Asia
the great powers' interest in far away battles for
legitimacy. Borer provides a telling quotation from
Leonid Brezhnev that makes the point perfectly. When
the United States overturned Salvador Allende in
Chile, the Soviet leader feared a similar result with
disastrous consequences to a Russian-supported regime close to home. "To have refrained from intervention in Afghanistan," he quotes the Soviet leader,
"would allow aggressive forces to repeat here what
they were able to do, for example, in Chile" (p. 136).
In a final summary chapter, Borer explores the
question of how Vietnam and Afghanistan affected the
legitimacy of the superpower governments at home. In
the American case, of course, the Vietnam experience
made citizens suspicious of their government, impacted on its psyche in various other ways, but did not
undermine the basic institutions beyond repair. No
doubt the situation would have been much worse were
it not for the rapid decline of the Soviet Union and its
final collapse. More than the Gulf War, which, Borer
rightly notes, served to clarify the differences between
wars like Vietnam and wars fought under favorable
circumstances to restore a traditional government as in
Kuwait, the disintegration of the Soviet empire provided a great boost to American thinking about its
institutions and has revitalized in many ways Wilsonian
universalism.
For Moscow, however, Borer feels Afghanistan was
a fundamental cause of the Soviet meltdown. To argue
this way, he cites the impact of the withdrawal as a
driving force in Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program.
Probably even that formulation is not strong enough:
Afghanistan became the force that drove the reform
agenda. Economically, it cost the Soviets much more
than Vietnam did the United States. Gorbachev's
ability to aid the other nations under Moscow's wing
was damaged. Psychologically, the impact on Eastern
Europe was electrifying, especially in Poland, where
the example of Russian troops returning home stimulated demands for freedom. And the reverse effect
occurred in Russia itself, where, Borer argues, any
attempt to suppress these demands in the Warsaw Pact
countries would have undermined the legitimacy of
perestroika and glasnost. In the end, the author argues, the Soviet Union is best understood as a "transition regime" between premodern and modern states.
"The claim of superiority and infallibility could only be
maintained in time of military success" (p. 238). Afghanistan was not Russia's Vietnam, he concludes; it
was a much more fundamental turning point.
This book will provide historians with a lot to chew
over. The usefulness of analogy and counterfactuals
has become increasingly apparent for teaching purposes and has perhaps taken the place of the old
problems books of another era. This book picks up on
sociological theory, primarily that of Max Weber, but
is never weighted down by jargon. Borer's theses about
Afghanistan and the quest for independence from
Moscow, and the legitimacy of the Soviet state, will
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167
command attention for both Cold War scholars and
international historians.
LLOYD GARDNER
Rutgers University
ASIA
Peking: Temples and City Life, 14001900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xxxiv, 816. $80.00.
SUSAN NAQUIN.
The subtitle of this book indicates its distinctive method: Susan Naquin shows how the temples in and
around imperial Beijing helped to define urban life, in
sacred aspects and secular, as nodes of social action,
venues for public activities, and channels for the
court's interaction with its subjects. Through the lens
of Chinese religion in its social context, she projects a
richly detailed history of imperial Beijing.
With temples as the focus, here is a five-century
urban history that reveals the full range of political and
cultural factors that defined the capital: the fifteenthcentury founding of the city by the Ming usurper
Y ongle; the wrenching transition after the Manchu
conquest, when all Chinese were forced to move to
what became an "outer" city south of the Ming wall;
the gradual emergence of a distinctive Peking selfawareness; the evolving physical structure of the city
and its administration; and the changing relationship
between the imperial city and its concentric surroundings.
Did temples define a "space" between state and
family that did (or could) serve as a medium for
something like a "public sphere?" Naquin immediately
calls attention to this question but shows that it cannot
be settled. The picture is ambiguous. Only hazily and
episodically did anyone perceive a religious "space"
beyond the regulatory grasp of the state, and any such
perception was embedded in practice rather than
theory. The Ming state had a more systematic approach to the regulation of religion, whereas their
Qing successors both patronized and regulated religion more selectively. Although temple life had its own
distinctive effects on society, nobody assumed it to be
part of a realm immune to state authority. On the
other hand, the thousands of temples in premodern
Peking did in fact serve as gathering places for both
public and private groups. Many such places and
groups were tolerated or even patronized by the rulers,
and the structure of public life was therefore not
defined by the state in any strict sense. Yet the state
was never unconcerned with popular ritual associations, nor lacked the will to regulate them.
