The Abortiveness of Late Ming Politics

For a brief period between approximately 1530 and 1630 Ming autocracy was at first quietly and then vocally threatened by elite reaction against "authoritarian Confucianism." In an era when Chinese emperors had abdicated their day-to-day involvement with affairs of state, the power vacuum created at the center was filled by contending eunuch and gentry-official factions. A devolution of local power in turn left the gentry firmly entrenched at home.

The collision course between gentry-organized private academies and central authority climaxed in the early seventeenth century, when the Tung-lin Academy in Wu-hsi joined with neighboring academies in Wu-chin and l-hsing. The resulting diffuse but still powerful Ch'ang-chou faction was able to influence imperial policy in Peking. Their power reaching a peak between 1621 and 1624, the Tung-lin partisans then suffered a series of reverses that coincided with the rise of the eunuch Wei Chung-hsien, who became the young T'ien-ch'i Emperor's (r. 1621-28) most intimate advisor. Despite their high place in the imperial court, the Tung-lin representatives were gradually undermined by Wei's faction at court and eventually dismissed from office.

The purge of Tung-lin partisans reached its apogee in the summer of 1625. Arrests and deaths by torture of Tung-lin leaders were accompanied by imperial denunciations of private academies as politically subversive organizations. Private academies throughout the empire were ordered destroyed. The halls of the Tung-lin Academy, partially destroyed in 1625, were completely torn down by imperial order in 1626. A special order was sent out from Peking to tear down all academies in Ch'ang-chou and Su-chou prefectures in particular because most were assumed to be part of the Tung-lin organizational network.

Although it was manipulated by crude politicians for their own purposes, the chief theoretical issue in 1625 was imperial prerogative versus the possibility of concerted and organized gentry involvement in politics. A century-old problem, the issue defined the threat posed by

[57] Hucker, "Tung-lin Movement," p. 143; and Ono, "Torin^[*] to^[*] ; ko^[*]   (ichi)," p. 589.

private academies and associations in light of the realities of political power within an autocratic imperial state. Wei Chung-hsien's crude purge of his Tung-lin opponents mirrored a fear widely held among more cultivated Confucians that it was wrong to establish separate political organizations for the advancement of personal interests.

All factionalism was impugned and repudiated with the officially sanctioned destruction of the Tung-lin Academy. The limits of what was politically permissible in Ming political life had been reached. Factions went against the public interests, which were represented ideally by the ruler. In the national political arena at least, late Ming efforts to strengthen gentry interests had failed.^[58]

But Wei Chung-hsien's uses of terror could not rein in the political forces unleashed by the Tung-lin partisans. After Wei fell into disgrace in 1627 (he subsequently committed suicide) private academies and associations emerged in full force again. Factionalism likewise reared its divisive head in the political controversies that ripped apart the last reigns of the Ming dynasty. Among the most successful and best-organized group of literati were those associated with the Fu She (Return [to Antiquity] Society) movement, which revolved around Su-chou in the 1620s and 1630s. A formidable organization dedicated to supporting its members in the factional struggles that dominated late Ming politics, the Fu She represented the largest and most sophisticated political interest group ever organized within the imperial bureaucratic structure.

With the fall of the Ming dynasty first to peasant rebels and then to Manchu conquerors, the Fu She ceased to function and Ming factionalism disappeared. Both the Tung-lin partisans and their Fu She successors had sought ways to grant the gentry scholar-official a position of political prestige. But in the end their diffuse efforts failed. Confucians of the time attributed the demise of the Ming dynasty in part to imperial despotism but blamed the debilitating factionalism even more for failing to achieve a viable consensus for gentry involvement in national politics.^[59]

If gentry forces had been able to influence the provincial and national

[58] Yang Ch'i, "Ming-mo Tung-lin tang yü Ch'ang-chou." See also Busch, "Tung-lin Academy." Primary sources are conveniently included in Tung-lin shih-mo and in Huang Tsung-hsi, Record of Ming Scholars , pp. 223-52. See the useful summary in Lin Li-yueh, "Ming-mo Tung-lin-p'ai te chi-ke cheng-chih kuan-nien," pp. 20-42. See also Goodrich et al., eds. Dictionary of Ming Biography , pp. 702-709. For a contemporary list of Tung-lin martyrs, see Chin Jih-sheng, Sung-t'ien lu-pi , pp. la-24a. Cf. Tung-lin pieh-sheng .

