Bibliographical Essay

Though the study of violence as a separate topic formed no part of traditional Chinese historiography, recent historical studies of China have begun to explore the possibilities offered by surviving sources for such research in several different ways, for example through local studies.

The period from c. 500 to 1500 has moreover rarely been written about as such, in part because in Chinese terms it spans two very different epochs. The early collapse of a unified empire in China, which in effect began to take place in the second century ce, and the violent end of the second period of unification in the early tenth century that ushered in a new age characterised especially from the following century by a very different culture - marked for example by much greater urbanisation and the use of printing, ceramics and improved agricultural techniques - has meant that students of Chinese history in the Anglophone world have tended to specialise in the first millennium ce or the second, but not both.

More common, however, are diachronic studies that deal to some extent with the period before 1000 ce, reaching back into early Chinese times, but find a greater weight of useful evidence in more recent centuries. This is true for example of a major study of the important topic for violence in religious contexts of Chinese demonology, Richard von Glahn, The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). The advisability of taking into account the persistence of long-term cultural phenomena within very different historical periods in China is illustrated in this case by long-lived traditions of what might be called ‘demonography', describing harmful entities and how to combat them: Donald Harper, ‘A Note on Nightmare Magic in Ancient and Medieval China', Tang Studies 6 (1988), 69-76, finds writing in this tradition in the manuscripts recovered from Dunhuang that evidently kept alive very ancient beliefs, even though these were not the province of an established - and bibliographically self-aware - tradition like Buddhism and Daoism.

At times a divergence of approach in assigning significance to much earlier evidence in interpreting later phenomena seems to reflect different historiographic communities, even within Anglophone scholarship. North American scholars, for instance, following earlier Chinese publications, tend to assign considerable importance to the role of Manichaeans in violent uprisings, such as those that resulted in the founding of the Ming dynasty, whereas in European publications much greater reserve on this matter has generally been expressed. In part this may follow Japanese scholarship, as in T. H. Barrett, ‘Chinese Sectarian Religion', Modern Asian Studies 12.2 (1978), 333-52, at 337, but in the main it is due to a perception of the probable persistence of earlier, non-Manichaean forms of eschatology: a good example would be the diachronic survey of Hubert Seiwert, in collaboration with Ma Xisha, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003). At this point any history of religion and violence spanning 500­1500 is bound to be a tentative construct, but it may have its uses in bringing into relation studies never associated before, and thereby pointing to possibilities for future work.