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Authors: Yuri Pines

Tags: #General, #History, #Ancient, #Political Science, #Asia, #History & Theory, #China

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The nomadic challenge to the notion of unity recurred in the tenth century, in the aftermath of the Tang dynasty’s demise. The northeastern Khitan tribesmen formed the new Liao dynasty (907–1125), which swiftly established its hegemony over the eastern section of the steppe belt, and over sixteen northeastern prefectures of China proper. Unlike

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other nomadic states, the Liao from its inception acted as a proper “Chinese” dynasty: its rulers adopted the Chinese imperial title and claimed to be true heirs of the great Tang dynasty. As such they were expected to try to unify all of China under their aegis; and their active involvement in the affairs of northern China in the post-Tang era could have suggested precisely this course of affairs. In 947, Liao briefly occupied Kaifeng, the capital at the time of northern China, and for a short while—before their rapid withdrawal—it seemed that China faced a new period of nomadic rule in the north, and potentially in the whole of the country.
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These expectations notwithstanding, Liao rulers resisted the temptation to enter the nightmarish politics of divided China. They continued to maintain a dual identity, combining nomadic and Chinese traditions in their administration, and appeared to be satisfied to rule over just the sixteen prefectures of China proper. Liao remained the most powerful state in East Asia even after the Song dynasty reunified most of China in 960; and its military prowess enabled it to negotiate an exceptionally favorable treaty with the Song in 1005. According to the Treaty of Shanyuan, the Song emperor recognized his Liao counterpart as his equal; Liao retained the sixteen prefectures and received huge annual payments from the Song court. The treaty proved remarkably viable: aside from brief conflicts in 1042 and 1074–1076, both sides maintained peace, even if, at times, grudgingly.
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In terms of realpolitik, the Shanyuan Treaty was a good bargain for the Song: even annual payments to Liao were minuscule in comparison with the costs of war, and lasting peace allowed Song rulers to create a remarkably stable and efficient state. And yet the treaty undermined the very foundations of dynastic legitimacy. Recognizing the equal status of the Liao emperor was bad enough; but it could be tolerated if the Khitans remained pure aliens, like the Turks, Uighurs, or Tibetans, whose independent and equal status had been recognized by China’s rulers in the past. Yet Liao presented itself as a Chinese dynasty; it demanded equality in terms of Chinese diplomatic protocol; and it ruled Chineseinhabited territories to the south of the Great Wall. Its persistence meant that the Song emperors failed to complete the unification of the realm, and this challenged their position as “True Monarchs.” To aggravate the matter, the normalization of two concurrent emperors encouraged new players, most notably the Tangut Xi Xia kingdom (1038–1227), to attempt to create yet more loci of recognized authority on a par with the Song and the Liao. The notion of the singularity of the Chinese Son of Heaven had been greatly compromised.
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Members of the Song political and intellectual elite faced a difficult task in trying to come to terms with the new situation. While the practical advantages of the Shanyuan Treaty and the lasting peace on the vulnera

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ble northern frontier were self-evident, and while the exceptionality of the Liao in comparison with earlier nomadic polities was readily recognized, the idea of lasting parity with the Liao was nonetheless considered abnormal. In the short term, Song intellectuals were ready to admit the inevitable bifurcation between the imperial rhetoric and the reality; but in the long term the insistence on the universality of the emperor’s power could not be dismissed.
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Suffice it to mention that two of the leading Song intellectuals, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) and Sima Guang (10191086), argued in influential essays that the only true criterion of dynastic legitimacy is the ability to unify “All-under-Heaven.”
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Clearly, the Song rulers failed to do so. What impact did this have on their legitimacy?

