Research Of Northern Song Dynasties’ Prime Minister Regime

The prime minister is one of the most important political institutions in ancient China. As the turning point of China’s history from the Middle Ages into the modern era, Northern Song dynasty’s prime minister regime was uniquely, it inherited from the Sui and Tang dynasties on the basis of "San sheng" structure, and gradually developed its new features like multiple leadership and group consultations, and made distinguished contributions to the political, economic and social affairs of Northern Song dynasty. In the later stage of Northern Song dynasties’history, along with fiercely party conflicts, the regime was gradually destroyed, Prime minister with absolute power has dominated the regime, which incurred serious problems such as corruption and mistakenly foreign policy, and lead to the final destruction of the Northern Song dynasty ultimately.This paper is divide into three parts:introduction, body and conclusion. Introduction illustrates the origin and significance of the Northern Song’s prime minister regimes’research, clarifies some core concepts of this research, introduce the study methodology, and lists relevant papers and citation sources.The body has five chapters. Chapter One describes the origin and evolution of prime minister regime before the Northern Song dynasty, and illustrates the development of Northern Song dynasties’prime minister system. The prime minister system of ancient China’s evolution orbit has been presented from the "San Gong" to the "San sheng", and then to the Cabinet in its more than One thousand years of history, by differentiated the 176 years history of prime minister’s regime of northern song dynasty into three period——the early, the middle and the late stages, we could find out that the made up of this regime was changing from"San sheng" to"Liang sheng" or even "Yi sheng".Chapter Two segments the prime minister regime into four parts——foreign interface, system culture, system target and organization formation by using structural functionalism analysis method, and point out that it has been placed by the imperial examination system, literati culture, literati dictatorship and group lead-ship according to the history of the Northern Song dynasty, described how its formed and developed, and pointed out that they common constitute the structure of Northern Song’s prime minister regime.Chapter Three constituted contributions of prime minister regime’s four components, they separately played functions like environmental adaption, model sustainability, target acquisition and system integration. These functions operated under the grown and maturity phases of prime minister regime of Northern Song dynasty, contributed an important role in every aspects of the Song society.Chapter Four focus on the later history of the Northern Song dynasty, discussing the deterioration of prime minister regime’s components since the happening of "Yuan you geng hua" event, the deteriorated and alienated components of the system cannot play its functions continually to sustain the prime minister system. Imperial examination system got rigid, literati culture corrupted, officials’ diathermy lowed, and literatis’ common aims and principles depleted. The internal rot of the prime minister regime made the power of prime ministers inflated, replaced the ruling mode of Group consultation by solo dictatorship, which caused the whole system collapsed, and lead to the destruction of the Northern Song dynasty eventually.The final chapter illustrated the legacy of Northern Song dynasties’ prime minister regime, provide some ideas and inspiration for the present reform of political regime.As the last content of the paper, the conclusion summarize the text, and reemphasize the meaning of research.