王远康：《和谐与战争：儒家文化与中国权力政治》（评论）

王远康：《和谐与战争：儒家文化与中国权力政治》（评论）

保罗-雅科夫-史密斯

宋元研究》杂志

宋元及征服王朝研究会

第42卷，2012年

pp.492-501

10.1353/sys.2013.0011

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为了代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

审稿人：：

Paul Jakov Smith

王元康 .和谐与战争：儒家文化与中国权力政治。纽约：哥伦比亚大学出版社，2011年。Pp. xvi + 310.50.00美元（布）。ISBN 978-0231151405。

关于中国军事的书籍、论文、文章、会议发言和研究小组的激增都表明，战争终于成为中国历史领域的一个主流话题。在帝国时代的大部分时间里，以儒家思想统治中国并塑造其历史学的文人阶层系统地淡化了战争，宣扬了一个由民间价值观和军事行为模式主导的[End Page 492]社会形象。长期以来，中国的现代历史学家都采用了这种观点，他们一直将战争和军事在中国历史和社会中的作用降到最低。但最近，中国、日本和西方的历史学家都在努力驳斥一位学者对中国历史的 "非军事化 "看法，并阐明 "充斥着军事事件 "的历史对中国政治、体制、文化和艺术的影响。

阿拉斯泰尔-伊恩-约翰斯顿（Alastair Iain Johnston）试图在《文化现实主义》中概括中国的战略文化，但尽管在概念上富有想象力，该书在实践中却仅限于将约翰斯顿对七大军事经典的解释应用于单一王朝--明朝的战略决策中。

本刊的读者应该对这本书特别感兴趣，因为他挖掘了宋代和明代历史学家的工作，为他关于文化和战争之间关系的更大的理论结论收集证据。

但是，王氏将历史与国际关系理论结合起来的做法最终是不和谐的，原因我将在下面解释。

和谐与战争》是对Wang 2001年在芝加哥大学发表的政治学博士论文的修订。

第一个目标是颠覆王在台湾长大时学到的关于中国历史和儒家经典的教训，他认为这些教训是 "传统智慧"：即中国的 "和平儒家文化产生了一个具有防御意识和避免向外扩张的国家，"除非领土扩张是通过儒家文化的和平传播而发生的（第xiv页）。法

第二是将源自西方经验主义的国际关系理论--结构现实主义--应用于亚洲的一个重要案例，以 "反驳国际关系理论不适合非西方世界的说法"（第6页），证明中国过去的行为与其他大国一样。

也就是说，中国 "在实力相对较强时采取进攻性大战略，而在实力相对较弱时采取防御性大战略"（第8页）。

第三个目标是利用这一洞察力来警告当前的政策制定者，尽管当代中国领导人坚持其国际目标是和平的，但 "中国已将追求权力作为其安全政策的核心要素"（第208页）。

约翰斯顿的《文化现实主义》一书的出版似乎更直接地促进了王的研究，该书对王在芝加哥的导师约翰-米尔斯海默所代表的那种国家间关系的结构现实主义理论提出了文化主义的挑战。

在米尔斯海默看来，国际关系的两种主要理论方法可以分为自由主义和现实主义。自由主义理论认为，国家的内部特征和政治文化很重要，一些内部安排，如民主，比其他安排，如独裁更可取；计算...

Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics by Yuan-kang Wang (review)

Paul Jakov Smith

Journal of Song-Yuan Studies

The Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies

Volume 42, 2012

pp. 492-501

10.1353/sys.2013.0011

Review

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Reviewed by:

Paul Jakov Smith

Yuan-kang Wang . Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 310. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0231151405.

The proliferation of books, theses, articles, conference presentations, and study groups on the military in China all demonstrate that war has finally become a mainstream topic in the field of Chinese history. The Confucian-minded class of literati who governed China and shaped its historiography for most of the imperial era systematically downplayed war, promoting the image of a [End Page 492] society dominated by civil over military values and modes of behavior. That perspective was long adopted by modern historians of China, who consistently minimized the role of war and the military in Chinese history and society. But recently, historians in China, Japan, and the West have worked to refute what one scholar calls the "undermilitarized" view of China's past, and to elucidate the impact on Chinese politics, institutions, culture, and the arts of a history "awash with military events."1 But if the study of Chinese history is no longer resolutely undermilitarized, the military dimensions might still be seen as undertheorized, with few efforts undertaken to thematize the role of war in Chinese history overall.2 Alastair Iain Johnston attempted to generalize about China's strategic culture in Cultural Realism, but while conceptually imaginative, that book is limited in practice to an application of Johnston's interpretation of the Seven Military Classics to the strategic decision-making of a single dynasty, the Ming.3 Now Yuan-kang Wang provides an even more ambitious attempt to capture the place of war in Chinese history and culture, in his reëxamination of strategic decision-making in the Song, Ming, and PRC through the theoretical lens of a branch of international relations theory known as structural realism. Wang's book ought to be of special interest to readers of this journal, since he mines the work of Song and Ming historians to marshal evidence for his larger theoretical conclusions about the relationship between culture and war. But Wang's marriage of history and IR theory is ultimately discordant, for reasons I will explain below.

Harmony and War constitutes a revision of Wang's 2001 Ph.D. thesis in political science at the University of Chicago.4 At the broadest level, the thesis and ensuing book seek to achieve three objectives. The first goal is to subvert the lessons about Chinese history and the Confucian classics that Wang learned while growing up in Taiwan and that he associates with "conventional [End Page 493] wisdom": that is, that China's "peaceful Confucian culture had produced a state that was defensive-minded and avoided outward expansion," except where territorial expansion occurred through the peaceful spread of Confucian culture (p. xiv). The second is to apply a theory about international relations derived from empirical roots in the West--structural realism--to a major case in Asia, in order to "[refute] the assertion that IR theory is ill-suited for the non-Western world" (p. 6), by showing that China in the past acted like any other Great Power. That is, China adopted "an offensive grand strategy when its power was relatively strong, and a defensive one when its power was relatively weak" (p. viii). And the third objective is to draw on this insight to warn current policymakers that despite the insistence of contemporary Chinese leaders that their international aims are peaceful, "the PRC has made the pursuit of power the core element of its security policy" (p. 208).

The more immediate catalyst to Wang's research appears to be the publication of Johnston's Cultural Realism, which launched a culturalist challenge to the kind of structural realist theories of interstate relations represented by Wang's mentor at Chicago, John J. Mearsheimer. In Mearsheimer's view, the two main theoretical approaches to international relations can be divided into liberalism and realism. Liberalist theory assumes that the internal characteristics and political culture of states matter, and that some internal arrangements, like democracy, are preferable to others, like dictatorship; that calculations...