Ouyang and Sima did not pose the question directly; they were not warmongers, after all. However, their writings and others of that ilk created an atmosphere of deep dissatisfaction with the Shanyuan Treaty and fueled latent hopes for change. Even after a century of largely peaceful coexistence with the rival court, this was considered an aberration, to be corrected whenever conditions permitted. “Irredentism” (or, more precisely, the drive to finalize unification) had deeply influenced the Song court since the second half of the eleventh century; and it eventually caused the dynastic disaster: Emperor Huizong (r. 1101–1125) chose to ally with Liao’s foes, the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234).
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The Jurchens overpowered the Liao but almost immediately moved against Song, driving it south of the Yangzi and eventually enforcing a much more humiliating treaty, in which the Song emperors recognized their inferiority vis-à-vis Jin.

Song history, especially the history of Northern Song (960–1127), poses therefore an intriguing alternative to the common narrative of the advantages of unification for ensuring peace. Pragmatically, the Shanyuan Treaty was a more efficient means of preserving peace than “irredentist” war; and had the Song emperors agreed to discount the sixteen prefectures from “All-under-Heaven,” they might have enjoyed peace and stability for a considerably longer period. It was the ideological determination to attain “full” unity rather than practical considerations that led the Song to denounce the Shanyuan Treaty and try to regain the lost lands. The resultant debacle was extremely costly: although the crippled dynasty succeeded in preserving an impressive degree of internal stability and economic prowess for another century and a half, its position in continental East Asia remained precarious. An attempt to eliminate the Jurchen menace eventually led it to cooperate with the Mongols, and it was the Mongols who put an end to the Song dynasty after a prolonged and heroic war of resistance, which ended with the dramatic drowning of the last Song emperor and many of his courtiers after the naval defeat near modern Hong Kong, in 1279.
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The Mongols’ rule opens a final chapter in my discussion of the impact of the “Great Unity” paradigm on Chinese history. The Mongol conquest of China (especially of its northern parts) was as violent as Mongol victories were elsewhere; of all rulers of China the Mongols were the least inclined to assimilate within the Chinese culture; and their policy of relying on foreigners and ethnic minorities at the expense of native cadres should have deeply alienated the Chinese elite. Nonetheless, the Mongols were deemed during their reign and thereafter—including nowadays—legitimate rulers of China, and despite occasional anti-Mongol diatribes, their image in China was considerably better than in other parts of their worldwide empire.
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The reason for this is not difficult to find: as unifiers of the Chinese world, the Mongols put an end to the long-term ambiguity of the Song period coexistence of two or more “Sons of Heaven.” Chinggis Khan (ca. 1162–1227) was the first steppe ruler to commit himself to the literal unification of the
entire
world (the steppe and the sown areas alike); and when his grandson, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294), had brought the entire Chinese realm under Mongol rule, this enhanced his legitimacy both among his tribesmen and among the Chinese subjects.
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Thenceforth, “All-under-Heaven” remained unified, albeit mostly under alien rule. The advantages of unification in the eyes of the Chinese elite (and probably of the whole population) clearly outweighed the disadvantages of alien rule.

This final observation suggests that the “Great Unity” paradigm was not just an essential feature of Chinese political culture but the most foundational of all. Even the explicitly discriminatory conquest regime fared relatively well in China’s history owing to its attainment of unification, unprecedented in its geographic scope. The Mongols might have dismissed many Chinese cultural norms; but their blending of nomadic and Chinese ideas of Great Unity into a coherent whole made their accommodation possible both in real time and long after their dynasty was overthrown. The Yongzheng Emperor, whose statement in favor of megaunification I cited above, was right: steadfast commitment to the goal of the unification of “All-under-Heaven” was the sine qua non for any dynasty—be it native or “alien”—to be accepted.

 

EPILOGUE: FRAGMENTATION REVISITED

The notion of Great Unity is probably the most distinctive production of China’s political ideology. Having been formed long before the empire came into existence, it was repeatedly reinforced through official rhetoric, imperial historiography, and other means of ideological production, turning into the pivotal principle of Chinese political culture. While at times the need to accommodate political and military constraints re

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quired the leaders to refrain from actively pursuing the goal of unification, such pursuit of “partial appeasement” (
pian’an
) was invariably conceived of as a temporary compromise, not as abandonment of the goal of the realm’s unification. Lasting compromises were acceptable—if unwelcome—only with regard to the territorial extent of the due-to-be-unified realm, but not with regard to the elimination of alternative loci of power within China proper.

