The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China.

Levine, Daniel

The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China. By YURI PINES. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. Pp. vii + 245. $39.50.

Since outgrowing the essentialism of Wittfogel's "Oriental despotism" and the ahistorical fallacies of Fairbank's "Chinese world order," Chinese historians outside of China have been justifiably skeptical about producing grand syntheses and master narratives of "traditional" Chinese political institutions, culture, and thought over the imperial era's longue duree. After reconceptualizing the "transition to modernity" not as a Levensonian ideological shift from "culturalism" to "nationalism," but rather as an epistemic shift in which the discourses of political community and Chinese identity were radically disrupted and then reconstructed, we have become even warier about postulating intellectual continuities amongst pre-modern dynastic monarchies and modern nation-states. While Western historians of various methodological inclinations have become wary of producing unified theories, Chinese "national learning" (guoxue) scholars have been retroactively constructing historical lineages of "Chinese" political ideology and institutions that served the nationalistic and nation-building projects of the contemporary People's Republic.

Looking back over 2500 years of Chinese history from our own time, when we are witnessing China's "peaceful rise" as a global power as well as the tenacity of one-party autocracy, we should indeed be reassessing the survival of the imperial ideal. In The Everlasting Empire, Pines seeks to do just that, bringing big thinking back into Chinese imperial history. Inspired by his mentor Liu Zehua's grand theory that Chinese political thought was dominated by an ideology of "monarchism" (wangquanzhuyi), Pines seeks to explain the remarkable longevity of the imperial ideal as the outcome of its architects' deliberate reconstruction of ancient ideological blueprints. Commendably, rather than producing "reductionist, essentialized, or ahistorical perceptions of Chinese culture," Pines is seriously attempting to historicize the ideology of empire, explaining why its core concepts and terms were shared by intellectuals and political actors, from the Warring States period all the way into the twentieth century (p. 5). Cautioning that "historical sensitivity should not preclude readiness to generalize," Pines seeks to recognize the long-term intellectual and institutional patterns that belied the apparent chaos and complexity of the rise and fall of imperial dynasties from Qin to Qing (p. 7).

Ranging widely over the full ambit of imperial history, Pines traces the evolution and persistence of three crucial ideological premises in Chinese political culture, which he claims were broadly shared by monarchs, elites at the political center, and elements of local society. First, emperors would omnipotently exercise universal rule and sacral authority over the realm while delegating broad executive powers to their ministers, so that a theoretically "omnipotent monarch" became a "rubber stamp" whose unlimited powers were circumscribed by bureaucratic checks and balances (p. 45). Second, while emperors could inherit the throne regardless of their personal worthiness, their officials would be selected for their moral and intellectual excellence in devising and implementing state polices for the good of the realm. Consequently, "intellectuals" and "literati" defined their socio-political identity in terms of loyally serving the monarchy, whose ultimate authority they refrained from directly challenging, a fateful choice that "generated persistent frustration and manifold tragedies" when bureaucrats self-destructively served dysfunctional or abusive emperors (p. 78). Third, the empire's commoner subjects would be excluded from an elitist and hierarchical political process that ostensibly served their interests, as long as government action could ensure social stability and public order. Pines maintains that the lower orders of Chinese society internalized the hegemonic imperial ideal to such an extent that even after popular rebellions overthrew reigning dynasties, their victorious leaders established their own dynastic monarchies rather than advancing revolutionary or anti-systemic alternatives.

These three interlocking concepts were so pervasive, Pines argues, that "premises of unity and monarchism became the ideological foundations of the future empire, and they were not questioned for millennia to come," so that new imperial regimes were reconstituted along the same structural and ideological blueprints, even after moments of systemic collapse and centuries of territorial division (p. 3). The strength of imperial ideology, Pines argues, lay in the flexibility of its core principles, which were filled with internal paradoxes and tensions, allowing them to adapt to changing historical situations. For example, intellectuals imagined the monarchical institution as generally infallible, while assuming responsibility for central government functions when mediocre or mendacious rulers occupied the throne. Still, if this ideological system was so deeply riven with internal contradictions, one wonders whether these were a source of weakness rather than strength, and furthermore, whether Pines is looking in the right place for an explanation of the longevity of the imperial project, and overlooking the impact of institutional innovations and state-society alignments. Since Pines does not rigorously distinguish between political imaginaries and state capacities, he has difficulty demonstrating how universal monarchism was practically applied in the bureaucratic administration of the empire in its various institutional incarnations, and in the cores and peripheries of an empire that spanned a subcontinent.

Recapitulating the central arguments of his monographs Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1992) and Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1999), Pines narrates pre-Qin intellectual history as leading almost inevitably towards the teleology of imperial unification. In his formulation, Mengzi's statement that -stability is in unity" was the common thread of Warring States political thought, when no thinker explicitly advocated a multistate order as a viable alternative to a "True Monarch" of a reintegrated realm (pp. 18, 19). Universal monarchy was so pervasive in classical political discourse that Pines maintains that it "was conducive to the goal of unification," becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as feudal separatism became "associated with turmoil, bloodshed, and general disorder" (p. 18). Yet demonstrating the endurance of an ideology is more easily accomplished than building an argument for the absolute inconceivability of a counter-ideology. Pines does not include any evidence that would contradict his perfectly linear explanatory framework, which began to raise doubts in my mind about its certainty and persuasiveness.

