Seven
Moral Duty and Self-Regulating Process in Southern Sung Views of Famine Relief

Robert P. Hymes

A few years before the fall of the Sung dynasty, in the autumn of 1271, Huang Chen, a Neo-Confucian thinker in the line of Chu Hsi and a skilled and experienced local official, was ordered to take up the post of administrator of Fu-chou, a prefecture in eastern Chiang-hsi circuit (modern Jiangxi province). The prefecture, in normal years a rich agricultural center, had been struck by drought. Huang's task was to see the population fed and disaster averted. On his way to Fu-chou Huang began sending ahead public notices addressing the wealthy householders, urging them to sell their stored rice at once to those without food. In failing to do so, he said, they had betrayed Fu-chou's tradition of community goodwill and had neglected their clear duty.

Though it is true that many of the great officeholding houses are issuing grain for sale, I have heard there are some who, because there is profit in raising prices, have secretly sold to traveling merchants, while lending no sympathy to the desperate appeals of their neighbors. There are others who wait for their price and are not yet willing to sell. . . . Where, then, is the tradition of goodwill? How can they, led astray by thought of profit, fail to awaken to the suffering of others? Heaven gives life to the five grains precisely to save the common people from starvation. Heaven gives good fortune to the rich families precisely because it intends that the poor and the rich aid one another. If rice is dear and one does not sell, if people starve and one takes no pity on them, what will Heaven say?^[1]

Here is an argument for social action founded on moral grounds. Appeal is made to feelings of human sympathy, of shame before Heaven, of moral

[1] Huang Chen, Huang-shih jih-ch'ao (SKCSCP ed.) 78:5b-6b.

duty. Moreover, Huang locates the duty he appeals to in a specific relation within society: the relation of mutual aid and dependence that should bind rich and poor together. The relations that ground obligation here may in fact be more specific still. Huang continues:

This is all the more so when those who look to one to sell are, if not his own kinsmen, then his in-laws; if not his in-laws, then his old friends; if not his old friends, then his servants and tenants; if not his servants and tenants, then his neighbors! For what, after all, have they respected him and looked up to him?

The rich householder is enmeshed in a web of social relations whose mutuality binds him and obligates him to act: in this case, to dispose of his property in certain ways and to certain people. Lying athwart this web of obligation and threatening to tear it apart is his urge for personal profit (li ). The famine that faces his community can only be relieved if he casts aside profit and chooses obligation.

Little in this is surprising. The strategy of "urging sharing" (ch'üan fen ) that Huang adopted here, by which a local official exhorted private households to give or (in the Sung more often) to sell their surplus rice to those without, and so based famine relief at least partly on private efforts, had a long pedigree and was a commonplace in the Sung.^[2] More generally an account of society as a web of relations of mutual dependency and obligation, very old in China, was strongly developed in the Neo-Confucian thinking of Chu Hsi, to which Huang Chen was heir. Chu and his followers argued that the reconstructing, strengthening, and honoring of such relationships was one key to the reform of society. The argument underlay two new social institutions that Chu Hsi himself promoted: the community granary (she-ts'ang ) and the community compact (hsiang-yueh ).^[3] It is not strange to find a follower of Chu treating the problem of how to feed people during a famine (or more precisely, how to persuade some people to feed others) in the same terms.

These terms, however, were not the only ones available, and the strategy was not uncontroversial. A rather different approach to the problem of famine relief and of its relation to the private economy had been argued some seventy years before, in a book submitted to the throne and distributed with imperial approval to the various circuits of the Southern Sung empire. This was A Book for Relieving Famine and Reviving the People (Chiu-huang

[2] On ch'üan fen , see for instance Wang Te-i, Sung-tai tsai-huang ti chiu-chi cheng-ts'e (Taipei, 1969), pp. 147-53.

[3] On the community granary, see chapter 5 in this volume. On the community compact, see Monika UÜbelhoör, "The Community Compact of the Sung," in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and John Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 371-88.

huo-min shu ) by Tung Wei. Here I attempt to locate Tung's work within Southern Sung discourse on famine relief, by setting it in contrast to the very different approach of Chu Hsi and Huang Chen.^[4]

Tung Wei, a man of Te-hsing county in Jao-chou, Chiang-tung circuit, achieved the degree of chin-shih in 1193, held a number of local offices, and died in 1217.^[5] Very little information survives on his life, his career, or his thought; and of several works he left behind, only the Book for Relieving Famine remains. Tung had studied with Ch'eng Chiung (chin-shih 1163), a Neo-Confucian scholar whose own academic descent, as Tung's funerary inscription points out, could be traced back through Yang Shih (1050-1135) to the founding Neo-Confucian figures, the Ch'eng brothers.^[6] Ch'eng Chiung's varied writings included works on the Classic of Changes , on the Spring and Autumn Annals and its commentaries, on the Analects and the Mencius —an assortment of texts much to be expected from a Neo-Confucian of Ch'eng school descent. Somewhat less predictably, he also wrote a book on medicine, a monograph on population, land systems, and taxation, and (perhaps significantly) an account of relief policies during the Ch'ien-tao period (1165-1173).^[7]

The precise nature of Tung Wei's scholarly legacy from Ch'eng Chiung, or indeed from Yang Shih and the Ch'eng brothers, is uncertain: his own writings are too incomplete to situate his thought as a whole in a line of descent or within his own time.^[8] We are told, however, that while serving as professor of the prefectural school in Ying-chou (not long after 1207) he

[4] On Tung Wei's book, see Yoshida Tora, "Kyuko katsumin sho to Sodai no kyuko seitaku," in Aoyama Hakushi koki kinen Sodaishi ronso (Tokyo: Seishin Shobo, 1974), pp. 447-75. The book is also cited repeatedly in Wang Te-i, Sung-tai tsai-huang ti chiu-chi cheng-ts'e .

[5] For Tung Wei's life and career, I follow mainly his funerary inscription in Ch'eng Pi, Ming-shui chi (SKCSCP , third collection) 10:la-5b. Tung's death date is there given as "the tenth year" of an unidentified year-period. The last date previously mentioned is a ting-mao year, which given the 1193 date for Tung's chin-shih must refer to 1207. The only year-period after 1207 with as many as ten years (until the 1250s, too late here) is the Chia-ting period, whose tenth year is 1217. The article on Tung Wei in Sung Yuan hsueh-an pu-i 25:106b cites a sketchy biography from a Jao-chou prefectural gazetteer, which appears to have certain events in Tung's life out of order; otherwise the Sung Yuan hsueh-an pu-i confines itself to extracts from the funerary inscription.

[6] Ch'eng Pi, 10:4a. Tracing through the Sung Yuan hsueh-an , one may connect Tung Wei to the Ch'eng brothers in four steps of discipleship: Tung studied with Ch'eng Chiung, who studied with Yü Shu (d. 1180), who studied with Yang Shih, who studied with the Ch'engs. See Sung Yuan hsueh-an (SPPY ed.) 25:22b for Ch'eng Chiung, and 25:16a for Yü Shu.

[7] For a list of Ch'eng Chiung's works, see his biography in Sung shih ch. 437. Most of the same list is given in Sung Yuan hsueh-an 25:22b. The two works last mentioned are the Hu-k'ou t'ien-chih kung-fu shu and the Ch'ien-tao chen-chi lu .

[8] It is not clear, for example, when or for how long Tung studied with Ch'eng Chiung. It may have been during Ch'eng's service as administrator of Tung's native Te-hsing county. The connection between the two was presumably reinforced, however, when Tung married Ch'eng's daughter. See Ch'eng Pi, 10:4b.

gave lectures based on Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean (Ta-hsueh chang-chü and Chung-yung chang-chü ) and on various commentaries and discussions of the Analects and the Mencius .^[9] The choice of texts—the Four Books—and of commentaries in particular suggests that Tung not only placed himself consciously in an intellectual line of descent from the Ch'eng brothers but felt specific affinities to at least certain aspects of the thought of Chu Hsi. Tung thus seems intellectually and academically a figure by no means divorced from the developing academic networks and curriculum of Tao-hsueh , and specifically Ch'eng-Chu, scholarship in his own time.

The genesis of Tung's book is more or less clear. According to his own preface, addressed to a reigning emperor, he had been impressed, in his reading in his youth, by the example of Fu Pi (1004-1083), who had saved hundreds of thousands from death by famine in North China. "Living in straitened circumstances in hamlet and lane, I had observed thoroughly what was advantageous and what was not among the people, and what was good or otherwise of the measures adopted by prefectures and counties." Vowing to find an opportunity to fulfill his ambition to "revive the people," he had compiled the present book. All this seems to have happened some time before Tung's chin-shih degree in 1193. Having attained a degree late, midway through life, and fearing that his age and failing strength would prevent his achieving his old ambition, he copied out the book and offered it up to the emperor for perusal and, if the book should be found to contain ideas worth adopting, for promulgation throughout the empire.^[10]

Tung's preface is undated, the emperor unnamed. From Tung's funerary inscription and other evidence, however, we can place the submission of the book to the throne in the reign of the emperor Ning-tsung, not many years before 1207, and most probably in the Chia-t'ai period (1201-1204).^[11] According to the inscription, a drought that struck as Tung was completing a local term of office in Szechwan convinced him that his book could be of immediate use to the empire. He hurried to the capital and submitted it. The book won the approval of an assisting councillor and was sent to the fiscal intendancy of the capital region for printing and distribution to all circuits of the empire.

The assisting councillor (chih-cheng ) who approved Tung's book cannot be identified.^[12] It is clear, however, that the submission and promulgation

[9] Ch'eng Pi, 10:3a.

[10] Tung Wei, Chiu-huang huo-min shu (TSCC ed.), front matter. Hereafter cited as HMS .

[11] The account of the book's submission in Ch'eng Pi, 10:3a, directly precedes Tung's service in Ying-ch'en county, Te-an Fu, which in turn ends at the time of the Chin invasions in 1207.

[12] Assuming that the work's submission did fall in the Chia-t'ai period, any one or more of six men who held the office of ts'an-chih cheng-shih (to which the less formal term chih-cheng normally refers) during the years 1201-1204 could have been the one or ones referred to in Tung's epitaph. The six were Ch'en Tzu-ch'iang, Chang Yen, Hsu Chi-chih, Yuan Shao-yu, Fei Shih-yin, and Chang Hsiao-po. See Sung shih (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1977), 213:5592-95.

fell within the period of domination of the court by the imperial in-law Han T'o-chou (d. 1207), enemy and persecutor of thinkers and statesmen of the Tao-hsueh circle, Chu Hsi among them.^[13] In view of Tung's own distant academic descent from the Ch'eng brothers and his evident personal affinities with Chu Hsi's thought and curriculum, one would like to know whether the promulgation of the Book throughout the empire with imperial imprimatur occurred while the works and person of the circle, termed by its persecutors "False Learning," were still officially proscribed, that is, before the second month of 1202. Unfortunately, the state of the sources makes it as difficult to place Tung Wei definitely, whether intellectually or politically, in relation to Han T'o-chou as in relation to Chu Hsi.^[14] The sponsorship of his work by the center in a period when—whether or not the formal prohibition was still in effect—the reputation and influence at court of Neo-Confucian scholarship of Chu Hsi's kind, and of the broader legacy of the Ch'eng brothers, was at a nadir, remains an intriguing datum whose significance cannot yet be assessed. The evident differences of Tung's approach to famine relief from that of Chu Hsi or of Chu's direct intellectual descendant Huang Chen thus stand against a rather uncertain, and possibly rather complicated, political and intellectual background. For now a consideration of Tung's place must limit itself to what can be learned from his book.

A Book for Relieving Famine and Reviving the People is a handbook of methods of famine relief, drawing on and evaluating past experience both ancient and modern. The work comprises three chapters. The first offers a chronological selection of historical cases of famine and policies adopted against it, beginning with material on the legendary reign of the sage ruler Shun drawn from the Classic of Documents and proceeding through the clas-

[13] See Conrad Schirokauer, "Neo-Confucians Under Attack: The Condemnation of Wei-hsueh, " in Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China , ed. John Winthrop Haeger (Tucson, 1975), pp. 163-98.

[14] Tung's chin-shih degree too falls inconveniently in 1193, three years before the proscription; we can deduce nothing about his intellectual or political associations or how they were perceived at the time. It should be noted, however, that Tung's teaching of Chu Hsi's commentaries in Ying-chou, attested in his funerary inscription, dates to a bit after 1207, that is after Han T'o-chou's death and well after the lifting of the "False Learning" proscription. It may well be that he had taught them before; but one cannot exclude the possibility that his favorable attitude to Chu Hsi's work was a late development, perhaps connected with a general improvement in the public position of Tao-hsueh after the death and general discrediting of Han T'o-chou and his policies. There would remain Tung's studies under Ch'eng Chiung to connect him in a more general way with Tao-hsueh circles.

sical age of Chou down through the imperial dynasties of Han and T'ang and well into the Sung. In Tung's preface he tells us that this chapter "examines antiquity to offer testimony for the present day" (k'ao ku i cheng chin ). But the scope of "antiquity" here is very broad: of seventy-four historical cases, thirty-one are drawn from Sung, the last from 1182, only twenty years or so before the book's promulgation. The second chapter abandons the historical framework to list, discuss, and evaluate, one by one, the major institutions and practices of famine relief in Tung's own time, in Tung's words "expound[ing], item by item, the strategies [ts'e ] of famine relief at the present day." The third chapter resumes the historical-case approach but not the chronological presentation of the first, setting out in no very discernible order some forty further instances of famine relief from Sung.

On a first reading of the book this arrangement is confusing. In particular the third chapter, by resuming in part the method of the first, raises questions about the place of each in the whole. The third chapter, however, departs from the first not only in limiting itself to the Sung and abandoning chronological order but also in omitting, in all but a very few cases, any comment. The cases are simply cited, with no indication of Tung's attitude toward them. This contrasts sharply with the first chapter, where Tung's remarks on each case often outweigh the cited material itself. Further, in reading the third chapter one is struck from time to time by the inclusion of cases of policies or acts that seem to conflict with Tung's own views as they emerge from the first two chapters. A review of Tung's description of the third chapter in his preface makes sense of this impression: "It recounts in full (pei shu ) such measures proposed by famous ministers and worthy gentlemen of our own dynasty as are worth looking over, worth taking warning from , or worth respectfully emulating, to make them available for a leisured or a hasty perusal" (emphasis mine). The haphazard arrangement, the omission of comment, the inclusion of material at odds with what Tung elsewhere presents as good policy, and Tung's own description support a conclusion that Tung means the chapter to be a loose compendium of material for additional reference.^[15] The imagined reader will presumably have gathered enough of Tung's approach in reading the first two chapters to be able to judge, in the third, what is offered as "warning" and what for emulation. It is to the first two chapters, then, that one should look for a clear statement of Tung's own principles of famine relief.^[16]

[15] The phrase in the preface that I translate above as "recounts in full" (pei shu ) might be read instead as "recounts by way of appendix or supplement"; this use of pei is found often, for instance, in memorials to which reference material is attached. If this reading is the correct one here, it would clinch the characterization of the chapter I have offered.

[16] The work carries with it an additional section, presented explicitly as a supplement or shih-i (literally "collection of things left out"). Here a few more historical cases are presented, mostly with comments, to which are added a supplementary discussion by Tung of "urging sharing" (see below), miscellaneous further notes and comments, and an extensive section of reproduced documents having to do with Chu Hsi's community granary, a scheme of which Tung approved and which he had not treated in the main text.

"Principles," in the plural, is appropriate here. One could not expect a book arranged as Tung's is to offer a tightly worked out system, organized coherently around a single leading notion. Tung is interested in all aspects of famine relief, in details of administration as well as in guiding precepts. He deals with a large number of practices and policies, not all of which bear any necessary relation to one another. He is as interested in exhausting the field as in framing an argument. Yet he does frame arguments. There are principles here: not all-uniting principles, but recurrent and persistent themes, pervading attitudes, or better, favored ways of talking about problems. It is these, or one or two of them, that occupy me here. In my discussion, then, I abstract from a good deal not only of detail but of substantive material, material that Tung himself was deeply interested in. I believe the procedure is legitimate: that by focusing on certain themes and setting them off against a contrasting position in the book's own time one may uncover a central point of the book. But it may be that other "central points" would emerge if one set one's focus differently and especially if one set Tung's arguments off against a different set of contemporary discussions. This does not claim to be an exhaustive study of Tung's Book .

I have pointed out that Huang Chen's exhortations to the rich of Fu-chou took as their basis an account of society as founded in duty, in reciprocal moral obligation; and I have proposed to show that Tung Wei's work offers an alternative account. This is not to suggest that moral obligation has no role in Tung's arguments. I will argue rather that two quite different approaches to social action or interaction find place side by side (or, better, in alternation) in the Book . On the one hand is precisely an account of action as compelled by moral obligation and duty, hence as expectable and (implicitly) demandable of actors. On the other is a description of certain social phenomena as matters of automatic or self-regulating process, which can be directed or allowed to move in beneficial ways if properly understood.

I use "account" and "description" here—words that have to do with language as much as with ideas—deliberately, as conscious alternatives to a word like "model," which may also in some ways apply. I do so for two reasons: first because the two approaches I find in Tung are strongly associated with, or indeed almost wholly characterized by, the choice of specific sets of words and, largely implied by this first choice, the selecting of particular questions judged proper or appropriate to ask of certain situations or

the actors in them. That is, one can see Tung shifting from one approach to the other in important part by watching his vocabulary. But second, a central point of interest for me in the comparison of Tung Wei with Huang Chen is the peculiar way in which two differing vocabularies or their derivatives—in J.G.A. Pocock's terms two different political "languages"—are shared but used in different proportions, to apply to different situations, and in fact to articulate two rather different notions or "models" of how society as a whole works or should work.

Let us consider first the "moral obligation" account as Tung renders it. Here we find several key words—"duty" or "moral obligation" (i ); "shame" (k'uei ); "virtue" (le )—and also certain more general kinds of statements, not reducible to single words: that blame is due an actor for the re-suit of an action; that he occupies a position or participates in a relationship that obligates a certain way of acting or thinking; that certain ways of acting proceed from feelings of humanity or sympathy, others from their absence; and so on. In the second item of his first chapter, Tung quotes a prayer made by the sage ruler T'ang, founder of the Shang dynasty, during a drought:

T'ang, in drought, prayed: "Is my administration unfrugal? Does it cause the people to suffer? Why does the lack of rain go to such an extreme? Are my mansions and palaces [over-]splendid? Are women [too much] given a hearing? Why does the lack of rain go to such an extreme? Are bribes entertained? Do slanderers flourish? Why does the lack of rain go to such an extreme?"

To which Tung comments:

At bottom the disasters of Heaven are like the fierce anger of a parent. Whoever is a son will know that, even if the fault does not rest with him, he should still offer fear and reverence, so as to gain the pleasure of his parent. Was T'ang, a sage, ever guilty of these six faults? That nevertheless he spoke of them without fail, one by one, was in order to show the completeness of his reverence for Heaven. All the more for one who is not T'ang's equal: can he do other than hold himself responsible?^[17]

A ruler, it seems, may be responsible for drought and famine through his own failings as ruler: if excess and corruption mar his reign, Heaven may send disasters to signal its anger. Thus the ruler should emulate the sage T'ang and be ready to take the blame, to hold himself responsible . The case is drawn from Hsun Tzu . Tung finds another far closer to hand: in the reign of Jen-tsung (r. 1023-1063), fourth emperor of Sung:

[17] The source of the passage Tung cites here is Hsun Tzu , book 27: Ta-lüeh p'ien . See Tzu-shu erh-shih-pa chung (Taipei, 1975), p. 1099. My translation is based on the standard commentary given there.

In the seventeenth year of Ch'ing-li [1047], because of the drought, the emperor avoided the main palace, and decreed that officials within and without should set forth the most acute questions of the time. He further sent down a decree: "The calamity is of my own doing. What fault is it of the people's? It would be better [of Heaven] to have sent down disaster to me [personally] than to have sent down calamity to others." On the day hsin-ch'ou he prayed for rain in the blazing heat of the sun, refusing any shade and declining to ride.^[18]

A still more recent Sung example comes from the reign of Shen-tsung (r. 1068-1085):

During the Hsi-ning period the capital suffered long drought. Those below sought [and gained] an imperial decree calling for frank discussion [of problems facing the dynasty]. It said, in part: "Is it that proposals I have entertained and accepted were not in accord with principle? Is it that my judicial decisions have not been in accord with human feelings? Is it that my taxing has lacked restraint? As loyal and pious counsels have pressed upward for the emperor's hearing, have many been blocked and concealed by flatterers for their own selfish ends?" When the decree came down, people rejoiced greatly. The next day it rained.^[19]

The implication, to which Tung takes no exception, is that if misrule can bring drought, self-correction can bring rain. In any case the moral responsibility of the emperor for the suffering or prospering of his people in time of disaster—and more, the emperor's obligation to acknowledge his responsibility—is clearly laid out here and elsewhere in Tung's book. Tung cites the Mencius :

King Hui of Liang said: "I use my heart to the utmost for my state. When there was dearth in Ho-nei, I moved its people to Ho-tung and grain to Ho-nei. When there was dearth in Ho-tung I did likewise. I have noted that the governing of my neighbor states is not so diligent as mine. [But] the people of the neighbor states do not grow fewer, and my people do not increase. Why is this?" Mencius then instructed him on the government of a [true] king, and said: "Now, when dogs and pigs eat of men's food, you do not know enough to gather it in; when there are corpses of starved people on the road, you do not know enough to distribute. When people die, you say, 'It is not me, it is

[18] HMS 1:17. We can be sure Tung approves of the emperor's remarks, because in his comment on the next article he classes Jen-tsung among the "founding emperors" of Sung (tsu-tsung ), whose acts he repeatedly takes as models for their successors, and refers to Jen-tsung as a "sagely ruler."

[19] HMS 1:18. Tung's comment gives credit for the issuing of this decree to the minister Han Wei, who took note of the emperor's reduction of his food and avoidance of the palace in response to the famine, and approved these, but called Shen-tsung's attention to a specific policy, the Green Sprouts law, which Han felt was aggravating the conditions brought about by the drought.

the harvest.' If the king would not blame the harvest, then the people of the world would come to him."^[20]

To this famous passage, which he partly abridges here, Tung offers this comment:

If a lord of men, when times are normal, levies to excess, appropriates abusively, and is unable to allow the people to nourish the living and mourn the dead without vexation, then even if, on encountering drought or flood, he shifts people and grain about, Mencius holds that he does not know what is fundamental.

The fundamental, it appears, is precisely to "allow the people to nourish the living and mourn the dead without vexation"; and there can be no doubt that Tung, with Mencius, sees this as the ruler's moral obligation. For the ruler stands in a special relation to the people. "One who is king takes the world as his family," Tung remarks in commenting favorably on the conduct of the first Southern Sung emperor, Kao-tsung (r. 1127-1162).^[21] Jen-tsung had gone even further. "Even the people outside the borders are my infant children," he had said to his ministers when faced with a flood of refugees from the Khitan territories in 1029; he had taken steps to provide them with lands.^[22] We have already seen Jen-tsung wishing personal disaster sent to him rather than calamities to his people. Of the T'ang emperor T'ai-tsung (r. 627-649) Tung tells a story that elaborates on the same theme.

There were grasshoppers m the capital region. The emperor went into his garden and saw some grasshoppers. He picked several up, looked at them, and said: "The people depend on grain for their lives, and you eat it. Better that you should eat my vitals." He lifted his hand and was going to eat them. His attendants admonished him: "Evil things [like these] may cause illness." The emperor said: "If I take on disaster for the sake of my people, why should illness be something to avoid?" And so he swallowed them. That year the grasshoppers did not bring disaster.^[23]

Tung, then, applies the language of moral obligation first of all to the acts and sentiments of the emperor, who because he is the emperor is responsible for the people's welfare, indeed should regard their welfare as more important than his own. But the language, with the model it articulates, has wider application. Tung tells us of the measures taken against drought in Hsiu-chou by Hung Hao in 1124. Hung had learned that the circuit authorities of Che-tung were then shipping forty thousand hu of rice

[20] HMS 1:5. Tung here abridges Mencius , Book I, chapter 3.

[21] HMS 1:21.

[22] HMS 1:16.

[23] HMS 1:11.

for the circuit's official Ever-Normal Granaries system to (one presumes) the circuit capital, on a route that would take it past Hsiu-chou city. He ordered the rice intercepted and advised the prefectural administrator and circuit intendant to hold it and offer it for sale to relieve the famine.

The prefect was unwilling, saying, "This is something to be initiated by the imperial brush. [To do it without such authorization] is a capital offense, not subject to amnesty." Hung said: "The people will depend [on us] for food until the wheat ripens. If we stop midway now when the year is not yet over, we might as well not have offered any relief at all. Better to trade one life for the lives of ten thousand."^[24]

Here the obligation to value the people's lives over one's own is proposed for the regular bureaucrat. This is especially striking because elsewhere Tung cautions the local official against interrupting the flow of grain in the private sphere: moral obligation operates differently with official than with private grain. Here Tung offers no comment, but since elsewhere he urges the local official to take extraordinary action when needed without waiting for imperial authorization, we may presume he shares Hung's sentiments. Certainly he approves T'ang T'ai-tsung's sentiments in 767:

[In that year] long autumn rains damaged the crop. The administrator of Wei-nan county, Liu Tsao, claimed that within that county's territory alone the rice shoots were unharmed. The emperor said: "The long rains have been universal. How can only Wei-nan not have had them?" He ordered the censor Chu Chiao to make inspection, and [Chu found that] over 3,000 ch'ing of fields had been damaged. The emperor sighed. "A county administrator is an official who cares for the people. Even if the crop were unharmed he ought to say it had been harmed. And he is as inhumane as this! " He demoted Liu to sheriff.^[25] (Emphasis mine)

"These words of T'ai-tsung's," Tung tells us, "get at the essential substance of [what it is to be] a lord of men." He goes on to absolve the local officials of his own time, in the main, of the inhumanity T'ai-tsung finds in Liu Tsao—"Which of today's county administrators has not a heart concerned for the people?"—and blames their failing instead on the heavy burdens laid on them by their superiors. But to the administrator's moral responsibility for his charges, in disaster as at other times, he takes no exception. It is a question, for him as for T'ai-tsung, of having "a heart concerned for the people" or not, of being humane or not.

