Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China

7. Discourses of Authority and the Authority of Discourse

CHAPTER SEVEN Discourses of Authority and the Authority of Discourse A Country party must be authorized by the voice of the country. It must be formed on principles of common interest. . . . A party, thus constituted, is improperly called party. It is the nation, speaking and acting in the discourse and conduct of particular men. —Bolingbroke, A Dissertation on Parties, Letter IV By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. —James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 This study has reconstructed a missing chapter from Song political and intellectual history by illuminating the linguistic rules that governed the writings of faction theorists and factional rhetoricians and by explaining the ideological and institutional causes and effects of the late Northern Song factional conflict. Rancorous coalitional struggles dominated the political history of the late Northern Song, when monarchs and regents from Shenzong to Huizong personally identified themselves with their chosen ministers’ ideological programs . A series of powerful grand councilors, from Wang Anshi to Sima Guang to Cai Jing, sought monarchical support to pack the bureaucracy with their loyal supporters, to purge their “factious” opposition, and to override checks and balances on ministerial authority. Through a close reading of a broad crosssection of essays, memorials, edicts, and court debates from the late Northern Song, I have explained how faction theorists and factional rhetoricians declared their loyalty to the dynastic polity as individuals while dismissing organized opposition as treacherous and disloyal, and why the concept and vocabulary of faction were resistant to reinterpretation and redefinition in publicly circulat161 ing genres of rhetoric. Both reformist and antireformist officials, despite their acute and chronic ideological differences, shared a court-centered discourse of authority that described political actors, affiliations, and practices according to polarized moral categories. Factionless superior men were imagined to loyally serve the public good of dynastic polity as individuals, while affiliations of petty men were labeled as factions that served the private interest to destructive ends. Consequently, factionalists presented their monarchical audience with a polarized representation of the political community that could neither acknowledge nor accommodate the possibility that horizontal ministerial coalitions could loyally serve the dynastic polity or monarchical interests. Except for Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu in 1044, a small number of ministerial exponents of “conciliation” like Liu Zhi and Zeng Bu, and those who took a subjective view of the existence of factions like Qin Guan and Fan Chunren, late Northern Song theorists and rhetoricians generally condemned ministerial factions in their public pronouncements and writings. In the process, monarchs and their chosen councilors became vertically aligned against officials who opposed the current state policy consensus. As the factional conflict escalated, the rhetoric of politics became progressively disengaged from the practice of politics; monarchs personally identified themselves with their ministers’ ideologies and supported the silencing and elimination of political dissent rather than accommodating or containing it. While late Northern Song political theorists and practitioners rejected Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu’s revisionist theory, which argued that only true factions of superior men could loyally serve the public good, they retained the same polarizing vocabularies and worked within the same classical and historical frames of reference. Throughout the factional conflict that began with Wang Anshi’s promulgation of the New Policies in 1069, deepened with the Yuanyou “reversion” of 1085–1086 and the Shaosheng “restoration” of 1094, and culminated in the Chongning factional proscriptions of 1102–1104, officials who affiliated on the basis of a shared ideology continued to condemn ministerial factions for treachery and disloyalty. Sharing a common language that drew authority from the classics and history, both reformist and antireformist rhetoricians presented contending representations of authority that polarized the political community between petty-man factions and factionless superior men. Yet political practice was more complex, contingent, and chaotic than faction theory or factional rhetoric could represent. Throughout the late Northern Song factional conflict, political rhetoric became disconnected from political practice, as the word “faction” (dang) represented an illegiti162 Divided by a Common Language Discourses of Authority and Authority of Discourse 163 mate affiliation that was far more coherent and stable than the bureaucratic coalitions the word was intended to describe. As a result, the conflict could not be...