The integrity branch of government.(Law)

THE SUMPTUARY RULES of the Chinese Imperial Civil Service established a rigidly defined set of dress requirements for all public officials: from the black lacquer-treated hats with protruding wings and the black boots trimmed with white lacquer to the ceremonial belts backed with jade, rhinoceros horn, gold or silver. Each distinctive sub-unit or rank of the civil service also had a badge of rank in the form of a cloth chess piece embroidered, in the case of the civil hierarchy, with birds in pairs. The top rank had two stately cranes soaring above clouds. The lowest rank had a pair of earth-bound quails, pecking the grass. The military ranks wore breast patches carrying images of fierce animals such as lions, tigers, bears and panthers.

There was one distinct civil service unit with a unique system of badge identification. Western scholars, by an inaccurate analogy with the Roman administrative system, called this unit the "censorial" or "supervising" branch of government. Its role was to maintain the integrity of the mechanisms of governance. Civil officials in this branch had an embroidered breast patch, which was identical for all members of the branch, regardless of rank. It displayed a legendary animal called a Hsieh-chih which could detect good from evil and, allegedly, could smell an immoral character from a distance, whereupon the Hsieh-chih would leap upon the person and tear him or her to pieces.

The Chinese censorial system was organised as a separate branch of government to maintain surveillance over all other governmental activities and thereby enforce proper behaviour through processes of impeachment, censure and punishment. It also had the function of initiating recommendations for change of governmental policies, practices or personnel. The success of the Chinese Imperial tradition, a system of administration, manifest in its longevity, has been attributed to the power and vigilance of the censorate.

The thirteenth-century Mongol emperor Kublai Khan once said of his governmental structure: "The Secretariat is my left hand, the Bureau of Military Affairs is my right hand, and the Censorate is the means for my keeping both hands healthy."

Insofar as the Chinese system had a separation of powers, which given the overriding authority of the emperor could not be rigid, it was the censorate rather than the judicial arm of government that could be characterised as sufficiently independent to constitute such a separation. One of the means by which this independence was enforced was that censors had a right to directly address the throne by means of written memorials, without any intervening official commentary. If not independence in our sense, there was a substantial degree of institutional autonomy.

Of course, like any other branch of government the censorate was liable to develop institutional interests of its own. There is a natural tendency in any surveillanee mechanism to come to believe that the administration of government exists for the purposes of being investigated. There would naturally be times when these processes were taken too far. One Imperial Grand Secretary complained about the continued intervention of censors in matters of administration. He said they were like the "squawkings of birds and beasts".

In the 1920s, Sun Yat-sen proposed that the Republic of China adopt a five yuan or branch system of government comprised of three branches from the Western governmental tradition--executive, legislative and judicial--and two from China's past: an examination branch and a control or integrity branch. When an American constitutional lawyer recently proposed that modern constitutions should now incorporate a separate institutionalised integrity branch of government, another American scholar drew attention to the similarity between that proposal and the Chinese imperial tradition adopted by Sun Yat-sen.