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

shiji , known later as the New History of Five Dynasties, or Xin Wudai shi), adopted the same discrimination to polarize the polities into two hierarchical categories, “Basic Annals” for the northern dynasties and “Hereditary Houses” (shijia ) for the so-called “Ten States,” using nomenclature borrowed from Sima Qian (145–87? BCE), the earliest of China’s official historians.⁹ The same treatment is found in some unofficial historical records of the Song dynasty, such as the Stories of the Five States (Wuguo gushi ), which uniformly identified the southern states as “wei.”¹⁰ Compared to those “illegitimate” southern states, even the controversial Later Liang (907–923), the first of the northern dynasties, which Song historians vehemently condemned for its founding emperor’s brutality and usurpation, was practically treated as legitimate by most of the early Song writings.¹¹ In this dominant narrative, the five northern dynasties obtained their de facto positions in the line of “orthodox succession” (zhengtong ), an influential idea for political legitimacy in traditional Chinese historiography, while other powers, no matter how independent and powerful in reality, were denigrated as petty regimes deserving conquest by the unifying force from the north.¹²

This binary grouping and its discriminatory interpretation, though not unchallenged since the Northern Song,¹³ fundamentally shaped later generations’ perceptions of the regimes and the national politics of the Five Dynasties period. Even today, compared to the study of the political history of the five northern dynasties, the neglect of the “very real kingdoms” of other parts of China is obvious in modern scholarship, especially in Western-language publications.¹⁴ Influenced by this same Song perspective, another imbalance in the writings on the tenth century is also quite observable: scholars have paid far more attention to the later period preceding the founding of the Song than to the early stage that connected the Five Dynasties to the Tang.¹⁵ Their “greatest concern has been to explain how we get to the Song rather than how we get from the Tang,” as one scholar noted incisively.¹⁶ Clearly, in this approach the Song reunification is seen as an inevitable historical trend, just as the unequal status of the “Five Dynasties” and “Ten States” is taken to be