Power and Politics in Tenth-Century China: The Former Shu Regime ...

examined in chapters 2 to 4. And I examine in detail Wang Jian’s skillful mixture of military and diplomatic tactics based on his sensitive grasp of changes in national politics and accurate appraisals of the changing strengths of neighboring regimes.

In strengthening authority within domains, rulers of the Five Dynasties, especially founding monarchs, relied heavily on military men, who played a particularly direct role in the political realm. Yet this widely recognized dominance of the military did not preclude the participation of the literati in government. As a matter of fact, these unlettered military rulers had to recruit a large number of literati as civil officials for various tasks after founding regimes consistent with the imperial style of the Tang. Thus the tension between the civil (wen ) and the military (wu ) constitutes one of the basic themes in the political history of the tenth century. As the Five Dynasties history shows, in order to legitimize their authority the military-oriented regimes necessarily turned to civil matters, such as organizing the bureaucracy and performing rituals but, ironically, the shift to the “wen”—along with the decay of the military power widely seen in the reigns of rulers of the second generation—quickly doomed many regimes.⁵⁰ A critical analysis of the civil-military relations during the reigns of Wang Jian and his heir are provided in chapters 5 and 6.

There are many reasons to choose the Former Shu as the subject of this case study. It was one of the first regional regimes to claim imperial status on the heels of the Tang collapse, and consequently led China into a multistate era that differed from former times both in content and in form. Occupying a territory that ranked third largest among the “Ten States” (only smaller than that of the Wu and its successor Southern Tang), Former Shu was one of the most politically and militarily successful regimes in the Five Dynasties period, succeeding not only in establishing a “legitimate” successor empire to the Tang in southwestern China but also in challenging the hegemonies of the contemporary northern dynasties and obtaining their recognition as a political equal. Thus, a careful treatment of the political history of the Former Shu, with a focus on its legitimation efforts and strategies in dealing with others, will help