Ordering the World

Preferred Citation: Hymes, Robert P., and Conrad Schirokauer, editors Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1000031p/

Ordering the World

Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China

Edited by Robert P. Hymes
and
Conrad Schirokauer

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

© 1993 The Regents of the University of California

for Debora and Lore
and to the memory of E. A. Kracke

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Acknowledgments

This book grows out of the conference on Sung Dynasty Statecraft in Thought and Action, held at Scottsdale, Arizona in January 1986, with funds provided by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Thanks are owing to Jason Parker, Executive Associate of the Council, for his aid and advice in the planning of the conference and for his active and very helpful participation at Scottsdale. We owe thanks also to Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Tu Wei-ming, who as successive chairs of the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council gave us important guidance and feedback on our proposal and on our later planning.

Wm. Theodore de Bary, whose contribution to the conference is represented in this volume, and John Langlois, not present at the conference, were prime movers in putting forward the idea of a series of conferences on Chinese statecraft. The idea was further elaborated at a planning meeting held at Columbia University in October 1981, also under the sponsorship of the Council of Learned Societies. As yet ours has been the only statecraft conference to grow out of this planning process; we hope there will be others. Many others who did not participate in the conference aided us in planning it, in particular Hok-lam Chan, Herbert Franke, Klaus Flessel, Mira Mihelich, and Charles Peterson.

Our conference was a large one, and it was obvious from the start that of the many excellent papers presented there not all could possibly find their way into a single volume. Our deep appreciation goes to the participants whose work we would wish to have included but could not: Hao Chang, Peter Golas, Chün-chieh Huang, Thomas Lee, Winston Lo, Michael McGrath, Hoyt Tillman, Monika Übelhör, and Allan Wood. All, through their contributions at the conference and afterward, have affected in impor-

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tant ways the content of the volume. William Atwell gave us crucial help and insight as intellectual envoy from the world of the Ming and Ch'ing. In him and in our ambassador from points west, John Pocock, we had discussants of extraordinary quality, who made us think at every moment about the foundations and implications of our thoughts and claims. The conference could not have proceeded as smoothly as it did without Marie Guarino, who performed the demanding and exhausting role of sole rapporteur with unfailing intelligence, efficiency, and good cheer. In the preparation of the volume Francine Ovios, systems analyst and programmer at the Center for Computing Activities at Columbia University, provided services well beyond the call of duty without compensation and without complaint. We are in her debt. For extremely helpful readings of earlier versions of the manuscript we thank Patricia Ebrey and another, anonymous reader. Our debt to Robert Hartwell in our introduction is obvious.

Finally, we offer thanks to the management and employees of the Hungarian Pastry Shop at 1030 Amsterdam Avenue, whose patient hospitality and excellent hot chocolate (which we nursed far longer than was really fair) carried us through hours, days, weeks, and months of productive talk, excited argument, and extraordinarily harmonious editing and writing.

CS
RPH

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Contributors

Peter K. Bol is professor of Chinese history at Harvard University. His recent publications include "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China .

John W. Chaffee is associate professor and chairperson of history at Binghamton University, the State University of New York. He is the author of The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations and coeditor with Wm. Theodore de Bary of Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Period . His current research focuses on the history of the Sung imperial clan.

Wm. Theodore de Bary is the John Mitchell Mason Professor and Provost Emeritus of Columbia University. His more recent books are The Trouble with Confucianism and Learning for One's Self .

George Hatch is associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. His interests include Sung literati and Chinese historical thought.

Robert P. Hymes is professor of Chinese history at Columbia University. He is the author of Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung and is currently completing a book on Taoist saints' cults.

James T. C. Liu is professor of East Asian studies and history, emeritus, at Princeton University. A founding figure in the study of Sung history in this country, he is the author of numerous articles and books, including biographies of Wang An-shih and Ou-yang Hsiu and, more recently, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (1988).

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Conrad Schirokauer accepted early retirement from the City College of the City University of New York (1991) to concentrate on research in Sung intellectual history. He is the author of articles on Chu Hsi and Hu Hung as well as of a textbook.

Paul J. Smith , a student of Sung and Yuan social and economic history, is associate professor of history at Haverford College. He is the author of Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224 (1991).

Richard von Glahn is associate professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times and is currently undertaking research on political culture and popular politics in Ming China.

Linda Walton is associate professor of history at Portland State University, Oregon. She has published articles and book chapters on Sung social and intellectual history and is currently completing a book manuscript on academies and society in the Southern Sung.

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Introduction

Conrad Schirokauer and Robert P. Hymes

It is precisely for the sake of duty (i) and public-spiritedness (kung) that we are engaged in putting the world in order (ching-shih). . . . Even when Confucians reach to where there is neither sound nor smell, neither place nor form, they always give priority to putting the world in order.
Lu chiu-Yuan^[1]

In the Sung dynasty (960-1278) the Chinese state faced challenges that in their combination and intensity were without clear precedent. Inside China, massive population growth and a swiftly growing private commercial economy threatened to outstrip, and in the long run would outstrip, the administrative and extractive capacities of both inherited and newly improvised institutions. Outside, a succession of powerful new non-Chinese states grew up on the northern and western borders, posing a threat of war and loss of territory that haunted the dynasty from its founding till its final conquest by the last state in the series, the Mongol Yuan. The threat, and the need to maintain huge standing armies against it, vastly aggravated a need for revenue that made it crucial to come to terms with the changes at home. These changes themselves, however, presented not only problems but opportunities. New sources of revenue offered themselves. New wealth and more accessible education bred a larger and confident elite. Intellectual life took on new energy, and new political visions became available.

For the problems and the opportunities confronted not only the state itself, but any among the educated elite who tried to deal in thought, writing, or action with questions of government and politics and their relation to society, who tried to understand or to influence what government was and what it should or could do in and to the world around it. This is the subject of our volume: How, in a time of marked and often threatening change,

[1] From Lu's first letter to Wang Shun-po. Lu Chiu-yuan, Lu Chiu-yuan chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1980), p. 17. Our translation is adapted from Wing-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 567. Lu Chiu-yuan is here drawing a sharp distinction between Confucians and Buddhists, who he believes are motivated by profit and selfishness in their withdrawal from the world. The second clause alludes to Ode 235 of the Classic of Poetry and the "Appended Remarks" of the Book of Changes .

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Sung statesmen and thinkers saw the relation of state and society—or, more broadly, how they saw the place in society of organized political action and institutions, even when these fell outside the state. The chapters in this volume differ in approach and topic, but all bear on this central problem. This volume joins with other recent work in the field to show, we think, that Sung men's views on the state and its proper place changed dramatically over time. We will argue further that an issue that was to occupy statesmen and political thinkers centuries later under the Ch'ing dynasty, the problem of a distinct "public space" lying between the state and the private or familial sphere, was perhaps first confronted in articulate Chinese political discourse in the latter half of the Sung. The project that led to this volume began by seeking Sung ideas of "statecraft," a term which, when used to translate the Chinese ching-shih , has a distinct significance in the history of later Chinese political thought. For reasons that will emerge, we have moved away from the term; but we do maintain that Sung connections or parallels to the later discourse are there.

Our concern lies where political or institutional history meets intellectual history. But although we and our contributors are variously intellectual, institutional, or social historians, our emphasis in this setting is, in a broad sense at least, intellectual. These studies aim, not at institutions for their own sake, though some do treat institutions; not even at social and political change in themselves, though almost all take these into account; but at how institutions were seen, imagined, or occasionally invented; at how social and political change were interpreted, blamed, welcomed, reacted against, and sometimes planned for. The question of the relation of state and society is central for us because we believe that it was, in one guise or another, central for the men of Sung. They themselves thought and argued about it, though in vocabularies and within frameworks that differed strongly not only from our own but at times from each other's.

We began by suggesting directions and kinds of social and political change within which the Sung state and its advocates or critics had to find their way. It is worth dealing with these more fully: they are important background for all that follows. Work in the social and economic history of China suggests three major processes of change (not all, as yet, of equal certainty) that the state and political actors would have had to confront. Longest in time of the three is an apparent secular decline in the power of the Chinese state stretching across a millennium. G. William Skinner argued some years ago that the state grew progressively, though not necessarily steadily, weaker in China from roughly the T'ang (618-906) through the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911). While the population grew about tenfold across this stretch of time, Skinner pointed out, both the number of administrative centers from which the state directly governed and the size of the bureaucracy itself grew little or not at all. That essentially the same appa-

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ratus could not control four hundred million as closely as it once controlled fifty million seems an inescapable conclusion. The argument is not uncontroversial, but it is plausible on its face, and empirical support is not lacking. Skinner's chronology would lead one to expect that the Sung might represent an important segment of the curve of decline. We will argue that something like this is true, though for reasons at least partly distinct from Skinner's: that the failure of the state to grow reflects in part a social decision, or social contract, first negotiated in the Sung.^[2]

The second process of change is the economic and social transformation of China that has been called the "T'ang-Sung transition," but which must be seen as extending, perhaps even more dramatically, well into the Sung itself. Its broad outlines are clear. The development of new staple and commercial crops such as rice and tea; a vast increase in population, particularly in the rice-growing south, reversing the old demographic and economic dominance of the north and promoting the growth of cities; the collapse of the old T'ang system of government markets under the weight of rapidly increasing trade, which generated new markets in city and countryside alike and extended the reach of the commercial and monetary economy and of contractual relations into the daily life of the peasantry; an extraordinary expansion in the use, and the supply, of money itself, which came to include government-issued paper currency for the first time in world history—all of this was shown some years ago by Japanese scholars in particular. Technological progress spawned vast new industries in iron and steel and in porcelain, as well as the three inventions of world-historical import that are well known from the period: gunpowder, used extensively in war by middle Sung; the mariner's compass, which helped to support the vast South Sea trade of the period; and printing. The last gave new opportunities for education, which, now that it was easier to grow rich through trade or commercial agriculture, expanded the educated and office-seeking, largely wealthy elite who found their way into the system of civil service examinations, new in the Sui and T'ang and greatly expanded in the Sung. Within this group, as time went on, southerners came to predominate in a way unprecedented in Chinese history. The pace and content of Chinese daily life had been transformed.

Finally, recent work has argued for a third process of change, shorter in span and more specific to the Sung. Historians divide the Sung into two periods, lying on either side of a major political and territorial change. From the late tenth century to the 1120s, during what we now call the Northern Sung, Sung governed almost all of China proper. The Liao state of the Khitan people controlled only a strip of sixteen prefectures at the

[2] G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 23-26.

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northern edge of what had traditionally been Chinese territory. The Sung capital was K'ai-feng, lying on the north China plain. But in 1126 a successor state to the Liao, the Chin, founded by the Jurchen people of what is now Manchuria, drove down on the Sung from the north and seized the capital. In the years that immediately followed, the Chin was able to consolidate its control of North China, and the Sung state was forced into a southern territory only two-thirds of its former extent, with its capital at Hang-chou. This situation continued to 1278, when a third Northern people, the Mongols, conquered Sung and reunited China under their Yuan dynasty. The period of constricted territory is called by historians Southern Sung.

The territorial shift, it seems, meant a social shift as well. Robert Hart-well and one of us elaborating on Hartwell's lead have argued that the elite of Southern Sung both acted and saw itself very differently from the elite of Northern Sung. In marriage, in patterns of residence, and in other ways the Northern Sung elite concentrated whenever possible on acting upon a national stage, on achieving high office, on living the role of the elite of a nation, an empire. The Southern Sung elite, by contrast, seems to have retrenched itself in its home localities, to have married locally, lived locally, and in many ways (though by no means all) thought and acted locally. Office, particularly high court or capital office, did not hold the central place in elite strategies and self-conceptions it had held in Northern Sung. Like Skinner's proposal on the Chinese state, this picture of the transformation of the Sung elite needs further demonstration and elaboration. In particular, Hartwell's suggestion that the change was permanent—that its effects can be recognized in the nature of the elites of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties—remains to be explored. But a basis is here on which we can build in exploring the political and social thinking of Sung.^[3] In turn, our explorations may help to round out the picture of the social transformation.

Connections to and confrontations with all three of these major processes of social and political change can be found in Sung approaches to state and society. Most especially, the idea of a discontinuity between Northern and Southern Sung, and the specific characterizations of that discontinuity in work done so far on social history, prove extremely fruitful for politico-intellectual history as well. In their notions of the proper place of the state, we will argue, Northern and Southern Sung men lived almost in different worlds. Yet we will argue too for a major continuity: that certain oppositions, certain fundamental disagreements about how to define the goals of political action, cross the Northern-Southern Sung boundary and recur in

[3] Robert Hartwell, "Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42 (1982): 365-442. Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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new contexts and in new language. To argue these points will be a major burden of this introduction.

In what follows, then, we introduce the chapters in the volume by framing a set of arguments of our own, arguments very much influenced not only by the chapters themselves but by long discussion and debate with their authors. On certain points and with certain authors we may—we do—use their work in ways that they would not; the reader will see this in proceeding to the chapters themselves. All the authors represented here agree, we think, that their studies are interrelated in numerous ways; each would probably organize the relationships at least partly differently than we have done here. We think this potential diversity, clearly manifested in the authors' own arguments, reflects the richness of our field and adds to the richness of the volume. In exercising the editors' (and introduction writers') prerogative here by treating the authors' work in our own way we are trying, not to silence or outshout them, but to give them a sounding board against which their works may shout back in their own voices.

Discourse and Language

Before moving to the substantive issues raised above, we need to pause at least briefly to clarify our approach. In attempting to ferret out the assumptions of men removed from us in time and space, we need to be aware of our own assumptions, and in discussing their language we should not fail to be conscious of our own. Writing in English we face a problem of distance and the need for translation. But in fact using a language of interpretation—the term is J. G. A. Pocock's^[4] —clearly distinct from the language or languages under study can be an advantage as well. We hold that the primary criterion for a language of interpretation is its explanatory power, not whether its terms have native equivalents. We are not barred from writing about Chinese philosophy simply because there is no equivalent in classical Chinese for "philosophy." It is helpful to bear in mind how much our own language has changed and continues to change. There was, after all, no equivalent for our "philosophy" in seventeenth-century English either, since what Englishmen meant by "philosophy" then was far larger than what we mean now. Yet historians do not shrink from writing of seventeenth-century English philosophy. Most of our other "keywords" (to use Raymond Williams's term)—"society," "culture," "the state"—are distinctly modern. Writing in twentieth-century English, then, we need not stake all on (though we do need to know) whether our terms find direct

[4] See "The Concept of Language and the métier d'historien : Some Considerations on Practice," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modem Europe , ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 27.

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equivalents in the language of Sung writers. But we do need to worry about the opposite, since we have to discuss Sung terms and ideas with such English equivalents as we can find. Indeed, the search for possible near equivalents can lead to significant insight even, or perhaps especially, when it fails.^[5] Where rough equivalents come to hand, we need to remain conscious of differences in range and shades of meaning and to bear in mind that in all languages meaning is conditioned, even where not wholly determined, by context. Most words, after all, and perhaps especially those that carry the most cultural or emotional weight, have wide ranges of meaning, which give writers the freedom to emphasize some senses and disregard others; or to make use of the prestige attached to one sense while developing their argument through another.^[6] This applies perhaps with especial force to classical Chinese, well known for the richness of its words' associations and connotations.

These are broad considerations, and largely obvious. Something more should be said of one pair of words, around which this introduction and much of the volume revolve: "state" and "society." We certainly cannot claim that Sung Chinese has terms that overlap wholly or even largely in their range of senses and uses with these two English words. This, again, poses no necessary obstacle to our talking in meaningful ways about "Sung views of the relation of state and society." For when Sung speakers argue that government authority should be decentralized, or when one of them seeks to organize the countryside into officially supervised pao-chia units while another proposes to form voluntary and locally rooted community compacts instead, or when one proposes that officials should force the wealthy to sell grain to relieve a famine while another argues that commerce left to itself or subtly guided can do the same job better, we can perfectly well see, and say, that they are proposing arrangements that involve, in our terms , different—sometimes opposite—relations between state and society. And when arguments that we can reasonably redescribe in this way recur again and again, are invested with enormous political and emotional force, and come to be consistently central to political discourse, we find it

[5] Recent work suggests that the failure of Chinese and English to match presents particularly fruitful opportunities for the comparativist. See, for example, Chad Hansen, "Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and 'Truth'," Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (May 1985): 491-519. But see also A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle: Open Court, 1989), pp. 395-96.

[6] Raymond Williams surely noted a universal propensity when he found that people in letters to the editor—an archetypically rhetorical and persuasive medium and so not unlike some of the genres we shall be drawing on here—tended to resort to dictionaries "to appropriate a meaning which fitted the argument and to exclude those meanings which were inconvenient to it but which some benighted person had been so foolish as to use." Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 14.

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fair to say that "the relation of state to society" was of deep concern to Sung men themselves.

But we think we can go still further here. For although "state" and "society" in English have each a considerable array of possible meanings and connotations, still when one says "state and society," naming them as a pair to indicate a contrast or tension—a relation —the act of pairing them itself narrows things down, picks out for each a much more particular sense or set of senses. And here we think the search for Sung equivalents becomes more fruitful. That is, though Sung men may have had no words that meant just what "state" and "society" mean, they did have conventional pairs of terms that picked out, we think, in some considerable measure the same relations, the same tensions, the same contrast or complementarity that the pairing "state and society" picks out in English. Among these pairings, we think, is that of kuo-chia versus t'ien-hsia , more conventionally translated as "state" and "world" respectively, treated by Peter Bol in chapter 3 here; but also kuan ("the official" or "the authorities") versus min ("the people") and even the much-discussed kung ("the public") versus ssu ("the private"). Our views on these will become clearer further on. For now, before claiming that Sung men did not have available to them ideas, or ways of thinking and talking, that are available to us, one needs to go well beyond the apparent evidence of the meanings of single words. The point again seems obvious, but the advice has not always been taken.

Words, that is, go to make up languages and so cannot be divorced from the activity of discourse that they form and that forms them. The question arises whether it is legitimate and useful to consider the Sung thinkers and actors we are considering as engaged in a single common discourse. Or, to turn the question around, is the notion of "discourse" as now (variously) used by literary scholars, Foucauldian historians, and others in the West a fruitful one for what we are trying to accomplish here? We think it can be fruitful; but much depends on how "discourse" is taken. We do not here follow Michel Foucault in his attempt to uncover the epistemic rules that define a discourse and, in his view, cut one discourse off radically from another. We do not deny the potential interest or validity of such an attempt. If we avoid the language of radical discontinuity, it is certainly not to deny significant change but to suggest, nevertheless, continuities within the changes we see. Any "discourse" in our material that one might justly claim to be set off radically from what came before or after would have to be constituted at a far higher level of generality (or indeed vagueness) than the bodies of assumptions, utterances, and exchanges we are dealing with and which we sometimes call "discourse" in what follows. For these are observably not so cut off. Rather, they grade into one another over time, share parts of one another, react to one another in ways that will not support a claim (or presumption) of mutual unintelligibility or incommensur-

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ability. What we seem to be dealing with is a set of "discourses" overlapping diachronically as well as synchronically, conversations bounded and in part channeled by context but fed sensibly by what came before.

From similar considerations we cannot, in the way of most discourse theorists, regard our "discourses" as all-determining, all-encompassing, as it were all-imprisoning. For there is, again, real difference, real conflict, angry argument, in our materials within the same time as well as across time. More precisely: difference, conflict, argument are real at the level of analysis at which we are operating. We do not deny a priori (though we do not know, and do not think it can be affirmed a priori either) that they could be dissolved into larger patterns of unquestioning and unconscious agreement that imprisoned our arguers even as they thought they were arguing. But to show this would again mean moving to a higher level of generality than the one at which we choose to operate. We suspect that patterns at such a level could not be specific to the Sung, but again must operate across much longer spans of time. The point is that the finding of agreement, of conceptual imprisonment, at such a level would not abolish the disagreement, difference, argument, even freedom, we find at our level; nor can disagreement at our level abolish agreement at a higher level. To argue from agreement at the higher level that Chinese culture, thought, politics are "basically" unchanging or "finally" one would be without useful meaning, since what is "basic" or "final" will itself depend on one's chosen level of analysis. (At a sufficiently high level of generality, after all, one might even plausibly argue that all human cultures are fundamentally alike; but no one would believe that this makes the study of cultural difference a waste of time.) And to argue that unconscious but shared assumptions are all that counts especially fails to convince when men are willing to snub, demote, banish, or occasionally even (though far less often in Sung than, say, in Ming) kill one another over what is conscious. In other words, we are operating quite happily at a lower level of analysis than most discourse theorists; and we are equally happy to appropriate the term "discourse" and use it in a rough-and-ready way for the lower-level, smaller, largely more conscious collections of common assumptions, questions, and often differing answers with which our subjects spoke and thought aloud.

If we share with Sung thinkers themselves a sense of history and discourse as constituted of continuity as well as of change, we yet view them from very different perspectives. In his analysis of the debate between Chu Hsi and Ch'en Liang, Hoyt Tillman has shown Sung Confucian discourse to have been multileveled, operating on metaphysical, cultural, and sociopolitical levels yet still focusing its debates around a common term, the Way (Tao ).^[7] On the one hand, this may help to explain how someone who,

[7] Hoyt C. Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 153-54.

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like Li Hsin-ch'uan, showed little interest in moral metaphysics could nevertheless identify with the Learning of the Way (Tao-hsueh ), and why at least one late-Sung collection included Ch'en Liang under the same rubric:^[8] they were operating on the cultural or sociopolitical rather than the metaphysical level. On the other hand, it allows us to detect cases of men talking past one another through occupying different levels.

Men could talk at different levels and yet share a good deal else, of course. Among the things shared by men as far apart as Chu Hsi and Ch'en Liang were their command of and reliance on a shared literary tradition: they read largely the same texts and had a set of common textual and historical reference points. Out of shared texts as well as out of ongoing discussion might grow common vocabularies. The work of reconstructing these in the sphere of social-political discourse has only just begun. Though the field has generated mountains of dissections of such key metaphysical terms as principle or pattern (li ) and material force (ch'i ), we are not so well served for the language of social and political thinking. Sung men themselves did not reflect as extensively on their own language in this sphere: we have found no equivalent here for Ch'en Ch'un's Neo-Confucian Terms Explained .^[9] Perhaps when Sung men wrote on state and society they considered their vocabulary clear enough not to need elucidation. Be that as it may, while only Hymes, in chapter 7, makes vocabulary an especial focus here, considerations of language can never be far from our concern.

Indeed, as Pocock has suggested, the history of political discourse can be understood as a history of "languages," with their shifting idioms and rhetorics.^[10] As we understand Pocock, a "language" is a set of vocabulary, meanings, and usages that have come historically to be to some degree crystallized as a way of talking about a particular topic. Notions of what topic it can usefully be applied to may in turn change historically, and to focus upon this is one of the purposes of Pocock's conception. "Languages" in this sense are tools used in discourse, and participants in a single discourse may call upon and apply more than one. They may use a "language" to

[8] Li Yu-wu, (Huang-ch'ao) Ming-ch'en yen-hsing lu . See Yves Hervouet, A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), p. 127.

[9] Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Neo-Confucian Terms Explained (The Pei-hsi tzu-i by Ch'en Ch'un, 1159-1223) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

[10] We retain quotation marks around this use of the word "language" because such a "language" is in fact a local or otherwise special subset of vocabulary, idioms, and usages within a larger "language" in the literal or conventional sense. Both of us have linguists or philologists in our ancestry, and we see the problems that may arise in calling anything but a language a language. Pocock's usage is a metaphor. The metaphor, however, is a powerful one, and we find Pocock's category, whatever its name, indispensable. Pocock himself has expressed dissatisfaction with the term and considered the merits of alternatives. See, for instance, his contribution to Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England , ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

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define their own position in the discourse as distinct from that of a participant who uses another "language"; or they may adopt the "language," or part of it, of their opponents to show that it may be turned to their own purposes. A "language" may have value both because it really does provide means that work for talking about something, and because it has acquired prestige and persuasive power in itself through its earlier associations and uses. The notion, as Pocock at least employs it, is useful especially for its flexibility, for its ability to handle situations of change, for its attention to the strategies of participants in discourse, for its comprehension of the rhetorical along with the denotative aspects of language. Especially important here is the diffusion of one group's "language" to other members of a community in a process of appropriation or expropriation. In our own material, a striking case is surely the triumph of the terminology and rhetoric of the movement that called itself Tao-hsueh , or "the Learning of the Way." In the twelfth century men using this "language" were still attacked for employing esoteric terms as code words in examination essays. But in the thirteenth century we find it extended to local political concerns not only, as we might expect, by a Chen Te-hsiu (see de Bary in this volume), but also, though in a different fashion, by a Tung Wei (cf. Hymes).

Perhaps the time will come when we can construct our own book of "keywords" with their histories and vicissitudes. Surely one will be Tao-hsueh itself.^[11] While our general policy has been to render all Chinese terms in English, we have made an exception here. Paradoxically, and unfortunately, Tao-hsueh is not among the terms of Tao-hsueh dealt with by Ch'en Ch'un in his Terms Explained . Like many pivotal terms, it presents vexing problems. Most often, and most fundamentally, it refers in modern usage to

[11] Two others might be li , "rites," and ch'üan , "balance," "equilibrium," "weighing," "prudence." In the case of li , also often translated as "propriety," not only are there different prescriptions for its proper observance but the word itself means different things to different men. None emphasized it more than Li Kou (1009-1059), so much so that Peter Bol (personal communication) has suggested that for him it was the sum of all values; while Sun Fu, as Allan Wood tells us, regarded it as "a fundamental principle governing the human as well as the cosmic order." For the Annals commentators, and again when contrasted to custom by Su Hsun (see chap. 1), li , represents a set of firm, even inflexible guidelines, whereas in other contexts, as when juxtaposed to the mind (hsin ), emphasis is on its character as external performance—an emphasis in keeping with the Confucian tendency to relate behavioral norms to specific situations and circumstances and thus retain flexibility. It is also notable that the distinction between ritual and law (fa ) hardly figures here, probably because none of the men studied here was prepared to rely solely on ritual. As to ch'üan , a shift of meaning is noticeable in our volume. Su Hsun's "expediency" or "prudence" becomes Chu Hsi's "moral appropriateness to the situation" in a striking instance of the moralization of politics that de Bary discusses. Neither rendition of ch'üan conveys the sense of "authority," which historically is a conspicuous part of the range of meanings of the Chinese term. Here the need to change the English, our language of interpretation, highlights the difference in use, though at the price of obscuring what common ground remains.

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the movement of which Chu Hsi (1130-1200) was the central synthesizing figure and leading teacher. But there is basis, in the range of usages we find in its own time, for limiting its precise extension to scholars with biographies in the Tao-hsueh chapters of the official Sung history (compiled in Yuan),^[12] or on the contrary for expanding it to include almost all "Neo-Confucian" tendencies. Here we follow de Bary's suggestion and use "Neo-Confucian" broadly to distinguish the Confucianism that developed during the Sung.^[13] In this sense it is not interchangeable with Tao-hsueh and does not translate any Chinese term; it belongs to our discourse, not to any of theirs. Not only is there no English word with the range and depth of meaning of Tao (roughly, "Way") or hsueh (roughly, "learning"), but what Sung writers meant when they put the two together changed over time. When Chang Tsai in a letter to a disciple deplores the separation of "Tao-hsueh " from the arts of politics (cheng-shu ), he refers not to any particular school of learning or set of doctrines but simply to the extension of parental love to all people.^[14] Here perhaps the term means nothing more special than "moral learning." We must be alert for similar readings by others,^[15] and we should bear in mind that it was only later that the word was reserved exclusively for thinkers and ideas in the line of transmission from the Ch'eng brothers to Chu Hsi and his followers. It had been a major goal of Chu Hsi to define the line of orthodox transmission, the tao-t'ung , and naturally this influenced the understanding of Tao-hsueh , so that it came to mean the orthodoxy as defined by Chu and to exclude other thinkers, even some of those who also drew on or identified with the teachings of the Ch'eng brothers.

The point is an important one, for as Hoyt Tillman has shown, a clear sense of the common, broader twelfth-century sense of Tao-hsueh is essential for a proper analysis of Ch'en Liang and others. Chu Hsi's own work, then, though fundamentally one of synthesis, involved at the same time a sorting out of strands of thinking in his time, all claiming to trace their origins to the Ch'engs, and a selecting among them: in some respects a distillation and purification, as Chu saw it, of the true Ch'eng heritage. But during his life Chu Hsi did not hold the stage alone; and John Chaffee's study of Li Hsin-ch'uan in chapter 8 here strongly suggests that after Chu Hsi, even among those who considered themselves his disciples, Tao-hsueh again came

[12] Some would define it even more narrowly: the Yuan editors, after all, chose to include Shao Yung.

[13] Wm. Theodore de Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush, eds., The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 8-9.

[14] Chang Tsai, Chang Tsai chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1978), p. 349.

[15] For example, a lecture in the Imperial Seminar in which Yang Shih states, in connection with Analects I:15, that only those with Tao-hsueh can be happy in poverty. Yang Shih, Yang Kuei-shan hsien-sheng ch'üan chi 5:9b-10a.

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to be seen as encompassing a very broad range of interests and concerns—for some of which, to be sure, one can find roots in Chu Hsi too. Moreover, when Wei Liao-weng as a young man wrote to Yeh Shih asking for an inscription for his study, he praised Yeh for "clarifying the Tao-hsueh orthodoxy for later scholars."^[16] At least at that stage of his career, Yeh was presumably pleased to have the word applied to him. Since Yeh is well known for rejecting many of the concerns of those—like Wei himself—who traced their intellectual descent to Chu Hsi and the Ch'engs, the case suggests that the term sometimes had a range broader than we can yet make entire sense of. Yet there does seem reason to see in the endeavors of Chu Hsi a narrowing of the range of thinking and concerns that in Chu's view (and that of his immediate followers) were to be accepted as belonging to Tao-hsueh , followed by a broadening, as the school gained more general acceptance, that could allow a man like Li Hsin-ch'uan to see himself as a member and believer. On the other hand, the pejorative use of the word, to mean a kind of thought that focused on personal morality or metaphysics to the neglect and detriment of everything else, and even the image of the Tao-hsueh hypocrite found often in sixteenth-century novels, also date to the Sung.^[17] It is this very range of meanings and extensions that has led us to leave the term untranslated throughout the volume.

These ruminations, though anything but systematic, may help give a sense of our methodological inclinations to the reader of what follows. We move in the next section to identify and trace what we have already touched upon: a major change in Sung views of state and society.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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-

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

Enduring Oppositions in Sung Political Argument

We begin with an analogy: Ssu-ma Kuang is to Wang An-shih as Ch'en Liang is to Chu Hsi as Tung Wei is to Huang Chen.^[45] What does this mean? Broadly, that Sung political discussion recurrently organized itself around an opposition between two poles. On one side, in various guises, was a moral reformationism that aimed to transform the whole of Chinese society and could envisage major institutional innovation as one means to do so. On the other was a bureaucratic meliorism that aimed chiefly to reestablish proper relationships and ways of acting within the state, that saw the state's task as being to balance the contending interests in society at large, or at times perhaps to tap into those interests for purposes of the public good, but that was largely willing to accept society as it was.

[45] We are indebted to Peter Bol for this suggestion, presented in precisely this form at the conference that led to this volume. For Tung Wei and Huang Chen, see chapter 7 in this volume.

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That this account fits the opposition between Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang, we think, Bol shows in chapter 3. Wang hoped to dissolve the distinction between state and society by expanding the public sphere to include all of social life, thus transforming all social relations into relations that would embody the public interest, all human action into action on behalf of the public good. Ssu-ma, however, accepted the division of public from private sphere as natural and necessary and set out only to make the state itself embody the public good more perfectly. To do this required at one and the same time a restoration of proper bureaucratic procedures and an ethical revitalization of officialdom. The second part is important: Ssu-ma was second to none in his insistence on high moral conduct by emperors and ministers. But he did not demand the moral remaking of society at large. Wang and Ssu-ma, then, are the paradigm case.

Taking our lead from von Glahn, we have already introduced the notion of fundamental parallels between Wang An-shih and Chu Hsi. It is not hard to see in Chu Hsi the impulse to remake society on a new, or renewed, moral basis. As von Glahn shows, when Chu looked at China and its problems he saw first of all the moral deterioration of fundamental social relationships. This view informed his plans for community granaries and community compacts, his approach to famine relief (see again von Glahn and also Hymes in this volume), the public notices he issued while in local office,^[46] his rules for local academies, but also, as we have seen, his approach to the role and influence of the emperor. All social and political relations are to be revalued and restored, not simply in people's minds but in their actions as well. Unlike Wang, Chu's method for doing this did not focus only on institutional innovation—though as we have argued, this aspect of his project is important—but was more broadly concerned with moral education and the self -reform and self -cultivation of the gentleman. Yet the breadth of the aim, its fundamentally moral character, and most especially the diagnosis of severe illness in the body social where others might see it only in the body politic, join him to Wang. There is a clear and strong totalizing impulse in his image of the good society or the good state. The impulse is worked out comprehensively perhaps only in his system of ritual, with its carefully divided hierarchy of forms encompassing all of society from the family up to the emperor at court;^[47] but its mark is there in all his social and political thinking. In Chu Hsi we find the overarching re-moralization of society propounded by Wang An-shih, transplanted into a world whose political discourse has largely abandoned the notion of large-scale reform through state action.

[46] Ron-guey Chu, "Chu Hsi and Public Instruction," in Neo-Confucian Education , ed. de Bary and Chaffee, pp. 252-73.

[47] See de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China , pp. 32-33.

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In comparison Ch'en Liang appears, like Ssu-ma Kuang alongside Wang An-shih, rather modest. He wants to readjust the relation of state to society in ways that will allow the state to see to its proper tasks, in his time especially the task of reunifying China. Again, to do this the state must actually grow smaller, must withdraw from its too extended posture in society at large, must sometimes yield part of its power to forces or agencies outside it. (For Ch'en the north was lost, in fact, because the state was too large and too centralized.)^[48] One can imagine Chu Hsi agreeing with much of this. As we have seen, he held no brief for centralization; his social transformations were to come in other ways. But the point is that for Ch'en Liang this is virtually the whole picture. There is no sense, as there is with Chu Hsi, that the whole society needs curing, except perhaps from the disease of overcentralization itself. Ch'en, Tillman tells us, wants to "leave the difference between rich and poor to follow its natural course,"^[49] whereas Chu wants to reinstill in the relation of rich to poor the moral content of protection, support, and mutual dependence that should properly be there (and, he believes, was once there). When Ch'en proposes reforms at the local level—that is, reforms that might impinge directly on the way people at large organize their lives—it is as a short-term means to a specific national end, the military recovery of the north.

Now it is true that Ch'en, in an examination paper that Tillman has discovered and discussed at length,^[50] once claimed that laws—a particular interest of Ch'en's—could be used to make naturally self-interested human minds public-minded, to transform "private" (ssu ) into "public" (kung ) in the minds and lives of men. The claim is surprising because it seems to suggest that Ch'en, like Chu Hsi, saw his enterprise as the transformation of people at large into proper moral actors. Tillman, however, convinces us that the claim was untypical for Ch'en, who more usually looked to laws to balance the various private impulses at work in society and so establish an area of public good in their midst—essentially Ssu-ma Kuang's position. That he should ever have made the larger and more ambitious claim is interesting in itself. It may represent a mere momentary inconsistency in his position, perhaps a holdover from his youthful period as a convinced Tao-hsueh follower.

But Ch'en's move here may be more interesting than this. Like Ssu-ma Kuang earlier, Ch'en suggests a man who lives and thinks surrounded by a conversation of which he is not fully or properly a part. In his case it is a conversation on how men and the world are to be transformed morally, the Tao-hsueh question. It is a conversation whose premises he does not wholly

[48] Tillman, "Ch'en Liang on the Public Interest," p. 37.

[49] Tillman, "Ch'en Liang on the Public Interest," p. 32; and see also p. 34.

[50] Tillman, "Ch'en Liang on the Public Interest," passim.

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accept; yet he feels compelled, perhaps, at least to claim to solve the problem that it poses. In effect he says: "Look, laws can do that , too!" To propose to solve the problem through central laws and institutions was to suggest means that had not figured prominently in the conversation as so far conducted by most participants. In some ways his answer amounted to changing the subject, but changing it by a particularly clever stratagem. But the claim was in any case not one he felt inclined to pursue or support in later discussions. It remains as a sign of the power of the Tao-hsueh discourse in his time.

To pursue our analogy to its third pair, Tung Wei and Huang Chen offer a particularly clear case. In chapter 7 Hymes shows Huang as a conscious inheritor of the focus on moral relationships that animated his chosen intellectual ancestor Chu Hsi. Famine relief, for Huang as for Chu, means getting rich men to act as rich men should act: getting them to protect those weaker and poorer than they, those who depend on them, but on whom in turn they depend for labor, for aid in other crises, even for mere neighborliness. (That "protecting" the needy even in this case means selling , rather than simply giving, one's grain suggests the strength of commercial modes of thinking in the same period.) The rich—but likewise the poor, who must conquer their own urge to rebel against the rich when treated poorly—must change their ways of acting, their ways of thinking. They must realize and carry out their moral duty.

For Tung Wei, on the other hand, the way the rich think and act is simply a given. Little can or should be done to change it directly. Instead, the official concerned must use his knowledge of how men's interests work—his knowledge that the rich will act in their own economic interest—and his knowledge of how a commercial economy works, how prices rise and fall, to see to it that grain moves eventually from those with to those without through the normal and natural, indeed inexorable, process of economic exchange. The sense of the legitimacy, and inevitability, of private interests is, if anything, stronger here than in Ssu-ma Kuang. Indeed, the official here is able to achieve public good not simply in spite of private interests, or as part of a balancing act among them, but because of them. But in the notion that the state, here in the person of the local administrator, must deliberately hold back from actions that might seem to assert the public good in society at large, and that these actions in fact—illegitimate interventions, as Tung sees them—would produce the opposite of the result hoped for, the parallel to Ssu-ma Kuang is clear.

Yet as Hymes also argues, there are elements of Tao-hsueh discourse in Tung as well. Tung studied under Cheng Chiung, whose own intellectual lineage went back directly to the Ch'eng brothers; and Tung himself taught the Four Books while in local office. The terms he uses in treating the role and responsibilities of officials echo the Tao-hsueh vocabulary of duty and moral self-cultivation. Likewise, Huang Chen himself, when describing his

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own program, seems to use, at least as tools of persuasion, terms and assumptions that recall Tung's own system of quasi-laissez-faire administrative "technique." Without elaborating further here on ground covered in chapter 7, we would argue that something is going on here akin, though not identical, to what we have just suggested for Ch'en Liang and earlier for Ssu-ma Kuang. Two arguers, though essentially opposed, are borrowing the terms of each other's arguments.

Pocock's notion of "language" seems particularly apt here. Once again, "languages," far from being the all-determining and all-encompassing worlds of thought so often meant by "discourse," are sets of vocabulary and groups of propositions simply available for use, as parts of an often diverse cultural baggage that lies at hand to thinkers and talkers whatever their purposes. In the time of Tung Wei and Huang Chen, two "languages" had come to be established for talking about famine relief, or indeed for what we would now call "economic" issues more broadly. One was the "language" of moral social relationships propagated specifically by the Tao-hsueh movement. The other was a "language" of administrative technique and natural economic process embodied by the core sections of Tung Wei's work but with long historical roots of its own. Each had a certain real prestige—this was crucial—and even if only for that reason a certain persuasive power. By late Southern Sung both were, potentially at least, common intellectual property. Treated logically, or as whole systems of ideas, the two were perhaps in contradiction to each other. But as "languages" either of the two could be, and for good persuasion might need to be, drawn upon by advocates whose thinking as a whole seems more naturally affiliated with the other. To suggest this is not to suggest that Huang Chen and Tung Wei were insincere in partly borrowing each other's "language," although in this instance the two ways of speaking do seem more skillfully accommodated to each other, through their assignment to different actors and different spheres of social life, in Tung Wei than in Huang Chen. In any case the phenomenon, surely, is not limited to these two advocates or to these two "languages" in Sung political and social discussions.

We are arguing, from three pairings, that a single opposition of ideas can be traced across the transition from Northern Sung to Southern Sung and through the period when Tao-hsueh comes to dominate the intellectual field. A good deal more would need to be done to show that indeed the polarity we are proposing can organize much of Sung sociopolitical argument. We are optimistic that this could be shown, and perhaps even that the framework would have use for the intellectual history of later dynasties. It will certainly generate, for Sung, groupings of thinkers and advocates different from those that other criteria, for example those of intellectual and academic filiation, would generate or have generated. It is precisely this crosscutting effect that makes the polarity so interesting to us.

Assuming that our case will hold for Sung, one point is especially strik-

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ing: that it is consistently from the moral idealist side of our opposition, the side on which we locate Southern Sung Neo-Confucianism of the sort associated with Chu Hsi, that significant institutional innovation emerges. On this side fall both the massive state-centered reforms of Wang An-shih and the piecemeal local institution-building of Chu Hsi and company. More striking still, it is really only at this pole of the opposition, in Sung at least, that one finds significant and continuous interest in local reform, in what was to be done at the interface of community and government, later so crucial a focus of "statecraft" projects in the late Ch'ing. There has been a tendency, perhaps, first among Chinese scholars of the late Ming and Ch'ing, then among modern students of the same periods, to assume that "Sung learning"—meaning really the moralizing idealism that descends from Chu Hsi—was inconsistent with the impulse to order and repair the world institutionally, the impulse to ching shih , if you like. We are arguing to the contrary that in Southern Sung it was precisely that form of learning, and no other in the same time, that spawned institutional innovation at the local level. By confronting the problems of the localities, it inherited even as it transformed the impulse that had animated the reforms of Wang An-shih. There is, we are convinced, significant matter here for the student of later dynasties. The Che-tung men of Yuan studied by John Langlois and John Dardess,^[51] who devoted themselves to problems of the institutional framework for local government, claim intellectual descent in equal parts from Ch'en Liang and Chu Hsi: they are, it seems, conscious synthesizers of the two lines. If we are right, the Chu Hsi line surely plays an important part in their interest in local government. We will not try to trace these matters further here.

The Problem of Authority: Ideal Sources and Political Locations

A common theme, implicit when not explicit, in Sung discussions of ways to order the world or of the relation of state to society was the nature and locus of authority. If we take the problem of authority as having to do broadly with the right or legitimate capacity to make decisions as to right and wrong, or as to what should or must be done—decisions often binding on others—we may sort it immediately into two more specific questions.

[51] See John D. Langlois, Jr., "Political Thought in Ghin-hua under Mongol Rule," in Langlois, ed., China under Mongol Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 137-85; John W. Dardess, "Confucianism, Local Reform, and Centralization in Late Yuan Chekiang, 1342-1359," in Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds., Yuan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion under the Mongols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 327-74, and Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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One is where the knowledge of the proper ways of deciding, or where the moral capacity to decide, comes from: what is the source or the ground of authority? The other is: in what human agency or agencies are this knowledge and capacity to be seen as vested? The two questions are certainly related, and in the extreme case their answers may even wholly coincide: a human being, the emperor for example, may be seen as the ultimate fountainhead of authority, which has no other ground or source than his judgment or will. But more often than not the answers to the two questions will be separate, and certainly the questions themselves are logically distinct.

If we deal with the first question first, it is obvious that for many who thought, talked, or acted politically in Sung, authority resided first of all in certain writings. In Allan Wood's work on Sung Spring and Autumn Annals commentaries, represented at our conference but not in this volume, what unites all commentators is implicit and unquestioning acceptance of the Annals as an authoritative text: authoritative both on questions of personal morality and—for our purposes the more important point—on proper ways of political action.^[52] Throughout Sung and beyond, classicists continued to rely on canonical texts as repositories of moral, social, and political truth even as they sought to understand them anew. The authority of the classics rested in turn on their provenance—their supposed descent to us from the hands of Confucius and the sages—but was confirmed when scholars found additional grounds, external to the classics themselves, for holding that what the classics taught were essential and necessary truths.

The precise character and ultimate source of the truths that constituted the deep meaning of the classics, of course, were open to different interpretations. Behind the labors of Sun Fu, Ch'eng I, and the other students of the Annals can be detected a search for touchstones that could serve the needs of their own time and especially for ultimate principles underlying political authority. The dedication of so many scholars to a text even many contemporaries admitted was as dry as dust provides the clearest evidence of their conviction that it held true gold. And as Wood has shown, all who used the Annals in this way agreed that it grounded political authority in something higher than men, higher than emperors—be this sacrosanct ritual, cosmic principle, or, as most clearly in the case of Wang Hsi, Heaven. The point is important and goes to the second of our questions; we will return to it. Yet not everyone agreed about the status of the Annals : there was evidently a constituency that welcomed Wang An-shih's condemnation of it as deeply as others took offense. Wang tried to use government to define the canon, and by rejecting the Annals gave it a new luster unintentionally. But clearly he was second to none in the efforts he made to establish that there was good canonical evidence for his ideas and policies:

[52] Allan Wood, "Views on Authority."

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he simply found this in the Rites of Chou rather than in the Annals . After Wang, no one again tried to suppress a classic in its entirety, although the Tao-hsueh movement would eventually succeed in shifting the intellectual and pedagogical focus from the classics as a whole to the Four Books. What was in any case left unspecified or at best implicit in the Annals discussions that Wood has analyzed, or in other similar discussions, was who was to define the canon, interpret the true meaning of the classics, or ascertain the demands of ritual, principle, or Heaven. All left, to outsiders' eyes at least, ample room for disagreement. The Annals commentators would seem to have had scholars like themselves in mind, and older Confucian traditions were not inhospitable to such claims.^[53] In any case, the extensive re-examination and reinterpretation of the classics in Sung clearly implied that scholars had the authority as well as the need to determine the meaning of the old texts.

Textual scholarship like that of the Annals commentators was a hallmark of the Sung. Another of at least equal importance was the "inward turn" already touched on, which helps account for the Tao-hsueh emphasis on the Great Learning , the text that linked the gentleman's self-cultivation to the governance of the world. As de Bary has shown, the "learning of the mind" was from the beginning central to Tao-hsueh , including the thought of Gh'eng I.^[54] At a minimum, the "inward turn" implied a properly cleared and cultivated mind to read the classics correctly—thus shifting some of the authority embodied in the classics to the process of mental self-cultivation itself. But it could mean much more. Ch'eng I, Peter Bol has recently argued, derived all intellectual, moral, and (from moral) political authority from the human mind's capacity for direct access to "Heaven-and-Earth" (t'ien-ti ) and the truths that resided there ("patterns" in Bol's translation, "principles" more commonly: in Chinese, li ).^[55] In this approach the truth and authority of the cultural tradition, including the classics, became a dependent, not an independent, variable. Chu Hsi's stand is less clear. On the one hand, Donald Munro has recently shown that Chu Hsi could see the mind as its own light source, but, on the other, he concludes that "there is no consistent or clear answer in Chu's writings to the question of when an individual should follow the inner authority and when the outer ones, and if the answer should be the outer ones, there is no guidance on which of them

[53] David Hall and Roger Ames have recently argued that Confucius himself can be understood as endowing the fully realized person, whatever his political status, with authority over "ritual action" (li ). See Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 100 and 110-25.

[54] Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

[55] Peter Bol, "Ch'eng I and Cultural Tradition," paper delivered at the Regional Seminar on Neo-Confucianism, Columbia University, February 5, 1988.

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should be followed."^[56] But a number of other influential thinkers, among them Hu Hung and Lu Chiu-yuan, reached the conclusion that the mind itself—in some original and true form, to be sure, which had therefore to be recovered—was paramount.

The emphasis on the mind, again, could mark a retreat from the active world, but it also sanctioned and even demanded that a man follow what was in his own mind and heart. Insofar as one located moral authority in a mind that alone embodied the true principles (or patterns) of the world, this could entail a granting of the right to act, and to judge action, at least potentially to any gentleman whose mind was cultivated. If Wei Liao-weng was echoing a long tradition when he insisted on the central importance of the imperial mind, he never felt deterred from using his own mind to apprehend principles and criticize the way His Majesty's mind functioned in fact.

For both those who sought truth in classic texts and those who looked for principles within themselves or in Heaven-and-Earth, what they found was timeless. This is as central to the arguments of the Annals commentators as to the moral metaphysics of Tao-hsueh theorists, and provided the ground for countless lectures in the Imperial Seminar ("classics mat," ching-yen ) or for memorials admonishing emperors that ancient models of sagely government remained ever relevant. Ou-yang Hsiu's "Essay on Fundamentals," which we have already cited, is an excellent example from relatively early in Sung. Even some historians, foremost among them Ssu-ma Kuang, thought to see timeless truths in history, and to call to their support the authority of history much as Wang An-shih did that of the Rites of Chou . Ssu-ma, as we have seen, claimed to promise timelessness to Sung itself as a real and worldly entity.^[57] Fan Tsu-yÜ (1041-1098), the great historian and prominent Imperial Seminar lecturer, went further to hold Sung already exempt from the forces of historical decay because of the excellence of the foundations laid by its first emperors.^[58] Classicists and moralists held no monopoly on timelessness. Yet there were other voices and other views. Su Hsun and Ch'en Liang looked to history in a quite different way. Ch'en, like Su, stripped high antiquity of its normative character, historicizing and relativizing the classical age. Antiquity is reduced to history. Authority changes

[56] Donald J. Munro, Images of Human Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 191; for the mind as a light source, see pp. 81-93.

[57] This is not to say that Ssu-ma derived the truths he saw from history or historical study. Huang ChÜn-chieh, in a paper delivered at the conference but not included here, argued persuasively that Ssu-ma was finding his values elsewhere and then locating them in history. This seems consistent with Bol's view in this volume that Ssu-ma used history as a way of showing that his ideas were true rather than as a source of material from which truths could be derived inductively.

[58] Freeman, "Lo-yang and the Opposition to Wang An-shih," p. 75.

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with and becomes subject to history, so that history itself assumes considerable authority. Ch'en explicitly denied that antiquity represented the one and only True Way. What was suitable for one age might not fit the next, and no period was privileged. Such a view might seem to open the door to bold new political experiments, but in fact neither man is associated with any striking new initiatives. Indeed, if, as Tillman has persuasively argued, Ch'en propounded a Confucian utilitarianism, Ch'en did not concentrate his own efforts on proving the specific practical use of his own doctrines.

This suggests that at least as important as the source of authority is the way its advocates sought to use it. Even for the mavens of timelessness, what were timeless were broad principles, not specifics. The most convinced Sung classicist knew all too well that the classic age was long ago and that history, in the sense of temporal decline at the very least, could not be denied. It may be a sign of the strength of historical consciousness in Sung that, even before Mencius's views had come to prevail, disagreements over human nature figure less prominently in the discussions we have been studying than do those over history and its lessons. There were, after all—though figures as various as Su Hsun (see chapter 1) and Wang An-shih (see below) might set them up as straw men—few if any radical restorationists in Sung. In practice, no Sung commander went off to do battle in ox-drawn chariots as Fan Kuan had done in T'ang,^[59] and we know of no armchair strategist who proposed doing so. Thus Ch'en Liang's view, noted above, that "what was suitable for one age might not fit the next" was in fact already a clichè in Sung, though Ch'en took it further than some. Compare Wang An-shih, quoted by Hatch: "Some people nowadays, without much clear thinking, want to follow the exact footsteps of the ancient kings; they do not understand that changes are made in weighing the times." Chu Hsi too regarded the historical reality of antiquity, with its specific institutional framework, as something that had "passed away long ago" and could not be revived. There were some who talked about bringing back the well-fields (Chang Tsai, Hu Hung), but there were no serious attempts or even specific proposals to do so. Instead, as we have seen and as Linda Walton shows, the ancient institution, a powerful symbol of economic equality and of the perfect and all-including state, was even brought in without a hint of irony to justify and shed luster on Southern Sung lineage estates, institutions which for all their altruism were, by definition, held exclusively by and for specific kin groups. In Northern Sung it had been standard rhetorical practice in memorials on the land situation to discourse on the virtues of the well-fields, then to pronounce their unsuitability or impossibility

[59] Edwin G. Pulleyblank, "Neo-Confucianism and Neo-Legalism in T'ang Intellectual Life, 755-805," in The Confucian Persuasion , ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 99.

