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

“dynasties” and “states,” which in most cases sensibly chose to “share” the mandate and should be treated equally as “regional regimes.”

Dynasties, States or Regional Regimes

The Song historians’ perception of tenth-century regimes is a hierarchical one, which, based on their need to legitimize the origin of the Song, bestows “central” and “legitimate” status on the northern dynasties but underrates the significance of other polities. This discriminatory vision finds its expression in the usage of the deceptive term, “Wudai shiguo.” While the word “dai” or “chaodai ” is used in Chinese historiography to separate one ruling house from its immediate predecessor and successor, the name “guo” is applied with few exceptions to small, short-lived regional polities, such as the “Shiliu guo ” (Sixteen Kingdoms, 304–439), apparently following the custom in the Zhou dynasty (ca.1046–256 BCE), which used the term for scattered vassal states.¹⁷ Thus, the molding of the two categories in the early Song to group the tenth-century regimes must have borne the bias of the Song people from its very beginning.¹⁸ Since Ouyang Xiu first introduced the term “Wudai shiguo,” it has been widely adopted as the name of the era of historical transition from Tang to Song.¹⁹ But as pointed out earlier, the discrimination underlying this term should serve to remind us of the danger of adopting it as an essential explanatory or descriptive category in our study of the political history of this period, for it misrepresents the historical reality of tenth-century politics, the interstate relationships in particular, and overlooks other political components. I would argue that there did not exist a clear-cut division or hierarchy between the northern dynasties and the other polities, especially during the early Five Dynasties, when some powerful non-Central-Plain polities successfully challenged the “central” dynasties and were recognized by the latter as equals. Although the polities of the day possessed varied territories, military strengths, and political pursuits, none of them had become a dominant enough power to be a unifying force. Thus it is better to treat both the “dynasties” and the “states” as merely “regional regimes.”