Free The Everlasting Empire by Yuri Pines

Xiongnu as a “rival state” ( di guo ), that is, China’s equal; established marriage alliance with the Xiongnu leader, the chanyu; and bestowed lavish gifts on him to prevent further clashes. Unfortunately for China and the nomads, this “peace of relatives” ( he qin ) proved unsustainable: the unruly tribesmen repeatedly raided the Chinese frontiers, resulting in renewed military tension, renegotiation of the treaties, and a steady increase in the value of China’s “gifts” to the Xiongnu. This mode of relations was humiliating to the Han and indicative of the weakness of its ruling house. Not surprisingly, a leading early Han thinker, Jia Yi, complained that appeasing the Xiongnu meant “letting legs be up, and the head—down.” 56 Jia Yi and many
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other Han courtiers demanded decisive change in relationships with the aliens to demonstrate the superiority of the Son of Heaven. 57
    Han Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), the single most energetic Han ruler, reversed the tide once again. His armies inflicted a series of blows on the nomads, dramatically expanding the Han realm to an extent that dwarfed even the Qin empire. Emperor Wu’s exceptionally vigorous expansion appears to have been driven, among other considerations, by his peculiar type of imperial ideology. A previously marginal text, the Gongyang commentary on the canonical Springs and Autumns Annals , was suddenly elevated in Emperor Wu’s court to almost sacral status; and insofar as this text advocated the eventual incorporation of the aliens into the realm of the True Monarch, it provided Emperor Wu’s expansionist endeavors with an excellent ideological excuse. 58 Indeed, only a very few Chinese emperors could match Emperor Wu’s enthusiasm for military expeditions to the remotest corners of the realm: from North Korea to Yunnan and from the Ferghana valley to Hainan Island. Not only were the Xiongnu repulsed; scores of smaller polities were annexed or subjugated.
    Ideology and enthusiasm aside, Emperor Wu, his aides, and his successors eventually realized that incorporating remote territories within the empire would be economically unfeasible and militarily unsustainable. The solution, which had a lasting impact on China’s ties with its neighbors, was to focus on the ritualistic facade of the Chinese emperor’s superiority. The so-called tribute system, which had been devised to maintain diplomatic and commercial ties with alien polities, turned into an important asset for preserving the image (sometimes entirely fictitious) of China’s supreme position vis-à-vis the foreign states, while simultaneously allowing the aliens to maintain domestic autonomy, if not outright independence. Through a combination of economic enticement, military intimidation, and skillful diplomacy, the Han dynasty and most of its heirs succeeded in preserving the vision of the Son of Heaven’s unrivaled position at the apex of the universal ritual pyramid without inciting much resentment in foreign leaders. Even the proud Xiongnu, who engaged the Han in a lasting conflict for more than eighty years, had finally succumbed to Han demands, recognizing its superiority in 53 BCE. Once again, it was possible to speak of the Chinese emperor as a “universal” monarch. 59 Indeed, not just the Han but incomparably weaker dynasties, the rule of which was limited to a small portion of China proper, such as the aforementioned Southern Tang, could at times utilize tribute relations to maintain their self-image as a “universal” dynasty, which “possesses the four quarters” and “leads Chinese and barbarians” alike. 60
    Throughout subsequent Chinese history, one can discern a constant tension between what Wang Gungwu terms the rhetoric of the inclusiveness of the emperor’s rule and of China’s superiority over alien polities, 61
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and that of tacit—and yet quite recognizable—division between the “internal” realm, where the power of the emperor had