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An all too common failing, even among professional historians, is to look at the present as an inevitable, lineal outcome of the past. From this perspective, "China" seems to be eternal - a feature of the geo-political map that always has been and always will be there. In Unbounded Loyalty Naomi Standen challenges that view, reminding us that history is the outcome of random chance, and that at any point along the historical narrative events could have gone differently and led to a different outcome.
Standen is the author of the Five Dynasties chapter to the Cambridge History of China, vol. 5, "Five Dynasties and Sung" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and among the very few scholars to take as a central focus of her scholarship the tenth-century interregnum that separates the Tang and Song dynasties. In this volume she has given us a new approach to north China through that interregnum that forces us to recognize the possibilities that were inherent to an unstable era. Whereas past studies of the same era, such as Wang Gungwu's venerable study of military governors (The Structure of Power in North China during the Five Dynasties. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), adhered to China's traditional narrative that traces the lineage of the Mandate, of the "legitimate" dynastic transmission, through the historiographically-orthodox Five Dynasties themselves, Standen instead has placed the Liao dynasty at front and center. In so doing, she confronts the idea of China's historical inevitability: "[I]n fact, during those two hundred years following An Lushan's rebellion ... nobody knew that a Chinese empire would ever again be the dominant power in East Asia. This book is an exploration of ... a moment when 'China' as we know it was not inevitable, when East Asia might conceivably have remained, like Europe, a congeries of competing states" (p. 1).
To be blunt, Standen is turning History on its head. She demands that we see the Liao not as the orthodox narrative would have it, as a peripheral and barbarian empire arising from the steppe that was governed by the culturally and ethnically heterodox Kitan people. Rather, she sees it as a central player in the politics of north China at...