The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China.

• Author: Levine, Daniel
• Position: Book review

The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China. By YURI PINES. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. Pp. vii + 245. $39.50.

Since outgrowing the essentialism of Wittfogel's "Oriental despotism" and the ahistorical fallacies of Fairbank's "Chinese world order," Chinese historians outside of China have been justifiably skeptical about producing grand syntheses and master narratives of "traditional" Chinese political institutions, culture, and thought over the imperial era's longue duree. After reconceptualizing the "transition to modernity" not as a Levensonian ideological shift from "culturalism" to "nationalism," but rather as an epistemic shift in which the discourses of political community and Chinese identity were radically disrupted and then reconstructed, we have become even warier about postulating intellectual continuities amongst pre-modern dynastic monarchies and modern nation-states. While Western historians of various methodological inclinations have become wary of producing unified theories, Chinese "national learning" (guoxue) scholars have been retroactively constructing historical lineages of "Chinese" political ideology and institutions that served the nationalistic and nation-building projects of the contemporary People's Republic.

Looking back over 2500 years of Chinese history from our own time, when we are witnessing China's "peaceful rise" as a global power as well as the tenacity of one-party autocracy, we should indeed be reassessing the survival of the imperial ideal. In The Everlasting Empire, Pines seeks to do just that, bringing big thinking back into Chinese imperial history. Inspired by his mentor Liu Zehua's grand theory that Chinese political thought was dominated by an ideology of "monarchism" (wangquanzhuyi), Pines seeks to explain the remarkable longevity of the imperial ideal as the outcome of its architects' deliberate reconstruction of ancient ideological blueprints. Commendably, rather than producing "reductionist, essentialized, or ahistorical perceptions of Chinese culture," Pines is seriously attempting to historicize the ideology of empire, explaining why its core concepts and terms were shared by intellectuals and political actors, from the Warring States period all the way into the twentieth century (p. 5). Cautioning that "historical sensitivity should not preclude readiness to generalize," Pines seeks to recognize the long-term intellectual and institutional patterns that belied the apparent chaos and complexity of the rise and fall of imperial dynasties from Qin to Qing (p. 7).

Ranging widely over the full ambit of imperial history, Pines traces the evolution and persistence of three crucial ideological premises in Chinese political culture, which he claims were broadly shared by monarchs, elites at the political center, and elements of local society. First, emperors would omnipotently exercise universal rule and sacral authority over the realm while delegating broad executive powers to their ministers, so that a...