Boundaries of the public sphere in Ming and Qing China

Daedalus

Volumn 127, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 167-189

  Wakeman Jr , Frederic ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 0002352980     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate," Modern China 19 (2) (April 1993): 108-138.
2. There is also a considerable literature in Chinese and Japanese on this issue, but in this essay I will intentionally confine my citations to Western language references. By "public sphere," I refer to the functional definition used by Rudolf G. Wagner: "That space between state and society . . . presented to public scrutiny in a bid by each side to convince and thus socially to enhance the argumentative power of its position." As Professor Wagner says, "This presupposes a minimal consensus in terms of values and of the rules validating an argument, but not that these values and rules be those of 18th-century European enlightenment." Rudolf G. Wagner, "The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere," China Quarterly 142 (June 1995): 427.
3. William T. Rowe, "The Problem of 'Civil Society' in Late Imperial China," Modern China 19 (2) (April 1993): 139-157.
4. Mary Backus Rankin, "Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere," Modern China 19 (2) (April 1993): 158-192
5. and "The Origins of the Chinese Public Sphere: Local Elites and Community Affairs in the Late Imperial Period," Études Chinoises 9 (2) (1990): 13-16.
6. The translations are all taken verbatim from Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, comp. R. H. Mathews (Shanghai: China Inland Mission, 1931; rev. American ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943).
7. R. Bin Wong, "Great Expectations: The 'Public Sphere' and the Search for Modern Times in Chinese History," Zhongguo shixue (Studies in Chinese History) 3 (October 1993): 7-50.
8. Mark Elvin, "The Gentry Democracy in Chinese Shanghai," in Jack Gray, ed., Modern China's Search for a Political Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pass.;
9. Mary Backus Rankin, "'Public Opinion' and Political Power: Qingyi in Late Nineteenth-Century China," Journal of Asian Studies 41 (3) (May 1982): 453-483;
10. Min Tu-ki, National Polity and Local Power: The Transformation of Late Imperial China, ed. Philip A. Kuhn and Timothy Brook (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 89-179;
11. Lloyd Eastman, "Ch'ing-i and Chinese Policy Formation during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880-1885," Journal of Asian Studies 24 (4) (1965).
12. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1860 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1966);
13. Philip Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980);
14. Muramatsu Yuji, "Landlord Bursaries," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29 (1966).
15. Daniel H. Bays, "The Nature of Provincial Political Authority in Late Ch'ing Times: Chang Chih-tung in Canton, 1884-1889," Modern Asian Studies 4 (4) (1970): 325-347;
16. Kenneth Folsom, Friends, Guests and Colleagues: The Mu-fu System in the Late Ch'ing Period (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1968).
17. My debt to G. William Skinner for this notion of nestedness, along with the implication that boundaries open and close, hardly needs to be stated.
18. This is one of the implicit points of Alan Wood's argument about the Song philosophers' use of the "imperial seminar" (jingyan), the "learning of the emperor" (dixue), and the Hall of Enlightenment (Mingtang) "to inculcate . . . in the ruler an understanding of the principles of natural law that were believed to unite heaven, earth and man." Wood believes that moral suasion acted as a restraint on arbitrary imperial authority that likened kingly rule in China to medieval European monarchy. Alan T. Wood, Limits to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confitcianism to a Doctrine of Political Rights (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 145.
19. Some of these themes are adumbrated in Timothy Brook, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 3-47, 118-148;
20. William T. Rowe, "Approaches to Modern Chinese Social History," in Oliver Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1985), 242-262;
21. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "Models of Historical Change: The Chinese State and Society, 1839-1989," in Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquhar, and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 68-102.
22. Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
23. K. C. Hsiao, "Li Chih," Tien Hsia Monthly 1 (1936): 317-341.
24. Hok-lam Chan, Li Chih (1527-1602) in Contemporary Chinese Historiography (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), 3-38, 87-99.
25. Ronald G. Dimberg, The Sage and Society: The Life and Thought of Ho Hsinyin (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1974).
26. S. A. M. Adshead, "The Seventeenth Century General Crisis in China," Asian Profile 1 (2) (October 1973): 271-280;
27. William S. Atwell, "Notes on Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 3 (8) (December 1977): 1-33;
28. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "China and the Seventeenth Century World Crisis," Late Imperial China 7 (June 1986).
29. Chun-shu Chang and Hsüeh-lun Chang, Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth Century China: Society, Culture, and the Modern in Lin Yii's World (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992);
30. Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979);
31. Nelson I. Wu, "Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636): Apathy in Government and Fervor in Art," in Denis Twitchett, ed., Confucian Personalities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 260-293.
32. For an interesting discussion of Song academies and "civil society" see Thomas H. C. Lee, "Academies: Official Sponsorship and Suppression," in Frederick P. Brandauer and Chün-chieh Huang, eds., Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1994), 117-143.
33. John Thomas Meskill, Academies in Ming China: A Historical Essay (Tuscon, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1982).
34. Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).
