Writing against The State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China

This text is about the tension between de facto political power and the claims to intellectual and moral leadership of the shi (gentleman class) in early medieval China. Shelun , or Hypothetical Discourse is used to place the surviving texts against the political background that accounts for its rise and decline in early medieval China. Comprehensively annotated translations of seven Hypothetical Discourses are placed in context of their author’s lives and times, with an emphasis on the post-Han examples of the genre. This thorough study gives insight into this subgenre of fu by which the world of Chinese gentlemen class finds an always ambiguous expression in the rhyme-prose texts under review.