Andrew Chittick

"This book compares the ways in which new powers arose in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its Byzantine and Carolingian successors, of Iran, the Caliphate and China in the first millennium CE. These new powers were often established by external military elites who had served the empire. They remained in an uneasy balance with the remaining empire, could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Some relied on dynastic legitimacy, others on ethnic identification, while most of them sought imperial legitimation. Across Eurasia, their dynamic was similar in many respects; why were the outcomes so different?"--

In traditional Chinese and modern Western historiography, the period has been framed as a North-South rivalry between two dynasties that each sought to reunify "China," meaning the empire originally founded by the Qin and Han. The two empires are seen as culturally complementary; for example, the North is characterized as "martial" but lacking in cultural sophistication, while the South is described as more "literary" but lacking in military strength and assertiveness. The empire based at Jiankang had persisted since the founding of the Three Kingdoms state of Wu in the early third century, with only a brief 37-year interregnum of rule by the North under the Western Jin dynasty. Southern urban development was especially spectacular. The southern regimes also emphasized the internal colonization of new lands. The greatest output of non-religious prose writing during the northern and southern period was unquestionably in the genre loosely understood as "history."

Modern studies of civil-military relations recognise that the military is separate from civil society, with its own norms and values, principles of organization, and regulations. Key issues of concern include the means by which - and the extent to which - the civil power controls the military; and also the ways in which military values and approaches permeate and affect wider society. This book examines these issues in relation to China, covering the full range of Chinese history from the Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties up to the Communist takeover in 1949. It traces how civil-military relations were different in different periods, explores how military specialization and professionalization developed, and reveals how military weakness often occurred when the civil authority with weak policies exerted power over the military. Overall, the book shows how attitudes to the military’s role in present day Communist China were forged in earlier periods.