Rediscussing the Political Struggle in the Light of Reform in Late 11th Century China under the View of Digital Humanities

In late 11th century, a reform carried out by Wang Anshi (1021–1086) brought about controversies and initiated a series of political struggles between factionalized reformers and anti-reformers. The origin and nature of these factionalized struggles have been discussed for a long time among scholars. In this paper, we discuss the issue based on the literary and political relationships among people in the era of the reform. First, two matrices are respectively constructed of the literary and political relations among these people based on the data collected from CBDB (China Biographical Database). Then a Poission-Gamma factorization model is adopted to obtain the key factors of the matrices, and the Louvain Modularity algorithm is used for community detection. The results show that people engaging in similar literary pursuits were more likely to share political interests and people belonging to the same literary groups were more likely to join in the same political groups, suggesting. Ensuing discussions illustrate that people’s differing academic views indeed played a shaping role in the formation and exacerbation of factionalized struggle, for which the mechanism unfolded herein of “literati politics” was highly responsible.