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in modern times, and finally to propose whatever new program or other solution—a census of holdings, or the like—one had been intending to propose from the start.

The message of such rhetoric, when it was sincere (and it often was) was that this can be to our times as the well-fields were to theirs . Classicists, that is, did not seek to re-create the normative past but looked to principles derived by drawing analogies between present situations and those in classic times, much in the way that Ssu-ma Kuang sought to use historical analogies to substantiate his recommendations. It is crucial to understand this, or much of Sung political discourse becomes incredible and its participants look silly. To say that A is to the past as B is (or can be) to the present is, after all, not to say that A equals or ought to equal B , or even that A and B are all that much alike. It is in this respect, we think, that von Glahn's notion of classical analogism has force.

The chapters by von Glahn and Hymes among others suggest that men otherwise as far apart as Chu Hsi and Tung Wei naturally, almost as a matter of course, drew on the recorded past in dealing with immediate problems of the present. Indeed, it may well be that the more practical the concern, the more likely men were to pay serious heed to the policies of predecessors—including those of the recent past. Schirokauer suggests in chapter 4 that although history hardly held the authority for Chu Hsi that it had for Tung Wei or Ssu-ma Kuang, he too took history seriously. The Confucian tradition of self-cultivation and of defining morality situationally helped him balance what would otherwise seem the unreconcilable claims of history and principle. And certainly after Chu Hsi, if not before, the Tao-hsueh tradition itself came to be seen by some of its members as accommodating history as easily as moral philosophy, even if emphasis fell on the latter. As Chaffee shows, Li Hsin-ch'uan, a Tao-hsueh partisan with impeccable political as well as family credentials but with no interest in the metaphysics of self-cultivation, saw no need to defend his preoccupation with history. Implicit in his life's work is the conviction that this too formed part of the "learning" of the Way. His history, like Tung Wei's, is recent; and it is not a series of moral cautionary tales: his interest is in how institutions come to be what they are and, in his history of the Tao-hsueh movement itself, in how a moral and philosophical movement grasps and keeps political power.

Li's account of Tao-hsueh , as we have already argued, is also a reminder of the importance of the center; and at the center of the center stood (or was supposed to stand) the emperor. We move with this to our second question: in what human agency or agencies is authority vested?^[60] The Sung has ac-

[60] For a survey of the intense debate over an issue closely related to authority, that of dynastic legitimacy, particularly in the writing of history, see Jao Tsung-i, Chung-kuo shih-hsueh shang chih cheng-t'ung lun (Hong Kong: Lung-men, 1977), chap. 8.

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quired the reputation, partly through the founding work of Naito Torajiro, of a period of increasing imperial autocracy. Two issues, at least, are potentially of concern. One is the question whether in fact the power wielded by emperors relative to their ministers and other officials became greater in Sung than it had been in, say, T'ang. On this we will say little here.^[61] The other is whether Sung ideas of imperial authority had changed: whether Sung men granted the emperor a legitimate supremacy that T'ang men had not, an issue deeply relevant to our present concerns.

This issue exercised Annals commentators and generated much subsequent discussion. Who was (or were) properly authorized to be society's decision maker(s)? Who had the power and the responsibility for the correct application of the rules? How was power to be distributed? The general thrust of the Annals commentators on these questions was to strengthen the authority of the emperor, a message reinforced by the dynasty's felt need for leadership in dealing with warring neighbors. The Annals commentators—note that Wood's subjects are men of Northern Sung—saw a need for a stronger imperial role. This perception was perhaps strengthened, or perhaps the need was aggravated, by the unassertiveness and indecisiveness of the dynasty's third and fourth emperors, Chen-tsung (r. 997-1022) and Jen-tsung (r. 1022—1063). Many scholars have seen in this emphasis a potential support for imperial absolutism, to be fully realized perhaps only in later dynasties. What is important in Wood's work, however, is that he has shown that commentators consistently set out to ground the principle of reverence for the emperor, and the emperor's authority itself, in something higher—in ritual, for example, or in "principles," and that they saw this ground as constraining the exercise of imperial power. That is, they set out to exalt the emperor's authority but at the same time to limit it. The authority to interpret what this meant in actual practice, however, was not in these commentaries clearly vested in any specific institution or distinct estate.

The possibility remained that a time might come when an emperor would claim himself to be the authoritative interpreter and insist on being treated as a sage.^[62] But that is not how outspoken officials treated Sung

[61] Arguments on both sides can be made as to the power of Sung emperors; we would only call attention here to the prominence, particularly in Southern Sung, of long-serving and apparently dictatorial chief councillors. That some of these were themselves involved in the removal and replacement of particular emperors does not speak well for imperial despotism in Sung. One may also compare the extreme rarity of executions or state-sanctioned killing of officeholders in Sung—the few examples, such as Yueh Fei, became causes célèbres forever after—with the virtually routine execution of political offenders or even men simply unsuccessful in their assignments under the Ming. Clearly the relation of emperor (or of the political center) to official had undergone a sea change in the former's favor; but this change came after the Sung.

[62] See Nivison, "Introduction," pp. 14ff., esp. p. 22.

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emperors. Indeed, if there is any consistent thread that seems to run through the views and words of Sung scholars and officials who were articulate on the issue from about mid-Northern Sung on,^[63] it is that the authority to interpret and articulate truth and to judge the acts of emperors (as well as other men), and even the authority to decide action, rests with scholars, gentlemen, or officials themselves. This is again at best implicit in the commentaries that Wood has studied, but is explicit elsewhere. Reverence does not necessarily translate into the yielding of real executive authority. As Sariti has shown, for example, Ssu-ma Kuang in elevating the emperor to what look like the heights of absolute power actually raised him so high as to leave him (in Ssu-ma's view) with the power to make only the most general of decisions. In this view, the delegation of imperial power should be "complete and unquestioned."^[64] In determining policy alternatives the emperor was effectively to be left out of the loop. Sariti has termed the intended result "bureaucratic absolutism"—meaning that the bureaucracy was absolute, since this is where effective decision-making authority was to be lodged. Certainly Sung emperors in fact were not all this remote;^[65] but if ideas are the issue, there is no support for autocracy here.

Ou-yang Hsiu too, in "On Fundamentals," had made delegation (jen-jen ) the single most important element in the proper management of institutions. Fan Chung-yen, as James Liu has shown, had argued in four essays presented to the throne that an emperor's success depended upon the quality of his ministers, that scholars had the moral right to judge his acts, and that power should be concentrated neither in the emperor himself nor even in his chief minister, but distributed among a wider circle of officials. Wang An-shih, perhaps closest to a believer in the concentration of authority in the emperor among the figures treated here, nevertheless argued for long-term and thoroughgoing delegation of power to what Smith calls "bureaucratic entrepreneurs." And Ch'eng I stated the position that would later become standard among Tao-hsueh advocates, arguing, as David Nivison showed years ago, for the authority of the scholars who taught the emperor, and objecting (as Wang An-shih and Lü Kung-chu would object) to the custom of having lecturers stand rather than being seated together with him. Ch'eng went so far as to claim that "the most important responsibilities in the empire are those of prime minister and imperial tutor in the

[63] This qualification is important, since those who were articulate and whose views we thus now read may have been precisely those who were critical of current ways of doing and viewing things.

[64] A. W. Sariti, "The Political Thought of Ssu-ma Kuang: Bureaucratic Absolutism" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1970), p. 189. See also pp. 131ff.

[65] See, for instance, Lao Nap-yin, "The Absolutist Reign of Sung Hsiao-tsung (r. 1163-1189)" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1986). Lao portrays Hsiao-tsung as a highly assertive emperor, though he also concludes that his absolutism failed to prevail against Chu Hsi.

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classics. Order and disorder in the world depend on the prime minister , and the perfecting of the ruler's virtue is the responsibility of the imperial tutor" (emphasis ours).^[66] As Nivison shows, the implicit denigration of the emperor's own importance in this document from the hand of a Neo-Confucian founding figure was to excite an angry rebuttal from the Ch'ienlung emperor six and a half centuries later.

The men discussed here were all to some degree centralists in a Northern Sung mode. Southern Sung men who found power in their own time too centralized in capital and court were if anything still less inclined to see authority as resting solely with the emperor. They might of course, even if Tao-hsueh men, diverge from Ch'eng I's assumption that the prime minister was most crucial. We have seen Wei Liao-weng proposing reforms in court procedures that would work to the advantage of imperial power. But again this was to counter the vast growth of ministerial power in Wei's time and to set the emperor up as defender, through his adherence to established forms and procedures and not through the free exercise of his will, of officialdom more broadly and of the educated class as a whole. Similarly, Tao-hsueh views on self-cultivation and efforts to promote local voluntary institutions involved an assumption that the man of proper cultivation could act for the good of the community and empire without needing to wait upon instructions from his emperor, or even if his emperor, deluded by those around him or addled by his own life of indulgence, would not approve.

Power, if not authority, could be fragmented—or else concentrated in a small number of bureaucratic hands—by the growth of factionalism. Traditionally this had been taken as a sure sign of the absence of the harmony characteristic of ideal rule. Factional partisans in Sung could and did charge the opposite faction with infringing on imperial authority. But this was not the whole picture. Ou-yang Hsiu's defense of factions of virtuous men is well known. The impression persists in the field, however, that Ou-yang's was an isolated effort. Yet Liu showed over twenty years ago that the position had been asserted fifteen years before, and again immediately before Ou-yang's essay, by Fan Chung-yen. Liu also discussed its various workings-out in the arguments of Ssu-ma Kuang, Ch'in Kuan, Su Shih, and others. Bol refers in chapter 3 to Ssu-ma Kuang's own defense of factions. All these, of course, are Northern Sung examples. But Ou-yang's work continued to supply one of the standard vocabularies for talking about factions in Southern Sung. Wei Liao-weng is shown, by Liu in chapter 9 here, stating Ou-yang's position that virtuous men and small men fall naturally into different factions to the chief councillor Shih Mi-yuan, quite as if it were common currency, and going on to add the ironic appendix:

[66] David Nivison, "Ho-shen and His Accusers," in Confucianism in Action , ed. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 230-31.

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"Who would admit that he is a mean, small-minded man?" The implication seems to be that factions are natural even apart from questions of virtue. Li Hsin-ch'uan's work on the history of Tao-hsueh reflects the same assumptions, if only implicitly. Li's essay, as we have seen, is frankly the history of the movement as a political entity, as a faction, not as an intellectual school; and he urges its members, in effect, to act more like a faction by attending to what attains and keeps position at the center. Tillman has shown that in fact Tao-hsueh adherents very commonly referred to themselves as a "faction." Chu Hsi himself adopted Ou-yang's position when he advised the emperor to employ superior men regardless of whether they formed a faction, but even more strikingly when he wrote to a serving chief councillor: "Not only do not be angry with superior men for forming a faction, but do not fear placing yourself in a faction. Not only do not fear to place yourself in a faction, but also lead superior men in forming a faction, and do not be afraid."^[67]

Implicit in all of these discussions of factions is an impulse to limit imperial authority, since other men are being authorized not only to take positions or urge policies but to join together and organize in support of them. Our point is not that this was the only way of talking about factions in Sung: clearly it was not. The older language of principled antifactionalism survived and was used—it was Shih Mi-yuan's language, for example, in his conversation with Wei Liao-weng. It may be that in Ming and Ch'ing it would become again the only language available, at least on pain of severe imperial or ministerial response. But in Sung it coexisted with its opposite. And to view them necessarily as opposites is in any case too simple. Chu Hsi, Nivison has shown in another context, used the language of antifactionalism himself in his sealed 1180 memorial to the emperor Hsiao-tsung, attacking a coterie of officials with whom the emperor had surrounded himself, and criticizing the emperor himself for doing so. But this, as Nivison points out, is precisely the point: Chu is using this language not to exalt the emperor's power (though he speaks of the officials as infringing upon it) but to challenge his right to choose to rely on these few men; he goes on to tell the emperor he does not know right from wrong.^[68] Both the notion of the "faction of superior men" and the notion of the impropriety of factional behavior, though logically opposites, could be turned to the same purpose of asserting a right of persons other than the emperor to judge action and to act.

Since officials and memorialists, from Fan Chung-yen to Wei Liao-weng, appealed to emperors to resolve factional disputes in favor of "superior men," and since in practice the throne was the ultimate resort, it might be

[67] On Chu Hsi's letter, see Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Career," p. 181.

[68] Nivison, "Introduction," p. 21.

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argued that we are still dealing with a phenomenon ultimately strengthening the case for imperial despotism. However, it is crystal clear that for those who make the appeals it is not imperial approval that defines the "superior man." On the contrary, the emperor is being called upon to ratify the judgment of others. Chu Hsi was hardly alone in deploring the access to the throne enjoyed by unworthy men, thus questioning both the emperor's judgment and his authority to exercise his judgment when it was so imperfect. He and others of course went much further in censuring the emperor himself, passing judgment on what we would call his private as well as his public life, and claiming it as their role to rectify him.

On this limiting of imperial authority and on leaving room for the authority of others, men associated with both the polarities we have discussed agreed. It held true for moralists who wished to transform society, because they did not look upon the emperor as the fount or even, barring a hoped-for transformation of his character, the repository of all values. It held true even more obviously for those who would limit the scope of the state and allow for the operation of private decisions. Whatever the facts of the distribution of power in Sung, autocracy—let alone despotism—was not the ideal of most articulate Sung political argument.

Conclusion

An introduction, perhaps, should not properly "conclude": its point is to set the stage for what follows. We have tried to show some ways in which a rather varied set of chapters bears on common themes. There are, again, surely other themes and other perspectives. But to round off our own deliberations on these materials, let us return to where we began. Near the outset we laid out, as a broad framework for our project in politico-intellectual history, three broad and overlapping historical processes. One was the long-term secular decline in the power of the Chinese state, especially in relation to local communities, proposed by G. William Skinner. The second was the process of social, demographic, economic, and cultural and intellectual change encompassed by what is usually called the "T'ang-Sung transition." The third was the political transformation from Northern to Southern Sung, and with it the complex of changes in the behavior, concerns, and self-conceptions of the elite that first Hartwell and later Hymes have argued took place across the same boundary.

Of these three processes of change, the third obviously has been central to our discussion so far. The other two point us in different directions, one backward in time, the other forward. On the relation of all that appears here to the changes of the T'ang-Sung transition, much work remains to be done. The course of intellectual change from mid and late T'ang through Five Dynasties and into Sung is as yet not fully traced; David McMullen's

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recent work on T'ang provides a strong foundation that needs to be built upon.^[69] None of the chapters in this volume says anything of ways of thinking or arguing that precede Sung. Yet at the outset some plausible suggestions can be made. Quite apart from processes of intellectual change or lineages of ideas, if the T'ang-Sung transition was anything at all, it was a process of enormous expansion of commerce, of commercially oriented agriculture, and of private wealth. The middle and late T'ang state, as Denis Twitchett showed long ago, created fiscal institutions that drew on the expanding commerce to shore up public treasuries depleted by the loss of taxing authority in large parts of the country to regional military governors and other provincial authorities.^[70] The Sung state was heir to many of these institutions. All of this is surely the essential foundation for the common Sung concern, for some nearly an obsession, with issues of the relation of public to private interests: see the chapters by Smith, Bol, yon Glahn, and Hymes. The "engrossers," builders of private economic power, that so preoccupied Wang An-shih were not his concern alone: Chang Fang-p'ing, who in the reform period became Wang's opponent, had earlier written of them with equal urgency, and the problem seems to have been a commonplace of middle Northern Sung discourse.^[71] We will have more to say about the problem of "public" and "private" below. How to see commerce and the things that commerce brought about was clearly a major issue of Sung argument. But Sung discourse reflects not only anxiety over private wealth and its exchange, but familiarity as well. We have already suggested that the emphasis on the sale rather than donation of grain in Southern Sung famine relief schemes—even those of would-be remoralizers of community life like Chu Hsi—reflects a general comfort with commercial ways of thinking that grows directly out of the real changes of the period; and that the very term yueh —"contract" in one rendering—in Chu Hsi's own community compact scheme likewise reflects the influence of commercial usages. In talking of economy one could say extraordinary things in Sung, things that seem to have no root in earlier Chinese discussions and to which we know no later parallel. Consider the censor Sun Sheng, writing in Northern Sung to justify existing fiscal privileges for urban residents:

[69] McMullen, State and Scholars . Work as yet unpublished by Peter Bol promises to do much to clarify the transition. We have written this introduction before being able fully to examine Bol's recent book manuscript, "This Culture of Ours," forthcoming 1992 from Stanford University Press.

[70] Denis Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T'ang Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially pp. 49-65.

[71] Personal communication from Peter Bol on work in progress. On Chang Fang-p'ing, see Liang Zhihong, "Conceptions of and Practices in the Eleventh-Century Chinese Government: Based on the Case Study of Chang Fang-p'ing" (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaii, 1988), passim.

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The system of requisitioned labor service is implemented in the countryside but not in the cities. The government is not unaware that this means liberal treatment for people in cities and hard labor for the rural population. But in peaceful times people in the cities are engaged in commerce day and night. By keeping commodities circulating, they sell the hundred products and support the countryside.^[72]

What could be more unexpected than a Chinese claim that cities, by their commerce, supported the countryside —a reversal of all traditional Chinese arguments on the relation of trade and agriculture, of cities and countryside? A degree of acceptance—but more than acceptance, really approval—for urban and commercial life is expressed here that goes beyond even anything treated in the chapters here, though Tung Wei certainly approaches it closely. Surely this could only have been said in a period of rapid urban growth, when actual relations of city and country were being transformed.

On the Skinner hypothesis more can be said. If secular decline in state power is rooted in population growth, Sung should hold an important early position in the process, since the first of the massive demographic expansions of the second thousand years of imperial China began in T'ang and continued through the first century of Southern Sung. As we have seen, there are certainly reasons for holding that the Sung state was significantly weaker in Southern than Northern Sung. But the case is complicated. In the first place, it is hard to explain Southern Sung state weakness in purely demographic terms, since a state still of roughly Northern Sung size now confronted a population reduced initially by a third through the loss of North China. Indeed, the Southern Sung state actually expanded slightly the number of county seats in the territory remaining to it, which as Skinner points out is characteristic of Chinese states in periods of division, and so in theory improved its apparatus of control. If technical imperatives are to explain the state's fairly sorry performance in the localities in Southern Sung, it is perhaps rather to the military threat in the north, and the drawing away of resources—especially resources of coercion—in that direction, that one should look.

But there is, we would argue, still more to the story. In Skinner's picture, after all, it is not simply the growth of population that weakens the state, but the state's tendency not to keep pace with that growth, or with growth in the commercial economy, by expanding in turn. The question why this was not done is made more interesting, in Sung, by the fact that

[72] Li T'ao, Hsu Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (Taipei, 1961) 196, 17 a-b. We take the passage from Peter Golas, "Financial Statecraft in Sung: The Case of the Government Monopolies," unpublished paper. Golas's paper, which grew out of one presented at our conference but is not included in this volume, is a long and eloquent argument for the (sometimes qualified) legitimacy of commerce for Chinese officials in Sung.

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the major political upheavals of Northern Sung turned precisely on a determined and massive effort to do just that, an effort that, though in the end abortive, dominated Chinese politics for sixty years. For if one looks to China in this period for some equivalent of the state-building monarchs and ministers of Europe after the sixteenth century, surely one finds just that in Wang An-shih and in his successors of the same factional line in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, particularly the minister Ts'ai Ching and his emperor, Hui-tsung. Here were expansion of means of revenue-gathering and of quantities of revenue, and extension of bureaucratically organized state power into daily life at the local level (pao-chia , Green Sprouts) to a degree unprecedented in Sung and perhaps unrivaled afterward until the late nineteenth century—and motivated, at least most immediately and practically, by the same concern to compete militarily with strong neighbors that would drive European nation-builders. Here above all was a commitment to expand the bureaucracy itself—partly by dissolving the distinction between it and the clerical subbureaucracy beneath it, which was to be fully professionalized—and to draw existing non-governmental elites fully into the service of the state.

There is no doubt of this last point, which sets Wang and his followers so clearly apart from what was to become the virtually universal Chinese view that a lot of officials was a bad thing. Here is Wang, quoted by Smith: "Only with many officials can [essential] tasks be accomplished. So long as these tasks are accomplished there is nothing wrong with great [official] activity." (Against conventional notions of balancing expenditures against revenue, which always implied that both must be kept low, Wang then went on to argue that large-scale spending could promote prosperity.) Wang was proposing precisely that the state should grow to keep up with, and indeed ultimately take up, the private sector. And this in fact, under his regime and especially that of Ts'ai Ching, it tried to do. In the introduction to her important work on state expansion and the growth of a "public sphere" in late Ch'ing, Mary Rankin has recently written:

The [Ch'ing] government was chronically underfinanced and therefore superficial. It sought to dominate the critical aspects of political, military, and fiscal power, but it did not penetrate much below the level of the district administrative centers, and it intervened only when it considered its interests clearly at stake. Despite the use of Confucian ideology to instill loyalty to the emperor and obedience to authority, the claims of the Chinese state over the populace do not seem as extensive as those deriving from the organic concept of a strong, interventionist, integrated state that developed in Europe and parts of Latin America.^[73]

[73] Mary Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 13.

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Now it seems to us that the ideas of Wang An-shih and the late Northern Sung reformist state-builders offered precisely the "organic concept" that Rankin finds missing in Ch'ing, and that their "new laws" attempted to put the concept into practice. If this is so, then the factional struggles over Wang's reforms, their political failure with the fall of Northern Sung, and later the ultimate victory, among the educated elite of Southern Sung, of the view that the state should not grow, acquire a fateful tone in retrospect. It may be that any attempt to expand the Chinese state to match and control the expanding population under it was doomed ultimately by technological limits that could not be surpassed before industrialization. This is not the place to argue the general point. But though the argument convinces utterly when one tries to imagine a preindustrial state achieving tight control of a population like the four hundred million of late Ch'ing, it is less clear that the task was impossible for a state confronting the roughly hundred million of Sung. In other words, at some point and for some period the failure of the Chinese state to grow may be simply a historical fact, needing explanation apart from ultimate technical limits—unless it can be demonstrated that the technical limits had already been reached in T'ang, and this we doubt. In this context it may be useful to see what goes on in late Northern and Southern Sung as a sort of process of social decision, the working out, in political conflict and then compromise, of a tacit yet negotiated agreement between state and elite as to what sort of state one was to have and what sort—Wang An-shih's sort—one was not to have.

This process of "decision" has to have been just that: a process. It was complex, shaped by the interaction of ideas with events, of institutions with values, of real possibilities with notions of what was possible and of what was desirable, of history with men's beliefs about history—most particularly, perhaps, shaped by the military and territorial catastrophe of the end of Northern Sung and by a partly delegitimized and certainly weakened state's need to attract the loyalties of southern local elites thereafter. Finally, we should almost certainly think of it not as a smooth and direct development but as one with its share of fits and starts. We have so far drawn a clear line between Northern and Southern Sung in relation to views of state and society; but temporally the line may not have been so sharp. There were still powerful people at court in the first reigns of Southern Sung who declared some sort of allegiance to the line of Wang An-shih, who was enshrined in the Confucian temple at this time and continued to be so honored until 1241.^[74] Whether this allegiance extended to the larger content of Wang's projects for state and society or was largely a matter of simple fac-

[74] Kondo Kazunari, "Nan-So shoki no O Anseki hyoka ni tsuite," Toyoshi kenkyu 38 (1979-80): 26-51. See pp. 2-3 for English summary.

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tional affiliation remains unclear. Peter Bol has shown elsewhere that Chu Hsi himself felt the need to treat Wang's legacy as a serious intellectual competitor.^[75]

Many particulars of both the political and the intellectual sides of the process remain to be worked out. It is tempting, for example, to speculate that Chia Ssu-tao's policy of land expropriation between 1263 and 1275, which even if geographically limited represented a drastic, desperate attempt at central-government intrusion, was doomed from the start not only by politico-economic realities but also by its failure, even in the face of external menace, to muster arguments persuasive enough or force powerful enough to reverse the prevailing social decision and so overcome the resistance of local elites and bureaucrats not only in the affected regions but throughout the country and the bureaucracy.^[76] More work needs to be done before we can say just how, and how quickly, the negative or limited view of state power that we have been tracing displaced alternatives represented by Wang or even by predecessors like Fan Chung-yen and Ou-yang Hsiu. Clearly, again, the process was related to the localizing tendencies of Southern Sung elite life. But the larger point is that once efforts like Wang's had, for a considerable stretch of time, failed; once the elite had moved toward ways of living and defining itself that went directly counter to the effort to absorb elite into bureaucracy; and once systems of ideas had been worked out that legitimated and indeed encouraged localist, or more precisely voluntarist and nonstate, approaches to problems of governance; then it became much harder for later regimes even to consider doing what Wang had set out to do. We do not claim that in Sung a turning was made once and for all, but we do claim that things happened (and did not happen) here that have significance for later dynasties as well. The same social decision may have had to be made again (in early-to-mid Ming, for example?), but it would then have been made against the background of a heritage of social and cultural conditions, especially a heritage of local elite practices and beliefs, already long shaped by Sung choices and their consequences.^[77]

We see connections to later periods in another direction as well. Here we return to Rankin's argument for the emergence in late Ch'ing discourse of a notion of "public" (kung ) space or "public" activity as something lying between what was "private" (ssu ) and what was "official" (kuan ). The "public" activities of gentlemen activists, which included the founding and

[75] Peter Bol, "Chu Hsi's Redefinition of Literati Learning," in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , ed. de Bary and Chaffee, pp. 151-85.

[76] Herbert Franke, "Die Agrarreformen des Chia Ssu-tao," Saeculum 9 (1958): 345-69. For a discussion, far less detailed, in English, see Herbert Franke, "Chia Ssu-tao: A 'Bad Last Minister'," in Confucian Personalities , ed. Wright and Twitchett, pp. 217-34.

[77] We argue here along lines at least partly anticipated or paralleled by Smith, Bol, and yon Glahn in their chapters.

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promoting of new institutions and agencies of social amelioration, were inspired in part by the "statecraft" theories of late Ming—early Ch'ing scholars like Ku Yen-wu, but they built also on established and by late Ch'ing well-developed semiformal arrangements under which local men made decisions and managed services for their own communities. Rankin shows that these efforts at social rebuilding from the locality up came into conflict with the state-building efforts of the central government in the late nineteenth century.^[78]

We would argue that a notion very like Rankin's "public space" is precisely what is emerging in Southern Sung, partly through conscious and systematic Tao-hsueh -based efforts at institution building like Chu Hsi's and partly, again, through a less precisely articulated tendency among local elites in general to involve themselves in semiformal, semipublic institutions of community. To see the parallel to what Rankin describes for Ch'ing one must first look beyond the evidence of language itself, for the emerging "middle space" of Southern Sung did not acquire the term kung , "public," as its special epithet, as it seems to have done in late Ch'ing. But it is worth dealing briefly with the uses that were made of the terms and notions "public" and "private," kung and ssu , in Sung. We will then suggest that another term did acquire in Sung some of the peculiar connotation that kung would have in late Ch'ing.

It is generally held that Chinese social and political discourse found little room for a positive notion of private interest, or ssu . This view that self-interest is wholly rejected by the tradition may have resulted from the weight of the undeniable negative connotations that ssu could and often did entail, but also from considering only certain sorts of evidence. There is little question that in moral philosophy ssu , which may often be as well rendered by the English "selfish" or "selfishness" as by "private" or "privacy," is commonly treated as an aspect of humanity that needs to be suppressed by or transformed into its opposite, kung , "public-mindedness," "the public good," "the common welfare." This was the general approach of Tao-hsueh thinkers. Tillman argues that Ch'en Liang is working toward a more nuanced approach to the issue with his stress on the naturalness of human desires and with his insistence that laws must accord with these—a point that we have seen was also Ssu-ma Kuang's; but even Ch'en does not seem to have explicated a clear distinction between a normatve and a descriptive sense of ssu or made of personal self-interest anything like a positive good. Still, the ideas that human desires were natural and that laws and institutions must accord with them were sometimes affirmed even by men more firmly within the Tao-hsueh circle. In the context of such affirmation ssu would seem to mean simply an excessive yielding to one's own

[78] Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China .

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limited self-interest, or perhaps a yielding to self-interest in a context that made it inappropriate (when one was in office, for example, or when one was emperor). The more deeply one examines what even Tao-hsueh theorists have to say, the less one is able to support the notion of an absolute rejection of self-interest as a motive. Yet the negative bent of much Tao-hsueh discourse on the issue remains clear.

"Public" and "private," kung and ssu , however, were used to refer not only to aspects of human motivation and behavior but to areas of life, parts of the social world. And here the picture is far less black-and-white than in discussions of personal morality. The notion of a private domain, in society and economy, as something with a legitimate existence of its own was very old in China, though it was also not the only view available. Peter Golas has called attention to the "cliché" that "one ought not to compete for profit with the people."^[79] That this was a cliché in Sung shows the strength of one way of thinking and talking about these issues; the saying itself goes back at least to the "Discourses on Salt and Iron" at the court of the Han dynasty. What makes it interesting is its clear assumption that "profit" (li )—what Mencius had rejected as a proper topic with King Hui of Liang—is a proper pursuit for "the people." For those who used the line, there was an arena in society in which profit was a legitimate aim. That this was a notion widely, though not universally, shared in Sung 'discourse is shown by Bol on Ssu-ma Kuang, Tillman on Ch'en Liang, and Hymes on Tung Wei.

This arena, to be sure, is here identified as the arena of "the people" (min ), not explicitly a ssu or "private" arena. We suggest that in Sung and in other periods "the people" was one of the most prestigious and thus persuasive words available when one was attempting to talk of what we might now call a private sector in a way that granted it legitimacy. Joining it with kuan ("officials," "government," "the governmental sphere") as a contrastive pair was common usage, and generally when the two were paired each side was treated as having its own proper and legitimate, but potentially different, interests. But "people" was not the only such word. There was another cliché in Sung. Consider Ou-yang Hsiu, in his "Essay on Fundamentals," complaining of the poor management of surpluses by the Sung state: despite agricultural wealth that was steadily growing, "whenever we encounter one flood or drought, as in the Ming-yu and Ching-tao periods, then in the empire public and private [kung ssu ] alike are in want. "

Here are "public and private" as domains or aspects of society; and when the "private" domain is in want, that evidently is bad. We find the same with Wang An-shih's associate Wang Shao, quoted by Smith: if a trading bureau is opened, "both official and private interests [kuan ssu ] will

[79] Golas, "Financial Statecraft in Sung."

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benefit." For private interests to benefit, it seems, could be a good thing even to a supporter of Wang An-shih. Such expressions are absolutely standard fare in Sung memorials. It was a predictable argument for any new proposal that if it was implemented, "public and private will both benefit" (kung ssu chieh i ). The point may seem obvious, but what is important is that it shows that ssu could have positive or neutral as well as negative connotations. Those who used the pairing of "public and private" here could, if they had found the notion of ssu inherently negative, have used "people" instead of "private," as we have seen. That they did not feel the need shows that the word ssu had in the proper contexts a legitimacy of its own. There was a private domain or sector of social life; it was legitimate and its interests deserved consideration; and it could be designated as ssu . That the same word could also be used to mean "selfish" should not distract us from the fact that it is here used to indicate a legitimate side of social and economic life. To think in these terms does not seem to have required the revaluation and even celebration of individual self-interest as personal motive that took place in some branches of the Wang Yang-ming school in Ming. One might say that in Sung kung and ssu had on the one hand an evaluative sense, as terms of moral discourse applied to ways of feeling and living, and on the other hand a social-descriptive sense, as terms for different parts or levels of society or economy; and that in the latter usage both sides could be seen as neutral or necessary, or even good.

For the comparison with Rankin it is interesting that when arenas or sectors of society were the issue in Sung, the term "public" (kung ), if used, referred always to the government. It was not available, so far as we can find, as a prefix or epithet for institutions and activities of the "middle level." "Private," when used in like contexts, seems to have applied to the world of individual and household interests and to the commercial world. There was no single term that characterized the new local-level institutions promoted by Chu Hsi and others. Rather, there were several, falling into two categories. There were terms that referred directly to the social level of the activity or institution, that identified the sort of group it was created for—for example she in she-ts'ang , "community granary," or hsiang in hsiang-yueh , "community compact," where both she and hsiang are commonly translated "community." Of the two, hsiang was much more common for such purposes; thus we find it also as one of the social levels of ritual in Chu Hsi's compendium: "community (-level) ritual" (hsiang-li ).^[80] And there was the word i , "duty" or "moral obligation." There were i-ping (literally "duty troops"), private voluntary militia; i-i ("duty service"), arrangements for the performance of state-required local service duties in rotation supported

[80] Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China , pp. 32-33.

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by a common pool of privately donated funds; and i-chuang ("duty estates"), the charitable estates studied by Walton.

We would argue that "duty," i , came more and more in Southern Sung to be applied in contexts having to do with voluntary social action and semiformal governance at a level lying between family and state. There were ambiguities or alternative usages.^[81] Some i-ts'ang , "duty granaries," were state institutions. It would be interesting to discover whether in Southern Sung most official i-ts'ang were not in fact established by a single local administrator on his own initiative and often with his own personal funds. We suspect that a large proportion were, and that the action might thus still have been seen at the time as belonging to the same middle level of nonbureaucratic, nonfamilial "duty," and the name might have been applied partly for this reason. Community granaries, for example, were often founded in this way. Walton's charitable estates belonged more often than not to lineage-like descent groups. This was not necessarily an exception to the tendency we are tracing, as descent groups too were viewed as, and to a considerable degree really were, organizations of community above the household (chia ) and below the state. The discussions of descent group estates that justify them in terms of "duty" treat them precisely as organs of community governance. "Duty," we are suggesting, was acquiring, as one of its meanings, the specific sense of a motive to beneficent action which, falling between "filial piety" (hsiao ) for one's relation to one's family and "loyalty"' (chung ) for one's relation to the state, belonged peculiarly to a certain social level: the "middle" level of the (often ideal or imagined) "community."

If we are right in this, then i as an identifying prefix in Sung corresponds in important ways to Rankin's late Ch'ing usage of kung. Kung itself was not used in just this way in Sung. Still it is fascinating to find the two terms used together, as intimately connected notions, in a line famous for other reasons, but which heads this chapter chiefly because it is one of the few prominent Sung uses of the term ching-shih , the "statecraft" of Ming-Ch'ing discourse. This, of course, is Lu Chiu-yuan's declaration: "It is precisely for the sake of duty (i ) and public-spiritedness (kung ) that we are engaged in putting the world in order (ching-shih )."

The term ching-shih brings us to a final issue. As we have said at the outset, the conference out of which this volume developed was an attempt to raise the question of "statecraft" as an aspect of Sung political discourse and action. We moved, in our discussions of the issue at the conference, between two poles: on one side treating "statecraft" or ching-shih in its Ming-

[81] As there were in late Ch'ing as well: there certainly were usages of kung that continued to apply to the state rather than to Rankin's "public sphere,"

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Ch'ing sense—essentially equivalent to "practical statesmanship"—as it has come to be understood in Western discourse on those periods, and looking for Sung equivalents or anticipations of it; on the other side working from the broader but literal sense of ching-shih as "ordering the world," the sense which it seems to have in its occasional Sung and increasingly frequent and influential Yuan usages. It was in this sense, for example, that the term was read by most of our Chinese participants, for whom indeed it was often still very much a live idea. We had at the same time the powerful presence of John Pocock at our sides, pointing out the peculiarity of the term "statecraft" and its Sinologic usages in the eyes of a historian of Western political ideas.

Several points became clear as we progressed. First, there never was in Sung, in our own view, a "school" that was the equivalent or ancestor of the statecraft "school" (if that is an adequate way of characterizing it) of Ming and Ch'ing. Rather, the concerns that were typical of "statecraft" scholars and activists in Ming and Ch'ing were in Northern Sung largely one part—alongside much else—of a broadly shared universal discourse. Though this was by no means as true in Southern Sung, then too men who occupied themselves with such concerns did so without seeing themselves as belonging to a particular school or line of thought.

Second, to treat "ordering the world" as a central issue of Sung discourse, though true insofar as the sheer meaning of the words is concerned, runs up against the fact that the Chinese term ching-shih , of which the English words are a conventional translation, was used only occasionally in Sung^[82] It neither functioned as a slogan nor attracted especial controversy. At the same time, many of us were convinced that there were signif-

[82] The expression first appears in Chuang Tzu , where it seems to mean something like "passing through the ages" or "past ages" and so apparently is not an ancestor of the later usage. See A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 44. During the Sung it appears prominently first in the title of Shao Yung's Huang-chi ching-shih shu . His son Po-wen explains that "ching is what is meant by most constant, shih what is meant by most changing." The implication is that ching-shih here means something like "bring constancy and order to the secular," which is coming closer to later meanings of the term. Shao Yung also wrote a poem on ching-shih (I-ch'uan chi jang chi [Chugoku koten shinshu ed., Tokyo 1979], pp. 152-53). By the time Lu Chiu-yuan uses it, he seems able to assume a meaning something like "ordering the world." "Ordering/managing the age" has been suggested as an alternative translation (personal communication, George Hatch). In our view "age" does not fit into the context of Lu's usage as well as "world"; Lu is criticizing Buddhists, not for not dealing with time, but for not dealing with the social and "worldly." It is clear that nothing in this or later Sung usages excluded the possibility that nonstate initiatives would be meant. We suspect, though have not done the work to show, that this possibility of meaning was still open in Ming and Ch'ing as well. For discussions of ching-shih , see Otto Franke, Studien zur Geschichte des Konfuzianischen Dogmas (Hamburg, 1920), pp. 13-15; and Wolfgang Franke, "Die staatspolitischen Reformversuche K'an Yu-weis und seiner Schule," Mitteilungen des Seminars fur Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zn Berlin 38 (1935) no. 3, pp. 59-60.

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icant parallels or connections between the issues of Sung discourse we were discussing and the "statecraft" problematic of late Ming and Ch'ing. But this issue too is complicated by the fact that specific influences from Sung to Ming or Ch'ing are often not demonstrable. William Atwell was on hand to tell us that the hard-line ching-shih figures of late Ming who have been his particular interest, such as Ch'en Tzu-lung, rarely cited Sung authors, going back more frequently to T'ang or Han authorities and assuming that "Sung learning," at least after Wang An-shih, was concerned only with personal morality or metaphysics. It is possible that the infrequent Sung use of the term ching-shih itself contributed to this view, but doubtful that this is the whole story.

None of these points is uncontroversial. In chapter 10 Wm. Theodore de Bary argues persuasively for a continuous line of development from Chu Hsi through Chen Te-hsiu to Ch'iu Chün in Ming, author of the compendium of practical statecraft, the Ta-hsueh yen-i pu .^[83] It may be that our modern treatments of "statecraft" thinking in Ming and Ch'ing at times separate it too sharply from other strains in the same periods, perhaps enough so that the notion of a statecraft "school" itself needs reexamination. On the other hand, some students of Sung would be willing to place Ch'en Liang and Yeh Shih together with such other figures as Ch'en Fu-liang and perhaps Lü Tsu-ch'ien and speak of a "statecraft school" in Southern Sung, distinguishable from, though at some points overlapping with, the Tao-hsueh movement. Further work would be needed to support this idea; for now we see things otherwise, and the outcome of our discussions at the conference has been that as editors of the volume we have chosen not to make "statecraft" our central notion. It had become clear to us that the participants shared a common problematic without the need of recourse to the Ming-Ch'ing term; and that this common problematic was how Sung men viewed the relation of state and society, how they grounded those views, and the implications of that relation for social and political action, especially of an organized or institutional kind. This is what we have been discussing so far, and all of the chapters in the volume bear on it in significant ways .^[84]

Still, none of this is to abandon the notion of parallels or connections to later "statecraft" discourse, even apart from specific influences of the kind de Bary shows. We have argued for some of these here, and have tried in particular to call attention to the institutional-reformist side of the Tao-hsueh

[83] The same connection from Chen Te-hsiu to Ch'iu Chün is traced in Hung-lain Chu, "Ch'iu Chün's Ta-hsueh yen-i pu and Its Influence in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Ming Studies 22 (1986), pp. 1-32. Hung, however, places much greater stress on the differences between Chen's work and Ch'iu's.

[84] We have not, however, seen any reason to force our decision upon our contributors, and the term "statecraft" appears in a number of the chapters.

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movement, which we think later treatments, whether by seventeenth-century thinker-activists or by twentieth-century historians, have unduly neglected. More broadly, we have argued that the notion of a middle-level "public space" that Rankin points to for late Ch'ing had emerged in Southern Sung, as far as we know for the first time in the history of Chinese social and political discourse. We hope that students of both periods, and of the long, long time between them, of which we still know too little, the Yuan and particularly the first half of Ming, will take up our arguments, either to challenge them or to work them out further than we have been able to work them out here. We remain convinced that the Southern Sung was, in more than one way, a pivotal time.

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One
Su Hsun's Pragmatic Statecraft

George Hatch

The writing of Su Hsun (1009-1066) is a literary model of pragmatic statecraft. It was prepared during the years 1047 to 1055, inspired by the reform regime (1043-1045) of Fan Chung-yen (989-1052), and submitted to the court by Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072) at the height of the literary reform in 1056. At its center is a thesis about historical contingency, an idea developed first in military strategies, then set in the context of historical evolution, producing finally a judgment of historical experience and political action critical of early Sung tendencies toward cultural orthodoxy.

Su Hsun was a townsman in Mei-shan, Szechwan; his family were small landholders commercially involved in the local silk trade.^[1] There was no office before his generation. Su Hsun passed a wayward youth and failed to study seriously until age twenty-five. After his visit to K'ai-feng in 1047 to take (and fail) a mao-ts'ai exam, he claimed to have consigned all his previous writing to flames, pursuing a new style, which finally came in a revelatory flood in the early 1050s. A series called Ch'üan-shu embraces five essays on military strategy and five more on great historical strategists; a series follows under the title Heng-lun , treating in ten essays the management of generals, ministers, scholars, law, land tenure, and military institutions. The implication is that the ch'üan and heng essays relate to each other like the weight and beam of the steelyard, that is, that strategy is the fulcrum of statecraft. There are then two grand rhetorical pieces, "On Assessing Circumstances" and "On Judging the Enemy," in which the sovereign

[1] Su Hsun, Chia-yu chi (hereafter, CYC ) (Taipei: Commercial Press reprint, 1968). See the biographical material on the family in Herbert Franke, ed., Sung Biographies (Wiesbaden, 1976), pp. 885-969.

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shows less the power of creation than of response to external things. A series follows "On the Six Classics," extending the contingency thesis to the origin of civilization in a dialectic between the sage and custom. A last series includes two essays "On History," a redefinition of the normative function of historical writing, and two more "On Remonstrance," in which credit is given to the "wandering persuaders" of the Warring States era.^[2]

In 1055 Su Hsun completed a family genealogy, which tried to establish country virtue where court status could not be found.^[3] He left for the capital again in 1056, intending both to enroll his sons in the chin-shih exam of 1057 and to find patrons for his own bag of literature. He wrote boldly to Ou-yang Hsiu (councillor of state and literary reformer), Fu Pi (chief minister), Han Ch'i (privy councillor in charge of imperial armies), and T'ien K'uang (assistant military commissioner), excusing all the while his presumption in addressing them. Su stressed in his letter to Ou-yang Hsiu a deep conversion experience;^[4] in his letter to T'ien K'uang he claimed his literary talent was a gift of heaven, which must be used.^[5] In Southern Sung, Chu Hsi would pronounce Su Hsun's letters shameless and undignified.^[6] But in the 1050s such a confrontation between the heavenly elect and the state's elite was not an impropriety, but a usable strategy in the reform of scholarship and letters then under way, and Su Hsun found his patrons. Su met with these luminaries, and they praised his work. He received in 1060 an editing appointment in the Imperial Libraries—without examination.

Literary reformation and the reform of the examination system were two strands of a single thread in early Northern Sung. Literature was dominated by parallel prose style, a decorative aestheticism in tonally opposite lines, which was applied even to official examinations and state papers. Attracted to Han Yü (768-824) and the T'ang classical prose movement since his youth, Ou-yang Hsiu began to study with the prose master Yin Chu (1001-1046) in 1029. In the same year the emperor Jen-tsung favorably considered reform proposals, but no permanent action was taken. In Fan Chung-yen's Ch'ing-li reform (1043-1044), Ou-yang was chosen to write new examination standards; they were approved only shortly before the Ch'ing-li reform failed.^[7]

In the ten years after the Ch'ing-li reform, Ou-yang Hsiu endured an unstable exile in the face of personal and political attacks upon him. He

[2] The "Essays on the Six Classics" are a separate subject and are not dealt with here.

[3] CYC , ch. 13, "Su Shih tsu-p'u."

[4] CYC , ch. 11.

[5] CYC , ch. 10.

[6] Chu-tzu yü-dei (Taipei: Chung-cheng reprint, 1962), ch. 130, p. 13a.

[7] For Ou-yang's role in the literary movement, see James Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), chap. 10.

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had written his major essays in political ideology before the Ch'ing-li era; now his militant interest in political reform waned. He gave his attention to literary correspondence, continued serious work in historical research and writing on the Five Dynasties period, and strengthened his ties with outstanding classicists such as Hu Yuan (992-1058) and Sun Fu (992-1057), whose revisionist approach to a relevant understanding of the classics he shared. When he returned to court in 1054, he was still trying to expand his circle of prose writers. It was in 1056 that he sanctioned Su Hsun and his literature, commenting that no other pleased him more.^[8] In 1057 Ou-yang Hsiu gained control of the triennial chin-shih examination, and without prior announcement required candidates to demonstrate fitness to govern by writing in the ancient prose style and answering questions on the Confucian classics. The power of state was used to move where persuasion had failed. Su Hsun's sons Su Shih (1036-1101) and Su Ch'e (1039-1112) took high honors in this contested event, and the whole family became celebrities.

The literary movement was ideologically radical. While Han Yü impelled the movement, he wanted a return to the free prose in which classical writing was done, and he wanted people to return to the classics as the curriculum of value formation. Where Confucian values are taken exclusively as the measure of value, and other historical alternatives are eschewed, a society tends toward orthodoxy. Han Yü projected a strong bias for cultural unity; he concocted an influential theory called the tao-t'ung , or orthodox succession of the Way, which read Buddhism and Taoism out of history.^[9] Han Yü became the patron sage of the Sung movement. Ou-yang Hsiu accepted his line in his examination behavior, and avowed in his essay "On Fundamentals" (Pen lun ) that only a return to ancient Confucian rituals would restore the sanctity of culture.

The diversity and flexibility with which Sung scholars met antiquity in literature, classical studies, and statecraft is an expression of the pursuit of classical norms in a changing culture; the search was for contemporary cultural forms that were consistent with classical principles. Su Hsun helped to supply the former, but not the latter. He was uninterested in Confucian orthodoxy, and began his writing, not with the Confucian classics, but with the political literature of the Warring States and early Han, which tended toward anomy in the eyes of his Confucian contemporaries. The product was preserved in anthologies of "the eight great prose masters of T'ang and Sung," but was not assimilable in Confucian thought. It is significant in the social history of the Northern Sung period, in which provin-

[8] Ibid., pp. 145 and 154.

[9] Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T'ang Search for Unity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 158-66. Hartman likes the term "cultural orthodoxy."

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cial minds had to meet and respond to Neo-Confucian ideas surging from south-central China. We are given a datum in the process of social change.

Contingency

Su Hsun raised a contingent politics in defining the political act in terms of ch'üan and shih. Ch'üan means (often irregular) authority or power. Legalists and dynastic hegemons meant by it an absolute and unmediated sovereign power. Confucians in the New Text school in Han used the word to mean expedient action in correlation with ching , the constant norm. Su Hsun liked to stand on that ground: "The doctrine of Chung-ni [Confucius] was founded exclusively on constant principle (ching ); my doctrine reverts to constant principle via expediency (ch'üan )."^[10] But he preferred to refer to the most basic meaning of the character, the weight on a steelyard. "Now the beam (heng ) of a steelyard is always scaled, with a notch here to mark the chu measure, and there to mark the tan measure. If a true measure is not obtained, it may be said that the weight (ch'üan ) is bad."^[11] Playing on the double meanings of the word, it becomes the function of authority to "weigh" or "balance" events. Imperial power is thus limited (by circumstance rather than by principle), relative, expedient, and temporal; there can be no absolute force.

Shih is in Su Hsun's usage simply "circumstances." Circumstances are multiple, motivated by separate wills, and impact upon one another to create a shifting ground of action. A general, minister, or sovereign cannot create or control circumstances. One can only ride them for a time in pursuit of one's own interests. Events in formation offer both limitations and opportunities for action; strategy is required to deal with circumstances, to bring about the opening one seeks. While the future seems open, events in retrospect appear inevitable, the result of the characteristics of the separate elements that comprise them. Possessing knowledge about the motives of these elements is what Su Hsun's strategies are all about: he claims to influence the interplay of circumstances to the advantage of his patron.

The theme of contingency characterizes Su Hsun's work because in his mind circumstances are changing and unpredictable, because action is a limited response conditioned by external things, because politics is pragmatic rather than normative. He began his thinking in jejune battlefield strategies, where he learned about weighing circumstances; he moved to the criticism of historical statesmen, where he transferred his strategies to politics; and he began finally to criticize contemporary state policy, where his

[10] CYC , ch. 8, "Chien-lun," I.

[11] CYC , ch. 4, "Heng-lun," preface.

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"circumstances" became necessary historical trends, and he the philosopher of "historical contingency."

Strategy

Su Hsun found his heroic tales in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi . He found there great statesmen, figures who may have often taken the field, but for whom war was only one factor in the achievement of larger political purposes. The themes of Su's early essays are drawn from events in the late Spring and Autumn, Warring States, and early Han periods, when political behavior was informed by a high social mobility, an unstable political pluralism, and unguarded personal heroism in the pursuit of wealth and power.

