Ari Daniel Levine

Welcome to the Occupation

Aside from the few envoys dispatched to the Jin court in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Southern Song subjects seldom experienced the occupied north after the Jurchen conquest of 1127. Passing through the former Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, ambassadors found a neglected, depopulated, and impoverished city, and described its destroyed and reconstructed urban spaces as metaphors for the Jurchen occupation of the homeland. Their private travel records transposed their experiences of Jin Kaifeng into a pre-existing textual framework of Northern Song geographical knowledge. These authors shared a collective diasporic memory of Kaifeng’s lost spaces, recognizing its rebuilt cityscape and ruined sites from pre-conquest accounts rather than from direct experience. In their accounts, Kaifeng’s urban spaces became legible not only for their survival under Jurchen rule, but for how far they deviated from textual representations of the pre-conquest past, evoking homelessness and nostalgia for a lost time and place. En dehors des quelques ambassadeurs envoyes a la cour des Jin a la fin du xiie et au debut du xiiie siecle, rares sont les sujets des Song du Sud ayant pu visiter le nord sous occupation depuis la conquete Jurchen en 1127. Lorsqu’ils traversaient Kaifeng, l’ancienne capitale des Song du Nord, les ambassadeurs trouvaient une ville negligee, depeuplee et appauvrie ; les sites urbains demolis ou reconstruits qu’ils decrivent etaient comme une metaphore de l’occupation de leur patrie par les Jin. Les recits de voyage qu’ils ont laisses integrent leur experience de Kaifeng sous les Jin a un ensemble textuel de savoir geographique remontant aux Song du Nord. Participant de la memoire collective d’une diaspora, ils identifient le cadre reconstruit de Kaifeng et ses sites en ruine a partir de recits anterieurs a la conquete plutot que sur la base d’une experience directe. L’espace urbain de Kaifeng devient lisible non seulement pour avoir survecu a la domination des Jin, mais aussi dans la mesure de ses deviations par rapport aux representations ecrites d’avant la conquete, d’ou le sentiment de deracinement et la nostalgie pour une epoque et un lieu disparus.

Court and Country: Discourses of Socio-political Collaboration in Northern and Southern Song China

The Northern Song Empire (960–1127) was the most spatially integrated and bureaucratically centralized polity in the late medieval world, and its rulers articulated ideological claims to unitary and universal sovereignty. Both its monarchs and ministers shared a discourse of authority that postulated the throne as the only legitimate source of authority, which was not openly challenged by organized blocs of aristocratic, religious, or urban elites. Yet, the Northern Song Empire was much less autocratic in practice than in theory, since monarchs chose to delegate the making of state policy and the civil and military administration of the empire to a hierarchy of central, regional, and local officials, so that intra-bureaucratic dynamics limited arbitrary monarchical action. Using a micro-level case study of the abolition of the Green Sprouts rural credit policy (qingmiao fa 青苗法) in 1085–1086, this article analyzes the debates within the Northern Song imperial bureaucracy about the reach of state power. The court’s anti-reformist high officials were united in their opposition to the policy, and individual ministers used a court-centered discourse of authority to denounce it for undermining the public good of the polity. Yet, its abolition required mobilizing extensive bureaucratic support within the central government and in local administration. By paying closer attention to the contexts and generic constraints of political rhetoric, and the intricacies of bureaucratic dynamics, it is possible to demonstrate more subtle fluctuations within the force fields of socio-political authority at court and in the country.

Stages of Decline Cultural Memory, Urban Nostalgia and Political Indignation as Imaginaries of Resistance in Yue Ke’s Pillar Histories (Ting shi)

After the fall of the Northern Song (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng to Jurchen invaders in 1127, diasporic literati of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) recreated and revisited its lost sites through textual commemoration, especially in memorabilia literature (biji , lit. ‘brush notes’). As knowledge of the city passed from communicative memory into cultural memory, its decline and destruction became the focus of nostalgia and indignation for Yue Ke (1183–1234), the author of the Pillar Histories (Ting shi ), a collection of counter-narratives of Northern Song history that expressed the shared experience of social trauma induced by dynastic collapse. Disconnected from their spatial context and even from historical fact, the city’s memory sites became stages for amoralistic declension narrative, in which the city’s destruction and occupation was assumed to have been instigated by the decadence of the imperial court of the passive Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–26) and his ‘nefarious ministers’. The most colourful elements of Yue’s ludic and fantastical narratives became the focus of his indignation, which encouraged his readers to denounce the traitors who had betrayed the empire by inviting the Jurchen invasion. In the Pillar Histories, Yue deployed textual imaginaries of nostalgia as forms of resistance by re-contesting the past events that led to dynastic collapse. By reconstructing the city in the cultural memory of his fellow diasporic literati, Yue was creating a vision of an ideal political, cultural and moral community that once existed at the dynasty’s inception, and might be reconstituted in the future, if and when Song subjects recaptured their lost homeland.

