This is a study of the use and interpretation of the distinction between Zhongguo and Yi-Di, “the Central Lands” and “the barbarians,” by Guwen (Ancient Style) writers from Tang's Han Yu into Northern Song and Daoxue (Learning of the Way) thinkers in Northern and Southern Song. Shao-yun Yang documents the playing out over time of a claim Han Yu made in his essay “Tracing the Way” with reference to the Spring and Autumn Annals. I quote the passage because much of the book turns on it.

The key sentences are 諸侯用夷禮則夷之。夷而進於中國則中國之。They convey the idea that one would be judged on the basis of behavior, not on what one was born as. It cannot be shown that Han Yu wrote the two characters yi er 夷而, as Yang notes (165n16), but this is the version he works with. The alternative version, without 夷而, was in the most authoritative Song edition of Han's works; it was understood by some Song writers to mean that lords who used barbarian rites (for example, in making alliances with them) were to be seen as barbarians, but if those same lords advanced to (using once again the rites of) Zhongguo they were to be regarded as Zhongguo worthy.

The book would be worth reading just for its thoughtful accounts of how various writers (Han Yu, Sun Fu, Liu Chang, Cheng Yi, etc.) addressed the distinction in their studies of the Annals, but it has a much larger argument to make. Yang argues that through these texts we can see an initial definition by Han Yu and the Guwen writers of “Chineseness” as “ethnicized orthodoxy” and later a redefinition of “Chineseness” as “ethnocentric moralism” by Cheng Yi and the Daoxue philosophers. He thus joins the debate over how China was defining itself in the face of the rise of powerful foreign states during the course of the Tang and Song by offering an alternative to those who argue that “China” was defining itself as a race, a nation, or a culture (in the anthropological sense).

Chapter 1 is devoted to Han Yu's “Tracing the Way” and the Orthodoxy of the Way of Sages as found in the Classics. Han creates a parallel between his rejection of Buddhism and Daoism and Mencius's refutation of Yang Zhu for his denial of the political order and of Mo Di for his denial of the social order. Over this Han layers the distinction between the Central Lands and the barbarians, thus treating all those who do not accept the social-economic-political-cultural order of the sage kings as tantamount to being barbarians. Yet, Han Yu's militant orthodoxy was not shared by Liu Zongyuan, who was willing to accommodate Buddhism (Chapter 2), and in fact there were ninth-century writers who came closer to ethnocentric moralism, or moral universalism in what Marc Abrahamson called “ethnicized discourse” (Chapter 3, 66). Nevertheless, initially Northern Song Guwen writers (Liu Kai, Shi Jie, Sun Fu) attacked Buddhism and Daoism as barbarian and called for total rejection. Although I am not persuaded by Yang's argument that Han Yu was more concerned with Buddhism than Daoism in his essay, this does not seem to me to affect his argument. In contrast, the more moderate Ouyang Xiu and Li Gou stressed that the victory of Orthodoxy depended on the government so furthering the common good that the populace would turn away from Buddhism and Daoism (Chapter 4). Sun Fu's famous commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals held forth two great principles, “honor the king and repel the barbarians” (zun wang rang yi) and through his commentary he explained what was involved if they were not to be considered barbaric: honor the true king's universal authority (rather than practicing hegemony) and hold to the rites and moral duties of the Central Lands. The barbarians—the tribes threatening the Central Lands and, presumably, the northern states, in the eleventh century—were to be repelled when they invaded but should accept the authority of the one true king. In contrast Liu Chang argued that the “Way of the Central Lands” was not so much geographic as a commitment to ethics; unethical conduct by those in the Central Lands was “barbaric.” Yet—to make a point I will come back to—Liu recognized that the Yi-Di actually referred to some people somewhere, thus although he had proposed a moral definition he also spoke of the “real (zhen) Yi-Di.” The monk Qisong, a sharp critic of everything Han Yu, had to argue that foreignness was irrelevant; the Buddha's teachings were also about moral principles and that alone should be the issue. With this, Yang argues, ethnicized orthodoxy came to an end (Chapter 5).

