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

The primary sources for Song history are replete with references to political factions (pengdang 朋黨). This book constitutes the first major study of Song “factional rhetoric,” which the author glosses as “the persuasive means by and through which officials defined, described, and interpreted forms of political affiliations and organization” (p. 187). The rhetoric of Chinese politics, in the Song or any period, remains a vital yet neglected topic, and this book takes a big first step toward defining the field and establishing some fundamental hypotheses. Although the first and third chapters discuss pre-1068 factionalism, and the final chapter contains several pages on factional aspects of Southern Song Daoxue 道學, the book’s core (Chapters 3–6) is a chronological survey of the rhetoric of “factional conflict” between officials who supported the New Policies (reformist) and those who did not (antireformist) during the period from 1068 through 1104. Levine reaches two interlocking conclusions: 1) each side in this conflict employed the same polarizing rhetoric, centered on the opposition of junzi 君子 versus xiaoren 小人, to describe itself and vilify its opponents; 2) they did so because all sides accepted a “court-centered discourse of authority” that sanctioned “vertical alliances” between the sovereign and a favored chief councilor but disparaged “horizontal alliances” among top officials as “factions” (dang 黨), a word that carried illicit moral and political connotations throughout the Song and after.

The problem of factionalism intersects with a wide range of issues fundamental to the Song polity: defining loyalty to the sovereign, setting standards of ethical conduct for officials, and drawing boundaries between licit versus illicit policy formulation and implementation. Levine’s book thus contributes in several ways to recent scholarship on Song “political culture.” First, as Levine is well aware (pp. 14–16), the major narrative of Song history—a protracted moral struggle between the junzi of Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052) and his supposed heirs versus a parade of disingenuous xiaoren from Lü Yijian 呂夷簡 (978–1043) through Jia Sidao 賈似道 (1213–1275)— grew from the polarizing rhetoric of Song factional discourse itself. Rather than deconstructing the rhetorical structures of its primary sources, the official Song historiographical process (finalized in the 1345 Songshi 宋史) developed instead an extended narrative to validate these structures. Many contemporary historians of the Song, even as they abandon the antique vocabulary of junzi 君子 and xiaoren 小人, still work within the confines of this polarized narrative of Song political history as a 300-year long morality play, an enduring struggle between the forces of good and evil—in most tellings, heavily balanced in favor of the good. I still recall my own initial surprise when I first encountered, deep in the primary sources, the accusation from 1094/6 that Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086) had “put together a faction…. and disbursed its members throughout the realm.”¹ As Song history evolved, both in the act and on paper, such derogatory references to “junzi” slowly disappeared from the collections of primary sources from which the narratives of Song history were constructed. Levine’s research, by demonstrating that all sides employed the same rhetoric, enables a revised, balanced narrative of Song political history free of the moral “tags” that descend as a legacy from the rhetoric of the documents themselves.

Second, as Levine explains in his final chapter, the struggles of the late Northern Song marked a defining moment in the history of Chinese political attitudes and institutions. The negative connotations of dang 黨 (faction) as an illicit and disloyal subgroup of servitors, plus the impossibility of any grey hinterground between the dualistic absolutes of junzi and xiaoren, forestalled the possibility of a “loyal opposition” within the Song polity. Levine argues that these parameters of Song factional rhetoric heavily influenced the contours of the imperial polity of Yuan, Ming, and Qing (pp. 178–80). Although the intellectual foundations of modern Chinese political parties have Western origins, one could argue that the...