We can represent the kind of strategy that preoccupied Su Hsun in his early essays by his views on Ssu-ma Ch'ien's account of the defense of Lu by Tzu-kung, a disciple of Confucius.^[12] A crisis arose when T'ien Ch'ang, usurper in Ch'i, sought to occupy disloyal generals by sending them out on an expedition to Lu. Tzu-kung, known for argument among Confucius's disciples, was recommended to prepare the defense. Tzu-kung went first to Ch'i, where he argued that Lu was a poor prize in war, and that the suspicious generals would only grow in stature and ambition at such an easy victory. He advised T'ien Ch'ang to direct his generals toward Wu instead, where the plunder was better and the generals might even perish. In Wu, Tzu-kung revealed the impending attack, arguing that a defense of Lu would raise Wu's stature as a hegemon state, and that the defeat of Ch'i would handily intimidate Chin, strong neighbor to Wu. Wu agreed to the entrapment of Ch'i, but feared revenge in its rear by little Yueh. Tzu-kung called that cowardice and offered to persuade Yueh to join the attack on Ch'i, thus removing any threat. In Yueh, Tzu-kung invited the ruler to avenge his hatred of Wu by following the expedition on Ch'i. If Wu were defeated, Yueh would be fortunate; if Wu were victorious, she would move on Chin and find herself encumbered by both Ch'i and Chin while Yueh raised havoc in her rear.

Wu began the attack on Ch'i to alleviate pressure on Lu; Ch'i was overcome. Wu went on to attack Chin, and was herself sharply defeated. Yueh sacked the Wu capital in the rear of the campaign and killed its king and ministers. After three years Yueh moved east to become hegemon. It was by the merit of Tzu-kung, said Ssu-ma Ch'ien, that Lu was saved, Ch'i thrown into disorder, Wu extinguished, Chin strengthened, and Yueh made hegemon. "By causing circumstances to break on each other," he noted, a transformation was brought about in all five states.

[12] Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Shi-chi , ch. 69.

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Su Hsun was fascinated by the "breaking circumstances," but he disliked the strategy. He thought it too complex and unfairly disastrous to innocent parties, like the state of Wu. Wisdom might suffice to initiate a strategy, but something more—good faith—was required if results were to endure. Here, vengeful states would soon be at war as before. More simply, Su thought, the rebellious generals of Ch'i might have been told of the plot against them, and been drawn to join Lu in punishing T'ien Ch'ang for his treachery. Ch'i would then lie in debt to the virtue of Lu, with benefit for several generations. Tzu-kung, said Su, "was in this a follower of the wandering persuaders who could ride the advantage of the moment, but could not sustain an affair over time."^[13] The relation between wisdom and good faith drawn here suggests Su Hsun's own understanding now of the different character of war and politics.

Su Hsun thought Han Kao-ti a brilliant strategist, with "high wisdom for great affairs, though less sense in small things."^[14] As though he could see before him the machinations of the Lü family and the rebellion of the principalities, he presciently appointed Chou P'o grand protector at a time when things seemed perfectly secure. It was then Chou P'o who preserved the throne when rebellion occurred and members of the Lü clan tried to drive the Liu family from court. Why had Kao-ti not removed the empress Lü in the first place? Because "circumstances would not permit it." The empress Lü had assisted in pacifying the empire, and was held in fear by the great ministers. This alone could suppress their ambitions and permit the heir to reach his maturity. Knowing what he was powerless to prevent, Kao-ti had wisely protected his line in advance. These events offer a historical ground for a proposition stated more lucidly in criticism of Hsiang Yü, whose strength, courage, and nobility of character were still a heroism fated to consume itself:

Now you cannot gain the power of empire unless you give something up; you cannot exhaust the profit of the empire unless you admit some loss. Thus there is ground that cannot be conquered, there are cities that cannot be attacked, victories that cannot be completed, defeats that cannot be avoided. One cannot be overjoyed at a turn of good fortune, nor angered by its reverse. One must let events in the world take their course, and try to exercise an influence in their wake to dominate the outcome.^[15]

The passage may stand in statement of Su Hsun's early understanding of contingency. He had begun with academic battlefield strategies, and moved then into diplomacy and politics. Time was the focus of action. Tzu-kung had found in unstable circumstances and human vanities the opportunity to

[13] CYC , ch. 3, "Tzu-kung."

[14] CYC , ch. 3, "Kao-tsu."

[15] CYC , ch. 3, "Hsiang Chi."

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stir wide conflict in the interest of Lu. Han Kao-ti, in planning the security of his house, had sought an accommodation to circumstances that might support his authority without arousing hostility. Politics remained still a strategy of response because the possession of power could never be permanent: it was held over a changing relation of discrete circumstances and independent wills, which might be ridden for a time but never really contained. Kao-ti played the field with cunning and restraint; Hsiang Yü, on his own account, set his ambition against heaven. Such an absolute victory was impossible, and success only a relativity; one might hope, in Su's words, to gain more than was lost. Where "one must let events take their course and try to exercise an influence in their wake," events have become genuinely autonomous, limiting the exercise of authority, and defining its role as no more than balance.

History

Su Hsun's pragmatic statecraft moved on a sense of historical process. What he primarily sought in the study of history was the location of authority and its relations with contingent elements in the political society. In an essay entitled "Judging the Situation" (Shen shih ), a grand rhetorical strategy for stabilizing the Sung state, Su Hsun begins with this hypothesis:

He who governs the empire first determines what shall be exalted. When that has been determined, it can remain unchanged for a hundred million years, giving the people a whole (i ) to fasten their eyes and ears upon without distraction, and providing royal descendants something to uphold for the ease of their government. Thus the sages of the three great ages were able to extend their line seven or eight hundred years. How could it have been that the memory of their merit among their people alone brought this about? It was rather because descendants received the laws (fa ) of their ancestors, and relying upon them were able to perpetuate their houses long. Hsia exalted royalty; Shang exalted simplicity; Chou exalted refinement; rulers looked to what the empire ought suitably to exalt and held to it firmly. They did not esteem refinement in the morning and simplicity in the evening. After a period of disintegration, a sage appeared again to determine what the time ought to exalt.^[16]

Su Hsun has agreed here to inhabit the historical time of the Shu ching , in which each of the ancient states was a self-contained cultural episode. Precedents were thought to have been transmitted rigidly within each house, until delegitimized by a bad last ruler. A new house was then established with the help of the mandate of heaven; no ritual transmission was envisaged between the two. It was the Han commentators Cheng Hsuan and Ma

[16] CYC , ch. 1, "Shen-shih."

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Jung who correlated the cycle of loyalty, simplicity, and refinement with the progress of the ancient dynasties. Su Hsun took these cultural identities to insist on a linear time in which each age defines itself anew. Historical time is then divided into two parts: antiquity, dominated by the founding sages of Hsia, Shang, and Chou; and the long "historical present" in which no sage has yet appeared. Su recalled that Chia I had attempted to persuade Wen-ti of Han that he ought first to fix the form of his institutions, but had gone unheeded. On this perspective, even Sung was an open moment in time in which the sage might be recognized in the act of definition.

At present the empire is enjoying a peaceful governance, and an imperial plan for ten thousand generations requires that what shall be exalted be first determined, providing posterity with precedents to uphold while reigning in peace. When defects of administration appear there may be small adjustments, but the general structure (ta-t'i ) may not be altered.

At midpoint in the essay, Su places Sung firmly in the context of the centralized prefectural (chün-hsien ) system laid down in Ch'in, and at the end of the piece he flatly asserts that the basic structure of the Sung state could not be altered at all. The proposition is now in doubt: the injunction is, on the one hand, for the Sung sovereign to establish the institutional identity of his empire and to base endurance on the continuities of its transmission; at the same time he shall not alter the precedents of the previous thousand years. The problem lies in the absence of a sage to preside over the great transformation from feudalism to centralism. Su cannot now conceive a political legitimacy without him.

This tension finds no resolution in "Judging the Situation"; instead, we discover what a strategic politics might be on Su Hsun's prescription.

I have examined into the court and the country at large to discover what it is that the state now exalts, and have yet my doubts. Why? The situation (shih ) in the empire may show either strength or weakness. The sage examines the state of affairs and responds to it with his weight (ch'üan ). When the situation shows strength, the addition of further force may cause it to crack; when the situation shows weakness, an extension of further compliance may cause it to wither. In order that the situation go to neither extreme, the sage applies a balance of sternness and kindness. When strength is dominant, sternness will exhaust its power to move; when weakness is dominant, kindness will be taken for granted and not considered a virtue. Thus a sovereign who reigns in weakness must use sternness to advantage; and one who reigns in strength must use kindness to advantage. When one stands on the sternness [that is inherent] in a position of strength to practice kindness, his kindness will be respected. When one stands on the kindness [that is inherent] in a position of weakness to confer sternness, it will cause the empire to tremble at its foundations. Thus sternness and kindness are the means by which situations of strength and weakness in the world are moderated.

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We begin to imagine how difficult it is to be a sage. Su Hsun said sternness and kindness were like medicine applied to the sick; and one had to know whether the state of health was yin or yang , for the addition of like to like would cause the patient to succumb. In Chou times the imperial domain was dwarfed by the territories of its vassals; yet for a long time each lord presented himself as servant, and the state of weakness did not become an insecurity. In later times the house began to lose its virtue and the vassals scattered, building strength to attack each other. The Chou rulers temporized, "trying to relieve a situation of weakness through a politics of compliance, and the empire succumbed to its weakness." The state of Ch'in divided its territories into commanderies and districts, gathering even local authority into the hands of the ruler, and achieved a situation of strength. But in growing distress, they continued to rely on legal controls to beat and behead the common people. Attempting to relieve a situation of strength through a politics of coercion, Ch'in succumbed to its strength. "Neither examined the state of things in the world."

The structure of rhetorical concepts which Su Hsun built into this piece may nearly pass the judgment of reason; only when "one stands on the kindness [that is inherent] in a position of weakness to issue sternness" does the rhetorical logic stray from substance. We cannot imagine how such a demonstration could be made credible, and Su does not supply any examples. "A state of weakness such as that of Chou required that the feudal system be altered before strength was possible," said Su, exposing his own sophistry. He located Sung in the context of Ch'in centralism, yet found it mired in weakness by excessive practice of kindness. Su's answer was a politics of "stem majesty" (wei ), to vitalize imperial decision making, tighten legal punishment, reduce corruption, and discipline uncontrollable armies. The rhetoric suggests that stem majesty is called for by the condition of contemporary affairs, that it fulfills a historic purpose and follows upon the succession of loyalty, simplicity, and refinement in the three ages of antiquity. The exhortation is to act as the sages of old, each of whom "looked to what was appropriate to the situation in which he found himself."

It is a feature of statecraft on this model that institutions and politics are simply different modes of activity. Institutions are historically given; in the major ambiguity of the essay, 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 are secured, where things beyond one's control are somehow managed to suit one's own purposes. But so long as strategy remains the model of political activity, its contingencies are not really informed by a consciousness of historical time.

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All politics in "Judging the Situation" take place in a statically defined present, attributable to the exclusive role given the sage. Su Hsun cannot conceive on the hypothesis of that essay an extension of political order in time that does not seem to require a suspension of social change.

Custom

In "Judging the Situation," Su Hsun exhorted his emperor to act the sage of antiquity, then confined him to political strategies rather than institutional reformation. The conclusive act of the sage rendered history static; society itself possessed no motive for change. Su Hsun escapes this box in a subsequent Shu-lun essay; he changes his focus from the founding sage to a new perspective on custom evolving in time, and he achieves originality.

Changes in custom are acted upon by the sage: he applies an influence (ch'üan ) in accord with the change. When the influence of the sage is exerted in a given age, the changes of custom are made the more complete, to the point where they cannot retrogress. If a sage should in good fortune appear to inherit and continue these changes, the world may be kept in order. But if no sage follows, the changes will exhaust themselves, and having no further development, come to a standstill. Once I wished to discover what changes had occurred in antiquity, but sought in vain. Where in the Book of Poetry Shang and Chou are mentioned, there is not sufficient detail; so I looked in the Classic of Documents . There I discovered the time of Yao and Shun and the changes of the great ages occurring in rapid succession. The changes from Yao to Shun were received by sages, so there was no concern. But with Chou the changes of the world had come to an end. Loyalty had evolved into simplicity, and simplicity evolved into refinement. These circumstances came about easily. But to suppose that the change of refinement might again revert to loyalty is like expecting a river to run across mountains. That men are happy with refinement and dislike loyalty and simplicity is like water's refusing to forsake its downward course and flow upward. Men in the beginning knew nothing of refinement, so they did not object to loyalty and simplicity. But once men have fed daily on delicate meats, could one really hope to restrict them again to a vegetable diet? Alas! for there have since appeared no sages; the changes of custom have reached their limit, and having no further direction, have come to an end.^[17]

Su Hsun appears to say that customs are self-generating and always changing, but in themselves are incapable of uniformity, like water, which loses its form without a channel in which to flow. The sage here is involved, not in an act of cultural creation, but in a response to autonomous behavior. He can influence customs in accord with their change and articulate a consistency to define his time; but he cannot direct a course that is not in-

[17] CYC , ch. 6, "Shu-lun."

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herently within their natural form, nor can he reverse their flow. The emphasis is on ongoing change, not static duration; custom and sagely authority are in a dialectical relationship that never ends. Neither alone can produce a social order; each engagement is on a new ground.

These are the implications of the Shu-lun essay, though Su Hsun passes too quickly over difficult ground. We do not understand the behavior of the custom referred to here; it has no obvious source. In the Classic of Documents , upon which Su claims to draw for his hypothesis, ritual status is given to ancestral ceremonies, political institutions, social etiquette, and the five relationships; it is these which are created by a sage and transmitted in a time of dynastic hegemony to legitimize a ruling house. Custom, on the other hand, refers there to the behavior of a people incompletely (or not at all) informed by ritual practice. Custom is different in place, changing in time, and easily moved by affective gratification. Custom and ritual are conceptual antonyms, separate bodies of behavior. Ritual makes the Way (Tao ), while custom remains the object of rectification.^[18]

We can read in the Record of Ritual (Li chi ) statements that are closer to Su Hsun's perspective and may be his source: the ruler "carried out the rites without seeking to change customs"; he "pursued the moral instruction of the people without altering their local usages"; the ruler "unified his morality in order to make his customs uniform."^[19] The enhanced status of custom in these passages suggests that the state may be required to govern through customary forms rather than by their alteration.^[20] Su Hsun wrote conventionally about the transmission of ritual in "Judging the Situation" above; now it is custom which has become the carrier of social continuity. Perhaps the two essays represent a shift of focus on Su Hsun's part, away from the "hundred million years" of ritual emplacement toward a more evolutionary view of social forms, in which the sage's role recedes as the realm of customary practice grows. That is in fact what has happened to the long "historical present" in which no sage has appeared. Su felt the institutions of Ch'in to be binding on Sung even though they did not possess the authority of ritual.

Some such transition must at any rate be imagined to appreciate the character of essays in the later Heng-lun series. Arguing tenets of state policy, they are preoccupied with constructing the authority of historical continuity in place of the sage's timeless ritual forms. Su Hsun observed in the Shen-fa essay that "the law of antiquity was simple, whereas that of today is complex. Simplicity would not suit present conditions, nor would complexity have suited antiquity. It is not that present law is not as good as anti-

[18] James Legge, The Shoo-King (Taipei reprint, n.d.), pp. 203, 574-75.

[19] Harvard-Yenching Sinological Series no. 27, "Index to the Li-chi," p. 604.

[20] Legge, Shoo-King , p. 572.

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quity, but that times now are not what they were."^[21] The former kings drew only the general outline of penal codes and were able to rely upon the clerks to decide the circumstances of the crime and its appropriate punishment. But in Sung officials were often ignorant of the law, clerks were usually venal, and the people were frivolous and deceitful. These then were contingent circumstances, which require that "law today is more like selling shoes, where sizes large, medium, and small are ready-made to fit the feet of everybody in the world."

In defending the laws of redemption (i-fa ), Su Hsun asserted that "in antiquity laws and statutes obtained obedience in the practice of benevolence and righteousness, whereas in later ages benevolence and righteousness are enforced by means of laws and statutes."^[22] A lack of full virtue in postclassical sovereigns was the reason for the turn. The T'ang officials Fang Hsuan-ling and Tu Ju-hui had drawn up a "penal code of minute and clear distinctions, appending to it uncompromising definitions of benevolence."^[23] These then became contingent circumstances in Sung, where "they followed the T'ang code, changing small items somewhat, but preserving its general structure." 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; a strict enforcement was the only possible response.

Su Hsun's most cogent contribution to the political forum of his day came in a pair of essays entitled "Land Institutions" (T'ien-chih ) and "Military Institutions" (Ping-chih ), where he was aroused to oppose the radical idealism of Confucian reformers citing classical models in place of social realities. The well-field system was a popular theme in the writing of Northern Sung literati; it was an item of Confucian ideology, which held up the possibility of social justice and economic equality. The discussion of its applicability to Sung raised the question of the meaning of the historical experience between Chou and the present. In the land tenure essay, Su accepted the charge of injustice laid by moralists on economic institutions and tried to show a policy that could utilize historical contingencies to mitigate the public distress.^[24]

Su Hsun acknowledged that it was the abolition of the well-field system which encouraged land to be taken from cultivators and given to those who did not cultivate. What should be done? His own preference was not for restoration: he produced an impressive catalogue of the divisions and dimensions of the well-field structure, insisting that it was a physical impossibility

[21] CYC , ch. 5, "Shen-fa."

[22] CYC , ch. 5, "Yi-fa."

[23] Ou-yang Hsiu et al., Hsin T'ang shih , ch. 96. Their legal work is not revealed in these biographies.

[24] CYC , ch. 5, "T'ien-chih." A partial English translation is in Wm. T. de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 408-9.

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to move the dirt and push the people of Sung into it without impoverishing the state· More interestingly, he denied that the system could be "restored," because it never had been "created·"

Did not the well-field system, which reached its height in antiquity, begin in the age of T'ang and Yü? Without the age of T'ang and Yü, the Chou would not have had the means to complete the well-fields. T'ang and Yü began it; it was put in order little by little in Hsia and Shang, and only achieved full preparation in Chou. The Duke of Chou inherited this system, settling it in accord with precedent and extending it to his borders. An institution like this could not have been hastily achieved in a single day; the course of development that it followed was gradual.

Su thought the expropriation policies in Han were ill-advised: "What goes against human feeling is difficult to practice·" When the well-fields are well placed on the plane of historical evolution, it becomes attractive to deal with problems of land tenure in the same incremental way. Su proposed that a limitation on landholding be announced for the future, which the wealthy could not exceed· Current holdings would fall by attrition· "Either descendants of the rich will be unable to preserve their holdings after several generations and will become poor, while the land held in excess of the limit will be dispersed and come into the possession of others; or else as the descendants of the rich come along they will divide up the land into several portions." I find the proposal naive; in the same mode, it would be better to lessen the appeal of land as an investment by stiff progressive taxation. But Su stands on the natural tendency of the estate to fragment among heirs: "Now just by sitting at court and promulgating the order through the empire, without frightening the people, without mobilizing the public, without adopting the well-field system, still all the advantages of the well-fields could be retained· Even with the well-fields of Chou, how could we hope to do better than this?" A clear line of argument emerges, insisting that institutional continuities and the feeling of people grown accustomed to them must be respected in policy formulation.

The essay on military organization is argued on similar historical lines, but toward a more complex and substantial conclusion.^[25] In it Su took up the problem of how to support a large military establishment without impoverishing the state·"In the three great ages, soldiers fed on their own plowing and dressed by their own mulberry cultivation· They had to labor, and labor produced a good heart. Since Ch'in and Han, a soldier has become one who sits and eats off the local government, and in his arrogance there is nothing he will not do." It was the abolition of the well-fields that encouraged the decline, and in the long time since then statesmen had come up only with the garrison (t'un-t'ien ) and the state militia (fu-ping ), using

[25] CYC , ch. 5, "Ping-chih."

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soldiers to grow their own food when they had nothing else to do. Even these had been hard to preserve and had still not relieved the people of financial burdens. In Sung there were a few garrisons left, but no state militia at all, and no unoccupied land on which to restore them.

"Even a three-foot child knows that the well-fields of the three great ages cannot be restored; but it might be possible to approximate the intent of antiquity by a gradual planning." Su noted that the government held two kinds of property: grant lands (chih-fen ), farmed out to tenants, with half the yield going to the support of government offices; and defaulted registries (chi-mo ) taken for tax liabilities, which were either sold off or rented out for the public good. Su advised that these latter, of unknown quantity, not be sold anymore, but distributed to tenants at the rate of three hundred mou per family. The former tax of one-half could be reduced to a third and turned over to the treasury. Each of the tenant families should produce one person for the "New Army," gathered for training and service for one season of the year. This army would grow with the natural rate of defaulted properties, and in several decades would amount perhaps to 90 percent of the armies. As practicing farmers, customary labor would ensure their discipline. A benefit would accrue to all parties, army, society, and tenant family in particular. "If a family can by providing one soldier enjoy securely several hundred mou of land, without having either the military conscriptor or the tax collector reach their doors, certainly they would undertake it gladly."

Themes that Su Hsun had pursued erratically reach a maturity here. The historical line applied to the development of these institutions contrasts with the static cultural episodes of the "Judging the Situation" hypothesis: they dissolve as Su confronts the well-field fixation and historicizes its creation. The sage retreats, leaving behind the natural evolution of historical circumstances; Su then grasps the process as a condition of policy formulation. In raising solutions that must evolve naturally from immediate circumstances, Su asks his sovereign to perceive the historical contingencies by which things must be as they are, to discover that opening in the structure of the present through which he may encourage a gradual movement toward his objective. Su Hsun stood in common with his Confucian adversaries against coercion. His ground was not, however, a moral idealism, but the natural limitations of imperial power engaged in a strategy of survival: "One must let events in the world take their course, and try to exercise an influence in their wake to dominate the outcome."

Continuities

It is a conception of time that grows in Su Hsun's writing; he passed from an infatuation with the timing of the strategic moment to an awareness that political action is taken within the context of complex historical tendencies.

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It was here that Su Hsun's unusual mind confronted the classical orthodoxy of his day.

I argue that with Confucius the authority of ritual norms was traditional: one observed customary practices handed down from generation to generation in an act of social inheritance.^[26] He acknowledged a change of custom, but not a rupture of transmission. His presumption was that traditional value and historical experience were consistent enough to warrant the claim of continuity between high antiquity and his own time. It was Han Yü in the ninth century who subverted the authority of tradition. He created the possibility of a hiatus in time, a piece of history without the Way, as it were. The possibility of "restoring antiquity" (fu-ku ) lay with this point: the historical and the customary had to give way to the authority of classical value.^[27]

The pull of classical authority may be seen in the statesman Wang An-shih (1021-1086), who was, even so, not heavily associated with the restoration line. Wang thought the regeneration of customs a priority: "The sages ruled the people in accordance with the wishes of heaven. The main task is to give the people security and wealth. The essence of this task is none other than the rectification of social customs. Changes in custom affect the volition of the people on which the prosperity or decadence of the country depends."^[28] The reason the Sung court could not rectify customs was "because many existing regulatory systems fail to agree with the government policies of the ancient kings."^[29] Wang thought the reign of the Duke of Chou and King Ch'eng, as described in the Rites of Chou (Chou li ) the most perfect model, yet warned against duplicating the past. "Some people nowadays, without much clear thinking, want to follow the exact footsteps of the ancient kings; they do not understand that changes are made in weighing the times."^[30] It is hard, however, to make Confucius stand as authority for such a pragmatism; Wang found him finally a model not of change but of summation:

Now the Way emanated from Fu Hsi, though his laws did not obtain completion until Yao. Although Yao was able to complete the laws of the sages, these are nowhere more replete than with Confucius. Now if the knowledge of a single man applied to the prosperity of the sages is sufficient to fully form the laws of the world, why should it have remained undone until Confucius? Because it was never the intention of the sages to seek coercive action in the world. They awaited its transformations and fashioned their laws in accord

[26] Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1972), chap. 7, "Time, Institutions, and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding," pp. 233-72.

[27] Han Ch'ang-li chi (Taipei: Ho-lo, 1975), pp. 7-11, "Yuan-tao."

[28] James Liu, Reform in Sung China (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 41.

[29] Ibid., p. 43

[30] Ibid.

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with them. It was not until the time of Confucius that the transformations of the world reached their completion; only after that could the laws of the sages be made replete. This is what is meant in the Book of Changes, "Working through the transformations, the people will not be labored." Mencius said: "It was Confucius who achieved the great completion," meaning that he gathered the affairs of the sages to complete the laws of ten thousand generations. This is why he is more worthy than Yao and Shun.^[31]

We recognize that Wang An-shih is astride the same dilemma that plagued Su Hsun's reasoning on time in the cultural episodes of antiquity: a potential evolutionary premise, which might even leave Wang the "completer," is thwarted by the insistence that the possible transformations of the world had run their course by the time of Confucius, and in Confucius found their highest social articulation. Regretfully, perhaps, Wang agrees to close tradition within classical time, in order to retain the authority that a classical orthodoxy affords to a politics taken in its name.

It was Su Hsun's achievement to accept the consequences of continuity in the events of postclassical time. He got there, not by historicizing antiquity (Liu Tsung-yuan had done that better before him and still not made the jump),^[32] but as a result of confronting the premise of classical orthodoxy with his own conception of political action. When authority is conceived as a power of balance taken in response to autonomous circumstances, the extension of such acts in time may produce an inverse conception of traditional continuity: social norms are not inherited in customary usage, but are emergent in social experience. I have designated this a concept of historical contingency, the antithesis of classical orthodoxy, in which social norms are applied prescriptively on the authority of past usages rather than current practice. The Sung classicist might lament that the social degeneration between Han and T'ang should not have happened, and wish for a sage to restore the Way. But on an understanding of contingency, the continuity of social experience cannot be broken. Each act is conditioned by an environment of circumstances not all apprehended; the unexpected proves retrospectively inevitable; yet each moment in time appears open.

Su Hsun was not interested in confounding historical explanation by casting Indra's net around each discrete event; he cared, not about historical causation, but about the ground of political action. A contingent act is an expedient response, conditioned but not predetermined, taken pragmatically on immediate interest. He had said of king and hegemon, "It was simply that each looked to what was appropriate to the situation in which he found

[31] Wang An-shih, Wang Lin-ch'uan chi (Taipei: Shih-chieh, 1960), ch. 67, "Fu-tzu hsien-yu Yao Shun," p. 423.

[32] See the essay "On Feudalism," in Liu Ho-tung chi (Taipei: Ho-lo, 1974), ch. 3, pp. 43ff.

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himself." Contingent action in historical perspective reveals that social change is linear and irreversible, that institutional development is gradual and incremental, that the customs and conventions of behavior in the present constitute the only limits and opportunities available to political action. Su Hsun's essays on land, law, and military institutions are well argued theses that define the contingency of time and action to refute the premise of classical orthodoxy in policy decision.

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Two
State Power and Economic Activism during the New Policies, 1068-1085' The Tea and Horse Trade and the "Green Sprouts" Loan Policy

Paul J. Smith

Modern historians of China have identified two long-term movements whose intersection helped shape the economic statecraft of the New Policies. On the one hand, as Twitchett, Skinner, and Feuerwerker among others have observed, from about the eighth century "there was a clear tendency for public and private [sectors of the economy] to be more clearly differentiated, and for the private sector to be enlarged at the expense of the public."^[1] The chief symptom of this trend, which continues into the twentieth century and stands as a defining characteristic of China's late imperial era, was the steady withdrawal of government from direct involvement in the economy, as market activity expanded beyond the regulatory capacity of the premodern state.^[2] On the other hand, for many historians of the middle and late imperial eras the Northern Sung, in particular the statist reform program of the New Policies, marks the high point of direct state involvement in the economy and society, and the culmination of a three-century cycle of economic activism that also began in the eighth century.

How are the long-term disengagement of the state from the economy and

Acknowledgments : I would like to thank the members of the Haverford-Bryn Mawr History and Social Theory Workshop for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

[1] Albert Feuerwerker, "The State and the Economy in Late Imperial China" (unpublished manuscript, 1983), p. 12. See also Denis Twitchett, "Merchant, Trade, and Government in Late T'ang," Asia Major , n.s. 14, no. 1 (1968): 63-95, and G. William Skinner, "Urban Development in Imperial China," in G. Wm. Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 3-32.

[2] For an analysis of the organizational constraints on an expansion of the state commensurate with the growth of population, see Skinner, "Urban Development," pp. 19-24. As Skinner points out, problems of size, complexity, and span of control restricted government involvement in all areas of local administration, not just commerce.

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the three-century cycle of economic activism related? One solution is to view the activist cycle that culminated in the New Policies as a final attempt by a uniquely professionalized bureaucratic elite to keep the burgeoning economy under the control of the state. Here I attempt to support such a view by contrasting two measures that represent the New Policies approach to economic mobilization, and that highlight the ways in which the activist state intervened in the market economy. These are the Szechwan Tea and Horse Trade, which monopolized Szechwanese tea to pay for the purchase of cavalry horses from Tsinghai, and the "Green Sprouts" farming-loan act, which sought to turn the state into the primary provider of rural credit. Comparison of the Green Sprouts and Tea and Horse measures is recommended both by their similarities and by their differences. As I will discuss later in the chapter, both policies reflect a typical characteristic of Sung economic regulation: the creation of regional state enterprises and agencies to participate directly in the market economy; and both measures were generated by a common activist blueprint for reform that authorized field agents to employ state power to compete with private economic actors for control over the returns to commercial activity. But similar policy impulses take different organizational shape depending on the nature of the specific task and the environment within which it is to be performed. In later sections I analyze the organizational structure of the Superintendancy for Tea and Horses (tu-ta t'i-chü ch'a-ma-ssu , hereafter termed the Tea and Horse Agency, or THA) and the circuit-level Ever-Normal Granary intendancies (t'i-chü ch'ang-p'ing-ssu , or ENGs), which administered the Green Sprouts loans, and attempt to explain why the same action blueprint produced a radically decentralized enterprise based on the autonomous, entrepreneurial use of power in the first instance, but a tightly centralized network of dependent agencies in the second. Finally, in my conclusion I speculate about why post-Sung administrations gradually abandoned direct state involvement in the market economy, as shifts in the social basis of official service promoted the view that the state might regulate but could not dominate society.

The Sources of Activist Statecraft

Since the following pages will be devoted to a discussion of the nature and institutional shape of economic activist statecraft during the New Policies, I begin with a working definition of economic activism. By economic activism I mean, first, a propensity to participate in the commercial economy both directly, through monopolies and government enterprises, and indirectly, through commercial taxation; and second, a commitment to the use of state power both to promote economic activity and to increase the government's share of the economy's total resources. With this definition as a starting

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point, if we accept as useful the hypothesis that from mid-T'ang on the Chinese economy began to expand more rapidly than the regulatory capacity of the state, how can we explain the synchronous cycle of economic activism that peaked some three centuries later in the New Policies? Many factors converged to produce the activist statecraft of Northern Sung, but no convincing explanation should exclude the interplay between the rise of a bureaucratic elite that benefited from the expansion of government activity and the emergence of strong frontier states that forced China into a perpetual search for new resources with which to subsidize defense.

As Denis Twitchett has shown, even as burgeoning market expansion convinced T'ang finance officials that commerce could no longer be suppressed or adequately controlled, the rebellion of An Lu-shan in 755 left the T'ang court with few sources of revenues apart from commerce. Once the state had lost control over the flow of direct taxes from agriculture, a newly emergent group of specialized financial administrators began systematically to exploit the rapidly growing commercial economy by imposing state monopolies on the sale of salt, tea, and wine, and ad valorem taxes on the transit and sale of commercial goods. By the rise of Northern Sung in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Robert Hartwell has demonstrated, the T'ang nucleus of financial specialists had developed into a functionally integrated financial service, disproportionately staffed by members and associates of a professional bureaucratic elite that specialized in and drew a large part of its income from government service, and that was oriented to the use of state power to regulate and tax commerce and industry.^[3]

Through its encouragement of trade and industry, expansion of the money supply, dissemination of new knowledge and techniques, and pursuit of predictable and consistent economic policy, the Sung financial administration initially helped to foster China's spectacular economic transformation. At the same time, Sung specialists, building on the foundation laid by their T'ang predecessors, created the elaborate bureaucratic apparatus needed to tax and intervene in expanding commercial activities. In the course of the eleventh century they built up a field administration of some 2,000 commercial-tax stations and another 3,000 government economic in-

[3] For Twitchett's account, in addition to "Merchant, Trade, and Government," see also "The Salt Administrators after the Rebellion of An Lu-shan," Asia Major , n.s. 4, no. 1 (1954): 60-89; Financial Administration under the T'ang Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 49-65, 97-123; and "The Composition of the T'ang Ruling Class: New Evidence From Tunhuang," in Denis Twitchett and Arthur Wright, eds., Perspectives on the T'ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 47-86. For Hartwell's analysis of the composition of the Sung elite and its relationship to policy formation, see "Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, no. 2 (1982): 405-26. On the rise and nature of the Northern Sung professional financial service, see Robert M. Hartwell, "Financial Expertise, Examinations, and the Formulation of Economic Policy in Northern Sung China," Journal of Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1971): 281-314.

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stallations (ch'ang-wu ) to collect the empire's taxes on trade and manage its salt, wine, and tea monopolies and other fiscal enterprises.^[4]

Because of its widespread fiscal apparatus, in Northern Sung the government was able to draw more of its revenues from the dynamic commercial sector of the economy and to draw a larger share of the economy's total output than at any other time through the late nineteenth century. According to the financial expert Chang Fang-p'ing, for example, combined receipts from the commercial sector amounted, at 15 million strings of cash, to about 23 percent of the government's total income of 65.6 million units at the turn of the eleventh century, rising to 36 percent of its total income of 126 million units in the late 1040s. By 1076 combined commercial receipts came to 50 million strings, roughly equal to the value of the direct-tax (liang-shui ) quota of 52 million units, and so just under 50 percent of the government's total income. After the Sung, commercial taxes did not again loom so large in the revenues of the Chinese state until the early twentieth century, when Ch'ing finances came under foreign supervision. At the same time, according to estimates by Albert Feuerwerker and others, it appears that the Sung state was able to take in almost twice as much of its economy's total output as either the Ming or the Ch'ing state.^[5]

As long as the state was able to use its tax revenues to provide services that stimulated investment, Sung economic activism facilitated economic

[4] Peter Golas provides a clear description of Sung fiscal organizations in his chapter "The Sung Financial Administration," esp. p. 14, in The Cambridge History of China , vol. 5, in preparation. For an analysis of the sources and distribution of income and expenditure during the Sung, see Robert M. Hartwell, "Government Finance and the Regional Economies of China ca. 750-1200," unpublished paper prepared for the PARSS Seminar on Historical Data and Theories of Rational Choice, 1987. Studies of specific government contributions to various features of economic development during the Sung abound. For a synthesis of the chief Chinese and Japanese literature as of the early 1970s (drawing particularly on the work of the Tokyo school), see Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973).

[5] Chang Fang-p'ing, Lo-ch'uan chi (SKCS ed.), 25/25b-26a; Ma Tuan-lin, Wen-hsien t'ung-k'ao (Shih-t'ung ed.), 4/59b (hereafter WHTK ). During the Ming and early and middle Ch'ing the land tax accounted for about 75 percent of total government revenues. See Ray Huang, Taxation and Government Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 46; and Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China , 1750-1911 (Cambridge: Harvard University East Asian Series, 1973), table 4:2, p. 72, and table 4:4, p. 80. Feuerwerker estimates Northern Sung taxation at about 13 percent of total economic production, in contrast to between 6 and 8 percent for the Ming and Ch'ing (through the late nineteenth century), speculating that the difference may reflect the greater ease of taxation in the context of relatively higher urbanization rates during the Northern Sung. See "The State and the Economy," table 1, p. 4, and p. 7. Feuerwerker's figures are quite speculative, as he himself suggests, but they suggest an order of magnitude that is accepted by, inter alia, Marianne Bastid, "The Structure of the Financial Institutions of the State in the Late Qing," in Stuart Schram, ed., The Scope of State Power in China (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), pp. 74-75.

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growth. But the impact of the activist state on a growing economy was mediated by a second critical component of Sung China's political environment, the rise from the seventh century on of powerful and united steppe empires. Encircled by stable, literate, and often hostile states, the Sung was unquestionably the most beleaguered of the major dynasties, and the only one forced to acknowledge equal players in a multistate Asian system. By 1127 Sung would lose half of its territory to the Jurchen Chin, but the dynasty had been threatened by rising frontier states from its very inception. At the founding of Sung in 960 the Khitan Liao were already established well inside the Great Wall frontier to the north, and shortly thereafter the Tangut Hsi-Hsia began an expansion outward from the Ordos that by 1036 gave them control of all the oasis cities of the Kansu corridor. Sung policymakers were constantly aware of the power of their northern neighbors, and of their own vulnerability. In many ways the competitive nature of the Asian geopolitical system between the tenth and thirteenth centuries helped foster the innovations that have come to characterize the Sung economic revolution. Sung's precocious development of mining, metallurgy, armament, and naval technology all stemmed in part from the need to repel sophisticated steppe cavalries, while the state's unusually active promotion of international trade was aimed at supplying much-needed revenues and such essential foreign commodities as horses. Later dynasties paid a price for their relative freedom from competitive pressures: following the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century the steppe no longer presented a formidable threat to China, and as Elvin has suggested for the late imperial era as a whole, and Wakeman for the Ch'ing, the absence of strong international competitors fostered a sense of self-sufficiency and isolationism in the last two dynasties that contributed to their political and technological stagnation.^[6]

[6] Sung encirclement is discussed in greater detail in Paul J. Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224 (Cambridge: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1991), chapter 1. See also the essays collected in Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chap. 2, provides an extremely clear synthesis of Western scholarship on the interrelationship between war, markets, and technology in Sung China. For the retarding effects of the absence of competitors, see Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past , pp. 215-25; Frederic Wake-man, "China and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis," Late Imperial China 7, no. 1 (June 1986): 20-23. In excluding the Manchus themselves as a threat from the steppe I follow the position that the Ming fell under the weight of its own systemic sclerosis, which rendered any solution to the externally generated crises of climate, famine and pestilence, bullion-flow, and the rise of the Manchus impossible. See Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), and William Atwell, "The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in China and Japan," Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (Feb. 1986): 223-44.

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Chou Po-ti has suggested that the fiscal innovativeness of Sung stemmed directly from its military weakness, which compelled financial administrators to invent new methods of generating revenues to pay for expensive technological and logistical solutions to military vulnerability. This points to the malign side of the relationship between the rise of the steppe and the Sung economy. The need to maintain a constant defensive readiness against actual or implied foreign threats was translated into a growing fiscal burden that transformed the Sung fisc into what Shizuo has referred to as a perpetual "wartime economy." By the middle of the eleventh century, for example, the regular army numbered 1.25 million men, for whom grain and other provisions had to be imported from the southeast at great cost to the government. As of 1065 defense expenditures alone consumed 83 percent of the government's cash and 43 percent of its total yearly income, surpassing by 35 percent the entire Ming budget of 1502. Escalating defense expenditures forced the activist state to dig ever deeper into the burgeoning economy, raising the danger that overtaxation would encounter diminishing returns and bring investment and economic growth to a halt. Indeed, by 1059 revenues and production had already succumbed to overexploitation in the southeastern tea industry, forcing the government to suspend its eighty-year monopoly.^[7]

Beginning in the late T'ang, then, the rise of a professional financial service converged with the growing costs of geopolitical insecurity to produce an activist orientation to economic statecraft. When a sense of crisis overtook the Sung leadership in the mid-eleventh century, this activism provided the foundation for the radical state-directed experiments of the New Policies. The proximate origins of the New Policies can be traced back to the early 1040s, when the Sung lost every important battle in a three-year war with the Tanguts that underscored the impotence of China's huge but aging army and drove the economy into two decades of inflation. The Tan-gut wars initiated a quarter century of political reexamination, but neither the Ch'ing-li reform movement under Fan Chung-yen nor later reform initiatives by such leaders as Ssu-ma Kuang and Ou-yang Hsiu in the 1050s and 1060s successfully addressed the chronic problems of physical security and financial solvency, and military and economic crises again converged in the mid-1060s: the Tanguts stood poised to invade the Tibetan buffer zone of Tsinghai, threatening Sung's only horse supplier and imperiling its very

[7] Chou Po-ti, Chung-kuo ts'ai-cheng shih (Shanghai, 1981), pp. 259-60; Sogabe Shizuo, Sodai zaisei shi (Tokyo, 1966), p. 3; Shiba Yoshinobu, "Sodai shiteki seido no enkaku," in Sodai shogygoshi ronso (Tokyo, 1974), p. 128. The Ming figure is extrapolated from Ray Huang, Taxation and Government Finance , p. 46. On the southeastern tea industry, see Paul J. Smith, "Interest Groups, Ideology, and Economic Policy-making: The Northern Sung Debates over the Southeastern Tea Monopoly," unpublished paper presented at the Regional Conference, Association for Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast, Eugene, Oregon, 1977.

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borders, and for the first time government expenditures exceeded receipts.^[8] Emperor Shen-tsung's accession in 1067 brought an even greater sense of urgency and provided the opportunity for a new approach, and the new emperor issued a broad appeal for fundamental reforms^[9] Within a year the emperor had thrown his support behind Wang An-shih, who proposed meeting the crises of the time by thrusting the power of the bureaucratic state still further into society and the economy in order to mobilize the resources of the nation for defense and national renewal. In conception and execution the resulting New Policies represent the culmination of the trend of economic activism begun three centuries earlier in the mid-T'ang.

The New Policies and Economic Activism

Many eleventh-century political thinkers saw an intensifying conflict between public (kung ) and private (ssu ) interests, but they offered widely different solutions. As Peter Bol shows in his comparison of the political visions of Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang, Ssu-ma accepted the proliferation of private interest groups as irreversible and sought only to prevent private interests from capturing the public institutions and functions of the state, and thus to ensure that as the sole public and impartial agency in society the state could mediate between private interests to promote social and political stability. Wang An-shih, on the other hand, came close to rejecting a legitimate place for private interests in the polity (without forgoing the manipulation of private interests as a means of inducing public-minded behavior), and from early on dedicated his career to recreating in the present an imagined ancient unity that would obliterate barriers between public and private spheres and collapse distinctions between the state and society.^[10]

Wang's idealized commitment to reunifying state and society informed a variety of practical policy proposals, such as the attempt to merge clerks and officials through reforms of the subbureaucracy, or to unite farmers and soldiers in his pao-chia local policing system.^[11] But the goal was most

[8] Ch'eng Min-sheng argues that the deficit, traditionally put at 4.2 million units, was a statistical fiction that reflected the inability of Sung financial officials to keep track of the national accounts by 1065. See his "Lun Pei-Sung ts'ai-cheng ti t'e-tien yü ch'eng-p'in ti chiahsiang," Chung-kuo-shih yen-chiu , 1984, no. 3:27-40.

[9] Sung-hui-yao: chih-kao 60/3a-4a (hereafter cited as SHY:CK ).

[10] See Peter Bol, "Government, Society, and State: The Political Visions of Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih," chap. 3 in this volume.

[11] In 1072 Wang told emperor Shen-tsung that "to unite clerks and officials and farmers and soldiers as one is the first obligation of imperial governance" (li yü shih, ping yü nung, ho wei i, ts'u wang-cheng chih hsien-wu yeh ). Li T'ao, Hsü tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (Shih-chieh shu-chü ed.), 237/8a (hereafter cited as HCP ). For an extended discussion of this issue, see Miyazaki Ichisada, "O Anseki no rishi goitsu saku—Soho o chushin to shire," in his Ajia-shi kenkyu , vol. 1 (Kyoto, 1957), pp. 311-64; anti James Liu, Rearm in Sung China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 82.

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sharply enunciated in his theories of political economy. Wang put public finance at the very center of public affairs, even investing finance with a sense of moral mission: "governing is for managing resources, and managing resources is what is meant by moral duty" (cheng-shih so-i li-ts'ai, li-ts'ai nai so-wei i yeh ). Public finance could assume a moral dimension for Wang precisely because he recognized no rightful demarcation between the public and private sectors of the economy: household, public fisc, and the resources of the natural economy were interlinked, so that if any one sector was to be enriched they must all be enriched. As Wang proclaimed in his Myriad Word Memorial of 1058, the proper object of public finance (chih-ts'ai , governing resources) had always been "to utilize the energy of all under heaven to produce wealth for all under heaven, and to use the wealth of all under heaven to meet the needs of all under heaven."^[12]

Wang's normative model of state and society generated an unconventional, although by no means unprecedented, diagnosis of the mid-century fiscal crisis. The conventional view was represented to the emperor by Ssu-ma Kuang, after he was appointed to investigate the deficit crisis in mid-1068. Ssu-ma reported that "the reasons for the current budgetary shortage lie in wasteful administrative expenditures, unrestrained bestowal of emoluments and rewards, an overpopulated imperial household, a bloated bureaucracy, and an inefficient military."^[13] Shen-tsung dutifully instituted a campaign for fiscal responsibility in the imperial household and established an Office of Expenditure Reductions (ts'ai-chien chü ), but by early 1069 the economizing campaign appears to have run out of steam, and the emperor turned instead to Wang An-shih.

Wang had consistently refused to see excessive expenditures or inadequate resources as the primary reasons for budgetary crises. On the broadest level, the state was straitened because "there was no Way (tao ) in the governance of resources," and its officials had "lost the Way of creating wealth."^[14] By the "Way of creating wealth" Wang meant the institutions, techniques, and authority through which the state was meant to govern the exchange values (ch'ing-chung ) and collection and disbursement (lien-san ) of goods and money in the economy as a whole. Though today we

[12] Wang An-shih, Wang Lin-ch'uan ch'üan-chi (Shih-chieh-shu>-chü ed.), 73/464, "Ta Tseng Kung-li shu"; 75/479, "Yü Ma Yun-p'an shu"; 39/222-23, "Shang Jen-tsung Huang-ti yen-shih shu" (hereafter cited as WLC ).

[13] HCP:Shih-p'u 3A/14b-15a; WHTK 24/232c.

[14] WLC 39/222; 75/479.

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may see the eleventh century as the high point of Chinese economic expertise, from Wang's perspective it was the very erosion of economic skills that was responsible for the financial problems of the state. For example, in early 1069, when Shen-tsung sought Wang's advice on how to manipulate the value of Shen-hsi's currency to improve frontier grain supply, Wang replied that first it was necessary to revive the basic techniques of economic regulation (literally the "technique of opening and closing [the flow of money] and collecting and disbursing"—k'ai-ho lien-san chih fa ) as once practiced by the Chou dynasty Treasury Officer (ch'üan-fu ):

The office of Treasury Officer was the means by which the Former Kings controlled and regulated would-be engrossers (chien-ping ), measured and equalized the differences between rich and poor, transformed and circulated the wealth of all under heaven, and caused all benefits to flow from a single source.^[15]

In short, for Wang the appropriate way to enrich state and society was to stimulate the economy, which meant suppressing private monopolies, re-distributing wealth, and facilitating the smooth flow of resources throughout the empire. But as Wang and the emperor agreed, the establishment of necessary regulatory authorities was hampered by the small number of officials competent in the techniques of economic management (li-ts'ai ). And as Wang argued in his "Request for a Finance Planning Commission" (chih-chih san-ssu t'iao-li ssu ), through incompetent economic management the state had forfeited its fiscal prerogatives to private economic actors:

Most commodities used by the court are levied from places where they are not produced, or demanded before their season. Wealthy merchants and great traders have taken advantage of the crises. This allows both public and private interests to usurp control over exchange values and the collection and disbursement of money and goods.^[16]

[15] Yang Chung-liang, Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien chi-shih pen-too (Sung-shih tzu-liao ts'ui-pien ed.), 66/2095 (hereafter CPPM ); HCP:Shih-pu 4/4b-6a. The Treasury Officer (see Chou-li , ch. 4) was often invoked by Wang as the model regulatory office, particularly in regard to the farming loans. Historically the Treasury Officer seems to have served as the ideal model for activist intervention in the market economy. In 10 A.D. Liu Hsin recommended it to Wang Mang, describing it as a Chou official "[for control of money in public markets], whose office received [by purchase for public storage] that which was unsold, and [when there was a scarcity] gave [out for sale] to those who desired to obtain." See Nancy Swarm, Food and Money in Ancient China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 335.

[16] SHY:Shih-pu 4/5b; CPPM 66/2096-97. A summons was issued to all officials in the capital and the field with any competence in economic matters to memorialize their views, emphasizing that "individuals of all sorts (chu-ssu jen ) will be permitted to state their views before this commission." (CPPM 66/2097). For the Sung shih authors it was this creation of the Finance Planning Commission that launched the New Policies. See T'o T'o et al., Sung shih (Beijing ed.), ch. 14 (hereafter SS ).

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In the second month of 1069 Shen-tsung authorized the creation of the Finance Planning Commission to "promote the arts of economic management," to coordinate economic planning, and to provide Wang An-shih with an agency through which to "recapture authority over exchange values and collection and disbursement and return it to the public domain (kung )." This move not only formally inaugurated the New Policies, it also launched a government campaign against "engrossers" (chien-ping ) in the commercial economy. The term "engrossers" had been used at least as early as Hsun Tzu (fl. 298-238 B.C ) to mean individuals who used extraordinary wealth and power to expropriate others. Since at least the Han the label had been used to categorize classes of economic actors, such as great landlords, merchants, and mining industrialists, whose wealth and power the state saw as destabilizing or coveted for itself.^[17]

Wang An-shih inveighed against "wicked engrossers," who had shattered the ancient unity between public and private property, in an early poem entitled "The Engrossers." Under Wang's aegis the term was deployed in the same way that class labels have been used in the People's Republic of China, to justify new uses of state power and to identify potential or actual targets of state campaigns. Wang himself emphasized the suppression (ch'ueh-che ) of engrossers as an essential component of economic statecraft, as we have seen; and in fact the need to suppress engrossers provided the explicit justification for two of the three policies (State Trade and Green Sprouts) most closely associated with the Finance Planning Commission. The 1072 edict that established a branch of the State Trade Agency (shih-i wu ) in the capital, for example, lamented that "traveling merchants from all over the empire who bring goods to the capital are put in great distress by the 'engrossing houses,' and many must sell at a loss and go out of business." That same year Wang An-shih described to the emperor the prac-

[17] WLC 70/445, "Ch'i chih-chih san-ssu t'iao-li." The memorial is undated. Ch'i Hsia, not wholly convincingly, ascribes it to Lü Hui-ch'ing, handpicked by Wang An-shih to administer the Commission. Su Ch'e was selected to coadminister with Lü, but in his first memorial denouncing "superfluous clerks, superfluous soldiers, superfluous officials" he took his stand with the proponents of "fiscal responsibility" rather than economic activism. See HCP:Shih-p'u 4/7a-14b; CPPM 66/2096; Ch'i Hsia, Wang An-shih pien-fa (2d ed., Shanghai, 1979), p. 270. For examples of the term chien-ping , see Chung-wen ta tz'u-tien , entries 1511.40-41; Daikanwa jiten , entries 1483.115-117. T'ung-tsu Ch'ü writes that the "term ping-chien or chien-ping suggests a person whose extraordinary wealth and power enabled him to encroach upon the people. Literally, it means to swallow up, to encroach, and thus to grab the property of others." See his Han Social Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), p. 394, n. 7. For an example of the use of the term in Han, see Wu-ti's currency reform of 120 B.C. , which was intended "to provide [money] for governmental expenses, and to curb unsettled, unscrupulous monopolists (Swann's translation for chien-ping ) [and their followers]." Swann, Food and Money , p. 266, translation of Han Shu 24B/1163.

