Persuading the emperors
A quantitative historical analysis of political rhetoric in traditional China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22231997 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Z Hong (0000-0002-5343-3008, University of Macau, corresponding author), Yuqi Chen (0000-0001-9769-1167, Peking University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2662-9992 • E-ISSN: 2662-9992 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/s41599-024-03164-5 |
| OpenAlex | W4400085380 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 50 |
The study of rhetoric has a long history in the Western intellectual tradition. However, only minimal efforts have been made to rigorously examine the cultural evolution of various rhetorical strategies in argumentation over time. In this study, we harness the power of fully digitized Chinese dynastic history to systematically analyze how different rhetorical strategies were used to persuade superiors throughout the past two millennia. By leveraging existing literature on Chinese rhetoric and argumentation styles, as well as engaging in extensive consultation with historians of ancient China, we identify and classify rhetorical strategies into distinct categories. We then examine their recorded success in persuasion and any temporal changes in frequency. Our findings point to a cumulative payoff-biased cultural evolution where later dynasties tend to demonstrate higher recorded persuasion success, with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty. Additionally, we detect a temporal decline in the frequency of rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures, such as analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs
Aesthetics · Analogy · Archaeology · Argumentation theory · Art · China · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Persuasion · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Cultural Differences and Values · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Psychology
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Mao's Little Red Book
Literary Forms of Argument in Early China
The evolution of prestige
Not By Genes Alone
The evolution of cultural evolution
Chinese Rhetoric
Pragmatic inference and argumentation in intercultural communication
What Logic did to Rhetoric
Reasoning and Culture in a Historical Perspective
Introduction
Chinese rhetoric
Rethinking prestige bias
Location Matters
Beyond rhetorical relativism
The Past in the Present—The Role of Analogical Reasoning in Epistemic Learning About How to Tackle Complex Policy Problems
A transformative political campaign? The new rhetoric of protest against airport expansion in the UK
On the study of ancient Chinese rhetoric/Bian
On the Universality of Argumentative Reasoning
The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences
Combining Conformist and Payoff Bias in Cultural Evolution
Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |