Die 'Clique' in der Sung-Geschichtsschreibung uber die Sudliche Tang.

摘要

Chinese factions defy easy definition which is obvious in the attempts of various modern scholars that describe factions in terms of groupings among officials, eunuchs, imperial relatives and so forth.; In the case of the Song historiography on the Southern Tang (937-960/975) authors use factions to construe the historical record. The earliest sources on the history of the Southern Tang categorize officials according to qualifications such as junzi ("gentlemen") and xiaoren ("mean men"). The authors of the sources stress moral short-comings on the side of certain officials who are made responsible for the ruin of the dynasty. Most influential in the development of the faction in writings on the Southern Tang has been Ouyang Xiu in his Xin Wudai shi. There he takes up the notion of a group of officials called the "Five Devils", which already had been described in the Diaoji litan (ca. 1010-1020), an anecdotal work.; Ouyang Xiu himself was well acquainted with the discussion of factions and indeed fell victim to "factional struggles". From Ouyang Xiu's Xin Wudai shi onwards the faction becomes an ever more important part in Song historical writings on the Southern Tang. This development culminates in the Nan Tang shu by Ma Ling (1105). Ma Ling sets up two confronting groups of seven officials each, one of which acts as a faction whereas the opponent group is labelled as junzi. Since junzi according to the traditional view cannot band together as factions, we have thus a "real" faction and a "non"-faction.; The experience of people like Ouyang Xiu and Ma Ling did express itself in their writing "factional" history. They used the model of the faction to explain how its evil machinations supported the downfall of empire.; The faction "personnel" within the texts we read (in this case fourteen between 974 and 1184) is subject to constant changes which means that every text invents its own faction. This is why definitions of factions do not work.