Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography

Abstract

Remonstrances (jian諫) reveal a great deal about the writing of history in China during the Eastern Zhou. As represented in theZuozhuanandGuoyu,remonstrances, like other speeches, are normally delivered in court and address questions of official policy. They tend to test contemporary phenomena against the lessons of the past, especially as those lessons have been formulated in theShijing, theShangshu, aphorisms, and other forms of what I term “inherited speech.” Remonstrances also have the support of the third-person historical narrative which surrounds them; the ruler who ignores a remonstrance always suffers for his obstinacy. After briefly discussing the importance of speeches in theZuozhuanandGuoyu, I outline the structure of a remonstrance and examine four passages in which critical speech, including remonstrance, is said to have circulated freely in the courts of an idealized early period. Next I show how remonstrances match observed historical particulars with fragments of inherited speech. The famous remonstrance of Gong zhi Qi, an exemplary episode, shows how this application of inherited speech guides rhetorical choices and establishes Traditionalist or Confucian terms as the keys to historical intelligibility. Finally, I examine a set of remonstrances which are exceptional in that they do not include overt citations of inherited speech. Among these, military remonstrances can genuinely eschew explicit citation of lessons of the past, while others borrow the authority of inherited speech without seeming to do so. In one case, a brief remonstrance has apparently acquired the status of an aphorism, so that already when it is first uttered it qualifies as a sort of inherited speech. In another case, a precursor of the indirect remonstrances (fengjian諷諫) of later periods, remonstrators use a theatrical combination of actions and speech to criticize their superior's departure from correct ways. As texts in which the speakers (and behind them the authors) of theZuozhuanandGuoyustate explicitly their understanding of historical causation, remonstrances make it possible for us to understand the ideals which operate implicitly throughout the narratives of these works.