Yuri Pines. The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its
Imperial Legacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 248 pp. $39.50 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-691-13495-6.
Reviewed by Jingbin Wang (Elizabeth City State University)
Published on H-Empire (July, 2014)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
Ideology and the Longevity of the Chinese Empire
monarchism respectively, summarizing his earlier work,
especially Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political
Thought of the Warring States Era (2009), and elaborates
on how they operated in reality. According to Pines, each
premise was a major contributing factor in the longevity
of the Chinese empire. Specifically, it was widely agreed
first among the educated elite during the immediate preimperial Warring States period and then among all major
political actors that “All-under-Heaven” should be unified under one single monarch. Whoever could unify
China and maintain order and peace gained legitimacy
in the eyes of both the elites and the people. This was the
case even when China disintegrated into regional states
and fell under nomadic rule. There were always attempts
to restore unity during periods of fragmentation. Unity
was the norm, and disunity simply an aberration. In addition, what made the empire resilient was the flexibility
that the imperial rulers displayed in their attitude toward
its boundaries. As their fortunes rose and fell, they could
adapt to a territorially larger or smaller empire. Similarly,
the emperor was an absolute and almost divine monarch
in theory, but often a weak one in practice. The majority
of the emperors were mediocre, dealing with a bureaucracy that was not always cooperative. They worked under a system of “checks and balances” with Chinese characteristics. Even strong emperors, such as Han Emperor
Wu and Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, operated under various constraints. As a rule, the government stood
somewhere between centralization and decentralization,
For over two thousand years, from its first unification
and emergence as an empire in 221 BCE to the founding
of the republic in 1912, China boasted the longest continuous polity in the world. There were periods when China
was divided, with more than one political center. However, it was reunified each time after its collapse, with
more or less the same sociopolitical structure. Empires
abounded in world history, but none enjoyed the kind of
longevity the Chinese empire did. Why did the Chinese
imperial system last so long? Such is the question Yuri
Pines, the Michael W. Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, asks in his recent book, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture
of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy. In response to
two popular views based on geography and demography,
Pines counters that the Chinese topography was “as conducive to the emergence of small independent polities
as any part of the world” and that the Chinese population was “similarly heterogeneous” (p. 11). Moreover,
the Chinese empire was “not only an administrative and
military entity but also an ideological construct” (p. 4).
Focusing on the role of ideology, Pines argues that certain ideological premises and their flexible implementation combined to contribute to the exceptional durability
of the Chinese political system. At the end of the book,
Pines discusses the imperial legacy in post-1911 China.
In the first two chapters, Pines lays out what he
calls the two ideological premises of political unity and
1
H-Net Reviews
which was conducive to the stability of the empire.
traditional Chinese political culture in particular. For
centuries in the West, it was common to examine ideIn the three chapters that follow, Pines demonstrates ology or culture in essentialist and ahistorical terms, eshow the literati, local elites, and the people each helped pecially when it came to China. Consequently, one could
sustain the imperial order in their own way despite their easily equate a Chinese emperor with a despot. Pines’s
own concerns and sometimes conflicts of interest with effort to look at the modes of functioning as well as the
the government. Otherwise known as scholar-officials,
ideological stipulations of the empire reveals two sides to
the literati saw themselves as moral leaders to the whole
an emperor: one in theory and one in reality. It offers a
society, including the emperor. Yet they were at the same necessary corrective to the literature that has tended to
time committed to government service and always loyal focus on the theory but not the practice of the Chinese
to the throne. Local elites could be potential challengers imperial experience.
to the center. Therefore, they were suppressed and kept
under control in regional states during the Warring States
The author nicely goes beyond the Western modperiod and especially in the Qin dynasty. But for most of ernization perspective and evaluates the Chinese empire
the imperial era from the Han dynasty, local elites were through the Chinese prism and in a historical context.
either co-opted into the government bureaucracy or en- While many revile the empire’s stability as a sign of stagcouraged to perform various tasks in the localities to cut nation, Pines sees virtue in it. According to Pines, the aladministrative costs. The common people were normally ternative to stability and peace in the Chinese historical
excluded from the political process, but had the right to context was a divided China torn by interstate wars. And
rebel. Destructive as they were of a dynasty in the short “their destructiveness dwarfed the human and economic
run, rebels always sought changes from within and were costs the population had to pay under even the most cruel
paradoxically a stabilizing force for the imperial system. and tyrannical regime” (p. 42). Although a stable system relatively had more merit to the Chinese than outIn the last chapter, Pines revisits each of the themes siders have been able to appreciate, Pines fully recogcovered in the earlier chapters from our vantage point in nizes its limitation: “imperial China’s disastrous performodern times and considers how the Chinese Commu- mance vis-à-vis Western (and Japanese) challenges in the
nist Party (CCP) could draw on traditional Chinese politnineteenth-twentieth centuries.” Nevertheless, Pines inical culture to compensate for the lost appeal of Marxismsists, “few if any premodern polities worldwide were able
Leninism. A sea change befell the literati, local elites, and to provide such a fair degree of stability, peace, and relthe people. Intellectuals lost their dual cultural and polit- ative prosperity to so many people as did the Chinese
ical leadership roles. Local elites as an autonomous force empire” (p. 9).
