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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments “Is it a book yet?” My friends, family, and students now know that an academic monograph can take a really long time to research, write, and revise. I began this project ten years ago, as a graduate student at Columbia, when I realized that factionalism had intellectual and social repercussions far beyond Song court politics. Originally I planned to reconstruct the social networks that underlay court factions, but when I dug deeper into the sources for social history , I discovered some alarming anomalies in their survival patterns. In local histories, collected works, and funeral inscriptions, members of the reform faction became virtual non-persons, while evidence of their opponents’ lives was far more likely to have been preserved. And after I scrutinized the relevant narratives in the standard histories, I came to realize that the documentary record of Northern Song political history had been manipulated to accord with the antireform agenda of its compilers. For my doctoral dissertation, I interrogated the primary sources for the factional conflict on both the historiographic and historical levels, demonstrating how Northern Song court chronicles and political language distinguished heroes from villains. I must thank my graduate advisor, Robert Hymes, for giving me the freedom to embark on this ambitious research program, which he patiently supported. A Fulbright-IIE Dissertation Research Grant generously funded a year in Taibei, where the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, provided much-needed institutional support. The staffs of the Fu Sinian Library, the National Central Library, and the National Palace Museum Library went above the call of duty in enduring my rare book requests. During my graduate coursework in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Michael Tsin challenged me with swift kicks of theoretical insight when I most needed them. My committee, which included Peter Bol, Paul Smith, Conrad Schirokauer, and Wei Shang, provided me with copious and constructive criticism, which was invaluable in revising this study for publication . Gina Cogan, my across-the-hall neighbor, was (and still is) the best reader ix and listener anyone could have. Peter Flueckiger was always amenable to crossing 110th Street. At Columbia University’s C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Ken Harlin, Rongxiang Zhang, and Alex Brown provided first-class research assistance , as did the staffs of the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Gest East Asian Library of Princeton University. The staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department of the University of Georgia Main Library have been highly dependable Chinese book foragers. Additional research for this project was supported by a Research Fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies of the National Central Library in Taibei , as well as an International Research Grant from the University of Georgia Research Foundation. I would like to thank Keng Li-chun, Vera Yu-chen Ma, and Lily Wu for making the summer of 2004 in Taibei so productive. Thanks to Margherita Zanasi for all those great dinners on Yongkang jie, and all those virtual coffee talks ever since. This study is an expansion and revision of the second half of my dissertation , which analyzed the political theory and rhetoric of the late Northern Song factional conflict. I am appropriating the quip “England and America are two nations divided by a common language,” usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, as the title of this study, which analyzes the divisive functions of political rhetoric. I will explain how political and ideological adversaries could share a common language of factionalism, and how this language divided the political community between loyal “superior men” and factious “petty men.” Furthermore, I will explain how divisive rhetoric could be exploited to justify the undermining of institutional checks and balances, the emergence of arbitrary executive power, the pursuit of disastrous ideological policies, and the silencing of critical opposition, all of which could recur in other times and places. The late Denis Twitchett took a gamble on an unproven graduate student when he recruited me to write political narratives of the Zhezong and Huizong reigns for Volume 5, Part 1 of The Cambridge History of China. I can only hope that the final results will justify his faith in me. In Chapters 5 and 6 of this book, I analyze a broader sample of a shared corpus of primary sources, which inevitably overlap with this earlier study. Focused on cultural and intellectual history rather than court politics and state policy, the present study, which went into press before the Cambridge History volume, represents the final product of this ten-year...