Since the rise in the 1990s of the academic trend calling for the “return of the state,” scholars have been paying more attention to the functioning of the state and the role it played in shaping the literati's social and cultural lives. State Power in China, 900–1325 represents another attempt in this context. The essays in this volume together provide a new perspective on examining the Chinese state and state power. As editors Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith propose in the introduction, the state should be examined as one “cohabited by diverse and internally fractious elites” (p. 5).Footnote ¹ Tensions and even rivalries between and within the political classes, from the monarchs to the literati class, shaped Song political culture. Equally important in understanding state power is how it was received and reacted to by the subjects of the state, who, albeit less powerful, defined the limits of state power. Essays organized in the four parts of this volume exemplify the complexity of state power, each part centering on the actions or thoughts of one group of power actors.

Due to limited space, this review will not summarize each essay; rather, it will highlight the new insights and methodologies presented by contributors to the volume. The chapters by Tracey Miller, Charles Hartman, and Cong Ellen Zhang demonstrate how cultural products—such as architecture, historical records, and commemorative biography—could be shaped by and used for the political purposes of monarchs and scholar officials. Hartman's “textual archaeology” of the renowned anecdote of Taizu's oath illustrates a valuable methodology for examining historical documents critically (pp. 63–64).

Both Paul Smith's and Song Chen's chapters focus on the ever-growing literati class as power cohabitants of the state. Looking at high politics, Smith explores how top members of this elite class attempted to break through the equilibrium of the same system that had bred them, some successfully and others unsuccessfully. Song Chen makes use of a new tool of digital humanities, the China Biographical Database, to investigate a slightly lower stratum of political elites: prefects. He reveals how the composition and social behavior of this group were significantly shaped by the state's conscious tapping into the economic and cultural developments in South China. Chen's analysis confirms the Southern Song shift toward localization that was earlier proposed by Robert Hartwell and Robert Hymes, but it also indicates a continuity between the two halves of the Song in the sense that southern urban centers continued to grow and replaced the central position of the capital and its vicinity in producing successful examinees and desirable affinal connections for them.Footnote ² In this way, Chen's research echoes Beverly Bossler's observation on Southern Song localization of marriage: since desirable resources had become available near home, Southern Song elites did not need to search afar for them.Footnote ³

Li Huarui's and Jaeyoon Song's chapters enrich our understanding of the intellectual context of Zhu Xi's thought by respectively discussing a mirror image and a foil to Zhu Xi's ideas. Tracing the source of Wang Anshi's reform to Mencius's political ideals, Li echoes other research that has revealed the similarity between Wang Anshi and Zhu Xi.Footnote ⁴ Song's study of Southern Song debates on just taxation demonstrates that the Yongjia thinkers envisioned a social order reliant on landed gentry—a “conservative realist” view that stood as a foil to Zhu Xi's efforts to moralize the society and economy at the cost of the wealthy elite (p. 265). It will be intriguing to compare the defense raised by Yongjia thinkers for the independence of propertied local elites with that made by scholars within the orbit of Zhu Xi's school of teaching.Footnote ⁵

Shifting the focus to the ruled population, the last two chapters both provide important insights into the functioning of the Song state. Elad Alyagon reveals how the Song penal-military complex created a permanent lower class who were constantly resisting coercion, violence, and terror imposed by officials sharing Confucian values about benevolent governance. This study of lower-class resistance also suggests that state policies were sometimes “shaped by attitudes and activities at the bottom of society” (p. 300). Patricia Ebrey observes that the Song stood out from the Liao, Jin, and Yuan states, as it employed very limited forced relocation of civilians. This exceptionalism, Ebrey concludes, originated in the Song state's stronger reliance on market principles to mobilize resources and human labor—an important effect of the Song commercial revolution.

Due to the nature of State Power in China, 900–1325 as a collection of essays, a lack of a systematic analysis of the functioning of the Song state and state power is only to be expected. Overall, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how Song state power took effect in a context where diverse and internally fractious power cohabitants interacted with one another and with not-so-powerless subjects. As inspiring as they are, these essays predominantly explore these interactions from the perspective of factional politics and the state-elite relationship. Some other forms of tension between the power cohabitants, such as competition and negotiation among officials over everyday governance, await further exploration.