Public space was of course unavailable to sects that
the government had labeled "heterodox" and targeted
for persecution. These were perforce private rather
than public, hidden rather than open. Like communicants of the "house-church" movement in today's
China, devotees might have preferred a public site but
were forced to resort to secret worship in private
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Reviews of Books
places. Foreign faiths, too, such as Catholicism or
Lamaism, were strictly controlled; in the case of
Catholicism, such controls led to extinction by the
mid-eighteenth century. Imperial policy toward devotional groups was thus selective and embodied no
overarching principle that defined the relationship
between state and religion. Thus Naquin's study suggests that the public had "spaces" but no "sphere."
"Temple" (as a place where a deity was enshrined, a
space for "making contact with the supernatural") is
defined here broadly to include not only buildings
specifically dedicated to deity cults but also the sites of
such institutions as occupational guilds and nativeplace lodges, which Naquin seems to characterize as
quasi-temples (not her phrase) by virtue of their
shrines to patron deities. Actually, the bold inclusiveness of her "temple" category has led to an overarching vision of how secular and sacred interpenetrated in
urban institutions of all sorts, a unique contribution of
this book.
Indeed, the grand picture presented by this work
reveals the underlying basis of Chinese urban life:
particularism of many types (sojourning compatriots,
ritual associations, occupational groups, foreign ethnics) formed a colorful mosaic of communities, whose
identities usually were marked by specific ritual observances. Whether in a "temple," pure and simple, or a
native-place lodge, the worship of deities was fundamental to every community in the city. Sacred and
secular functions were thus interdependent. In this
mosaic of particularism, both inclusive and exclusive
forces were operating through temples: those temples
that brought disparate groups together, and others
that bounded and defined their distinctiveness.
Naquin's sources include imperial archives, a broad
array of private contemporary essays and memoirs,
guidebooks and gazetteers, and (most prominently)
stela inscriptions from all over the city. These inscriptions have enabled her to trace the intimate details of
temples' histories, including particularly their patrons.
Besides these primary sources in Chinese, the author
has consulted numerous firsthand Western perceptions
of imperial Peking. The result is both a landmark in
our understanding of imperial Chinese urban life and
an excellent introduction to the imperial institution in
its social setting.
PHI LIP A. KUHN
Harvard University
BENJAMIN A. ELMAN. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. (A Philip E. Lilienthal
Book.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xlii, 847. $75.00.
This is an important book on a major institution of late
imperial China: the civil service examination system in
the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods.
Its strengths lie in its meticulous presentation of
information on change in the curriculum, grading
practice, and results of examinations based on metro-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
politan and provincial examination records. It documents clearly that the civil service examination was not
a monolithic instrument of late imperial governments.
The book successfully conveys a sense of the complexity of the civil examination in terms of its linguistic,
social, political, and intellectual aspects. In response to
criticism leveled at the structuralist approach of his
earlier article on the same topic, Benjamin A. Elman
has made an effort to include discussion of the tension
and struggle between the imperial state and the literate elites in their control over this "cultural arena" (p.
xxiv). He also argues convincingly that topics on
astronomy, mathematics, and music were not unimportant in the training of literati in the late imperial
period.
What is less successful and convincing is his construction of the "cultural history" of the examinations
and his conclusions about their impact on social stratification and intellectual change in these periods. His
"cultural history" approach is meant to go beyond
studies that focus only on the question of whether the
examinations produced a more fluid society in the late
imperial period. But he takes the side of those who
argue that they did not increase social mobility. His
argument is built on the idea that acquisition of
"classical literacy" required an extended period of
linguistic and literary training. This is a valid point, but
he overstates his case by insisting that the "unequal
social distribution of linguistic and cultural resources"
"culturally excluded" common people like artisans,
peasants, and traders (p. 372). It can be argued that
Elman's position is undermined in two ways by the
evidence he provides. First, in the beginning of the
book he uses terms like "gentry-official," "gentry literati," "elite degree-holding gentry" to characterize the
elite groups that monopolized success at the examinations. Increasingly, he prefers terms like "gentrymerchants" and, finally, "gentry, military, and merchant elites" (pp. xvii, 12, 141, 126, 376, 422, 625).
Elman's logic, placing a premium on resources, does
allow expansion of the literate elites to include merchant and military families. If the merchants could use
their resources to acquire classical literacy for their
sons, so could military families (pp. 253-56). But why
would commoners not take advantage of the examinations that provided the most coveted access to wealth
and power in this period? In fact, Elman does provide
evidence for the possibility of sons of poor commoner
families to acquire classical literacy. He mentions
support from lineage schools. Despite the dominance
of gentry and merchants in lineage leadership, sons
from peasant and artisan families were allowed to
attend lineage schools, sometimes with grants from
lineage trusts. One cannot understand why the fact
that more than sixty percent of the over 22,000 metropolitan graduates were from commoner families is
considered insufficient evidence for a fluid society in
the Ming and Qing. The explanation is that they were
already members of local literati elites. The denial of
mobility to these graduates is based on the idea that
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