The article aims to rethink the pluralistic intellectual currents and social changes of the last centuries in China: How literati reacted to the historical changes, the economic developments, the collapse of the hierarchical order, and the social mobility from the end of the Ming to the middle of the Qing dynasty. Urbanisation, the great silver inflow, the acceleration of trade, and social mobility raised new challenges to the orthodox view of the world and to Neo-Confucian norms. These new attitudes of the Chinese literati—which can be inferred both from literary and philosophical works—uncover new attitudes in the mental structure of the intellectual strata of the time. In the history of ideas we notice a progressive detachment from the orthodox view of the conflictual relationship between principle and desires, especially in the ambit of the Taizhou school. The elaboration of a new anthropological mindset aimed at the rehabilitation of passions and desires culminated with Li Zhi. This trend went on in the Qing period, from Wang Fuzhi to Dai Zhen. In literature, a similar trend, the so-called “cult of qing ,” can be found with the moral justification of emotion-desire (establishing emotion as a genuine and active source of virtue), and with the vitalistic identification of emotions as the source of life and reproduction. Another indication of change is the challenge of common and accepted truisms through the praise of “folly” in real life situations and literary works: To be “crazy” and “foolish” became a sign of distinction among certain intellectual circles, in contrast with the pedant orthodox scholars and officials and the vulgar nouveaux riches . The unconventional character of the anti-hero Baoyu is emblematic, with his aversion for any kind of official ceremony and convention, his abnormal sensibility and impractical and na?ve mentality, and his consciousness of being different from others. The crisis of the established ladder of values can be seen in the exaltation of “amoral” wisdom and in the presentation of various dimensions of love, from the idealistic sentiment of “the talented student and the beautiful girl” to the metaphysical passion that overcomes death, and to the minimalist concept of “love is like food” in a carpe diem perspective. And finally another challenge is exemplified by Yuan Mei’s reflections on the concept of Heavenly Mandate, retribution, human responsibility, and historical constructions by resorting to “abnormal” phenomena to uncover the absurdity of reality and unconscious imagery. His questions testify the polyphonic debates of the late imperial China, besides established conventions and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy.
This article examines the process whereby Qu Dajun (1630–96), a seventeenth-century writer, became canonized as one of the national poets of nineteenth-century China. Qu Dajun was moderately popular during the early Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty (1644–1911) among his friendship network because of his loyalty to the Ming (1368–1644), the last Han-Chinese dynasty. It was only in the eighteenth century under the Qing court’s censorship that Qu became an anti-Manchu symbol among local activists. This article explores different receptions of Qu’s writings in the court and society from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, especially during the “literary inquisition” in the eighteenth century and the rare book collecting cult that arose in local society afterwards, the enthusiasm for local writings in the nineteenth century, and the nation-wide “Classical Learning” (guoxue ) in the early twentieth century. By rediscovering the critical roles played by local book collectors in preserving knowledge, this article contributes to new understanding of power and the fluidity and resilience of local discourse in late imperial China.
This article discusses how the Mongol Yuan dynasty served as a model of empire-building for the rulers of the early Ming dynasty. It argues that early Ming emperors and statesmen imagined the Ming empire as a Yuan successor state, and endeavoured to match the Yuan’s territorial extent and encompass the steppe region. By comparing imperial maps from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, this article demonstrates that early Ming depictions of empire more closely match those of the Mongol Empire than those of its “Confucian” predecessor, the Song dynasty. Ming rulers’ judgments of history further reflect the full incorporation of the Yuan dynasty into China’s imperial past, and those judgements referenced the Yuan for examples of successful and unsuccessful policy while circumventing its foreign Mongol origins. Thus, Mongol-style martial values and imperial ambitions maintained a core place in Ming strategic and intellectual thought through the first eighty years of Ming rule.
In response to Lothar von Falkenhausen’s contention that the Western Zhou government was hopelessly stuck in a kinship structure that operated in accordance with the order of aristocratic lineages, the present paper offers new theoretical grounds as well as new inscriptional evidence showing that the Western Zhou government was a bureaucracy invented precisely to allow the Zhou king to overcome or manipulate the restrictions imposed by a kinship structure, in order to achieve actual political and administrative goals. This is the central debate in the study of the Western Zhou government as the fountainhead of the long-standing Chinese political culture and institutions. To refute the ill-conceived “anthropological model” of the Western Zhou government, the paper carefully examines the logical confusions, the wrong methodological choice, and the misinformation about contemporaneous bronze inscriptions as well as about current archaeology exhibited in Falkenhausen’s review, thus reconfirming bases for a correct understanding of the Western Zhou government already offered in Bureaucracy and the State in Early China (Cambridge 2008). Furthermore, the paper discusses intellectual norms in book reviews in the West and China and offers new insights into the date of the Ling group of vessels, a central problem in the dating of Western Zhou bronzes. The paper provides an important cornerstone for future constructive studies of the Western Zhou government and the issue of bureaucracy in Chinese history.