[59] Atwell, "From Education to Politics."

levels through legitimate factions such as the Tung-lin Academy or Fu She, what sort of political forces would have been released in Confucian political culture? Some scholars have speculated that the late Ming drive to reform the state "showed features strikingly similar to the trend against absolute monarchy and toward parliamentary rule in the West."^[60]

Ming factionalism, however, was implicated as a chief culprit in the fall of the Ming house in 1644 and in the consequent triumph of the Manchus over a native Chinese dynasty clinging to life in south China until 1662. In fact, it is doubtful that the legitimacy of Confucian parties would have been vindicated even if the Tung-lin partisans had triumphed. Fearing peasant rebellion more than Manchu occupation, gentry recognized that their social and economic privileges depended on the political power of the state, which they quickly rejoined as officials. Vigorous Ch'ing emperors soon restored imperial initiative in political affairs, making what might have been a moot point until the turmoil of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most novel element in this ongoing conflict was not the extremes to which imperial autocracy would go to defend itself but rather the audacity of the gentry assault. With the increase of schools and academies during the late Ming, an enlarged educated class of elites emerged. The various reformist agendas of the thousands of Confucians affiliated with the Tung-lin Academy and the Fu She crossed a treacherous boundary within Ming authoritarian government.^[61]

The fruitlessness of Ming activism should be seen in light of the increasing independence of the urban order within the imperial state. Criticism of the overbearing political authority of Ming imperial institutions carried over into the early decades of the Ch'ing dynasty. This is so even though the broader political consequences of Ming activism had been successfully aborted. The startling perceptiveness of such celebrated Ming loyalists as Huang Tsung-hsi and Ku Yen-wu— if understood in the context of the disintegration of the Ming state in the seventeenth century—marked major steps forward in Chinese perceptions of the intimate relation between Confucian institutions and autocratic state power.^[62]

[60] Struve, "Continuity and Change," vol. 9, pt. 1.

[61] On the political aspects of local Tung-lin activities see Tanaka, "Popular Uprisings," pp. 181-83. See also Dennerline, "Hsu Tu," pp. 124-25, and Tsing Yuan, "Urban Riots," pp. 296, 309.

[62] Hou, "Lun Ming-Ch'ing chih chi te she-hui chieh-chi kuan-hsi ho ch'i-meng ssuch'ao te t'e-tien," 26-35. On the Tung-lin partisans, see Huang Tsung-hsi, Ming-Ju hsueh-an , pp. 613-42 (chüan 58), and Ku Ch'ing-mei, "Ch'ing-ch'u ching-shih chih hsueh yü Tung-lin hsueh-p'ai te kuan-hsi." Cf. de Bary, "Chinese Despotism." On Ku Yen-wu, see Goodrich, Literary Inquisition , pp. 75-76.

What exactly did the Tung-lin initiative represent? Did its failure in the seventeenth century mark the decisive divergence in historical trajectories between imperial China and revolutionary Europe? Did Tung-lin activism fail because the imperial state was overly autocratic or because the Confucian political style was suicidal? For a gentry-official to remonstrate with the Ming throne was tantamount to presenting one's head on a platter. Gentry solidarity was forbidden. Martyrdom was assured. Could gentry organizations like the Tung-lin have successfully carved out a political niche in Confucian political culture? These questions immediately come to mind as we evaluate the futility of late Ming politics against the backdrop of the powerful lineages of the Yangtze Delta.^[63]