1. Why this case is the suite’s archetype of judicial murder
The phenomenon expresses itself through many instruments. Saul threw a spear and then loosed a manhunt; Athens cast potsherds and then convened a treason court; Rome prosecuted for embezzlement; the late Roman court used a treacherous execution and a palace knife; Justinian used recurrent recall and a final confiscation. Among all these instruments, one recurs with special frequency and a special significance, the conversion of the deliverer into a traitor through the empty forms of legal process, the judicial murder in which a tribunal, a charge, and a sentence are deployed to kill a man whom the regime fears, with the apparatus of justice supplying what the facts cannot. The suite takes Yue Fei as the archetype of this instrument, and this is the first reason it receives a full and central treatment. No case in the whole set displays the judicial murder of a deliverer more purely, for in the Yue Fei case the emptiness of the legal charge was not merely a fact to be inferred by the historian but an emptiness confessed, in so many words, by the very minister who prosecuted it.
The phrase that confessed it has become one of the most famous in Chinese history and gives the suite its sharpest single piece of evidence. When Yue Fei had been imprisoned and another official protested that there was no proof of the crime charged against him, the minister Qin Hui is reported to have answered that the charge was, perhaps, not necessarily groundless, or in the form in which the phrase entered the language, that it was a charge of something that perhaps existed, the three characters that have ever since stood in Chinese as the byword for a fabricated accusation and a judicial murder (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). The minister’s answer was an admission that the evidence did not exist, that the charge was a thing that might be, a possibility dressed as a fact, and that the deliverer was to be killed not because he had done wrong but because the regime had determined that he should die. No clearer confession of the phenomenon’s mechanism survives anywhere in the suite, for here the prosecutor himself acknowledged, in the act of prosecuting, that the legal form was a covering for a predetermined destruction.
The second reason the case is central is the explicitness of the political motive, which the sources lay bare with unusual clarity. Yue Fei was not killed because his prestige had grown vaguely threatening or because a suspicious sovereign feared what he might someday do. He was killed because his military success threatened a specific and concrete political interest of the emperor, the security of the emperor’s own hold on the throne, in a way the sources state plainly. The case thus joins the demonstrated emptiness of the charge to a demonstrated and specific motive, and the combination makes it the suite’s clearest example of the judicial murder of a deliverer for reasons of the throne’s self-preservation.
The third reason is the case’s extraordinary afterlife, the transformation of the executed general into the supreme national symbol of loyalty and of his prosecutor into the supreme symbol of treachery, a moral reversal so complete and so enduring that it constitutes posterity’s verdict on the phenomenon, rendered and re-rendered for nearly nine centuries. The suite attends to this afterlife because it is the clearest instance in the whole set of the judgment of history reversing the judgment of the regime, the deliverer the state condemned as a traitor becoming the nation’s emblem of fidelity, and the minister who killed him becoming the figure at whose image men still spit.
2. The deliverance: the defense of the Song against the Jin
The deliverance Yue Fei rendered, the first criterion of the phenomenon, was the defense of the Chinese Song state against the Jin invaders who had overrun the north, a defense in which Yue Fei was the foremost commander and the one general who seemed capable of reversing the catastrophe that had befallen the dynasty. In the early twelfth century the Jurchen Jin had invaded the Song empire, captured the Song capital, and carried off into captivity the reigning emperor and his father, the retired emperor, an almost unparalleled humiliation in which the rulers of China were taken prisoner by the barbarian enemy and the north of the country was lost (Kaplan, 1970). A surviving prince established a new Song court in the south, becoming the emperor known by his temple name Gaozong, and the Southern Song fought to hold what remained and, if possible, to recover what had been lost.
In this war Yue Fei rose to be the greatest of the Song generals, a commander whose armies were disciplined, loyal, and effective in a degree that set them apart, and whose campaigns against the Jin met with a success that no other Song commander could match (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). His troops were famed for their discipline and their refusal to plunder the people they defended, and the saying attributed to his army, that they would freeze to death rather than tear down houses for firewood and starve to death rather than plunder, became proverbial as the mark of an army that served the people rather than preying upon them. Yue Fei drove back the Jin in a series of victories, recovered territory, and at the height of his success stood poised, by his own account and the judgment of the sources, to press on into the north, to break the Jin power, and to recover the lost capital and the lost provinces, even to liberate the captive emperors and restore the empire to its former extent (Kaplan, 1970). His deliverance was real and it was the Song state’s best hope, and the first criterion is met in the strict sense, for Yue Fei was the commander whose skill stood between the Southern Song and the Jin who had already destroyed the Northern Song, and whose victories offered the dynasty not merely survival but restoration.