In The Everlasting Empire Pines ambitiously carries his argument about classical monarchism forward into the first and second millennia C.E., with diminished sensitivity to the political imagination of post-Han imperial regimes, in which Pines seems to be assuming a priori that the prevailing intellectual climate inevitably favored the broad acceptance of the imperial ideal by elites who served every subsequent dynastic monarchy. While Pines claims to be discussing "political culture," this book appears to be an assemblage of cross-referential texts, many of which are disconnected from political practice and institutional history, much less monarchy as seen from below, or reworked by non-Chinese conquest regimes. It appears that Pines has selected pieces of evidence that suit his preordained conclusions, in order to present monarchism as a self-executing principle. To his credit, Pines acknowledges the epistemic feedback loop that comes with an "overreliance on traditional Chinese historiography," which described the imperial state almost exclusively from the commanding-heights perspective of monarchs and ministers, suppressing alternative ideological frameworks and non-elite subjectivities--such as Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion--which are beyond the scope of the study (p. 6). In most cases, he is quoting from prescriptive rather than descriptive texts, which were more concerned with outlining abstract ideals of monarchism than with their institutional applications in specific dynastic monarchies. He neglects the possibility that these apparent continuities might simply be retroactive, a product of state-oriented historiography and generic constraints, rather than inherent in historical experience. Perhaps they were in fact tools of dynastic legitimation, whose authors could have been exercising agency by reshaping ancient tropes of classical monarchism under the guise of continuity, thereby suppressing ideological and institutional ruptures across dynastic transitions.

Rather than reifying an everlasting empire into existence, perhaps it would make more sense to highlight the moments of contingency in which alternative modes of structuring state and society could have been accepted by political contenders and ruling elites. Even the history of the "first empire" could have evolved along a completely different trajectory within its first century, if the First Emperor of Qin (221-210 B.C.E.) had not been convinced by Li Si's (280-208 B.C.E.) argument that the centralized bureaucratic monarchy was preferable to a return to feudal decentralization, or if Emperor Gaozu's (r. 202-195 B.C.E.) rival Xiang Yu (232-202 B.C.E.) had succeeded in reviving a multistate order presided over by a hegemon-king. or if the Western Han Emperors Wen (180-157 B.C.E.) and Jing (157-149 B.C.E.) had failed to recentralize imperial authority by reducing the authority of internal kingdoms. Oddly, Pines devotes little space to explicating one of the unlikeliest events in world history: the reunification of the Sui-Tang "second empire" after three centuries of north-south division. Explaining the persistence of the ideal of universal monarchy would require an explication of how specific historical actors, facing specific institutional, military, fiscal, environmental, demographic, and technological constraints upon state capabilities, could have implemented alternative models of monarchical overlordship that could have accommodated the existence of multiple power centers. In fact, such a situation existed under "alien" conquest dynasties such as the Kin= Liao, Jurchen Jin, Mongol Yuan--dynasties whose rulers defined themselves as "emperors" with universal sovereignty even when multiple competing "Sons of Heaven" coexisted--or in the Manchu Qing dynasty, whose official diplomatic discourse could accommodate (and lesser lords who ritually accepted) imperial suzerainty.

In my view, ideological factors alone cannot explain the sheer improbability of the persistence of imperial hegemony, and we must embed these ideas more deeply into the socio-political contexts that shaped the relationship between elites and the state. This book would be more persuasive if Pines would define the rhetorical contexts and genres of the documents he is citing and define the audiences that their authors are addressing with greater precision, so that he could definitively prove that the imperial ideal was shared by specific historical actors operating at specific historical moments. This would require a greater sensitivity to generic constraints, semantic slippages, and epistemic shifts within the discourses of monarchism. To illustrate one example of how Pines collapses native vocabularies into a single continuous ideology, Pines has chosen to translate the Chinese term shi which held different meanings across time, as "intellectuals," a term that signified "a well-defined group, primarily because of their distinct self-awareness and strong group identity" (p. 76). Even if Warring States "servitors," Han "scholars," Song "gentlemen," or Qing "scholar-officials" shared a vocabulary of self-definition, this elides the fact that they occupied dissimilar positions with respect to the imperial center and local society. What they shared was not a common status as pro-monarchist "intellectuals," but rather a common hegemonic discourse with which to represent their political roles as ministers and advisors in publicly circulating genres of political texts.

Along these lines. Pines could do more to sharpen the conceptual tools of his analysis of political culture, and I would suggest an alternative explanatory framework that would fit his empirical data more closely, by shifting the object of analysis from ideology to epistemology. Instead of an ideological system full of paradoxes, Pines appears to be describing a highly overdetermined discursive system. The hegemonic discourse of empire was a highly resilient and robust means of using language, one that derived from shared corpora of pre-imperial classical and early-imperial historical texts, to make claims about political authority in certain rhetorical contexts. Instead of persistent ideas and eternal concepts, Pines is actually explaining the survival of a vocabulary that was shared by intellectual elites across the millennia who retroactively reconstructed it to suit their own historical circumstances: Warring States rhetoricians like Mengzi and Xunzi, Tang aristocratic scholars like Han Yu (768-824), Song Neo-Confucianists like Zhu Xi (1130-1200), and Ming scholar-officials like Hai Rui (1515-87). Employed by monarchs and ministers in specific genres of texts on political theory, this closed system of vocabulary provided a context for defining monarchical authority as universal and omnipotent, for portraying officials as loyal servitors to their monarchs, and for postulating the common people as the beneficiaries of political order.

What Pines is describing and explicating is the endurance not of an eternal empire, but rather the persistence of a common discourse of imperial authority that transcended paradigm shifts within political thought and Confucian learning, and could be flexibly deployed within varied epistemic frameworks. The Everlasting Empire is a staggeringly ambitious and challenging book, which will stimulate a vigorous and healthy debate amongst intellectual historians from all periods and subfields of Chinese history, as well as amongst undergraduate and graduate students. If anything, this book will lead historians of China to be less hesitant to make generalizations, and motivate them to develop more informed ones, just as Pines intended.

ARI DANIEL LEVINE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA