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

locations and greatly varied political, military, and economic resources, different polities developed different survival strategies that defined their ways of ruling within their domains and interacting with rivals. Some powerful regimes, such as the Wu, the Southern Tang (937–976), and the Former and Later Shu (934–965), assumed imperial titles and at times achieved equality with the northern dynasties both in rhetoric and in reality. Some regimes like the Min (896–945) and the Southern Han (905–971) located in the remote southeastern coast frequently ignored orders from the Central Plains or other political “centers” and even established imperial authorities of their own. Several other regimes, such as the Wu Yue (893–978), Jingnan (907–963), and Chu (896–951), preferred to nominally accept the sovereignty of the northern dynasties to counterbalance their hostile neighboring states, but this pragmatic strategy and their lip service to one or multiple regimes never weakened their de facto autonomies, which were recognized by their contemporaries.²⁴ Even Ouyang Xiu had to admit that “none of the ‘Ten States’ belonged to the Central-Plain dynasties” ().²⁵

The traditional dynasties-states division, especially the problematic category “Wudai shiguo,” presents another difficulty. It fails to acknowledge other polities that were neither politically inferior to nor militarily weaker than most of the other regional regimes, especially some of the “Ten States.” For example, it does not reflect the power dynamics of the early tenth century, when the Later Liang was confronted by the Jin, the political predecessor of the Later Tang. The Qi (887–930) in the northwest and the Yan (895–913) in the northern area of Hebei are not included either, though both had contributed to the political transition in North China during the first two decades of the period to a significant extent.²⁶ A similar omission is found with respect to some other regional polities, mostly in the north, which—though nominally recognizing the sovereignty of the northern dynasties—maintained independence for a while and played important roles in the Liang–Tang transition.²⁷ Upon examining tenth-century China in a broader geopolitical context, some non-Chinese powers surrounding China proper during