Native Incumbency and Elite Networks in Song Dynasty Sichuan: Evidence of the Turn of the Mid-Eleventh Century from China Biographical Database (CBDB)

Robert M. Hartwell, in his path-breaking article on the transformation from the eighth to the sixteenth century, defined this transition as the demise and re-absorption of “a semihereditary professional bureaucratic elite” into “a multitude of local elite gentry families,” which it had hitherto coexisted with. Since Hartwell maintained that those local gentry elites had dominated the local scene since the Tang times or earlier and continued as such into Southern Song, change at the end of the eleventh century was not about the rise of local elites but rather about the demise of the professional political elite which had succeeded in monopolizing policymaking organs in the central government until the end of the eleventh century. As the data he collected are centered on high policymaking and financial officials, Hartwell’s argument tells more about the court side of the story and assumes continuity of elite groups in local society.