In one field in particular Tung finds the local administrators of his time falling short of their moral responsibility—in favoring their own jurisdic-

[24] HMS 3:75.

[25] HMS 1:12.

tions over others. In this they are inferior even to the selfish and contentious feudal lords of the Spring and Autumn era.

In the sixth year of Duke Yin [of Lu], the capital reported hunger. The Duke on this account appealed to [the states of] Sung, Wei, Ch'i, and Cheng for the purchas of grain. This was [in accord with] proper rules of social relations. In the winter of the twenty-eighth year of Duke Chuang, there was hunger. Tsang Sun-ch'en appealed to [the state of] Ch'i for the purchase of grain. This was [in accord with] proper rules of social relations.^[26]

Tung comments:

In Spring and Autumn times, the feudal lords snatched territory and monopolized authority over their fiefs. Yet allied states still maintained (yu ) the duty (i ) of relieving calamity and sharing disaster, and never blocked the purchase of grain [by one from another]. Today's prefectures and counties, unaware of their origins [in the feudal states of old], do not allow rice to move downriver out of their own borders. If they look back to the states of Spring and Autumn, they will be ashamed.

Tung's text makes the sale of grain by one state to another in time of famine a matter of "proper rules of social relations" (li ). Tung himself calls it, for administrators of modern counties and prefectures as well as for their feudal predecessors, a matter of "duty" and its omission a proper occasion of shame. The point, again, is central for him: in its support he offers several other cases from the Spring and Autumn period,^[27] and he devotes a full section of his second chapter to the ill of administrators' "blocking the purchase of grain" (o ti ) between their respective counties or prefectures in his own day, reiterating the moral nature of the problem:

Now when one's neighbor prefecture, because there is abundance within one's own territory, comes to appeal for purchase of grain, this is a case in which as a matter of duty one should take pity [or: one should give relief] [i so tang hsu ].^[28]

We are moving here into questions of specific policy, to which I will return. Here the broader point is central: that Tung makes the actions and sentiments of local officials faced with famine, like those of emperors, a question of moral obligation.

[26] HMS 1:3. The source is the Tso chuan for the years cited. See Shih-san ching chu-shu (Taipei, 1980), v. 6, pp. 91 and 178.

[27] See the three articles that follow the one cited above, citing Kuo yü and Tso chuan again, in HMS 1:3-4.

[28] HMS 2:32. This is in the second section of the article on o ti . In the first part Tung cites a 1059 memorial by Wu Chi, which again cites the precedent of Spring and Autumn states, and from which some of Tung's own language in the passage quoted earlier clearly derives.

To frame action in these terms largely excludes considerations of profit or of private or partial benefit, even to the government as a whole, let alone to the individual official. Tung makes this explicit. Tracing the origins of the Ever-Normal Granaries system to the Warring States period, he comments on his own time:

Those who carry on Harmonious Purchase today attend to the seeking of a bit of profit as if this were merit . [Thus ] they forget utterly the idea that the gathering and distributing is for the sake of the people .^[29] (Emphasis mine)

Of Kao-tsung's readiness to remit taxes, Tung comments approvingly: "One who is king takes the empire as his family. He does not know how to give thought to private accumulation " (emphasis mine). And in his general discussion of Ever-Normal Granaries and their functions, he argues:

The measures taken by the authorities [such as the Ever-Normal Granaries system] are only for the purpose of relieving the people's ills. Finances are not to be calculated. If one acts on the model of a private household's managing of its wealth, then one will lose the point for which Ever-Normal [Granaries ] are made .^[30] (Emphasis mine)

Nothing in all this is very surprising. Tung sounds here like the academic descendant of the Ch'eng brothers that he is. He speaks of the emperor and his officials in words very like those Huang Chen uses to exhort the wealthy private householders of Fu-chou. Huang would surely see little to argue with in Tung's argument from moral responsibility here. Where Tung diverges is in applying the argument, and its language of shame, duty, blame, and the forswearing of profit and self-interest, almost exclusively to officials . When he comes to deal, in particular, with wealthy householders like Huang's, a different way of talking takes its place. The hinge that joins one account to the other, perhaps, is the notion of ts'e ("strategies" or "policies") or of shu ("techniques"). These, it seems, the emperor or official must have if he is to fulfill his moral obligation. In his preface Tung tells us:

I have heard that there has never been an age without disasters of flood or drought, frost or locusts. Yet when one has no techniques [shu ] for relieving dearth , then the people will suffer the calamities of flight, of starvation, and of sprawling and dying in gutters and ditches.^[31]

There is some suggestion in Tung's work that being in possession of strategies and techniques may itself be a moral obligation for an official; at

[29] HMS 1:5.

[30] HMS 2:25.

[31] HMS , front matter.

least the language of shame applies. In the third article of his first chapter, Tung recites several of the failings of local officials of his day:

It is not that they are unacquainted with the ancients' idea of giving life to others, but simply that they are pressed by the levies and demands of the various agencies [above them] and are left no time to plan. Yet anyone who takes thought of the people and the nation will be ashamed to have no strategy for dealing with this^[32]

Having the right strategies and techniques, however, is also a question of the breadth of one's knowledge, insight, and awareness. Of officials who choose the wrong policy, Tung frequently tells us that their "frame of reference" or "scope" (kuei-mo ) is "narrow and cramped" or "shallow and mean," or simply that they "do not know" (pu chih ) such and such a thing that would lead them to act otherwise if they knew it.^[33] The relation of this to moral responsibility remains unclarified. Perhaps an official who properly takes upon himself the burden of caring for the people will simply make it his business to learn what he needs to know. Perhaps his "scope" and breadth of knowledge will necessarily be greater than those of other officials. Can an official be "humane" and yet "not know"? Whatever the answer, we do seem to move, in this vocabulary of "knowing," "breadth of scope," "technique," and "strategy," some distance beyond the realm of moral responsibility.

What are these techniques the official facing famine must possess? What is the knowledge Tung expects of him? One theme in particular seems crucial: the primacy, the natural mode of action, and the beneficial capacities of private commerce in grain. This primary orientation is clearest perhaps when, to an outsider's eye, it seriously distorts Tung's reading of historical texts. The first article in his book is an amalgamation of two passages from the Classic of Documents :

The sovereign said: "Ch'i, the black-haired people still suffer from famine. Let you, O prince, as minister of agriculture, continue to sow for them the various kinds of grain."

Yü said: "The inundating waters rushed to the sky and in their vastness surrounded the hills and covered the mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed. Mounting my four conveyances, I cut down the trees along the hills. Together with Yi, I showed the multitude how to get flesh to eat. I cut openings for the streams of the nine provinces and brought them

[32] HMS 1:2.

[33] See for example the comment on the first article in HMS 1:1, the second item under chin o ti in HMS 2:32; and for "not knowing" (pu chih ), see for instance the last item under pu i chia in HMS 2:34. For an example of"having no strategy" (wu ts'e ) as a root of ills, see under ch'iian fen in HMS 2:30.

across to the four seas. I deepened the channels and canals and led them to the sea. Together with Chi, I sowed, and showed the multitude how to get food by toil as well as flesh to eat. I encouraged them to exchange what they had for what they lacked and to trade what they had stored up. All the people were [thus] supplied with grain, and the myriad states were brought to order."^[34]

On this Tung remarks:

In the time of T'ang Yü, state expenditures were still simple; what the ruler took from the people was very little. All the benefits of the mountains and marshes rested with the people. So at times of hunger, they simply caused mutual access and adjustment between those who had and those who had not [or: of that which they had for that which they lacked],^[35] and that was all. . . . Today those whose scope is shallow and mean utterly lose T'ang Yü's intention to encourage exchange.

If one is to take seriously the labors of Yü as a model for government action against famine—as Tung invites us to do—one must surely see in this passage an extraordinarily activist government, which, in the person of its minister, controls floods, constructs irrigation systems, plants crops and teaches the people how to do likewise, and, finally, encourages trade. Yet in Tung's reading only the last comes through: "they simply caused mutual access and adjustment between those who had and those who had not"—that is, "encouraged exchange"—"and that was all."

Tung's stress on commerce, and on governmental action that furthers, encourages, or works through it, clearly lies behind a preference for "relief sales" (chen-t'iao ), or sales of state grain to needy families at prices slightly under the market in order to increase supply and bring down prices, over two other techniques common in his time: "relief grants" (chen-chi ), or direct grants of state grain to needy households who have been registered and certified as in need, and "relief loans," government loans to the poor for repayment in better times. In this Tung qualifies somewhat the enthusiasm of Su Shih (1036-1101), who as Tung tells us had claimed that relief sales were the only method needed to relieve famine—that government need only operate through the market.^[36] Tung holds that there are several

[34] HMS 1:1. My translation in most respects follows Clae Waltham, Shu Ching: Book of History (London, 1972), pp. 15 and 31.

[35] A translation of t'ung-yung yu wu . Tung uses the phrase in a number of other places, always with reference to promoting movement and equalization of grain supplies from one place to another, usually by commercial mechanisms. I have tried to keep some of the literal sense of the original rather than simply translate it as "promote exchange," which is clearly its sense as applied to this passage.

[36] HMS 1:15. Here Tung approves Su's ideas, noting only that the method needs to be modified to extend its reach to the countryside, since Ever-Normal Granaries, on which Su proposed to rely, were located only in cities. In HMS 2:26 Tung discusses Su's position again and elaborates on the rural-urban issue, then goes on to note that of course there are still the Charitable Granaries as a source of relief grants, which can be carried out concurrently with Su's proposed relief sales without any impropriety.

methods of getting state grain to those who need it, and in particular that different methods may be appropriate to different places.^[37] But his qualification of Su's position is just that—a qualification, not a repudiation—and Tung gives pride of place to relief sales, among forms of government relief, throughout his work. We may sense his preference for commercial solutions too in his recommendation that officials consider, when they do adopt the direct-grant technique, issuing grants at least partly in money, which recipients may then spend in part on foodstuffs other than rice.

But Tung's faith in commerce is clearest in his discussion of three techniques available to officials and which, in whole or in part, he rejects. These are the lowering or fixing by officials of private grain prices (i chia ); the interdiction of commercial passage of rice beyond one's own borders (o ti ), already touched on above; and the strategy called "urging sharing" (ch'üan fen ). It is here that he differs in policy most sharply from Huang Chen, and from Huang's intellectual ancestor Chu Hsi as well. It is here, and elsewhere in his discussions of government use of the market for relief, that Tung brings to bear what I have called an account of economy as automatic or self-regulating process. Below I will quote from his discussions at some length and then discuss them as a group.

Consider first the official regulation of prices, which Tung discusses in his second chapter under the heading "Not forcing down prices." To refrain from controlling prices, that is, is in itself a technique:

The text of the regulations on Ever-Normal Granaries reads that in the sale or purchase of grain one may not constrain or coerce [i-lei ]. As it says "may not constrain or coerce," it is clear that the movement of rice prices up or down according to the times may not be prohibited or constrained by the authorities. In recent years administrators do not understand the intent of the legislation, and say that if money is lacking among the people, one must fix the price. They do not know that if the authorities force down the price, then merchant rice from outside [k'e-mi ] will not come in. If the price is low here alone, while in other places it skyrockets, then who will be willing to trade? If trade is not forthcoming, then within this territory people will want for food, and the upper-grade households who have stores accumulated will be still less willing to offer them [for sale]. The hungry people, holding their money in their hands, trembling in fear, will have nowhere to go to buy. Those unwill-

[37] See the preface to the discussion of the three forms of relief in HMS 2:42. But compare also HMS 2:30, under ch'üan fen , where the registering of the needy population and the issuing of direct relief grants seems to be judged appropriate chiefly or only in "places of mountain paths which do not give access to boat traffic," that is, in remote spots isolated from normal grain commerce.

ing to go to their deaths without protest will inevitably rise up and cause disorder: the feelings of men are easily stirred up. No disaster is greater than this. . . . But if one does not force down prices, not only will the carts and boats [bearing grain] converge as spokes to a hub, but the upper-grade households too, fearing lest they be too late, will contend [or: compete!] to open their granaries, and the price of rice will fall of itself.^[38]

And further on:

I have been in villages and seen that the families with accumulated rice were unwilling to sell it to the ordinary local people, but that brokers from outside were buying grain in the villages in great numbers. As neighboring counties too were undertaking famine relief, the authorities naturally did not dare to institute sudden prohibitions [against such sales]. All this is simply because the higher authorities have directed that one may not raise rice prices wildly. The original aim is to suppress engrossing and show sympathy to the little people. But [these authorities] do not realize that the price outside the borders [of this jurisdiction] is higher. If the little people want to offer additional money to buy from the upper-grade households, they are restrained forcibly by men of low character. Only brokers will always draw up a contract and privately add extra money [to the legally fixed price] for the seller. This is called "secret annotation." Men's pursuit of profit is like water's tending downward. Thus the brokers can buy their grain but the local people are short of food. Now, if one does not hold down prices . . . will anyone then countenance selling his grain only to men from other counties?^[39]

It is through letting prices rise, then, and not through forbidding the trading of rice beyond one's own borders, that one is able to keep local supply high and prices moderate. I have already quoted Tung on the moral imperative, for an official, of not forcibly denying his territory's grain to other jurisdictions. Rather:

It would be fitting to search for places of abundance upstream and to urge and cajole great surnames, or the prefectural administration, to supply money, then assign a man to go around and make purchases of grain [to bring back and sell here]. The cycle of buying and selling will be able not only to revive the people of one's own territory, but to revive the hungry people of neighboring prefectures and counties as well. . . . Supposing instead that rice from here were not allowed to leave our own borders, then rice from other prefectures would likewise not be allowed to enter [as other prefectures retaliated with restrictive policies of their own], and whenever there was hunger, all would stand fixed in place, looking around at each other, with nowhere to go to buy. Then the hungry people would inevitably rise up and cause disorder to prolong their lives for a day or an evening. This would be a great hastener of ill fortune and disorder.^[40]

[38] HMS 2:33.

[39] HMS 2:34.

[40] HMS 2:32.

Tung's position on forcing down prices and blocking grain trade is simple and clear. As to "urging sharing"—official exhortation of wealthy families to sell their stored grain to those without at moderate prices (something akin to what is now called "jawboning")—r-his view is more complicated. This was the strategy that Huang Chen, as we have seen, adopted in Fu-chou in 1271, though he shied away from the name. The term, and a variety of practices covered by it, were common in Sung. Tung lists "urging sharing" among the fundamental techniques to be used by local administrators, at the start of his third chapter. But his full discussion in the second chapter, and references elsewhere, show that he has something rather special in mind.

When private households [min-hu ] have rice, and can get [the right] price in money to sell it for, why would they wait for the authorities to urge them? It is only because the authorities make uniform assignment of quotas [to be sold] according to the five household grades, and make unexpected checks at the marketplace; thus households are afraid and so shut off their stores to purchasers [p'i ti ] and hide them snugly away as provision against the unforeseen. . . . People's normal feelings are such that, if one urges them to offer their rice, they will offer it still less. But if one urges by not urging , the rice will come out by itself. I say that the best thing would be to cajole a rich merchant or great trader among the upper-grade households into supplying money; the authorities will then send broker-clerks to places of abundance to buy rice and return, each to his community, to relieve the little people [by selling it]. When the program is completed, return the original money. In a place where there are no great traders, allow ten or more [smaller trader] households to pool their money for the trading; or where local people are unwilling to pay in money to the officials but willing to sell grain themselves, allow that. The authorities will not force down the price. People will naturally and gladly rush to anyplace where there is profit. The rich houses too, fearing lest they be too late, will contend to be first to open their granaries. Thus the rice will come out, of itself, without a deadline's being set. This is the essential technique of urging sharing.^[41]

Tung favors persuasion, then, but persuasion aimed chiefly at merchants, seeking temporary loans of money to buy grain elsewhere and pursue the market-mediated strategy he has outlined elsewhere. This is not what "urging sharing" usually meant in the Sung. Quotas of grain to be sold are not to be assigned, nor prices to be fixed. The wealthy nonmer-chant households whom Huang Chen addresses seem to be spared attention here; they are presumably the "rich houses" who will later rush to sell their grain. (On the special, indeed discriminatory, attention to merchants, more below.) Further on Tung does suggest that these others too may be "urged"; but the terms of the urging are rather particular:

[41] HMS 2:30.

To sell grain in a bad year and thus revive the common people can be called a benefice that costs nothing. All the more so as those it reaches are all of one's own community and neighborhood: one can form ties of grace and affection, can accumulate hidden virtue, can stimulate and evoke harmonious feelings, and by degrees further one's prosperity. One can cause banditry not to arise, and long preserve one's wealth. These things are of aid to the great family too. If one lets the little people sprawl in the ditches and gutters or flee to other places, will the great family have the leisure to till its own fields? If the land is abandoned and wasted, this will surely cause harm. . . . [All] this should be known to a county administrator. To proclaim and instruct as to these ideas is proper [k'oyeh ].^[42]

There may seem to be reminiscences here of Huang Chen's stress on the moral obligations of relationships to members of one's own community. But the real sense is, I think, sharply different. With every line, Tung is proposing a benefit that may come to the wealthy household if it sells, or harm that may come if it does not. "Hidden virtue," which sounds like an exception, is not. The term is used consistently in Sung texts of acts which, though unrewarded in their own time, must bring benefits to future generations. The basis of the belief, of course, is moral—Heaven rewards those who act in this way—but it is to the benefit, the reward, not to the obligation itself, that Tung calls attention: to "furthering one's prosperity" and "preserving one's wealth." "Hidden virtue" is part of a vocabulary of self-interest. "To proclaim and instruct as to these ideas is proper"—this is how an administrator should persuade: with arguments of benefit and loss. For this, as we have seen him say, is what motivates people.

