:Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period.(The New Middle Ages.)

Abstract

Traditional Chinese historians have perpetuated the truism that the decline and fall of the Song dynasty was the foreordained result of an excess of civilism (wen) and a dearth of militarism (wu). Or, in modern textbook terms, the dynastic founders centralized military authority and created a dependent scholar-official elite, thereby producing a resurgence of the humanistic arts and civil governance while undermining their empire's long-term survival and territorial integrity. According to the consensus view of the penultimate generation of historians, Song monarchs and ministers responded to border threats from conquest dynasties with diplomatic and defensive strategies rather than with interventionist military solutions, which generally ended in debacle. Moreover, this wen/wu dyad was mapped onto ethno-cultural and political boundaries, so that traditional historians conflated Song “China” with civilism and civilization while equating rival “barbarian” polities with militarism. Surrounded, truncated, and ultimately occupied by conquest states of increasing threat-level—the Khitan Liao (907–1125), the Tangut Xi Xia (1038–1227), the Jurchen Jin (1115–1234), and the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368)—the Song Empire occupied a delicate geopolitical position from its inception to its collapse. To survive in a multi-polar world, the Song court was forced to acknowledge rival power centers as sovereign equals, blurring the sino-centric certainties of Tang diplomatic culture. Starting with the Treaty of Chanyuan of 1005, Song monarchs bought peace with indemnities and entered into fictive kinship arrangements with Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen rulers, thereby undermining imperial claims to ideological legitimacy and universal sovereignty.