In Hilde De Weerdt's study of factional competition over the standards and content of the curriculum for the civil service examinations in the Southern Song, she provides a detailed and useful presentation of examination manuals and their intellectual strategies. Having refined her 1998 Harvard dissertation, De Weerdt has carefully developed this impressive case study and its attempts to address larger interpretative issues.

In her critique of Benjamin Elman's scrutiny (e.g., A Cultural History of Civil Examinations [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000]) of how the examination system served to enhance the status quo later in imperial China, De Weerdt proclaims the inadequacy of his interpretation for addressing cultural reproduction and periods of change (pp. 13–15). She focuses on an era of contests between rhetorical layouts and argumentative strategies in which the Yongjia political group's rising influence in the second half of the twelfth century was soon eclipsed in the early thirteenth century by the “Learning of the Way” (Daoxue), a rival political group and ideology. In her view, Daoxue was created by Zhu Xi beginning in the 1180s, the same period during which (in my view) Zhu's hostile condemnations of his rivals began to narrow the group. De Weerdt's sharp division between Daoxue and Southern Song Yongjia (actually a somewhat broader selection of thinkers from Zhedong, i.e., modern Zhejiang) serves well her particular emphasis on the divergence between the Zhedong concentration on the historical mode of interpretation in exegesis and discussion of government, on the one hand, and the Daoxue demand, on the other, that moral philosophy and moral judgment be regarded as the guide to both exegesis and political discourse. Even though De Weerdt does not incorporate my discussions of the contrast between Zhu's ethical philosophy and the historical and statecraft writings of Chen Liang and Lü Zuqian (see Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992]), my conclusions about these topics are confirmed and reinforced by what she finds in the examination manuals. Furthermore, in contrast to many scholars who continue to ignore the Song precedent for the Yuan dynasty's decision in 1313, De Weerdt (e.g., p. 387) comes to the same conclusion that I did on the importance of the Song endorsement in 1241 of Zhu and his commentaries on the Four Books for the examinations.

De Weerdt demonstrates how Zhedong scholars widely shared a heightened concern for statecraft solutions to the political and military crises of the era. Although she does not flesh out its implication for supporting the actual existence of a statecraft school of thought, her presentation of Yongjia as a coherent and even a reasonably coordinated political and intellectual grouping provides considerable support for my defense in Chen Liang on Public Interest and the Law (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994) of the traditional notion of a “statecraft school” in the Southern Song—a defense against the skepticism articulated by Robert Hymes and Conrad Schirokauer in their introduction to Ordering the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1993). Although she apparently does not perceive her implicit challenge to Hymes on this point, she otherwise follows Hymes closely.

The book contains useful discussions of De Weerdt's approaches and debts to the work of such Western scholars as Louis Althusser and his ideas about ideology. However, such current theory perhaps contributes to a seemingly dismissive posture at times toward earlier scholars whose insights lack particular theoretical terms. Furthermore, the wonderful contribution provided in her rich details about competition in the examination field is enveloped within discourses on larger issues that tend to devolve into speculation and a seemingly narrower, or somewhat deterministic, view of historical reality than one would expect when reading her discussion of the examination field. In the process, she appears at times to become careless in her characterizations of those she corrects. For instance, I am particularly puzzled that she construes me as projecting Daoxue to be “ecumenical” (p. 32 n. 15) and reduces my analysis of the differences Zhu made in that tradition to a mere “hypothesis of reductionism” (p. 28). Regarding “reductionism,” she essentially reduces Daoxue to what Zhu alone created beginning in the 1180s. I never imagined the Daoxue fellowship as “ecumenical,” and it further appears to me problematic for her to use the word “ecumenical” to characterize such diverse things as Gaozong's “refusal to endorse partisan curricula” (p. 174) and Zhu's followers' incorporation of diverse ideas from his contemporaries because they “presented the same truth as Zhu Xi's Learning of the Way” (p. 287). Application (to Song history) of such religious terminology from Christianity also appears in her utilization of such characterizations as “christened” (p. 365), “confession of faith” (p. 340), and “article of faith” (p. 371). Although her claims and generalizations about larger interpretative issues are at times problematic, De Weerdt's detailed case study greatly enriches our understanding of conflicting guidelines for examination preparation during the Southern Song.