disappeared. The people for the first time got involved
in the political process. They were even politicized in
Pines adds a thought-provoking historical perspecMao’s times. However, the current government is mov- tive to the party’s legitimacy issue. He points out that
ing away from mass campaigns toward political elitism, “the successful unification of both China proper and its
more along traditional lines. It might move to cultivate ethnic peripheries became … an important—perhaps
the “newly emerging socioeconomic elites” while con- the primary—source of the Party’s legitimacy” (p. 167).
tinuing to show concern for the people as in the impe- Many Western observers have tied the party’s legitimacy
rial era (p. 182). Monarchism has found its way into the to political as well as economic liberalization. If the
party leadership as “a collective emperor.” Now as in the party’s ability to hold the Chinese world together and
past, it is important for the government to maintain “its maintain stability matters most to the people, political rehegemonic position vis-à-vis a variety of social groups form is not likely to be a priority for a long time to come.
and local interests, and reining in centrifugal socioeco- China watchers who have been expecting the party to
nomic and political forces” (p. 181). The idea of political collapse without such reform sooner or later would do
unity remains valid (in nationalist rather than universal- well to have second thought.
ist terms). As long as the principle of one unified China is
The central question—why the Chinese empire lasted
not compromised, Beijing is expected to show flexibility
so long (over two thousand years)—in the book is clear,
on Taiwan and even ethnic frontier issues.
but becomes less clear when the author rephrases it and
Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary gets down to specific dynasties. For example, in one
sources, The Everlasting Empire is an illuminating study place, he underscores the empire’s “repeated resurrecof how to approach ideological principles in general and tion in more or less the same territory and with a func-
2
H-Net Reviews
tional structure similar to that of the preturmoil period”
(p. 3). Elsewhere, he asks, “what are the reasons, then,
for the sustainability of the unified empire, and, most
of all, for its regeneration after periods of division” (p.
11)? The “sustainability” question is straightforward,
but the “regeneration” one is not. Did the latter also include those cases in which the collapse of one dynasty
was immediately followed by the founding of another
one, with turmoil in between but without long periods
of division? One can find the answer only when reading
the theme chapter, but analytically, the author does not
make that distinction. As far as specific dynasties were
concerned, the Qin was the first to establish an empire,
albeit after periods of division, so it did not fit into the
“regeneration” framework. Nor did it go well with the
“sustainability” framework because the Qin empire was
such a short-lived one (221-206 BCE). Some conceptual
clarity would have been helpful and desirable.
more satisfying answer.
In the section on how the Song could revive the empire, Pines says little (in two paragraphs), but focuses
on how regional states unsuccessfully attempted reunification (in three pages). In the former case, he simply points to the ideological commitment among both
the conquerors and the conquered to the idea of political
unity, leaving the answer incomplete even on his own
terms. It is his stated purpose not to “pretend to provide a comprehensive answer” and rather to “focus on
a single variable” (“the empire’s exceptional ideological
prowess”) (p. 3). This is mostly true. Yet from the start,
Pines acknowledges, “unification was attained through
resolute military action” (p. 19). The military factor has
to be addressed at least in a way that can help put the
ideological factor into perspective, because although an
ideology encouraged (re)unification in the case of China,
it might not have appeared to be that significant had no
Pines indicates that he is more interested in the “re- power been able to unify a fragmentary Chinese world
generation” question, but he is not explicit about which by force in the first place.
cases were “regeneration” cases. Reading between the
The military factor is more important than the author
lines, one can clearly see two cases of “regeneration after
assumes
from a comparative perspective as well. Pines
periods of division”: the Sui and Song dynasties (founded
refers
to
a
multistate Europe and asserts that it could not
after about three and a half centuries and half a century
be
unified
as an empire because it lacked the kind of poof disintegration respectively). The Southern Song dylitical culture (and its flexible implementation) peculiar to
nasty (1127-1279) could be a period of division when the
China. Yet one wonders whether the nationally divided
Chinese lost the North, and the Yuan dynasty would then
be a regeneration case. The author does not touch on the Europe really lacked a unifying ideology or sufficiently
question. Also, he chooses to discuss questions in an il- powerful military powers. Indeed, Pines is most reveallustrative manner, not systematically. Although the Sui ing when he shows that despite “an elaborate legitimawas important to his question, he ignores the dynasty. tion campaign,” one of the pre-Song regional states Later
Liang failed to achieve unification primarily because of
Instead, he focuses on the Tang dynasty, which came im“the weakness of his armies” (p. 28).
mediately after the collapse of the Sui and did not constitute a case of “regeneration after periods of division.”
Despite the limitation of focusing on a single variable,
He could have devoted his attention to the beginning of The Everlasting Empire has made the most of it. Moving
the Tang. Surprisingly, his attention centers on the last between ideology and the real world, the author has gone
decades of the tottering dynasty. Pines seeks to explain far to deepen our understanding of the practical impact of
how it could continue to survive after the 850s by exploit- traditional Chinese political culture on the empire. In so
ing its ritual superiority. This was clearly a “sustainabil- doing, he debunks various myths and stereotypes prevaity” case. Even here one wonders whether or not the ide- lent in both China and the West. This book is a good startological factor really did the job because the court con- ing point for those who wish to provide a more compretinued to do so, but ceased to be successful after the 870s. hensive answer. It should be of interest to both students
In short, a clear specification of the cases and a more sys- and scholars.
tematic treatment of them would have helped to offer a
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-empire
Citation: Jingbin Wang. Review of Pines, Yuri, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its
3
H-Net Reviews
Imperial Legacy. H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. July, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41935
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
4