Which issues determine the importance of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–25) in the history of the Song dynasty, and in the history of China? How successful is Patricia Ebrey's monograph in dealing with these issues? To answer these questions, this review will focus on two specific political issues.

The first, and unarguably the most important, is Huizong's military strategy toward the Xi Xia empire. Even though the Northern Song was eventually brought down by the Liao and Jin empires, Huizong's decision to wage war against the Xi Xia was particularly significant. Since “the dynasty was never in any real sense threatened” (p. 377), as Ebrey correctly points out, why did the Song go to war against the Xi Xia? I think that this decision should be understood in two contexts: a traditional military strategy that linked the Xi Xia to the Liao, and Huizong's effort to glorify the reign of Shenzong (r. 1067–85), which was in fact an effort by Huizong to avenge his father. Realizing that it could not fight on two fronts, the Song had long ago decided that it should defeat the Xi Xia before trying to recover the Yan-Yun territories from the Liao. Shenzong had followed this strategy, but was humiliated by the Xi Xia in 1081–82. The thirty-five-year-old emperor cried openly at court, refused to eat, and passed away two years later, leaving Huizong an orphan at the age of four. Only three years after his enthronement, Huizong appointed his eunuch confidant Tong Guan supervisor of the campaign against the Xi Xia and its allies, thereby marking the campaign as his own. The Xi Xia was brought to its knees in 1106, humiliating moreover the Liao as Xi Xia's overlord. This victory tempted Huizong to carry out the second half of the strategy: to defeat the Liao and complete the grand unification that his ancestors had failed to achieve. In 1111, Huizong sent Tong as diplomatic vice-envoy to spy on the Liao. In 1117, breaking the “ancestral rule” that eunuchs never be appointed military administrators, Huizong made Tong the head of the Bureau of Military Affairs. In 1119, he began fomenting war against the Liao, finally creating an alliance with the Jin. Although Ebrey asserts that “he was gambling on the sort of military victory Song had not had for more than a century” (p. 506), it is also evident that Huizong had only two choices: doing nothing while the Jin took over the entire Liao empire, or allying with the Jin to regain the Yan-Yun prefectures. Huizong chose the second strategy and lost, because he overestimated his military strength after his success against the Xi Xia, and because he underestimated the strength of the Liao. The defeat of Song forces by the non-elite Liao armies exposed the weakness of the Song and invited the invasion of the Jin—which arguably might have been inevitable in the long run.

The second issue, also unprecedented in Song history, is the large-scale persecution of scholar-officials and the suppression of their works. It remains puzzling that Huizong changed abruptly from trying to balance the reformers and the anti-reformers in mid-1100 to preferring the reformers in late 1101. Just as puzzling is that his rejection of the anti-reformers was so absolute that in 1102 he personally wrote down the names of about 120 of these men and had these names carved onto a stele that was erected at a main palace gate, denouncing the men as an “evil clique” (jiandang). Three months later, he prohibited “the scholarship and politics of the Yuanyou period” (p. 98) from being taught. The next year, he banned more scholarly works and had a copy of the condemnatory stele put up in every prefecture. Despite occasional respites, usually in the wake of imperial celebrations or natural calamities, the ban on scholarship was never lifted and the names of the condemned were never cleared. As late as 1124, the literary works of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian were subject to immolation; anyone who disobeyed this policy was liable to prosecution for “disrespecting the emperor” (pp. 118–19). Only when the Jin army left the besieged capital in 1126 did rehabilitation begin. Ebrey argues that these prosecutions were not autocratic, on the grounds that some of the measures may not have been effective. But is it not true that a dictator is still a dictator even if he cannot effectively suppress the opposition against him? I think that these measures were autocratic in nature and in intention, if not in effect, because they made political disagreement a crime against the emperor and the state, punishable by both material and mental prosecution. These measures also helped secure a one-party rule under one person, the emperor. Without checks and balances, autocracy is apt to thrive. One wonders how long and how profound the legacy of Huizong's autocratic measures was in their effect on political thought, social networks, official careers, and academic pursuits.

As a whole, however, Ebrey's book offers the most comprehensive general narrative of Huizong's reign in any language. For those who wish to learn still more, the book provides an extensive bibliography (pp. 599–635); I recommend in particular Ren Chongyue's Song Huizong, Song Qinzong (Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1996).