The Politics of the Past in Early China by Vincent S. Leung (review)

The rethinking of early Chinese historicity has become a popular exercise in recent years. The challenge in this new scholarly endeavor lies in distinguishing interpretation from the established didactic readings of the Chinese past, a task that requires innovations in methodology, perspective, and analysis. Leung's book is among recent efforts to apply fresh methods in a re-examination of the meanings and functions of the past in early China.

The book is divided into five chronologically ordered chapters investigate the changing politics of the past in early China. In Chapter 1, which focuses on Western Zhou, Leung compares the predominance of the genealogical history in early Zhou bronze inscriptions with the past as seen in the Analects and Mozi, in which the past is presented as cultural practice and knowledge of the past is utilized to construct the present. Chapter 2 examines the ambivalence toward historical knowledge during the fourth and early third centuries b.c.e. By analyzing the Guodian Laozi and Mengzi, Leung argues that a new ambivalent and even hostile attitude toward history emerged during this period, when history was believed to have negative impacts on people. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the legalists used historical knowledge to disprove history and how their construction of the Qin imperial order marked the end of history. The last two chapters deal with past in the view of three Western Han thinkers—Jia Yi, Lu Jia, and Sima Qian, featuring the rehabilitation of antiquity in the early Han and Sima Qian's critical view of the past.

Leung certainly deserves applause for the contributions of this reader-friendly book to the field of early China studies. He clearly outlines the book's thesis and arguments as a whole and of each chapter; he restates each chapter's important ideas in the conclusion of each chapter, helping readers to review and evaluate his new interpretations; and he organizes sections within the chapters to respond to, and resonate with, each other, illustrating the trajectory of the past in political rhetoric and political capitalization of history in early China. Leung's most important contribution in this book is his departure from the cliched didactic reading of history in early China studies. Eschewing the once dominant moral reading of history, Leung convincingly demonstrates that early Chinese thinkers manipulated the past as ideological capital in their competition for political influence and their construction of political order. In this way, he broadens the scope of investigation of the conceptualization and utilization of the past in early periods. Rather than narrowing his research to received historical records, such as Zuozhuan or the Ru canons in which the past is a major topic, Leung extends his research to works such as Mozi, Guodian Laozi, and legalist texts, resources generally considered less historically oriented, thereby producing fresh, insightful readings from these "new" materials. Even in his discussion of the commonly studied Ru classics, Leung entertains readers with innovative interpretations.

Although the insightfulness of Leung's methodology is highly evident, his claim to a theoretical breakthrough by means of different material selections causes some issues. For example, in his discussion about the rehabilitation of antiquity in the early Han, Leung focuses only on the writings of Jia Yi and Lu Jia while ignoring the many court memorials and decrees recorded in the Shiji and Hanshu. The dominance of quotations from the Xinshu in the section about Jia Yi shortchanges the exciting theories of previous chapters. The final chapter about Sima Qian's use of the past, the most anticipated chapter in a book distinguishing itself from previous studies, focuses only on two Shiji chapters concerning the economy. Although Sima Qian's records by no means evince a unitary voice, the question arises about how representative these two chapters are of Shiji's critical view of the past. Nor is Leung's assertion that Sima Qian presents a "radical quality" in his adoption...