The Zuozhuan as Political Theory

• In Event: Ancient History as Political Theory

Abstract

In a recent lecture on “Thucydides and the ‘Thucydides Trap,’” the prominent Chinese intellectual Gan Yang 甘阳 notes that “I always ask my students, given the huge number of pre-Qin classics in China, whether there is not a single book from that canon, that could describe Sino-American relations today. Of course there is, for example the Zuozhuan. It’s just that we don’t think of it that way.” While Gan’s primary focus in the lecture is on the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and its applicability to current Sino-American relations, the above remark prompts broader reflection on why it is that Thucydides’ text has been read (and continues to be read) for its contemporary political relevance, and why it is that a text like that Zuozhuan has not been read in that way. This paper attempts to reflect on this question by asking what it would mean to read the Zuozhuan as a work of political theory.

The Zuozhuan is the earliest narrative history from China, likely compiled (from earlier sources) in the fourth century BCE. In its received form, the text is structured as a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (one of the so-called five Confucian classics, offering a sparse historical record of the period from 771-481 BCE), traditionally believed to have been either written or edited by the historical Confucius (551-479 BCE). The extreme terseness of the Spring and Autumn Annals spurred several commentary traditions seeking to understand the moral and political judgments Confucius (supposedly) subtly encoded in the text. While two of those extant traditions (the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries) focus on the significance of word-choice in the Annals, the commentary of the Zuozhuan takes the form of a more expansive historical narrative, one that chronicles the various attempts (and ultimate failures) to recreate a stable interstate order in the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Zhou regime.

While the Zuozhuan has long been read as crucial source for the history of the Spring and Autumn period, and recent commentators have turned to more literary analyses of the text, this paper sketches a methodological approach to analyzing the Zuozhuan as a work of political theory. It begins by charting the key themes and conceptual frameworks within the text that lend themselves to such an analysis, such as: the causes of interstate conflict; the relationship between speech and deed; hegemony as a form of both interstate and domestic political order; and the shifting relationship between virtue and expediency in political decision-making. In then turns to the depiction of King Ling of Chu (r. 540-529 BCE) as a case study that can illustrate how the above themes are woven together within the narrative framework of the Zuozhuan. King Ling’s rise and fall can be fruitfully read as a type of tragedy, one that reveals how the Zuozhuan frames the issue of historical causation. Such an account of historical causation is necessary, I argue, if we are to understand how the Zuozhuan approaches the question of political judgment. This reading is developed in dialogue with scholarship on the “tragic” and “scientific” readings of Thucydides.

Author

• John T. Lombardini, College of William & Mary