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tices of "engrosser" comb wholesalers who tried to depress the price of raw materials brought to the capital by traveling merchants, and "engrosser" tea-guild magnates who tried to raise the price of tea sold wholesale to less powerful guild members. In each case the State Trade Agency intervened to assume the function of primary wholesale distributor, inserting itself between the smaller merchants and the great metropolitan trading houses, in order to neutralize the monopolist powers of the largest guild merchants and gain a wholesaler's mark-up for itself. The campaign against "engrossers" was not confined to the great guild merchants of the capital, and the New Policies administration was equally willing to deploy state agents to compete with regional merchant groups, as in the Tribute Transport and Distribution Act (chün-shufa ), or with the kingpins of the rural economy, as we will see below in connection with the Green Sprouts policy.^[18]

Wang's commitment to pitting state agents against private "engrossers" directly contradicted conventional fiscal wisdom, for it required expanding rather than reducing the size of government and its expenditures. But Wang An-shih openly encouraged bureaucratic expansion and the increased expenditures this entailed, as a means of stimulating economic activity and generating greater revenues. In response to calls for the abolition of a waterworks post, for example, Wang wrote that "only with many officials can [essential] tasks be accomplished. So long as these tasks are accomplished there is nothing wrong with great [official] activity. And large expenditures will stimulate increasing prosperity. So long as they stimulate prosperity, what is the harm in great expenditures?"^[19] Shen-tsung was never as sanguine as his prime minister about the wisdom-of bureaucratic expansion, however, and the Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien records an attempt by Wang to instruct Shen-tsung in the economic benefits of

[18] For Wang's poem, which Bol dates to 1053, see WLC 5/22. The 1072 edict is in Sung hui-yao: shih-huo 37/14a (hereafter SHY:SH ). On State Trade Bureau intervention, see HCP 236/11b-13a, discussed at length in Kato Shigeru, "On the Hang or the Associations of Merchants in China" (in English), Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 8 (1936): 68-69. Intervention should have equalized prices to the advantage of the smaller commercial interests. In the case of the comb market, the traveling merchants had themselves taken their case to the State Trade Bureau, which bought up their goods. According to Wang An-shih's report, "the 'engrossers' then wanted to utilize the new [state trade] laws to buy the entire lot (chan-mai ), but the [state trade administrator] instead distributed it to the local comb shops" (HCP 236/11b). In the case of the tea industry, Wang reported that "since we have now established a State Trade [Bureau] these ten or so [greatest guild] houses—the 'engrossing houses'—will have to buy and sell at the same price as the poor merchant houses, which is why these ten houses dislike the new policy and slander it. [I] recently obtained this information from a report by a member of the tea guild, but the same situation is to be found in all other guilds." HCP 236/31a; Kato, "On the Hang," p. 68. On class labeling in the People's Republic, see Richard Curt Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), especially chap. 2.

[19] WLC 62/391, "K'an-hsiang tsa-i"; James Liu, Reform , p. 48.

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appointing additional officials to administer the local Farming Loan and Service Exemption (mien-i ) funds:

The number of [county-level] officials in charge of distributing and collecting the Service Exemption and Ever-Normal funds does not exceed 500, and salaries for these 500 are not more than 100,000 strings [annually]. This year profits [from the two accounts] reached 3 million strings, at a [total administrative] cost of but 300,000 strings. Establishing new offices does not lead to unnecessary expenses.^[20]

Although Shen-tsung remained apprehensive about adding extra bureaucrats, under Wang An-shih's direction the number of qualified (not necessarily actively employed) officials registered the greatest increase of the entire dynasty, jumping 41 percent from 24,000 in 1067 to over 34,000 men in 1080.^[21]

But it was not enough to make government larger; if the state was to compete successfully with private interests in the expanding marketplace, then officials had to think and act not only like bureaucrats but also like entrepreneurs. It was precisely this vision of a society transformed by bureaucratic entrepreneurs that Wang An-shih put forth in his Myriad Word Memorial of 1058. There Wang blamed the economic, military, and moral ills of society on the deficiencies of the state, which was staffed mostly by men selected by the examination system for their strong memories and literary skills, rather than for the practical experience essential for good government. In chapter 3 in this volume Peter Bol addresses in detail the four stages—instruction, nurture, selection, and employment—Wang held necessary for producing an appropriate moral and political leadership over the long term. It is the second two stages that provide the core of Wang's theory of mobilizing talent for immediate reform.

In brief, Wang argued that men with the skills and abilities needed to meet the needs of the time had to be mustered from all levels of society, tested in actual government affairs, and the truly able ones appointed for long terms of office to posts that suited their qualifications.

In this way, intelligent, able, and energetic gentlemen [shih ] will be able to put all their intelligence into the pursuit of achievement, without having to worry that their projects will go unfinished and their accomplishments be left incomplete. . . . Once appointed, they must be given exclusive authority, not hampered or bound by this or that regulation, but permitted to carry out their ideas [chuan yen er pu i-erh i fa shu-fu chih, erh shih chih te hsing ch'i i ].^[22]

[20] HCP 250/14a-b (1072.2).

[21] See John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 27, table 4.

[22] WLC 39/220; see also p. 224, "she kuan ta-ti crier tang chiu ch'i jen . . . hou ke-yi tse ch'i yu wei."

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Once a man has been appointed to office, Wang continued, he should be trusted to "select men of like character and put them to the test for a period of time, then appraise their abilities and make recommendations to the ruler, at which point they will be granted salaries and ranks." Above all, Wang stressed the need for full discretionary authority, writing that "there has never been a single case in history that has shown it possible to obtain good government even with the right man in power if he is bound by one regulation or another so that he cannot carry out his ideas."^[23]

The mobilization of bureaucratic entrepreneurship then incorporated five key elements: (1) men with the requisite practical and managerial skills were to be recruited from all levels of society; (2) the most able were to be assigned strategic posts or tasks on the basis of their proven skills, and not their formal credentials; (3) these action-oriented cadres were to remain in their respective positions for as long as it took to accomplish their assigned goals; (4) they were to be permitted to choose their own subordinates; and (5) they were to be given exclusive authority to experiment in the achievement of their tasks.^[24]

Wang An-shih's action strategy allowed a reform-minded leadership to define critical political and economic tasks, assign these tasks to aggressive and innovative officials in the field, and delegate extraordinary power to the men who were most successful in meeting reform goals. Wang had put his theory into practice once in 1060, when as member of an ad hoc committee to review horse-procurement policy he recommended that Hsueh Hsiang be appointed to the concurrent posts of Shensi fiscal intendant, regulator of Chieh-chou salt, and intendant for horse purchases and pastures, and given a broad mandate to reorganize the region's finances.^[25] Then from 1069 to 1076, as head of a government charged by the emperor to initiate wide-scale reforms, Wang had an opportunity to put his theory fully to the test. The following sections will focus on the Green Sprouts farming loans and the Szechwan tea and horse trade to assess the ways in which Wang's theories of economic activism and bureaucratic entrepreneurship animated the creation and enactment of New Policies economic reforms.

[23] WLC 39/224.

[24] My interpretation of Wang's Myriad Word Memorial as a theory of bureaucratic entrepreneurship is informed by Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), especially chap. 2; and James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). Eugene Lewis has put Thompson's analysis of organizational power to similar use in his Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1980).

[25] HCP 192/4a-b, 7a-9b; WLC 42/243-4, "Hsiang-tu mu-ma-so chü Hsueh Hsiang chatzu,"

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Economic Activism and Policy Formation

I have ascribed to Wang An-shih a fiscal theory that sought to assert the regulatory authority and developmental initiative of the state in the market economy, and an action strategy that would mobilize bureaucratic entrepreneurs to enlarge the regulatory capacity of the state. In the realm of reform economic policy, fiscal theory and action strategy converged in the creation of new public agencies empowered to participate directly in the market economy, administered by officials chosen for their entrepreneurial characteristics. The Szechwan Tea and Horse Exchange and the Green Sprouts farming loans exemplify both the theory and the strategy. Both policies aimed at displacing private economic actors from key sectors of the economy; both policies came to emphasize revenue maximization out of an initially broader spectrum of objectives; and both policies were administered through new regional-level agencies—the Tea and Horse Agency (THA) and the Ever-Normal Granary intendancies (ENGs)—run by officials selected according to entrepreneurial criteria. But in the actual exercise of power the similarities between the THA and the ENGs break down. As I will show, the THA intendants were encouraged to create an autonomous public enterprise, and given a broad mandate to wield unrestrained public authority in the marketplace. The Tea and Horse Agency represents Wang An-shih's model of decentralized bureaucratic entrepreneurship in its purest form. The Ever-Normal Granary intendancies, on the other hand, were much more tightly restricted in their use of public power and became an example of what I describe as centralized managerial agencies. I discuss the reasons for these differences in a later section.

Displacing Private Interests

The Szechwan Tea and Horse Exchange and the Green Sprouts farming-loans act both replaced key private economic actors with agents of the state. The Green Sprouts policy took aim at the cycle of rural debt and propertylessness that seemed to be intensifying throughout the eleventh century. As Peter Golas argues in his useful survey of the literature on rural China during the Sung, by mid-century roughly 80 percent of rural landowning households (that is, "owner households," chu-hu ) were ranked in the lowest two grades (4 and 5) of a hierarchy consisting of five grades of commoners and a single grade of officials. Building on the work of Yanagida Setsuko, Golas estimates that as a class the grade 4 and 5 households (numbering about 10.5 million households) possessed only about 22.5 percent of the empire's cultivated lands, with average holdings of just fifteen mou (about two acres), roughly three mou less than was needed to meet the minimal food requirements of a family of five. On the whole, households in the

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lowest two grades lived at the margins of economic independence and were often forced to supplement their incomes through hired labor or as tenants on other people's lands. As Colas puts it, "many of them were chronically in debt, and mounting debts led all too often to forced sale or foreclosure of their land."^[26]

All Chinese dynasties faced the problem of keeping poor peasants solvent and accessible to the state, in order to ensure minimal tax receipts and manpower for the military and public works. In Six Dynasties and early T'ang the principal lever used by the state to protect peasant solvency and independence was periodic land redistribution. Ever since the collapse of the equitable field (chü-t'ien ) system during the mid-T'ang, however, the state had ceased to intervene directly in land distribution, and private transactions in land had become routine.^[27] Having lost its capacity to limit the size of landholdings by command, the state was forced to devise other ways to keep at least some land in the hands of the smallest peasant landowners. As land and the entire rural economy became increasingly commercialized the peasant's ability to hold onto his plot depended more and more on his access to money and credit, and for New Policies reformers rural credit came to seem the fulcrum on which state power could best protect peasant solvency. In an important memorial in the ninth month of 1069 the Finance Planning Commission blamed peasant distress on the monopoly over rural credit wielded by "engrossing households": "The reason people are burdened by deficits is that in the seasonal gap separating the old harvest from the new, engrossing households take advantage of the crisis to demand interest rates of 100 percent. Consequently, would-be borrowers are often denied the funds they need."^[28]

The Commission proposed a solution that married a model of state-supplied rural credit that had been worked out independently by local officials to the enormous reserves of the Ever-Normal Granary system. A prototypical rural credit policy had been devised in the 1040s by the finance official Li Ts'an, who issued cash loans called "green sprouts cash" (ch'ing-miao ch'ien ) for the planting of dry-land crops in the spring, to be paid back in grain at harvesttime in the fall. Wang An-shih himself instituted a similar practice during his term as magistrate of Yin county in Chekiang in

[26] Peter Golas, "Rural China in the Song," Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 2 (1980): 302-4. Chu-hu constituted two-thirds of the total rural population of 1050; k'e-hu , guest households, were officially regarded as migrants, with no land of their own. Naturally these categories raise a number of descriptive and analytical problems and have spawned a considerable literature, which Colas surveys on pp. 305-9.

[27] Twitchett, Financial Administration , pp. 1-23; Golas, "Rural China," p. 299.

[28] SHY:SH 4/16a. This key text, which comprises the basic legislation for the ch'ing-miao policy, is analyzed by Sudo Yoshiyuki, "O Anseki no seibyoho no shiko katei," Tokyo daigaku daigakuin kiyo 8 (1972): 172-74.

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about 1049.^[29] Wang revived the notion in 1069 in the now-lost Documents on the Green Sprouts (Ch'ing-miao shu ), but temporarily bowed to Su Ch'e's protest that the combination of easy loan money, 20 percent interest, and local-government distribution and collection would corrupt otherwise honest residents and hand over irresistible coercive powers to already corrupt clerks. But at about this time Wang Kuang-lien, a managing supervisor in the Ho-pei Fiscal Intendancy, sent up a request for several thousand Buddhist ordination certificates to capitalize the local enactment of a Green Sprouts loan policy in Shensi, and Wang An-shih was able to push through adoption of Wang Kuang-lien's "Shensi Green Sprouts loan act" on a regional experimental basis.^[30]

The sources are muted on the details of Wang Kuang-lien's plan, when it was promulgated nationwide in the ninth month of 1069, capitalization for the loan fund was generated by liquidating the grain reserves in the Ever-Normal (ch'ang-p'ing ) and Universal Charity (kuang-hui ) granaries. Traditionally, the Ever-Normal Granaries were authorized to buy up grains when prices were cheap for resale when prices were dear, or in times of natural disaster. By the onset of Shen-tsung's reign, however, reformers and reform opponents agreed that the mechanism had ceased to work effectively: as a 1069 memorial from the Finance Planning Commission complained, 15 million piculs of grain and strings of cash sat idly in the Ever-Normal and Universal Charity granaries while relief aid was doled out piecemeal from the sheng-ts'ang granaries used to store grain for officials' salaries.^[31]

Naturally, conservatives and reformers disagreed about the cause of the Ever-Normal system's failure. Ssu-ma Kuang, for example, saw the issue as a problem of personnel, not of institutions. In a retrospective assessment in 1086, Ssu-ma agreed that the system was slow to respond to price changes. Before a grain purchase could be made, he wrote, the purchase request had to travel up the administrative hierarchy of county, prefecture, and judicial intendant to the Court of Agricultural Supervision; by the time a purchase authorization traveled back down the prices had all changed and the request was rendered irrelevant. But Ssu-ma insisted in 1086, as he had in 1070, that the problem with the Ever-Normal granaries lay, not in the system, but in the poor selection of administrators.^[32]

[29] Chou Po-ti, Chung-kuo ts'ai-cheng ssu-hsiang shih (Fukien, 1984), pp. 232-33; SS 330/ 10619; SS 327/10541. Wang's policy included interest charges; both measures were reported to be well received.

[30] HCP:Shih-pu [SP ] 5/20b-21a; SHY:Shih-huo [hereafter SHY:SH ] 4/16a-17b; SS 339/ 10822.

[31] On the granary systems, see SS 176/4275-42. The 1069 memorial is in SHY:SH 4/16a; 18a.

[32] HCP 384/1b-2a. Ssu-ma Kuang, Ssu-ma wen-cheng chi (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed.), 7/4a, "Ch'i t'iao-li-ssu ch'ang-p'ing-shi shu" (hereafter cited as SMWCC ).

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The reformers, however, condemned the system itself and sought to install a new one. Although in principle the granary system was intended to provide a mechanism for the seasonal adjustment of prices, the Finance Planning Commission asserted that granary stocks were only sold off in years of truly bad harvests, and then only to the advantage of "shiftless idlers in the cities (ch'eng-shih yu-shou chih jen )."^[33] It is possible, however, that the Commissioners were moved chiefly by the capitalizing potential represented by the granary reserves, and in its directive of the ninth month of 1069 the Commission proposed a simultaneous solution to the problems of price equalization, disaster relief, and seasonal credit crises that transformed the nation's granary stocks into a "Green Sprouts" fund for rural investment. Control of the granaries was transferred from the circuit judicial intendants to the fiscal intendants, and almost immediately thereafter to the newly created Intendants for Ever-Normal Granaries (ENG), who were empowered to convert the reserves into a liquid loan fund.^[34]

Actual administration of the loan fund was assigned to the county magistrates and local village officers. The new policy was advertised locally through public notices. Potential borrowers were organized into mutual-guarantee groups (pao ) of five (later ten) or more households under the personal supervision of the county magistrates, with the assistance of village elders and household chiefs, and each household was permitted to contract for a loan of currency or grain proportional to its household wealth.^[35] Guest households (k'e-hu ) could borrow only by entering a group with an owner household (chu-hu ); and urban and suburban households could borrow in groups of five households if they put up collateral, but not until all interested villagers had obtained their loans. The loans were to be made in the spring and repaid in two installments after taxes in the summer and fall. A series of rules were established to protect borrowers against unfair manipulation by officials. For example, loans could be repaid in either currency or grain, with exchange rates set to ensure only that the government lost none of its basic capitalization (pen-ch'ien ), and forced loans (i-p'ei ) were expressly prohibited. Opponents of the Green Sprouts policy, as we shall see, charged that officials routinely disregarded these provisions.

Nothing less than a complete rejuvenation of the agrarian economy was expected from the new measure, which was seen as a means of rationalizing

[33] SS 176/4276; SHY:SH 4/16b. According to Han Ch'i, who vigorously opposed the new policy, under the old Ever-Normal system lower-grade villagers were issued vouchers that entitled them to buy up to 3 tan of grain at reduced prices at the granary in the county (seat?); poor urban residents and vagrant families were permitted to buy smaller amounts on a daily basis, and their access was tightly controlled. Upper-grade residents were, according to Han, excluded. See SHY:SH 4/28b.

[34] SHY:SH 4/17b; HCP:Shih-pu 6/13a.

[35] SHY:SH 4/19a; HCP 252/27ab.

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the distribution and collection of grain and money to equalize commodity prices, minimize the unequal geographic distribution of resources, and ensure adequate supplies of relief grain. Most important, by supplanting private landlords and moneylenders as the principal source of rural credit, the state could "enable the peasants to hasten to the management of their affairs so that engrosser households will be unable to take advantage of their crises." With these basic problems solved, a galvanized officialdom could "exhort and induce [the peasants to greater productivity] and promote the benefits of irrigation, so that everywhere agriculture will be improved."^[36]

State control of the Szechwan tea industry was more directly tied to financial imperatives than was the rural credit policy. The tea and horse trade grew out of Wang Shao's state trade agency, which constituted a direct assault on mercantile profits. As military affairs commissioner for Ch'in-feng circuit, charged with prosecuting his own plan to recover the Tibetan territories of Hsi-ning and the T'ao River Valley that formed the centerpiece of New Policies military strategy, Wang Shao was ever alert for new revenues to support his campaign. In 1070 he requested permission to open a State Trade Bureau (shih-i wu ) in Ch'in-chou to capture the profits of frontier trade:

I do not know how many hundreds, thousands, and ten-thousands of strings worth of goods flow from all four corners of the Fan (Tibetan) lands to us every year, yet the profits of the merchant travelers all return to the people. I wish to set up a State Trade Bureau in this circuit and to borrow government funds to use as capital [with which to buy commodities to trade to the foreign merchants in order to] capture [for the state] the profits [that otherwise flow] to merchants and traders.^[37]

Wang An-shih actively promoted Wang Shao's recommendation, even reminding him in 1072, just after Wang Shao had captured Hsi-chou, to open a state trade bureau as soon as the town was walled, "so that Fan and Han, official and private interests will all benefit."^[38] That same year the state trade policy was enacted in K'ai-feng as well; in 1074 it was expanded into the Superintendency of State Trade, charged with breaking the monopoly of great guild merchants, speeding the circulation of goods, and lending out government goods and money at 20 percent interest.

Wang Shao's state trade policy led directly to the tea and horse trade. From the start Wang Shao needed to keep his frontier trading posts stocked

[36] SHY:SH 4/16a-17a.

[37] SHY:SH 37/14a; Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 44-47. The classic article on Wang Shao's frontier campaign is Enoki Kazuo's "O Sei no Kasei keiryaku ni tsuite," Moko gakuho 1 (1940): 87-168.

[38] WLC 73/464-65, "Yü Wang Tzu-ch'un shu."

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with Szechwanese commodities, principally silk and tea, and from the capital Wang An-shih pushed through measures to ensure that he got an adequate supply. In late 1073 officials were sent to Szechwan both to buy tea for Wang Shao and to explore the possibility of opening a State Trade Bureau in Ch'eng-tu itself. But in mid-1074 Wang Shao changed the direction of events, memorializing that "The Westerners have begun to bring good horses to the frontier. All they desire is tea, but we do not have enough to trade to them. I request that the tea-purchase office buy tea in all haste."^[39]

The planning investigation for the Ch'eng-tu bureau was abruptly canceled, and in the eleventh month of 1074 two of the investigators, Li Ch'i and the Szechwanese P'u Tsung-min, were named the first intendant and co-intendant for tea purchasing for Western Szechwan and Han-chung and charged with buying tea in Szechwan and transporting it to the horse markets of Ch'in-feng and the newly opened Hsi-ho circuits.^[40]

The procurement of horses, a strategic good, was traditionally, and in Sung eyes naturally, managed by the state; the horse side of the THA enterprise added nothing new to the arena of state-managed trade. But on the tea side the THA intendants, driven by the need to create a self-financing trade, expanded the scope of state intervention in producer and consumer markets to an unprecedented degree. The state's relationship to the Szechwanese tea industry mirrored the region's turbulent response to Sung unification. The early Sung state's confiscatory policies in Szechwan at the end of the tenth century had produced the shattering rebellion led by Li Shun and Wang Hsiao-po, and even at the time of the New Policies opponents of economic activism in Szechwan invoked the cautionary message of that uprising. Political turmoil had made Szechwan hard to tax, and from 980 to 1059 a legislative wall was erected that left the Szechwanese tea industry internally unregulated but prohibited tea exports out of Szechwan itself, in order to preserve northwestern markets for the state's monopolized southeastern tea. When the southeastern tea economy collapsed in 1059, all restrictions were lifted, and for the first time in almost a century Szechwanese tea could circulate freely. Deregulation stimulated a booming triangular trade composed of Shensi salt, Szechwanese tea, and Inner Asian animal and mineral products, all under the control of private Shensi guest merchants (k'e-shang ). It was with these merchants that the new tea-purchase intendants had to compete, without destabilizing the industry or fomenting unrest.

[39] See HCP 217/9b-10a; HCP 219/8b; SHY:SH 37/18a; SS 186/4549-50. Wang Shao's memorial is in SHY:CK 43/47b.

[40] Much of the following discussion is taken from Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , chap. 4. The main records for the tea and horse trade during the New Policies are in SHY:CK 43 and SHY:SH 30.

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The tea and horse intendants soon crafted an ambitious solution that paired a monopsony on tea production in Szechwan with a monopoly on tea sales in Shensi. On the tea-purchase side, the Tea and Horse Agency quickly laid claim to the tea industries of Szechwan and the Han-chung Basin, inserting itself between producer and distributor as the sole legal purchaser of the tea crop. Whereas Szechwanese tea households (ch'a-hu ) in the unregulated market had sold to traveling merchants, shop owners, local consumers, and in barter markets along the Szechwan-Tibetan frontier, under the monopsony regulations that were in full force by 1077 they could sell only to government purchasing officials in the forty-seven markets operated by the state. Although the government paid cultivators less than had private merchants, because of new demand opened up by the horse trade they could sell much more than before. Cultivators shifted from small-scale production of fancy tea for Chinese consumers to bulk production of low-quality tea for the state export trade; by 1085 the Szechwanese tea industry was producing, at thirty-eight million pounds yearly, more tea than the entire southeastern industry produced at any time during the Northern or Southern Sung, and a level of output not reached in any subsequent period in Szechwan until the twentieth century.^[41]

The fifteen thousand horses bought yearly from the Tibetans took only one-eighth to one-sixth of the Agency's tea, and the intendants concentrated on expanding the market in which to sell the rest. Because southeastern tea was still unregulated, no government agency had a proprietary interest in it, and the Tea and Horse Agency intendants took advantage of this administrative vacuum to get all of northwest China, from the frontier markets of Kansu in the west to the Chinese heartland prefectures within the Wei and Yellow Rivers to the east, designated an exclusive Szechwan tea-marketing zone. Moreover, this long-distance trade was operated entirely by Agency officials, who ran 332 tea-sales markets throughout northwest China, at every level of the administrative hierarchy from prefectural city to frontier stockade. Tea merchants were encouraged to buy tea from the Agency, but they could sell it only in the intraregional markets of Szechwan.^[42]

[41] Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , table 5, p. 218.

[42] For the enabling acts, see HCP 334/13a; SHY:SH 30/18b, 23a. The scope of THA control over the Szechwan tea industry is conveyed by the first 2 of 38 Revised Articles of the Tea Market Agency promulgated in 1083. The first article defined the monopsony operation in Szechwan: "All the tea-producing districts of Ch'eng-tu-fu and Li-chou Circuits and Chin-chou have established markets to buy out the tea of the cultivator households. Guest-(merchants) are permitted to buy tea in the government markets (on payment of a 10 percent license fee) and to sell it in the four circuits of Ch'uan-hsia (i.e., Szechwan) and on the borders of Chin-chou. All those who illicitly and heedlessly buy and sell, barter and trade in, or enter the territories of Shen-hsi may be seized and informed on by the general populace, and will be dealt with according to the articles on violation of the [Fukien camphorated] La-tea Act" (SHY:SH 30/18b).

A second article delimited the government's marketing region: "[Shan-fu West (i.e., Shen-hsi), Hsi-ho and Lan-hui Circuits and the two prefectures of Wen and Lung] constitute a Government Tea Restricted Region (kuan-ch'a ti-fen ). For all merchants of any circuit selling Szechwanese tea, southern tea, la-tea, or various teas without licenses, permit commoners to inform and seize. All violators will be dealt with according to the regulations on violation of the La-tea Act" (SHY:SH 30/93a).

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The Szechwan tea and horse trade relegated merchants to minor partnership in a huge state-run enterprise. Public interest was occasionally claimed as justification for the government monopoly, but in general the THA intendants simply cited evidence of high merchant interest and profits as sufficient warrant for annexing a given market and prohibiting further private trade. Because of the overriding need to provision and finance frontier defense the THA intendants could simply disregard private mercantile interests, without having to justify their expansion into private markets.^[43]

Though the Green Sprouts program and the Szechwan tea monopoly both set state agents against private economic interests, their initial goals were quite different: the rural credit policy was enacted as an economic welfare measure, and the tea monopoly was established to provide exchange commodities for a publicly conducted foreign trade. But in a policy-making environment driven by the desire to eliminate deficits and generate new revenues, which most scholars agree Shen-tsung's court was, both policies were soon transformed into predominantly revenue-producing operations.

In its 1069 directive establishing the Green Sprouts loans, the Finance Planning Commission explicitly disavowed any diversion of the loan fund to the public treasury: "The loan policy is for the sake of the people; the government (kung-chia ) will claim no benefit from its receipts." Nor were provisions made to subsidize administrative costs of the loan policy, but within a few months interest rates of 20 to 30 percent were established in order to finance it. These interest charges were among the most controversial features of the Green Sprouts measure. Wang An-shih claimed that the Chou li provided a philosophical justification for interest charges, but opponents dismissed Wang's reading of the text and rejected outright the propriety of government usury. Han Ch'i, for example, in one of the most interesting rejoinders, argued that the people's taxes and services to the state should stand in lieu of interest charges. In fact Wang agreed with his critics that

[43] See SHY:SH 30/12b on the Ming-shah tea trade; SHY:CK 43/48a on Hsing-yuan-fu and Yang-chou in the Hanchung Basin; and SHY:SH 30/13a on Liu Tso's intent to monopolize the Shensi-Szechwan tea and salt trade. In 1086 Investigator Huang Lien successfully invoked the financial imperatives of frontier defense as a basis for retaining the THA monopoly even in the midst of Restoration attempts to dismantle the Tea and Horse Agency. HCP 381/ 22b-23a.

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charging interest on government loans was by no means ideal, but he argued that in order to remain solvent the loan fund had to be rationally managed: salaries, transport costs, emergency supplements, and spoilage all had to be provided for. For this reason, Wang concluded, a 20 percent interest rate was the very pillar of rural credit reform.^[44]

Thus the Green Sprouts loan policy was intended to be self-financing, but not profit-making. The revenue potential of the loan fund was enormous, however, and given the New Policies' financial goals it was inevitable that the fund would be thoroughly exploited. In mid-1070 jurisdiction over the Ever-Normal Granary system was transferred from the Finance Planning Commission to the Court of Agricultural Supervision (ssu-nung-ssu ), newly reconstituted under the leadership of Lü Hui-ch'ing. Soon the growing loan fund joined service exemption revenues as the chief source of money for Ssu-nung-ssu projects. From 1070 to 1085 Ever-Normal Granary funds were routinely used to finance flood and famine relief, irrigation projects, and border provisioning and defense. By 1072, as was noted above, Wang An-shih had begun to praise the loan policy at least as much for its profitability as for its redistributive justice. And in 1082, two years after Shen-tsung built the Yuan-feng Treasury to hold the Court of Agricultural Supervision's growing riches, eight million strings of cash in surplus farming-loan profits from around the country were deposited in its vaults.^[45]

As critics such as Han Ch'i and Ssu-ma Kuang had predicted all along, then, revenue production soon superseded rural credit relief as the primary operational goal of the farming-loan policy. Although social welfare ideals constrained the pursuit of profit, Ever-Normal Granary officials were judged, not by the efficiency of their disaster-relief operations, as Ssu-ma Kuang recommended, but by the volume of loans issued and collected. Overall, the farming-loan system operated under a minimum quota of 13.9 million strings collected on loans of 11 million strings, for a net profit quota of 26.5 percent. Individual officials were in turn judged for promotion or demotion primarily (though not exclusively) on the basis of their success in meeting local loan targets, which were not abolished until 1086.^[46] Social welfare ideals could not be ignored in an agency ostensibly dedicated to agrarian relief, and the contradictions between social and fiscal goals had a marked impact on the power structure of the Ever-Normal Granary system, as I discuss more fully below. But it is clear that for the duration of the

[44] SHY:SH 4/16b; Han Ch'i's Chia-chuan , quoted in HCP:Shih-pu 7/26a; WLC 73/464, "Ta Tseng Kung-li shu." See also WLC 41/239, "Shang wu-shih cha-tzu."

[45] HCP 211/9a-b; 330/12a-b. This source contains extensive material on farming-loan subventions to other agencies.

[46] HCP 374/11b-13a; 226/6b; 287/5a-b; 330/12a-b; 358/2a. Han Ch'i's and Ssu-ma Kuang's criticisms are taken up in greater detail below.

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New Policies making money became the chief objective of the farming-loans measure, while economic welfare was relegated to a secondary place.

The Tea and Horse Agency made the transition to a predominantly revenue-producing agency by a less circuitous route. When appointed intendant and co-intendant in 1074, Li Ch'i and P'u Tsung-min were charged simply with buying tea in Szechwan and transporting it to the horse markets of Ch'in-feng and the newly opened Hsi-ho circuits. Implicitly, they were expected to make the operation self-financing, but even that charge was never specified.^[47] As with the Green Sprouts loan fund, however, the revenue potential of the tea not needed for the horse trade was enormous, and the THA intendants very quickly learned how to realize that potential and to transform profits into bureaucratic power. In earlier work I have already demonstrated the relationship between Agency profits and the bureaucratic power cycle; here I simply note that the THA chiefs were able to translate every increase in their net-profit quotas into greater organizational power, as measured by increases in their formal status and that of their Agency and by rising influence and autonomy in their relationship to other agencies and internal resources and personnel.^[48]

The chief source of Agency profits was the monopoly in Shensi. According to figures provided by the Szechwanese opponent of the tea monopoly, Lü T'ao, the Agency could realize a net profit of 200 to 300 percent on sales of Szechwanese tea in the northwest.^[49] (Private tea merchants, on the other hand, earned only about 25 percent on their sales of tea in the intraregional markets of Szechwan.) From tea sold directly to foreign traders and domestic consumers in the northwest and to merchants in Szechwan the tea and horse enterprise not only became self-financing but also generated substantial surpluses that could be allocated to defense agencies in Shensi, or deposited in court-controlled discretionary funds (feng-chuang ) in Shensi and Szechwan. Yearly surpluses amounted to 400,000 strings of cash in 1074, 600,000 strings by 1076, 1 million strings (the new quota) by 1083, 1.6 million strings in 1084, and 2 million strings—4 percent of the imperial cash income of 48.5 million strings—in 1085.^[50] And of course the Agency paid for the horse trade.

As with the Green Sprouts farming loans, the transformation of the tea and horse trade into an enterprise devoted essentially to revenue production is revealed by the Agency's incentive system. And without the conflicting claims of social welfare, the Tea and Horse Agency intendants could devote

[47] I impute the implicit expectation that the tea and horse trade be self-financing on the basis of my analysis of the history of Sung horse procurement policies. For the detailed argument, see Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 38-44.

[48] Ibid., chap. 5.

[49] Lü T'ao, Ching-te chi (Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu ed.) 3/9a.

[50] Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , Appendix D, pp. 332-34.

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themselves to making money with unalloyed zeal. In order to translate the fiscal interests of the state into the private interests of the officials and local participants in the Tea and Horse Agency, the intendants devised a unique achievement-oriented incentive system that dispensed liberal promotions and material rewards for the production of surplus revenues.

The most striking component of this system split a percentage of the extra-quota profits between the tea-market inspectors (chien-kuan ), service personnel, and key local-government officials. In the monopsony markets of Szechwan and Han-chung, which sold tea to shops and local traders, the inspectors shared 5 percent of all earnings above their market's net-profit quota with their commoner stock controllers, warehousers, scale operators, and bookkeepers; another 1 percent went to the local-government official, usually the county magistrate, who served as nominal auditor for the market. A similar system applied to the monopoly markets of the northwest. And in government markets where tea had been traded for silver, textiles, grains, and assorted other commodities, officials and clerks shared 10 percent of all net profits realized in converting the trade goods into cash, providing the liquidation took place within six months. Indeed, the constant and profitable turnover of tea and other goods for cash took on the status of an Agency obsession, testified to in notices sent to market officials to "expedite rapid purchases and sales, prevent the stagnation of capital" (wu-ling mai-mai t'ung-k'uai, wu-chih fang-chih ch'ien-pen ).^[51]

The Structure of Economic Activism: Entrepreneurial and Managerlal Intendancies

It should be clear from the discussion above that as policies that mobilized state agencies to compete with private economic interests and sought to increase the state's share of total economic resources, Green Sprouts and the Szechwan tea monopoly exemplified New Policies economic activism. Both policies also shared a basic feature of the New Policies administrative model: the proliferation of new circuit intendancies to fulfill reform tasks at the level of the economic, administrative, or military region.

As Winston Lo has shown in his important analysis of circuit intendancies and Sung territorial administration, Wang An-shih and his colleagues, rather than working through existing machinery and entrenched personnel, preferred to create new institutions to carry out reform tasks. At the political center, the reformers breached the three-part division of financial, mill-

[51] Though the Agency's incentive system was enacted after Wang An-shih had retired from office, the congruence between it and Wang's theory of uniting officials and clerks is clear. For the incentive regulations, see Lu Shih-min's 38-article Revised Regulations of the Tea Market Agency of 1083, sixth month, in SHY:SH 30/18b-21a. On expediting purchase and sale, see Lü T'ao, Ching-te chi 1/12a.

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tary, and executive authority by creating new fiscal agencies (such as the Finance Planning Commission) or reviving old ones (such as the Court of Agricultural Supervision), and by routing orders around the Directorate of Military Affairs, to centralize general policy-making and command functions in the executive branch of government dominated by Wang An-shih and his followers. Specific reform initiatives were then delegated to such new single and multicircuit intendancies as the intendants for state trade, the pao-chia and militia intendants, the Office for the Management of Frontier Finances, and of course the Ever-Normal Granary and Tea and Horse intendants. And the reformers increasingly empowered circuit intendants to bypass conservative prefectural administrators in exercising administrative control over the counties, by giving them greater powers over the appointment and promotion of county magistrates.^[52]

The circuit intendancies, then, served as the central link in a chain of command joining reformist policymakers, region, and locality. The Intendancy for Tea and Horses projected state power into the tea production and sales markets of Szechwan and Shensi through an executive triad of super-intendant, co-intendant, and vice-intendant. Similarly, the Ever-Normal Granary intendancies linked K'ai-feng to agrarian producers and borrowers all over the empire, through intendants and co-intendants in the capital region and, at one time or another during the New Policies era, twenty-two of the empire's twenty-three circuits.^[53]

To summarize the argument to this point, then, the Green Sprouts and Tea and Horse policies embodied a common policy impulse—restoring the state as the dominant actor in the commercial economy—and were embedded in homologous institutions—regional and subregional state agencies, or intendancies. But when we focus on the ways in which the THA and ENG intendants were allowed to fulfill their assigned tasks—that is, on the actual structure and exercise of power—it becomes clear that power was decentralized to the THA and ENG intendancies to strikingly different degrees. Reform policymakers granted the THA intendants considerable autonomy over critical inputs (whom to tax, where and from whom to buy), disposi-

[52] Winston Lo, "Circuits and Circuit Intendants in the Territorial Administration of Sung China," Monumenta Serica 31 (1974-75): 89. For Lo's model of the Sung system of dual control over county magistrates, see pp. 92-95. In 1086 Ssu-ma Kuang retrospectively denounced Wang An-shih's practice of creating new intendants, assistant intendants, and staff supervisors for each reform policy, and staffing them with young, low-ranked, and frivolous men with seniority status no greater than prefectural vice-administrator, county magistrate, or market inspector. (HCP 368/23b-24a.)

[53] For the initial deployment of intendants and co-intendants, see CPPM 68/2162. The only circuit for which I have not identified an intendant is Huai-nan-hsi, but the absence may be simply circumstantial. The circuit's granary system was no doubt administered from neighboring Huai-nan-tung.

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tion of output (how and to whom to distribute its goods and services), and internal structure, most importantly its personnel. In the case of the Ever-Normal Granary intendants, these same decisions were made at the center, primarily by the Court of Agricultural Supervision. The THA intendants obtained for themselves precisely that entrepreneurial autonomy prescribed by Wang An-shih, while the Granary intendants served as managers of an administrative apparatus closely controlled from the center.

Wang An-shih's entrepreneurial strategy, it will be recalled, entailed assigning proven innovators to long terms of office in strategic posts, regardless of their formal credentials, and allowing them to staff their own organizations and experiment in the fulfillment of their tasks unfettered by bureaucratic red tape. The first set of characteristics describes the selection of entrepreneurial types; the second set, the exercise of entrepreneurial power. The men selected as Tea and Horse and Ever-Normal Granary intendants shared certain "entrepreneurial" traits that made them, on taking up their posts, relatively indistinguishable. But once they were in position, as we will see, the similarities diminished.

Attributes of the Intendants

The first two components of Wang's entrepreneurial strategy, selecting action-oriented and practical men regardless of formal credentials, can be specified by mode of entry and formal civil service rank. In the case of the THA, six of the seven men appointed to one of the triad of intendant's positions between 1074 and 1085 rose to office, not just as fiscal experts, but as fiscal experts who had displayed their aggressiveness, ingenuity, and loyalty to the reform cause in previous New Policies posts or tasks. To cite but three examples, the first intendant, Li Ch'i, had been commended for his management of currency and silk reserves in Shensi before being sent to Ch'eng-tu. His successor, the Szechwanese Li Chi, had worked for Lü Hui-ch'ing and served the reform cause as fiscal staff supervisor (chuan-yun p'an-kuan ) in Hopei before getting the THA intendant's post. And Lu Shih-min, the most expansionist of the THA empire-builders, served as Li Chi's managing supervisor (kan-tang kung-shih ) before his appointment as co-intendant in 1080, then superintendant in 1083, where he expanded and consolidated the dominant position of the THA in two macroregions (the Upper Yangtze and the Northwest) and three industries (tea, salt, and the local commodities trade).^[54]

In accordance with Wang's prescription for giving men power on the basis of their success and not their rank—which Wang's critics lambasted as the employing of mean and petty men—the stipendiary ranks of the early

[54] For sources on the careers of the THA intendants, see Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , Appendix C, pp. 327-31.

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intendants at appointment were almost uniformly low: between 8b and 7b, with one exceptional 6b (Liu Tso). More important, the court acknowledged that the intendants stood at the bottom of the civil service hierarchy, and took steps to counterbalance their low status. In 1080, for example, the court granted a new assistant intendant a titular commission so that despite his low rank he could "awe the prefects and county magistrates he would encounter." And in 1083 the emperor himself ordered that "although the ranks of the (THA intendants) are low, they must be permitted to wield authority as they see fit."^[55]

The Ever-Normal Granary intendancies were filled by much the same sort of men, and indeed two (Yen Ling and Ch'eng Chih-shao) went on to serve as THA intendants in the postreform era. I have identified seventy-one men appointed intendant or co-intendant in one of the twenty-two circuits or the capital from between 1069 and early 1086. Obviously, so relatively large a sample will show much greater variation than the seven intendants of the THA, but a preliminary analysis of the seventy-one cases reveals largely the same pattern of technical skills, New Policies affiliation, and low rank. One of the first twelve men sent out to implement the farming-loans directive of the fourth day of the ninth month of 1069, for example, was Wang Kuang-lien, whose recommendation as managing supervisor of the Hopei fiscal intendancy had brought the farm-credit idea to fruition. Wang was made Ever-Normal Granary intendant for Hopei that very month, and a year later was given the concurrent post of judicial intendant as well.^[56] Ch'en Shih-hsiu, sent by emergency relay to manage the Ching-hsi-Huai-nan water conservancy in 1070, was promoted in place to Ching-hsi Ever-Normal Granary intendant around 1072, where he continued to advise on irrigation.^[57] And Wang Ku, who as registrar of the Court of Agricultural Supervision was despatched to investigate natural disasters in Liang-che Circuit in 1075, was subsequently kept on as granary co-intendant, then transferred to the intendant's post in K'ai-feng the following year.^[58]

If anything, the reformers reached further down the administrative hierarchy for their Ever-Normal intendants than for the THA. At least four men were promoted to intendancies from posts as county magistrate, including Court of Agricultural Supervision chief Lü Hui-ch'ing's younger brother Lü Wen-ch'ing. Moreover, at least three men were appointed to the

[55] SHY:CK 43/65a; HCP 341/2a.

[56] SHY:SH 4/17b; HCP 214/7a. At least four other men held the two posts concurrently.

[57] HCP 215/12a; HCP 233/18a. The full set of Ever-Normal responsibilities included, in addition to the granaries, management of service-exemption accounts, water conservancy, ferries, and in some areas state trade. (SS 167/3968.)

[58] In 1081 Wang Ku was fired as Ever-Normal Granary intendant of Ching-hsi circuit for criticizing the granary policy. HCP 269/22a; 275/10b; 313/7b-8a.

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position of intendant from executory-class posts as civil aides. In almost every case, however, the men who were jumped from county or local government posts had distinguished themselves in endeavors related to granaries or farm loans. Finally, the stipendiary ranks of the forty-one appointees for whom the datum is available were even lower than those of their THA counterparts: one at 9a, ten at 8b, twelve at 8a, nine at 7b, six at 7a, and the three still in executory class.^[59]

At entry, then, there was little to distinguish the men appointed to the Ever-Normal and THA intendancies. But in the ways they were used in office the differences were more pronounced. The divergence begins with length of term. Wang An-shih prescribed long terms, to give incumbents full opportunity to see their projects through to completion, since in his view office holding was a mandate for experimentation. The THA intendants exemplified his theory fully: until reform opponents set a maximum term of thirty months for Agency chiefs in 1086, there was no statutory limit on the length of time an intendant served. The early intendants were kept in office as long as they kept innovating, their ambitions fed with imperial awards, greater authority, and promotions in rank. Thus the average term of office for the New Policies THA intendants was a remarkable forty-nine months, a figure that is only slightly skewed by P'u Tsung-min's presence in Ch'eng-tu for the entire eleven years. Moreover, THA intendants rarely went on to other posts. One of the first seven intendants was transferred out in an unexceptional manner, and a second was impeached when his new salt-monopoly venture went awry. The others served until death, illness, or the Restorationist policy reversal intervened; and of these the only man to return to office in the postreform era—Lu Shih-min—added another sixty-five months as THA intendant to his original sixty-six when Emperor Che-tsung revived the entire apparatus on reaching his majority in 1094.

Long tenures promoted the development of the local and intra-agency networks indispensable to decentralized bureaucratic entrepreneurship. But they also posed the risk that power might be abused, or that longtime specialists might monopolize the performance of critical tasks. My information on the tenures of the seventy-one Ever-Normal Granary intendants is not precise enough to yield a representative average, but it does not appear that they were unusually long. There were some exceptions: Fang Tse, an affinal relation of Lü Hui-ch'ing's, was in Chiang-hsi for sixty months; Chao Hsien

[59] HCP 246/1b; 267/13a; 271/13a; 305/6b; 307/4a; 347/1a. Family connections clearly played a role in some of the intendancy appointments, and at least fourteen intendants had family connections to more prominent faction members—though in Han Cheng-yen's case his uncle, Han Ch'i, was one of the most vehement antireformers. Three of the seven early THA intendants were also related to prominent political partisans, and in two of these cases (Lu Shih-min and Fan Ch'un-ts'ui) their relations were also against the reforms.

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was in Ho-tung for forty-nine months; and Liu I had the same tenure in Chiang-nan. But most of the identifiable terms vary between fifteen and twenty-five months. And in contrast to the powerful but futureless THA intendancy positions, a term as Ever-Normal Granary intendant often heralded the start of a typical specialized career in finance. The ENG intendancy was inserted into the bottom of the rotation of circuit posts and was followed by promotion to fiscal staff supervisor (twelve cases), vice fiscal intendant (four cases), judicial intendant (four cases,) fiscal intendant (one case), or one of the new reform-era circuit posts (four cases).^[60]

But Wang An-shih himself had recommended a significant variation of long tenure in 1071, when he defined it as promotion to higher intendant positions within the same circuit. Wang specifically cited the case of Ch'en Chih-chien, who served serially in Ching-hsi as Ever-Normal Granary intendant, provisional fiscal staff supervisor, and provisional vice fiscal intendant in the early 1070s. Court of Agricultural Supervision chief Ts'ai Ch'ueh endorsed Wang's plan in 1078, recommending that successful granary intendants be promoted to judicial intendant of the same circuit. At least four granary intendants in addition to Ch'en fit this new pattern of regional as opposed to functional specialization, which was to become typical of the THA intendants in the Southern Sung, when recentralization and decreasing productivity led to severe curtailment of the Agency's autonomy. In both cases this variant of long tenure allowed the court to benefit from a man's knowledge of a region but retain centralized control over his performance, by preventing him from exploiting a particular office for personal ends yet not sacrificing his close familiarity with the problems and resources of his assigned region.^[61]

Rights of Personnel Selection

Differences between the THA and the Ever-Normal Granaries become starker still when we move from the characteristics of the intendants to the powers they were allowed. One of the most critical prerogatives for any bureaucratic agency, stressed by Wang An-shih in his Myriad Word

[60] HCP 267/9b-10a; 285/5b; 286/6b; 307/4b; 329/22b; 324/1a-6b; 372/15a-b. See Hart-well, "Financial Expertise," pp. 286-89.

[61] HCP 212/5b; 229/7a; 236/6b. As Robert Hartwell has shown, intraregional specialization in diverse careers characterized Southern Sung office holding generally. See "Transformations of China," p. 400. Where the government sought to maintain tight surveillance over circuit officials, it could array one official against another through a system of checks and balances that Winston Lo has referred to as functional interchangeability and overlapping jurisdiction (Lo, "Circuits and Circuit Intendants," pp. 86-91). At the same time, by rotating individual officials through the entire complement of circuit offices in each region the government could capitalize on each man's familiarity with local conditions and feed a variety of informed opinion into the process of regional decision making. For further discussion, see Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 212-16.

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Memorial, is the right to appoint its own personnel. In order to further Agency success in the procurement of tea, horses, and above all revenues, the THA intendants were granted selection privileges that earned for the Agency unique status as "an organization permitted to appoint its own subordinates." And because the Agency's revenues kept growing, the intendants retained their selection rights over some forty-five field administrators and one hundred to two hundred petty officials even after the personnel privileges of virtually all other government agencies were rescinded in 1081.^[62]

The autonomy of the THA over its own personnel selection was enhanced by extraordinary access to the special "right of appointment in contravention of regular procedure" (pu i ch'ang-chih chü-pi ), and the privilege of coselecting with the fiscal intendant the magistrates of key tea-production and transport counties. The right of irregular appointment empowered administrators to place men with special skills and experience in posts for which they lacked the specified civil service rank, and to fill critical vacancies or shuffle personnel without awaiting court approval. Agency intendants successfully argued that irregular appointment was crucial for preserving the profitability of the tea and horse enterprise, and from 1077 on, when all but the most limited use of the privilege was prohibited elsewhere in the government, it became standard practice in the THA.^[63] The right to coselect the magistrates for at first four and in later periods up to ten key production and transport counties turned tea procurement and transport into a central concern of local government, considerably extending the effective authority of the Agency. And finally, THA selection powers were enhanced by Wang An-shih's "law for appointments and transfers to distant offices" (yuan-kuan chiu-i chih fa ), which allowed Szechwanese to request multiple terms of office in prefectures close to their family residences, and offered ambitious and still unsettled Szechwanese the quid pro quo of home service and bureaucratic advancement in return for taxing their own region on behalf of the state.^[64] Although only two of the first seven intendants were Szechwanese, at least one of them was always in office, ensuring a continual Szechwanese presence in Ch'eng-tu. At the staff level, despite a complaint from a later period that the intendants appointed only Szechwanese to subordinate positions, the only formal restriction imposed on them was that in the case of dual offices—for example, a single market with two inspectors—only one appointee could be Szechwanese.^[65]

Unlike the Tea and Horse Agency, which developed into an autonomous, fully staffed enterprise, the individual Ever-Normal Granary in-

[62] SS 167/3969. On the recentralization of appointments, see WHTK 38/361b-c.

[63] For a sample of decisions, see SHY:hsuan-chü 28/10b-12a.

[64] HCP 214/21a-22b; SS 159/3721-24; Lo, "Circuits," pp. 77-79; Smith, Taxing , pp. 105-7.

[65] SHY:CK 43/102b-103a.

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tendants served as a new level of management set between center and locale to coordinate procedures actually performed by regular government functionaries. At the prefectural level one official, usually the vice-administrator, or two (including a civil aide) in prefectures of ten counties or more, supervised overall granary and farm-loan operations. In the subordinate counties, either the magistrate or the county finance official among the civil aides directed the distribution and collection procedure. The county was the key link in the system, and a county magistrate could bring the operation to a halt, as did Ch'en Shun-yü in Shan-yang county (Huainan) in 1070, when he blocked distribution of the Green Sprouts loan funds and then impeached himself in protest against the policy. Prefectural and county officials in turn presided over a clerical staff specially assigned to granary functions that was not to exceed three per prefecture and two per county.^[66]

To help them motivate their subordinates the ENG intendants were given relatively liberal sponsorship privileges: as of 1077 each intendant could recommend nine men yearly for promotion from the executory to the administrative class. But their direct appointment rights were quite limited. On the whole, ENG intendants were merely allowed to recommend, in conjunction with the fiscal intendant, men already in a prefectural or county-level post for assignment in place to a granary-related task.^[67] The THA intendants in contrast routinely created new posts to which they could recommend men currently out of office, giving them substantial powers of patronage.

When the Granary intendants, and even their director in the Court of Agricultural Supervision, were allowed to make new appointments, the central government maintained a close watch. For the rural credit policy authorized officials to hand out a substantial portion of the national treasure in the form of loans, and the government was always concerned about getting its treasure back. Nor was it easy to keep track: in 1075 officials in K'ai-feng county neglected to record loans of nonglutinous rice worth 60,000 strings of cash and overlooked the collection of another 40,000 strings of cash, all because county officials did not know how to keep the Green Sprouts' books.^[68] In such emergencies the Court of Agricultural Supervision despatched its own officials to teach registration procedures. But for new appointments of court executive assistants and ENG granary custo-

[66] SHY:SH 4/16b; HCP 250/4b; 289/15a; 212/7a-b; 249/6b. The same number of clerks again were deployed for the agricultural irrigation policy.

[67] SHY:SH 4/16b; HCP 250/4b; 282/2a.

[68] HCP 267/13b-14a; 269/2b. The Court of Agricultural Supervision was under orders to keep track of the volume of cash loans in circulation and collected; the volume of grains collected and in arrears; the number of defaulters; the volume of grain purchased and sold, and at what unit prices; the volume of relief aid; and the total interest earned on loans. HCP 214/28b.

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dians the court director and the circuit granary intendants were ordered to choose men who were qualified in the first place. In particular, only officials who had already served as county magistrate and had passed their annual merit rating with the very highest honors, or in the absence of such luminaries men whose comportment was exceptional and seniority high, were to be considered for the two job categories.^[69] It is obvious that when it came to distributing the state's reserves, the government's chief decision makers wanted stolid, upright managers, not entrepreneurs.

Operational Autonomy

The central design of Wang An-shih's action strategy was to let bureaucratic entrepreneurs wield power freely in crafting innovative solutions to New Policy tasks. In its hunger for tea monopoly revenues, the New Policies court granted the THA intendants uncommon authority to disarm their rivals, protect their output in tea and funds from arbitrary expropriation by other agencies, engage in ancillary businesses, and above all to expand their marketing region.

In the course of the New Policies at least six prominent Szechwanese, nine regional financial administrators, and four central-government officials were fined, demoted, or cashiered for questioning Agency practices; in 1078 a blanket order prohibiting other government bureaus from interfering with the Agency was issued. With its critics neutralized, the Agency was free to consolidate and expand its operations. In order to protect its profitability and to ensure that its profits were all counted toward the promotional incentives and cash bonuses that propelled the enterprise along, organizations receiving THA cash or tea had to follow strict accounting and payback regulations established by the intendants, with all extraquota subventions registered as net sales.^[70] And to put its surplus funds to the most profitable use, the intendants were permitted to enter a variety of sideline businesses. In the northwest, Agency officials bought and sold Inner Asian valuables, traded in grain, and exported Szechwanese silks, while in Szechwan they sold Shensi salt and dealt in local textiles, paper, and medicinal herbs and made loans to tea cultivators and wineshop operators at 20 percent interest. The THA brought under its own umbrella operations that in other regions were shared by the salt monopolies, Ever-Normal granaries, and bureaus of state trade.

But the most important component of Agency entrepreneurship was its freedom to create new markets for Szechwanese tea. The geographic expansion noted earlier turned 7.5 million new domestic consumers and much of Inner Asia into drinkers of Szechwanese tea, giving the Szechwanese indus-

[69] HCP 280/21b; 283/13b.

[70] See Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 268-77.

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try the largest marketing region it was ever to have. The market possessed all the instability of monopoly markets, of course, and when chief minister Ts'ai Ching sought out new markets for his remonopolized southeastern tea in 1102, bureaucratic competition dispossessed Szechwan of two-thirds of the extraregional tea drinkers that bureaucratic entrepreneurship had first obtained. But during the high tide of activism under the New Policies, the THA was given a free hand.

The THA was organizationally autonomous. It answered to the Secretariat-Chancellery, and after 1080 to the Ministry of Finance, but it was directly subordinate to neither. Though located at the same level in the administrative hierarchy, the Ever-Normal Granary intendants were all subordinate links in an apparatus directed centrally by the Court of Agricultural Supervision. Consequently they were much more tightly controlled.

The farming-loans policy prompted an obstructionist movement led by such elder statesmen as Fu Pi and Ou-yang Hsiu, who from the prefectural posts to which they were rusticated for opposition to the reforms openly and systematically encouraged county officials to disobey the loan directives. But even after the obstructionist movement was silenced in 1071, Shentsung was so shaken by the insurrection of his most prestigious advisers that the farming-loans policy was kept in constant view, and the granary intendants were under continual surveillance.^[71]

The Ever-Normal Granary intendants were subject to both horizontal and vertical control. As one of a cluster of circuit-level officials responsible for regional administration, the granary intendant was bound by a system of checks and balances that Winston Lo has described as functional interchangeability and overlapping jurisdiction. For example, both the fiscal and the judicial intendants had oversight responsibility for the credit policy, primarily to prevent forced loans; and in 1073 all fiscal intendants, fiscal staff supervisors, and judicial intendants were ordered to comanage the Ever-Normal Granary system. Conversely, the granary intendant also served to keep his colleagues in check—for example, by reporting on the antireform activities of fiscal intendant Fan Ch'un-jen in Ch'eng-tu in 1071, or investigating local finances and the salt administration in Ching-hu in 1084. But unlike their peers in the THA, granary intendants were discouraged from expanding into the activities of other circuit agencies on their own initiative, and at least three Ever-Normal Granary intendants were fined or summarily dismissed for exceeding their proper authority (yueh chih ).^[72]

[71] The obstructionist movement and the debates it inspired are documented in detail in CPPM 68, passim.

[72] Lo, "Circuits," pp. 86-91; SHY:SH 4/18b-19a; HCP 220/22b; 244/5a; 279/13b; and HCP 224/21b-22a; 348/15a. Mutual surveillance also meant mutual responsibility. In 1084 the granary intendant, vice fiscal intendant, and a prefect, vice-prefect, and managing supervisor in Kuang-nan East were summarily dismissed and demoted for a scandal and cover-up in the salt administration. HCP 345/5a. The ENG intendants fined or dismissed were Chang Shang-ying and Chang Wan in 1079, and Li Hsiao-po in 1080. HCP 287/2a; 299/21a; 307/4a. Court of Agricultural Supervision director Ts'ai Ch'ueh launched a move in 1078 to free his granary intendants from outside interference, and in particular sought to protect ch'ang-p'ing funds from encroachment by the fiscal intendant. But Ts'ai was promoted to the Council of State in 1079, and under his successor Li Ting the campaign died down. HCP 292/2b; 293/8b; 298/8b-9a.

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Finally, because they were responsible for so wide a range of critical and delicate activities, the Ever-Normal Granary intendants were also subject to ad hoc surveillance from above. At least seven circuit granary operations in all parts of the empire were put under outside investigation between 1071 and 1076, for problems that included illegal collections, negligence, ineffective disaster relief, and inadequate water-conservancy projects.^[73] Constrained both laterally and from the top, Ever-Normal Granary intendants were subjected to a degree of centralized control that was not extended to the Tea and Horse Agency until the middle of the following century.

Choosing Centralization Strategies

Both the Green Sprouts farm loans and the Szechwan tea monopoly grew out of an activist effort to replace private economic actors with public agencies in order to revitalize the economy and generate new revenues for the state. And both were administered regionally by men chosen according to the same entrepreneurial criteria. But while the THA intendants were encouraged to use bureaucratic power in an experimental, entrepreneurial way, their counterparts in the Ever-Normal Granary system were tightly controlled. In the case of the Green Sprouts loan policy the entrepreneurial mandate was located much higher up the administrative hierarchy, in the Court of Agricultural Supervision. The farming loans act promoted state economic control through increased centralization; the Szechwan tea monopoly pursued the same goal through decentralization. How can we understand the choice of two such different strategies for the same goal?

To begin with decentralization, what might be called the frontier factor stands out. Distance alone would recommend for frontier regions a degree of decentralization that would be unnecessary closer to the capital. Transport distance from K'ai-feng to Szechwan rendered all transfers of information, men, and goods costly and time-consuming, making delegation of broad discretionary authority to regional-based agencies the most effective way to govern. And since the tea and horse trade yoked the Shensi economy so strongly to Szechwan's, once fiscal authority had been decentralized in

[73] Investigators included Shen Kua, Chang Tun, Liü Sheng-ch'ing, P'u Tsung-meng, Hsiung Pen, and Hsu Hsi. See HCP 227/11a; 236/2b; 237/14a; 245/2a-b; 247/3a; 248/4b; 271/ 18a-b; 272/6b.

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Szechwan, it became advantageous to delegate it to the same agency in Shensi as well. Hence, from 1079 to 1082 Li Chi not only headed the THA but served concurrently as Shensi fiscal intendant.^[74] Closer to the capital, in the center of the political network, so great a delegation of power would have been both imprudent and unnecessary.

Szechwan's political history also commended decentralization as a useful strategy for enhancing state control. Because it was culturally and geographically isolated from the political heartland, Szechwan had proved relatively impervious to centralized taxation policies since the mid-T'ang. But the rebellions of Li Shun and Wang Hsiao-po had fractured multigenerational patron-client bonds, forcing Szechwan's magnate classes to turn to the state for protection and opening them to political recruitment. From the early eleventh century on increasing numbers of Szechwanese adopted bureaucratic careers as their primary mobility strategy, and bureaucratization of the Szechwanese elite gradually fostered integration of the region into the national polity. But even after the rebellions Sung administrators were wary of laying too heavy a hand on the Szechwanese economy: for most of the eleventh century, for example, Szechwan provided only 5 percent of the empire's twice-yearly tax quota, or about half of its percentage of the national population.

With the fiscal and military crises of the 1060s, however, the state felt compelled to increase its claims on the Szechwanese economy. Wang An-shih's "law for appointments to distant offices" enabled the state to maximize fiscal control in Szechwan by recruiting the growing pool of technically skilled and ambitious Szechwanese of low rank, whose chief hope for mobility lay in successful pursuit of a bureaucratic career, into serving in their own region as agents of the state. By grafting native recruitment onto the strategy of bureaucratic entrepreneurship, reform policymakers decentralized operational and personnel authority to the men who had most to gain from state economic activism and thus acquired for the state unprecedented access to Szechwan's surplus product.

But the efficacy of enhancing state revenues by decentralizing entrepreneurial power in distant regional agencies does not explain why, among all other possibilities, power flowed to the Tea and Horse Agency. One part of the explanation has to do with the degree to which the THA satisfied goals viewed as critical by the center. The sociologist James Thompson, in his useful and insightful book Organizations in Action , has supplied an axiom that links an organization's power to its operational success. Thompson writes that "an organization has power, relative to an element of its task environment [those parts of the environment that are relevant to goal setting

[74] At the same time the superintendant's headquarters was transferred from Ch'eng-tu to Ch'in-chou. HCP 297/16b; 299/12b; 330/9a-b.

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and attainment], to the extent that the organization has capacity to satisfy needs of that element [in our case state policymakers] and to the extent that the organization monopolizes that capacity." During the New Policies era the state's greatest needs in Szechwan and the Northwest frontier were for tea, horses, and revenues, and the THA was a generous (and in the case of tea and horses a monopolistic) supplier of all three. In order to keep tea, horses, and revenues flowing, policymakers granted THA intendants extraordinary power and autonomy. But however much the THA might resemble a private monopolistic enterprise, ultimately its power flowed from the state. And to the degree that changes in the task environment—particularly changes in policy objectives and marketing opportunities—undercut THA effectiveness, the state withdrew its support. In 1102, for example, Ts'ai Ching's reclamation of eastern Shensi for southeastern tea in 1102 created a surplus of Szechwanese tea and a doubling of the price ratio between tea and horses; and the Jurchen conquest of North China in 1127 deprived the THA of not only the rest of its extraregional markets, but most of its horse suppliers as well. Each shock progressively undermined the THA's capacity to supply the revenues and horses on which its power had been built, prompting successive administrations to curtail that power and reimpose a higher level of control. By the middle of the twelfth century, although Szechwanese regional administration was even more decentralized than under the New Policies, the THA itself had been reduced to but one component of a functionally overlapping fiscal network subordinated to the new post of viceroy (hsuan-fu shih ).^[75]

Organizational success, in short, was rewarded with organizational power, and the organization that ceased to be successful found its powers increasingly diminished. From this perspective we can understand why the ENG intendants were never granted the degree of autonomy enjoyed by their THA peers: for the Ever-Normal Granary operation was charged with a set of mutually contradictory goals that drew it in conflicting directions and made it impossible for the policy and its administrators to achieve the unambiguous success registered by the Tea and Horse Agency.

On the one hand, the ENG intendants were under great pressure to generate revenues through rapid circulation of the loan fund. Circulation was measured by quotas for distribution and collections, inspiring such abuses as forcing loans on the basis of household registration; issuing new loans to households with unpaid prior debts; and overzealous collection of back debts. On the other hand, the ENG intendants presided at the same time over the state's primary mechanism for relieving a peasantry that both reformers and reform opponents agreed was stretched to the limit by nat-

[75] Thompson, Organizations in Action , pp. 30-31. For the decline in THA powers, see Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 191-217.

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ural disaster and (for the reformers at least) inequalities of wealth. Thus even as it pushed the ENG intendants to deliver profits from the farming loans, the central government had to monitor them carefully to ensure that grain reserves were adequate to meet emergency needs, that relief grain was in fact distributed, and that loan collections did not dispossess poor peasants.^[76] The inconsistencies that stemmed from this tangle of conflicting goals are illustrated by the debate over loan eligibility and the problem of deferred repayments (i-ko ).

The question of loan eligibility placed the reformers in a vulnerable ideological position. As a social welfare measure, the Green Sprouts policy was intended to "suppress engrossers and relieve the poor and weak." But as a means of generating revenues, the Green Sprouts loan fund had to be circulated widely and to households that could be counted on (or forced) to repay. Consequently, in early 1070 the Finance Planning Commission pegged loan limits to the household grading system and extended eligibility to virtually all resident (as opposed to vagrant, fou-lang ) families. The new order entitled grade 5 and guest households to 1,500 cash; grade 4 to 3,000 cash; grade 3 to 6,000 cash; grade 2 to 10,000 cash; and grade 1 to 15,000 cash. The order then added that "if there are remaining funds, county officials are authorized to assess the situation and offer additional loans to households of grade 3 and above; if there are still surpluses, then interested households from the urban wards and suburbs with property and businesses to offer as collateral will be allowed to form into five-family guarantee groups and obtain loans under the Green Sprouts statutes."^[77]

Han Ch'i immediately attacked the new measure for providing public loans to the very same interests—the engrossers—it was purportedly seeking to suppress:

It is the rural households of grade 3 and above and the propertied urban and suburban households that have heretofore been "engrossing families." Now they are all given loans and charged 1,300 cash for every 1,000. The government is simply chasing interest payments. The measure absolutely contradicts the stated intent of the policy to suppress engrossers and aid those in need.^[78]

[76] HCP:SP 7/la; CPPM 68/2162; HCP 252/27a-b; 254/1b-2a. On new loans to already indebted households, see Ou-yang Hsiu's charge in HCP 211/12a-16a. In the spring of 1071 Han Ch'i complained from his post as vice-administrator of T'ai-ning-fu that the Hopei ENG intendant refused to issue grain from the loan fund for the hungry poor, insisting that they be fed from the sheng-ts'ang instead. In response Shen-tsung warned the fiscal, judicial, and ENG intendants against withholding poor relief and causing vagrancy. HCP 221/la-b. In 1074, Shen-tsung worried that although loan revenues were substantial, over 70 percent of the system's resources were in circulation at a time when widespread disaster made adequate relief-grain stores essential. The granaries were ordered to keep half their resources in reserve. HCP 256/15a-b; 272/7a-b.

[77] Wang An-shih to Shen-tsung, 1070/2, in SHY:SH 4/20b; and SHY:SH 4/19a, as quoted by Han Ch'i in 1070.2.1.

[78] SHY:SH 4/19b.

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Han's charge apparently caught the reformers off guard and forced them to defend their position publicly and before the emperor. Shortly thereafter Wang An-shih added his personal response to an official rejoinder by the Finance Planning Commission:

Rural households of grade 3 and higher as well as wealthy urban and suburban households also encounter periods of financial trouble and then have to incur private debts. How can they all be "engrosser families"? At the present time, after making loans to poor families the surplus is loaned to these (wealthier) grades, so they too are not forced to contract loans at 100 percent from private houses. This is precisely within the intent of the original imperial decree to repress engrossers.^[79]

But Han Ch'i utterly rejected the official response:

Not only does this official know that [these grade 3 and wealthy urban and suburban households] are "engrossing families"; everyone under heaven knows it! The only reason the Finance Planning Commission denies that they are engrossing households is that it wants to push even more Green Sprouts funds on them to get back still more interest.^[80]

We need to know more than we know now about Sung rural society to judge whether Han Ch'i's condemnation of all upper-grade households as "engrossers" is accurate. But as a political tactic Han's attack was brilliant, for it highlighted the essential contradictions between the social-welfare and revenue-generating components of the Green Sprouts policy. Though Han did not succeed in reversing the Green Sprouts measure, he did force Wang An-shih and the Finance Planning Commission into lengthy public justification of their policy of universal eligibility.^[81]

The problem of deferred payments cut directly to the heart of the conflict between social and fiscal objectives. The Green Sprouts directive of 1069 specified that repayments be made after the summer and fall harvests of the year of loan issue, but allowed extensions of one harvest period in the case of disaster or poor crops. Subsequent orders extended the repayment period up to two years, but even with the more liberal provisions there were always borrowers who could not meet their obligations. Debtors and their guarantors were subject to confiscation, first of their collateral and then of their immovable property. As early as 1071 the Court of Agricultural Supervision obtained permission to funnel the returns from debt sales of property back into the ENG capital fund.^[82]

But even perfectly legal debt collections and property seizures could intensify rural disintegration, and in periods of endemic disaster the Court of

[79] SHY:SH 4/23a.

[80] SHY:SH 4/27b; also in Han's Chia-chuan , cited in HCP:Shih-pu 7/26a-27b.

[81] See, for example, SHY:SH 4/22b-24a, 24b-25b.

[82] SHY:SH 4/16b; HCP 228/7b; 279/23a-b; 294/8b-9a.

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Agricultural Supervision was pressured to grant payment deferrals. Yet deferrals created their own set of problems. First, a debtor under deferred status was presumed to be a bad risk and was legally prohibited from receiving further loans. But denying a loan amounted to withholding essential agrarian relief: in 1074 the administrator of Chi-chou, in Hopei, predicted that the denial of Green Sprouts loans to deferred planters of spring wheat would diminish the following season's harvest as well as force farmers to go hungry. The court immediately ordered the ENG intendants of five northern circuits to grant interest-free loans of 1,000 cash to all spring-wheat farmers below household-grade 3, even if they had deferred debts. Two years later, however, the emperor censured granary officials for issuing loans to deferred debtors, accusing them of pursuing profits and good merit ratings at the expense of prudence.^[83]

In addition, collecting from deferred debtors raised delicate political as well as practical problems. In 1075, for example, the Court of Agricultural Supervision got permission to set the summer of 1076 as the deadline for repaying loans issued in Liang-che, Huai-nan, and Chiang-nan two years earlier, agreeing to accept labor service in exchange for money or goods. By the summer of 1077, however, collections had still not progressed, and the Secretariat-Chancellery this time sent its own agents to press for repayment following good harvests in Liang-che and Huai-nan. The Secretariat's collections were halted again the following spring for the two lowest household grades; and in 1079 the Court of Agricultural Supervision was in turn forced to accept another extension for the poorest households in Liang-che. Predictably, the deferrals, politically essential though they may have been, were financially disastrous: loan collections were 13 percent off quota in 1080 and fell 1.8 million strings into the red a year later. Moreover, the politically unavoidable deficits spurred even tighter control, and in 1083 the Finance Ministry was ordered to lead an investigation of the ENG intendancies. In contrast with the THA, whose prodigious fulfillment of a consistent set of policy expectations protected it from outside interference, the inability of the Ever-Normal Granary system to satisfy an intrinsically contradictory set of social and fiscal objectives provoked suspicion and careful scrutiny from its superiors as well as its opponents.^[84]

Finally, the Green Sprouts policy was centralized at a higher level and watched more closely than the Szechwan tea monopoly because direct state intervention in the agrarian economy, and efforts to get more out of the peasantry than custom and direct taxation warranted, kindled greater controversy than state control of commerce. In contrast with the Szechwan tea monopoly, critics of the Green Sprouts policy rejected the fundamental

[83] HCP 258/17a; 272/2b.

[84] HCP 268/18a-b; 283/10a; 288/11b; 289/13a; 292/3b; 297/1b; 332/10a-b.

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principles and goals of the policy and occupied positions throughout the government, including the Ever-Normal Granary administration itself.

Among the many criticisms leveled at the policy, three in particular shed light on conservative fiscal views. Opponents rejected the theory of poverty on which the policy was justified; they criticized the dangerous reliance on money that the farming loans promoted; and they argued that the state was a far harsher creditor than private lenders could be.

As we have seen, the architects of the Green Sprouts policy blamed rural poverty on the powerful "engrossers," who could turn the endemic crises of agrarian production to their own advantage. But critics of the policy blamed rural poverty, not on exploitation, but on the spendthrift habits of the poor. In his polemic against the Green Sprouts policy and the Finance Planning Commission of 1070, for example, Ssu-ma Kuang outlined a model of rural society that portrayed wealthy families as a safety net for the poor:

The reason there are poor people and rich people is difference in talent, nature, and intelligence. The rich are more intelligent, their concerns deeper and their thinking more long-range, and they gladly work their muscles and toil their bones, dress plainly and eat sparingly. And to the end they do not want to borrow from others. Thus their households normally enjoy a surplus, and they do not go to the wolves [become hopelessly dependent]. Now poor people are timid and weak and grasp whatever they can rather than working industriously; they don't think of the long term, and if in one drunken day they get rich, soon there will be nothing left; when they are hard pressed they borrow from other people, and as the debts accumulate they are unable to repay them, until they reach the point that they must sell their wives and children. . . . Thus it is that the rich often make loans to the poor in order to enrich themselves, and the poor often borrow from the wealthy in order to survive. Though bitterness and happiness are not equally distributed, at least [rich and poor] mutually aid one another, in order to guarantee their livelihoods.^[85]

Anticipating Tung Wei's market-oriented theory of famine relief documented in chapter 7 in this volume by Robert Hymes, Ssu-ma Kuang identified wealthy rural families as the foundation of a stable order, and profit as the lure that moved the wealthy to aid the poor. For Ssu-ma Kuang, any policy that sought to displace the rural rich threatened to undermine society and the state.^[86]

[85] SMWKWC 7/3a, "Ch'i pa T'iao-li-ssu ch'ang-p'ing-shih shu."

[86] For Tung Wei's views, see chapter 7. Ssu-ma Kuang's projection of the impact of the Green Sprouts policy on the rich is worth quoting at length: "Now county officials [are themselves] issued interest-funds to lend to the people in spring and fall. None of the wealthy people want the loans, but the poor people do want them. Because the Intending Officials want to distribute [loans] on a wide scale in order to accumulate merit, they do not inquire into people's wealth or poverty, but just force loans on them according to their household grade. The wealthy are assigned relatively large debts, the poor somewhat smaller. Large loans go up to 15 strings, small ones not less than 1,000 cash. Prefectural and county officials and clerks fear [getting stuck with] the responsibility of absconders and defaulters, so order the poor and rich to array themselves together in pao-chia guarantee groups. The wealthy are made the chiefs (k'uei-shou ), the poor obtain money, and in no time at all the money is gone. In the future if the millet or wheat [harvests] are small or don't come up, they cannot even pay their twice yearly tax, let alone the interest payments. Since they cannot repay, the fears of the clerks are spread to all four quarters. The wealthy cannot avoid it, and must themselves repay the debts of the many households" (SMWCC 7/3b).

Ssu-ma then outlines a scenario for universal immiseration and disaster: "Once the poor are completely exhausted, the wealthy will also become poor; your minister fears that after ten years time there will not be many wealthy. And once the wealthy are completely exhausted, if the nation (kuo-chia ) should have the misfortune of a border emergency, and have to raise many troops, then from whom will the monies for grain, cloth, and military provisions be raised?" (ibid., 3b).

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Prominent critics also charged that the farming-loans policy changed the calculus of rural poverty by first pumping unnecessary money into the countryside, then siphoning it out again through monetized collections of fees and taxes. In 1074, for example, Feng Ching, second privy councillor, asserted that when the people of Hsiang-fu county, K'ai-feng, hear that the government is distributing loan funds they put up whatever they own as collateral to get money that they do not need: "They just see that the government is giving out money, and there are none who do not want some; so they pile up debts, and when the time comes they cannot repay."^[87] Cash loans were seen as an inducement to debt and extravagance. As Su Shih wrote in a retrospective assessment of the policy:

Peasant households balance expeditures against income and economize in clothing and food, so that even if poor they still meet their basic needs. But when peasants can get more money than they need their expenses naturally increase, and there is nothing they will not do [to get still more].^[88]

Having habituated the peasants to money, however, the government made money increasingly hard to get by drawing it out of circulation through loan collections, the service-exemption fees, and inequitable exchange rates for the payment of taxes. Ssu-ma Kuang called attention to the problem in 1074, alleging that monetized payments forced the peasantry to sell everything they had to obtain the one thing they lacked—cash—in order to pay the state. The currency shortage undermined the farming loans' original objective as a rural credit mechanism. For, as Wang Yen-sou argued in 1086, when it came time to repay their loans poor peasants once

[87] HCP 252/8a.

[88] HCP 384/10b. Cf. Shang-kuan Chün's assessment, HCP 378/18b.

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again had to borrow from the "rich families and great clans" at inflated interest rates to obtain the cash they needed to pay off the state. Thus the Green Sprouts policy had come full circle: "established in the name of suppressing the engrosser households, it wound up giving them great assistance."^[89]

Moreover, the state had far greater power to press its debtors than private lenders had. In 1069 Ssu-ma Kuang had predicted that although the rich could merely "nibble away" at the poor, county clerks and officials would come down on the peasantry with the irresistible legal and police powers of the state. According to Shang-kuan Chün's appraisal in 1086, although private lenders had charged nominally high interest rates, they had at least been flexible and relatively benign in their capacity to exact repayment. By the time a peasant finished paying off the ruthlessly efficient agents of the state, on the other hand, the price of a loan had risen to 50 or 100 percent. Wang Yen-sou graphically illustrated the monetary and physical cost of a government loan: first, in order to register for a loan, the guard chief, guarantee-group head, and notary for household registration all had to be paid off. Then, if at collection time there was not enough money to pay, when the government clerk appeared at the door he had to be bought off with food and drink. But the clerks could not be bribed endlessly, and for tens of thousands of debtors the inevitable day arrived when they were dragged off to be beaten and their property was seized. Nor did Wang Yen-sou assume that the Green Sprouts policy was intentionally malicious. The problems were simply the unavoidable consequence of government interference in the rural economy. "To strive intentionally for the benefit [of the peasantry]," he concluded, "is not as good as bringing them benefit by leaving them alone."^[90]

It should be evident from the discussion to this point that it was not merely a small circle of conservatives who rejected the rural credit policy; Green Sprouts critics were located throughout the government, constituting a vocal and persistent base of opposition to the measure at all levels. At the court level, complaints by such elder statesmen as Ssu-ma Kuang, Han Ch'i, Ch'en Sheng-chih, and Tseng Kung-liang kept Shen-tsung uncertain of the policy's merits and sensitive to its potential excesses and embroiled Wang An-shih and the Green Sprouts measure in continual and divisive court controversy. In 1070 Ssu-ma Kuang, against the emperor's wishes,

[89] SMWCC 7/10a-b, "Ying-chao yen ch'ao-cheng ch'ueh-shih chuang." Ssu-ma pointed to the low price of grains despite widespread famine as proof of the efficiency with which the government siphoned cash out of the countryside. For Chang Fang-p'ing's confirmations, see HCP 269/2b. On government manipulation of the exchange rate between money and goods in its own favor, see Ssu-ma's 1071 memorial "Chun t'i-chu Shen-hsi ch'ang-p'ing—kuang-hui-ts'ang ssu tieh," SMWCC 7/6a-7a. Wang Yen-sou's argument is in HCP 376/17a.

[90] SHY:SH 4/18a-b; HCP 378/18a-b; 376/17a-b.

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resigned in protest against the policy, and Ch'en and Tseng used illness as an excuse to withdraw from the fray. But continued attacks against Green Sprouts forced Wang An-shih temporarily out of office in 1074, and debate over the program compelled the court to confront fundamental questions of factionalism and the proper limits of remonstrance. Outside the court, Fu Pi and Ou-yang Hsiu used their posts as prefectural administrators to spearhead an obstructionist movement against distributing the Green Sprouts loans in Ching-tung East and Huai-nan East circuits in 1070 and 1071; and they were joined by a fiscal intendant in Hopei and a vice fiscal intendant in Shensi, as well as county administrators in K'ai-feng and Liang-che. Moreover, even the administrators of the policy turned against it: in 1070 Chang Tz'u-shan used his refusal of an ENG intendancy to lambaste the New Policies generally, while the Ho-tung ENG intendant Liang Tuan recommended that the Green Sprouts be abolished; in 1077 the Chiang-nan West ENG intendant Fang Tse counseled that the associated hired-service system be ended; and in 1081 Wang Ku memorialized against the rural credit policy after administering it in Liang-che, K'ai-feng, and Ching-hsi.^[91]

Opposition to the Szechwan tea monopoly, in contrast, was far more limited in political and ideological scope. The first wave of opposition to the monopoly, in 1077, was confined entirely to native Szechwanese in Szechwanese prefectural posts (Lü T'ao, Chou Piao-ch'üan, and Wu Shih-meng) and the censorate (Chou Yin). These four gained the dismissal of one intendant (Liu Tso), but were themselves all neutralized through transfers, dismissals, and a "muzzling order" that prohibited outside officials from interfering in THA affairs.^[92] Opposition to the THA was effectively silenced until the Restoration movement of 1086, when Lü T'ao and his fellow Szechwanese Su Ch'e were joined in their efforts to dismantle the THA enterprise by the elder statesman Liu Chih.

Ideologically, it is clear that state regulation of subsidiary crops and industries, including textiles and salt in addition to tea, provoked less fundamental resistance than official intervention in the staple grain economy. In the particular case of the Szechwan tea monopoly, even Lü T'ao and Su Ch'e were more opposed to the THA as an entrepreneurial enterprise than

[91] On the resignations of Ssu-ma et al., see CPPM 68/2191; SHY:SH 4/24b. Court debates over the policy, all involving direct participation by a confused and deeply troubled emperor, are richly documented in CPPM 68 and 69. See especially pp. 2164, 2169, 2171, 2173, 2176, 2180, 2185-89, 2221. For Ou-yang Hsiu, see HCP 211/12a-16a; SHY:SH 5/7a-b. For Fu Pi, see HCP 220/6b-7a; 222/6a-7b; 224/14b; and SHY:SH 5/8b-9a. For others, see SHY:SH 4/22a-b; SHY:SH 5/6b; HCP 212/7a-b; and for ENG administrators themselves, see HCP 210/10b; HCP 212/14a; HCP 285/5b-6a; HCP 313/7b-8a.

[92] HCP 283/9b; 284/15a-16a; SHY:CK 43/50b. For Lü T'ao's three critical memorials of 1077, see Ching-te chi 1/4a-23b.

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to the idea of a state-run tea and horse trade. In particular, they condemned THA autonomy and its control over county government; the unrestrained profit seeking associated with THA involvement in nontea commodities, the profit-sharing-incentive system, and the forced sale of tea to Shensi residents; and the exploitative burden the tea monopoly placed on tea producers and Szechwanese conscripted into tea-transport service. But both accepted the need to trade tea for horses and merely urged that instead of imposing a region-wide monopsony, the state purchase the tea it required in the open market. Similarly, both grudgingly agreed that the costs of frontier defense entitled the state to claim a share of the profits from the tea trade, but they pressed the government to obtain its revenues from the collection of sales and transit taxes and licensing fees from an otherwise free trade (t'ung-shang , literally "via merchants") instead of from monopolization.^[93]

Conclusion

Despite the anti-New Policies atmosphere of the Yuan-yu era (1086-1094), even the relatively modest recommendations of Lü T'ao and Su Ch'e were disregarded. In the absence of a critical mass of opposition, the Tea and Horse enterprise was too valuable, and its value too greatly tied to monopoly control, for even the Restoration government to tolerate more than partial deregulation and an agreement to end abuses. Even the late-eleventh-century Szechwanese critic of the monopoly, Yang T'ien-hui, observed that with a financial surplus of two million strings each year and a quota of 15,000 to 18,000 horses, "it is not that there is no desire to change [the intendancy operation], but that in truth it cannot be changed." The Green Sprouts policy, on the other hand, was gradually but irreversibly dismantled during the first quarter of 1086, and the experiment in state control of rural credit was brought to a decisive conclusion. Can we conclude from this that state control of the tea and horse trade was successful, but state intervention in rural credit markets was not? Unfortunately, we cannot. So politicized was the Green Sprouts debate that there is simply too much rhetoric and too little concrete information in surviving records for us to evaluate the overall impact of the policy with any confidence. Seasonal credit crises were an endemic component of agrarian life, and certainly some sectors of the poor peasantry in some regions of the empire must have benefited from the establishment of public credit institutions. But no observer has yet surfaced to provide the same locally specific and richly textured description of the impact of the Green Sprouts policy on the peasantry

[93] Lü T'ao, Ching-te chi 3/5b-7a; 8b-9a; Su Ch'e, Luan-ch'eng chi (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed.) 36/9a-b.

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that Lü T'ao has given of the Szechwan tea monopoly and the tea producers of P'eng-chou. Thus, although we can outline the probable best and worst results for the peasantry, we cannot yet assess its overall impact.^[94]

I have argued that both the tea and horse trade and the Green Sprouts measure emerged from a common blueprint for reform that sought to mobilize bureaucratic entrepreneurs to reassert the regulatory authority of the state in the market economy, but that only the Tea and Horse Agency, which consistently surpassed revenue expectations through its control of a cash crop in a frontier region, was allowed to develop into an autonomous entrepreneurial enterprise. Although the THA outlasted the New Policies, its entrepreneurial character proved more transitory. The promotion of entrepreneurship as a policy preference seems to have been unique to the New Policies leadership, and later administrations only reluctantly tolerated the radical decentralization of authority that lay at the heart of the entrepreneurial model.^[95] Moreover, shifting central policy goals merged with a changing geopolitical environment to erode the productivity of the Tea and Horse Agency over time, compromising the Agency's claim to extraordinary powers.

On the revenue side, the ability of the THA to provide surplus funds was undermined by the progressive loss of its extraregional markets to the revived Southeastern Tea Monopoly in 1103, and the Jurchen conquest of North China in 1127. By the 1130s the THA was able to subsidize only a small fraction of Szechwan's thirty-six-million-string defense bill; from mid-century on THA revenues routinely fell below quota; and by the end of the century the THA had forfeited its role as a revenue-producing agency. Jurchen possession of the Hsi-ho horse-marketing region, in conjunction with the Tangut occupation of Hsi-ning, had an even more chaotic impact on THA horse procurement. Total output of the Southern Sung THA averaged only 10,000 horses annually, less than two-thirds of the Northern Sung quota. More critically, usable northern "war horses" (chan-ma ) constituted only half of the annual quota; the rest were made up of weak and undersized Szechwanese "halter and bridle" ponies (chi-mi-ma ), largely unsuitable

[94] For the investigative report of Huang Lien, who was himself named intendant in 1086/ 6, see HCP 381/22a-23b. Yang T'ien-hui is quoted in Fu Tseng-hsiang, Sung-tai Shu-wen chits'un (1943 ed.), 26/10b-11b. On the ending of the Green Sprouts, HCP 368/26a; 374/4b-5a; 375/4b-5a. I discuss Lü T'ao's material in Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 63-68 and 220-27.

[95] Although the question requires greater systematic study, it appears that late Northern Sung and Southern Sung administrators viewed the decentralization of critical authority to autonomous regional agencies, especially military agencies, as a necessary evil rather than a valuable policy option. The best general discussion in English is still Lo, "Circuits," pp. 83-103. Hartwell, perhaps prematurely, sees the growth of powerful regional administrators during the Southern Sung, particularly the viceroys (hsuan-fu-shih ) and general supply commissioners (tsung-ling ), as a usurpation of central-government functions ("Transformations of China," pp. 397-98).

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for riding. As horse numbers, quality, and convoy survival rates plummeted during the Southern Sung, the THA and ancillary purchasers could meet only about 70 percent of the government's annual equine needs.^[96]

The government's response to declining THA productivity was predictable: over the course of the twelfth century the size, operational scope, and organizational prerogatives of the THA were steadily trimmed. By mid-century the THA had been transformed from an autonomous superregional enterprise, answerable only to the central leadership, into one link in a functionally integrated regional administration, tied through a system of collective responsibility to the circuit fiscal intendants and vice-intendants, and the regional supply master (tsung-ling-so ) and pacification commissioner (an-fu chih-chih shih ), all of whom were subordinate to the regional viceroy (hsuan-fu shih ).^[97] At several times toward the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, production shortfalls even forced the government to transfer direct control of the THA or its resources to other regional, extraregional, or central-government agencies.^[98] As organizational output dwindled, then, control over the THA was correspondingly centralized, until by the 1150s it had slipped into the same externally regulated managerial configuration that characterized the Ever-Normal Granary system under the New Policies.

There remained one crucial distinction between the New Policies ENGs and the Southern Sung THA. In the case of ENG administration of the Green Sprouts measure, centralized surveillance was at least partly intended to restrain official exploitation of the staple-growing peasantry. But cash-crop tea cultivators were less ideologically sheltered. Because the Southern Sung court was continually pressed for funds for which there were few new sources, it was very slow to reduce revenue quotas set when the market for tea was robust. Since revenue quotas determined the bureaucratic influence of the Agency and the material and career expectations of its personnel, even after the loss of North China and an empire-wide tea glut undercut the market for all tea, including Szechwan's, the THA was put under enormous pressure to replace entrepreneurial profits generated by the sale of tea to merchants and consumers with increased and inescapable imposts levied directly on tea producers. Until well into the thirteenth

[96] The trajectory of the tea and horse trade over time is discussed in Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , chap 7.

[97] See ibid., pp, 207-17.

[98] In 1186 the Pacification Commissioner was ordered to take over joint control of the THA's accounts because of its financial debts; in 1192 the THA owed horses as well, and the court transferred its capital funds to the Hu-kuang Supply Master to buy horses locally; in 1203 the THA was split into two branches, one in Ch'eng-tu and one in Hsing-yuan-fu (Hanchung), and both were put under the control of the Bureau of Military Affairs. See Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 216-17.

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century, when the records run out, tea market officials were driven by the rules of the Agency to force tea households into debt and to confiscate their plantations in order to meet long-outdated quotas, as bureaucratic entrepreneurship degenerated into confiscatory taxation. And in contrast with the rural credit measure, there is no evidence that THA functionaries ever refused to administer the tea monopoly.^[99]

But were the growers of staple grains, in contrast, well served by the disestablishment of the rural credit measure? As Richard yon Glahn and Robert Hymes document, famine and credit relief problems became even more pressing during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet as Schirokauer, Walton, and de Bary among others in this volume attest, many of the most prominent Southern Sung political thinkers indicted excessive bureaucratic centralization as the cause of contemporary social, political, and economic problems, to which they sought solutions, not in the bureaucratic entrepreneurship of state agents, but in the moral entrepreneurship of community-minded gentlemen. The community granary (she-ts'ang ) model popularized in the late twelfth century by Chu Hsi illustrates this shift in ideological orientation from central-institutional to local-voluntaristic solutions quite clearly. As yon Glahn demonstrates, Chu Hsi embraced the goals of Wang An-shih's Green Sprouts measure, but attempted to correct its flaws by severing the link between rural credit assistance and state revenue production, privatizing administration of the community granaries to "local literati gentlemen" (hsiang-jen shih chün-tzu ), and demonetizing the loans exclusively to grain rather than cash.^[100] Whereas Wang An-shih took aim at the rural credit crisis by despatching state agents to displace the rural rich, Chu Hsi attempted to circumvent the inadequacies of state policy by exhorting some among the rural rich to manage credit relief for the poor. But community granaries were seriously underfinanced and highly susceptible to bankruptcy, and von Glahn shows that over time they were likely to be absorbed by the state and turned into vehicles for episodic charity or local price stabilization, rather than the mechanism for perennial credit assistance that Chu Hsi sought.

Chu Hsi's community granary model represents a paradigmatic shift from the centralized bureaucratic state to the local voluntaristic community as the focus of political action. But Chu Hsi and his Tao-hsueh associates had little impact on Southern Sung policymakers, who perpetuated in however attenuated a form the basic statist policies of the Northern Sung. During the early years of the Ming, however, literati suspicion of the cen-

[99] The rising exploitative burden is reflected in changes in the smuggling laws, surtaxes, registered quotas, and the laws on debt liability. See ibid., pp. 227-42.

[100] For Chu Hsi's assessment of the Green Sprouts measure, see his "Wu-chou Chin-huahsien she-ts'ang chi," in Chu wen-kung wen-chi (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an ed.) 79/18a. Chu Hsi's community granary model is analyzed by Richard von Glahn in his chapter in this volume.

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tralized bureaucracy converged with Hung-wu's mistrust of self-serving bureaucrats to yield a state structure that, though highly centralized at the top, relinquished almost all capacity to intervene in and shape the economy. Ray Huang has pointed up the sharp contrasts between Sung and Ming financial administration. Whereas the Sung state (and here we restrict our view to Northern Sung) was willing to exercise its financial powers to reshape and tap into an expanding economy in order to increase revenues without overburdening the taxpayers, the Ming founder shackled the development of his financial apparatus in order to centralize fiscal authority in the position of the emperor and maximize political stability. The result was a financial administration that was remarkably self-denying, in that it reduced its own operational capacity to the minimum, neglected to develop revenues from industrial and commercial sources, and refused to consider the possibility of seeking assistance from private quarters. The whole tone of the administration was regression rather than progress. Huang demonstrates that ultimately the underfinanced Ming government was unable to provide basic public services, which retarded the progress of technology and the economy as a whole and forced administrators to shift the mounting costs of government to those portions of the taxable population who were least able to resist extraschedule taxes.^[101]

For Huang the Ming system represents a significant break in Chinese fiscal history, and he concludes that "from this time onwards, the main aim of government finance was to maintain the political status quo, and it ceased to exhibit any dynamic features." Historians of the Ch'ing have largely accepted Huang's interpretation. In a recent study of Ch'ing fiscal administration, for example, Marianne Bastid finds little difference between the basic financial institutions of the Ming and the Ch'ing, and points out that these institutions were employed "as instruments of regulation and balance rather than of compulsion and unification." In direct contrast with even the least entrepreneurial Sung fiscal practices and institutions, Bastid notes that during the Ch'ing "the principle of personal direct responsibility to the emperor of all officials, together with a rapid turnover except in the highest and. lowest grades, limited the possibility of developing a body of regulations and conventions specific to financial institutions which would allow such institutions to protect themselves and expand while still assuring their own internal policing."^[102]

It is now recognized that effective state intervention plays an integral role in economic transformations, and that active state participation was as

[101] On the political frustrations of Tao-hsueh adherents during the Southern Sung, see the chapters by John Chaffee and James Liu in this volume. On the Ming situation, see Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance , pp. 315-16 and 321.

[102] Huang, p. 323. Marianne Bastid, "Financial Institutions of the State in the Late Qing," pp. 67-68, 75-76.

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central to the early industrial revolution as it has been to later industrial change.^[103] Historians of China as well as comparative historical sociologists acknowledge that economic development in late imperial China was seriously impeded by what Ray Huang calls the "limited handling capacity" of Ming and Ch'ing financial institutions, which were unable to accumulate or distribute capital in ways that would promote economic growth. In her provocative comparison of economic development in China and Japan in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, the sociologist Frances Moulder (following Eli Heckscher) has employed the term "provisioning" to characterize the very weak interaction between the late imperial Chinese state and the economy. For Moulder, a political economy oriented to pro-visioning aims

above all to acquire revenues and supplies for a static or relatively slowly expanding state civil and military apparatus and to ensure an adequate supply of food and other necessities to the rural and urban populations in order to forestall riots and rebellions against the upper classes. The state that has a provisioning policy plays a relatively passive role in the economy. Provisioning policies generally neither suppress commerce, industry, and private capital accumulation nor especially encourage their development.^[104]

Moulder contrasts the provisioning policies of Ch'ing China (and, she argues, Tokugawa Japan) with the mercantilist orientation of the state-building European regimes of the eighteenth century on and the industrial capitalist states of the present day. "The key element of mercantilism," she writes, "is the conception of the economy as a national economy whose wealth and strength can be increased in part through government action"; among these actions she includes the promotion of capital accumulation, expansion, technology diffusion, and the encouragement of a national marketing infrastructure through, for example, currency unification and the improvement of internal transportation.^[105]

[103] For a useful and provocative interpretation of the state and economic development, see Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. Evans, "The State and Economic Transformation: Toward an Analysis of the Conditions Underlying Effective Intervention," in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 44-77.

[104] Frances V. Moulder, Japan, China and the Modern World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 48. Moulder's interpretation is generally consistent with that of Dwight Perkins in "Government as an Obstacle to Industrialization: The Case of Nineteenth-Century China," Journal of Economic History 27, no. 4 (1967): 478-92. Even during the High Ch'ing in the eighteenth century the state impinged only very lightly on the economy. As Feuerwerker argues, "the traditional Chinese economy did not depend upon any direct economic role performed by the central government, or usually even by local officials, for its continuing operation and for such prosperity as it achieved." See State and Society in Eighteenth-Century China: The Ch'ing Empire in Its Glory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies: 1976), p. 89.

[105] Moulder, pp. 49-50.

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I think that the mercantilist category Moulder reserves for the centralizing states of Europe and the industrial states of today can be usefully extended to the activist economic orientation of the Northern Sung, and especially to the statist experiments of the New Policies as represented by the Tea and Horse Agency and the rural-credit measure. But this returns us to the question raised at the outset of this chapter: for if provisioning policies are a measure of the disengagement of the state from the economy, how can we explain the transition from a mercantilist to a provisioning orientation in the post-Sung era?

The question is a complex one, and any complete explanation would have to consider changing international contexts and the question of technical capacity, particularly the limits on formal organizational capacity imposed by premodern technology. But in conclusion I would point to changes in the relationship between the state and the dominant elite as an underlying factor in the transformation of the Chinese political economy. Following Twitchett and Hartwell, I argued at the outset that economic activism from the late T'ang through the Northern Sung was promoted by the rise of a professional bureaucratic elite that depended on government service for its power and income and benefited therefore from the expansion of government activities. As Hartwell has demonstrated, long-term social, economic, and demographic changes in the structure of elite power from the eighth century on were exacerbated by the intense factional power struggles of the New Policies and its aftermath, which nullified the formal organizational tactics used by professional elite families to guarantee government careers for their offspring. With the intensification of factionalism and political purges, separate families of the national hereditary elite increasingly abandoned the endogamous marriage practices and career specialization on which their power had rested, and adopted the same strategies of career diversification and local social, economic, and political consolidation as the local gentry. The late eleventh and the early twelfth century, Hartwell concludes, saw "the disappearance of the professional elite as a cohesive status group made up of families who specialized in government service and the coming to the fore of local gentry lineages who encouraged a division of labor among their progeny with government service as only one possible career choice."^[106]

Hartwell has identified a persuasive correlation between the disintegration of the national bureaucratic elite and the rise of a new parochialism in Southern Sung policy-making, as local careers and interests replaced the national ambitions and intellectual horizons of officials in the Northern Sung. Moreover, it now seems clear that the rise of the local gentry in the twelfth century marked a watershed in the evolution of the Chinese elite that ultimately transformed the foundation of state power and economic

[106] Hartwell, "Transformations of China," pp. 416, 421-22.

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policy-making. As Hymes and Ebrey have documented for the Sung, and Elvin, Beattie, and Wiens for the Ming and Ch'ing, social, institutional, and demographic factors all converged from the twelfth century on to diminish the role of government service in the lives of the dominant gentry elite. Even the examination system drove a wedge between the elite and the state, for the increasing ratio of degree holders to government positions made entry into the civil service progressively remote and made the examination system as much a mechanism for acquiring status and connections as a ladder to official success.^[107]

Although official position probably remained the quickest route to power and fortune throughout the late imperial era, for any given family the downward slide out of the civil service was far more predictable than entry into it. Under the circumstances, elite mobility strategies gradually clustered around the control of land, commerce, and credit, supplemented by the widespread pursuit of the social and cultural rather than the official rewards of education. It is true that starting in the early Ch'ing large numbers of lower-degree holders began to specialize in local managerial functions, such as tax farming, pettifogging, school supervision, and irrigation and bursary management. Though in some instances illegal or semilegal, these managerial roles became an intrinsic component of the local government apparatus. But rather than extending the power of the central government into local society, they tended to transform the empire's administrative machinery into a weapon in the private economic struggles of the upper gentry and its managerial functionaries. In consequence, as Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones have observed, "as the monarchy lost its capacity to defend its realm against the assertion of private interests, the role of the central government itself in dominating and defining the sphere of public interest was being irreparably damaged."^[108]

These changes in the basis of elite power are well known, but I suggest that they lie behind the long-term shift from a mercantilist to a provisioning political economy. Recent political theory has stressed the ways in which

[107] Hartwell, "Transformations of China," pp. 400, 424; Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Patricia Ebrey, Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Mark Elvin, "The Last Thousand Years of Chinese History: Changing Patterns in Land Tenure," Modern Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (1970): 97-114; Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T'ung-ch'eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Mi Chu Wiens, "Lord and Peasant: The Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," Modern China 6, no. 1 (1980): 3-40; Chaffee, Thorny Gates , p. 27, table 5, Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York: John Wiley, 1964), chap. 3.

[108] See Ho, chap. 4; Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones, "Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion," in John K. Fairbank, ed. The Cambridge History of China , vol. 10:1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 110-16 and 162.

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states are more or less autonomous from, and often in direct conflict with, the dominant social strata that supply their personnel. Nonetheless, I think there are at least two broad but testable generalizations that can be made about the ways in which long-term social and politico-economic changes were intertwined. First, the growing localism and independence from government service of the gentry as a class fostered a preference for minimalist, noninterventionist, provisioning economic policies on the part of gentrymen as members of the government. And second, when some participants in the late imperial Chinese state did make sporadic attempts to enhance the power of government in society, an independent dominant class that also controlled the institutions of local administration was easily able to repel these efforts.^[109] In the centuries following the collapse of the national bureaucratic elite and the rise of the local gentry, the Chinese imperial state lost both the will and the capacity to expand the arena of public power.

[109] For a discussion of the literature on the autonomous state, see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 24-33, and "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In , pp. 3-43. On the situation in late imperial China, see, for example, Ray Huang, 1587 , and Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), as well as the comparative analyses in Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions , and Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

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Three
Government, Society, and State: On the Political Visions of Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih

Peter K. Bol

Contrasts and Contexts

As scholars and political leaders Ssu-ma Kuang (1019-1086) and Wang An-shih (1021-1086) articulated fundamentally different political visions. Their views presented the literati with a classic choice between an activist government, which sought to manage social and economic developments in the interest of all, and a more limited government, which sought to maintain necessary public institutions at minimum expense to private interests. They found, once Wang gained power, that their differences were irreconcilable. Ssu-ma wrote Wang, in a letter that criticized all his major policies: "What I have said here runs exactly counter to your ideas; I know you will not agree. But although our directions are different, our ultimate goal is the same. You wish to gain power to pursue your way and benefit all the people, and I wish to leave office to pursue my purpose and save all the people." Even if they shared the common goal of serving the general welfare, their courses diverged so greatly that it is hard to believe that their ends could have been the same. Wang An-shih responded that they had differed in every instance on policy, in spite of having long been friendly, "because the methods we have adopted are for the most part different." Their "methods" (shu ) had to do with bureaucratic process and policy (cheng ), but they were also the methods of scholarship and learning (hsueh ) that each relied upon to justify his ideas about what government ought to do. Wang explained in 1069 to the emperor: "I certainly wish to aid Your Majesty in accomplishing something, but today customs and institutions are all in ruin. . . . If Your Majesty truly wishes to use me . . . we should first discuss learning, so that you are convinced of the necessary connections in what I have

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learned." And, in response to the emperor's comment that some believed Wang's learning had not prepared him for practical leadership: "Methods from the Classics (ching shu ) are the means with which to manage the problems of the age (ching shih-wu ). . . . The priority of the moment is to change customs (pien feng-su ) and establish institutions (li fa-tu )." Ssu-ma Kuang was just as confident that his historical studies, which he was presenting to the same emperor, fully supported his views. Their visions were political and institutional, but also cultural and moral. Both men thought they knew how men ought to learn and where their learning should come from.^[1]

This chapter asks how Wang and Ssu-ma reached such different conclusions about the correct functioning of government. Rather than take Wang's advocacy of political reform and Ssu-ma's conservative opposition as the starting point of analysis and so depict them as polar opposites, it is more useful, I think, to view them as men who, responding to a shared set of questions, exhibited generational similarities as well as crucial differences. We can then see that the political stands they took after 1068 are related to the visions they developed earlier before they became political leaders. It is particularly misleading to see Ssu-ma only as an opponent of "change" and to ignore his own positive vision. Although past studies have sometimes inclined to polar analysis based on attitudes toward the New Policies, they have established many of the differences between the two men. They may serve here to remind us of whom we are speaking.

Contrasts

Higashi Ichio's study provides a point of departure for reviewing some of the differences between Wang and Ssu-ma.

Regional Origin . Wang came from the south (Lin-ch'uan county in Fuchou in Chiang-nan-hsi circuit, south of Lake P'o-yang). His region had been growing dramatically in population and wealth. Ssu-ma came from the north (Hsia county in Shan-chou in Yung-hsing-chün circuit, west of Lo-yang). His home had seen little dramatic growth and produced far fewer officials through the examination system. Wang served as a local official only in southern areas (Huai-nan, Liang-che, and Chiang-nan circuits) and

[1] Ssu-ma Kuang, Ssu-ma Wen-cheng kung ch'üan-chia chi (Wan-yu wen-k'u ed.) 60:725 (cited hereafter as SMK ); Wang An-shih, Lin-ch'uan hsien-sheng wen-chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1959) 73:773 (cited as LCC ); Hsu tzu-chih ch'ang-pien shih-i 4:3b, in Li T'ao, Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (rpt. Taipei: Shih-chieh, 1964; cited as HCP ). As Chang Hao has argued, Sung ideas about statecraft generally entailed a larger social-moral vision, rather than focusing narrowly on "bureaucratic statecraft" in the manner of the late Ch'ing; see his "Sung Ming i-lai ju-chia ching-shih ssu-hsiang shih-i," in Chin-shih Chung-kuo ching-shih ssu-hsiang yen-chiu t'ao-lun wen-chi (Taipei, 1984), pp. 3-19.

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retired to Nanking. Ssu-ma served only in the north (Ching-hsi, Chingtung, and Ho-tung circuits) and retired to Lo-yang. Thus they experienced two very different kinds of local society and economy.^[2]

Social Background and State Service . Both Ssu-ma and Wang came from landowning, literati (shih ) families that had been successful in the examinations from their grandfathers' generation on. Wang was the first official in his family to rise higher than a prefectural post. He claimed that he depended on his salary to support his family and became a strong advocate of increasing official salaries. Ssu-ma Kuang's father, Ssu-ma Ch'ih (980-1041), reached high office, however, and was able to bring relatives into the civil service through yin privilege. Ssu-ma passed the chin-shih examination in 1038, but he had been granted official rank five years before.^[3]

Umehara Kaoru has argued that the official careers of the two men reflected their family traditions. Wang was seriously concerned with local government, remaining in local posts by choice in some instances. Some see his years as administrator of Yin county (1047-1050) as the origin of the New Policies. Ssu-ma, however, left local service as quickly as possible, using his father's connections to gain a capital post. In this view Wang's commitment to local government led him to envision a government that would "include the people," whereas Ssu-ma's desire to join the "bureaucratic aristocrats" led him to see government as by and for the scholar-officials. This may overstate the case. But from family tradition and personal experience Wang had reason to believe that officials could take the lead in further developing society and economy at the local level. Ssu-ma's background gave him reason to believe that local affairs were best managed by old, locally prominent families, who could also provide conservative and experienced men to guide government and preserve stability. There is little solid evidence for the claim that Ssu-ma was a "representative" of the "class" of large landlords and aristocrats or that Wang represented medium and small landlords. However, we shall see that Wang wished to break the power of the wealthy to make others dependent upon

[2] Higashi Ichio, OAnseki jiten (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1980), pp. 236-37. Higashi is the author of a popular study of Wang and Ssu-ma, OAnseki to Shiba Ko (Tokyo: Chusekisha, 1980). This work is in fact largely devoted to Wang. He has also written the most extensive account of the New Policies, OAnseki shimpono kenkyu (Tokyo: Kazama shobo, 1970). Local histories record 179 degree holders for Wang's native Fu-chou in Northern Sung but only two for Ssu-ma's Shan-chou. See John W. Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of the Examinations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 197, 200. The figure for Shan-chou may be affected by the loss of records in the north. The primary biographical sources for the present study are, for Wang, Ts'ai Shang-hsiang, Wang Wen-kung nien-p'u k'ao-lueh (Shanghai: Jen-min, 1959), and Higashi Ichio, OAnseki jiten , and, for Ssu-ma, Ku Tung-kao, Ssu-ma t'ai-shih Wen-kuo Wen-cbeng kung nien-p'u (1917).

[3] Ku Tung-kao, 1.4a-4b.

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them, while Ssu-ma thought government should not interfere with the existing social order.^[4]

Scholarship . According to Higashi, as well as James T. C. Liu and Ch'ien Mu, this difference can be described in terms of texts: Wang was a Rites of Chou (Chou li ) scholar and Ssu-ma a Spring and Autumn Annals ( Ch'un-ch'iu ) scholar. The two texts provided alternative models for thinking about the role of the state in society. Higashi notes that the Spring and Autumn Annals , although usually taken as a model for moral judgments in history, is also about political hierarchy, the issue with which Ssu-ma Kuang begins his Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government .^[5] The Rites of Chou , in his view, directs attention at preserving and benefiting the livelihood of the people.^[6]

Wang, author of the official New Policies commentary on the Rites , did write, in about 1070: "Managing wealth takes up the half of this one work the Rites of Chou ." But the Rites more obviously depicts an elaborate system of state institutions as the basis for political unity. In Sung and later periods the Annals was probably used less to justify moral judgments than to argue both for the centralization of authority and for the existence of limits on that authority. Wang discounted the Annals , but Ssu-ma defended the Rites against the charge that it was a later forgery. It is not hard to find congruence between their ideas and their understanding of these two texts. Wang did advocate the creation of institutions that extended the scope of state activity. Ssu-ma was more concerned with the stability and survival of the dynastic system.^[7]

Robert Hartwell has described the difference between Wang and Ssu-ma

[4] Umehara Kaoru, "Shiba Ko to O Anseki," Rekishi to chiri , 1973, no. 11:106-19. The association of Wang and Ssu-ma with different classes of landlords, the orthodox position in Chinese Marxist historiography, has recently been criticized. See, for example, Ku Ch'an-fang, "Ssu-ma Kuang yü Wang An-shih pien-fa," Chin-yang hsueh-k'an , 1984, no. 2:67-74.

[5] Ssu-ma Kuang, Tzu chih t'ung-chien (Peking: Ku-chi ch'u-pan she, 1956) 1:2-6.

[6] Higashi, OAnseki jiten . For a general discussion of how the difference was perceived, see James T. C. Liu, Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021-1086) and His New Policies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 30-33. See also Ch'ien Mu, Sung Ming li-hsueh kai shu (Taipei: Hsueh-sheng, 1977).

[7] LCC 73.773. For a study of the Chou li 's system and its historical background, see Sven Broman, "Studies on the Chou Li ," Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 33 (1961): 1-88. For the Annals in Sung, see Alan Thomas Wood, "Politics and Morality in Northern Sung China: Early Neo-Confucian Views on Obedience to Authority" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1981), in particular his account of Sun Fu. For Yuan, see John D. Langlois, Jr., "Law, Statecraft, and the Spring and Autumn Annals in Yuan Political Thought," in Yuan Thought , ed. Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 89-152. These two studies show how "praise and blame" could be used to address political problems rather than merely being a vehicle for moral didacticism. For Ssu-ma's defense of the Rites , see SMK , 42.538-39. However, Higashi claims that Ssu-ma thought that the Chou li was indeed a later forgery; OAnseki jiten , p. 237.

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in terms of their attitudes toward history while noting their attachment to the two texts. In his view Wang was a "classicist"; he believed that the Classics "depicted the ideal society and provided an absolute standard for judging current policies." Ssu-ma Kuang practiced "historical analogism," the "use of principles abstracted from historical models" to judge policy. (Thus neither was merely a "moral didact" concerning himself with apportioning "praise and blame to the participants in historical events as a means of encouraging the good and warning the evil.") The distinction is useful. Wang held that universally valid ideas could be inferred from particular authoritative texts (thus his official commentaries on the Rites of Chou, Odes , and Documents ). Ssu-ma believed that the necessary principles of government could be inferred from the past conduct of affairs. I would not say, however, that texts determined their visions, but suggest that one kind of text did lend itself more readily to one kind of vision than another. However, their intellectual interests were broad. Wang did not limit himself to the Classics, nor Ssu-ma to the histories. Both thought the examination system ought to test knowledge of the Classics rather than literary skill and memorization, yet both wrote in the various genres of literary prose and poetry. They also wrote on the Book of Change and the Classic of Filial Piety .^[8]

We should also note that both Wang and Ssu-ma claimed to speak for the Ju ("Confucian," or "scholarly," or "classicist") tradition. Yet they differed greatly in their appreciation of "earlier Ju." Wang championed Mencius, while Ssu-ma promoted Yang Hsiung of Han and developed an interest in numerology. Ssu-ma's later critique of Mencius is well known, but Wang did not reject Yang Hsiung. They also differed in their attitudes toward non-Ju intellectual traditions. Wang was known to be eclectic, finding room for the Lao tzu and Chuang tzu in his scheme of things. Wang also had an active interest in Buddhism and wrote commentaries on various sutras. Ssu-ma criticized eclecticism, but he too wrote a commentary on the Lao tzu . It is fair to say, I think, that both men eventually came to be fairly inclusive in their scope, laying claim to the great books of the past, thinking about the processes of heaven-and-earth, and concerning themselves with human nature and the mind. Their efforts represented, I believe, an attempt to show that the principles they espoused were truly universal.^[9]

[8] Robert Hartwell, "Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh-and Twelfth-Century China." American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (1971): 690-727. For Wang An-shih's writings, see Yü Ta-ch'eng, "Wang An-shih chu-shu k'ao," Kuo-li chung-yang t'u-shu-kuan kuan-k'an , n.s. 1, no. 3 (1968): 42-46. For Ssu-ma's historical scholarship, see Ts'ui Wan-ch'iu, T'ung chien yen-chiu (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1934), pp. 32-39; for his other writings, see Fumoto Yasutaka, "Shiba Onko no gakugyo ni tsuite," Boeidaigakkokiyo 11 (1965): 1-79. Wang's commentaries on the Change and the Classic of Filial Piety are now lost, although his collected writings contain essays on the Change . Ssu-ma's commentary on the Change (SKCS ) is unfinished; his Classic of Filial Piety commentary is extant.

[9] Ssu-ma wrote commentaries on Yang's T'ai hsuan and Fa yen as well as a minor work entitled "Hidden Vacuity" (Ch'ien hsu ), modeled on the T'ai hsuan . Known editions of the latter are elaborations on an original unfinished work, making it difficult to know what remains of Ssu-ma in the present text; see Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu tsung-mu t'i-yao , vol. 3, pp. 2230-31. Nevertheless, this work, which treats cosmological and numerological issues in relation to political institutions, has repeatedly been used as the basis for discussing Ssu-ma's philosophy. Wang's commentaries on the Analects and the Mencius are now lost. Remnants of Wang's Lao tzu commentary have been collected in Jung Chao-tsu, Wang An-shih Lao tzu chu chi-pen (Peking: Chung-hua, 1979). Wang's commentary on the Surangama Sutra, now lost, is well known, but he also wrote commentaries on the Diamond Sutra and Vimalakirti Sutra; see Chikusa Masaaki, "Ssu-ma Kuang Wang An-shih yü fo-chiao," in Chi-nien Ssu-ma Kuang Wang An-shih shih-shih chiu-pai chou-nien hsueh-shu yen-t'ao lun-wen chi (Taipei: Wen shih che, 1986), pp. 477-87. Wang's decision to convert his estate into a monastery in 1084 suggests his devoutness. However, Ando Tomonobu notes that no compelling explanation exists for a presumed conversion; see Ando, "O Anseki to Bukkyo—Shozan yinseiki o chushin to shite," TohoShukyo 28 (1966): 20-34. A convincing case has yet to be made for Buddhist inspiration in Wang's political vision. Chikusa argues that Wang was not a Buddhist layman, that his creation of a monastery was a common act of filial piety among well-to-do literati, and that his interest in Buddhist texts proceeded from an interest in supporting his Confucian views. Ssu-ma's Lao tzu commentary survived in the Taoist canon under the title Tao te chen ching lun , 4 ch., with the author given as a "Mr. Ssu-ma." However, the introductory comments and the first section correspond to the 2 ch. Lao tzu tao te lun , mentioned in the "Record of Conduct," as that text is described by Ch'ao Kung-wu in his entry for Wen-kung tao te lun shu-yao of 2 ch.; see Ch'ao's Chün-chai tu shu chih (rpt. Taipei: Commercial Press, 1968), 4.824.

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Modern scholars usually overlook a contrast of considerable importance to Wang and Ssu-ma. Wang An-shih was an active literary man for much of his career—a noted poet and anthologist of T'ang poetry, a calligrapher, and a persuasive essayist in the "ancient style" (ku wen ) mode. We know, for example, that Wang's Miscellaneous Ideas from South of the Huai (Huai-nan tsa-shuo ) and his Commentary on the Great Plan (Hung fan chuan ) were circulating in the early 1060s and did much to establish his reputation as an intellectual leader. Wang An-shih the literary man, classicist, and eclectic thinker came together in a work from the 1070s entitled Explanations for Characters (Tzu shuo ). Through an analysis of the way in which the constituent elements in a written character formed a whole, Wang sought to establish the true values or purposes of the things and affairs to which the character referred. Yet this work, which claimed that the sages had created the characters on the basis of what was "so-of-itself" (tzu-jan ) or natural, in the end reminds us that Wang's roots were in the literary tradition of culture, even as he railed against those who were "merely" literary.^[10]

[10] Hou Wai-lu and his collaborators believe that the essays in Wang's collection include those of the Huai-nan collection; see Chung-kuo ssu-hsiang t'ung-shih , vol. 4, pt. 1 (Peking: Jenmin, 1959), pp. 421-22. Hou et al. note that Lu Tien saw these works before 1065 in the south. Lu's testimony shows that, irrespective of when Wang wrote his essays, it was still possible for literati to read them as new and startling works in the 1060s; see Lu, T'ao shan chi (TSCC ), 15.164-65. Liu An-shih (1048-1125) later said that in the early 1060s, when both Wang and Ssu-ma were in Kaifeng and had become friends, Wang's essay was circulating and "all admired him and compared him to Mencius." See Ma Yung-ch'ing, Yuan-ch'eng yü-lu (TSCC ed.), 1.6. In 1070 some examination candidates were already citing Wang's commentary on the Great Plan ; see Li T'ao, Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (Peking: Chung-hua, 1986), 215.5246. Wang's Tzu shuo is now lost. Fifty-two entries (some of which may be incomplete) have been collected in K'o Chang-i, Wang An-shih p'ing chuan (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933), pp. 242-47. Further quotations will be found in the reconstructed commentary on the Lao tzu and Wang's Chou kuan hsin i (SKCS ). Winston Lo was one of the first modern scholars to point to the importance of this work; see his "Wang An-shih and the Confucian Ideal of Inner Sageliness," Philosophy East and West 26, no. 1 (1976): 41-53. Wang's introduction to the Tzu shuo is in LCC 84.879.

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Ssu-ma Kuang, who began by making himself known through "ancient style" writing, came to deny he was a literary man and refused promotions to positions he considered "literary," while Wang accepted the same positions. Ssu-ma eventually concluded that literary ability did not justify a claim to political authority or wisdom. He accused Wang not only of staffing the Finance Planning Commission, the office that drafted the New Policies, with "gentlemen of literary talent" as well as fiscal experts, but also of being inspired by the thoroughly literary desire to "change all the old models and make everything new and unusual (hsin ch'i )." When the Comprehensive Mirror lambastes the "persuaders" who used rhetoric to guide political action, we may suspect that Ssu-ma has in mind all those who used skill with words to persuade others. However, Ssu-ma himself was not averse to rhetorical devices. He was a brilliant memorialist with a gift for descriptive narrative. Nor was he uninterested in cultural accomplishment. Wang could imagine inspiring ideas hidden in the form of a character; Ssu-ma sought to fix the proper forms for conducting affairs and using words. He revised ceremonial rituals from the I li for modern use, wrote rules for organizing the family, and prepared models for all manner of public and private correspondence.^[11]

The distinction I would make here pertains to the manner in which Wang and Ssu-ma understood texts, for both men did claim to know the "Way" for government and society from past texts, in contrast to those who believed that men should try to know it directly with their minds. Wang, who came from an area where learning was especially marked by literary interests, was convinced that the way texts were organized revealed the principles that informed the authors' thinking or the actions depicted by the texts. Ssu-ma, who came from a region known for sober scholarship rather than literary composition, granted that texts gave an account of how men might have acted but held that principles were to be inferred from the rela-

[11] For an account of Ssu-ma's unease with the literary, see Ho Chi-p'eng, "Ssu-ma Kuang te wen-hsueh kuan chi ch'i hsiang-kuan wen-t'i," in Chi-nien Ssu-ma Kuang Wang An-shih , pp. 339-60. For his charges against Wang, see SMK 60:720, 726, first and third letter to Wang. For attacks on "persuaders," see Tzu-chih t'ung-chien 3:100 and 6:221-22. Ssu-ma's works on family, ritual forms, and written formats are collected in Ssu-ma shih shu i (TSCC ).

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tion between actions and their historical consequences. Wang saw history in the context of literature; Ssu-ma saw literature as part of history.

Political Attitudes . The simplest contrast, proposed by Higashi and many others, is that Wang was a (progressive) reformer who sought to defend the interests of the people and make China strong, while Ssu-ma, a (reactionary) conservative, opposed Wang's reforms because they threatened the privileged elite. Wang saw the need for change, Ssu-ma defended tradition. Wang wanted to increase wealth and power, Ssu-ma did not. Wang was willing to defend the borders, Ssu-ma preferred appeasement. Wang was good, Ssu-ma was not. Until recently such a categorical assessment was insisted upon by historians in the People's Republic of China, but since 1980 Wang and the New Policies have been condemned by some while Ssu-ma's opposition has been defended. Both have been depicted as defenders of the feudal order, with Wang furthering the interests of the feudal state at the expense of the people, and Ssu-ma defending the feudal ruling class against the state. In some eyes, Ssu-ma has gained the upper hand, and he is said to be neither reactionary nor conservative.^[12]

There have been more nuanced and complex views. Hsiao Kung-ch'üan calls Wang a "Confucian activist (yu wei che )" and notes Ssu-ma's lack of activism. Hsiao argues that Wang's activism took form in the New Policies, which were meant to bring about reforms in a planned and realistic manner. Wang stressed institutions but saw the need for talented men and envisioned an educational system to provide them. He aimed to "enrich the nation and strengthen the military" by increasing production and reducing the burdens on the people. Ssu-ma, however, in Hsiao's view had no systematic political vision but was bent on securing the autocratic power of the ruler and the subordination of his ministers. He opposed government activism on the grounds that the wealth of the state was fixed; any increase in the government's share led to a decrease in the amount in private hands. Yamashita Ryuji takes a view similar to Hsiao's. Anthony Sariti has effectively challenged the view that Ssu-ma was furthering autocracy, suggesting instead that he was defending the bureaucracy.^[13] Yet Hsiao and Sariti both

[12] The opening shot in the reevaluation of Wang and the New Policies appeared in 1980; see Wang Tseng-yü, "Wang An-shih pien-fa chien-lun," Chung-kuo she-hui k'o-hsueh , 1980, no. 3:141-54. For a defense, see Chou Liang-hsiao, "Wang An-shih pien-fa tsung-t'an," Shih-hsueh chi-k'an , 1985, no. 1:19-37, and 1985, no. 2:9-17. For an account of the reevaluation of Ssu-ma, see Huo Ch'ün-ying, "Chin-nien lai Ssu-ma Kuang yen-chiu chien-lun," Chin-yang hsueh-k'an , 1986, no. 3:81-83. A more detailed account of this debate will appear in Bol, "1086 and 1986: Reversing the Verdict?" Journal of Sung and Yuan Studies (forthcoming).

[13] Hsiao Kung-ch'üan, Chung-kuo cheng-chih ssu-hsiang shih (Taipei: Chung-hua wen-hua, 1954), 456-61, 482-84. Yamashita Ryuji, "O Anseki to Shiba Ko," Tokyo . Shina Gakuho 13 (1967): 135-50. For a similar view; see Yeh T'an, "I-fa tou-cheng chung te Ssu-ma Kuang," Hsi-nan shih-fan hsueh-yuan hsueh-pao , 1985, no. 4. Anthony Sariti, "Monarchy, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the Political Thought of Ssu-ma Kuang," Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (1972): 53-76.

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show that Ssu-ma was particularly concerned with the proper organization of relations within the imperial system. In contrast to Wang, I would note, Ssu-ma argued for a sharp divide between public and private interests.

Wang has received far more study than Ssu-ma. More impartial historians such as Saeki Tomi, Wang Yü-ch'üan, and James T. C. Liu seem to me to represent a consensus holding that Wang and the New Policies above all served the interests of the centralized state. Professor Liu shows Wang "as a bureaucratic idealist who upheld the ideal of a professionally well-trained and administratively well-controlled bureaucracy as the principal instrument for the realization of a Confucian moral society." Although I suspect Ssu-ma Kuang would have thought this described himself, not Wang, it is prudent to agree that the historical effect of the New Policies was to "put the interests of the state. . . above everything else."^[14] In chapter 2 in this volume Paul Smith argues that the New Policies represented an attempt to reassert the state's control over a burgeoning private economy.

Philosophical Orientation . A few modern scholars have tried to account for Wang's desire for reform and Ssu-ma's opposition on the basis of their respective ideas about the Way (of heaven-and-earth; i.e., Tao ) and human nature (hsing ). Their conclusions are remarkably similar. Ch'eng Yang-chih develops a nurture-versus-nature dichotomy, in which Wang believes that men are formed by society (thus one must change society to transform men), whereas Ssu-ma believes that each man receives a fixed nature that determines what he can be (thus one must accept one's role). Others have now argued that Ssu-ma Kuang was really a materialist. Teraji Jun's Wang is a scientist, his Ssu-ma a moralist. In this view Wang, who does not believe in any resonance between heaven and men, must learn from the world how to make it serve man's interest, while Ssu-ma, who believes in resonance (a conclusion I do not fully accept), asks only that men try to be "good" by accepting the lot heaven has given them and obeying their superiors. Eleventh-century thinkers were divided over the nature of the relationship between heaven and man, or the natural and the cultural. For some—and, like Teraji, I would include Wang An-shih and Ou-yang Hsiu in this group—the true values for human society were to be inferred from human history rather than from a particular view of cosmic process or human nature. This contrasted with the view that norms for human conduct were established by heaven and that government should make men fit those

[14] Liu, Reform in Sung China , pp. 114, 115. See also Wang Yü-ch'üan, "Pei-Sung she-hui yü ching-chi cheng-chih," Shih huo yueh-k'an , 3, no. 11 (1936): 23-34, and 3, no. 12, 21-43, and Saeki Tomi, OAnseki (1929).

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norms.^[15] But I do not think Ssu-ma Kuang believed that men should act in a certain way because heaven had decreed that they should or because it was natural for men to do so.

In sum, these scholars argue that Ssu-ma's belief structure led him to conclude that it was impossible for men truly to change the given situation; if they wished to survive, they had to learn to accept their predetermined roles. Wang An-shih, however, saw that men could be formed by their environment. He set out to change that environment for the common good. Clearly, evidence has been adduced for these views, which I have only caricatured here. But I think it can be shown that the political-social visions of the two men preceded their philosophical speculation, and that such natural-philosophical ideas as they espoused were intended to confirm further what they already knew. In contrast to those who would later be seen as forerunners of Tao-hsueh , Chang Tsai and the Ch'eng brothers in particular, they did not make ideas about heaven-and-earth the foundation of their thinking about human values. Rather both, in my view, illustrate Ou-yang Hsiu's advice that scholars should first seek to know human affairs; they would find that heaven-and-earth fit the same principles.^[16]

I would redescribe the contrast the earlier studies suggest in this manner: both Wang and Ssu-ma believed that most people were guided by material desires. Wang believed that as long as government policy offered most men an opportunity to satisfy their desires, policymakers could establish institutions as they saw fit and men would become accustomed to them. Ssu-ma Kuang believed that such efforts must be undertaken with the utmost caution; that certain social relationships, in particular that between superior and inferior, were necessary to hold society together; and that sudden attempts to change the ways in which men satisfied their desires could destroy those fragile relations and, as a consequence, the state. We can begin to understand these positions by turning to their intellectual context, that is, to the kinds of questions that confronted Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang when, as thoughtful and ambitious young men, they began their careers and formed their ideas.

[15] Ch'eng Yang-chih, "Wang An-shih yü Ssu-ma Kuang," Wen shih tsa-chih 2, no. 1 (1942): 1-17. Hou Wai-lu and his collaborators predictably treat Wang as a materialist (for the most part) and Ssu-ma as a pure idealist. Wang knows society can be restructured to change the way men act and to benefit all. Ssu-ma supposes that some are endowed with heaven-given knowledge and thus demands that all others accept the lot heaven assigns them. Hou Wai-lu, pp. 449-69, 511-21. For Wang as scientist, Ssu-ma as moralist, see Teraji Jun, "Tenjin sokansetsu yori mita Shiba Ko to O Anseki," Shigaku zasshi 76, no. 10 (1967): 34-62. For Ou-yang Hsiu, see Teraji Jun, "Oyo Shu ni okeru tenjin sokansetsu e no kaigi," Hiroshima Daigaku bungakubu kiyo 28, no. (1968): 161-87. For Ssu-ma as materialist, see for example Chao Chi-hui, "P'ing Ssu-ma Kuang ti che-hsueh ssu-hsiang," Chin-yang hsueh-k'an , 1986, no. 4:56-59.

[16] Ou-yang Hsiu, Hsin wu tai shih (Peking: Chung-hua, 1974), 59:705-6.

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Contexts

If we ask why Wang and Ssu-ma defined the "problems" the way they did and how they justified their "solutions," we must inquire into the visions they brought to bear on the times. For this our primary context is the intellectual world in which they participated. There are important similarities in their intellectual ambitions. First, they followed the previous generation, men born approximately fifteen years earlier (ca. 1005), in believing that the literati needed to unite behind an ideal purpose, and that this had to do with politics and institutions. (Later there would be men who, like Chu Hsi [1130-1200], believed that individual moral regeneration was prior to institutional action.) Second, both Wang and Ssu-ma held that the goal of learning was to identify the principles upon which a coherent set of policies could be based. This contrasts, I think, with the previous generation's view that the goal of learning was to cultivate the correct attitude toward politics, and with its reliance upon the power of opinion.^[17] (Su Hsun [1007-1066], discussed by George Hatch in chapter 1 in this volume, is representative of this earlier view.) Third, Wang and Ssu-ma assumed that once the government adopted a program based on right principles the "affairs of government" (cheng shih ) would be perfected and the common interest realized. Their confidence in the perfectability of institutional action would not be shared by leading thinkers in the next generation (men born ca. 1035). Ch'eng Yi (1033-1107), for example, gave precedence to "moral conduct" (te hsing ) as individual moral self-cultivation, and Su Shih (1037-1101) saw "literary learning" (wen hsueh ) as a means of cultivating and expressing an individual identity. Su and Ch'eng were concerned with how literati should act independently of the political system. But Wang and Ssu-ma defined intellectual and moral values for the literati in terms of institutional ideals.

We may begin with the expansion of the examination system into an institution for selecting large numbers of officials from among the shih ("lite-rati"). Until the advent of the New Policies the exams tested the "civil arts": literary composition for the prestigious chin-shih degree, memorization of various Classics, histories, or ritual texts for the lesser degrees. Five Dynasties shih had included military power-holders, officials, and generally those families with traditions of state service. But the new exam system, by rewarding with office those who had mastered civil-literary-cultural (wen ) learning, shifted the definition of what it meant to be a shih away from family tradition and the possession of power toward education. Those who

[17] See James T. C. Liu's discussion of the role of opinion and the Ch'ing-li reforms; "An Early Sung Reformer: Fan Chung-yen," Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 105-31.

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pursued literary learning in hopes of gaining office and defending the civil order, whether or not they came from families with traditions of service, were now licensed to think of themselves as shih . In effect the shih , the "elite" as opposed to the "commoners" (shu ) or "people" (min ), became literati.

Mastering culture and being civil was a shared purpose and practice that "worked" as an idea and as a reality. Perhaps it was too successful. By the 1020s and 1030s being cultured and civil had lost its patina of idealism, as skill in the civil arts came to be appreciated above moral commitment. A new turn in the intellectual history of Sung literati began when some literati objected that, as men who justified their participation in politics on the basis of their schooling in the civil-cultural-literary tradition, literati should aspire to the highest ideals of that tradition. One immediate focus of their criticism was the examination system itself They did not object to examinations: they objected to testing literary skill alone, on the grounds that "good" wen (writing; literature; cultural expression) should show the way to realizing the ideals of the civil-cultural-literary tradition.

Because early-eleventh-century shih defined their shared values in terms of wen , attempts to redefine literati values easily took the form of redefining the nature of "good" wen . "Ancient style" writing, inspired by T'ang models, became the vehicle for this movement. Advocates of the new style claimed that wen would be good if the composer sought guidance from the Way of antiquity, which had guided the sages in establishing the cultural tradition and civilization. He revealed what he had learned through his writing. In effect, "antiquity" was held up as a source of values, and "good" wen promoted those values. The examination system, some held, should favor prose over poetry to give men with ideas a chance to express themselves and be judged accordingly. "Ancient style" was both a literary and an intellectual movement; it supposed that a change of style was also a change of heart and that the values that informed the mind, evident in what a man said and how he said it, would also inform his conduct. Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072) became the leading figure in this movement. He was involved in affairs, promoted antiquity and the broad study of the cultural tradition, and called for universal standards of moral judgment; but he also created a persona of ironic, self-conscious detachment and disinterestedness, the appropriate attitude for one who aimed to transcend selfish interest. Men of Ou-yang's generation shared an extraordinary confidence in their ability to know what was right and practice what they had learned. Representative of this spirit is Ou-yang's three-part essay "On the Basis" (Pen lun ), written in 1042 as part of a campaign to persuade the court to turn to Fan Chung-yen (989-1052) and his allies for political leadership. Here he made the essential claim of the movement: that truly ordering or

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governing the state (kuo-chia ) requires that government guide society by serving the interests of society.^[18]

We shall see that Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih had very different ideas about what was necessary to accomplish this. In examining their views I shall try to maintain a distinction among three notions: first, "state" (kuo-chia or kuo ), referring to the dynasty as a larger entity that includes both the people (min ) on the one hand and the government on the other (although it is sometimes used to mean the government itself); second, "government" (cheng ), referring to official institutions and their administration; and third, "society," the realm in which people pursue their private interests (sometimes called "all under Heaven," t'ien-hsia ). Both Ssu-ma and Wang view "society" as part of the "state," but they have very different views on how "government" and "society" should be related within it.

Making Reputations: Intellectual Careers,, 1038-1057

Ssu-ma Kuang (chin-shih 1038) and Wang An-shih (chin-shih 1042) began their careers just when an upwelling of idealism, a desire for political change, and a border crisis were pushing the court into giving men of the new movement, led by Fan Chung-yen (989-1052), a brief trial in the aborted Ch'ing-li "reform" of 1043-1044. Their two careers were advancing rapidly when, between 1055 and 1067, old allies of Fan's, including Ou-yang Hsiu, gained positions on the Council of State. In the 1040s it was easy for men seeking reputations for learning both to believe that literati ought to have a common purpose and to accept that the "ancient style" was the right vehicle for expressing their views on what that purpose was and how it could be achieved. But Ssu-ma and Wang responded to the "ancient style" call in different ways.

From common beginnings in the late 1030s to early 1040s, the two men took significantly different career paths. Ssu-ma early began a long period of service at the center, in the capital; Wang held back, remaining deliberately in local posts. But for both men the period 1057-1058, which saw Ssu-ma's return to the capital after a brief absence and Wang's submission of

[18] For the first side of Ou-yang Hsiu, see Liu Tzuochien, Ou-yang Hsiu ti chih-hsueh yü ts'ung-cheng (Hong Kong: Hsin-ya, 1963). For the second, see Ronald Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-72) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). "On the Basis" appears in Ou-yang Hsiu, Ou-yang Hsiu ch'üan chi (rpt. Taipei: Shih-chieh, 1971), Wai chi 9:411-13 (part 1 of the essay) and Chi 17:121-24 (parts 2 and 3). The second part of the essay in translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary et al., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). Ou-yang excised the first part of the essay in his later years, presumably because it could by then be read as justifying the New Policies approach to government. See the fuller discussion of this essay in the Introduction.

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his famed "Ten-thousand Word Memorial," marked a new phase both politically and intellectually.^[19] It is fair to say that beginning in 1057-1058 Ssu-ma and Wang were being treated as prospective candidates for leading central positions. Although their places in the factional alignments of these decades are not entirely clear, it seems that Wang's sympathies lay with those who had been associated with Fan Chung-yen's reforms of 1043-1044, while Ssu-ma's patrons were not known as supporters of the reforms. The departure from office of his backer P'ang Chi in 1054, for example, was followed by the return of Fan's allies.^[20]

At the very beginning of their careers Wang and Ssu-ma adopted the prevalent method of making themselves known: they sent their compositions to high-ranking officials. For this purpose they composed ancient-style writings and showed that they were, as Ssu-ma explained to a patron, "superior men, concerned with knowing the larger and more far-reaching."^[21]

[19] Ssu-ma took the chin-shih degree in 1038, Wang in 1042. But because Ssu-ma then went into extended mourning for both his parents, he and Wang both received their first appointments in 1042. These were the usual local-government positions. In 1046, however, Ssu-ma took a post at the State Academy and proceeded to hold capital posts for the next twenty-five years, with the exception of 1054-1056 when he took local posts under his foremost patron, P'ang Chi, who had been forced out of his position as chief councillor. 1057 thus marks the beginning of Ssu-ma's second career as a capital official; the direction of his intellectual efforts shifts at this point as well. Wang, on the other hand, had remained in local posts, refusing an invitation to test for an academic position at court in 1051. Yet he was not completely successful in maintaining the role of outsider, he came to the capital for a nonacademic post in 1054-1056, and in 1058 he took a post in the financial administration. Although Wang left the capital in mourning in 1063 and remained out of office until 1067, the year 1058, when he submitted his memorial, does clearly mark a new stage in his career.

[20] P'ang Chi (980-1063) served on the Council of State from 1045 to 1053, rising from assistant commissioner of military affairs to chief councillor (1051/10-1053/7). For membership on the Council I have followed the chart for 1041-1125 in Higashi, O Anseki jiten , pp. 211-20. He was forced out of office when he was unable to quell the charge, brought by Han Chiang (who would later become an enthusiastic supporter of the first New Policies), that he had arranged the death of a man who had been found guilty of trying to bribe him; see Sung shih 311:10201. I have not yet been able to determine P'ang's attitude toward the reforms of 1043-1044. However, he may well have been allied with another faction. Although together with Fan and Han Ch'i he had been rewarded for solving the border problems in Shensi in 1043/2, he was not appointed to the Bureau of Military Affairs with them in 1043/4. Moreover, Tu Yen, who was to be allied with Fan, replaced Hsia Sung (an ally of P'ang's) as commissioner of the bureau at the same time. P'ang only joined the bureau in 1045/1, immediately after Fan's group was replaced. Ssu-ma also sought the patronage of Sung Hsiang, who was at odds with Fan's arch rival, Lü I-chien, but was brought into the Council of State to replace Fan in 1045/1. See these dates in Sodai shi nenpo (Hokuso ) (Toyo bunko, 1967).

[21] SMK 58.696; LCC 77.810; SMK 60.727-28. We have Ssu-ma's own testimony from 1062 that he began his career with the aim of making a name for ancient-style writing; see SMK 59.712-713. There is little question about Wang's reputation as an ancient-style writer. Wang Ch'eng saw him, with the Sus and the Tsengs (Wang's cousins), as the successor to Ou-yang Hsiu; see Tung-tu shih-lueh (rpt. Taipei: Wen-hai, n.d.) 115.1. For Wang's decision to make a name in this way, see Ts'ai Shang-hsiang's account of relations between Ou-yang, Tseng Kung and Wang in Nien-p'u k'ao-lueh 2.47-48, 3.52, 3.56, and 3.83. Ssu-ma eventually concluded that the ancient style offered little of value. Wang, although he denied that literary skill was an adequate standard by which to evaluate literati, continued to value ancient-style writing in his later career; see LCC 75.798-99 and 76.802.

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Wang An-shih and Ku Wen: Integrating Government and Society

In 1044, the year Wang's cousin Tseng Kung (1019-1083) recommended him to Ou-yang Hsiu, Wang wrote Tseng: "We learn from the sages and nothing more. When we learn from the sages our friends and teachers will necessarily be men who also learn from the sages. The words and actions of the sages are uniform; of course [our friends and teachers] will resemble each other."^[22] Learning from the sages led to uniformity because the values that guided the sages were uniform and consistent. The sages had acted according to a single Way. In 1045 Wang claimed to have understood this Way by reading the texts of the sages (i.e., the Classics) and seeing their unity:

My ignorance is such that I do not understand changes in affairs and priorities. I only trust in the sages. When I heard that in antiquity there were a Yao and a Shun and that their Way was the great middle, perfectly correct, and constantly practiced Way, I got their books, shut the door, and read them. I lost all sense of anxiety or joy. I threaded together top and bottom; I immersed myself in their midst. The smallest, seamless; the largest, boundless; I sought only to fathom them as one.^[23]

Wang explained in 1046 why such a unity could be found in the Classics, although they were not the work of a single hand or period:

The teachings [that led to] order and the commands [that effected] policy were what the sages called wen . When written on slips of wood and when applied to all the people they were one. As for the sages in regard to Way, their minds must have apprehended it. When they acted and made teachings and commands, there were root and branch and what came first and last. They instituted principles according to the situation but unified them at the ultimate point. When they wrote them down on slips of wood they were simply recounting how it was.^[24]

Wang's sages acted in full accord with the Way as something that exists of itself. But Wang does not conclude from this that he too ought to apprehend the Way directly with his own mind. Instead, he points to several mediating levels between the Way itself and himself in the present. There are the sages' mental apprehension of the Way, the sages' policies, the writ-

[22] LCC 71.755.

[23] LCC 77.810.

[24] LCC 77.812.

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ten record of policy (which he assumes to be equivalent to the society that those policies created), and the Classics as texts that carry those written records. But far from being an obstacle, these mediating levels make it possible to accord with the Way in the present. Wang makes three claims: the sages' apprehension, application, and written records are consistent with each other and realize the Way; these visible levels can be analyzed to reveal a coherent system; and any apparent contradictions in the records are merely situational variations that are ultimately in perfect agreement. This allows Wang to conclude that understanding the unity or coherent system of the Classics is equivalent to understanding the Way.

Literati have the material from which they can know the Way of the sages, both the Way the sages grasped and the way the sages acted. Wang can also tell whether they have understood those ideas correctly. A lack of unity, integration, and coherence in writing shows that the writer has missed what is fundamental; this comes of picking and choosing what one likes in the Classics rather than seeking to understand their systematic unity. True wen , the kind that can be applied in the present, must be based on an understanding of the coherence of the sages. Wang makes this point and then writes, in the letter just quoted:

Therefore if one writes it on slips and it is good, then when it is applied to all the people it will always be good. The Two Emperors and Three Kings [of antiquity] were the ones who applied it to all the people and it was good; Confucius and Mencius were the ones who wrote it down on slips and it was good. They were all sages. Under different circumstances it will also be good.^[25]

Wang has now reached a conclusion that he will continue to hold as chief councillor. Unlike Ou-yang Hsiu, he believes that a policy that is in accord with the principles that made the Way of the sages coherent is necessarily correct, and that its consequences will necessarily be good.

Wang envisioned the ancient world, at least during times of "perfect order" (chi chih ), as a place where political authority took responsibility for ensuring the welfare of all the people. As administrator of Yin county, he writes in 1047:

I have heard that among the ancients, in times of perfect order, ruler and ministers applied the Way to provide employment for all the people. If there was a single common man or woman who did not partake of the benefit, they were most ashamed and worried about them. The blind and the deaf, the pygmy and the dwarf, each was able to use his talent to draw support from the appropriate office. The transformations brought on by their sincere minds were such that the hooves of the oxen and sheep could not bear being un-

[25] LCC 77.812. For a similar statement on composing wen that can be applied in the present, see LCC 77.811.

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benevolent to the grasses and shrubs, as the poem [from the Odes] "Traveling over the Reeds" shows. How much greater [the effect] on their gentlemen and great officers (shih tai-fu ). This is why they achieved harmony between superior and inferior and called it a time of perfect order.^[26]

The achievement of "perfect order" in antiquity reveals the fundamental and primary task to be integration and unification, economic, physical, social, and moral.

The details of [the sages'] carrying out of policy and instruction and all that they shared with others, especially what they enjoined [upon men] as priorities, are clearly easy to know. They connected the roads and rivers. They organized paddy-fields and mulberry [plantings]. They erected dikes, dug irrigation canals, and dredged out rivers to prepare against flood and drought. They established schools and assembled the people to practice rituals and music in them, thus bringing them to submit through transformation. These they enjoined [upon men] as priorities and clearly easy to know.^[27]

As county administrator Wang did make these his priorities, and he took the lead in organizing irrigation projects and establishing a local school. He sharply criticized policies that the common people could obey only at the risk of losing their land, and made this a matter of principle. Yet Wang also held that leading the people to greater prosperity could require coercing them to share the burden. "You can enjoy the final result with lesser men," he wrote about his irrigation projects, "but it is hard to think about the beginning with them. Even when there truly is great benefit you still must force them."^[28]

Wang's conviction that government should take responsibility for organizing society and furthering the general welfare is apparent in a telling comment from 1047. The current deficit, he writes, "is not only due to unrestrained expenditures, it is also the result of our having lost the way to create wealth (sheng ts'ai ). To enrich the family [the emperor's], you draw on the state (kuo ), and to enrich the state, you draw on society (t'ien-hsia ); but if you wish to enrich society you draw on heaven-and-earth." Increasing prosperity was only possible through increased production; otherwise wealth would simply be flowing from one party to another, without general benefit. (The appointment of commissioners to oversee increasing agricultural production was one of the first New Policies.)^[29] The same conviction is clear in the position Wang took on state education during these years:

[26] LCC 74.780.

[27] LCC 82.866. In this passage Wang is approvingly quoting a colleague.

[28] LCC 75.794. For a detailed account of Wang's activities in Yin, see Ch'eng Kuang-yü, "Wang An-shih chih Yin shih chih chih-chi yü fo-chiao," in Chi-nien Ssu-ma Kuang Wang An-shih , pp. 141-66.

[29] LCC 75.795.

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The world under heaven cannot do without policy and teaching [cheng and chiao : compare Ou-yang Hsiu] even for a single day; thus the world cannot do without schools even for a single day. The ancients organized all fields into well-fields, and the various levels of local and national schools were established in their midst. All policy came from the schools—the archery contests and wine-drinking ceremonies, the gatherings for music in spring and fall, the care for the aged and agriculture, the honoring of worthies and employment of the able, the examination of arts and selections of sayings, and even planning military campaigns, presenting the ears of the slain, and the interrogation of captives. . . . Day and night, all the students (shih ) saw and heard was the Way with which one orders the world and the state.^[30]

This was not how schools functioned any longer, but it was how they should function. (Establishing state schools, examination reform, and the creation of a new curriculum were to be part of the New Policies.)

The world of perfect order Wang proposed saw no distinction between the institutional concerns of government and the moral and economic life of society. As Wang wrote in 1053, "For the people of the Three Eras, wealth was not divided between public and private; . . . and engrossing was criminal."^[31] But Wang had to recognize that in the present there was private property and private trade; "engrossing" (chien-ping ), whether of land or of capital, was perfectly legal. Similarly, he knew that the unity of values of antiquity did not exist in the present. He wrote in 1058, after being criticized for his actions in a judicial matter:

The ancients "unified values (tao te ) to make customs the same [for all]." Therefore when literati looked to what the ancients had accomplished for standards there was no difference of opinion. Today families hold to separate ways and men to different virtues. Moreover, [the values] they hold are pressed by the force of degenerate customs and they are unable to be like the ancients in every case; how can difference of opinion be fully repressed?^[32]

Wang had to rely on persuading the literati to share his vision.

As an "ancient style" essayist during this period, Wang set out to show literati that by turning to the Classics and seeking the Way of the sages they would see the true purpose of government—the transformation of society into an integrated order—and would learn that there were sure ways of achieving that end. Several of the essays justifying this view will be cited later. Here I only note some of his "methods" in writing. First, he writes largely about the Three Eras of antiquity. Second, he gives particular attention to why it was possible to establish and maintain an integrated order.

[30] LCC 83.870.

[31] LCC 4.114; cf. 12.177.

[32] LCC 72.768, "Yü Wang Shen-fu shu" (second letter), gives the 1058 case and response. I have translated a similar but more elaborate passage found in LCC 75. 794.

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Third, in discussing the Classics as texts, as seen in his writings on the Book of Change, Odes , and Documents , he explains why the particular arrangement of parts within a text forms a coherent system, and he uses this explanation to reach conclusions about the "root and branch" of the sages' Way, thus to define the sequence of policies and the structure of ideas necessary for achieving an integrated order in the present.^[33]

Ssu-ma Kuang and the Ancient Style: Ending the Cycle of Order and Chaos

It is not coincidental that Ssu-ma Kuang's extant "ancient style" essays date from 1042 and 1045, just before and after the Ch'ing-li reform, and 1056-1057, when the ancient style was finally triumphing in the examinations under Ou-yang Hsiu's leadership. For these essays challenge the assumptions of the movement whose mode of expression Ssu-ma had adopted. It is not surprising that at the end of this period he discounts the possibility that the ancient style had a special claim to intellectual value. But rejecting the claim that literati should be guided by an ancient ideal order impelled him to provide an alternative. The difference is already apparent in a 1039 piece, which contrasts those whose concern with ideals is merely literary with Ssu-ma's true Ju:

He read the books of the Former Kings, not to master the commentaries but to seek their patterns (li ). Once he had apprehended their patterns he did not simply recite them to deceive others, he would necessarily practice them in his personal life and in his community. If he had had nothing to spare, then [these patterns] would not have shined outside of these [settings]. Had they not shined it would have been as if the Way of the Former Kings was screened. Thus he looked for cases in the politics and customs of the state where [these patterns] had been realized or lost and composed poems and prose to make them known.^[34]

The Former Kings of antiquity had a Way. This Way can be grasped by seeing the patterns of their conduct in the Classics.^[35] One acts out these

[33] For examples see his "Explanation of the Sequence of Chou-nan Poems," LCC 66.701. Shimizu Kiyoshi has made this point in his discussion of the "Explanation"; see his "O Anseki no shu-nan shi ji-kai ni tsuite," in Toyogaku ronso (Tokyo: Uno Tetsuto kinenkai, 1969), pp. 491-510. See also "Explanation of the Images in the Change," LCC 65.697-700, which presents the 64 hexagrams as a coherent sequence teaching the "way of the superior man." The introductory section of the Great Plan commentary is another example; see LCC 65.685.

[34] SMK 69.851. This passage plays on Analects I.6, which says to study wen only if one has strength to spare after learning to behave ethically. In an article that traces Ssu-ma Kuang's acquaintance with Ou-yang Hsiu and the intellectual similarities and differences between them Ch'en Kuang-ch'ung points out that, while the two had many friends in common, to which both wrote poems, there are no poems of friendship between the two; see his "Ssu-ma Kuang yü Ou-yang Hsiu," Shih-hsueh chi-k'an , 1985, no. 1:11-18. I think this personal distance corresponds to the intellectual differences noted here.

[35] The idea that one should read the Classics for models for the present, bypassing the commentaries, is not at odds with the general ancient-style view. But in 1069, having seen the consequences of reading the Classics without the commentaries, Ssu-ma rejects this approach; see SMK 42.538-39.

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patterns in one's own private life before applying them to the judgment of political actions in writing for the present. Thus the test of value is not whether the ideas of the sages form a coherent system, but whether or not the individual can practice what he learns. Wen has moral validity only if the author is promoting standards he has realized in his own conduct. The unity of word and deed is more important than the unity of literary coherence.

Ssu-ma's early essays take aim at what he regards as the merely "literary" attempt to promote certain values. "On the Ten Worthies," written in 1042, argues for the priority of "ethical conduct" (te hsing ) over the "affairs of government," "literary learning," and "speaking." Here Ssu-ma interprets ethical conduct as a firm commitment to the "full realization of the good," in contrast to seeking fame by relying on a mere "talent" (administration, writing, speaking) that might be used for any end. As he argues in "On Virtue and Talent," talent is the particular skill a man is born with, while virtue is the acquired knowledge of the good ends talent should serve. The claim that literary talent does not imply a knowledge of good ends was hardly exceptional, but Ssu-ma goes on to attack the idealizing of antiquity and sagely order as merely another form of literary talent, one that is particularly harmful because it claims knowledge of good ends. Because Chia I, for example, idealized antiquity, he failed to understand that establishing ritual and righteousness and securing the dynastic succession were the basis of political order; his advice thus threatened the survival of Han.^[36]

The danger of the clever persuader is that he leads others to think that rhetoric can be more vital to the state's survival than real achievements in national defense and administration. "Virtue" involves a commitment to doing the best one can under present circumstances rather than trying to be a "hero" but failing to accomplish anything. Warring States figures who failed to restore "ritual and righteousness," "perfect impartiality," "policy and instruction," and the "great Way" should not be praised for trying or blamed for failing, Ssu-ma argues. They should be judged by how they served their rulers, benefited their states, and nurtured their people. Grandiose plans entail great disturbance and risk, as the Han emperor Wu-ti's

[36] SMK 65.302; 64.797-98, and cf. 72.882; 65.806-7. The four categories, "ethical conduct," "affairs of government," "literary learning," and "speaking," are found in Analects XI.3. I have argued elsewhere that Sung literati used the first three categories (thus excluding speaking) to define the various fields of endeavor in which they made reputations and the responsibilities they claimed for themselves as the national elite (i.e., for government, perpetuation of the cultural tradition, and promotion of ethical values); see Bol, "Culture and the Way in Eleventh Century China" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1982), pp. 79-84.

