Circulation and flow: Immanent metaphors in the financial debates of Northern Song China (960–1127 CE)

Abstract

The Song Empire (960-1279 CE) had a larger population, a higher agricultural output, a more efficient infrastructure, and a more extensive monetary system than any previous empire in Chinese history. As local jurisdictions during the eleventh century became entangled in empire-wide economic relations and trans-regional commercial litigation, imperial officials sought to reduce the bewildering movement of people, goods, and money to an immanent cosmic pattern. They reasoned that because money and commerce brought to imperial subjects the goods they required to survive, money and commerce must be beneficent, and because they were beneficent, they must conform to the immanent pattern of the moral cosmos, as did everything else that was enduringly sustaining of life and wellbeing. And because money and commerce conformed to the moral cosmos, officials attempted to understand their workings by analogy with other phenomena that sustained human life, such as the flow of water and the circulation of vital essences through the human body. During the 1030s and 1040s, officials and scholars believed that knowledge of the cosmic pattern lay within their grasp, and that this knowledge would allow them to align culture with nature, and the present with hallowed antiquity. By the 1080s, however, this intellectual optimism had been defeated by irreconcilable disagreements about financial and economic policy. The failure of the attempt to understand finance by natural analogy draws attention to the underlying ideological insistence on moral learning as the basis for political power, and to the very limited range of economic discourse that has been preserved in eleventh-century texts.

Considering citizenship in imperial Chinese history

“…Both claims of exceptionalism are equally problematic and both proceed from deeply held beliefs about the essential nature of 'western' and 'eastern' culture. Medieval European metaphors of the body were also organic, hierarchical, and focused on the ruler; from early imperial times terms such as 'the body of the state' (guoti 國體), 'the body of governance' (zhengti 政體), or 'the body of the sovereign' (junti 君體) became part of Chinese (and later East Asian) political discourse and metaphors of the body and body parts had already come into use in the centuries of interstate warfare leading up to the early empires to discuss the parts, the structure, the organization, and the operation of the polity overseen by a 'head' (Yang 1993;Zhang 2000;Huang 2002Huang , 2006Huang , 2008Xiao 2006;Li 2012;de Pee 2018;Hartman 2015).…”