Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 ce

Abstract

Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 ce by Andrew Chittick is reviewed.

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It would be an understatement to call this volume a mere "addition" to the field of Six Dynasties studies, given that Patronage and Community in Medieval China is the first book-length study in the English language that tackles the socio-political history of early medieval southern China after the demise of the Eastern Jin dynasty. Conceptual frameworks derived from Japanese scholarship had long dominated the field. Yet, ever since it had been shown during the 1980s and 90s that the complexities of the society and politics of the Southern Dynasties cannot satisfactorily be described simply in terms of "aristocratic lineages" and "community" (kydtai), little had been advanced towards a deeper understanding of that society and politics. This dearth stands in stark contrast to the study of the religious and literary aspects of the period that continues healthily in a series of steady publications and extremely stimulating debates. The publication of this volume must therefore be welcomed in the hope that it may re-animate a languishing field of scholarship.

With Patronage and Community in Medieval China, Chittick proposes a new paradigm for the socio-political description of this period based on a pair of concepts, "patronage" and "community" (understood as "imagined communities"). He maintains that the concept of patronage could serve as a "model for the entire social system of the southern dynasties" (p. 7). However, the book is less a thematic exploration of the scope and typology or institutional forms of patronage than a critical retelling of the history of the Southern Dynasties' dynastic changes from the particular and peripheral perspective of the provincial military society of the Xiangyang garrison (situated in what is now the north of modern Hubei province). This book will be valued as the first English-language account of the political history of the Southern Dynasties from ad 400-600, making it an essential point of departure for anybody interested in the period.

The central four of its six chapters provide a chronological account of the region's society as well as its members' interactions, in terms of the patron-client relationship, with representatives from the political and cultural centres of the time - first Jiankang and, after the incorporation of the area into the political sphere of the Northern Dynasties in 550, Chang'an. The chapter titles -"Development, 400-465", "Fragmentation, 465-500", "Zenith, 500-530", and "Sublimation, 530-600" - suggest a neat narrative, a fact which is not always borne out by the extremely complex events recounted in the chapters.

The first of these chapters introduces administrative measures and the local responses they elicited, focusing on the administrative reorganizations undertaken during the first half of the fifth century in order to address problems that arose from massive immigration from Northern Wei. It reviews the frequent military activities in the region, both against the barbaric Man-peoples of the surrounding mountainous areas as well as a major campaign that the southern dynasty led against its northern neighbour, finally to characterize Xiangyang society in terms of its oral culture and of solidly military values such as honour, vengeance and violence. The following chapter, dedicated to the period between 465 and 500, characterizes Xiangyang provincial society as highly fragmented, and attributes this feature primarily to the patronage pattern itself, which directed the local men's allegiances vertically towards their patrons from outside the locality, rather than horizontally towards their immediate environment and society. The third chronological chapter revises the interactions between the Liang dynastic family and the Xiangyang Garrison. Xiao Yan, the future Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, launched his successful assault on the ruling Southern Qi court in Jiankang from his base in Xiangyang, supported by a group of men from the region. This not only resulted in rewards for an unusually high number of Xiangyang men in the form of fiefdoms, high office and placements within the system of provincial military command, but also brought the region closer within the purview of the court and its "civilizing" efforts, like the founding of Buddhist institutions under the order of imperial princes despatched to govern the area. However, few of these Xiangyang men were able to convert these favours into a lasting social or political advancement of their families' standing. Also, the sources show evidence of reluctance, if not opposition, with regard to the efforts to introduce a metropolitan culture in the region. The final chronological chapter takes the story through the relatively smooth realignment process, in which the Xiangyang area detached itself from the southern court to seek patronage, as the Later Liang dynasty, under the northern courts. Chittick accounts for the smoothness of this process by describing the deep-seated traditions prevailing in the area of seeking patrons from outside, who could provide the best opportunities for the men of Xiangyang, independently of the cultural constraints imposed by values like loyalty.

Highlighting the aspect of voluntarism inherent in client-patron relationships that allowed for ready changes of allegiance, together with his view of the situation from the cultural and political periphery, allows Chittick to portray early medieval southern China as a highly volatile and riven society. In this portrait, lineage membership or community-based loyalties are factors that are far less decisive than previous scholarship and prescriptive sources suggested. In Xiangyang's world of largely illiterate men, military prowess and the capacity to raise funds and men for ambitious patrons (members of successive imperial clans of the period) were far more valid ways of gaining wealth, power, and influence than the capacity to participate in the ultra-sophisticated and refined metropolitan salon culture, in which command over Buddhist concepts and rules of poetic prosody, the sponsorship of religious activities and institutions and other such cultured pursuits earned respect and offered a way to political and social success. Chittick gives us a view of the underbelly of a superficially stable and cultured metropolitan society, and this glimpse goes a long way towards accounting for endemic violence in Southern Dynasties' society, proven by the fact that, with one exception, transmission of imperial power in the 200-year period under study was always accompanied by bloodshed, internecine war or violent dynastic change.

The narrative of these four chapters offers an account of Xiangyang regional society, and its interaction with the political centre and its representatives, as rich and complex as standard dynastic histories with their well-known limitations will allow. Where available, Chittick has supplemented his account with a deft use of poetry, local history, archaeology, and Buddhist materials. However, the chronological organization of the narrative chapters fits uneasily with the theoretical claims of the book developed in the two framing chapters. To sustain his claim for patronage as a model for the entire social system of the southern dynasties, what is required is a closer examination and delineation of the nature of patronage patterns. One would like to hear what contemporary sources have to say about client-patron relationship as a social and theoretical issue, and see these claims tested within more diverse social and political contexts that might include relations among members of the élite, between landowners and their various types of dependants, or between the laity and clergy in religious settings and many others. However, the great merit of this book is to have provoked these questions.