Northern and Southern Sung Views of the State

Northern Sung political thinkers and actors assumed or argued that government, or more particularly the imperial court, was the place from which the world could be made well again, or at least made better. They disagreed as to how much could be done, and how; but they took for granted that action to improve the world, political action, largely meant action from the political center. Southern Sung men, as Richard von Glahn and Peter Bol in particular argue in this volume, took a far less optimistic and far less ambitious view of central politics and institutions.^[18] A retreat from activism focused on the state meant for some a retreat from politics and institutional action

[16] Wei Liao-weng, Ho-shan hsien-sheng wen-chi 32:276. Compare Winston W. Lo, The Life and Thought of Yeh Shih (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1974), p. 153.

[17] Chou Mi, Chi-tung yeh-yü (TSCC ed.), p. 139. Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (1987), p. 240, translates tao-hsueh ch'i as "false moralism."

[18] The point in its essentials had been made much earlier by Wm. Theodore de Bary in "A Reappraisal of Neo-Confucianism," in Studies in Chinese Thought , ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 81-111, esp. pp. 105-6.

themselves, into a sole concern with the cultivation of the self; and it was perhaps for this above all that "Sung learning" was known and castigated in later ages. But for others an inward turn gave instead, as they saw it, new philosophical and moral depth to social commitment and involvement. We argue that for many of these the retreat from the center meant a concern with new and different kinds and levels of political or social action; while yet others, still concerned above all with the institutions and acts of the state, nonetheless revealed in their approach to these the same eclipse of the optimistic centralism of Northern Sung.^[19]

We have spoken of "Northern Sung" views, but we must acknowledge that this is a kind of shorthand. The politics, let alone the political thinking, of the first sixty years or so of Sung remain hardly explored in historical work. Thanks to David McMullen's analysis of the T'ang situation we are now in a better position to investigate the extent to which the Sung succeeded in adopting and adapting early T'ang models and to study the continuities and discontinuities between Sung thinkers and their T'ang predecessors.^[20] This is work for another place, however. The Northern Sung tendencies and ideas that we are concerned with here are largely those of the eleventh century and after, and in particular those of the reformist literary-political movement that promoted "ancient prose" (ku-wen ) as the language of examination writing and of written political and ethical discourse at large. Peter Bol has elsewhere argued convincingly that this movement put itself forward chiefly as embodying an answer to the question of the identity and proper role of the shih , the gentleman or literatus, in society; and that its rise to intellectual and political dominance by the mid-eleventh century reflects the assent its answer gained among the elite at

[19] On the "inward turn" as it affects Southern Sung politics, see also James T.C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

[20] See David McMullen, State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). McMullen makes very clear that early T'ang intellectual life was centered on court and government. After the An Lu-shan rebellion, thinkers like Li Ao and Han Yü "took their ideas to some extent out of the state-centered, official context that had shaped so much of the early T'ang outlook on the canons and made them universal statements about man" (p. 105). One is tempted to see here a foreshadowing of the Southern Sung tendencies we discuss below, But in T'ang even these men remained ambitious for high office, and many thinkers continued to look chiefly toward the center. An example is Liu Tsung-yuan (773-819), for whom "the offices of the imperial state, their insignia, ceremonial, and administrative procedures were 'the means through which the tao is implemented'" (p. 157, quoting Liu Ho-tung chi [Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958], Tso chuan chu shu 49:7b). A striking example is the continued prestige of writing rescripts even after the decline in the power of imperial offices (p. 238). McMullen also observes that the court maintained a relaxed attitude toward the world of scholarship, assured of "the loyalty of a scholarly community eager for official service" (p. 238). On this last point in particular the late T'ang does not look much like Southern Sung.

large.^[21] This answer, although complex, assumed for the gentleman a deep involvement in the "affairs of government" (cheng shih ) among other things; and this meant, ideally and ultimately, involvement at the center. There, since the empire was in crisis—just what sort of crisis, not everyone agreed, but the problem of the enemy northern states at least was common ground—he would work to reform the state and the world by repairing, restoring, or remaking the institutions and practices he found there.

This focus on the center was pervasive. Ever since the An Lu-shan rebellion scholars had looked to the Spring and Autumn Annals as a guide to reforming the world,^[22] and Allan Wood has shown that Northern Sung commentators on the Annals from Sun Fu (992-1057) on enlisted their text in the cause of the centralization of authority.^[23] Another figure, not a central focus here but an acknowledged founder of the "ancient prose" movement and a member of the first reform party brought to power by Fan Chung-yen, attempted in one of his most important pieces of writing to trace how China might be repaired from the center out. This was Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1070), and the essay was "On Fundamentals" (Pen lun ), written in the early 1040s.

"On Fundamentals" is most widely known today in the truncated form to which Ou-yang reduced it late in his life, when he cut out the first of what had been three sections. In this changed form "On Fundamentals" is an essay on how to combat the social power and attraction of Buddhism, and it places a heavy stress on the educative and culture-creating functions the state can perform through rituals and through schools. But the message, or at least the emphasis of the first section, which we must take as representing Ou-yang's thinking in the 1040s, is strikingly different. Here institutions (chih ) are all-important (Buddhism is not mentioned), and the problems with which institutions must deal first of all are the gathering of revenue and the control and employment of soldiers. Ritual, and the transformation through culture that it will bring about, can come into play only after this institutional foundation is laid.

The three Kings in governing the world used the management of quantities to treat all the world (t'ien-hsia ) fairly, used titles and lands to rank the countries and states, used the well-fields to place the people within delimited boundaries, and delegated tasks and affairs to officers. The world had fixed quantities, the countries and states had fixed regulations, the people had a fixed occupation, the officers had fixed tasks; so that those below served those above with diligence but not with toil, and those above governed those below

[21] Peter Kees Bol, "Culture and the Way in Eleventh-Century China." Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 1982.