3. The turn: the emperor’s fear and the twelve tablets of gold
The phenomenon’s third criterion, fear as the operative motive, is met in the Yue Fei case with a specificity that distinguishes it, for the emperor’s fear can be named precisely and its object identified concretely. The motive was not a generalized dread of the general’s power but a specific calculation about the consequences of the general’s success for the emperor’s own hold on the throne, and the sources state it with a clarity that makes the case the suite’s most legible.
The emperor Gaozong sat on the throne only because his father and brother, the former emperors, were captives of the Jin. Were Yue Fei to succeed in his ambition, to break the Jin and recover the north and liberate the captive emperors, the result would be the return of the very men whose captivity had made Gaozong emperor, and the restoration of the former emperor would call into question Gaozong’s own legitimacy and threaten his position (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). The general’s victory, in other words, threatened the emperor with the return of his predecessors, and Gaozong, whatever his public commitment to the recovery of the north, had a concrete and personal interest in a war that did not succeed so completely as to bring the captive emperors home. To this was joined the influence of the chief minister Qin Hui, the architect of a policy of peace and accommodation with the Jin, who for reasons of state policy, of personal ambition, and, in the judgment of his countrymen ever after, of treachery, sought an end to the war and the removal of the general whose victories made peace impossible (Kaplan, 1970). The emperor’s fear of his predecessors’ return and the minister’s commitment to peace combined into a determination to halt the war and to destroy the general who was winning it.
The means by which the war was halted gives this paper its title and stands as one of the most striking images in the whole suite. At the height of Yue Fei’s success, when his armies were advancing and victory seemed within reach, the emperor recalled him, and recalled him not once but by a succession of urgent orders, the tradition holding that twelve gold-lettered tablets, the most peremptory form of imperial command, were sent to him in a single day, ordering him to abandon his advance and return (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). The general, bound by his loyalty and by the absolute claim of the imperial order, obeyed, abandoning the campaign at the moment of its promise and turning back from the north he had hoped to recover, lamenting that the achievement of years was undone in a day. The twelve tablets of gold are the emblem of the case, the regime using the supreme authority of the throne not to support its deliverer but to halt him, to call him back from the victory that threatened the emperor’s interest, and the image of the general obeying, recalled from triumph by the very sovereign he was triumphing for, captures the phenomenon’s inversion exactly, the throne employing its highest command to undo its own salvation.
4. The destruction: the empty charge and the confession of its emptiness
The recall was the prelude to the destruction. Once Yue Fei had been called back and stripped of his command, the determination to be rid of him entirely followed, for a general of his prestige and his commitment to the war could not be left alive to threaten the peace policy or to serve as a focus for those who wished the war continued. Yue Fei was arrested, imprisoned, and charged, and the charge was the familiar one of the suite, treason, the imputation to the loyal deliverer of a plot against the throne he had served (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962).
The emptiness of the charge is the case’s defining feature, and it was established not by the later judgment of historians but by the contemporary record of the prosecution itself. The general Han Shizhong, a fellow commander, is reported to have confronted Qin Hui and demanded to know what evidence there was for the charge against Yue Fei, and Qin Hui gave the answer that has echoed through Chinese history ever since, that the matter was perhaps not groundless, that the charge concerned something that perhaps existed (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). The three characters of that answer became, and remain, the standard expression in the Chinese language for a trumped-up accusation, a charge fabricated to destroy a man against whom no real evidence exists, and their currency for nearly nine centuries is testimony to how clearly the contemporaries and all who came after understood that Yue Fei was killed on a charge that the prosecutor himself could not affirm to be true. The minister’s answer is, for the suite, the purest single piece of evidence of the phenomenon’s mechanism, for it is the prosecutor’s own confession that the legal form was empty, that the charge was a possibility dressed as a fact, and that the deliverer was to be killed regardless of whether he had done anything wrong.
Yue Fei was put to death in prison, killed on the empty charge, and his son and a lieutenant died with him (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). The judicial murder was complete, the deliverer of the Song destroyed by the Song through the forms of a justice that the prosecutor admitted to be a covering for a predetermined death. The historian must ask, as the method requires, whether there could have been any truth to the charge of treason, and the answer the case yields is the clearest negative in the suite, for the prosecutor’s own confession that the charge concerned something that “perhaps” existed is an admission that there was no proof, and the whole subsequent judgment of Chinese history, which made Yue Fei the symbol of loyalty and Qin Hui the symbol of treachery, rests on the universal recognition that the general was innocent and the charge fabricated. The operative cause of the destruction was the emperor’s fear that the general’s success would bring back the captive emperors and threaten his throne, joined to the minister’s commitment to peace; the charge of treason was the instrument, the empty legal form confessed to be empty by the man who wielded it.
