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

a natural historical reality. Such an influential hierarchical paradigm for the understanding of tenth-century China is highly problematic. Imposing a master narrative, this paradigm imagines the existence of a linear history, from the Tang through the Five Dynasties and down to the Song, and thus simply posits a teleological path to the Song reunification. In this narrative, an “inevitable” continuity emerges which naturally exaggerates the predominance of the northern dynasties over other regimes and denies any other possibility of historical development. As a result, the assumed line of orthodoxy in North China could easily blind us to the rhetorical strategies that Song historians used to contain the representation of other regimes and to forestall any other perception of the Tang–Five Dynasties–Song transition.

There is no doubt that this Song representation of the dynasties-states pattern politics needs to be reevaluated in order to rethink national politics, the reality of interstate relations, and the mentality of contemporary people in perceiving the upheavals and changes of tenth-century China. Such a reinterpretation of this era must shed more light in particular on the early stage of the Five Dynasties, in which there might have existed alternative political patterns different from those that tend to Song reunification and thus tell a different story about the political realities of the day. In order to do so, the focus needs to shift to the long-overlooked powers outside the Central Plains, and one needs to examine not only their individual developments in varied situations in this multistate China but also their creative interactions with one another and with the allegedly “central” northern dynasties. This book selects the Former Shu as a case study for the political environment of the early tenth century, in which a southern state grew out of the chaos surrounding the Tang’s end and maneuvered to survive by interacting strategically with its neighboring powers. By exploring the Shu’s military strategies and diplomatic contacts with other regimes in particular, especially with the Later Liang and Later Tang (923–936), the earliest of the ostensibly “dominant” and “legitimate” dynasties to rule North China during the period, I hope to define a different political configuration of tenth-century China that is characterized by balance of power and pragmatic coexistence among the