Shan Lin

This manuscript examines human mechanisms—non-institutional processes of political communication and decision-making initiated by local officials in Southern Song China. It focuses on how these officials bent the rules or employed innovative approaches to secure food and financial resources within their jurisdictions, navigating heavy central demands and intense competition with neighboring localities. It demonstrates that the state was not a monolithic, top-down entity but operated through the divergent agendas of individual officials, revealing horizontal, bottom-up dynamics crucial to the state's function. The project argues that these human mechanisms, alongside formal institutions, underpinned the state's practical workings amid fiscal pressures in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries.