These essays examine the relation of society and the state or, more broadly, the place of political action in society and in the history of Sung China. Connections between intellectual change and sociopolitical change are a consistent focus; attitudes toward history and problems of authority are a recurrent concern. The authors suggest new kinds of continuity between the disparate intellectual worlds of Northern and Southern Sung China. Their findings have important implications for our understanding of the neo-Confucian movement in Sung history and of the Sung in the history of Chinese ideas about politics and social action.

Contributors

Peter K. Bol is professor of Chinese history at Harvard University. His recent publications include "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China .

John W. Chaffee is associate professor and chairperson of history at Binghamton University, the State University of New York. He is the author of The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations and coeditor with Wm. Theodore de Bary of Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Period . His current research focuses on the history of the Sung imperial clan.

Wm. Theodore de Bary is the John Mitchell Mason Professor and Provost Emeritus of Columbia University. His more recent books are The Trouble with Confucianism and Learning for One's Self .

George Hatch is associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. His interests include Sung literati and Chinese historical thought.

Robert P. Hymes is professor of Chinese history at Columbia University. He is the author of Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung and is currently completing a book on Taoist saints' cults.

James T. C. Liu is professor of East Asian studies and history, emeritus, at Princeton University. A founding figure in the study of Sung history in this country, he is the author of numerous articles and books, including biographies of Wang An-shih and Ou-yang Hsiu and, more recently, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (1988).

Conrad Schirokauer accepted early retirement from the City College of the City University of New York (1991) to concentrate on research in Sung intellectual history. He is the author of articles on Chu Hsi and Hu Hung as well as of a textbook.

Paul J. Smith , a student of Sung and Yuan social and economic history, is associate professor of history at Haverford College. He is the author of Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224 (1991).

Richard von Glahn is associate professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times and is currently undertaking research on political culture and popular politics in Ming China.

Linda Walton is associate professor of history at Portland State University, Oregon. She has published articles and book chapters on Sung social and intellectual history and is currently completing a book manuscript on academies and society in the Southern Sung.