Yuri Pines - The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy

Stability is in unity.

Mengzi

WESTERN OBSERVERS seem always to have been fascinated with the durability of the Chinese political system. While attitudes toward the Chinese political model changed dramatically over the centuries, reflecting shifts and turns in Europes political and intellectual historyfrom the Jesuits admiration of Chinas stability to Hegels derision of its stagnation, from Voltaires praise of it as an exemplary enlightened monarchy to Karl Wittfogels detestation of its Oriental despotisminterest in the Chinese empires exceptional longevity persisted.1 In turn it led Western scholars to investigate numerous aspects of Chinese political thought, values, and modes of sociopolitical behaviorwhat today may be called political culture. While in the course of the twentieth century interest in the Chinese imperial model and in Chinas political culture diminished among nonspecialists, it remained intense among scholars of China who searched in the imperial past for explanations of Chinas turbulent present. Particularly during Mao Zedongs years in power (19491976) and in their immediate aftermath, scholars repeatedly debated the cultural roots of the vicissitudes of Chinese history, investigating imperial patterns of autocracy, dissent, submission, and rebellion and their impact on Chinas present.2

In recent decades this interest in Chinese political culture among Western students of China has gradually subsided. Many factors have contributed to this: emerging scholarly uneasiness with sweeping generalizations that all too often served hidden or overt political agendas; decentering shifts in the historiography that redirected scholarly gaze from the center to the periphery and from the rulers to the ruled; and, arguably, the seemingly dull and predictable state of contemporary Chinese politics, which makes the field of political studies of currentand, mutatis mutandis, premodernChina much less attractive than it was during Maos twists and turns.3 Yet curiously, just when Chinese politics became less exciting and Western scholars lost their interest in Chinese political culture, this topic gained unprecedented prominence in Chinas indigenous scholarship. Prompted by the need to reassess the traditional sources of manifold malpractices of Maos (and not only Maos) era, and encouraged by

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relative relaxation of academic control, Chinese scholars produced dozens of monographs and thousands of articles on various topics concerning traditional Chinese political ideologies, values, and practices and their modern impact. Few are the topics on which the divergence of interests between Chinese and Western scholars is so marked.

My interest in Chinese political culture had been aroused since my first encounter with the leading Chinese scholar in the field, Liu Zehua, under whose guidance I studied in the 1990s, at Nankai University, Tianjin. It was there that I first began contemplating the need to address anew the political miracle of the Chinese empireone of the largest political entities worldwide, which endured against all odds for more than two millennia. Unlike my Chinese teachers and colleagues, I was attracted to Chinese political culture primarily not because of its impact on Chinas current political experience, but as an explanatory framework for the empires unparalleled durability. I believe that now, as ideological battles in which the Chinese empire served as a model or a foil for the Occident have long ended, the time is ripe to address its history anew, and try to understand how its architects and custodians were able to establish the longest continuous polity in human history.