[22] See McMullen, State and Scholars , pp. 101-2.

[23] Allan Wood, "Views on Authority in Northern Sung Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals. " Unpublished paper, 1986.

with simplicity, not with burdening. Wealth [or revenue: ts'ai ] was sufficient for use and able to provide for natural disasters. Soldiers were sufficient to ward off calamity but did not go so far as to cause calamity. Only with all this supplied did they embellish rites and music and promote humaneness and duty to guide them with teaching .^[24] (Emphasis ours)

The image is of a state that has provided the basis on which proper social life can go forward, not only by providing security against outside threats, but also by ensuring among other things that the people have land (through the well-fields) and so have a "fixed occupation." The government of the ancient sage kings Ou-yang describes here is to be a model for the ruler of his own day—not in its specific institutions, but in the understanding of priorities and purposes. It is clearly a sort of state activism that he envisions. Its agent, however, is not simply the ruler himself, but the men to whom he will entrust his institutions:

Among the means to spare wealth and employ troops, nothing comes before institutions (chih ). Once institutions are provided, troops become usable and wealth suffices for expenditures. Among the means for sharing the preservation of them [i.e., for sharing the preserving and guarding of institutions], nothing comes before delegation to others (jen jen ).

The importance of delegation makes recruitment crucial. Here is the reformist concern with the gentleman's career of service to the state and the commonweal, viewed now from the opposite direction: how are gentlemen, wise men (hsien ), to be drawn into central service so as to care for the ruler's all-important institutions? Ou-yang's provocative answer is that one must "exalt fame" (shang ming ): that is, one must treat fame and reputation with respect (Ou-yang does not believe they are adequately respected in his own day: "The fashion of the time hates men who love fame"), so that worthy men will want them, and will then seek them through service in high official positions.

Both the vision of a state that shapes or reshapes society with its institutions and the concern for how to attract the right sort of men to its service would recur in later Northern Sung discussions. But on the matter of the state it is important not to exaggerate the case. Ou-yang does here treat all influences as proceeding outward from the political center, and his image of the governance of the ancient kings does suggest that the state through its institutions can (and should) determine what sort of society it will be governing. Yet he is far from calling explicitly for the sort of expansive, all-absorbing state that we find in Wang An-shih, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3 here by Paul Smith and Peter Bol. Indeed, a prime end of the institu-

[24] Ou-yang Hsiu, Ou-yang Hsiu ch'üan chi (Hong Kong: Kuang-chih shu-chü, n.d.) 3:8-10. The passage quoted is on 3:8.

tions of revenue gathering is to assure that too much revenue is not gathered: "Given wealth in abundance, if one takes it without limit and uses/spends it without measure, those below will be more and more aggrieved, and those above will be more and more wearied."

Thus Ou-yang speaks of "means to spare wealth/revenue." And in his picture of the ancient kings, "those above governed those below with simplicity (chien ), not with burdening (lao )." It is reasonable as well to suppose that Ou-yang later cut this section from "On Fundamentals" precisely because he had come to think it emphasized institutions too much, and so could be read as giving support to the vast attempt to transform society by institutional means that Wang An-shih was undertaking in Ou-yang's last years and to his great distress. The two sections that remained, again, stressed ritual and schooling as means of cultural transformation (literally "teaching": chiao ), and proposed that if ritual were to have this effect it must in the first place be in accord with the natural desires (yü ) and tendencies of men—precisely what Ssu-ma Kuang, for one, would argue Wang's reforms were not. (Note also the strong contrast with some later Neo-Confucian evaluations of human desire.) One might then read the "teaching" (or perhaps better, "enculturation") of the second two sections as standing in contrast or as complement to the "government" (cheng ) so heavily emphasized in the first, and argue that Ou-yang is recognizing a segment of life, an aspect of the world, into which "government" as such does not or should not reach.^[25] In this area improvement must be by cultural means, which must work to some degree in harmony with the way people already do or see things. Here would be a foretaste of the view of Ssu-ma Kuang, whom Bol portrays as recognizing and accepting as proper the division between a state that is the guardian of the public interest and a society in which private interests and concerns have some real degree of free play. There is something in this parallel, but the matter is still more complicated. For it is very clear that what Ou-yang hopes for is ritual and education installed in local society by the state and from the center : cultural transformation will come not by the mere force of moral example (as some Southern Sung Neo-Confucians were to have it) but through channels that are still thoroughly institutional. Absent is any suggestion that any aspect of social life can get along by itself. Ou-yang is asking the center to act systematically and positively on the world around it. He assumes that it can, and that its actions can have large effects. This is the assumption of the eleventh century in China.

The strongest exemplar of the same assumption is of course Wang An-shih, who sought through state action a real assimilation of society to state,

[25] The idea was suggested to us by Peter Bol.

of private to public. Smith and Bol show this from institutional and intellectual perspectives, respectively. What is more striking is that the tendency runs in subtler ways through the arguments of men who would seem to stand rather apart from the Northern Sung reformist and statist mainstream. Su Hsun and Ssu-ma Kuang, in different ways, are good examples. Although Su is traditionally seen as one of the leading masters of "ancient prose," George Hatch suggests in chapter I that in many ways he was a figure outside the developing discourse. Unlike Wang An-shih or his predecessor in reform Fan Chung-yen, Su saw himself as no builder, even in imagination, of grand new political structures. Indeed—and here he differs from Ou-yang as well—he was not chiefly interested in institutions as such. For Su, according to Hatch, "institutions are historically given . . . their authority lies either in the creative act of the founding sage, or in the continuity of customary usage in time. Su Hsun suggests that it is neither advisable nor necessary to alter the form of institutions to achieve social order. That task is achieved by politics, where human behavior is manipulated, survival and self-interest secured, where things beyond one's control are somehow managed to suit one's own purposes."

If we ask the place of the state in society for Su, we find its freedom greatly circumscribed, in part by sheer factitious circumstance, but also and more significantly by custom, which may even be merely local, and which has the accumulated force and weight of a long history behind it. In Su's view, more perhaps than in any other Northern Sung view, the separation of state from society is radical and complete: there is no question of the one's remaking the other. Far from the state's molding society, influence may pass more easily in the other direction: as Hatch notes, Su held that "it was not enough to blame the administrators of laws for corruption of the system and litigiousness in court. The fault lay with the state of society." This makes it all the more noteworthy that on this very point the state's only possible response, for Su, was "a strict enforcement." This did not entail a remaking of society, hopeless and in any case wrong, but was still a forceful response to ward off the corrupting tendencies of society at large. Here Su, like Ou-yang and virtually all others who talked politics in Northern Sung, takes the perspective of the man at the center. This is especially striking for a man who spent most of his life far from the court. And if we look at his specific suggestions for dealing with problems of the day, we find what in a man of his views seems a surprising institutional daring and a surprising optimism about the effects of central actions.

To solve the problem of land distribution, as Hatch tells us, Su proposed announcing a future statutory limit on holdings. For Su what was attractive in this was that it did without a grand administrative scheme and instead made use of natural or automatic processes already in play. The normal

long-term process of attrition of holdings through equal division on inheritance, based in long and "natural" custom, would proceed; while the usual countervailing tendency of the rich to build up new large estates or extend existing ones would be interrupted by awareness of the future prohibition, as self-interest would lead men rather to sell off their holdings now in order not to yield them up for nothing later. Yet to an eye not of the Northern Sung world, what is most striking about the proposal is its breathtaking confidence in the ability of a government to make such an order stick in the future and so to have it taken seriously in the present. Similarly, Su's proposal for repair of the dynasty's military failings envisions what amounts to a whole new institutional structure, managed apparently from the center. Here he seems to us simply to contradict his broader notions and commitments. But it is just such contradictions that are most interesting, as showing the aspects of the larger discourse that creep into the ideas of a man who may be trying to stand apart. Even Su, who would build no institutions, when he must add his proposal to the chorus of proposals of the day becomes an institution-builder.

Ssu-ma Kuang is even more interesting and, because of his broader influence, for our purposes more important. Bol's chapter can be read to suggest that, in relation both to "ancient prose" as such and to the reformism that had come to the political fore repeatedly from the 1040s on, Ssu-ma is a man drawn into a conversation he almost wishes were not taking place. Where others—most notably, but hardly uniquely, Wang An-shih—are asking how the state can change itself so as better to change the world around it, Ssu-ma holds that neither of these is the point: nothing essentially new is called for in either instance. Rather, one must restore proper relations of authority and proper routines of bureaucratic practice within the state as it exists, and as it was handed down by the dynastic founders. By so doing one will bring it to perform what has always been its special function: not to change society but to embody, uniquely, the public interest and so bring into stable balance the contending interests that will always inhabit the social world outside it. Ssu-ma's ideas for bureaucratic change were more highly specific and more deeply practical, and potentially consequential, than we are making them sound here, but they are nonetheless a far cry from institutional innovation in any usual sense.

In granting legitimacy, or at least irrevocable reality, to a sphere of private interests, Ssu-ma stands as far as possible from Wang An-shih. More, the apparent lack of ambition of his program for the central government seems to separate him from a great deal else that was being said and done around him in Northern Sung. And yet in certain ways Ssu-ma is at one with the prevailing discourse: with at least one of its assumptions and above all with its tone. In the first place, though as a would-be preserver and restorer of established relations of authority he is not an aggressive cen-

tralizer, his perspective is still entirely that of the center.^[26] If—and only if— the emperor, the chief councillor, the court, do thus and so, things will get better. And how very much better they will get! For Ssu-ma, as Bol shows, is prepared to argue that proper bureaucratic practice at the center can end the cycle of dynastic rise, fall, and replacement once and for all. Where Wang holds, in the extreme, that the Sung state can abolish the distinction between itself and society, Ssu-ma argues, against all previous assumptions of Chinese political argument and historiography, that it can make itself live forever. It is hard to know which of them had the greater faith: Wang in new institutions or Ssu-ma in bureaucratic relations and routines reinvigorated by the moral conscience of the bureaucrats. Here is state-centered optimism if ever there was.

One might argue that Ssu-ma's claim is one he is forced into by the demands of the time, and of bureaucratic competition in particular: that where others in the running to head the court are promising astounding achievements, he must do so too. There may be something to this; but on the other side of the argument lies the work to which Ssu-ma devoted years of the most crucial period of his life: the grand historical work Mirror for Aid in Governing (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ). This book is devoted first of all (Ssu-ma tells us so) to explaining the rises and falls, but in practice especially the falls, of dynasties. If this for him was the central historical problem—rather than, as for other historians of his period, variously the cumulative development of institutions, or the transmission of the legitimate mandate, or the lessons in individual morality that history may help to teach—then we must take seriously his claim elsewhere to be able to solve the very same problem politically. The sense in which the former argument will hold, instead, is that Ssu-ma, drawn into a conversation that assumed central government could solve great problems, quite sincerely took some part of that assumption, though not all the rest of the terms of the conversation, into his own approach to the problems of the day. Whether without doing so he could have become the leader of a major party in the factional struggles of the later eleventh century seems extremely doubtful.

In the Southern Sung, assumptions were transformed. Von Glahn states the case strongly in chapter 5: "Southern Sung political thought was marked by a loss of faith in state activism. . . . Critiques of the misuse of power commonly were accompanied by a corresponding skepticism toward

[26] See, for example, Paul Smith's examination of tea policy, in which Ssu-ma's antireform party seems to have been less willing to experiment with decentralization of the tea monopoly than were Wang's remakers of society. More generally, it is striking that when Ssu-ma achieved power, the reversals of New Laws institutions were undertaken in as sweeping and total a way as their introduction had been, with as little consideration of local peculiarities or variations, as little consultation of local men's views, and with the same assumption of the right and ability of the center to legislate for the empire as a whole.

the desirability of legislative innovation. Conservatism—defined as an abhorrence of radical institutional reform—had become a hallmark of mainstream political thought since the 1070s, when Wang An-shih's sweeping program of reform triggered a virulent conservative backlash."

To modern historical eyes governmental authority was significantly less centralized in Southern than in Northern Sung. Decentralization found formal expression in institutions such as the superprovincial directorates-general (tsung-ling-so ) that governed the great regional armies along the northern frontier, and through whose hands passed a great portion of the county and prefectural revenues that once had gone directly to the center.^[27] It progressed also informally, through a measure of flexibility and freedom of action granted to county administrators greater than their counterparts in Northern Sung had disposed of, and through a perceptible weakening of all state authority in the countryside. Yet as yon Glahn points out, it was a commonplace of Southern Sung political argument that government was far too centralized, that too many decisions were made at the top. In part this may have been a response to a government that in fact looks far more blatant, even crass, in its grasping after revenue than Northern Sung regimes had been. When Paul Smith tells us that Southern Sung central administrators "perpetuated in however attenuated a form the basic statist policies of the Northern Sung," it is chiefly to this revenue-hungry, frankly extractive approach to matters local and commercial that he refers. But the approach itself was a function of weakness. A state that could not draw the large and reliable volume of land taxes from the southern circuits that the Northern Sung had taken for granted, yet was pressed by sometimes aggressive neighbors and always hungry soldiers at the northern border, reached to take what it could. Southern Sung men saw the reach, if they did not always see (or chose not to talk about) the weakness. But common assumptions as to how long the reach should be, and more important, how much the state—especially the center—should be doing in a positive way, had in any case fundamentally changed.

As before, we see the change of assumptions most clearly when we look at men who in other particulars stand apart from what was becoming a new consensus. A special interest in central institutions and their workings distinguishes a number of Southern Sung political thinkers (sometimes referred to as a group as "institutionalists" or "utilitarians"—the latter name in particular fits some of them better than others) and sets them in some degree apart from a developing discourse more and more dominated by the so-called Learning of the Way, Tao-hsueh . Some are as yet too little studied for us to say much about them: Lü Tsu-ch'ien (1137-1181), a man who

[27] See Hartwell, "Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550," pp. 397-98.

had one foot in each camp (if camps they were), and Ch'en Fu-liang (1137-1203), a fascinating institutional thinker with a particular interest in military history, cry out for systematic inquiry. Two others, on whom we are fortunate to have significant scholarly work, are Ch'en Liang (1143-1194) and Yeh Shih (1150-1223).

Ch'en Liang, as Hoyt Tillman has made clear in a large body of important work, did indeed come to stand apart from the increasingly influential Tao-hsueh movement after an early commitment to it. His de-emphasis of personal moral cultivation as a means to social and political improvement, his especial indifference to the issue of the moral standing of the emperor, his avowed interest in things pragmatic and a willingness to judge a course of action by its results rather than by its means, distinguish him as clearly as his interest in law and central institutions. Yet as Tillman has convincingly shown, Ch'en stands even further from the centralizers of Northern Sung. In his specific discussions of institutions he appears always as a decentralizer. In an essay not included in this volume Tillman shows that in discussing laws Ch'en was prepared to argue that the Sung had, already, too many.^[28] The case is if anything clearer with Yeh Shih. Winston Lo has shown that Yeh's proposals for revamping Southern Sung institutions called for a vast cutting back of government and the decentralizing of authority, out of which would quickly spring a society far healthier for being left alone.^[29] There are echoes of Ssu-ma Kuang in both Ch'en and Yeh, to be sure. But what in Ssu-ma is a confidence in the workings of a central government that is strong but understands the limits of its power has become in Yeh a positive aversion to strong central government in itself.

If Southern Sung political thinking had lost (taking von Glahn's words again) "faith in state activism," what if anything had taken its place? Outside the political sphere as such, certainly, a turn toward individual moral and spiritual cultivation. Wm. Theodore de Bary was the first to suggest, in a seminal article now more than three decades old, that it was a move away from the political reformism characteristic of Northern Sung that led Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucians of Southern Sung "back to . . . the problems of human nature, personal cultivation, and man's place in the universe."^[30] Chang Hao, in a paper not in this volume but presented at the conference that led to it, has elaborated fruitfully on the notion of the "inward turn" in this period. Michael Freeman has argued in an important dissertation that the metaphysical side of Southern Sung Neo-Confucianism has its Northern Sung origin precisely in the period of Lo-yang exile of Wang An-shih's anti-reform opponents, when Ssu-ma Kuang, Ch'eng I, and others began in the

[28] "Ch'en Liang on the Public Interest and Its Relation to Laws." Unpublished manuscript, 1990.

[29] Winston Wan Lo, The Life and Thought of Yeh Shih , pp. 59-68.

[30] de Bary, "A Reappraisal," p. 105.

absence of meaningful political action to take an interest they had not formerly shown in the speculations of Shao Yung and Chang Tsai.^[31]

But an "inward turn," however real in part, is far from the whole story. A crucial outcome of the processes of rethinking whose origins Freeman traces was a strong emphasis on the linkage between inner and outer worlds found in the Great Learning , where investigating things, perfecting the self, and bringing peace to the world are seen as parts of a single process. If this implied that reforming the world started with the self, it also meant—when taken seriously—that self-cultivation was never its own end. For many it never precluded an interest in institutions. On the contrary, as de Bary has pointed out, there is a strongly institutional side to the Southern Sung Tao-hsueh movement, particularly as represented by its leading figure, Chu Hsi.^[32] Von Glahn's study of the community granary is an important contribution to this side of the picture. Von Glahn suggests provocatively that Chu Hsi shared with his seeming opposite Wang An-shih a commitment to "classical analogism," which held that "internalization of the classical ethos of moral cultivation [and not necessarily replication of the specific forms of classical institutions—eds.] would provide the inspiration for political activism." As von Glahn points out, this view freed political and institutional action from the confines of the actual experience of the recent historical past, and "envisioned the creation of new institutions infused with the spirit of antiquity exemplified in the Rituals of Chou " (emphasis ours).

The stress on institutional innovation here is particularly apt. As Hymes has argued elsewhere,^[33] the community granary was only one of three institutions, new in Southern Sung, that then and afterward were closely associated with the name and influence of Chu Hsi. The other two were the private local academy (shu-yuan ) and the community compact (hsiang-yueh ). None was properly Chu Hsi's invention, but he worked to promote all three. All had crucial points in common. First, each was at bottom a substitute or replacement, of a local and voluntary kind, for a major state institution promoted from the center under the reforming regimes of Northern

[31] Michael Freeman, "Lo-yang and the Opposition to Wang An-shih: The Rise of Confucian Conservatism," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974. This introduction was written before we were able to take account of the important new work on Shao Yung by Anne D. Birdwhistell; see Transition to Neo-Confucianism: Shao Yung on Knowledge and Symbols of Reality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

[32] Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 32-33.

[33] Robert Hymes, "Lu Chiu-yuan, Academies, and the Problem of the Local Community," in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 432-56. See also Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 132-35. Our present discussion partly recapitulates the discussion of the same issue in these two settings.

Sung, that of Wang An-shih in particular. Thus the local academy, a private school with associated ritual center, was a direct and often explicit alternative to the county and prefectural government schools first established under Fan Chung-yen, expanded under Wang An-shih, and made the central channel for official recruitment at the height of reformist power in the last decades of Northern Sung. The community granary, as von Glahn shows here, reproduced in essentials the method of Wang's vast national Green Sprouts farm-loan program, but on a voluntary and strictly local basis and under the private leadership and guidance of (Chu hoped) local gentlemen of a charitable bent. And the community compact, to our eye, is a transformation of the pao-chia system of mutual surveillance and policing that Wang imposed on localities from the center and that still survived in varying forms in Chu's own time.

This last point deserves more comment. In Chu Hsi's own time, indeed so far as one can tell throughout Sung, the community compact was not put into practice widely, if at all. Yet Chu's plan for it must be taken seriously as part of the larger program of community reformation he envisioned. The compact was to be an association contracted voluntarily among members of an existing community. (Yueh may be translated as "contract" as easily as "compact"; and if the growth of contractual economic relations in Europe is to be taken as background to notions of "social contract" there, we should probably see this "community contract" of Sung China similarly against the background of expanding commercialization and mercantile relationships in its own time.) Through systematic and regular mutual exhortation and observation, common ritual, and organized charity, supported by written registers of membership and the recording of good and bad deeds, a moral and social order reminiscent of the classics but missing in Chu's own time was to be achieved.

Monika Übelhör has done extensive research on the compact,^[34] and she contributed a paper, not included here, to the conference from which this volume grows. We owe such understanding as we have reached of the compact to our reading of her work. For Übelhör, the compact is partly, perhaps especially, a response to the challenge posed in Chu's time by lay Buddhist community and charitable organizations: Chu set out to provide, on a model first established by Lü Ta-chün (1031-1082), a specifically Confucian form of community organization. We agree that this may have been one motive. In view especially of Miriam Levering's work on the social contacts and intellectual interaction between Buddhists such as Ta-hui and students of the Ch'eng brothers in early Southern Sung (Chu Hsi's own father's friends were in fact participants in these circles), Chu's awareness

[34] See Monika Übelhör, "The Community Compact of the Sung," in Neo-Confucian Education , ed. de Bary and Chaffee, part 4.

of Buddhism as an abiding and challenging alternative to the emerging Tao-hsueh should certainly not be underestimated.^[35] Yet the time of origin of the model from which Chu worked, the original plan of Lü Ta-chün, drawn up probably in the 1070s, powerfully suggests another motive. For it was just at that time that Wang An-shih's pao-chia system was being instituted. Lü belonged to the faction of Wang's opponents. Surely he had intended, in laying out a voluntary, contractual, and, as it were, bottom-up scheme for community ordering and mutual monitoring within natural social groupings, to offer an alternative to the thoroughly top-down plan of state-defined, artificial, and decimal self-policing units that Wang proposed. Such units, again, were still a reality in Chu Hsi's own time. They, and the notions of state-imposed order they represented, must have formed—perhaps even more saliently than Buddhist community organizations—the context for Chu's own revision of Lü's plan.

On another point Übelhör offers crucial data. Chu took over Lü's plan, but he changed it. Most notably, as Übelhör points out, he paid far more attention than Lü to differentiating status and position within the compact, particularly to defining and in some degree celebrating the status and position of officeholders or gentlemen (shih-ta-fu ) in relation to other members. Lü had little or nothing to say of this. It is plausible to read this to mean that Lü did not assume that such men would be members of the compact, or at least that they would be much present at its gatherings. Chu Hsi, in contrast, living in a period when elites were in fact more and more acting within and as members of local communities, intended explicitly to encourage their participation and in fact to define them as central to the working of the compact. It was because they would be there, and should be there, that their position must be clearly defined; and to define it as distinctly superior, as Chu did, served to bring them to the fore as the proper leaders and reformers of a morally reinvigorated community.

Chu Hsi, then, sought in promoting these new institutions not only to provide voluntary and locally based equivalents for the reform institutions of Wang An-shih and his ilk, but also to supply a role and sphere of action for gentlemen within a local community and apart from the state. He set out to define a "middle level" for social and political action, a level lying

[35] See Miriam L. Levering, "Ta Hui and Lay Buddhists: Chan Sermons on Death," in Buddhist and Taoist Practices in Medieval Chinese Society: Buddhist and Taoist Studies II , ed. David W. Chappell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 181-207; and the same author's "Ch'an Enlightenment for Laymen: Ta-Hui and the New Religious Culture of the Sung," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1978. Ari Borrell, a graduate student at Columbia University, is currently writing his dissertation on the circle of early Southern Sung Neo-Confucians who had contact with Ta-hui or otherwise showed interest in Ch'an; conversations with him and a reading of his previous work have strengthened our awareness of the importance of Buddhism in the early phases of the Tao-hsueh movement.

between family on the one hand and state on the other.^[36] He also set out to define the local gentleman of cultivation and goodwill, who might or might not be an officeholder too, as a proper and legitimate leader at that level—often, to be sure, in cooperation with the local administrator, but still in contradistinction to any central bureaucrat who might, like Wang An-shih of old, try to impose his will or his ruler's on local communities.

The institutions Chu promoted had varying fates.^[37] But it is clear that he and the followers who picked up his institutional commitment did not act in a vacuum. In fact they acted to systematize, to shape, perhaps to domesticate, an impulse that was alive in society all about them. Southern Sung was a time when new local institutions, some voluntary, some state-sponsored, some a mixture, sprang up in great numbers. Linda Walton deals here with one category: estates founded for charitable purposes, whether for descent groups (tsu , "lineages") or for larger or vaguer commonalities. As she shows, the distinction between the two is made to appear less sharp in the documents that record their founding than one might expect. The founders of lineage estates or of community estates alike could be praised for their unselfishness in extending charity or "duty" (i ) beyond the bounds of their immediate families (chia ).

One may suspect that this is rhetorical strategy. Surely devotion to a

[36] The notion of such a "middle level" in Chu's view of society is supported as well by Chu's systematization of classical rituals in his I-li ching-chuan t'ung-chieh . The seventeen sections of the canonical ritual compendium, the I-li , were arranged in an order apparently based on the successive stages of a gentleman's life. In his work Chu retained this traditional order, but reinterpreted its basis by dividing the work into larger sections corresponding not to stages of life but to levels in a hierarchy of social groups. At the lowest level of the hierarchy was "family ritual" (chia-li ); higher up lay "ritual of countries and kingdoms" (pang-kuo li ); and between these two was "community ritual" (hsiang-li ).

[37] Von Glahn shows the vicissitudes of the community granary and its rapid divergence from Chu's intentions. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that many such granaries, however various their fidelity to the original plan, were founded throughout Sung, and that the Ming-Ch'ing institution of the same name is in some meaningful sense their institutional descendant. The community compact plan, again, was apparently never applied in Sung, though it too was taken up in rather different form by later dynasties. The local academy "movement," well under way before Chu lent it his abundant support, prospered throughout Southern Sung. In Yuan the academy, like the compact and granary in Ming and Ch'ing, became to a great extent a state institution, though waves of private academy foundings were to recur in Ming and Ch'ing. On Sung and Yuan academies, see inter alia John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning , pp. 76-99; Thomas H. C. Lee, Government Education and Examinations in Sung China , pp. 26-28, and "Chu Hsi, Academies, and the Tradition of Private Chiang-hsueh ," in Chinese Studies 2, no. 1 (1984): 301-29; Linda Walton, "Education, Social Change, and Neo-Confucianism in Sung-Yuan China: Academies and the Local Elite in Ming Prefecture (Ningpo)" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978); and Terada Go, Sodai kyoikushi kaisetsu (Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1965), pp. 6-14, 31-33, 265-71, 306-10, 313-17, and 322-23. On Ming academies, see John Meskill, Academies in Ming China: An Historical Essay (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982).

lineage organization was really more often than not grounded in different interests than was action on behalf of a non-kin community or a voluntary association. But even so the rhetoric itself shows the currency of a certain attitude. If institutional action for kin is rhetorically assimilated to institutional action for local community—if private beneficence is assimilated to public charity, in our terms—it must be because the idea of institutional action for local community has power and meaning for the audience of the rhetoric; perhaps more power and meaning even, in public and explicit discourse at least, than the idea of action for kin. Most notable of all in Walton's material is the use of classical analogies, to the well-field system in particular, to ground and justify charitable estates, again whether for lineages or for larger communities. The well-fields, men argued, had done certain things for the people; they could not, of course, now be restored as such, for times had changed (declined, in most such arguments); but institutions of a new kind could, on a smaller and weaker scale to be sure, play a like part today. Wei Liao-weng, treated by James Liu in chapter 9 here, frames a similar argument. On the one hand, such arguments are always partly an admission of the failure of modern men when compared with the sages of old. On the other hand, something large and striking is being claimed nonetheless: that the new institutions truly are or can be to their times what the well-fields had been to theirs; perhaps even that there are sages about again, however limited the scope of action that the times will allow them. More broadly, Walton's records are claiming that founding an estate to provide aid for one's lineage or one's community is an act akin to governing : that it is, if not "statecraft," at least (classical) statecraft's (modern) analogue.

Again, the claim may be largely rhetorical. But its evident attractiveness as rhetoric shows the contemporary power of a line of thought broadly akin to Chu Hsi's "classical analogism," or more broadly the continuing power of a notion that the gentleman ought to act for the world and for the empire: ought, in fact, to do at least something like governing. And this something-like-governing could and should be done, as Chu Hsi and others would have it, partly through new, voluntary institutions of local community. In most of this section we have been trying to show that notions of political action, of the relation of state and society, changed deeply from Northern to Southern Sung. But the argument we have just framed suggests important continuity. The continuity is captured in part by von Glahn's notion of "classical analogism"' as something that united Chu Hsi with Wang An-shih. Despite a real pessimism about state action, and indeed about the capacity of any action to effect change quickly or on a large scale, the idea that institutional innovation could not only improve society but transform it, make it moral, restore a wholeness equivalent to

the wholeness of classical society, was very much alive in Southern Sung. Chu Hsi and his followers were its particular advocates.

In other ways too one can find traces of continuity or recurrence. In the first place, it is too simple to treat Chu Hsi as simply transferring Wang An-shih's reformism downward to the local and voluntary level. For Chu the institutions he promoted there were building blocks toward a larger order. The "middle level" (our term, not his) was just that: a level between family and state, neither of which lost legitimacy by the addition of a third. While Chu's institutions of local community do seem designed to clear a space free from infringement either by the too private interests of the family or by an overweening center, at times we see what seem conflicting impulses. Thus, as von Glahn shows, Chu first set out to have the community-granary system made uniform law for the whole empire by imperial decree. Such examples raise the question whether Chu's schemes for the local level were things taken up by default, for lack of access to central power. Had Chu Hsi gained high position at court, would he have acted like Wang An-shih? Is community-based institutional innovation merely a poor substitute, dictated by the times and by his own position, for something much larger?

There is certainly something to the idea that as a matter of sheer practicality in the Southern Sung, local-level action—whether as administrator or as indigenous gentleman—was the chief resort available to men like Chu Hsi for long periods of their careers. It was also, as we have just seen, an arena where much was already going on: to some degree Chu Hsi and others were responding to developments independent of them, systematizing or domesticating as much as initiating. Yet it is difficult to picture Chu Hsi, like Wang, drafting and implementing a vast system of reforms from the center, even if his luck had been different. One cannot forget Chu's own explicit declarations that the government of the Sung was far too centralized, indeed (on this see chapter 4 in this volume) had been so from the beginning: that the supposed lessons of the disintegrative decentralization of T'ang had from the start been learned far too thoroughly by Sung emperors. In his articulation of anticentralism Chu went beyond even Ch'en Liang, certainly far beyond Ssu-ma Kuang, for whom the founding emperors had achieved precisely the proper balance, which had only to be restored.

If all this is true, it is clear nonetheless that the central importance of the emperor and his acts is never far from the minds of Chu Hsi and some of his most influential followers.^[38] The emperor is important, however, not so much for his position in a structure of institutions as for his influence as

[38] For example, Chen Te-hsiu, who continued and built upon the Northern Sung "Learning of the Emperor." See Wm. Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 91-98.

moral leader. Although Chu's memorials addressing the emperor directly do deal in a meaningful way both with issues of personnel and recruitment and with the need to open up the channels of official communication (compare Wei Liao-weng, below), their strongest message, still, is of the emperor's need to rectify himself and of his capacity, by so doing, to transform those around him and below him.^[39] The language of moral cultivation and self-perfection applied itself easily to the problem of what to do about the emperor, and of what the emperor should do. Missing here is any extended confrontation with the problem of central institutions , or with central politics as other than chiefly a personal and individual moral problem.^[40] There was nothing logically necessary about this omission: personal and individual moral cultivation was central to Chu's notions of what went on and should go on in the local community as well, but at this level self-cultivation could become a natural basis (to Chu's eyes) for institutional action and even institutional creation; or institutions could become the very means of moral cultivation itself, as in the community compact. If we cannot expect a strong impulse toward institutional creation at the center from a Southern Sung man—if indeed such a notion, in the political climate of the time and whatever the inclinations of the particular thinker, simply would not "fly"—still one might expect some more circumstantial approach to central institutions as they were. If the late-Ming and Ch'ing (and modern!) stereotype of "Sung learning" was that it substituted moral idealism for politics in the gentlemanly scheme of things, and so in effect simply fled the political stage, the stereotype clearly originates—and has some foundation—here.^[41]

But if this gap is present in Chu Hsi's social thinking and the thinking of many of his followers, we would argue it was not a gap whose filling was prevented by Neo-Confucian ideology and discourse themselves. In fact we find evidence in the chapters in this volume that men who regarded themselves as devoted members of the Tao-hsueh movement had begun, in the later decades of Southern Sung, to return in a serious way to the problem of the center, of its institutions and politics. The return may have been part of a more general redirection of attention toward matters of practical administration, of whatever level. This is suggested by the detailed material on

[39] On these memorials, see Conrad Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Career: A Study in Ambivalence," in Confucian Personalities , ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 162-88; Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Thought," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5 (1978): 127-48; and David S. Nivison, "Introduction," in Confucianism in Action , ed. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). Lu Chiu-yuan went even further than Chu, asking the emperor to stay out of governing altogether and concentrate on cultivation and moral exemplarhood.

[40] An exception perhaps are the interesting remarks Chu had to make on the problem of factions; we will return to these.

[41] Our own view is rather that it played some part in building a new political "stage," at the local level.

local administration appended to Chen Te-hsiu's Classic on Governance (Cheng ching ), probably in his students' generation, and dealt with by de Bary in chapter 10.^[42] The inclusion was no fluke; de Bary shows that Chen was intensely interested in problems of law. Chen turned his attention toward the center as well, focusing like Chu Hsi chiefly on the personal and moral aspects of the emperor's task but, as de Bary shows, in considerably more specific and systematic terms. But for attention to the problem of central politics specifically we may look especially to Li Hsin-ch'uan (1167-1224), examined here by John Chaffee, and to Wei Liao-weng (1178-1237), subject of chapter 9, by James T. C. Liu.

