Xīn Táng shū 120.
JS 40.
JS 84
The founder of Suí, Yáng Jiān, claimed to be a distant descendant of a branch of the Hóngnóng Yáng clan; see Suí shū 1. Yáng Sù, a foundational minister of Suí, was also a Hóngnóng Yáng clan descendant; see Suí shū 48.
No need to panic though. Party collapse scenarios often take a lot longer than most might estimate. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, people were complaining about Hàn being in obvious decline and in danger of collapse for a century before the collapse actually happened. You’ve probably got a few decades more than you think.