Divided by a Common Language : Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China

Between 1044 and 1104, ideological disputes divided China’s sociopolitical elite, who organized into factions battling for control of the imperial government. Advocates and adversaries of state reform forged bureaucratic coalitions to implement their policy agendas and to promote like-minded colleagues. During this period, three emperors and two regents in turn patronized a new bureaucratic coalition that overturned the preceding ministerial regime and its policies. This ideological and political conflict escalated with every monarchical transition in a widening circle of retribution that began with limited purges and ended with extensive blacklists of the opposition. __Divided by a Common Language__ is the first English-language study to approach the political history of the late Northern Song in its entirety and the first to engage the issue of factionalism in Song political culture. Ari Daniel Levine explores the complex intersection of Chinese political, cultural, and intellectual history by examining the language that ministers and monarchs used to articulate conceptions of political authority. Despite their rancorous disputes over state policy, factionalists shared a common repertoire of political discourses and practices, which they used to promote their comrades and purge their adversaries. Conceiving of factions in similar ways, ministers sought monarchical approval of their schemes, employing rhetoric that imagined the imperial court as the ultimate source of ethical and political authority. Factionalists used the same polarizing rhetoric to vilify their opponents—who rejected their exclusive claims to authority as well as their ideological program—as treacherous and disloyal. They pressured emperors and regents to identify the malign factions that were spreading at court and expel them from the metropolitan bureaucracy before they undermined the dynastic polity. By analyzing theoretical essays, court memorials, and political debates from the period, Levine interrogates the intellectual assumptions and linguistic limitations that prevented Northern Song politicians from defending or even acknowledging the existence of factions. From the Northern Song to the Ming and Qing dynasties, this dominant discourse of authority continued to restrain members of China’s sociopolitical elite from articulating interests that acted independently from, or in opposition to, the dynastic polity. Deeply grounded in both primary and secondary sources, Levine’s study is important for the clarity and fluidity with which it presents a critical period in the development of Chinese imperial history and government.

What motivates people to become involved in issues and struggles beyond their own borders? How are activists changed and movements transformed when they reach out to others a world away? This adept study addresses these questions by tying together local, national, regional, and global historical narratives surrounding the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning the era of Japanese industrial pollution in the 1960s and the more recent rise of movements addressing global environmental problems, it shows how Japanese activists influenced approaches to environmentalism and industrial pollution in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe, as well as landmark United Nations conferences in 1972 and 1992.

Japan's experiences with diseases caused by industrial pollution produced a potent "environmental injustice paradigm" that fueled domestic protest and became the motivation for Japanese groups' activism abroad. From the late 1960s onward Japanese activists organized transnational movements addressing mercury contamination in Europe and North America, industrial pollution throughout East Asia, radioactive waste disposal in the Pacific, and global climate change. In all cases, they advocated strongly for the rights of pollution victims and people living in marginalized communities and nations - a position that often put them at odds with those advocating for the global environment over local or national rights. Transnational involvement profoundly challenged Japanese groups' understanding of and approach to activism. Numerous case studies demonstrate how border-crossing efforts undermined deeply engrained notions of victimhood in the domestic movement and nurtured a more self-reflexive and multidimensional approach to environmental problems and social activism.

The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the development of civil society, social movements, and environmentalism in contemporary Japan; grassroots inter-Asian connections in the postwar period; and the ways Asian countries and their citizens have shaped and been influenced by global issues like environmentalism.

Contents Acknowledgments A Note on Conventions Chronologies 1. The Rhetoric of Politics and the Politics of Rhetoric 2. Frames of Reference: Classical Hermeneutics and Historical Analogism 3. Categorical Propositions: Faction Theory and the Political Imagination of the Northern Song 4. Unified Theories of Division: Factional Rhetoric in the Reform Era, 1069–1085 The Closed Circle: Factional Rhetoric in the Antireform Era, 1085–1093 Retributive Justice. Factional Rhetoric in the Post-Reform Era, 1094–1104 7. Discourses of Authority and the Authority of Discourse Notes Glossary References Index About the Author