Li Hsin-ch'uan stands out first of all for his fascination with institutions as such, and his apparent conviction that this fascination was in no way incompatible with a commitment, both intellectual and political, to Tao-hsueh . The institutions with whose history (largely recent, and this in itself is striking) he deals are chiefly central and provincial, much less often local, and as Chaffee points out, virtually never private. The political meaning, if any, of this concentration is somewhat obscured by the general absence (or at best extreme subtlety) of a prescriptive stance in Li's general historical work. Still it is interesting to learn from Chaffee of Li's strong interest in how documents moved through the bureaucracy to the center, and of his approval of the older system of mandatory rotational attendance at court audience by all officials in the capital—concerns that foreshadow the proposals of Wei Liao-weng below. Quite apart from treatments of specific institutions, Li's work on the history of Tao-hsueh , as Chaffee shows, explicitly affirms the importance of control of the political center for the fate of a politico-intellectual movement and so points back toward bureaucratic politics as a crucial sphere of Neo-Confucian endeavor.

But it is Wei Liao-weng who gets specific about how things must be done. Liu outlines the extensive list of reforms of court procedures and bureaucratic relations that Wei spoke out for in about 1233, after the death of the long-reigning chief councillor Shih Mi-yuan. Wei urged, among other things, the restoration of the independent but coordinated roles, as proposers, drafters, and reviewers of legislation, of the Chancellery, Secretariat, and Review Bureau at the top of the government; the revival of the independent reporting channel of the Bureau of Military Affairs; a return to older practices in the drafting of edicts and decrees independent from the supervision of the chief councillor; the revival of daily audiences and of regular rotating attendance at them by all capital officials; and the restoration of the right to memorialize the emperor to as wide a circle of officials as possible, extending even to mere students at the Imperial University.

[42] See also Ron-guey Chu, "Chen Te-hsiu and the Classic on Governance: The Coming of Age of Neo-Confucian Statecraft," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1988.

Two things are striking about this list. First, we must grant, is its seeming unoriginality. Wei is reaching back a great distance: the echoes of Ssu-ma Kuang in particular are strong. But as striking to an eye that knows something of the history of Sung politics is the thorough practicality of the list. Wei is concerned to prevent the stranglehold of bureaucratic authority wielded by strong chief ministers like Shih Mi-yuan in Southern Sung, and anxious to assure a voice for his faction in the deliberations of the realm. Lines and procedures of communication with the emperor earn his special attention. Now moderns may tend to read proposals for more frequent and more regularly scheduled audiences, or for the multiplication of opportunities to memorialize, with a dubious eye: what can this have to do with real politics? But Carl Olsson, in his important dissertation on the early reigns of Sung, has shown precisely how crucial the reduction of audiences and the narrowing of channels for memorials were for the first seizure of power by high ministers at the expense of the emperor and of other factions in the reign of Chen-tsung.^[43] Similarly, Silas Wu, Beatrice Bartlett, and others have shown the crucial importance of the memorial system for imperial power in the Ch'ing.^[44] Wei favored a relative expansion of imperial authority—relative, that is, to the dictatorship of Shih Mi-yuan of the preceding quarter century—because men of his own ilk had often suffered under dictatorial chief ministers. Imperial authority was proposed as a counterpoise to ministerial authority, and in defense of the authority of the bureaucracy and educated class at large to speak on public matters and be heard. Wei's proposals were no hot air: they went to the heart of the problems of imperial and bureaucratic power in Sung. Their unoriginality is balanced by their salience. In their own time they were a provocative and direct challenge to the ways things were in fact currently organized.

Taken together with Li's history of the movement, Wei's proposals suggest a new readiness of men of conscious Tao-hsueh affiliations in the thirteenth century to confront once again issues of central power and the institutionalized forms of central politics. To be sure, in doing so, Wei for one reached back to concerns and arguments like those of Ssu-ma Kuang, arguments framed at a time when it was assumed that how to use central power was the issue. But the point is that, at the very least, nothing in the content of Tao-hsueh as Wei saw it kept him from doing so. Indeed his memorial treated, though in far greater detail, the same issues of avenues of communication that Chu Hsi had raised in his own memorials. To renounce the

[43] Carl F. Olsson, "The Structure of Power under the Third Emperor of Sung China: The Shifting Balance after the Peace of Shan-yuan" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1974).

[44] Silas Wu, Communication and Imperial Control in China: Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693-1735 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Beatrice Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

institutional expansionism of the Northern Sung center and to bring personal cultivation to the fore (as Wei, though not Li, did) need not mean to lose the capacity to think and talk about central politics and central institutions.

If men in the thirteenth century could reach back to Ssu-ma Kuang for approaches to central government, and if what von Glahn calls "classical analogism" allies Chu Hsi's social thinking with Wang An-shih's, these are strands of continuity that cross the boundary between Northern and Southern Sung, a boundary we have argued is in other ways a watershed. We do not retreat from this view of the boundary. Nothing we have said detracts from the argument that notions of the state's proper relation to the larger society had changed fundamentally. It seems certain too (as both Bol and von Glahn argue here and as Hymes has suggested elsewhere) that the change in political and social notions is related to the change in practical elite strategies that Hartwell and Hymes have traced: that rejection of centralist activism makes sense for an elite that has reoriented itself away from high official service and toward local status-seeking, and that Neo-Confucian interest in new local institutions is in part a response to this elite localism and an attempt to channel it in morally acceptable directions. Much remains to be done in tracing these sorts of relations, their direction, and their timing. In the section that follows, however, we move again toward continuities. We argue that not only individual strands of ideas, but a strategic pair of contending views, crosses the boundary between Northern Sung and Southern Sung and recurs in Southern Sung social-political argument in new contexts and new guise. The argument between Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang, we suggest, did not end with the fall of North China.