5. The afterlife: the verdict of history reversed
The Yue Fei case is distinguished from every other in the suite by the completeness and endurance of the moral reversal that followed his death, the transformation of the condemned traitor into the national symbol of loyalty and of his prosecutor into the eternal symbol of treachery, and the suite attends to this afterlife because it constitutes posterity’s verdict on the phenomenon, rendered with a clarity and a permanence that no other case can match.
Within a generation of his death, Yue Fei was rehabilitated. A later emperor reversed the verdict, cleared the general’s name, restored his honors, and had him reburied with full ceremony, and Yue Fei passed into Chinese culture as the supreme exemplar of the loyal minister and the patriotic general, the man who served his dynasty faithfully and was destroyed by its treachery, the embodiment of loyalty to the country (Kaplan, 1970; Wilhelm, 1962). A temple was raised at his tomb, and he became an object of veneration that endured through the centuries and endures still, his name a byword for fidelity and patriotic devotion, his story told and retold in history, drama, and popular tradition as the very type of the faithful servant betrayed.
The reversal extended to his destroyers, and here the verdict of history took a form unusually concrete and unusually lasting. At Yue Fei’s tomb were placed iron statues of Qin Hui and his wife and the others held responsible for the general’s death, kneeling in eternal submission and disgrace before the tomb of the man they had killed, and for centuries visitors expressed their judgment on the betrayal by spitting upon or striking these statues, so that the figures of the minister and his accomplices became the physical objects of the nation’s contempt, kneeling forever in penance before the deliverer they had murdered (Kaplan, 1970). The name of Qin Hui became, and remains, the Chinese byword for a traitor, as Yue Fei’s became the byword for a loyal patriot, and the contrast between the two, the venerated general and the despised minister, the honored tomb and the kneeling statues, constitutes a verdict of history more complete and more enduring than any other in the suite. Posterity reversed the regime’s judgment utterly, declaring the condemned traitor a hero and the prosecuting minister a traitor, and it inscribed that reversal in temple and statue and language so that it might never be forgotten.
The suite attends to this afterlife because it bears on the closing argument about the nature of the phenomenon. The reversal shows that the regime’s reclassification of the deliverer as a traitor, accomplished through the empty forms of law, did not survive the test of time, that the judgment of history saw through the legal form to the fear and the treachery beneath it, and restored to the deliverer the honor the regime had stripped from him. The kneeling statues of Qin Hui are the phenomenon’s self-defeat in the moral register, the destroyer of the deliverer condemned by posterity to an eternal disgrace that has far outlasted whatever security his treachery purchased, while the deliverer he killed is venerated still. The regime won the immediate contest, killing the general and making its peace with the Jin, but it lost the verdict of history utterly, and the loss is written in iron at the tomb.
6. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the Yue Fei case
The four analytical concepts of Paper 1 are present in the destruction of Yue Fei, and the case displays them in the particular register of the judicial murder, the destruction accomplished through the empty forms of law.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the specific and concrete form that the Yue Fei case gives it, for here the general’s capability threatened the throne not through the abstract possibility that it might be turned against the emperor but through the concrete consequence that its success would bring back the captive emperors and undermine Gaozong’s legitimacy. Yue Fei’s very victories, the proof of his capability, were the threat, for the more he succeeded the nearer came the restoration of the former emperor and the calling into question of the reigning emperor’s title. This is the convertibility in an unusually direct form, the capability threatening the throne not by what it might do to the emperor but by what its success would accomplish, the return of the men whose absence made the emperor’s reign possible. The deliverer’s skill, exercised in the dynasty’s service, struck directly at the reigning sovereign’s interest, and this is why the sovereign halted it with twelve tablets of gold and then destroyed the man who possessed it.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in Yue Fei’s standing as the foremost and most successful of the Song generals, the commander whose victories and whose disciplined, devoted army made him a figure of national hope and a focus for all who wished the war continued and the north recovered. This prestige was a rival pole of authority and policy, for the general’s commitment to the recovery of the north stood in direct opposition to the court’s policy of peace, and Yue Fei’s standing made him a potential rallying point for opposition to the accommodation with the Jin. The court could not pursue its peace policy while the most celebrated general in the empire was winning a war and calling for its continuation, and the destruction of the general was, in part, the removal of a prestige that stood in the way of the regime’s chosen course. The deliverer’s standing was a competitor not only to the emperor’s legitimacy but to the minister’s policy, and both the emperor and the minister had an interest in its removal.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears in the divergence between the general’s interest, which was the prosecution of the war to victory and the recovery of the north, and the institution’s interest, which was the security of the reigning emperor’s throne and the minister’s policy of peace. While the war’s outcome was uncertain, the general’s capability was needed; once the court had determined on peace, the general’s capability became not merely unnecessary but actively obstructive, for his victories made peace impossible and his success threatened the throne. The institution, acting on its commitment to the emperor’s security and the minister’s policy, resolved the asymmetry by halting the general and then destroying him, preferring the security of a peace that left the throne unthreatened to the recovery of the north that the general’s capability offered. The self-preserving interest of the institution, the protection of the reigning emperor’s hold on the throne, overrode the national interest in the recovery of the lost provinces, and the deliverer was sacrificed to the throne’s security.
