Rigid Skeleton and Flexible Narrative: The Legalist Legacy and State Building in East Asia

Prevailing theories of state building focus overwhelmingly on coercive power accumulation: warfare, resource extraction and bureaucratic expansion. Yet one vital question remains marginalized: how the state’s institutional skeleton—the symbolic and procedural infrastructure sustaining daily governance—achieves standardization and cross-polity replication long after initial coercive conditions disappear. This article answers this question via a longue-durée comparison of China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea, and proposes institutional layering. Governance architectures are functionally stratified. A foundational rigid skeleton includes authority symbols, elite selection mechanisms and unified administrative-legal rules to secure ruling operability. A flexible upper layer of ideology, cultural ethics and legitimating narratives functions to secure normative compliance. China’s Qin-Han Legalist synthesis forms the original blueprint. Shang Yang’s reforms built this institutional skeleton and embedded Legalist principles into widespread social consensus. Though Japan, Vietnam and Korea repeatedly reshaped ideological discourse and pursued de-Confucianization, they consistently preserved and consolidated this enduring Legalist institutional core. This paper 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.