35. Charles O. Hucker, "The Tung-lin Movement of the Late Ming Period," in John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 132-163.
36. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "The Price of Autonomy: Intellectuals in Ming and Ch'ing Politics," Dœdaltis 101 (2) (Spring 1972): 35-70.
37. "The confrontation they took was perfectly legitimate as this was the consummate form of Neo-Confucian political conviction, that is, absolute loyalty. I believe that in this sense the Neo-Confucian political philosophy was romanticist, and had a strong irrational element. Without that irrationality, there was no way that one could demand the educated elited to embrace the absolutist notion . . . and submit to an a priori belief that the monarch's personal rule could ultimately be moral." Lee, "Academies: Official Sponsorship and Suppression," 137.
38. "The image of the Tung-lin partisans moved from one of a 'selfish' (ssu) political faction to that of a group of concerned literati whose aim was to address public (kung) needs of their time." Benjamin A. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990), 276.
39. The Restoration Society, through its connections with publishers who sold copies of successful examination essays, was able to set the style, so to speak, for the higher palace examinations. Candidates who mastered that style were also able, through the society's patrons, to gain access to the examiners themselves, who singled out individual members for selection as the "primus" (zhuangyuan) or "secundus" (bangyan) in the palace exams. The candidates' tests were tendered anonymously, but examiners could easily identify the candidate by his calligraphy - assuming they had met him before and come to recognize his hand. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), vol. 1.
40. See also, for the early Qing, Adam Yuen-chung Lui, The Hanlin Academy: Training Ground for the Ambitions, 1644-1850 (Hong Kong: Archon Books, 1981).
41. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "The Shun Interregnum," in Jonathan Spence and John Wills, eds., From Ming to Ch'ing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).
42. William T. Rowe, "Education and Empire in Southwest China: Ch'en Hungmou in Yunnnan, 1733-38," in Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994), 417-457, especially 426-427.
43. Jacques Gernet, "Clubs, cénacles et sociétés dans la Chine des XVIe et XVIIe siècles," 4e fasc. (Paris: Institut de France, 1986): 3-12.
44. Alexander Woodside, "The Divorce between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China," in Elman and Woodside, Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 458-492, especially 465-468.
45. William Theodore de Bary, Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
46. Lynn A. Struve, "Huang Zongxi in Context: A Reappraisal of His Major Writings," Journal of Asian Studies 47 (3) (August 1988): 474-502.
47. Willard J. Peterson, "The Life of Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682)," parts I and II, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968)
48. and Willard J. Peterson, "Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969);
49. Min Tu-ki, National Polity and Local Power: The Transformation of Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989), 92-97.
50. Min Tu-ki, National Polity and Local Power, 88.
51. " The chün-hsien system was attacked as ssu because it concentrated sovereignty in a single person, while the feng-chien system was supported as kung because sovereignty was shared by many." National Polity and Local Power, Ibid., 89-90.
52. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "Introduction," in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Carolyn Grant, eds., Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975).
53. But see the interesting analysis of Phillip C. C. Huang, "Between Informal Mediation and Formal Adjudication: The Third Realm of Qing Civil Justice," Modern China 19 (3) (July 1993): 251-298.
54. Paul S. Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin wai-shih and Ch'ing Social Criticism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1981).
55. Pierre-Henri Durand, Lettrés et pouvoirs: un procès litteraire dans la Chine impériale (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 1992).
56. Lucien Mao, "Tai Ming-shih," Tien Hsia Monthly 5 (4): 382-399.
57. Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944), 2: 701.
58. Silas H. L. Wu, Passage to Power: K'ang-hsi and His Heir-Apparent, 1661-1722 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
59. Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991);
60. Pei Huang, Autocracy at Work: A Study of the Yung-cheng Period, 1723-1725 (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1974).
61. Timothy Brook, "Censorship in Eighteenth-Century China: A View from the Book Trade," Canadian Journal of History (August 1988): 177-196.
62. Tom S. Fisher, "New Light on the Accession of the Yung-cheng Emperor," Papers on Far Eastern History 17 (March 1978): 103-136.
63. There is a copy of the tract, the Dayi juemi lu, in the Library of Congress.
64. Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in 18th-Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984).
65. James Cahill, "The Orthodox Movement in Early Ch'ing Painting," in Christian F. Murck, Artist and Tradition: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 169-181;
66. L. Carrington Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung (Baltimore, Md.: Waverly Press, 1935);
67. Harold L. Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor's Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch'ien-lung Reign (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971);
68. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "High Ch'ing, 1683-1839," in James B. Crowley, ed., Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 1-28.
69. Alison Dray-Novey, "Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing," Journal of Asian Studies 52 (4) (November 1993): 885-922.
70. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch'ien-lung Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987).
71. One of the compilers, the polymath Dai Zhen (1724-1777), developed a powerful critique of the School of Principle as a buttress of arbitrary and despotic authority in his treatises Yuanshan and Mengzi ziyi shuzheng. See the dissertation on the latter by John Woodruff Ewell, "Re-inventing the Way: Dai Zhen's Evidential Commentary on the Meanings of Terms in Mencius (1777)," Ph.D. thesis, Berkeley, Calif., 1990.
