Gonghe Regency

The Gonghe Regency () was an interregnum period in Chinese history from 841 BC to 828 BC, after King Li of Zhou was exiled by his nobles during the Compatriots Rebellion, when the Chinese people rioted against their old corrupt king. It lasted until the ascension of King Li's son, King Xuan of Zhou.

History

King Li of Zhou was a corrupt and decadent ruler. To pay for his pleasures and vices, King Li raised taxes and caused misery among his subjects. It is said that he barred the commoners from profiting from communal forests and lakes, and instated a new law which allowed him to punish anyone, by death, who dared to speak against him. King Li's tyrannical rule soon forced many peasants and soldiers all around Zhou China into revolt. Li was sent into exile at a place called Zhi near Linfen (842 BC), his son was taken by one of his ministers and hidden.

When King Li died in exile in 828 BC, power was passed to his son, the King Xuan of Zhou.

Interpretations

According to the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, who interpreted ''gonghe'' as 'joint harmony' in his ''Records of the Grand Historian'': during the Gonghe Regency the Zhou dynasty was ruled jointly by two dukes, the and the , hence effectively transforming the state into a coregency.Sima Qian, ''Records of the Grand Historian'' 4:144

Later discoveries proved this incorrect. According to the ''Bamboo Annals'', an archaeologically unearthed text discovered in antiquity but postdating Sima Qian, the Gonghe Regency was a period in which the Zhou dynasty was ruled by a single person—Gongbo He (; Elder He of the Gong lineage). This reading has been fully corroborated by an independent archaeologically unearthed text known as the '' Xinian'' (繫年).

Historiographical significance

The first year of the Gonghe Regency, 841 BC, is highly significant in ancient Chinese history, in that Sima Qian was able to construct a year-by-year chronology back to that point, but he and subsequent historians were unable to confidently date any earlier events in Chinese history. Sima himself found the information about earlier dates in his sources to be unreliable and contradictory and so chose not to adopt them in his work. The government of the People's Republic of China sponsored the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, a multidisciplinary project that sought to give better estimates for dates prior to 841 BC, but the project's draft report, published in 2000, has been criticized by various scholars.

When encountering the Western term "republic", the Japanese drew parallels with the Gonghe Regency of Chinese history, and began using the term (, literally "shared harmony country", analogous to "commonwealth") to describe such non-monarchical systems. This semantic shift would later be reborrowed into Chinese. It is worth noting however, that the term 民國 ("popular state", literally "people country", read as , and in Chinese, Japanese and Korean respectively) is used when referring to the Republic of China and Korea (but not the People's Republic of China or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which use the regular word for "republic").

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gonghe
Regents of China
9th century BC in China
9th-century BC Chinese monarchs
Regency (government)
Interregnums
Historical controversies in China