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search for immortals, expensive tastes, military campaigns, and oppressive taxation show. Ssu-ma objects also to those who use the model of the sages to argue that political leaders can fully control the direction of events. In "On the Spring and the Balance" (or "On the Timely and Irregular Use of Power") from 1045 he contends that the sages did take exceptional actions to redirect the course of events. But they did so to enable "state and family to be at peace and benevolence and righteousness to be established," while his contemporaries are merely advocating expediency and promoting themselves.^[37]

In Ssu-ma's view it is profoundly irresponsible to advocate policies to re-fashion the world according to an ideal model. First, doing so turns attention away from the immediate tasks of government; second, it fails to judge policy by its likely consequences. It is evident that Ssu-ma believes policies that greatly alter the government's role in society will threaten the survival of the state as a political unity.^[38] In 1045, after the defeat of the Ch'ing-li reformers, Ssu-ma's concern is not to explain his views but to find an alternative purpose for the literati, one that will lead them away from the model of antiquity. His options are limited. Antiquity and, to a considerable degree, the sages have been captured by men like Wang An-shih, whose vision of social-political integration offers literati in government a lofty purpose and a goal never achieved since the Chou dynasty. Ssu-ma finds his own issue. He begins to write about the historical cycle of order and chaos (chih luan ), and he begins to contend that when men understand why "order" failed to survive in the past they can act to preserve it in the present. Sung can accomplish what all previous ages had failed to do: the permanent preservation of political unity.

We can see this view emerging in a series of eighteen historical critiques. Ssu-ma makes his point, first, by discussing the unification and dissolution of political authority, in this case from the rise of Ch'in through the end of Han, and considers the values of "the superior man who brings order to the age." Second, he argues that political outcomes were determined by the choices of men with political authority, rulers and ministers. Their actions account for success and failure in establishing and maintaining the political order, yet these rulers and ministers were normal, even average, men. Third, he uses political practice rather than an idea of sagehood to define the content of traditional ethical terms. His attitude toward sages is

[37] SMK 65.805-7; 65.802-4; 66.825; 64.790.

[38] As we shall see below, later writings were to supply grounds for this conviction: the survival of political unity depends upon the government's ability to harmonize existing interests in a manner that makes it possible for the government to act to maintain itself and protect the state as a whole (i.e., a balanced structure of competing interests); policies that threaten existing interests substantially will deprive the government of their support, thus making it difficult for the state to rebalance and defend the structure.

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ambivalent at this point. They should not serve as models of rulership, because sage rulers were the exception even in antiquity; hereditary succession was the norm. But if sages are to be taken as models, they should be seen merely as men who were "good at correcting their mistakes," rather than as men incapable of error. Virtues are not innate human qualities but names for calculated modes of political behavior. Thus the judgment that Ch'in failed through lack of good faith, benevolence, and wisdom should be taken to mean, Ssu-ma claims, that Ch'in failed by betraying the Ch'u king, massacring the surrendered army of Chao, and failing to understand how these acts would affect the attitudes toward Ch'in of the feudal lords and masses.^[39] Historically, Ssu-ma is claiming, the creation and survival of political unity has depended on how those with political authority chose to behave. It follows that literati can take the survival of the state as their common purpose. To achieve this end they must judge actions by their effect on political unity and seek out the principles that ought to guide political conduct. Literati in government can ensure political stability, Ssu-ma concludes in 1052, and political stability is the basis for ensuring the welfare of "all the people."^[40]

Beginning in 1050 Ssu-ma identifies one such principle of political unity. The institutions of government must be kept "public" (kung ). That is, they must always function in the interest of the survival of the state's political integrity, never in the "private" (ssu ) interest of individuals in government. He sees his own task in the early 1050s as the defense of the public character of the state's institutions.^[41] Understood correctly, he contends, such terms as righteousness, merit, and even talent refer to individual achievements that serve to maintain the government as the single public and impartial institution. "Being principled" (i ) does not mean aiding the helpless or dying in defense of others, but "clarifying the great roles of ruler and minister, understanding the great principles of the world, and defending them to the death without changing."^[42] Ensuring that government is a "public" institution requires that men serve their roles, not take advantage of them.

We should note that Ssu-ma is not arguing that the government should suppress or challenge private interests. He is arguing that there must be a clear distinction between the government, which must be kept fair and impartial, and private interests, which guide men outside of government.

[39] The specific points noted here are found in SMK 67.827 and 828. The eighteen critiques as a whole occupy SMK 67.827-32.

[40] This is the theme of Ssu-ma's question for the decree exam of 1052; see SMK 75.920-21.

[41] See for example his criticism of attempts to use honorary titles to show the emperor's personal favor in 1050-1051, SMK 18:275-80.

[42] SMK 67.832.

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When individuals serve in government they enter the sphere of the "public" and must subordinate their personal ambitions to the demands of their offices.

Ssu-ma's essays from the mid-1050s restate a number of ancient-style-movement themes in his terms.^[43] "On Factions" contends that a "good" faction is one that defends the public quality of the state (as opposed to the party of idealists of Ou-yang Hsiu's famous essay from the 1040s). "Knowing Men" argues that the ruler's task is to know which men will maintain a unified hierarchy of political authority. "On Merit and Fame" urges the ruler to find men truly committed to the survival of the state (not men who have achieved fame in literati opinion) and to employ them fully and trust them completely, defending them against criticism, so that they will not be afraid to do what is necessary to preserve the state. At the same time, in a rare discussion of a favorite topic of "ancient-style" writers, the creation of civilization in antiquity, Ssu-ma tries to define the role of the government in society. The present is better than "high antiquity," he argues, though the people have not changed. It is better because the sages, seeing how needs and emotions had led men to exploit their environment to the point of scarcity and how scarcity led men to self-destructive competition, created civilization. They selected the wise to be rulers and superiors, they divided the land and forced men to respect boundaries, they defined social relationships, they established rites and music and government orders, they made clear the virtues, and they punished and fought those who did not obey. Thus the people were able to live in security and sufficiency. Government is responsible for maintaining this "teaching" (chiao ); indeed, the survival of the state as a unity that includes the people depends upon its doing so. But this also suggests the limit of government's interference in society: government defends the historically proven rules of social harmony and economic sufficiency but leaves the rest up to private interests.^[44]

Ssu-ma's willingness to claim the sages for his own cause suggests that he has turned from criticism of others to his own conclusions. His "Impractical Writings" of 1057 holds that the literatus who follows the "Way of the sages" will not try to change what he cannot control—his intelligence and courage, rank and wealth—but will simply try to do his best in his given role. By accepting his lot he will escape the sense of affliction that comes from unfulfilled desires, whether idealistic or selfish.^[45] For a literatus to be

[43] For a discussion of why kung is the most basic value, see SMK 69.856-57, "Chang Kung tzu Ta-ch'eng hsu" (1056). Ssu-ma marked his return to the capital in 1057 with several ancient-style essays. These can be read both as a defense of his patron, the former chief councillor P'ang Chi, and as support for the new regime of former Ch'ing-li reformers and ancient prose thinkers (but on his own grounds).

[44] SMK 64.793; 65.799-801; 65.787-90; 67.827.

[45] SMK 74:905-7, "Yü shu" reading through "T'ien jen" (1057-1058). My comments are an interpretation of the first ten sections. Ssu-ma Kuang does qualify this. On the one hand, he recognizes that the world is made predictable in large part because men continue to follow desire and are usually incapable of following good advice, if it requires a subordination of private to public. On the other hand, he points out that accepting one's role does not prevent him from continuing to learn, and learning leads to an ever-broader perspective (even to the point where one may realize his past has been a mistake).

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a Ju he need only put aside desire for fame and profit and seek it.^[46] The answers need not be sought in the realm of heaven-and-earth. "The teaching of the sages," he writes, is "order man, not heaven; know man, not heaven."^[47] It is not necessary to seek guidance through introspection. Nor is it correct to choose particular texts as authoritative expressions of the "Way of antiquity" and promote them by imitating the "wen of antiquity." Indeed, in this 1057 letter, Ssu-ma declares that contrary to his correspondent's impression, he does not practice the "ancient style." Now that he knows the true Way he can devote himself to advancing it and defining it; he does not need to persuade men through literary argument.^[48]

Ssu-ma now was ready to present his views systematically. In about 1060 he decided to make the writing of a great chronological history of China from 403 B.C. to A.D. 959 his scholarly goal.^[49] And in office he began to propose policies to ensure that even a government staffed by men with private interests could maintain its public function.

Programs for the Present, 1058-1067

By the end of the 1050s Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih were ready to announce programs. Wang's "Ten-thousand Word Memorial" of 1058 was presented on his appointment as supervisor of funds in the Finance Commission (tu-chih p'an-kuan ), a post he held until his promotion to special drafting official (chih chih-kao ) in 1061. In 1063 Wang left to mourn his mother's death, declining appointments until late in 1067 when it became

[46] SMK 59.707.

[47] SMK 67.833.

[48] In this letter Ssu-ma argues that one can be sure he is on the right track in understanding the Way if he can "base it in heaven-and-earth, check it against the Former Kings, support it with Confucius, and verify it in the present." Ssu-ma may claim that his own ideas satisfy these four tests, but he does not appeal to them consistently (particularly not the first until the 1080s). Nor does a historical account of his thought suggest that he sought understanding from these sources in this manner. Nevertheless, the four tests indicate the standards that claims to universality at the time were expected to meet. On the rejection of the ancient style, see also SMK 59.712-13, letter to P'ang Chi. Ssu-ma's growing antipathy toward the idea that wen hsueh could function as a method of both understanding the Way and choosing officials is evident in SMK 60.718-19.

[49] The dating of his decision to write a history relies on Liu Shu's recollection; see Wang Te-i, "Ssu-ma Kuang te shih-hsueh," in Chi-nien Ssu-ma Kuang Wang An-shih , p. 32-33.

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clear that the new emperor, Shen-tsung, actually wanted his advice. Ssu-ma Kuang began to spell out his program on his appointment as coadministrator of the Bureau of Policy Criticism (t'ung-chih chien-yuan ) in 1061. He served as a policy critic or censor until his appointment as a Hanlin academician in 1067.

Ssu-ma Kuang's Program

Ssu-ma had an unusually long tenure as a policy critic; he said he preferred a position that allowed him to "define right and wrong" to one that merely required literary skill.^[50] On taking up this post in 1061 he presented his program for ensuring the survival of political unity. He did this, first, through a series of memorials addressed to the emperor on political principles and specific policies and, second, by writing the Chronological Charts , his first major historical work, the forerunner of his Comprehensive Mirror .

"Five Guidelines," one of his first submissions, sets out a broad historical vision and the conclusions he draws from it. He begins with a review of the rise and fall of dynasties and concludes that dynastic houses have succeeded in maintaining the unity of the "world under heaven" for only five hundred out of the past seventeen hundred years because of the adventurism and negligence of rulers.^[51] Whether the Chinese world (Ssu-ma does not include the surrounding barbarians) remains unified depends on whether the "state" (kuo ) that unifies it survives. There is nothing natural about the rise and fall of states. The state is a man-made structure; it is possible to preserve it forever. Ssu-ma's analogy for the state is a building. The people are its foundation, rules and rituals its pillars, the high ministers its beams, the rest of officialdom its roof, the generals its walls, and the soldiers its latch. Rulers who "continue the structure and maintain the finished models of their ancestors" can pass it on to their descendants. But to do so they must keep this building in good repair. They must see to timely preparations against foreign invasion and natural disasters by selecting military and civil officials well, training the soldiers, storing up grain, and ensuring effective local administration. Selecting officials well requires noticing faults of character before they have a political effect. Finally, they must take measures to ensure that the functions of government are accomplished in substance, not merely in appearance.^[52]

Order exists, and the state as an integrated structure of functions sur-

[50] See Ssu-ma's nine refusals of his appointment as special drafting official in 1062, SMK 24.339-46. I have cited the sixth. See also his explanation for this behavior in his letter to P'ang Chi, SMK 59.712-13. For an account of why he accepted and tried to decline positions through his career to 1070, see SMK 43.555-56.

[51] SMK 21.307-14; 27.307-9.

[52] SMK 21:309-14.

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vives, in this view, when all the groups that constitute the state are kept in their proper relation and fulfill their partial roles in the whole. The historical task of the ruler is to maintain the structure once it has been put together by the founder of the dynasty. That founder is the king with "heaven's decree," that is the one whose intelligence and strength outlast those of his rivals.^[53] Rulers may be seen as "owners" of the building, but Ssu-ma treats them more as caretakers responsible for its upkeep. If they have done their job poorly in the past, it is because they have lacked the judgment necessary to make political decisions and choices, as another memorial explains:

I observe that there are but three great virtues for the ruler: benevolence, knowledge, and militancy. Benevolence does not mean genial indulgence. Establish transformation through education. Improve administration. Nurture the folk. Benefit all things. This is the benevolence of the ruler. Knowledge does not mean petty spying. Understand the principles of the Way. Recognize security and danger. Distinguish the wise from the foolish. Discriminate between right and wrong. This is the knowledge of the ruler. Militancy does not mean violent ferocity. Choose that which agrees with the Way and do not doubt. Slander cannot confuse him. Flattery cannot move him. This is the militancy of the ruler. To be benevolent yet not know is like having good fields without ploughing them. To know yet not be militant is like finding the weeds around the shoots but not pulling them. To be militant yet not benevolent is like knowing how to harvest but not to plant. If these are all complete together, the state will be ordered and strong. If one is lacking, it will decline. If two are lacking, it will be in danger. And if none of the three is present, it will be lost. Ever since there were people this has never changed.^[54]

Ssu-ma repeated this to every ruler he served. Within the context of these general values of rulership, Ssu-ma identifies three essential tasks that the ruler must carry out to ensure that the parts of the structure fulfill their assigned functions. This Ssu-ma repeated to all his emperors as well.^[55]

I have heard that the way of achieving order depends on but three things: first, the assignment of offices; second, reliable rewards; and third, necessary punishments.^[56]

[53] SMK 21:307.

[54] Ssu-ma kept repeating these prescriptions for rulers throughout his career, with later memorials often citing earlier memorials. The memorial cited here is SMK 20.296, "Ch'en san te shang-tien cha-tzu" (1061). Others are SMK 24.346, "shang-tien hsieh kuan cha-tsu" (1062); 27.275, "Shang huang t'ai-hou shu" (1063); 27.383, "Shang huang-ti shu" (1063); 28.381, "Ch'i chien-sheng hsi-wu" (1063); 31.417, "Yen wei chih so hsien shang-tien cha-tzu" (1064); 32.427, "Ch'en chih yao shang-tien cha-tzu" (1064); 38.493, "Ch'u ch'i chung-ch'eng shang-tien cha-tzu" (1067); 46.568, "Chin hsiu-hsin chih-kuo chih yao cha-tzu" (1085).

[55] See the memorials listed in note 54.

[56] SMK 20.297-98.

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The ruler's function is to see to it that all those responsible for the working of government fulfill their functions. This does not happen, however. Assignments and promotions are determined by mere longevity, and officials are shifted between offices before they learn their jobs, or when the difficulties their initiatives cause are still being felt but the good results are not yet apparent. Those who try are punished, while those who avoid problems are rewarded. The state cannot count on all officials to motivate themselves to fulfill their functions; few are able to be "concerned with the public and forget the private" irrespective of the situation.^[57] To make government effective requires institutional improvements: longer tenures, assignments by ability, and promotions by real merit. The first concern of policy is the effective administration of government.

When Ssu-ma wrote this he was fully aware that Sung was facing serious military and fiscal problems.^[58] We might well expect him to give priority to these pressing tasks of government. Why does he insist instead upon the importance of correct administration? The answer, I think, is evident in his analogy between the state and a building. The state is a structure of groups with different kinds of power and responsibility. (Note that the "people" are the foundation upon which the rest of the building-state rises.) Maintaining these groups in proper relation is the same as maintaining the state. The parts of the whole most subject to collapse are those with the most power; they are also fewest. If one part gets too much power, or gets the wrong kind, or fails to meet its responsibility, it will affect the work of the other parts. Thus, Ssu-ma concludes, make sure that the men assigned to each role can do the job, and use rewards and punishments to see that they continue to do so. The process of government, rather than the actual work of government, holds Ssu-ma's interest. This explains, I suspect, why Ssu-ma has a limited interest in the lower end of officialdom, in local government, where he supposes that if men are given the chance to develop competence and are rewarded for it, the tasks of government will be carried out. He is primarily interested in leaders of state as men directly responsible for making the government function.

Behind all this lies an assumption that men are generally guided by partiality and self-interest. Ssu-ma appeals even to the ruler's own partial interest: if he desires to keep the state for his descendants, he must have a total commitment to the "public." Institutions can be reformed, but whether officials do their duty depends upon the rewards and punishments that remind them where their own interests lie. This is not ideal, but, Ssu-ma points out, political authority must take the realities of "custom" (i.e., social values) into account. He does argue, at considerable length, that the

[57] SMK 21.312.

[58] SMK 20.298.

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government must try to influence social values in its own interest. That is, it should make men "accustomed" once again to "the roles of superior and inferior." "Be Careful about Habits" recognizes that a willingness to accept hierarchy is a state of mind and that men must believe in its importance or come to accept it as a given.^[59] Ssu-ma recognizes, of course, that it is not a given; it is necessary to help contain the problem of partial and selfish interests. However, once those with authority understand this, they can act so as to "make the people accustomed to the roles of superior and inferior."^[60]

The argument of this memorial, developed through a historical review of political change, is essentially this: the survival of a state is a function of its success in getting men accustomed to hierarchical relations of authority. This "custom" is the safety net of the polity, for the human resistance to change (which Ssu-ma takes as a given) entails a willingness to follow established authority as long as it does not itself involve costly change. In antiquity this habit was sustained by ritual, but with the decline of the Chou it gradually disappeared until only the powerless Chou king survived to testify to its value. During the Han and T'ang not only was ritual not restored, but men became accustomed to challenging superiors. By the end of T'ang men no longer spoke of "the ranking of honored and humble or the principles of right and wrong," and the ephemeral states of the Five Dynasties period were the result. The Sung founders "understood that all misfortune arises from an absence of ritual" and took measures to establish the authority of the ruler and reduce that of the provincial governors. They unified the hierarchy of authority so that it extended from the court to fiscal intendants (Ssu-ma's modern equivalent for the feudal lords of Chou) and thence to local officials and the people; "thus the ranking of superior and inferior was correct and rules and principles were established."^[61]

As Ssu-ma would later assert in the Comprehensive Mirror , a hierarchy of authority and clearly defined levels and areas of functional responsibility were basic to order and unity. These concerns dominate Ssu-ma's memorials as a policy critic. We find typical examples in his opposition to the regular granting of amnesties, on the grounds that they make rewards and punishments ineffective; his call for changes in the examination system, on the grounds that exams that "value literary writing highly" promote only one kind of talent; his proposal for a reform of the promotion system, to be undertaken to guarantee that only the competent rise; and his criticism of particular cases of rewards for men he finds lacking true merit.^[62]

[59] SMK 24.347-51.

[60] SMK 24.349.

[61] SMK 24:348-49.

[62] These examples are taken only from 1061 but are representative of the 1061-1065 memorials in SMK , ch. 20-36. On amnesties, see SMK 20:300; on exams, 20:302; on the promotion system, 21:314; for an example of a particular case, see his attack on Chang Fang-p'ing, 23:325.

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When Ssu-ma does turn to national defense and state finances, he again argues for bureaucratic and administrative solutions. Writing during a period of increasing tensions with the Tangut's state of Hsia, he argues against all attempts to increase the size of the military, conscript northern farmers, and establish a more aggressive posture on the borders. His aim is to keep the two parties, Sung and Hsia, in a stable relationship, one in which neither will disturb the other. But he also notes that a large military depletes the treasury, thus making the military itself a threat to the state. His advice is relatively simple. Better training and better selection of the officer corps will make it possible to return the military to its proper size; and he cites the achievements of the Sung founder, who had far fewer troops.^[63]

"On Wealth and Profit," his most extensive memorial on fiscal affairs from this period, takes a similar view. He opposes "literati of literary talent" whom he sees dominating the Finance Commission and proposing reforms aimed at increasing the state's share of the national wealth. The restoration of fiscal stability is to be achieved by three kinds of measures. First, improve the financial administration: fill financial posts with specialists in financial affairs and create a special career path of financial offices, separate from the career path of "literary talent." Second, bring the common people back to farming, their proper role, and thereby restore production and revenue. He advocates reducing farmers' taxes by tapping urban wealth and hiring ya-ch'ien servicemen. But since he sees poor administration as the main problem, he pays most attention to bureaucratic reforms that will ensure competence in local government. Third, he calls for a reduction in expenses. The stipends of the imperial clan and gifts to officialdom can be reduced. But the real problem is that the numbers in civil and military service are growing while "the production of heaven-and-earth is constant." Thus instead of discussing ways of increasing production and revenues to cover costs, Ssu-ma concludes that the state must manage its revenue better to make ends meet while reducing expenses. He calls for the unification of financial controls in a single organ under the chief councillor, with the responsibility of matching expenses with revenue, finding the causes of deficits and possible savings, and evaluating the financial bureaucracy.^[64]

Ssu-ma was well aware that his policy advice was not being taken.

[63] Ssu-ma's discussions of military policy became more specific as tensions with the Tan-guts increased during the 1060s; see SMK 20:298; 34:449-59; 35:461; 35:464.

[64] SMK 25:356; 25:361; 35:353-62. Note that Ssu-ma would bring the Privy Purse into this unified fiscal system as well.

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Moreover, he saw that rulers, in particular Ying-tsung, did not really believe that "to order the self nothing is prior to filial piety; to order the state nothing is prior to impartiality (kung )."^[65] To demonstrate the necessity of his views Ssu-ma turned to scholarship.

Learning from History . Long "fond of historical learning (shih hsueh )," Ssu-ma in the 1060s turned to historical writing in earnest. In 1064 he submitted to Ying-tsung the Chronological Charts (Li-nien t'u ), a chronology of events from 403 B.C. to A.D. 959, which was to be incorporated in a longer work, Record of Examinations into the Past (Chi ku lu ), in the 1080s.^[66] And in 1066 he submitted an eight-chapter work entitled Comprehensive Treatise , covering the years 403 to 207 B.C. The Charts appears to have become the outline for the Comprehensive Mirror ; the Treatise became its first eight chapters.

In the Mirror Ssu-ma would claim that learning from history was the "single starting point" (i tuan ) for knowing the Way to achieve order through government.

The Changes says, "The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past in order to increase his virtue." Confucius said, "It is enough that the language one uses gets the point across." Thus history is the single starting point for Ju, wen is a superfluous affair for Ju. As for Lao and Chuang, their "void" and "nothingness" certainly are not that with which we give instruction. Learning is that by which we seek the Way. There are not two Ways in the world. How could there be four learnings!^[67]

Ssu-ma was sure that history revealed the principles or rules (Ssu-ma uses such terms as kang-yao and chi-kang ) necessary for establishing and maintaining the state. As he asserted in the Chronological Charts , "From when the people first came into being to the end of heaven and earth, those who have had states, in spite of myriad sorts of change and transformation, have not gone beyond [the rules set forth here]."^[68] Ssu-ma freely admitted that

[65] SMK 31:417. For an example of Ssu-ma's view of Ying-tsung, see 36:471-75.

[66] For an account of this work, which briefly covers the period before 403 and Sung through 1066, see Wang Ching-chih, "Chi ku lu chien t'an," Chung-hua wen shih lun-ts'ung , vol. 14 (Shanghai: Shanghai ku-chi, 1980), pp. 121-31. I have followed the text of the Charts Ssu-ma reproduced in his Chi ku lu of 1086 (Hsueh chin t'ai yuan ed.), 1 l:58b-16:79b.

[67] Quoted in Lin Jui-han, "Ssu-ma Kuang ti shih-hsueh yü cheng-shu," reprinted in Sung shih yen-chiu chi , vol. 8 (Taipei, 1974), pp. 59-60. The passage is found in Ssu-ma's Tzu-chih t'ung-chien (Peking: Ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1956) 123:3868. Ssu-ma is here commenting on a passage relating the simultaneous establishment of "schools" of Neo-Taoism (hsuan-hsueh ), Ju, History, and Wen under the Liu Sung dynasty in the fifth century. Ssu-ma cites the I Ching , Ta-ch'u hexagram, trans. Wilhelm and Baynes, 516, modified, and the Analects , 15:41, trans. Lau, p. 137.

[68] Chi ku lu 16:78a.

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he had chosen those events that he saw as essential to tracing the rise and fall of states. But he held that the principles he derived from these were valid for the present because they could account for both the success and the failure of past political leaders to establish and maintain order. A single set of rules made history consistent and coherent: "The Way of order and chaos is on a single thread in past and present."^[69] Thus his history becomes a record of political conduct rather than of cumulative institutional or cultural change. He is after timeless principles, valid whether or not rulers followed them consciously. But they were principles that men should obviously try to follow.

What then is the content of these principles? The view that Ssu-ma was a monarchical absolutist and defender of autocracy, although still current, has been effectively challenged by Anthony Sariti, who argues that for Ssu-ma, "the emperor was confined in his own stratum, namely the bureaucracy," that Ssu-ma believed in the necessity of remonstrance, and that the ruler was to subordinate himself to "Confucian principles." While it is certainly true that Ssu-ma limits the ruler, demanding that he adhere to the lessons of history, Ssu-ma also makes the ruler bear full responsibility for the survival of the state. Precisely because government functions through a hierarchy of authority, the conduct of the ruler, more than that of any other position, affects the working of the entire government. Ssu-ma defines the functioning of the ruler according to principles that apply to the administration as a whole. No doubt these principles are more Confucian than Taoist, but we should not assume that there was a given set of clearly defined and well-established Confucian principles to which Ssu-ma and other officials could appeal. One of the purposes of Ssu-ma's historiography was to define what the principles of the Ju were.

The introduction to the Chronological Charts gives the essential rules that determine order and chaos, placing the ruler at the center:

The Way of order and chaos is on a single thread in past and present. The duration [of a state] is a matter of virtue alone. I am ignorant and of shallow learning, incapable of understanding the larger form of the state. But whenever I have divined it with the traces of previous ages as carried in the records I have boldly dared pronounce upon it. Now whether the state is in order or chaos depends entirely upon the ruler of men. The Way of the ruler of men is one. His virtues are three. His talents are five.^[70]

[69] Chi ku lu 16:75b, written in 1064. Compare, in 1066: "The sources of order and chaos have the same necessary form in past and present" (ku chin t'ung ti ): SMK 17:254-55.

[70] Chi ku lu 16:75a-75b. The Chronological Charts begins in 403 B.C. , as does the Comprehensive Mirror , because the division of Chin into three states shows that "the rules of ritual were exhausted." See Chi ku lu 11:58b. This judgment is explained and elaborated in the introductory comment in the Comprehensive Mirror ; see Tzu-chih t'ung-chien 1:2-6. Both works end in 959 A.D. with the demise of Later Chou, which Ssu-ma treats as having provided the foundation without which Sung could not have unified the world. The point here, I take it, is that Sung cannot truly distance itself from immediate pre-Sung history and simply return to antiquity. See Chi ku lu 15:74, Tzu-chih t'ung-chien 294:9599-9600. The twenty-five charts are now lost, but the year-by-year record of events has survived together with thirty-six comments interjected by Ssu-ma. In contrast to the comments found in the Mirror , Ssu-ma's comments here are largely devoted to evaluating rulers through history. For example, in the evaluations of Eastern and Western Han (12:87b-88b, 13B:103a-104a) and T'ang (15:61b-65b), every ruler is discussed, while ministers are introduced only in relation to the rulers' conduct of affairs. Although he wrote the work for Ying-tsung, it gained a broader readership with the publication of an unauthorized edition. This edition appeared under the title The Line of Emperors (Ti t'ung ), a title that Ssu-ma claimed "was not my intent." See SMK 71:877, "Chi Li-nien t'u hou," on the format of the original work and the problems with the unauthorized edition. The introduction presents the rules in general terms, while the various comments explain how particular rulers variously succeeded or failed to realize those principles.

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The one Way is the correct way to employ men; the three virtues, as before, are benevolence, knowledge, and militance; and the five talents are styles of rulership. In elaborating on the one Way Ssu-ma repeats much of what he has said before but also makes the new claim that it is the shih that the ruler must employ. They exist in every state as the men of either great wisdom or ability. They must be employed because the people follow them, as the leaves and branches follow the "root." To gain the support of the people the ruler must gain the support of the shih . Once he has them he must choose among them, assign them functions according to their real · talent and achievements, and give them full authority to carry out their tasks. He gives them rank and salary, encourages them with rewards, and punishes those who stray. In this view the shih , the elite, exist already in society. They are not created by the state, but they are essential to the state, which, Ssu-ma appears to imply, must make those members of the elite in government do its bidding yet not go so far as to threaten the leading position of the elite among the people.

The three virtues concern how the ruler employs men. The first two need no further explanation; the third, militance, concerns the ruler's ability to stand behind those he has chosen. The five talents are indicative of the ruler's success. There are founders, able to unify the world, and four classes of successors: those who keep the system in good repair, reforming those received institutions that have developed faults; those who do not pay attention to the historical situation; those who do and so "restore" the state; and those who are so utterly unconcerned that the state is lost. The point here is constant attention to the direction of events and an ability to see that a deterioration in the structure of relations presages trouble. The Way, virtues, and talents hold through all historical change, Ssu-ma concludes, yet an ordered world has been a rare achievement. The first two Sung rulers were true founders. Implicitly, readers are invited to ask what kind of successor the current ruler will choose to be.

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Thus by the end of Ying-tsung's reign Ssu-ma had articulated a body of principles and a general program. When Shen-tsung came to the throne in 1067, Ssu-ma was ready to provide advice. Instead, the emperor turned to Wang An-shih and proceeded to contravene the rules of government Ssu-ma had defined for him.

Wang An-shih's Program

Wang An-shih set forth his program for achieving political-social integration in his famous "Ten-thousand Word Memorial" of 1058, repeating its essential points in 1060 and 1061.^[71] The distance between Wang and Ssu-ma is clear. All that Wang requires of the ruler is that he support the program. Nor, for him, are the shih already present in society and waiting only to be correctly employed: Wang focuses on forming the kind of shih that will be suitable for carrying out his program.

Wang's memorial follows directly from his concerns in the 1040s. We can read it as an answer to one of his own examination questions:

There were root and branch in the sages' ordering of the age. There were what came first and what came last in their applying [of root and branch]. Today the problems of the world have been left uncorrected for a long time, and teaching and policy have not yet been put in accord with the intentions of the sages. We have lost sight of the root, seeking it in the branch; we have taken what should come last and put it first. Thus the world careens toward disorder. Now if it is so that the world will not be ordered except through the means the sages used to achieve order, then to be considered a true shih one must attend to how the sages achieved order. I want you gentlemen to relate in full the root and branch of how the sages achieved order and what they put first and last.^[72]

The memorial also responds to two objections, raised by the historically minded, to a policy of returning to antiquity. First, the policies of the sages addressed their times; times have changed and so must policy. Second, if there was an integrated order in antiquity and sages governed, then men seeking to cope with an age of decline clearly should not adopt policies suited only for an age of perfect order.

Wang begins the memorial by attributing contemporary problems (domestic and foreign, moral and financial) to a failure "to understand institutions" (fa tu ). By this he means understanding that to secure order institutions must "agree with the policies of the Former Kings." But more precisely: "imitating the policies of the Former Kings means we should only

[71] LCC 39:410-23. For Wang's restatements, see LCC 41:438 and 39.423. The memorial is fully translated in H. R. Williamson, Wang An-shih: A Chinese Statesman and Educationalist of the Sung Dynasty (London: Probsthain, 1935), vol. 1, pp. 48-84.

[72] LCC 70.747, third question.

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imitate their intentions." Moreover, these intentions, which ground a systematic program of action, stood the test of historical change in antiquity.

The two emperors [Yao and Shun] and the three kings [Yü, T'ang, and Wen] were removed from each other by over a thousand years. Order and chaos followed one upon the other and periods of splendor and decline were fully present. The changes they encountered and the situations they faced differed, and the measures they adopted varied as well. But their intentions in making society and state (wei t'ien-hsia kuo-chia chih i ), the root and branch and the first and last, were always the same. I therefore say: we ought simply to imitate their intentions. If we imitate their intentions, then whatever changes and reforms we make will not shock people or cause complaint, yet will surely be in agreement with the policies of the Former Kings.^[73]

In short, policies that accord with the intentions of the sages, and are systematically organized to correspond to—not to replicate—the sages' program of action, can be put into effect without fear of the consequences.

But, Wang continues, "to fit the intentions of the Former Kings to the changed situation of the present" is not possible as long as "human talent in society (t'ien-hsia ) is inadequate." Talent is the "root" of an integrated order; the government must set about "completing it by molding and casting it." The government creates the talent it needs through a sequence of measures founded in the model of antiquity.

The first requirement is "Instruction" through government schools, established to train all those capable of being of use in realizing the program. Schooling should immerse men in the integrated systems of antiquity. They will learn "the affairs of rites and music, punishment and policy" by living in an environment where all that they see and practice are the "model sayings, moral conduct, and intentions for ordering society of the Former Kings." Second is "Nurturing." The government nurtures all the people by providing economic support, establishing rituals of passage and of daily life appropriate to their economic stations, and finally by controlling them with penal law, thus to "unify social customs and bring about order." Third, through "Selection," the schools recommend the most wise and able to the leaders who may, on examining their speech and conduct, assign them probationary employment and titles. Finally, in "Employment," those selected and proven are assigned ranks and responsibilities commensurate with their talents. Such officials are to be given long tenures and left unfettered by regulations so that they can develop and complete projects and do what ought to be done.

Wang goes on to compare the present with the model. "Instruction" is incomplete, for it deals only with the civil and literary and ignores the military. Salaries are too low to "nurture" honesty among officials, while rites

[73] LCC 39.410-11.

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fail to restrain men, and the law does not punish basic faults. "Selection" is based on literary skill and memorization; it fails to garner men of real use. "Employment" is determined by a seniority system that assigns men to positions outside their competence. Wang concludes that the first step now is to devise policies to form talent under present conditions but in a manner in line with the intentions of the Former Kings. To accomplish this there is a necessary sequence: first think out broad strategies, then make precise calculations, then gradually put them into effect, and finally bring them to fruition. Offer rewards to those who further the cause and punish those who hinder it. Let the ruler take the intentions of the sage kings as his guide.

The "Ten-thousand Word Memorial" as I read it, is about the idea of a perfect, self-contained, and self-perpetuating system. The forming of talents is not separable from policies to provide for the livelihood, morality, and discipline of society. Producing men devoted to the system requires establishing the system at the same time. However, when the memorial turns to actual measures appropriate to the present, its aims are more limited. Rather than proposing a school system for all the people so that officials can be chosen from among them, Wang asks only that, as an initial step, the government restructure its relationship with the shih . In effect, Wang calls for integrating the shih with the government, rather than allowing the shih to exist independently of the government and its purpose. But we may also say, and perhaps just as accurately, that Wang is asking that the government be made one with the shih and with their aspirations as Wang presents them. In either case Wang's program demands the unification of politics and morality, of government and society. This is clear in his claim that education must "unify all who learn" to prevent disagreement among literati about what is to be done. It is clear too in his view of the economy: he holds it essential that the government "manage wealth" in order to keep private wealth from increasing to the point that people become beholden to private interests. That would irreversibly divide authority and so hinder the uniform implementation of policy.^[74]

For Wang political leadership belongs to those who have truly "learned," men committed to realizing the intentions of the Former Kings. "Even the son of heaven, facing north [thus acknowledging such men as teachers], will inquire of them and take turns acting as host and guest with them." In letters to followers in the 1060s, Wang insists that achieving an integrated system can arise only when men who have truly learned gain authority. Such men will be able to direct all the parts to fulfill their proper roles as pieces of a larger whole; "We cause others to take what is correct

[74] LCC 82.860-61; 82.862-63. Other accounts of the ideal school include 82.858 and 83.870.

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from us so that they are able to be correct." Once they have the knowledge in them, all they need is the political authority to put it into effect.^[75]

Learning from the Sages . Wang An-shih's essays show that he sought to justify his claim that literati ought to take the sages as their guide to political action. The model for the present must be the "completed model" (ch'eng-fa ) developed by the sages when they took over what heaven-and-earth had begun, "completing" the things nature had brought into being. (Contrast this with Ssu-ma Kuang's view that the truly relevant models are those of the dynasty's founders.) "Thus in the past, when the sages were in power and took all things as their responsibility, they necessarily instituted the four methods. The four methods are ritual, music, punishment, and policy; these are the means for completing things."

The sages' completed model, which was free of any onesidedness and partiality, was established over time in a cumulative manner. Later sages did not imitate the "traces" of former sages, Wang explains, because sages responded "according to changes in the times" (ch'üan shih chih pien ). Nevertheless, there was a basic uniformity to their intentions. Confucius, the last sage and completer of the system, responded to changed times according to the "intent of ritual"; he did not stick to "the forms of ritual [already] instituted." This meant, in the case of ritual, anchoring it in the communal feeling of man as it was at that moment while incorporating the sages' own tradition. Wang extends this to all institutions. A system must be built from the common desires of those affected, and it must be instituted in a way that allows the "average man" (chung jen ) to meet its requirements. Imitating the forms and imitating the intentions are not mutually exclusive, however. Those who successfully thought out and established integrated systems inferred intentions from the forms of the past. Thus they were better able to accommodate change and maintain an integrated system than were mere imitators of past forms. The latter, trying to preserve forms, were increasingly unable to incorporate new developments. True sages were able to create new systems on the basis of past intentions. Their willingness to make changes in forms to realize the same idea was a sign of their sincere desire to benefit all. Imitators of forms lacked that self-confidence; they copied the past to impress others but did not know the intentions on which past models were based. This accounts for the decline of Chou: men started imitating forms and forgot how to act as sages.^[76] Having the intent as opposed to imitating the form was what made kings and hegemons fun-

[75] LCC 82.858; 72.766-768. See also LCC 75.790-91: "In regard to learning, the superior man's intention is surely directed to society, but first to ourselves and then to our fellows. If we ourselves are in order, then whether others are in order or not depends on whether we realize our intention or not."

[76] LCC 69.730; 67.713; 66.701; 67.717; 67.714.

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damentally different. Ssu-ma Kuang did not share this Mencian view. Ssu-ma saw only a difference of degree, since political order under any circumstances depended upon the same principles: if order was achieved by hegemons, they must have been following the same principles as kings.^[77]

For Wang antiquity has authority in three ways. On the first level, he can justify the creation of institutions on the grounds that they formed part of the "completed model" provided by the ancients. Here it is a matter of "imitating the traces." On a second level, antiquity provides a set of ideas for organizing society and state into a single system. These ideas were constant, even though the institutional structure grew and changed. Third, antiquity provides, in the sages, a model for carrying out the reorganization of society and state. One who shares the intentions known from the forms of the past can do what is necessary to reestablish a coherent, unified system. Antiquity thus has authority as a source of models, purposes, and methods. These three aspects join in the term fa (model, rule, method, law, and to imitate). Knowing the fa of the sages is more important than historical knowledge, for their fa were effective in achieving true order. In what might well be seen as a response to Ssu-ma Kuang, Wang writes, "I hold that one who understands order and chaos ought to discuss the methods [the sages] used to transform men."^[78] Clearly Wang and Ssu-ma had different ideas about how the sages had civilized men.

Because Wang is sure that there are models, intentions, and methods, he can make claims about how sages in antiquity must have operated, even when evidence is lacking. This is illustrated in "The Duke of Chou," where he defends the idea of a state school system to form shih against those who think (like Hsun Tzu in this essay, or Ssu-ma Kuang) that the sages relied on a system of personal connections and recommendations to find shih . He appeals first to the "system of the Three Eras," a time when "fa was truly perfected," which is said to have included schools. But then he argues that this manner of forming shih is necessary for fa to be good. "If the Duke of Chou knew how to govern, then by rights he would have established the fa of schools under heaven."^[79]

This suggests that for Wang the real test of whether he is right is the ability of his own mind to envision integrated systems. To deal with the present he must, of course, fit in developments since antiquity.^[80] Essays

[77] SMK 73.896. For a discussion of Sung literati debates on this issue, see Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1982), pp. 46-53.

[78] LCC 69.731.

[79] LCC 64.677-78.

[80] He admits this when he writes that in learning men must "comprehend past and present, acquaint [themselves] with rites and rules, the patterns of heaven and the affairs of man, and the changes in policy and instruction." See LCC 69.734.

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such as "On Ritual and Music," where ritual and music are presented as models for true "learning," and "On Attaining and Using Unity," which defines the process of "learning," suggest that the process of mentally envisioning how various parts can be formed into a coherently integrated system is basic to Wang's view of learning. These are very difficult essays, in part because we find Wang trying to unite internal and external, human nature and sentiment, man and heaven-and-earth, sages and common men. If they are not persuasive as philosophical treatises, they still indicate what Wang was trying to accomplish. He begins the second essay with the statement "All things have their perfect patterns (li ). If one can grasp the essential of the patterns, one is a sage. The way to grasp the essential of the patterns lies simply in attaining [and using] their unity." This is applied to human affairs in the first essay when Wang concludes that all enduring creations "have been established by sages who attained [and used] the essential and loved learning." For Wang attaining and using the essential or unity enables one to hold all dualities together and create things that harmonize and synthesize diverse interests and traditions. By contrasting this with merely "maintaining completed models" he argues that this kind of learning can and must be a basis for reorganizing modern society.^[81]

There is a dialectic between Wang's attempt to achieve a coherent, unified understanding of the Classics and the sages and his efforts to envision a system that can incorporate all aspects of the world. We can see a similar dialectic, in Ssu-ma Kuang's thinking, between the effort to define the constant principles of political process and the attempt to make history coherent. To a greater degree than Ssu-ma, I think, Wang appeals to the coherence of his conclusions to justify their validity. He will later write his cousin Tseng Kung:

For long the world has not seen the complete Classics. If one were only to read the Classics, this would not be enough to [let one] know the Classics. I thus read everything, from the hundred schools and various masters to [such medical texts as] the Nan ching and Su wen , the pharmacopeia, and various minor theories, and I inquire of everyone, down to the farmer and the crafts-woman. Only then am I able to know the great system (ta t'i ) of the Classics and to be free of doubt. The later ages in which we learn are different from the time of the Former Kings. We must do this if we are fully to know the sages.^[82]

[81] LCC 66.707; 66.702-6; quoting from 66.706. Winston Lo, in "Wang An-shih and the Confucian Ideal of Inner Sageliness," and K'o Ch'ang-i, in his account of Wang's philosophical thought (pp. 194-96), both treat "On Attaining and Using Unity" as a statement of Wang's basic philosophy. I suspect that this essay and "On Ritual and Music" are late writings because they are concerned with the internal and the cosmological. Hsia Chang-pu has argued that after 1068 Wang changed his view of human nature to argue that good values were innate; see "Wang An-shih ssu-hsiang yü Meng-tzu," p. 315.

[82] LCC 73.779.

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Knowing the sages and the Classics means envisioning a perfect system that comprehends and integrates everything. Wang's claim, I think, is that if he has envisioned that system he knows the sages and he can act.

Advancing and Withdrawing, 1067-1086

Wang's rise to power began with his appointment to the Council of State early in 1069; at the end of 1070 he became chief councillor. He left central government for good in 1076 and soon retired. Ssu-ma left central government in the fall of 1070. Until 1085, when he was appointed to the Council of State after the death of Emperor Shen-tsung, he lived mainly in Lo-yang, working on the Comprehensive Mirror . He died in 1086 in office as chief councillor, surviving Wang by half a year.^[83] Once Wang's "New Policies" (hsin fa ), as they were soon known, were put into effect, Ssu-ma set forth his objections. When Ssu-ma gained power he fought to rescind the New Policies in their entirety.

The likelihood of disagreement between Ssu-ma and Wang had already become apparent in 1061, when Ssu-ma proposed a reform of the promotion system to ensure the effective bureaucratic functioning of government. He envisioned a twelve-grade system of assignments (ch'ai-ch'ien ), from chief councillor to sheriff and registrar, and new rules for determining assignments, tenures, and promotions. This was a reform close to Ssu-ma's heart, an essential part of his larger scheme. Called upon to review the proposal, Wang responded by dismissing it as a "petty reform, in the end offering no solutions to real problems and not worth undertaking." Improving the functioning of government missed the point, Wang held, unless it was accompanied by a complete reexamination of the system. "If the court is committed to greatly perfecting institutions and molding and ranking human talent," it should call upon all "literati with proposals" to debate.^[84]

When the two men met again, in 1068, they again disagreed. But the new emperor was interested in "accomplishing something," in spite of the growing deficit, and he asked for advice. Ssu-ma called for reducing ex-

[83] In 1068/4 Wang was summoned to the capital as Han-lin academician, in 1069/2 he was made vice-councillor, in 1070/12 he became one of two chief councillors, between 1072/3 and 1074/4 he was sole chief councillor, and, after having been briefly forced out, served again as chief councillor from 1075/2 to 1076/10 (alone from 1075/8). He then went to a prefectural post in Chiang-ning. He retired fully in 1077/6, and remained in Chiang-ning until his death in 1086/4. In 1068 Ssu-ma was Han-lin academician and reader-in-waiting, in 1069/2 and 1070/8 he requested outside appointments, in 1070/9 he took a provincial post in Yung-hsing but left that for a censorial position in Loyang in 1071/4. From 1073 he held a sinecure in Loyang. In 1084 he began to become active again, and in 1085/4 he was appointed to a prefectship. But in 1085/5 he was appointed vice-councillor, and then, 1086/interc.2, he was made a chief councillor. He died in office in 1086/9.

[84] SMK 21.314-16; LCC 62.667.

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penses (although he declined appointment to a committee to propose cuts) and suggested that the traditional gifts to high officials not be given at the sacrifices this year.^[85] This led to a debate between Wang and Ssu-ma before the emperor. Wang responded that Ssu-ma's proposed measures were a meaningless exercise that would do nothing to "enrich the state [kuo ]." His following comment was surprising: "Moreover, the inadequacy of revenue is not the priority of the present moment." Ssu-ma rejoined:

"Since the end of Chen-tsung's reign the state's revenues have been inadequate. How can you say this is not a priority?"

Wang replied, "Revenue is inadequate because we still lack men good at managing wealth (li ts'ai )."

Ssu-ma responded, "Men good at managing wealth merely tax, thus exhausting the wealth of the people. As a result the common folk are impoverished, they flee and become bandits; how does that benefit the state?"

Wang : "This is not what being good at managing wealth means. When one is good at managing wealth, revenues will be more than adequate without increasing taxes on the people."

Ssu-ma : "Those are the words with which Sang Hung-yang deceived Emperor Wu [of Han]; Ssu-ma Ch'ien recorded them to criticize Emperor Wu's obtuseness. The wealth and products heaven-and-earth produce are of a fixed amount. What is not with the people is with the government. If Sang Hung-yang was able to increase revenues, then, if he did not get it from the people, where did he get it?"^[86]

In the end, Wang An-shih's definition of the priorities of the day—man-aging wealth, changing customs, and establishing institutions—prevailed.^[87]

Debate over the New Policies

When Wang came to court in 1068, he immediately called for action on education, the civil service, agriculture, the military, and finances.^[88] Seen in isolation, the policies that he and his allies eventually proposed addressed specific problems, some internal to the working of government itself, others relating to the demands government made on society in order to maintain its tax base, its supply of manpower for local service and national defense, and its pool of potential officials. In many instances, the policies either had been proposed during earlier reigns or had been developed by creative local officials. And while Wang consistently cited ancient models to justify the institutions his policies created, he was not averse to citing Han and T'ang

[85] SMK 42.533-34 and 42.535-37.

[86] SMK 42.543-45. I am not sure this debate actually took place (the text is out of place in Ssu-ma's collection), but it does accurately reflect the positions of both men.

[87] HCP: shih-i 4.3b-4a (1070/2) and 5.19 (1070/9).

[88] LCC 41.444.

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precedents. But the New Policies were not intended to be discrete remedial measures. They were to work together to change the way government operated, change its relation to society, and transform society itself. Both Wang and Ssu-ma understood that the program was a vehicle for larger ends. The following chronology traces the institution of many of the New Policies.^[89]

1069, second month: Finance Planning Commission (Chih-chih san-ssu t'iao-li ssu). Codirected by Wang; absorbed into the Secretariat in 1070, fifth month. This office drew up the plans for the key policies.

1069, fourth month: Investigating Commissioners . Commissioners appointed to investigate local conditions in agriculture, irrigation, and obligatory local service and recommend action.

1069, sixth month: Administrative Regulations Commission (Pien-hsiu chungshu t'iao ssu). Abolished in 1075, tenth month. This office planned the restructuring of the bureaucracy completed in 1082. It resulted in placing the Council of State in charge of organs for financial, administrative, and military planning and operation, where hitherto the leading organs in these three areas had reported directly to the emperor.

1069, seventh month: Equitable Transport and [Price] Equalization Policy (Chün-shu p'ing-chun fa). Fiscal intendants for six southern circuits were given the authority and capital to supply government requirements by buying and selling according to market conditions, rather than relying on fixed local quotas and transport obligations.

1069, ninth month: Green Shoots Policy (Ch'ing miao fa). Using the Ever-Normal Granary (Ch'ang-p'ing tsang ) reserves as capital; led by Ever-Normal Granary commissioners in each circuit. Also known as the Ever-Normal [Granary] Policy (Ch'ang-p'ing fa ). Provided loans to farmers, and eventually to urban dwellers, at 20 percent interest (plus surcharges). Loan amounts were determined by household grade.

1069, eleventh month: Regulations on Agriculture and Water Conservancy (Nungt'ien shui-li t'iao-yueh). Based on reports from the investigating commissioners. Set out rules for recovering fallow land, carrying out local irrigation projects, and undertaking river conservancy.

1070, twelfth month: Tithing Policy (Pao-chia fa). Begun in the capital region; organized households into units of ten, fifty and five hundred. Each household with two or more adult males was to supply one as a militiaman. Militiamen received training, patrolled, and caught bandits for rewards. The basic unit was responsible for mutual surveil-

[89] For an overview of most of the New Policies, see Liu, Reform in Sung China , pp. 4-7. The most extensive account in English is still Williamson, Wang An-shih , pp. 131-346. Liu, pp. 98-113, discusses the Hired Service Policy in detail. Paul Smith, in chapter 2 in this volume, discusses the Green Sprouts Policy. For a brief account of Higashi Ichio's findings on some of the most important policies and planning offices, see OAnseki jiten , pp. 43-90.