The strategy fits perfectly into Tung's larger account of the place of private households in famine. Tung shows us a world in which movement of 'grain from place to place and from those with to those without happens naturally, unforcedly, so long as well-meaning officials do not try either to inhibit or to compel it. The motive force of the process is the desire for profit (li ), a desire as natural and unchangeable as the urge of water to flow downward. If actors in this process are to be persuaded in certain directions, they are to be persuaded by appealing to this desire: by showing them that material benefit—"preserving one's wealth" and "furthering one's prosperity"—lies where they may not at first have seen it.

To call the process of grain commerce, and the roles of actors in it, "natural" or "automatic" is not putting words into Tung's mouth. If Tung's moral-responsibility argument, as applied to officials, is marked by words like "duty" and "shame" and by associated notions, his discussion of grain commerce is peppered with different key words: "naturally" (tzu-jan ); "of itself" (tzu ); "inevitably" or "invariably" (pi ); "people's normal feel-

[42] HMS 2:31-32.

ings" (jen chih ch'ang ch'ing ); and so on. Thus, "The price of rice will fall of itself"; "people's normal feelings are such that if one urges them to offer their rice, they will offer it still less"; "if one urges by not urging, the rice will come out of itself"; "people will naturally and gladly rush to anyplace where there is profit"; "the rice will come out, of itself, without a deadline's being set." And elsewhere: "The families with accumulated rice, knowing that before long official rice will arrive, will naturally rush to offer theirs for sale in time."^[43] The process itself, allowed to go to its natural conclusion, is self-regulating: shortage of grain here will raise the price, which will bring merchant grain boats from outside "as spokes to a hub," whereupon local rice-holders will compete to sell as well; and the price will be brought down to a normal level.

The official, then, in Tung Wei's description, faces a world that simply will act in certain ways and, when he acts himself, simply will respond in certain other ways, without any regard to his intentions. "When wealthy people have grain, their inherent desire (pen yü ) is to sell it for money. If the authorities press them, it gets hidden all the more";^[44] "if officials force down the price, merchant rice from outside will not come in . . . and the upper-grade households who have stores accumulated will be still less willing to sell them."^[45] The chain of unintended consequences leads finally to disorder, in a process mediated again by consistent traits of human nature: "The feelings of men are easily stirred up." In all this the question of moral responsibility—whether of wealthy people to sell to the poor of their own community, or of the poor not to rise up against them (both urged by Huang Chen)—simply does not arise. In effect, and unlike Huang Chen, Tung never speaks of the nonofficial—the wealthy man whom the official confronts—as an active moral subject, akin to the official, who must choose duty or live with shame. Rather he is the object of the official's knowledge and understanding. Men will act in certain ways. The official's job is to know it.

The role of profit or material benefit (li ) in all of this is important. The metaphor "as water tends downward" will have called to the minds of all cultivated Sung men two passages in works of canonical or near-canonical status.^[46] One was from the hand of the great Han-dynasty historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien:

[43] HMS 3:54, under "Su Shih asks the sale of official rice."

[44] HMS 1:16.

[45] See above, under price fixing.

[46] See Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 6. I am now less willing than 1 was when writing the above to assume that Tung intended the Mencian connection to be noted and taken seriously.

When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business, then, like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow forth ceaselessly day and night without having been summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked.^[47]

The other came from Mencius, in his debate over human nature with Kao Tzu:

"It certainly is the case," said Mencius, "that water does not show any preference for east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high or low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards."^[48]

To associate Tung's view of profit with the optimistic Menclan vicw of human nature may be going too far; perhaps the roots of the metaphor lie only in Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Nonetheless, the contrast between the treatment of profit here, in connection with private commerce in grain, and its treatment in connection with the acts of officials and emperors is striking. Tung does not tell us, even here, that profit is a worthy aim; though he does not tell us that it is an unworthy one either. He is using here a way of speaking that (apparently deliberately) simply refrains from explicit moral evaluation. Yet within the larger Chinese language that Tung must also inhabit, it is hard for a word like "natural" to be utterly without positive connotation; and Tung does make clear that profit is a natural motive. There are other indications that it is at least a legitimate one; and these come precisely in a passage, already cited, in which Tung rejects profit for officials:

The measures taken by the authorities are only for the purpose of relieving the people's ills. Finances are not to be calculated. If one acts on the model of a private household's managing its wealth, then one will lose the point for which Ever-Normal [Granaries] were made.

Considering Tung's work as a whole, it seems inescapable that in excluding economic calculation for the Ever-Normal administrator here, Tung by implication legitimates it for the private householder. For Tung the private desire for profit is a fact, out there in the world. Its moral status is not directly addressed; but its functions, in supplying the whole empire with grain through a commerce that always pursues the best price, arc beneficial.

One must not go too far. Tung does not wholly abandon the language of moral responsibility even where he deals with the private economy. We have seen that in his discussion of "urging sharing" he proposes to make

[47] See Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien (New York, 1969), p. 334.

[48] See D.C. Lau, trans., Mencius (Harmondsworth, Baltimore, and Victoria, 1970), p. 160.

merchants and traders the main objects of persuasion. He does not suggest coercion, and the money he seeks is to be returned to its donors after it is used. But the sense that he is more ready to burden traders than other sorts of wealthy men is strong, and striking in view of his generally strongly positive view of commerce itself. The discrimination is both real and conscious. Further on in the same section Tung digresses to justify it. To do so he returns very clearly to an argument from moral responsibility, in which profit again acquires a certain taint:

In the world there are people (min ) who own fields and are rich, and there are people who are rich without owning fields. Those who own fields and are rich pay in [taxes in grain] each year to the authorities. To be sure, they use their fields for profit; but when there is hunger and dearth, they are capable by themselves of issuing [grain from] their surplus to aid their tenants. As for those who are rich without fields, aiming always for profit they prey upon the ordinary people. In a time of emergency, is it proper [k'o ] that they not give of their resources to intercede to save the hungry people, and so provide a foundation for [their continued pursuit of wealth at] a later time? It was for this reason alone that the house of Han burdened merchants heavily. Now in a year of famine, to urge this crew [tz'u ts'ao ] to give out money to trade for grain is by no means a heavy burden. All the more so as famine relief is a temporary action; how can they refuse?^[49]

The moral status of profit, perhaps, even among the populace varies with who is pursuing it. There is a definite physiocratic strain in Tung's combining a favorable view of commerce, most particularly in grain, with a denigrating view of merchants. On the one hand, the merchant is an essential actor in the commerce to which Tung applies his account of automatic process; on the other hand, the abstention from moral judgment that that account brings with it is held to most consistently, not with merchants, but with the householders who sell them grain. The privileged position of these, in turn, derives at least partly from a favorable evaluation of their role in society as taxpayers and potential benefactors of their tenants. There is a certain disingenuousness here. Tung certainly knows that merchants, in his time, bear their own considerable share of the fiscal burden of the empire in transit taxes and other levies on their goods, and elsewhere he argues for exemptions from these to speed the movement of grain to famine-stricken areas.^[50]

[49] HMS 2:31. The reference to support of tenants in famine is odd and seems to be hauled in only for the sake of the distinction Tung is drawing here. He nowhere else mentions it, suggests no techniques for seeing that it happens, and does not make it part of his technique of "urging sharing." This is in sharp contrast to Huang Chen and others, who directly push for it in the strongest terms, and with a backing of coercive threats.

[50] HMS 2:37, under ch'ih chin .

The two ways of talking are not kept utterly apart, and the "automatic process" vocabulary is not applied with full consistency. Still, to read Tung on the responsibility of officials and emperors and Tung on the role of participants in private commerce is to dwell in what seem (though of course for Tung they are not) two different discourses. In the one, duty and shame are central; in the other, self-regulating process, driven by the urge for profit. The implications for policy are considerable. Tung opposes registration of grain in private hands and assignment of quotas for sale; opposes interruption of grain traffic between jurisdictions; offers measured support to a form of "urging sharing" in which urging means pointing out to the wealthy the material benefits of their selling their grain; but prefers to concentrate instead on persuading merchants to lend money with which the government can enter the private market. His attitude toward coercion is symptomatic: he cites past imperial decrees in support of some of his positions and clearly favors disciplining officials who act against them, but he gives not the slightest hint that coercion might legitimately be applied to private holders and sellers of grain.