72. But see the discussion of Zhuang Cunyu in Benjamin Elman, Classicism, Poli-tics, and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late-Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990).
73. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 218-219.
74. For the charismatic glorification of the emperor, see ibid., 10-11.
75. In this regard see the tragically reflective remarks of Chün-chieh Huang in the essay "Some Observations and Reflections," in Frederick P. Brandauer and Chün-chieh Huang, eds., Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1994), especially 285.
76. Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor's Eyes, 10-11.
77. By defining the domain of all accepted social practices, Qianlong's regime - based upon pervasive control systems such as the baojia mutual responsibility system - was in many ways more interventionist than the "absolutist Polizeystaat, a state governed by princely ordinances or policies that could in principle apply to any domain of societal activity." Wolfgang Schluchter and S. N. Eisenstadt, "Introduction," Dœdalus 127 (3) (Summer 1998): 10.
78. See also Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso Editions, 1979), especially 15-42.
79. Alain Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Knopf, 1992).
80. Blaine Gaustad, "The White Lotus Rebellion in the Han River Highlands," Ph.D. thesis, Berkeley, Calif., 1992.
81. David Nivison, "Ho-shen and His Accusers: Ideology and Political Behavior in the 18th Century," in David Nivison, ed., Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 209-243.
82. A tael was roughly equivalent to one ounce of silver.
83. A. E. Grantham, Manchu Monarch: An Interpretation of Chia-ch'ing (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935);
84. Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn, "Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion," in John K. Fairbank, ed., Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 107-162;
85. Susan Mann Jones, "Scholasticism and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century China," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 3 (2) (December 1975): 11-33.
86. But see also the discussion of the Imperial College in Woodside, "The Divorce between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China," 475-480.
87. James Montel Polachek, "Literati Groups in Literati Politics in Early Nineteenth Century China," Ph.D. thesis, Berkeley, Calif., 1976.
88. "Probably more important as a formative influence bearing on the texture of nineteenth-century examination-elite culture, however, was the boost given the ideal of aesthetic fellowship as a result of the expansion of the role of verse composition in the imperial examinations during the mid-eighteenth century. . . . Verse writing itself had not played a major role in the examination system of the late imperial era until the Ch'ien-lung emperor chose to reintroduce it into the examinations through a series of changes undertaken between 1751 and 1760. . . . Personal convergence and intimacy henceforth would tend to find their ultimate expression in the sentimentality or lyricism of poetry, and not in the didacticism of prose expression." James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992), 26-27, 39-59.
89. Note Polachek's comments on examination influence via the Spring Purification Meetings held in 1829, 1832, and 1836. Polachek, Inner Opium War, 76-77.
90. Folsom, Friends, Guests and Colleagues;
91. Jonathan Porter, Tseng Kuo-fan's Private Bureaucracy (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Chinese Studies, 1972).
92. See the relevant articles in Elman and Woodside, Education and Society in Late Imperial China.
93. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yuan and China's Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984);
94. Woodside, "The Divorce between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China," 481-482.
95. Chang Hao, "On the Ching-shih Ideal in Neo-Confucianism," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 3 (1) (November 1974): 36-61.
96. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship;
97. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1973).
98. For qingyi, see Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship, 282-290;
99. Lloyd Eastman, "Ch'ing-i and Chinese Policy Formation during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880-1885," Journal of Asian Studies 24 (4) (1965);
100. and Rankin, "'Public Opinion' and Political Power."
101. Lloyd Eastman, "Political Reformism in China before the Sino-Japanese War," Journal of Asian Studies 27 (4) (August 1968): 695-710;
102. Mary Backus Rankin, "'Public Opinion' and Political Power: Qingyi in Late Nineteenth-Century China," Journal of Asian Studies 41 (3) (May 1982): 453-483.
103. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 360-395.
104. In this regard see Professor Wagner's interesting comments on Major's role as an initiator of the Chinese "public sphere" in Wagner, "The Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere," 432-440.
105. Elvin, "The Gentry Democracy in Chinese Shanghai."
106. Wakeman, "The Price of Autonomy."
107. K. C. Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K'ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858-1927 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).
108. Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986).
109. Joseph Richmond Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1958-1965);
110. Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert Kimber (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970);
111. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Collier Books, 1967).
112. The analogy with German nationalism is quite suggestive. "The German identity started as such a cultural construction. Its architects were not kings, princes or politicians but intellectuals - writers, philosophers or other members of the Bildungsbürgertum, i.e., an educational class comprising also higher state officials, lawyers, professors, engineers, or army officers." Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Bernhard Giesen, "The Construction of Collective Identity," Archives Enropeenes de Sociologie 36 (1) (1995): 72-102.
113. Eisenstadt and Giesen, "The Construction of Collective Identity," 79.