The dramatic scene that dominates much early Chinese literature is set in the court and involves two leading characters of unequal power: the ruler and the official. Given the prominence of this scene, the collection of essays under review here is most welcome and should provoke further debate about how the portrayal of the confrontation between ruler and official shapes our understanding of the Chinese past.
What picture emerges from these essays of the two leading characters in our scene? The claim that ruler and official are of unequal power is double-edged. While the political authority of rulers was so superior as sometimes to make speech in their presence dangerous, the official was assumed to be the superior in knowledge and moral insight. The inevitable tension between these two contrasting realms of superiority created what Waiyee Li aptly labels a “psychological tug-of-war between the ruler and the persuader” (p. 131). Nowhere is this tug-of-war more apparent than in the exchanges, explored in Sarah Queen's essay, between Emperor Wu and his minister Dong Zhongshu. Here we see an almost ludicrous disjunction between “formulaic conventions of imperial communication,” simple figures of speech bowing to the superior political status of the emperor, and “the hierarchy of moral knowledge, which posits the officials versed in the classical literature as the masters of the way” (p. 169). It almost seems an official may say whatever he wishes so long as he creates a “safe zone” with appropriately extreme expressions of self-abasement.
Neither the political power of the ruler nor the moral suasion of the official remained constant over time. The transformations of court remonstrance during the pre-Qin period are traced in remarkably similar fashion in the essays of Su-ching Chang and Yuri Pines. Chang speaks of three modes: “the instructive, the confrontational, and the authoritarian” (p. 42), which roughly characterize the Spring and Autumn, the Warring States, and the Qin periods respectively. The first two of these modes emanate from old ritual-based roles found in such texts as Zuozhuan and Guoyu, and are reinforced by Confucian and Mohist emphasis upon historical precedent and the “Way,” both “models of authority higher than the current ruler's,” whereas the third mode arose in a political climate dominated by Legalism and led to “ingratiating support for the powers that be” (p. 68).
In tracing this same transformation, Pines considers a series of famous “speakers” and their contrasting styles: Yan Ying (instructive), Mencius (combative), Xunzi (cautious), and Li Si (servile). But what Pines adds to these different styles of persuasive speech is a response to a question many of us asked when we first read Mencius: Just how did he get away with speaking to power so directly? Pines argues that such outspoken Spring and Autumn remonstrators as Yan Ying were members of aristocratic families and as such could not be treated lightly. While the even more aggressive Mencius, roughly two centuries later, lived in a time when “an interstate market of talent” put intellectuals “in an excellent bargaining position” (p. 87).
The last stage in the model Chang and Pines propose was a time of growing autocracy, and Waiyee Li's essay centers upon the complex rhetorical games encouraged in that climate. Such rhetorical devices as riddles appeared then because they diffused the tension between ruler and persuader. A riddle “calls for a solution and puts the speaker immediately in a position of power” (p. 125), but it does so without directly threatening the superiority of the ruler—after all, it is just a game and therefore grants the speaker “plausible deniability.” Riddles are only one game in the pattern of concealment, enigma, and verbal extravagance that characterize the rhetoric of this period, all richly analyzed in Li's essay.
Such sophisticated rhetorical games continued well into the Han, as the essays of Sarah Queen, Griet Vankeerberghen, and Michael Nylan all demonstrate. Vankeerberghen puts a third character in our scene, the imperial relative, occasionally appointed during the Han period to serve as a regional king. Such imperial relatives were the objects of unrelenting attack from officialdom, their natural competitors. Vankeerberghen's careful study of the case surrounding Liu Chang's dismissal as king for “impiety” in 121 CE reveals how a clever official's intercession was able to help establish “a balance between the harsh demands of regional officials and the demand that the emperor be lenient toward his kin” (p. 235). Michael Nylan shows just how tricky it is to understand the various rhetorical methods inscribed in early Chinese texts. Her analysis of chapter 13 of Yang Xiong's Fayan, among other things, exculpates Yang from the accusation that he places the “usurper” Wang Mang above Confucius and alongside the Duke of Zhou. She convincingly argues that Yang's praise for Wang Mang, which has drawn fire from Zhu Xi and others, is so extreme that it can only be read as sarcasm. Saying too much good about something, Yang Xiong says elsewhere in his text, is one way of rejecting it (p. 266).
Two other essays, those of David Schaberg and Garret Olberding, go somewhat beyond the ruler/official scene to raise key questions about Chinese historiography. Schaberg posits a relationship between shi 史, usually somewhat misleadingly translated “scribe,” and traveling envoys, known as shi 使, “newly versatile and powerful successors” to the former (p. 40). These scribes and traveling envoys helped create and spread a common Chinese culture, which was largely based upon “a full repertoire of historical and legendary precedents,” which were constantly refashioned around contemporary political circumstance (p. 41). This last claim leads to Garrett Olberding's essay, which takes up the question of how much “the facts” really mattered in early discussions of the Chinese past. Olberding examines early Chinese political debate and rhetoric to see what kinds of errors were actually disputed in court rhetoric and discovers that “due to basic limitations on debate and discourse within a monarchic environment … all knowledge was politicized and thus ultimately unreliable” (p. 137). The problem with Chinese history, in Olberding's analysis, is not so much the search for morality or the lack of a concept of evidence as a “poisonous early Chinese political environment” where “facts not only did not matter” but “could not matter as much as one ideally would have hoped” (p. 165).
Olberding's conclusion raises important questions not only about Chinese historiography but to some extent about several of the essays discussed above. I was sometimes struck as I read this book by how far our field has moved away from the critical skepticism of Gu Jiegang and his “Doubting Antiquity” school. For better or for worse, many of us seem to have returned to reading early Chinese historical texts as accurate or only slightly distorted reflections of historical fact. With reference to this collection, we might ask, to give just one example, at what point certain remonstrances, such as those of Yan Ying, became just a literary form responding to philosophical and political debates not centered primarily in the court at all. Much early Chinese historical writing might be distorted not only by the presence of the “autocrat,” as Olberding shows, but by an array of other complicating literary and philosophical factors. This is, however, only one minor reservation about a book that enriches our understanding of early China.
