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發表於 2005-3-27 17:45:50
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Inventing the Romantic Kingdom in its Initial Stages:
The Resurrection and Legitimization of the Shu Han Kingdom
Before the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (4 of 4)
Simon Shen
IV. Conclusion: Reassessing the Nature of the Shu Han “Heroes” for Future Romanticization
Although the Three Kingdoms era was not a piece of too remote history at the end of the sixth century, its real image was already blurred at the time. Not only was Shu Han resurrected and legitimized in its process of romanticization, the kingdoms of Wei and Wu were also vetoed to be the future myth-making targets. From the above process, we can briefly conclude by synthesizing the following initial characteristics of the Shu Han heroes for their future romanticization, especially in the famous novel the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
First, from the chaotic situation of the Era of Disunion and the southern dynasties, the Shu Han image reflected a tendency for contemporary Chinese people to want to see their heroes succeed – or even to repudiate their mournful endings. The Shu Han heroes in fact originally possessed tragic elements in their lives: Liu Bei lost his last battle decidedly to the Wu Kingdom and died in the next year; both Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were ultimately defeated in battles and executed; Zhuge Liang also passed away during his last military campaign. But paradoxically, the Chinese people in fact had “little sense of tragedy or irony,” as David Keightley proposed for one of his seven distinctive Chinese cultural features, because Chinese history often “witnessed the general success and uncomplicated goodness of legendary heroes.” Thus, we observe that the Chinese mythmakers gradually minimized the tragic sense of the Shu Han figures, and granted them outstanding abilities to win in imaginary battles. Through labeling evil characters in history, Chinese mythmakers also tended to shift readers’ attention from the tragic end of heroes to cursing those responsible for their deaths. With the readers dissatisfied, even the final outcome of the Shu Han Kingdom was eventually rewritten.
Fu Jian of the Early Qin Kingdom (351-394AD) presented another example. Fu once reunified northern China, brought a cultural renaissance to the central region and might have been a “Napoleon-type leader” as suggested by Bai Yang. Unfortunately, after his defeat by the Eastern Jin, his kingdom vanished and Fu lost respect and attention from ordinary Chinese people. Of course, there were still some tragic heroes in China that perhaps serve as exceptions to the rule, such as the mythologization of Qu Yuan, Yue Fei and Wen Tianchang. But there were also repeated attempts to repudiate their outcomes in history. Two kneeling statues of Qin Gui, the Southern Song chancellor supposed to be responsible to Yue’s death, and his wife remain in front of the Yue Fei Temple today for tourists to spit on them.
Second, as repeatedly stressed by many Western scholars such as David Keightley, Paul Ropp and Robert Ruhlmann, contemporary mythmakers already started to feature traditional Confucian values in their myths, which were “Confucianized fiction” in Ruhlmann’s terminology. While Westerners favored more rebellious, anti-establishment heroes, Confucian tenets discouraged ambitious individual characters for the society. Arthur Wright outlined thirteen “approved attitudes and behavior patterns” for Confucian role-models in Confucian Personalities, notably including “submissiveness to authority,” “reverence for the past” and “noncompetitiveness.”
Thus, though Liu Bei and his followers were in fact challengers to the status quo of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the mythmakers changed their images to legitimate Han successors prolonging the old order. Confucian mythmakers also glorified their benevolent, righteous behavior instead of their bold and independent courage in gambling for power in a chaotic world. As a result Zhuge Liang, for example, was transformed as a “loyal minister to a fallen dynasty,” the very words Ralph Croizier has suggested for the mythmaking process applied to the seventeenth century pirate leader Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga).
By the same token, the monkey Sun Wukong, another formerly rebellious hero in the classic novel Xi You Ji (The Journey to the West), was transformed from a challenger of Heaven’s status quo to a security guard protecting a Buddhist priest and submitting to the authority of Buddha. Even the bandit heroes in the Water Margin in the latter third of the novel surrendered to the Song court and helped the state to suppress other peasant leaders. Of course, the Chinese people also honored many founding emperors of dynasties; but as cultural scholar Jin Ze argues, the honor was more a response to the emperors’ ability to promote order or the “approved attitudes” that Wright listed. Mao Zedong in contemporary China is perhaps the greatest exception to the above rule.
Finally, as seen from the resurrection and legitimization of Shu Han before the sixth century, the Chinese mythmaking process incurred active state intervention in addition to public participation. “The bureaucratization of historiography” in China, identified by Twitchett, only glorified “the bare account of a subject’s performance of his limited role as a member of the bureaucratic apparatus.” More crucially, Ruhlmann noted that the Confucian bureaucrats in China could stall private heroes from emerging through “the pressure of censorship on writers, publishers, and actors, particularly in the later dynasties.” Thus, private writers in China could not create the Shu Han myth on their own, because they faced restrictions in granting regimes or individuals legitimate status, the fundamental criterion for any glorious legacy to be achieved in China. If the state rejected certain figures as historic heroes, ordinary Chinese people tended to neglect them thoroughly, as shown by the lack of respect by most Chinese people to Fu Jian. Most leaders of peasant revolts were also disdained in ancient China when their image as “bandits” was reinforced in most traditional history textbooks in China before the Communist Revolution in 1949, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong today. Of course, there are still some exceptions in Chinese history, such as the case of popular admiration of the pirate leader Zheng Chenggong, the brief ruler of Taiwan who was nominally loyal to the Ming court and opposed the establishment of the Qing Dynasty.
Once the state was involved in the mythmaking process, the heroes were inevitably invested with state-dominated ideology, as observed in Communist China’s transfiguration of the images of historic peasant leaders from 1949 on. As an example, Beijing scholar Zhang Chuanxi has paralleled the “uprising” of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang against the Qin Dynasty with the peasant movement led by Mao. Another official scholar, Liang Xiao, has even borrowed Communist jargon to credit Chen’s contribution in inspiring Mao’s revolution as an anti-federalist forerunner.
Nevertheless, the path of the Shu Han Kingdom from a weak, short-lived, illegitimate, Machiavellian, regional regime to a powerful, orthodox, Confucian political utopia for the Chinese people to fantasize about is now a fait accompli. The romanticization was neither a pre-determined routine repertoire in Chinese history, nor simply a creation for leisure. Were China not disintegrated between 280 and 589AD, the Shu Han myth might well be never created.
Yet, as the kingdom became a political utopia today, every person could project his or her different hopes into the non-existent regime. Although their messages are not necessarily the same, the dream of a harmonious, happy living world with a responsible, uncorrupted government is never doubted. No matter how artificially distorted, the Shu Han image effectively represented, is representing, and may continue to represent such a dream for the Chinese people in the future.
Green mountains remain,
As sunsets ingrain,
Hoary fishers and woodcutters,
And some small rafts and calm waters,
In autumn moon, in spring winds,
By the wine jars, by porcelains,
Discuss talk and tale,
Only laugh and gale.”
– Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
(4of4)
http://youthroundtable.org/html/admin/Newsletter039.htm
[ Last edited by 橙色力量 on 27-3-2005 at 06:03 PM ] |
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