Spring and Autumn Historiography by Newell Ann Van Auken

Author:Newell Ann Van Auken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS008000, History/Asia/China, HIS016000, History/Historiography
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Spring and Autumn: Simple Records of Judgments

Cases such as that of Kong Da, honored at home but condemned in announcements and registered in the Spring and Autumn records as having been killed; of Cui Zhu of Qi, who was driven away but said to have fled; of complex regicide plots ascribed to a single person; and of fugitives who were granted (or denied) asylum in Lu all reveal that beneath the brief and direct Spring and Autumn records lie multiple layers of conflicting interests and perspectives. We know little about the process and considerations entailed in determining how events were announced and subsequently recorded. Bribes and political power certainly played a substantial (if unofficial and unspoken) role, but we lack information on topics such as why responsibility for an act of regicide involving many people was assigned to one particular person, or why some fugitives to Lu were received and others turned away. The Spring and Autumn does not record the deliberations involved, only the final result, thereby reducing very complex situations to simple, unambiguous outcomes.85

While narrative accounts may expose discrepancies in how situations and actors were regarded, allowing for a range of potential considerations and evaluations, the announcements recorded in the Zuo Tradition voice unequivocal judgments of guilt, pronounced with finality and leaving no room for ambivalence. Their wording is anything but objective, and they seem to have functioned as communications of official verdicts that formally assigned responsibility for offenses. Announcements marked individuals as bad, and they labeled sanctioned killings (including some suicides) as punishments in response to crimes and flights into exile (not always the choice of the fugitive) as abandonment of religious responsibilities. These announcements were disseminated to the regional rulers, including Lu, and the details contained therein apparently served as the basis for some Spring and Autumn records. The records may differ from the narratives in the Zuo Tradition, but they generally align with the official announcements—for example, killers of noblemen are not identified, and suicides are framed as killings—and we may speculate that the underlying message and assumptions were the same.

Yet the Spring and Autumn is not a record of announcements. Even if the Spring and Autumn registers details about events that had been received via announcement, the records themselves employ fundamentally different wording from the announcements, and they had an essentially different function. Announcements communicated the official view of the state from which the announcement emanated, and their language was heavily freighted with judgment. The language used in the Spring and Autumn records is, on the surface, neutral and impersonal: there are no “bad vassals,” no references to being “prostrated because of a crime,” no accusations of “abandoning the altars,” and indeed, no direct mention of crime or offense. Simply put, the Spring and Autumn records are not transcriptions or redactions of announcements. The records do reflect the official view of events, and we may assume that they intend to present victims of killings and those who went out fleeing in a negative

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