Tung Wei is not, it is important to point out, opposing government intervention in the economy: quite the contrary, he favors it. The laissez-faire position in its pure form seems unavailable in Tung's time. But always his interventions would involve the government's moving into the private economy as a participant (a participant uniquely motivated by moral duty rather than profit) with its own weighty resources to apply, rather than attempting to stand outside it and control the movement of goods by non-economic means. A rhetoric akin to that of laissez-faire—profit is natural, commerce accomplishes what well-meaning government fiat cannot, the greater good is served by allowing men's pursuit of their interests—here sets out to justify, not inaction, but action always mediated by markets.

The example of Huang Chen has already shown that Tung's approach to "urging sharing" was not everyone's. Huang's differences from Tung in policy were as many and as sharp as this might lead us to expect. But there is reason to suspect a more systematic division of views on famine relief in Southern Sung than two examples can show. Huang Chen, again, was at a century's distance a disciple of Chu Hsi. Chu Hsi himself had considerable involvement in famine relief in the decades before Tung's book was promulgated to the empire. The records of Chu's service suggest principles again sharply different from Tung's.

There is not space here to dwell on Chu Hsi's famine relief policies. In his service in Nan-k'ang Chün, while appealing to higher authorities (as Tung too recommended, and as Huang Chen would do in Fu-chou) for exemptions from various taxes and for disbursement of official grain,^[51] Chu

[51] Chu Hsi, Hui-an hsien-sheng Chu Wen-kung wen-chi (SPTK ed.), 17:15b-20a.

made "urging sharing" a centerpiece of his local program. "Urging sharing" here took a rather systematic and bureaucratic form. Chu had his staff survey the rice holdings of families in the countryside and determine who had enough to make private relief sales to those without.^[52] A certain number of rice-holders were persuaded to make formal undertaking (ch'eng-jen ) to sell given quantities of rice.^[53] . In his public notices urging the rich to sell (and to make relief loans and so on), Chu appealed to their sense of moral responsibility and humanity. "The upper-grade households, apart from extending aid to their tenants, for any such rice as they have left over, must at once show forth hearts o f fairness and broad humanity and love . Do not raise prices" (emphasis mine).^[54]

These passages are brief; Chu does not go on and on. Yet we do see here, in kernel, assumptions about duty and benevolence that Huang Chen would elaborate on considerably in his messages to the rich of Fu-chou. These assumptions find expression as well in the more general addresses on the conduct of agriculture and on proper social behavior that Chu issued while holding various local offices. We see the reciprocal relations that make up rural society: "The two [i.e., landlords and tenants] need each other in order to exist. I hereby look to households to admonish each other: tenants should not [pu k'o ] infringe upon their landlords; landlords should not harass and oppress their tenants."^[55] We see how special positions in society bring special obligations: "I urge households with officeholding members: by being proclaimed as families of officials, they are different from the people as a whole. They in particular should be at peace with their lot, comply with principle, and attend to subduing self [k'o chi ] and benefiting others. All the more so as in a community there are none who are not relatives or old friends. Is it proper [ch'i k'o ] to rely on strength to diminish the weak or to use wealth to grab from the poor?"^[56]

This way of describing moral relationships, when applied to famine, yielded an approach to "urging sharing" very different from Tung Wei's. Not only did Chu direct his persuasive attentions at wealthy rice-holders in general rather than chiefly at merchants; not only did he survey holdings and determine in advance the amounts to be sold;^[57] he expressly required sales to be made at the current price and forbade sellers to raise prices any higher. Further, in "persuading" sellers to sell, Chu used coercive threats:

[52] Chu Hsi, pieh-chi 9:8a-9a.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Chu Hsi, 99:10a- 11a, and pieh-chi 9:20a-b.

[55] Chu Hsi, 100:11a.

[56] Chu Hsi, 100:6a-8a.

[57] Through a process of persuasion or negotiation, to be sure, rather than through arbitrary assignment according to the five household grades, which Tung especially complained of. But on Chu's means of persuasion, see below.

"If there are some who deliberately resist [ku wei ] and are unwilling to sell rice, I look to households of lower grades to bring suit against them through the county administration, so that this may be investigated by the authorities." Chu insisted that rice-holders honor the amounts to which they had committed themselves, and promised to report to higher authorities any who failed to fulfill their quotas.^[58] On all these points Chu Hsi ran directly counter to what Tung Wei would later urge.

It may be going too far to posit a "Chu Hsi school" of famine relief. Yet a line of descent is clear from Chu Hsi to Huang Chen. Huang himself was acquainted with the famine documents in Chu's collected works,^[59] and he referred specifically to Chu Hsi's precedent when justifying his own admonitions to the rich in Fu-chou.^[60] Elsewhere he referred also to the more locally salient precedent of Huang Kan, who had served as administrator of Fu-chou's metropolitan county during a famine in the early thirteenth century.^[61] Huang Kan, of course, had been Chu Hsi's leading disciple in Chu's lifetime. Too little survives on Huang Kan's performance as famine administrator, and nothing on its intellectual underpinnings or articulated justification. But we know from Huang Chen's reference and from a single document in Huang Kan's own works that he not only took direct police action to force open the granaries of wealthy rice-hoarders, but also acted to forbid the commercial shipment of rice out of the prefecture^[62] —a course of action, as we have seen, that was anathema to Tung Wei. Huang Chen himself followed in Huang Kan's footsteps as well as Chu Hsi's, directing his attention to wealthy rice-holders from the start, insisting that they begin selling their grain at current prices at once; forbidding shipment of rice out of Fu-chou; later checking on the prices being charged by sellers in the countryside and attempting to bring them down by persuasion and threats; and finally sending subordinates out to force the opening of granaries and administer the sale of stored rice.^[63] Tung Wei, one imagines, was spinning in his grave.

I have already pointed out that Chu Hsi's assertions of moral foundations for relief sales when "urging sharing" were considerably briefer and less elaborate than their equivalent in the public notices of Huang Chen. Huang, in fact, rehearses the argument from moral responsibility and from

[58] Chu Hsi, 99:11a, and pieh-chi 10:8a.

[59] Huang's very extensive reading notes on authors ancient and modern in his collected works make mention of Nan-k'ang famine relief documents in two places: of Chu's petitions to higher authorities, in Huang Chen, 34:11b-12a; and of Chu's public notices to Nan-k'ang people, in 36:35b-36a.

[60] Huang Chen, 78:7a.

[61] Huang Chen, 78:19b-21b.

[62] For the latter see Huang Kan, Mien-chai chi (SKCSCP ed.), 29:6b-8b. For the former see note 61 above.

[63] On all of this see Huang Chen, ch. 78; and cf. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen , chap. 6.

shame before Heaven again and again and at great length. It is impossible to convey the effect of this without reproducing the whole body of Fu-chou notices from his works. A last example may at least make clear something more of his tone. Shortly after arriving in Fu-chou, Huang issued a new notice to local households. The bulk of this was made up of a sort of soliloquy that Huang proposed the wealthy rice-holders should engage in:

Supposing the wealthy households were to say: "In not forcing prices down, the prefect is treating us with generosity. To lower them ourselves even though the authorities do not lower them would be to treat ourselves with generosity. All year long the little people work diligently to get their grain. We do nothing, we make nothing, we sit quietly, and we come grandly into possession of all this grain. We say quietly that we think this shameful. If in normal times, with all this grain, we cannot help being ashamed, then how much shame should we feel now, when those who work diligently for this grain cannot get it to eat, but die, while we who sit quietly and come into possession of all this grain are still obstinate and stingy with it, and do not offer it!

"As soon as the silkworm is washed, the mulberry [leaf] gives it life. As soon as a baby is born, the milk gives it life. As the people grow up all across the empire, the five grains give them life. The five grains were devised for the people. If the people are born, starve, and die, and the five grains are still withheld through our selfishness, it is as if we took away the mulberry and would not feed it to the silkworm, took away the milk and would not feed it to the baby. What a shame before Heaven is this!

"Those older than we and living in our community are the generation of our fathers and elder brothers. Those younger than we and living in our community are the fellows of our sons and grandsons. Hearing the noises of each others' chickens and dogs, we have watched over each other, given each other aid in sickness, upheld each other in youth and adulthood. We have gathered together for play and amusement, have lived peaceably and in harmony, have laughed and joked as if one family. If one day suddenly they want for food, and we do not think to divide our own to give to them, but instead raise the price and so bring them distress, where then are our everyday feelings? What has taken away our neighborly duty? What a shame before men is this!

"Since antiquity, the days of order have always been few; days of disorder have always been many. For those born in disorder, their very lives being unprotected, how could their wealth have been secure? Since our dynasty's first ancestor, in his humanity, established our state, we inferior people have for generations been able to be born and grow up in the peaceful breath of spring breezes. In troubled times in the past, in the face of peril we relied upon our former august emperors and venerable great ministers to restore peace to the world, and so were able again to live on this land, be housed in these houses, till these fields, accumulate day by day, store up month by month, to achieve this wealth. Thus our lives were given us by the court. Our lands and fields were protected by the court. And for our wealth too we have the court's grace

to thank. Life and death, giving and taking, all rest with the court. Though it borrow our grain, tax our property, or in extreme circumstances even take away our wealth, would it be improper? Now, when the court sends officials to treat us with generosity, we still hold obstinately to our selfishness. What a shame before the court, too, is this!"

