Conquer and Govern

Emilian Kavalski

The consideration of the alleged “shift to the East” in global life has pivoted on China’s rise to global prominence. In this respect, in order to unpack the meaning and implications of Beijing’s governance practices, a number of commentators – both within and outside of China – have increasingly tended to probe the country’s philosophical oeuvre for insights that might assist current explanations and understanding. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the focus of such explorations has been on the long shadow of Confucius over the formulation of China’s worldviews. In particular, by examining distinct interpretations of the Confucian legacy, observers of China’s policy behavior aim to construct veritable interpretations of the past, current, and future trajectories of Beijing’s governance predilections. The central inquiry of such analyses therefore is the extent to which culture – especially, strategic culture – has a bearing on China’s outlook. In this respect, Robin McNeal makes a welcome and incisive contribution to this conversation, by providing a study which simultaneously disturbs and challenges contemporary preoccupations with Confucian thought.

Rather than premising his analysis on the Analects of Confucius (or the works of any of his intellectual descendants), McNeal takes as his point of departure the Yi Zhou shu (The Remainder of the Book/Documents of Zhou). As the title of this military text suggests, only parts of this work remain today and their dating and meaning are subject to debate and contestation. This is probably one of the reasons why this ancient Chinese text has remained overlooked by contemporary studies. Another proposition is that we have only fragments of the book, not least because it was banished from the official historical record by perturbed Confucian scholars, whose sensibility was offended by the discrepancy between their assertions of the enlightened ways of the Zhou rulers and the slyly dealings in which they were purported to engage by the Yi Zhou shu. McNeal’s assessment of this text offers effective and compelling historical contextualization of the Yi Zhou shu. At the same time, his investigation emphasizes the significance of this text to the framing and formulation of Chinese strategic culture.

Engaging the forgotten prehistory of Chinese strategic thought

While ambitious and extremely perceptive, McNeal’s analysis does not intend an exhaustive account of the complexity and nuances of the Yi Zhou shu. Instead, he explores the relationship between the “civil” (wen) and “military” (wu) aspects of Chinese strategic thought and their impact on the conceptualization of righteous war. As McNeal demonstrates, the considerations of the association between civil administration and the application of coercive force had important implications for the development of nuanced understandings of the origins, exercise, and propagation of power. Such an examination offers thoughtful assessment of Chinese conceptualizations of a “vision of moral leadership”, which were closely tied to the understanding of righteous warfare, and “harked back to older forms of authority rooted in the decrepit Zhou political system, while also justifying an expansionist policy that ultimately demolished the remnants of that system and went far beyond the scope and scale of government ever achieved under the Zhou model” (p. 8).

The account provided by the Yi Zhou shu depicts the Warring States period as a time of testing different types of civil administration, the establishment of new means for social organization, and the slow, but steady emergence of formal, bureaucratic structures replacing older informal, hereditary offices. At the same time, the pattern of Chinese governance depicted by the Yi Zhou shu reveals an underlying and, perhaps, paradoxical “blend of the bureaucratic and the patrilineal/paternalistic. Continuity between state and family is one of the grand homologies on which much of Chinese ideology has been constructed” (p. 109). Thus, McNeal’s examination of the Yi Zhou shu offers ample evidence that the relationship between military power and just civil rule were important preoccupations for Chinese scholars and rulers from the fourth through the first centuries of the BCE. In this setting, the wen-wu interplay provides a crucial template for gauging the legitimate forms of government necessary to sustain and administer the state.

In order to elaborate this point, the second part of McNeal’s study provides a careful and meticulously annotated translation of the so-called military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. This aspect is probably just as (if not more) significant as his interpretative engagement with this ancient Chinese text. The level of detail to which McNeal goes is astounding. By undertaking a meticulous examination of the language of the Yi Zhou shu (comparing features such as the structure of the rhymes and the use of pronouns), he offers a convincing dating of the military chapters. The significance of such dating is in illuminate the relation between the Yi Zhou shu and other texts of the classical period. Such a parallel intellectual assessment indicate the centrality of the wen-wu dyad as an important conceptual framework for the consideration of the “dynamic nature of the various activities that constituted the state’s coercive power and ability to inspire awe and loyalty in its subjects” (p. 158). Such engagement with the forgotten prehistory of Chinese strategic culture aid McNeal in asserting that the weight of the ideational baggage of history structures the cognitive grammars of Beijing’s policy outlook.

How far back… into the future?

In their attempt to grasp the content of Chinese strategic culture, most commentators have looked back to various Chinese intellectual traditions for insights that might inform their future projections. McNeal’s study suggests that they have not looked far enough. Rather than focusing exclusively on Confucian thought and traditions, he suggests that contemporary preoccupations with Chinese policy behavior need to examine older texts in order to grasp the intellectual lineage of norms, concepts, and practices that are central to Chinese strategic culture. In this way, McNeal’s endeavor calls for broadening the scope of China Studies beyond the perspectives that tend to dominate contemporary debates. In this respect, McNeal’s consideration of the wen-wu dyad makes available an original approach for the analysis of Chinese political thought. It is expected that his book would benefit immensely those interested in the intellectual history of China’s strategic thinking. McNeal’s analysis will also be invaluable for the purposes of teaching and theorizing the transformations in China’s governance practices.

Emilian Kavalski, Institute for Social Justice, ACU (Sydney)

email: emilian.kavalski@acu.edu.au

Book Jacket

Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu

Robin McNeal
University of Hawaii Press, 2012
978-0-8248-3120-2

China’s Warring States era (ca. 5th–3rd century BCE) was the setting for an explosion of textual production, and one of the most sophisticated and enduring genres of writing from this period was the military text. Social and political changes were driven in large part by the increasing scope and scale of warfare, and some of the best minds of the day (including Sunzi, whose Art of War is still widely read) devoted their attention to the systematic analysis of all factors involved in waging war. Conquer and Govern makes available for the first time in any Western language a corpus of military texts from a long neglected Warring States compendium of historical, political, military, and ritual writings known as the Yi Zhou shu, or Remainder of the Zhou Documents. The texts articulate concretely and vividly the relationship between military conquest of an enemy and incorporation of conquered territories into one’s civilian government, expressed dynamically through the paired Chinese concept of wen and wu, the civil and the martial. Exploring this conceptual dyad as it evolved across the Warring States era into the early Western Han (ca. 2nd–1st century BCE) provides an alternative view of the social and intellectual history of classical China—one based not primarily on philosophical works but on a complex array of ideological writings concerned with the just, effective, and appropriate use of state power. In addition, this study presents a careful reconstruction of the poetic structure of these texts; analyzes their place in the broader discourse on warfare and governance in early China; introduces the many text historical problems of the Yi Zhou shu itself; and offers a synthetic analysis of early Chinese thinking about warfare, strategy, and the early state’s use of coercive power. Conquer and Govern will find a ready audience among specialists and students of Chinese philosophy and history, particularly those interested in the history of military thought and practice, and comparative philosophy.

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