The use of legal form to legitimate the destruction appears in the Yue Fei case in its purest and most fully confessed version, the judicial murder accomplished through a treason charge that the prosecutor himself admitted to be empty. The court did not kill the general openly as the removal of an obstacle to its policy; it charged him with treason, imprisoned him, and put him to death through the forms of a legal process, clothing the destruction in the appearance of justice. And the minister’s confession, that the charge concerned something that perhaps existed, is the suite’s clearest exposure of the function of the legal form, for it is the prosecutor’s own acknowledgment that the form was empty, that the charge was a covering for a predetermined death, and that the apparatus of justice was being used to accomplish what the facts could not justify. The legal form in the Yue Fei case is the phenomenon’s instrument laid bare, confessed by the man who wielded it to be the empty covering that the suite has argued it to be throughout.
7. The Chinese judicial variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the cases that precede it, the Yue Fei case confirms the phenomenon’s structure and contributes the archetype of the judicial murder, the destruction of the deliverer through the empty forms of law, confessed to be empty by the prosecutor himself. As in Saul’s pursuit of David, in Athens’s exile of Themistocles, in Rome’s persecution of Scipio, in the founding executions of Han Xin and Bai Qi, in the late Roman murders, and in Justinian’s suspicion of Belisarius, a genuine deliverer is destroyed by the regime he served, out of fear of the consequences of the capability and prestige the deliverance created, through a legal form that serves the fear rather than punishes any real crime. The Yue Fei case is distinguished by the purity of the judicial murder, the specificity of the political motive, and the completeness of the moral reversal that posterity rendered.
The case shares with the Chinese founding cases of Paper 5 the explicitness with which the phenomenon’s logic was understood and articulated by the contemporaries, but it adds a dimension the founding cases lacked, the confessed emptiness of the legal charge. Where Han Xin named the phenomenon’s mechanism in his proverb of the boiled hound, the Yue Fei case gives the mechanism in the prosecutor’s own confession that the charge was a thing that “perhaps” existed, the destroyer’s acknowledgment that the destruction rested on no fact. The two Chinese contributions together, the victim’s diagnosis and the prosecutor’s confession, make the Chinese material the suite’s most self-aware, the cases in which the phenomenon’s participants, both the destroyed and the destroyers, stated in plain words what was being done and why.
The Yue Fei case also gives the suite its clearest instance of the self-defeat in the moral register, the verdict of history reversing the verdict of the regime. The regime killed the general and made its peace, securing for the moment the throne and the policy; but posterity reversed the judgment utterly, making the condemned traitor the nation’s symbol of loyalty and the prosecuting minister the nation’s symbol of treachery, and inscribing the reversal in the venerated tomb and the kneeling iron statues so that it endures to this day. The regime’s destruction of its deliverer, accomplished through the empty forms of law, did not survive the judgment of history, which saw through the form to the fear and the treachery beneath it and rendered against the regime a verdict more lasting than any security the destruction purchased. The closing paper returns to this moral self-defeat, the way the phenomenon, whatever its immediate success, stands condemned by the long judgment of mankind; the Yue Fei case gives it its sharpest form, the deliverer venerated and the destroyer despised, the twelve tablets of gold that halted the savior answered, across the centuries, by the iron statues that kneel forever before his tomb.
References
Kaplan, E. H. (1970). Yüeh Fei and the founding of the Southern Sung [Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa].
Wilhelm, H. (1962). From myth to myth: The case of Yüeh Fei’s biography. In A. F. Wright & D. Twitchett (Eds.), Confucian personalities (pp. 146–161). Stanford University Press.
