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213 Notes Introduction 1. Pulleyblank, “An Lu-shan and militarism”; Peterson, “Court and province”; Twitchett, “Varied patterns of provincial autonomy.” 2. Historians constantly confront this problem of teleology. Clear expositions can be found in Cohen, History in three keys, Prologue 1; and from a more theoretical bent, Duara, Rescuing history from the nation. Although most premodern Europhone scholars are probably not deliberately seeking a history that will serve to bolster modern China’s claims to nationhood, there remains among this community an inclination for seeing China as ultimately and inevitably a unity (however diverse ). See, for example, Ng-Quinn, “National identity in premodern China”; cf. Wang Lei, “De¤nition of ‘nation.’” Certainly there were some conscious efforts to reconstitute the empire on one basis or another, as there had also been in the postHan period, but contemporaries could not predict their results. See, for example, Chiu-Duke, To rebuild the empire; Holcombe, “Re-imagining China.” 3. The term “state” is problematical in medieval European history but less so for the premodern Chinese empire, where it is widely used simply to indicate the more or less centralized and bureaucratized government machinery that was commonplace from no later than the third century BCE. 4. The Song became distinguished into Northern and Southern (1127–1276) only after the Jurchen Jin conquest. On the developing signi¤cance of the distinction , see Wyatt, “Invention of the Northern Song.” 5. It is still more common to take frontiers as a way of understanding a wider society or larger polity, which is usually related to a modern nation-state. A recent example dealing with premodern East Asia is Batten, To the ends of Japan. Some problems with this approach are discussed in Chapter 1. Baud and Van Schendel, “Toward a comparative history of borderlands,” raise important general considerations in their quest for a model for treating borderlands as entities in their own right, but their explicitly modern perspective ultimately compels a state-centered analysis which, while it rejects the idea of two separate borderlands, still splits the singular borderland into two parts. Cf. Sahlins, Boundaries. 6. Constant renegotiation was also the hallmark of relationships between rulers and aristocracies in early medieval western Europe, perhaps most notably in the tenth century. For example, Leyser, Rule and con¶ict; Maclean, Kingship and politics; Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals. Like the present volume, these works reinterpret existing evidence, reconsider categories and vocabulary, and take into account servitors’ 214 perspectives on issues such as loyalty. A trans-Eurasian comparison of tenth-century politics is currently getting under way, with reference to the ideas advanced in Moore, First European revolution, among others. 7. See XW 54:611–612; TJ 291:9511–9513; and discussion in Chapter 2. Richard Davis regards this as Ouyang Xiu’s chief concern in the XW, see Historical records, Introduction. 8. Ming writers could become particularly virulent. See, for example, Fincher, “China as a race, culture, and nation.” For a stimulating discussion of border-crossing in the present day, see Clifford, “Sites of crossing.” 9. Modern writers have explicitly credited Chinese ministers with Liao achievements , their civilizing in¶uence offsetting any transfer of loyalty; e.g., Cen Jiawu, “Liaodai Qidan he Hanzu”; Wang Mingsun, “Liaodai de hanren jituan”; Yan Yuqi, “Liaochao de hanzu”; Wang Chengguo, “Liaochao de er Han”; Meng Guangyao, “Shilun Liaodai Hanzu rushi de ‘huayi zhi bian’ guannian.” On the general theme of the superiority of Chinese culture and its inevitable dominance in cultural exchanges, see Ren Chongyue, “Qidanzu dui Hanzu wenhua”; Li Xihou, “Yutian Han”; Liang Shuqin, “Cong chutu wenwu kan Qidanzu dui Hanzu wenhua”; cf. Lin Ronggui and Chen Liankai, “Wudai Shiguo Qidan, Shatuo, Hanzu de jiaoliu”; Yao Congwu, “Qidan hanhua de fenxi.” 10. Naitô Torajiro’s (1866–1934) famous theory is outlined in Hiyazuki Miyakawa , “Naitô hypothesis.” There are, of course, challengers for the crown of signi¤cance, most recently the Song-Yuan-Ming transition, in an eponymous volume edited by Paul Smith and Richard von Glahn. 11. Naitô dated the end of the transition to the end of the Five Dynasties. However , several developments fundamental to the hypothesis remained embryonic in 960, and Naitô paid little attention to intellectual unfoldings now regarded as crucial—that is, the rise of neo-Confucianism. Accordingly, the end of the Transition is now usually taken as sometime in the eleventh century, although neo-Confucian developments, in particular, continued unabated through at least the twelfth century. One way into a voluminous literature is James T. C. Liu, China...

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