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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2012

Wang Mang: How to became an emperor?

Résumé

Although the title of my paper may sound ironical, as if we could learn from Wang Mang's political experience a simple recipe to become an emperor, I would like to give here a glimpse at the seriousness, the progressivity and the complexity of the path which led Wang Mang (ca 45 BC. BC-AD 23) from his position as a minister to that of an emperor. A descriptive account of this very process was first given by Gu Jiegang in the 14th chapter of his Qin Han de fangshi yu rusheng, but since then, not much attention has been paid to this aspect of Wang Mang's period/political achievement. Studies generally focuses on the judgment given on this highly debated figure, which implies to discuss more his value as a sovereign than his significance as a man who built a path or a continuity between the role of minister and that of sovereign. Even though the historical figure of Wang Mang has been almost unanimously condemned in Chinese historiography, we will still study in detail the circumstances of his seizure of power since, far from suddenly arrogating the imperial title, he has built at every stage of his career paths of legitimacy, so that he appears to have established a continuum between the role of the minister and that of the sovereign. In this process, Wang Mang masterly combined ritual elaboration, rhetorical tools and also, more conventionally, physical violence, as limited as possible, so as to match the great sages of the past. Here, I will mainly stress the imitation of the Duke of Zhou, who presents the characteristics to offer a complete scheme for creating a continuity between minister and sovereign.
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Dates et versions

hal-02503164 , version 1 (09-03-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02503164 , version 1

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Béatrice L'Haridon. Wang Mang: How to became an emperor?. 19th Biennal Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies, EACS, Sep 2012, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02503164⟩
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