Judged from typological perspective, both Samuel 1 and 2 and Kings 1 and 2 from the Bible and Zuo Zhuan 左传 (The Commentary of Zuo) are parallels in historical and literary development, even without any direct or indirect contact between approximately 1050–586 BCE in ancient Israel and Judah, and the Chunqiu Period (722–481 BCE) in China. They are two of the three oldest “narrative histories” (the Hebrew Deuteronomistic written in the 6th cent. BCE, The Histories in the 5th cent. BCE, and Zuo Zhuan from the 4th cent. BCE). This paper analyzes these two “histories” from the similar and different “sacred continua” in Israel, Judah and China; and also from the “divine kingship,” the “mandate of Heaven,” “theocracy,” the concept of God among ancient Hebrews and the concurrent concept of Shangdi 上帝, Di 帝 or Tian 天 and ethical principles among the Chinese. These works are “narrative histories,” both are vivid, detailed, written in an extremely dense, but also rhetorical style. They all used divination, dream interpretation, persuasive speeches and descriptions of wars. Both are didactic, not always following “historical truth.” They are works of great historical and literary value.
It is often said that “Confucius composed the Chunqiu 春秋 (The Spring and Autumn Annals) to convey the way of the king.” Scholars have long noticed that before the founding of and during the Han Dynasty the phrase that served as the title of the allegedly Confucian work, “Chunqiu,” was also often used to designate history in general. In what intellectual and textual contexts did the term evolve from something general into a specific concept associated with Confucius? What works or ideas did pre-Han and Han scholars have in mind when discussing Confucius’s Chunqiu and the broader “Chunqiu” canon?1 Exploring these questions, the study that follows begins by systematically documenting the occurrences of this term in pre-Han and Han texts. It demonstrates that while Mencius was the first person to associate Confucius’s teachings with the Chunqiu, his statement was a solitary and surprising voice in the pre-Han era. Not until the Western Han Dynasty was Confucius widely heralded as the creator of the Chunqiu. But few scholars are aware that Western Han scholars never strictly distinguished the laconic Chunqiu from the detailed historical knowledge preserved in the Gongyang 公羊, Guliang 谷梁, and Zuo 左 commentaries. Furthermore, as the Chunqiu gained canonical status, the phrase still served as a generic term, referring to various historical narratives. Zhang Xuecheng 章学诚 is famous for claiming that “The Six Classics are all history,” and I shall show that in the minds of the people of the Han Dynasty, all historical works were classics.
Some elements of Puritanism in Chinese tradition are obviously different from the well-known intellectual phenomenon in the West; in the Neo-Confucian ambit the key question concerns “order–disorder,” “harmony–disharmony” in society and inside one’s personality, rather than “sin” and “purity” in personal morality. Yet we also find that chastity is involved in the contrast between the two concepts of purity and pollution and the idea of “obscene” (meaning “inauspicious,” “ill-omened,” “profane”) allows us to uncover a darker side to sexual representation. Death seems another source of active or passive pollution: this effect occurs after contaminational contact with human or animal remains. Thus death is the source of “desecration,” or of “contamination,” especially when it is the consequence of violence. This means that in Chinese culture, a sense of impurity seems to be driven by the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by the passion of love; respectively, thanatos and eros. Other topics may also be associated, such as mental insanity referring to what is different, abnormal, strange, and socially subversive. The clean–unclean distinction originally responded to a basic visceral feeling—horror and repulsion/disgust—that is typically associated with hygienic worries and matter that is perceived as repugnant and inedible. But these basic ideas seem to have been symbolically extended to cope with the subconscious and metaphysical spheres: the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by passion, the mysteries which lie behind these emotions, and the attempt to sublimate such fears into an impulse to transcend the red dust of our limited existence.
Along with the promotion of Taiwan’s economic status in the mid-Qing Dynasty and the expansion of trade with the mainland, the merchants of Jinjiang County of Quanzhou Prefecture in the Qing Dynasty developed a business model focused on the growing cross-strait trade and coastal shipping in Southeast China. The success of these coastal traders in business was closely related to their full use of family and lineage. However, the links of family and lineage, at the same time, were problematical for these businessmen when exploiting economic opportunities. These complex family and lineage ties could either promote or obstruct the development of commercial capital depending on specific situations. Thus, the traditional argument that the family and lineage system hindered socio-economic development should be re-examined.
In order to purify the environment in which they planned to convert, from the 1860s onwards British Missionaries in late Qing China started to carry out anti opium campaigns. It was these campaigns that became the life work of British Medical Missionary John Dudgeon. Dudgeon was of the opinion that it was the ferocious opium trade that was destroying the morals, traditional culture, society, and economy of the Chinese, turning China into the West’s greatest market and in turn affecting China’s own economic benefits. Based on his surveys made on the wards, from a medical perspective, Dudgeon announced that “an opium-smoker’s family become extinct in the third generation.” Dudgeon drew up the “Dudgeon Plan” in the hope that Sino-British governmental cooperation could bring about the end of the opium trade. Nevertheless, these campaigns met with stiff opposition and suppression, and lost support from the Missionary Society. John Dudgeon’s plan was ultimately a failure.
In 1951, the government of Shanghai announced a movement to abolish prostitution. At that moment, the number of public brothels had already declined dramatically and the government took this opportunity to forcefully portray the favorable image that they had thoroughly rooted out “the poisons of the old society.” Then, in 1958, the city government announced the rehabilitation of prostitutes was complete because more and more women were becoming prostitutes in this “new society.” In a “new society,” this phenomenon composed a threat to the government’s ideology. Therefore, the new government started a campaign of labor reeducation or threw women in jail under the charge of being a vagrant and announced that the system of prostitution which had its base in the old society was now thoroughly eradicated. It was very difficult for these women who were taken in and rehabilitated to assimilate into society; when they were finally settled, the local government and the local populace were asked to continue to “supervise and reform them.” Thus, the women who had no way to become new people under socialism became “old elements” in the new society.