ABSTRACT
The idea that aggrieved people who fail to get satisfaction from local officials should be able to register their complaints with higher levels of the administration including the highest authority in the land may have appeared as early as the Zhou dynasty (c.1046–256 Bce). In the late Zhou, many important schools of thought began advocating key concepts such as heaven/nature, minben/people as the root, and heaven-human interaction that lay the foundations for natural resistance. These notions were further developed in the Han dynasty (202 Bce–220 Ce), which seems also to have projected certain complaint institutions such as the Lung Stone (feishi), back into the Zhou. Han Confucians praised those institutions and variations on them appeared in subsequent dynasties such as the Jin (265–420), Northern Wei (386–584), Liang (502–557), and Sui (589–618). The Tang dynasty (618–907), which took both the Zhou and the Han as models and which embraced the Buddhist value of compassion, systematized the complaint systems even as it imposed restraints on natural resistance under the law. The Song dynasty (907–1279), which was inspired by renewed forms of Confucianism, modified the inherited complaint systems in line with its generally lenient policies toward officials and the scholar elite. The Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), which reunified China after centuries of civil war, went further to accept even illegal skipping complaints as a way to control various power-holders. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which was founded by a commoner who paid considerable attention to popular welfare, temporarily ended the practice of sending complaints back down to local officials to be resolved. The Qing (1644–1911), which was more oriented to elite interests, experimented with punishing illegal skipping complainants while also dealing with the merits of the cases they brought to the center's attention. Administrators may have accepted the institutions simply as safety valves to vent popular discontent and facilitate their control of the people while the people may have resorted to them for their own purposes to check the abuses of local officials. But both states and populace seem to have agreed that they were essential parts of governance, too hot to hold for long yet too valuable to drop entirely.