A Review of “Subjects and Masters: Uyghurs in the Mongol Empire”

Hunt’s focus on this subset has produced an insightful and highly detailed social history of the insurgency that Americans have never understood. The result is a shrewd analysis of profound change that has taken place in Vietnam. The goal of this change, which the author refers to as “revolutionary modernism,” has little to do with the conventional, Cold War–inflected narrative of the Vietnam War that is still easily accepted by most students today. Hunt here adds to the work of such scholars as David Elliot (The Vietnamese War [M. E. Sharpe, 2006]) and David Marr (Vietnamese Tradition on Trial [University of California Press, 1984]) who have attempted to tell the story of the Vietnamese Revolution that had been underway for decades by the time the French were forced out following their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That revolution involved profound change—generational, gender, and class-based—that ushered Vietnam into the modern world. As Hunt’s book makes clear, this revolution was driven by dreams and visions both large and small that were full of contradictions and internal divisions that would only be shocking in their absence. The Vietnamese were considering democratization, equality between men and women and between parents and children, an end to landlordism, land reform, and Vietnamese unity and independence. They were highly enthusiastic and remarkably well organized in the pursuit of these goals. Hunt does not paint a picture of a movement insulated by an iron consensus on its march toward a common goal. Instead, he uses the RAND interviews to demonstrate the movement’s complexity and the sheer futility of using the Vietnam War–era label of “Viet Cong” to describe events, networks, people, and processes that are far more complex. The myriad pushand-pull factors that led peasants to join the National Liberation Front (NLF), for instance, should quickly disabuse any simplistic notions of coercion or a one-dimensional esprit de corps. Certainly, the NLF needed the peasants. However, the peasants also needed and wanted the NLF. Here Hunt confirms and adds dimension to the thesis that officials in Hanoi attempted to maintain control over the movement to prevent the revolution from running a more confrontational, independent, and dangerous course. Hunt describes a movement that was “improvisatory” (33), and highly decentralized. Nevertheless, as he writes, “the Front message elicited a near-universal response in the countryside” (39). The enthusiastic and dedicated movement in the countryside was profoundly disturbed and faced a new set of options following the American escalation of the conflict in 1965. Hunt describes the American “effort to empty the countryside” as a “holocaust” and a “catastrophe” that left lasting impacts as it pounded villagers from the air, poisoned crops and water, and sent enormous numbers of Vietnamese peasants fleeing in every direction (117, 119). Beginning in 1965, the escalation of major warfare in the countryside “emerges as a disturbing theme in the interviews” (125). Peasant rage was eventually alloyed by terror and demoralization in the face of this seemingly senseless slaughter. The interviews confirm an exodus of Vietnamese fleeing the bombings, some deeper into the hills, some into the cities, and many back again. The interviews also capture the larger phenomenon that by 1968, the U.S. campaign of terror had dispossessed approximately four million refugees out of a population of around twelve million. One consequence of this situation was that the revolution’s broad outlook gave way to narrower concerns about basic survival and controlling fear and panic in the villages. Hunt concludes, however, by focusing on the hope, resilience, and tenacity of the Vietnamese who, despite their suffering and nearly immeasurable losses, persevered and achieved victory. Although I enthusiastically recognize Vietnam’s Southern Revolution as a significant contribution to the literature, I must also point out that the author’s evidentiary base is, as he acknowledges, highly problematic. Interviewees, particularly those who were prisoners, had incentives to be dishonest and evasive, to flatter their interrogators, and to appear effusively contrite in the face of intimidation and torture—many had been tortured prior to being interviewed by RAND. RAND employees often misunderstood the content of the interviews and drew conclusions that were paternalistic, condescending and even racist. In the end, the United States and the Saigon regime ignored much of the responses anyway, because the interviews employed deeply flawed and destructive methods to address a set of problems that was often misunderstood. At the same time, the author is careful to point this drawback out, and he avoids many of the more obvious pitfalls inherent in using this kind of evidence. Hunt offers a very good and useful study and fills out much of a picture that we have not known, but have needed to know, about what happened in Vietnam during the years that the Americans attempted, ignorantly and tragically, to force Cold War compliance on the region.