The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History.

• Author: Janousch, Andreas

The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History. By ANDREW CHITTICK. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. xi + 411. $85.

In his thought-provoking new book, Andrew Chittick proposes to develop a new conceptual framework (p. 4) and terminology to extricate the history of what is generally known as the Six Dynasties from the narrative of a teleological, nationalist-inflected Chinese history. Owing to the limitations of this kind of historiography, the six successive dynasties that had their capitals at Jiankang (present-day Nanjing)--i.e., Wu (220-280), Eastern Jin (317-420), Liu-Song (420-479), Southern Qi (479-502), Liang (502-557), and Chen (557-589)--are not only rendered invisible in world history (p. 9), but also are marginalized within Chinese history as a political and military "dead end" (pp. 7-8) that had little to offer the unified state. Chittick reframes these dynasties as "regimes" of a distinct empire that lasted for three and a half centuries, the Jiankang empire of the title. However, the aim of this monograph is not merely to make the political and social history of an underappreciated political entity more widely known. Chittick's claims are far more ambitious. He ultimately proposes to "reorient" both "Chinese and world history" (p. 330) with the retelling and refraining of this era's history.

The book offers a well-documented and tightly organized exploration of a counterfactual question: to what extent did the Six Dynasties have the potential to develop into a sovereign, independent polity, culturally distinct from the empire centered on the northern Central Plains of the Yellow River? Why do we now have nation-states such as Vietnam and Korea, but no sovereign state established in what is presently the southern part of the People's Republic of China? Like all counterfactual questions, this one cannot be conclusively answered. However, Chittick contends that this should not stop us from thinking through possible answers as these force us to revise, and possibly abandon, long-held assumptions.

The fundamental conceptual shift that underlies this new vision of this period is inspired, among others, by Victor Lieberman's model dividing Asia into two zones, the "exposed zone" and the "protected rimlands." China, usually considered a single spatio-cultural unit, should thus be thought of as consisting of two distinct zones, each of which forms part of larger geographic-cultural spheres with which they share common characteristics and historical ties: while northern China, including the Central Plains around the Yellow River and the loess region...