Westminster and the Xiezhi: An Integrity Branch?

01/06/2022

Unlike the original Westminister tradition, the Chinese Imperial Civil Service had a set of dress codes for officials: a way, so to speak, to distinguish the different classes and ranks within each class.

Each rank had its own belts, hats and trim. The top rank had two stately cranes soaring above clouds, and the lowest rank had a pair of earth-bound quails pecking the grass. The military ranks tended to rely on tigers, bears and the like.

According to Huang (1981) and Hucker (1966), the censorial officials—those who supervised the integrity of the government mechanisms —had a simple uniform, identical for all members, regardless of rank, that displayed the Xiezhi on the right-hand side over the heart. Those who know Chinese scholarship will know that the Xiezhi could detect good from evil through their sense of smell – and would act ferociously when it decided something immoral had occurred.

The Xiezhi—or censorial system—was organized as a separate branch of government. Its goal was to maintain oversight of all governmental activities. It was charged with enforcing proper behaviour and balancing the inbuilt tensions between judges, policy advisors, budget holders, and central and local officials.

If we use Rhodes’s version of the Westminster model, the Xiezhi would sit outside the system but embrace it.

The success of the imperial tradition as a system of public administration is still seen today, and it is often attributed to the power and vigilance of the Xiezhi.

The question for the Westminster model has always been who oversees how the component parts work in harmony, and in the case of Aotearoa-New Zealand, what happens when executive parts (the accountability of ministers to parliament and the constitutionally independent bureaucracy nested in a non-partisan and expert civil service) become too strong for the other three parts, and relatedly if the institutional cultures and behaviour in the bureaucracy become problematic.

Maybe the questions are: Do we need a xiezhi? Do we need a fourth branch of government? What might an integrity branch look like?

References

Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, Yale Uni P,
Newhaven (1981) pp53-54.
Charles O Hucker, The Censorial System of Ming China, Stanford Uni P, Stanford,
California (1966) p3.