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Reviewed by:
  • Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China
  • John B. Henderson (bio)
Aihe Wang . Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv, 241 pp. Hardcover $54.95, ISBN 0-521-62420-7.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Aihe Wang examines the interplay between cosmology and politics from the Shang era through the Han dynasty. She endeavors to show how cosmology and empire "were formed by a common dialectical process" (p. 2), or "how cosmology and the imperial formation were mutually productive" (p. 3). In so doing, Wang aspires "to bring the history of early China … into general theoretical discussions about culture and power" (p. 10). But underlying this scholarly enterprise there is also a current political agenda: to demystify the Chinese cultural essence, embodied in the notions of an intrinsic Chinese cosmology and a unified Chinese empire, which Wang sees as an obstacle to modernity and "a significant cultural resource for the current politics of identity and nationalism today" (pp. 19 and 13). A grander summary of the deconstructive achievements Wang ascribes to her book appears in her conclusion: "This historical study of early China's cosmology demystifies this vision of [golden] antiquity, unpacks the imperial model, and debunks the idea of an essential Chinese cultural structure" (p. 210).

After an introduction that situates the book "in a larger theoretical, methodological, and comparative context beyond the specialized field of sinology" (p. 19), Wang proceeds to discuss Shang cosmology, structured on the sifang (four quarters) and a center (p. 23). She argues that the sifang was not just a spatial conception, but also served as "a cosmological structure for classifying all forces in the universe, and as a ritual structure for communication with the spiritual world" up to and including Di (pp. 25 and 34). The primary recipient and beneficiary of these communications was the Shang king, whose body stood at the center of the sifang. According to Wang, this sifang-center cosmology legitimated the [End Page 273] Shang king's political domination, as well as constructed it, becoming the embodiment of power relations in the Shang state (p. 56). But the sifang-center cosmology encompassed other dimensions as well, and had many layers of meaning. It was "a cultural totality" by which "the ancient Chinese scheduled their political, economic, and ritual actions, built their cities, temples, and tombs, constructed calendars and geography, conceptualized space and time, and classified all the events, forces, and beings in the universe" (p. 73). It thus formed the original core of the correlative cosmologies developed later during the Han period.

While the Zhou assimilated the sifang-center cosmology from the Shang, it also transformed it into more of a geographical conception, while domesticating the sifang by making them less alien, more homogeneous, and more subject to the center (p. 67). But the Zhou continued to locate the center and pivot of the cosmos in the king's body (p. 72).

The political disintegration of the Warring States era, however, decentered the king's body, and "transferred the business of connecting heaven and earth" from the king to various "usurpers," including religious and natural experts, rising bureaucratic officials, military specialists, and scholars (pp. 78-79). Whereas the ruler had formerly monopolized access to divine knowledge through his position at the center of the four quarters, he now served as the patron of those with claims to have a line to this knowledge, or some part of it. These usurpers, particularly the religious and natural experts, fashioned a new cosmology in order to dismantle the previous power relations as well as to legitimize both their own claims and a new philosophy of rulership. This new cosmology transformed the sifang structure with its privileged sacred center into a dynamic system of five interactive phases (wuxing) (p. 77). At first the wuxing was but one of many correlative systems (p. 89). But by the third century B.C., it had evolved into "a common discourse across class and regional boundaries" (p. 90), becoming "the core of a synthesized correlative cosmology during the Qin and Han" (p. 92). This correlative cosmology had a political purpose of dispersing the king's divine authority...

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