The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy.

• Author: Cheng, Hsiao-wen
• Position: Book review

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

By Yuri Pines

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 256 pages, ISBN 9780691134956.

WHILE dynasties rose and fell in the geographical area now called "China," in this book Yuri Pines treats the Chinese empire since the Qin dynasty as a whole and inquires into its longevity. This inquiry is justified by Pines' in-depth discussion on several continuous characteristics of Chinese imperial system and political culture: the persistent belief in the "Great Unity" and in absolute monarchism; the theoretical omnipotent monarchs and the practical "checks and balances" of the imperial bureaucrats; the literati class as the locus of both political and moral/cultural authority; and the exclusion of commoners from actual political processes. Focusing on the intellectual aspect, Pines draws connection between pre-Qin thought and political ideology of later times, effectively synthesizes scholarship on post-Qin developments, and shows numerous insights into the intrinsic tensions within Chinese political history.

The first chapter traces the belief in the "Great Unity" to the Warring States period, a period after the experiment on a multistate system had just failed and when thinkers only debated over "how to unify the world" instead of "whether or not it should be unified." Unlike the nomads who believed unity only happened occasionally under exceptional leaders, the Chinese deemed it as the norm and the proof of a regime's legitimacy--although the territorial definition of "unity" was always flexible. Such a belief and the fact that "China never developed adequate means of peaceful coexistence between contending regimes," according to Pines, contributed to China's constant unification after fragmentation, as unification was "the only way to stop such bloodshed." I have two questions here. First, how did thinkers from the Warring States period differ in terms of what unification means? When Mencius said, as Pines quotes, "stability is in unity" (or literally, "stability is in One"), did he mean that all regions should be under one centralized monarchy or that all should follow the same moral principle such as benevolence? Second, since the border of one "unified" dynasty was never the same with that of another, how did a dynasty decide to what extend it was "unified" enough to avoid bloodshed? How do we distinguish the rhetoric of stability from excuses for...