Guiguzi’s Book Of Baihe:A Rhetorical Reinterpretation

Rhetoric is an art of effective discourse and persuasion.In the Pre-Qin Era,China was ravaged by a ceaseless war,and the hundred schools of thought,including the Confucians,the Mohists,the Taoists,and the Legalists,were all unexceptionally involved in intense contention about what should be the best way for governance and living.Of these thinkers,Master Guiguzi,the representative of the Horizontal-and-Vertical School,distinguished himself with a combination of political strategy and persuasive art.In Book 1 of his masterpiece Guiguzi,entitled Baihe,he bases his theory of discursive efficacy primarily on the yin-yang tradition of ancient China,thus fusing two opposing and complementary powers of opening and closing to initiate an early theory of Chinese rhetorical art.In approximately the same historical period,rhetorical art flourished vigorously around the Mediterranean region,in ancient Greece and Rome.The Greek sophists and other thinkers following them,such as Plato and Aristotle,compiled seminal theses and monographs on rhetoric;and Roman scholars such as Cicero and Quintilian further conceptualized rhetoric and eloquence.In the book Rhetorica ad Herennium,the anonymous Roman author delves into rhetorical skills and functions and offers a comprehensive treatment of the art that covers everything from rhetorical invention,types of targeted audience,to style and diction.In the ancient world,these two traditions of conceptualizing rhetorical art account for the organization,coordination and prescription of the rhetorical habits and speech acts in both Eastern and Western countries,which ensured a dynamic equilibrium of conflicting powers and the functioning of discourses as productive rhetorical systems.Marked differences exist,however,between the ways the East and West gave emphasis to their respective understandings of rhetoric.This paper undertakes to explore what differentiates the East and the West in their conceptions of rhetorical principles and strategies by contrasting Guiguzi’s theory of opening and closing with its Western counterparts,so as to upgrade Chinese classical rhetoric in the world.