Shame before Heaven, shame before men, shame before the court. When the wealthy households give voice to this, I fear the tear-tracks will crisscross on their faces. A shame like the prefect's own will rise in their hearts, a shame that cannot ease of itself. Then the wealthy households will surely want to alleviate this shame for the prefect. If only they give of their humane hearts, lower the price of rice by themselves, and by themselves render gracious benefit to their community, then what [now] is worthy of shame will be changed, all at once, into a glorious act worthy of glory and congratulation.^[64]

Huang Chen far outdoes Chu Hsi here. The distance in language and conceptions from Tung Wei's treatment of grain commerce could not be greater. The reference to the prefect's "not forcing down grain prices," however, raises an intriguing point. From his earliest notices Huang Chen had explicitly declared that he would not do certain things. In the first place, he stressed that he chose not to "urge sharing," but only to "urge selling grain," and that this was a favor to the wealthy households, to which he expected them to respond.^[65]

The claim is distinctly odd. The conventional and most general meaning of "urging sharing" in Sung was precisely to urge, persuade, or otherwise induce rich families to sell their grain. Huang seems, in making this claim and drawing this unusual distinction, to be referring to a particular strategy conventionally included under the rubric "urging sharing" but which he chooses not to adopt, and which he also forswears more specifically: he will not "set up stations" (chih ch'ang ) or "announce [or assign] quotas" (fu shu ). Here the meaning is clear. These measures—establishing official grain-sales stations at which private holders are expected to sell grain under state supervision, and assigning or prearranging definite quotas for sale by particular households—are among those repudiated by Tung Wei but adopted by Chu Hsi. It is a fact that although Huang urged the rich to sell their grain and ultimately tried to oversee its forced sale in some cases, he never set up a systematic program of assigned quotas or officially administered sales stations; and in this he departed from the example of his master Chu Hsi. Nor, says Huang, will he "force prices down"—again a bête noire of Tung Wei's. Here Huang is on much weaker ground: by pushing families to sell at the current price on his arrival, and by surveying rural prices later on

[64] Huang Chen, 78:10a-12b.

[65] Huang Chen, 78:10a. Huang also includes "urging sharing" in a list of strategies he will not pursue in his first Fu-chou notice in 78:5a-b. The others are "forcing prices down," "establishing stations," and "seizing [or adhering to] quotas."

and trying again to urge or threaten them down case by case—as well as by undertaking forced sales of some families' grain at what he thought a fair price—he certainly did all he could to prevent prices from tending (to adopt Tung Wei's terms) "naturally" upward. But it is true, again, that he never proclaimed a permanent official price standard. We seem to see Huang presenting the specifics of his program in terms reminiscent of Tung Wei while acting, both in fact and in his broader persuasive rhetoric, more like Huang Kan or Chu Hsi.

Here I can only speculate. It seems possible that we see, paradoxically, both in Huang's insistent, almost obsessive elaboration of the theme of moral responsibility and in his description of his own strategies in terms (technically true in part, but in their implications largely false) that seem to echo Tung Wei, the influence of Tung's ideas in Huang's time. The moral-responsibility argument perhaps needed elaboration and reiteration in Huang's eyes precisely because the alternative account, or the policies associated with it and derivable from it, had gained real strength in the years since Chu Hsi acted and Tung Wei wrote. We need not give credit to Tung Wei alone, or even chiefly; perhaps further study will show that Tung's book was only part of a larger movement of official and elite thinking in the directions that Tung advocated. Chu Hsi, Tung Wei, and Huang Chen together do not constitute enough cases to yield definite conclusions. But I offer as a hypothesis for further inquiry that the terms of argument had undergone, in the latter half of Southern Sung, a change whose influences Huang Chen could not disregard.

But there is more to it than this. In forswearing "fixing prices" or "announcing quotas" Huang did indeed borrow, or perhaps accept as by his time common property, a part of the language and argument of Tung Wei, applying it to a course of action to which in Tung's eyes it would have been ill-suited. Perhaps Huang honestly thought what he was doing could qualify as "not fixing prices," or perhaps he borrowed the words because, as is the way with political words, the very speaking of them had come to have persuasive value quite apart from action. The evidence will not allow us to decide. But language was shared in the other direction as well. For, as we have seen, Tung's vocabulary of "duty" and "shame," of the renunciation of self-interest, was very much the moral vocabulary of Tao-hsueh in his own time; very much the language, in fact, that Huang Chen would use to the Fu-chou rich. If it is hard to know whether Huang used some of Tung's words ingenuously or strategically, there is little reason to doubt that Tung's use of a moral language like Huang's was perfectly sincere. Tung, as we have seen, simply applied it to a more limited sphere. For Huang it was appropriate to ask of any actor, anywhere in society and in any situation, where his duty lay, and to expect him to be susceptible to shame if he took another path. Tung asked this only of bureaucrats (including the

emperor), and expected only them to renounce self-interest in favor of the interest of the whole.

This analysis becomes a sort of solution to the problem of how to locate Tung Wei in relation to the Tao-hsueh circle from which his own master came and whose texts he taught, as we are told, at Ying-chou: namely, that Tung accepted what Tao-hsueh taught on the moral responsibilities of the person but applied it largely to those who governed. For him, on this reading, the classical texts central to Neo-Confucianism must have taught chiefly how to be a public servant. This is not in fact an unimaginable reading of the Mencius or the Analects (still less of many of the Classics proper), though it is probably not a correct one. A picture emerges in Tung, then, of a relatively small sphere in which virtue, shame, and moral duty are or should be the active principles, dwelling in the midst of and serving exclusively the larger common interests of a society whose own actions are governed—perhaps quite acceptably—by interests of the other kind. But this picture is deeply reminiscent of Ssu-ma Kuang (as presented here in chapter 3), who envisioned a state devoted uniquely to what was public (kung ) governing a surrounding society given over, more or less legitimately, to what was private or selfish (ssu ). And it makes considerable sense to see Tung Wei as pouring a Tao-hsueh -like vocabulary and style of moral argument into the mold of a conception of society on the whole more like Ssu-ma Kuang's.

This in turn suggests something about the flexibility of positions and meanings available within Tao-hsueh in this period. It is true that no Sung source explicitly associates Tung Wei with Tao-hsueh , but a man who studied with Cheng Ch'iung, and who went on much later to teach the Four Books and Chu Hsi's commentaries while serving in office, declared by both acts that he was connected in some way to the movement. The teacher-student relation itself would have made others assume it. That such a man could put the Tao-hsueh moral vocabulary to a use so different from the usual, could frame with its help an argument for an approach to famine and to economy so different from Chu Hsi's or Huang Chen's and a view of government and society apparently so like Ssu-ma Kuang's, suggests that the language of Tao-hsueh was no prison house. There were many open doors in and out, and many adjoining rooms. We must consider perhaps even more carefully than we have what the "rise of Tao-hsueh " really was and meant. If such as Li Hsin-ch'uan^[66] and Tung Wei could inhabit the movement or, in Tung's case, its outskirts, it was a more varied and capacious movement than has sometimes been argued.

What is certain is that there were two (if not more) significantly differ-

[66] See chapter 8 in this volume. Li constructed a version of the Tao-hsueh lineage which, on largely political grounds, actually included Ssu-ma Kuang as an important figure.

ent views of famine relief, and perhaps generally of economic action and its place in society and relation to morality, in circulation in Southern Sung. Their divergence, despite everything that has been shown or argued so far, should not be overstated. Tung Wei and Chu Hsi/Huang Chen shared, along with most other officials of their time, a number of strategies: reducing taxes, holding back already levied tax grain for sale or distribution, offering state-issued rewards, such as patents of appointment or monastic ordination certificates, in return for sale of grain, organizing public works projects to employ the poor and so supply them with grain or with the money to buy it—all of these were consistent with either of their two approaches. Tung reproduced Chu Hsi's community-granary scheme and urged its adoption, though one doubts he would have been so well disposed, say, to Chu's community compact. Chu Hsi and Huang Chen used arguments from material benefit alongside of those of moral obligation to convince rich men to sell: the point was to persuade men to honor their obligations, and means of persuasion might vary. Yet it is precisely here that the irreducible and significant difference appears. For Chu Hsi and after him Huang Chen, the problem of famine relief, as of social action in general, was to get men and women to act in moral ways, honor their obligations, live up to their binding reciprocal relations to other men and women. For Tung Wei the problem was to allow commerce to do what, if left alone, it would ultimately do; or to enter into commerce to speed the same result along. To know this, and to act accordingly, was for an official or emperor precisely where moral responsibility lay.