Peter Lorge - The Reunification of China: Peace through War under the Song Dynasty

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Peter Lorge 2015

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The research for this book began as a dissertation under the direction of Robert Hartwell. Professor Hartwell passed away before seeing it completed, and this book is respectfully dedicated to his memory.

The other members of my dissertation committee, Nathan Sivin, Paul Smith, and Joanna Waley-Cohen, continued to support me in completing the dissertation and in the years since. To all of them, I am eternally grateful.

I have incurred many other debts in the years that passed since that dissertation was finished. Perhaps the most important was a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for History and Philology at Taiwans Academia Sinica. That fellowship was made possible by Professor Huang Kuan-chung, whose support for my work was critical in advancing my research.

Most recently, I have been extremely fortunate in the support staff at Vanderbilt University, Yuh-Fen Benda, one of our extraordinary librarians, and Chris Strasbaugh and his staff at the Visual Resources Center, who helped make my map production even possible. I would also be remiss if I did not thank my extraordinary colleague Ruth Rogaski, who diligently went through the manuscript and offered many critical improvements.

My editors at Cambridge University Press, Dr. Lucy Rhymer and Rosalyn Scott, have been a pleasure to work with and added greatly to the quality of this volume. I must also offer my deepest gratitude to the anonymous readers whose comments went so far in correcting my many errors. That the final product is in any way coherent owes much to their anonymous help. Of course, neither the best editors nor the best readers can find and fix every error that I have made, and what remains is, of course, entirely my own fault.

Finally, I must thank my family. My parents and my siblings for having to listen to the travails of this book for so long, and to my wife, Tracy, and my daughters, Aileen and Lindsay, for my continual distraction. It is now done, and I can start endlessly discussing and being distracted by the next project.

The interaction between war and politics was the most important driving force in the formation of the early Song dynasty. War and politics shaped not just the territorial extent of the empire and the structure of the government, but the character and culture of the dynasty as well. Virtually inseparable sources of power for the first emperor, posthumously known as Song Taizu (r. 960976), these two forces were gradually separated during the reign of the second emperor, posthumously known as Song Taizong (r. 976997), before becoming almost fully detached from each other, at least with respect to the emperors power, in the reign of the third emperor, posthumously known as Song Zhenzong (r. 9971022). Up until now, this process has been simplified into a process of the rise of civil power over military power. There were, however, specific, historical reasons for the shift of political power to government bureaucrats; it did not happen because of a prescriptive imperial plan that intended to emphasize civil values over military values. Ironically, the civil-dominated government that emerged at the beginning of the eleventh century was produced by a half century of war and personal politics.

Civil officials in the late tenth century were given power in the government bureaucracy because they had no power outside of the central government. Initially, the imperial government at Kaifeng itself had very little authority. Military and political power was vested in the person of the emperor, whose authority came from his military success and his personal connections to the generals controlling the central armies. These personal ties allowed Song Taizu to focus the dynastys military power on conquest, rather than infighting, and then, with each military success, on political consolidation. The dynasty gradually became separated from the person of the emperor alone and, because the wars of conquest were successful, the imperial government gained power. Bureaucrats gained power when the central government they served gained power. Simultaneously, military matters, while still maintaining an enormous bureaucratic apparatus in the central government, became border or external concerns. Military men served the court, were paid by the court, and led imperial armies rather than maintaining their own forces from regional strongholds. All of these developments were driven by military success and shaped by political struggles. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the particular direction of early Song dynasty history.