In the late twentieth century, several scholars opined that the quest for unity in China is primarily a historiographie construct, which reflects the common predilection of imperial history-writers to emphasize the legitimacy of a single monarch and to denigrate regional rulers as illegitimate.
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I hope that in the preceding pages I have marshaled enough evidence to show that, beyond obvious historiographie bias, the quest for unity was very much a reality: this ideological paradigm deeply influenced political behavior in the ages of unity and division alike. And yet it is useful to readdress the biases of traditional historians. Was the period of fragmentation indeed as gloomy as most of them tend to depict it? Or rather, echoing Rafe de Crespigny, should we steer clear of the assumption “that grand centralized authority was an advantage to the people or the culture of China”?
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The answer is not simple. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the ages of division were not just periods of stagnation and despair. To the contrary: the ideological richness of the Warring States, the Buddhist flowering under the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and economic expansion and technological innovativeness under many of the post-Tang regional kingdoms are undeniable. On the other hand, we should not forget that what most people wanted was peace and stability—and those were unattainable in the ages of division. Interstate war was far more devastating than the incursions of foreigners. Pillage, indiscriminate killings, enforced mobilizations, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, the burning of the enemy’s granaries, and, of course, mass-scale murder and rape: all those turned political fragmentation into a nightmare. Moreover, since internecine wars were commonly waged in China’s fertile heartland, their destructiveness dwarfed the human and economic costs the population had to pay under even the most cruel and tyrannical regime. Suffice it to cite Shen Yue’s (441–513) description of the grave results of the mid-fifth-century wars between the states of Northern Wei (386–534) and Liu Song (420–479):

The strong were killed, the weak—imprisoned. Of several dozens of
thousands of households in the area from the Yangzi and Huai to the
Qing and Ji rivers, even one in a hundred could not flee to lakes and

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marshes. Villages became wasteland, wells were empty; none will re-
turn to hear the dogs’ barking and the cocks’ cries.
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This gloomy picture was all too common during the periods of disunion. Although astute regional rulers, such as the kings of Wu-Yue (907–978 CE), succeeded at times in ensuring relative stability and peace for their subjects, this was an exception, not the rule. As China never developed adequate means of peaceful coexistence between contending regimes, and as their conflicts were not confined to border incidents but were wars of mutual extermination, the only way to stop such bloodshed was unification. Neither the splendor of local courts, nor technological innovations, nor economic expansion under contending regimes could reduce the immense suffering of the populace. The saying “Stability is in unity” was self-evident for the people of China throughout the imperial millennia and beyond.

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CHAPTER 2
The Monarch

There is no turmoil greater than the absence of the Son of
Heaven; without the Son of Heaven, the strong overcome the
weak, the many lord it over the few, they incessantly use arms
to harm each other.
From the earliest generations, multiple states were
extinguished in All-under-Heaven, but the Way of the ruler did
not decline: this is because it benefits All-under-Heaven.

BOTH EPIGRAPHS are taken from the
Liishi chunqiu
, the major ideological compendium composed on the eve of the imperial unification of 221 BCE. The ideas they convey, namely, the fear of sociopolitical disintegration without a single powerful monarch and the belief that a rulercentered polity is the only normal and normative situation on earth, can be considered a succinct summary of the ideological consensus that crystallized during the Warring States period and remained unshaken until the very end of the imperial age. Throughout the intervening two-odd millennia, China was ruled by an immense variety of individuals: dreadful tyrants and weaklings, capable autocrats and mediocrities. Almost every single emperor was bitterly criticized by his underlings and his inadequacy mercilessly exposed by subsequent historians, but the fundamental idea of monarchic rule as the singularly acceptable form of government was not questioned. It is not surprising, then, that many leading historians consider monarchism to be the quintessential feature of Chinese political culture.
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BOOK: The Everlasting Empire
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