Rigid Skeleton and Flexible Narrative: They Never Abolished the Seal; They Only Changed the Story They Told About It

Prevailing theories of state building focus on coercive power accumulation: warfare, resource extraction, and bureaucratic expansion. Yet a vital question remains: how does the state's institutional skeleton---the symbolic and procedural infrastructure sustaining daily governance---achieve standardization and cross-polity replication long after initial coercive conditions dissolve? This article answers via a longue-dur'ee comparison of polities across East Asia and proposes institutional layering. Governance architectures are functionally stratified. A foundational rigid skeleton---authority symbols, elite selection mechanisms, and unified administrative-legal rules---secures ruling operability. A flexible upper layer---ideology, cultural ethics, and legitimating narratives---secures normative compliance. The institutional innovations forged during the Warring States period and consolidated under the Qin-Han Empire form the original blueprint. Though later polities repeatedly reshaped ideological discourse and pursued de-Confucianization, they consistently preserved and reinforced this enduring institutional core. This article advances three theoretical fronts. It separates institutional skeleton replication from coercive state-building dynamics. It revises historical institutionalism through functional layering to explain hierarchical institutional replaceability. It further expands isomorphism theory by defining function-driven isomorphism as a fourth mechanism, alongside coercion, mimesis, and normative pressure.