This brings Yang to the Learning of the Way, represented principally by Cheng Yi, who started to write a commentary on the Annals before he died; Hu Anguo, whose commentary on the Annals would later be required in the examination curriculum; and Zhu Xi. Cheng Yi's almost unprecedented reading of Analects 3.5—“The barbarians have rulers but are still not equal to [buru] Chinese states that do not”—as “The barbarians have rulers, unlike the Chinese states that do not,” points towards the Neo-Confucian conviction that all things possess the same nature but their physical make-up is less and more an obstacle to the realization of that nature. To be very clear about this: Neo-Confucians are not arguing that barbarians lack the same nature that are endowed in all things as creations of heaven-and-earth, but that as a class their qi makes it harder for them to realize that nature (presumably the philosophers would say the same for much of the non-literati population of the Central Lands) (Chapter 6). In conclusion Yang points to a change in attitudes occasioned by the political situation: in Tang the Central Lands can become barbarians and barbarians can become the Central Lands, but that second possibility causes anxiety in Song. The anxiety was heightened by Khitan Liao claims to be “central” themselves relative to external tribes and Jürchen Jin occupation of the North China plain, the historical “Central Lands.”

This account of intellectual change makes sense to me. Guwen writers understood the Way of the Sages as a historical creation. The strength of Han Yu's “Tracing the Way” was its account of the ideal social-economic-political-cultural order he had synthesized from his reading of the Classics and other early texts. Neo-Confucian philosophers rejected the Guwen view that learning meant acquiring an integrated vision of antiquity through one's own reading and bringing it to bear on the present through one's own writing and, if possible, service in government. Instead they contended that morality had a real foundation in the creative processes of heaven-and-earth and that learning meant realizing one's moral nature—and overcoming the incumbrances of one's physical constitution—through a process of self-cultivation. The goal was not to understand the order the sages had created but to become a sage oneself. Surely Song Daoxue was just as rejectionist when it came to Buddhism and Daoism as Han Yu and just as committed to a single doctrine, except that for the Neo-Confucians the realization of their doctrine did not depend on government action. Yang's point in distinguishing orthodoxy from moralism is, I take it, that Han's saw “our” original historical tradition as threatened by the ideas of late-arriving Buddhism and Daoism, whereas Neo-Confucian moralism was a universalist position that extended to the whole world but allowed “us” to be superior by virtue of being better at learning to become a sage.

What does ethnicity have to do with this? How does this define “Chineseness?” From Han Yu on the term Yi-Di or Yi is used in two mutually-entailing senses. The foreign enemies—as Liu Chang put it, the “real” Yi-Di—are tribal peoples that surround, threaten, invade, and even occupy the Zhong guo. To call them barbarians in opposition to “Central Lands” misses the point of the contrast between “us” in the center who have states (guo) and those tribal peoples who have ethnic identities but lack states. In this sense “we” are not an ethnic group but are the inheritors of the civilization Han Yu describes in his essay. But, as Yang shows, Han Yu creates a new discourse by reaching back to the Gongyang commentary on the Annals in which Yi-Di as a term for moral/civilizational inferiority or, more harshly, a lack of morality and civilization, can be applied to those of “us” here in the center who harm the common good (as signified by the Zhou king). The term “barbarian” is apt in this second sense, since it does not have to entail that one actually belongs to a foreign people. Keeping both senses in mind, and not eliding the distinction, seems to me to be important to making sense of what literati were saying from the eighth century on. Some adopted a rhetoric that conflated the two, but some did not. Following Yang's arguments leads to the conclusion that the term “Chineseness” refers to how these writers and thinkers defined both the nature of their state versus external others and their notions of morality versus those they thought lacked it. Their “we” was defined not by culturalism, nationalism, or racialism but by ideology.

The title of this study, The Way of the Barbarian, may seem puzzling since, by definition, barbarians lacked the Way, the Dao, in a normative sense. Its occasional use in the texts Yang has interpreted and contextualized so well is to denote behaviors that are wrong and immoral, barbaric in short, rather than to attempt to understand the norms tribal peoples had adopted in creating their confederations and states. Some Tang and Song statesmen and writers were concerned with understanding foreign enemies. But how they thought about them did have bearing on policy choices. It was, after all, under the New Policies regime led by the Guwen writer Wang Anshi that Song adopted an aggressive border policy, assuming that the tribal people could be transformed into subjects of a civil state. Sima Guang, who abandoned that policy, contended that the tribal peoples also possessed the Rites, just that theirs were different from those of the Song; peace required separation not integration. This all would become moot, first in the north and then in south as well, when the Yi-Di conquered the Central Lands.