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lance: it reported any crimes of members, new residents, and so forth. Eventually the tithing units were charged with tax collection.

1071, second month: New Examination System and Schools Policy . Followed discussions begun in 1069, fourth month. The various fields were dropped in favor of a single chin-shih examination. In place of the test in poetry, candidates wrote on the greater meaning of ten items from the Classic of their choice (Odes, Documents, Change, Rites of Chou, Book of Rites ) and from the Analects or the Mencius . There were also one essay and three policy proposals. Education officials were to be appointed to all prefectures, with special provisions for the northern circuits. Fields were ordered to be set aside to provision the schools in 1071, third month. The National University was restructured in 1071, tenth month, making it possible for those who passed through the three levels to be appointed directly to office.

1071, tenth month: Hired Service Policy (Mu i fa). Followed discussion and experiments in the K'ai-feng area. Obligatory local service was abolished in favor of hiring men to fill local subbureaucratic posts. Households were assessed a cash tax, graduated according to household wealth (thus requiring an assessment and grading of the wealth of rural and urban households).

1072, third month: [Government] Trade Policy (Shih i fa). Offices were created in major commercial centers to replace wealthy guild merchants as wholesalers, buying from and selling to smaller merchants and traders, as well as loaning money to smaller merchants at interest.

1072, eighth month: Land Survey and Equitable Tax Policies (Fang-t'ien chün-shui fa). Beginning with K'ai-feng and five northern border circuits. To survey land according to standard units, assess the quality of land, and determine ownership. The results, together with other investigations, to be used in correcting household grades so that they accurately reflected wealth (household grades were integral to determining loan eligibility under the Green Shoots and Market Trade Policies, Hired Service tax, and Tithing duties).

1073, third month: Bureau for Commentaries on the Classics (Ching i chü). Responsible for preparing official commentaries on the Odes, Documents , and Rites of Chou . Completed in 1075, sixth month.

According to Wang the most important policies were the policy of expansion in the northwest, the Green Shoots Policy, Hired Service, Tithing, and Government Trading. These were, he noted, also the most controversial, yet their beneficial effects would only gradually become apparent.^[90] These, together with Wang's approach to the bureaucratic system, were also the focus of Ssu-ma Kuang's critique. A comparison of what Wang saw

[90] LCC 41.440.

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as the promise of the policies with what Ssu-ma saw as their predictable consequences suggests that the real issue between them was the role of government in society.

Wang An-shih's Defense . What did Wang An-shih think he was trying to accomplish? His immediate concerns largely corresponded to his announced priorities: establishing institutions, changing customs, and managing wealth. Policies in one area were related to those in other areas. To manage wealth required establishing institutions whose effectiveness depended upon changing the values of the officials and the customary practices of the people. I shall make a more general distinction, however, between Wang's efforts to control the activities of government, officialdom, and the pool of potential officials (the literati) and his efforts to establish control over society. This last item will be clarified shortly.

The Finance Planning Commission was Wang's first move toward controlling the operations of government. Wang intended it to be the single organ for formulating an integrated set of policies to "manage wealth." It took authority for fiscal policy away from its traditional home in the Finance Commission, yet it was separate from the Council of State, thus depriving its members of a say in the initial stages of planning. Wang defended this bureaucratic anomaly: it was not incompatible with the structure of ancient government; it was the ancient rule that managing wealth should come before correcting the bureaucratic structure, and effective planning required that the planners share a unity of purpose and not be deterred by "divergent opinion." Wang avoided normal channels again when he appointed investigating commissioners to conduct local inspections and provide policy recommendations to Finance Planning, and yet again when he bypassed the fiscal intendants, the ranking officials of the circuits, and worked through newly created Ever-Normal Granary intendants. In each of these cases he appointed men he believed shared his policy goals. Here too he broke with normal procedure, appointing relatively young, lower-ranking officials to offices that gave them practical authority over older and higher-ranking officials. He then used these offices to promote those who had proved their commitment and effectiveness.^[91] (On all of this see chapter 2 in this volume.)

This creation of a government within a government can be seen as pragmatic, given that Wang aimed to change well-established policies supported by well-established officials. But Wang was unusually concerned with the threat of "divergent opinion" (i lun ), even after he had fully gained the imperial ear as sole chief councillor. He suspected that even objections

[91] HCP: shih-i 4.5 (1069/2); HCP: shih-i 6.1a-2b (1069/11). For an account of Wang's appointments in these areas, see Higashi, OAnseki jiten , pp. 81-86.

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to particulars of a policy were really aimed at the basic principles of his program. As Liu Chih put it, two "opinions" or views had emerged within the government:

[One] is secure in the constant and practices the old, happy when there are no problems. [The other] transforms the old and changes policy, pleased by the daring to act. . . . [The first] holds that in keeping to the successful policies of the [imperial] ancestors we need only follow those that are beneficial and, on the basis of traditional [policies], repair their deficiencies in order to achieve order. . . . [The second] holds that the [old] policies are rotten and the [old] way exhausted, and that without a great transformation we will be incapable of managing things and realizing our purposes.^[92]

Wang's policies amounted to a change in what was called the kuo-t'i , the normative form of the state, although he could see them as bringing the form of the state into line with antiquity. Effecting such a change required a unity of purpose, or at least general agreement, among the officials who made up the government. Those who subscribed to "divergent opinion" could be expected to try to thwart the change by stalling the implementation of the policies. Thus Wang did his best to see that leading dissenters were kept out of leading positions. Ssu-ma Kuang should not be appointed to the Council of State, he explained, because he "likes to offer divergent opinions," and his appointment, at a time when "customs are not yet fixed," would encourage lower officials to keep holding off. "If we give divergent opinion an authority to which to appeal nothing can be accomplished."^[93]

However, Wang's antipathy toward divergent opinion went well beyond the pragmatic. Unity was not simply necessary in order to carry out policy, it was itself a sign of the true achievement of the policy goals, and thus part of the goal of policy. For Wang, opposition was immoral because it was divisive; a moral world was one where all men shared the same fundamental values. The imperial mind seems not to have grasped this, for Wang found it necessary to lecture the emperor repeatedly. For example:

It is only that Your Majesty is not firm enough, so that you have not been able to unify morality and change customs. Therefore the clamor of divergent opinion does not cease. If you can act forcefully without tiring and decide every matter according to moral principles (i-li ), then men's sentiments (jench'ing ) eventually ought to change of their own accord. Your Majesty will

[92] HCP 224.5442-43 (1071/6). As Lü Hui-ch'ing explained in a debate with Ssu-ma Kuang, the regime was going beyond correcting faults in the established policies of the dynasty to change the policies themselves. HCP: shih-i 6.6a-10a (1069/11).

[93] HCP: shih-i 7.17b (1070/2) and HCP 213.5168 (1070/7). As James Liu notes, in his useful discussion of factionalism during the time, Wang has not entirely successful. He did not, for example, wrest control over the Bureau of Military Affairs from Wen Yen-po until 1073, See Reform in Sung China , pp. 59-79.

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observe that sentiments this fall are already different from those of the spring, so you may be certain they will gradually change.^[94]

The emperor did agree that if policies accorded with moral principles they would be of benefit.^[95]

Wang assumed that since his policies were based on a vision of how each part should function in the larger whole, and since they accorded with the real interests of men, people would eventually become accustomed to them and receive their benefits. It was only necessary to force them to become accustomed.

"At ease with it because it is accustomed; uneasy because it is unaccustomed." That describes the common folk. . . . Your Majesty must act as Heaven acts; then you will be able to protect all under Heaven. . . . [To bring about the year, Heaven must create and kill, and it does so] because it relies on true patterns and is free of sentiment.^[96]

Policies were intended to set out the normative order according to which action should take place. Wang rejected the criticism that he should leave the details of policy to specialized offices closer to the immediate situation:

The Duke of Chou made policy like this; he was not ashamed if it went into complex detail. Taking charge of both the minute and the large is the proper form of government, but the high-ranking are responsible for the great, and the low-ranking for the minute. Such is the model of the Former Kings and the natural pattern of heaven-and-earth. Just as with a man's body: seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing all [take place] in the head, but if he wants to scratch he needs fingernails. The forms are small and big, and the responsibilities differ, but all are necessary. Heaven-and-earth create the myriad things, yet each thing, even something as small as a blade of grass, has its pattern. In governing today we should only ask whether the policies established harm man or not; we should not rescind them because they deal with the minute.^[97]

In dealing with the government Wang had other means of garnering unity besides relying on the emperor. He could, and did, arrange special promotions and rewards for active supporters of the policies. This was, he explained, a means of persuading the majority of officials, men of "medium talent and less," to "achieve things by following the court's laws and institutions" instead of holding back out of fear of his opponents' criticism.^[98] This was fairly effective (helped along by increasingly harsh treatment of opponents), and by 1085 even Ssu-ma Kuang admitted that few men in

[94] HCP 215.5232 (1070/9). Cf. 225.5474-75 (1071/7), 250.6089-90 (1074/2), and 251.6129 (1074.3).

[95] HCP 219.5321 (1071/1).

[96] HCP 236.5742 (1072/interc.7).

[97] HCP 240.5827 (1072/11).

[98] HCP 240.5827 (1072/11).

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leading offices were dissenting. The new policies on the examinations, schools, and curriculum also promised to secure intellectually compatible literati for official service. But they went further: henceforth all those who wished to be considered shih and gain office through examinations would be taught the correctness of Wang's policy goals. Wang's memorial on the examinations stated:

The selection of shih in antiquity was rooted in schools in every instance. Therefore when morality was unified above, customs were perfected below and the talents of men such that all were capable of accomplishing something (yu wei ).^[99]

There were limits to this, of course. Men passed without subscribing to Wang's learning, provoking the comment that, while "eight or nine tenths of the literati have been transformed by the methods of the classics," just as many "have not sought mental comprehension."^[100] The restructuring of the National University perhaps offered more promise of ensuring the correct education of future officials.

Wang also sought unified control over government through his policies on clerks and local service personnel. Salaries were instituted for clerks to free them from dependence on bribes and make them more dependent on the institutions they served. The Hired Service policy in effect removed the leading local families from the local institutions that most affected their interests, replacing them with full-time personnel who lacked independent means. When this did not prevent corruption, Wang added a further enticement: he ordered that the best local clerks be recommended for ranked appointments. In doing so he had a further goal: that "henceforth good literati may be willing to serve as clerks; when good literati are willing to serve as clerks, then clerks and literati may once again be united as one, as in antiquity. . . . This was a priority of the Former Kings."^[101]

Once government began to function as a single whole, the policies would take full effect. But what did Wang think they would achieve? They would enable the government to organize the distribution of all wealth under heaven. As Wang explained: "To manage wealth, the ruler should see public and private [wealth] as a single whole."^[102] All wealth was to be subject to government control, just as all people were subject to social organization through the Tithing system (if they were not already organized as officials or government personnel). Wang maintained that managing wealth was far more important than increasing government revenues. When the wealth of society was correctly managed, the revenue problem would disappear of

[99] HCP 220.5334 (1071/2).

[100] HCP 248.6056 (1073/12).

[101] HCP 214.5223 (1070/8); 237.5764 (1072/8); cf. 215.5230-31 (1070/7).

[102] HCP 214.5223 (1070/8).

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itself, but to make the increasing of revenues the end was to miss the point.^[103] Managing wealth was the basic means of establishing the control over society necessary for creating an integrated human order that could be commanded from above. Just as control over government required silencing those independent-minded officials on whom other officials depended, so control over society required suppressing those of independent means on whom the poor depended. Benefiting society (li min, li t'ien-hsia ) involved controlling those private interests that, by their simple existence, threatened the government's command of society. Wang's logic might be stated in this fashion: for the people to receive benefits, they must be organized; to be organized, they must be willing to take direction from the government; to be willing to take direction, they must find that their material interests depend upon their doing so. Those social elements that came between the people and the government, that is, those who used their wealth to make others dependent on them, were an obstacle to this end.

Wang called these elements "engrossers" (chien-ping ). By this he meant all those who used wealth to make others dependent upon them, in either agriculture or commerce. Just how central "suppressing engrossers" was to Wang is evident from his initial justification for the Finance Planning Commission. Such an organ, he claimed, was "how the Former Kings suppressed engrossers, aided the poor, circulated the world's wealth, and caused benefit [or material interests] to come from a single source."^[104]

Only the greatly activist rulers of antiquity were able to suppress the engrossers. Those called engrossers are all leading men of means; their opinions are capable of moving the shih ta-fu . If in instituting policy today we merely go along with what suits popular sentiment in every instance, we will not be able to control engrossers. . . . [If we do not], how will we be able to equalize the world's wealth and free the common folk from poverty?^[105]

Suppressing engrossers required that the government use its power to affect material interests. In the following passage Wang is ruminating on the advantages of the T'ang tax system, which realized somewhat "the intent of the Former Kings" by taxing adult males, not household wealth, and by distributing land equitably:

If the ruler truly knows the interests of society (t'ien-hsia li-hai ) and institutes policies that confer what society regards as "loss" upon the engrossers, then they will not dare keep fields beyond the allotment. If he institutes policies that confer what society regards as "profit" upon those who till, then they will be encouraged to till and will not take fields beyond the allotment. But this must be done gradually in order to become established policy. Now if the

[103] HCP 251.6129 (1074/3).

[104] HCP: shih-i 4.5 (1069/2).

[105] HCP 223.5433-34 (1071/5).

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ruler can truly control profit and loss, and according to his values confer them [upon the people], he will not have to worry about getting people to do what he likes and avoid what he dislikes.^[106]

Suppressing engrossers was of such importance that it alone made Sung superior to past dynasties; even Ch'in had been unable to accomplish this. "In my opinion, from Ch'in on there have never been methods for suppressing engrossers, until today. Your minister thinks that if we are able to suppress engrossers, then managing wealth will work and we will not have to worry about a lack of wealth."^[107] Suppressing engrossers was a moral issue. In defending a proposal to have local state trading offices "investigate engrosser families that control profit and harm the New Policies" Wang asserted: "Heaven has given Your Majesty the nine regions within the four seas; certainly it intends Your Majesty to suppress the powerful and raise up the poor, so that poor and rich receive [heaven's] benefits equally." Such men were truly unworthy, yet some objected that the salaries Wang wished to give his officials were too munificent. Wang responded: "Today in every prefecture and subprefecture there are engrosser families who annually collect interest amounting to several myriad strings of cash without doing anything. . . . What contribution have they made to the state to [warrant] enjoying such a good salary?"^[108]

The New Policies created institutions that took over the functions of the engrossers. But this did not mean that the government was after material gain. "As to establishing the correct form of the state: suppressing engrossers and collecting their takings in order to accomplish things of benefit and relieve distress were the affairs of government of the Former Kings. These are not to be termed 'valuing profit.'"^[109]

For Wang a moral world was a unified, integrated world, free of engrossing. The Green Shoots and Government Trading policies were intended to supplant the engrossers as the source of rural and commercial credit. Suppressing engrossers, that is, meant depriving them of investment income, making the majority of small farmers and traders independent of them. It also meant making the people dependent on government institutions, thus allowing the government to reduce interest rates somewhat while using the profits to invest in economic development.^[110] As Wang explained with regard to Government Trading: "When the small traders have to rely on the great houses, the great houses take the larger share of the profit and the

[106] HCP 223.5419 (1071/5).

[107] HCP 262.6407 (1075/4).

[108] HCP 232.5640-41 (1072/4); 240.5829 (1072/11).

[109] HCP 240.5828 (107/11).

[110] For the goals of the Green Shoots Policy, see, for example, HCP: shih-i 5.19 (1069/5) and 7.7 (1070/2). For Government Trading, see HCP 236:5736-39 (1072/interc.7) and 240.5826-28 (1072/11).

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small traders' share is slim. Now officials take the slim profit, and the small traders gain the larger profit for themselves; how does this harm the small traders?"^[111]

Although the Hired Service policy collected the service-exemption tax from poorer households as well, the tax was graduated. Wang argued that the burden on poorer households was slight, that their real burden was exploitation by engrossers. When the service-exemption tax produced far more than was needed to hire local service personnel, Wang defended the policy: because the engrossers paid more, the poor could pay less; and because there was a surplus, there was now money available for famine relief and agricultural projects. No longer would the government need to demand relief loans from the rich. As long as the money was not wasted on imperial extravagances, Wang concluded, it could not be called exploitation. We might note that government agricultural projects and famine relief funds also challenged the wealthiest families' role as the leading investors in local projects.^[112]

The Tithing policy (pao-chia fa ) exemplified Wang's ideal union between government and society. While the initial rules made local security the point of the policy, Wang repeatedly said that his real goal was to "make farmers and soldiers one."^[113] With training, he claimed, the militia units would eventually become better than regular soldiers, and they would be cheaper.^[114] At the same time, it promised to establish a new set of local leaders, men who would command the respect of the militiamen and the community and lead the people to take direction from the government.^[115] The Tithing policy offered an alternative basis for community, one that disregarded family ties and private status and kept the people oriented toward the state. Wang soon concluded that the units could take on other official responsibilities. By 1075 they were collecting the land tax, service tax, and Green Shoots loans. Charging the people with many offices was, Wang asserted, the way the Former Kings employed the people.^[116] "Once the policies are in effect everyone will be of use. We will be employing all the

[111] HCP 251.6124 (1073/3).

[112] HCP 223.5433 (1071/5); 237.5776-77 (1072/8). For the promulgation of the policy, see 227.5521-24 (1071/10).

[113] HCP 218.5299-300 (1070/12) and 237.5764 (1072/7); for the initial regulations, see 218.5297. For a full account of Wang's plans and the emperor's doubts, see Teng Kuang-ming, "Wang An-shih tui Pei Sung ping-chih kai-ko ts'o-shih chi she-hsing," in Sung shih yen-chiu lun-wen chi (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi, 1982), pp. 311-20.

[114] HCP 235.5697 (1072/7). Regular military training took place mainly in the northern border circuits.

[115] HCP 218.5297 (1070/10). The rules required that pao-chia leaders be men of ability and intelligence from landowning households of any grade.

[116] HCP 263.6436-37, 6451 (1975/interc.4).

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people under heaven to do all the affairs under heaven and we will be free of the problem of useless people."^[117]

Ssu-ma Kuang's Critique . Ssu-ma began to memorialize on Wang's program in 1069/8. He repeated the same objections in 1085-1086, when he was in power. Knowing what Wang An-shih thought he was doing makes it easy to get the point of Ssu-ma's "divergent opinions" on the normative form of the state, the structure of government, the relation between government and society, and the necessary order in society.

Ssu-ma continued to insist that "order" depended on maintaining a clearly defined hierarchy of delegated authority, with a corresponding division of functional responsibilities. Thus while Wang was willing to break down established divisions within government in order to establish unified control and carry out his policies, Ssu-ma wanted to keep levels of government discrete. Wang wanted to integrate government and society; Ssu-ma argued for a necessary boundary between the institutional activities of government and the traditional procedures through which the people pursued their material interests. Whereas Wang aimed to break the power of private wealth, Ssu-ma defended the particular and necessary social function of the rich. And even in foreign policy, Wang could imagine integrating barbarians into China, while Ssu-ma favored a balance of power among states.

One of Ssu-ma's first targets was the way Wang was changing the administrative process, using the Finance Planning Commission to subvert the discrete levels that properly constituted the pyramid of government. This placed inexperienced, low-ranking literati in charge of formulating policy in areas where they lacked competence without advice from the responsible offices, and it produced policy so detailed that local variation was impossible. The use of commissioners to investigate local conditions, and later to oversee policy implementation, was wrong for the same reasons. The fiscal intendants were ignored, local government was investigated by men without adequate knowledge and experience, and proposals were made and policy effected without input from local officials. If established policies were not working well—and Ssu-ma agreed there were real problems—the solution lay in better personnel administration to insure competence in planning and practice. Later Ssu-ma publicly attacked Wang's conduct as chief councillor. Wang, Ssu-ma said, saw himself as another Duke of Chou aiding King Ch'eng, but was nothing more than a man who insisted that everyone share his opinions.^[118]

[117] HCP 215.2312 (1070/9).

[118] SMK 43.547-50; cf. 60.719 (1070/2); 45.572 (1074/8) and 17.258 (1082). He had already taken Wang to task in 1070/2 in a series of three letters: see 60.719-27.

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Ssu-ma had not lost his belief in the primary importance of administrative process. But he quickly realized that the real issue lay in what Wang hoped to use government to do. This was an issue of principle. Should the government be concerned with "profit" (li )? That is, should the government try to manage the wealth of society as a whole and so interfere in the way the people realized their material interests, instead of letting them pursue those interests for themselves? Ssu-ma did not think "managing wealth" was an integral part of ancient government. At most, government should insure that its policies did not prevent the people from enriching themselves. Ssu-ma held that the government should tax only to satisfy the minimal requirements for maintaining order. There was a world of difference in his eyes between that goal and an attempt to control how society produced wealth. .^[119]

To prove that Wang's policy goals were wrong, Ssu-ma defined what he saw as their long-term consequences and explained how these would eventually deprive the government of the resources necessary to maintain the state. The problem was that the policies changed existing relationships in society that were necessary for social stability and prosperity. The rich, for example, were both socially useful and politically necessary. The difference between rich and poor arose from natural differences in intelligence and ability among the people. The rich were those who planned ahead and worked hard, while the poor were those who did not. There was a mutually beneficial relationship between the two: the rich lent to the poor to enrich themselves, and the poor borrowed from the rich in order to survive. Now, through the Green Sprouts loans, the government was establishing itself as the sole source of rural credit, which appeared to serve the interests of the poor who needed to borrow. But in fact the institutional demands placed on officials kept them from fulfilling the traditional role of the rich, who after all needed to keep the poor in place to profit from them. To meet their loan quotas officials had to force all households to accept loans. To cover defaults, rich and poor were forced to join in loan guarantee units; thus in a bad harvest the poor (who could not manage their finances) would default, leaving the rich responsible for their debts. The cumulative increase in indebtedness would soon carry over into good years as well. As the poor fled, the rich would gradually be impoverished (they would no longer hold mortgages on the land of the poor borrower). Eventually the government would have to excuse the debt. When debts were excused the Ever-Normal Reserves, originally intended to be the major source of emergency funds for famine relief and military exigencies, would be depleted and their benefits lost to the state. The impoverishment of the rich, a traditional source of local relief funds, further harmed famine relief policy. In effect the govern-

[119] SMK 60.719-24, 726-27; 41.523-24.

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ment was creating the source of rebellion—landless refugees—while giving up the fiscal means to cope with it.^[120]

The creation of a service-exemption tax to be collected in cash led Ssu-ma to his second major argument against "managing wealth." Collecting taxes (and loans) in cash, he held, fundamentally changed the nature of the rural economy, which had previously been based on the products of the people's own labor with taxes levied only in kind. The new system made producers dependent on the market, since they had to sell their goods to get the cash to pay their taxes. Cash taxes made the poorest households suffer the most, for they were most easily harmed by price fluctuations. To pay their taxes the people would have to accept the lower prices available at harvesttime; this and the increased demand for cash would cause the value of goods relative to money to decline. Ssu-ma described the problem of what others called "cash famine": goods remained cheap, even in bad years, because money was expensive; thus marginal farmers were forced to sell real property. At the same time, the creation of official trade offices reduced the profit margins in commerce, decreased the number of traveling merchants, and harmed the flow of goods.^[121]

The monetarization brought about by the new tax system, according to Ssu-ma, led to commercialization, destroying rural self-sufficiency and so rural stability. The pao-chia policy further aggravated the situation. It forced the people to take on duties that interfered with agriculture, their proper function in the larger structure of the state. Yet they did not receive the kind of training in police methods and military arts they needed to serve competently as soldiers and police. In sum, the policies to manage wealth forced the people into flight and banditry, while the pao-chia system taught the people enough martial technique to become bandits yet deprived local government of effective security forces.^[122]

Ssu-ma's analogy between the state and a building can be applied to his critique of the New Policies. The people are the foundation on which the government is constructed, while high and low officials, generals and soldiers serve as different parts. Wang was taking the building apart in order to put it back together in a new way. Ssu-ma Kuang objected that the different pieces could only serve certain purposes effectively. Low officials could not play the role of high officials, farmers could not function as soldiers. In Ssu-ma's view society (i.e., the people) was the foundation on which government existed. Wang was trying to change the internal structure of that foundation by depriving the rich of their function. In the end this destroyed the stability and prosperity of society, and thus, however intricately the

[120] MK 44.559-63.

[121] .SMK 45.575-77, 17.258-59.

[122] .SMK 17.259.

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government was structured, it destroyed the foundation of government and led inevitably to the collapse of the state. As long as political unity did not depend upon the government's ability to command society, whether the rich kept the poor in a state of dependency or not was of no concern to the government. On the contrary, it was in the interest of the state to leave wealth in private hands in order to maintain social stability, as long as the government could fulfill its fiscal needs. In Ssu-ma's scheme of things the government had no legitimate reason to threaten the interests of the rich, but it did have legitimate cause for taking the interests of the rich into account. They, after all, had direct responsibility for the poor.

Ssu-ma's conviction that the state should come to terms with society as it was, rather than try to control it, was also evident in his attitude toward the relation between the government and the literati. In contrast to Wang's desire to bring the literati under government tutelage and integrate them into the government and its policies, Ssu-ma preferred to ignore state schools and prefectural qualifying examinations in favor of a recommendation system. The best way of staffing government, he argued, was to admit to the examinations only those men recommended by high officials (who were free to recommend kin), giving preference to those with the greatest number of sponsors.^[123] Government was to be an enterprise of an existing national elite. It should not try to create a new elite.

Ssu-ma Kuang's and Wang An-shih's foreign policies reflected the same division. Wang supported Wang Shao's efforts to recover territory and absorb new population in the northwest, and, although he warned that his domestic program should precede further foreign entanglements, he could envision integrating the barbarian peoples into China. "If we can transform the barbarians into Chinese [Han], that is good." In contrast to Wang's desire for integration and unity, Ssu-ma consistently argued in favor of a balance of powers between Sung and foreign states. These were different peoples with different interests. He even called for returning territory taken from Hsia.^[124]

Ssu-ma was never in any doubt about what should be done to resolve the crisis of state the New Policies had brought about. When he came into power he moved immediately to rescind all of the policies.^[125] At the same time he restated his general principles on the roles of emperor, court, and bureaucracy,^[126] and he proposed various measures to improve administra-

[123] SMK 40.517-22.

[124] HCP 221.5370, 5384-85 (1071/3); 245.5963 (1073/5); SMK 42.537-38; 45.569-71; 45.571-78; 17.257-60; 50.631-35.

[125] For a general statement, see SMK 46.588-91. This is detailed in memorials on the pao-chia , military, and hired service; 46.591-94; 48.611-13; 47.608-9. Not all were persuaded that the hired-service system should be abolished; see 49.626-28 and 55.669-71.

[126] SMK 46.586-88.

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tive process.^[127] For the first time Ssu-ma Kuang argued that the only justification for the New Policies had been Shen-tsung's desire to extend the borders of Sung to match those of Han and T'ang. Placing the blame on the emperor was consistent with Ssu-ma's understanding of his role in the polity. He concluded that if there was no longer a desire to "employ the troops," there was no longer a rationale for any of the New Policies.^[128]

Scholarship

The scholarly activities Wang and Ssu-ma pursued during these years gave further support to their political visions. Here I shall only note the larger outline. Wang oversaw the preparation of commentaries on the three Classics, writing that on the Rites of Chou himself. More than any other work from antiquity, he claimed, this text revealed what it was like when "The Way was present in the affairs of government" and true order prevailed; it was "the best source for the policies that can be applied to later ages."^[129] Wang's commentary does make the Classic support the New Policies, but it does more. It provides students with a model for finding meaning through envisioning the coherence of the text as a whole. Wang's Explanations for Characters was a unique work. Surviving explanations, and examples from his Rites of Chou commentary, illustrate his method of integrating the parts into a coherent whole as a means of defining values. Here too he adduced later knowledge to achieve that coherence (in a manner that seems quite ad hoc), just as he brought later knowledge to bear on the Classics to illuminate their great system. His confidence that his book had set out normative values for all affairs is evident: "Is it not that Heaven intends to revive this culture of ours (ssu wen ) and has used me to aid in its beginning? Therefore instruction and learning must begin with this [book]. Those able to know this [book] will have nine-tenths of the meaning of morality."^[130] In retirement, as is well known, Wang turned to spiritual interests. Although their exact nature remains vague, Wang's interest in Buddhism suggests that he was still intent on seeing the unity of Way with his own mind.

Ssu-ma Kuang finished the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government in 1084. It was massive evidence for his views on the timeless principles of government. Those views were succinctly stated in the first of his interjected comments, which serves as introduction to the entire work. It tells

[127] SMK 54.661-67; 55.671-75; 57.685-90, 51.641-42; 50.638-40. These all date from 1086.

[128] SMK 49,624-26.

[129] LCC 84.878. On the connection between the Rites of Chou commentary and the New Policies, see Liu K'un-t'ai, "Wang An-shih 'Chou kuan hsin i' ch'ien-chih," Ho-nan ta-hsueh hsueh-pao , 1985, no. 4:87-92. The best edition of this commentary is Ch'ien I-chi's edition in the Ching yuan .

[130] LCC 84.879; cf. 56.608.

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how the Chou order finally fell apart when, in 403 B.C. , the Chou king Weilieh allowed the three ministers (ta-fu ) of Chin to divide their state into three. Chou's failure to maintain the correct forms of political authority set the stage for its own destruction; the fault lay with the king himself. The first part of his comment will suffice to show that Ssu-ma's understanding of the correct form of the state was not the same as Wang An-shih's:

Your Minister Kuang says, "Your Minister has heard that of the Son of Heaven's responsibilities (chih ) none is greater than ritual (li ), that in ritual nothing is greater than roles (fen ), and that for roles nothing is greater than names (ming ). What is ritual? It is rules (chi-kang ). What are roles? They are ruler and minister. What are names? They are duke, lord [of a subordinate state], grand minister, and minister.

Now, that the broad land within the four seas and the multitude of people took direction from a single man, so that even those of exceptional strength and extraordinary talent dared not but rush to serve, was because that man used ritual to make rules for them. For this reason the Son of Heaven brought together under his control the Three Dukes, the Three Dukes led the Feudal Lords, the Feudal Lords directed the Grand Ministers and Ministers, and the Grand Ministers and Ministers ordered the shih and common people. The noble ruled the humble and the humble served the noble. Superiors' directing inferiors was like the heart's employing the limbs and the root and trunk's ordering the branches and leaves. Inferiors' serving superiors was like the limbs' guarding the heart and the branches and leaves' screening the root and trunk. Only then was it possible for superiors and inferiors to guard each other and for the state to be ordered and secure. Therefore I say that among the Son of Heaven's responsibilities nothing is greater than ritual.^[131]

Ssu-ma's commitment to a hierarchy of delegated authority extending from the ruler down to the lower officials is also evident in what he says about the Way in his commentaries on the Book of Change and Yang Hsiung's T'ai hsuan .^[132] Although he treated heaven and man, number and principle as parallels, his conclusion had more to do with "man" than with "heaven" and self-consciously avoided mysticism.^[133]

Ssu-ma did have spiritual interests as well, or at least an interest in "mind." He concluded that when men devoted to learning and acquiring knowledge succeeded in keeping their thinking mind undisturbed by external things, the mind would see all sides of a matter and find the mean. Achieving this state of mind he called arriving at chung or chung-ho (glossed as neither exceeding nor falling short). Men who attained it could keep the body healthy without medicine (and thus control their "destiny") and know

[131] Tzu-chih t'ung-chien 1.2-3.

[132] I shuo (SKCS ), "Tsung lun." SMK 67.834-35. His interest in numerology dated back to the 1040s; see T'ai hsuan (SPPY ), preface.

[133] SMK 74.913-16.

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which choices were necessary to bring order to all under heaven.^[134] Perhaps we can see in Ssu-ma's ideas about chung his conviction that harmony arose from balancing opposing parts and interests.

Conclusions

What were the essential differences between the political visions of Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang? Why were two such different visions articulated during the eleventh century? How was the historical choice they represented related to the course of Chinese history?

One obvious difference became apparent in the 1070s: Wang expanded the scope of government activity, while Ssu-ma wished to limit it. Yet a relative difference over the appropriate scope of policy, in my view, cannot by itself account for half a century of acrimony and partisanship. Rather, we must look to the underlying political visions. Not all would accept this. Some might interpret Wang's policies simply as a response to the fiscal and defense problems of the Sung government and suppose that the problems generated the solution. Wang, then, was a reformer who saw the problems and knew how they could be solved, though he was perhaps too idealistic.^[135] But Ssu-ma saw the same problems and proposed solutions no less plausible. Wang's program was not the only available choice. We can still ask why these two different solutions gained such followings. But the best reason for taking their underlying visions seriously is that Wang and Ssu-ma each saw his own normative form of the state as the necessary basis for

[134] Ssu-ma developed his ideas about chung in 1084-1085 in correspondence with Fan Chen (T. Ching-jen), who argued, to the contrary, that bringing order depended on supreme political authority, and Han Wei (T. Ping-kuo), who tried to persuade him that if the mind was made "empty" it would gain access to the "great basis," which was the one source of the "multitudinous bases" of the many things. The correspondence appears to have taken place in the sequence that follows: (A) 62.752, SMK to Fan with whom he had been discussing music; (B) 62.758-59, Fan's reply to (A); (C) 62.759-60, SMK responds to Fan (B); (D) 62.670-761, Fan replies to SMK (C); (E) 62.761, SMK replies generally and sends an essay, "On chung ho "; (F) 64.793-96. At this point Han Wei joins in the debate; see (I) and on; (G) 62.761-62, SMK notes Fan's disagreement and sends another essay, "Attaining Knowledge Depends on Guarding against Things," and a piece written in 1083 (included in the "Impractical Writings" entitled "Forsaking the Four"; (H) 65.800 and 74.911-12; (I) 62.765, Han informs SMK of his intention to participate; (J) 62.765, Han gives SMK his understanding of chung ; (K) 62.766-68, SMK replies to Han; (L) 62.769-70, Han replies to SMK (K) (note that this is incorrectly given as a reply from Fan Ching-jen in the collection); (M) 62.768-69, SMK replies to Han (L). The immediate origin for Ssu-ma's theory of chung appears to have been his interest in cultivating physical health (yang sheng ); see 61.734-35, "Ta Li Ta-ch'ing shu" from 1072, and 62.751, "Yü Wang Lo-tao shu" from 1080. Tanaka Kenji, in Shisei tsuken (Tokyo: Asahi, 1974), pp. 8-10, has noted the value of this debate.

[135] This seems to be the general thrust of the views collected in John Meskill, Wang An-shih: Practical Reformer? (D.C. Heath, 1963).

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resolving all the problems the government faced. Both were willing to sacrifice expedient, short-term solutions in the interest of their larger principles. As Ssu-ma pointed out, Wang had no interest in trying remedial measures; he countenanced continued deficits throughout his reign. Ssu-ma, for his part, was willing to restore the obligatory-service system, the burdens of which he had pointed out, in order to avoid the further monetarization of the rural economy he attributed to the hired-service system—this though many of his allies believed that hired service was preferred by the people.

What were the visions? Wang imagined a state without a distinction between government and society, between the political and the moral, and whose institutions fulfilled the common desires and needs of all men. Ssu-ma, however, aimed at securing the survival of the state as a political entity created on the basis of the existing society. To accomplish this, he tried to perfect the structure and operation of government, drawing a sharp line between public, institutional responsibilities and the private interests of those who bore them, and seeking to block the encroachment of one on the other.

Wang An-shih believed that public power should command private interests. Ssu-ma believed that this would destroy wealth, turn the people against the government, and make it impossible for the government to maintain the state. Wang, however, thought that Ssu-ma's efforts merely to defend the public realm from private interests and to perfect the administration of government were incapable of accomplishing anything of lasting value. In practice both saw the state as containing both government (court, civil officials, the military, laws and institutions, etc.) and society (literati, farmers, merchants, etc.). They both assumed, moreover, that there was a necessary relationship between government and society, that government policy directly affected (for better and worse) the values and material welfare of society, and that it was the responsibility of literati to use their learning to determine how government acted. They understood the correct form of the state (kuo t'i ) differently, and they understood differently the relationship between government and society necessary to establish and maintain that form.

Wang did not disagree with Ssu-ma's assessment that government existed within the context of private interests, which could threaten the government's power to maintain the state, but he believed that government had the power to keep those interests in check by making it advantageous for them to accept its own powers and functions. Ssu-ma's response was to ask how government could keep the support of private interests without harming its own functioning. His answer comprised two main elements: first, the ruler should ensure that the functions of government necessary to maintain the state (defense, judicature, revenue supply) were carried out fairly and impartially (i.e., that they had no other purpose than to preserve the state); and second, the men to whom the ruler delegated authority to

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administer government should be selected from among the shih as the most powerful, wealthy, and talented families in society. Thus, while government worked to defend political unity and stability, so that men would be free to pursue their interests and "enrich themselves," all at minimum expense to society, it co-opted into its service those who had the most to defend. Wang An-shih, however, saw no need to accommodate the interests of wealthy, independent families, for he believed that if government took direct institutional responsibility for social values and welfare, it could keep the support of society without their mediation and, at the same time, ensure an equitable distribution of wealth. But this also required actively suppressing those who used their wealth and position to make others dependent on them and so prevented government from gaining command over all under heaven.

It is certainly fair to call Ssu-ma a "conservative." He generally accepted the existing structure of society, with its unequal distribution of wealth; he held that the existing political order could be made to work effectively; and he saw no need to create new institutions or for the government to claim new social responsibilities. He accepted the existing social order because he believed there was an enduring balance between rich and poor in a self-sufficient rural economy. He saw commercialization as destroying that balance, but he blamed commercialization on government policy and the self-interested behavior of the shih , both of which he thought could be controlled. He assumed that the government could block political and social change. I am much less sure that we can call Wang a reformer. He was demanding radical social change. He was trying to bring about a "revolution" in the true sense of the word, a return to the beginning of civilization as the sage kings of antiquity had created it.

Wang and Ssu-ma claimed to have gained their knowledge of the principles they espoused from studying the human past, Wang claiming the Classics and Ssu-ma the historical record. But since not all classicists reached Wang's conclusions, nor all historians Ssu-ma's, it behooves us to look at their methods. Here I would emphasize the very different ways the two understood "unity" or "oneness." The issue may appear overly abstract, but both men wrote on it explicitly as a philosophical question; and their notions of unity were reflected in their scholarship and in their ideas on the form of the state. The difference can be seen clearly in their view of how parts must go together to form a coherent whole. Wang assumes an integrated, organic whole, and then figures out what the function of each part is relative to all the other parts given. In his true union each part takes direction from the guiding intent of the whole and functions in the interest of the whole. Wang's task, in scholarship and in government, was to see what the "intent" of the whole was and then to determine the "intents" the respective parts fulfilled in working together to fulfill that unifying intent. I am quite persuaded by Ssu-ma's charge that Wang was "literary." For

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Wang the Classics are a single, coherent literary work, in full accord with an inclusive, integrated natural order.

Ssu-ma's view of unity is not organic. It is a construct of divergent tendencies or forces, each playing a role, according to its ability, in a balanced structure. When the pieces are in good repair and kept in place, the structure will not collapse. The union survives, not because when joined correctly the parts are transformed into a single body taking directions from a single mind, but rather through diligent and deliberate maintenance. The difference is illustrated in the two men's greatest scholarly works. Wang's commentary on the Rites of Chou and his Explanations for Characters begin from the assumption that all the pieces are organically related. Ssu-ma, in his Comprehensive Mirror , consciously constructs a historical narrative from a collection of acknowledgedly independent texts and contradictory accounts.

This divergence bears on how they thought about the state. For Wang the issue was the "original intent" of the sages in creating the state (to benefit all under heaven), and he assumes that if he can see the unifying "pattern" (li ) of the original creation, it can guide the present. Moreover, since all things are in principle part of a greater whole, he assumes that they can be reintegrated according to how their individual patterns fit into the larger one. Wang can accommodate historical change and can change the way things are without fear that the state will collapse, as long as he is able to control the relations between all things. Ssu-ma, however, sees the state as the creation of a particular historical moment by a particular person. It exists because rivals were vanquished and the existing groups (armies, officials, shih , the people) were brought together in a mutually supportive structure that satisfied the particular interests of each. Looking back on a succession of historical states, he sees that there are necessary rules (chi kang ) for maintaining any such structure. But once the pieces are put together at a particular moment, the point of following the rules is to prevent any structural changes from taking place. An illustration of this difference is the contrast between Ssu-ma's profound fear that commercialization would distort the balance between rich and poor (by giving greater advantages to the wealthy and driving the poor off the land), and Wang's ability to incorporate the ongoing commercialization of Sung society into his program.

The models of the unified state Wang and Ssu-ma articulated were not unique to the eleventh century, although they were formulated in eleventh-century terms. What Wang had in mind should remind us of the Ch'in dynasty and of Wang Mang's Hsin ("New") dynasty, just as Ssu-ma's ideas are more consonant with Han and T'ang. Similarly, one might associate the Kuomintang's willingness to have government accommodate private interests with Ssu-ma Kuang, and the Communist Party's commitment to make private interests dependent upon public institutions with Wang An-

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shih. The current trend in the People's Republic toward elevating Ssu-ma Kuang and rejecting Wang is quite consciously part of a general rethinking of the proper relationship between government and society.

It is striking that although New Policies advocates dominated the government of Sung for almost half a century, from Southern Sung on the relationship between government and society in China generally accorded more nearly with what Ssu-ma had envisioned. Some would see exceptions in the Ming dynasty. But Chu Yuan-chang, the founder, seems to have adopted a similar vision of the state. He saw a need for clearly dividing public and private realms, preventing the shih from using government to further their private interests, and securing a noncommercial, self-sufficient agricultural economy. In his relations with the bureaucracy he did, of course, go well beyond the limits of his function as Ssu-ma defined it. Chang Chü-cheng, the great Ming statesman, insisted, like Ssu-ma, on the value of the dynasty's institutions. He too saw the task of government as ensuring the survival of the state and sought to defend the public nature of government against private interests. Unlike Ssu-ma, he did not develop a principled political vision, and he accepted the reality of commercialization, but he did not try to make government directly responsible for benefiting society.^[136] The fiscal reforms of the Yung-cheng period in Ch'ing, too, were remedial measures; they did not change the form of the state.

We can partially account for the turn away from the New Policies approach to government by referring to the realities of the 1120s and 1130s. The restoration of Sung under Emperor Kao-tsung, an admirer of Ssu-ma's Comprehensive Mirror , required the accommodation of existing interests—the issue was simply whether they would support the restoration of Sung political authority—and efforts to institutionalize government command over society were detrimental to that end. But in a larger sense, the abandonment of attempts to transform society through institutions has to be attributed to the unwillingness of the shih as a group to support such changes. The opposition of many bureaucrats to the New Policies was not, after all, an insurmountable problem; bureaucrats could be replaced. It was more difficult to replace the shih . How should we account for their opposition?

Here I propose a way of understanding intellectual and social change in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that will allow us to answer three questions at once: Why were larger political visions being articulated in the eleventh century? Why did Ssu-ma Kuang's view on the relation between government and society prove more acceptable to the shih ? And why did literati learning shift in the direction of Tao-hsueh ?

[136] My reading of Chang Chü-cheng is based on Robert Crawford, "Chang Chü-cheng's Confucian Legalism," in Self and Society in Ming Thought , ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 367-414.

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Much of what I shall say revolves around three issues: first, the role of learning in establishing men as shih ; second, the tension between the political meaning of shih (those who "serve" the state) and the social meaning of shih (those who are distinct from the "people" [min ] and are elite rather than "common" [shu ]); and third, the problem created for the shih when it became impossible for the vast majority to serve in government.

Through most of the eleventh century the shih saw themselves as men who "served" (shih ), and they assumed that the purpose of "learning" was to prepare for sharing political responsibility. Until the 1070s most scholarly or polemical writing assumed an audience primarily concerned with government. In the early eleventh century the shih were still assumed to be an existing group of families with traditions of official service. When the examination system was first expanded in the late tenth century, as north and south were unified, the aim was to provide a mechanism that would bring into government men from shih families lacking personal connections to the founding elite. But the examinations complicated things, for in effect they made "learning" the primary criterion for official service. As was noted at the time, men were now claiming to be shih because they had mastered the learning necessary for examinations, even though they did not come from families with traditions of service. Once they became officials it was too late. They were now unquestionably shih , and they had established the beginning of what their descendants could see as a family tradition of service. The practice of posthumously granting official rank to the ancestors of high officials was an institutional recognition of this desire.

Those who began writing on the ideal goals that ought to inform politics, men like Ou-yang Hsiu, were speaking to and for the ambitious men who were establishing themselves as shih through learning. Such writers accomplished two things. First, by presenting themselves as men truly committed to the public good, they justified their own desire to participate in policy-making at a time when the upper levels of government were dominated by shih from already established families. Ou-yang's attack on the Five Dynasties statesman Feng Tao, for example, was an attack on all shih who put family above state.^[137] Second, they explained to those who relied on learning rather than family why their learning could justify their claim to political responsibility. Indeed, they were asserting that the only true shih were those who rose through learning and who could determine political values through their learning. For these new shih , who lacked family traditions of service (or whose traditions were short and of recent beginnings), elite social status—equality with men of longer pedigree—was a direct conse-

[137] Ou-yang wrote the New History of the Five Dynasties in the 1020s. For his critique of Feng Tao, see Wang Gung-wu, "Feng Tao: An Essay on Confucian Loyalty," in Confucian Personalities , ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 123-45.

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quence of their official career. Anxious to gain office and rise in the bureaucracy, they tended to see the ideals they found through learning as goals that could only be realized through government action, and they assumed that policy should be a function of learning. Men from long-established shih families, who had access to yin privilege, facilitated examinations, and family connections to the highest officials, were born shih . Their family traditions suggested they had the "right" to an official career and gave them a certain interest in maintaining the status quo. Their elite status was mediated by the fact of their birth.

The "ancient style" writers' idealization of antiquity as an integrated order, in which government and society were indistinguishable and the government's institutions were also the institutions of social morality, provided a "teaching" that could guide "policy." But the idea that government should take institutional responsibility for the welfare of society also served the new shih . Such a program gave government a reason to promote shih with plans for new government action (which would also bring a need for more officials), and it envisioned the elite of society as the officials of government (who in turn were men working to change things). Wang An-shih made his reputation in pursuing this vision, and his rise to power was a sign that it had come to be shared. Wang, from a family of as yet only relatively low-ranking officials, envisioned the shih as men produced through government schools whose social role would be their political role. His "Ten-thousand Word Memorial" of 1058 presented the transformation of the shih as the basis for realizing the antique ideal. Ssu-ma Kuang, alarmed by the idea that an ideal model should determine policy choices without respect to consequences, attacked all those who relied on talent and ideal plans to justify a claim to political power. The son of a high-ranking official and holding official rank before he took the examinations, Ssu-ma put his formidable scholarship to the task of establishing the correct form of the state. He also viewed the shih as a historical elite, existing independently of the state yet necessary to every state because of their social leadership, scholarly and administrative traditions, and moral superiority. The claim to moral superiority was, I think, a way of justifying the dominant role in government of older shih families under pressure from newer men. Recall also that Ssu-ma wished to leave education in private hands and to admit men to the examinations through recommendation by high officials, and that he stressed the importance of "ethical conduct" in learning. His promotion of the virtue of filial piety illustrates his view that learning should begin in the family, in contrast to Wang's willingness to rely on state schools and his emphasis on the literary side of learning.

This leads me to suggest that grand political visions were being formulated in the eleventh century in response to a struggle between new and old shih , a struggle that arose because the examination system was creating new

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shih —many of whom used the idea that learning should guide politics to push for a greater role in government—at the expense of established shih families. The greatest of these visions were Wang An-shih's and Ssu-ma Kuang's. They defined very differently what shih could try to accomplish through government, and they justified their claims with different scholarly methods. Yet both continued to see the shih primarily as those who served, a political elite whose social privileges were justified by their potential service to the state through the institutions of government. And both continued to treat learning for the shih in the context of the shih's political responsibilities.

But by the end of the twelfth century leading scholars no longer shared these assumptions. Indeed, Tao-hsueh , as represented by Chu Hsi, insisted that the only true goal of shih learning was the moral transformation of the individual and his advance toward sagehood. Chu objected to examination learning because it failed to turn students toward the cultivation of a moral self, and because it made the selfish desire to succeed the goal of learning. He worked to establish alternative schools, he envisioned schemes that would allow local shih to take responsibility for local mores and welfare without official supervision, and he gave intellectual interests priority over official duties in his own career. Tao-hsueh represents the acceptance of Ssu-ma Kuang's view of the proper relationship between government and society, yet it no longer defined the shih as those who served in government. It may seem paradoxical that Tao-hsueh advocates also subscribed to the idealization of antiquity promoted by Wang An-shih. But since their vision of an integrated order was not based on the satisfaction of material interests, they could see government from Ssu-ma Kuang's perspective. Instead, they defined the real common interests of men as moral interests. An integrated order would emerge only when men realized in practice the moral principles possessed by all men alike. Integration of government and society did not require government command over society or social transformation, because it would exist when all men behaved morally. The primary responsibility of the shih and the purpose of learning had shifted from politics to morality.

To see why this happened, and why the shih chose Ssu-ma's view of government rather than Wang's, we must turn back to the eleventh century. The examination system attracted ever-larger numbers of candidates, although the absolute number of degrees awarded remained constant. It thus created an ever-larger group of men who by virtue of their participation in the examinations alone—whether they attained a degree or not—thought of themselves as shih . The New Policies exacerbated this by establishing a national school system that regarded all students as shih . By the end of the eleventh century there were about 200,000 registered students, half of whom were competing for about 500 examination degrees in hope of

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joining a civil service of possibly 20,000 men (but with probably only half that number of actual posts). The number of candidates continued to increase in Southern Sung. In short, the examinations made it possible for far more men to claim that they were shih , because they had cultivated the learning that made men shih , while denying them the opportunity to serve in government. Under these-circumstances the notion that shih were those, and just those, who served became implausible, and a real gap began to emerge between the great pool of shih and the relatively small group of shih who held rank as officials.

Wang's vision failed to keep the support of the shih because it could not (despite its ambition to do just this) provide them with official careers. Left without the possibility of government service, yet seeing themselves as the elite by virtue of their education, shih had to defend their social status as the elite by making connections outside of government. As shih did this, by establishing their families as the dominant families in local society, by taking up careers as teachers, and by joining intellectual movements such as Tao-hsueh that gave precedence to moral cultivation, their interests as shih tended to lie with an approach to government that did not interfere with the structure of society, shih learning, and private wealth.

Wang An-shih had seen this problem and had worked to keep this larger pool of shih dependent upon government. The idea that policy and teaching, and local government in general, should come from the state's local schools was a solution. Moreover, the idea of using local shih to staff the unranked positions in local government that had practical responsibility for administration (the "clerks") promised in theory to absorb the shih the schools were creating. In the long run, Wang also understood, this required providing full support to students, eliminating the need for private education and private funding, and either abolishing the examinations entirely or limiting access to the examinations to graduates of the schools; for the prefectural qualifying examinations and the custom (new in Sung) of blind examinations continued to allow men to enter the bureaucracy independently of state institutions. But the social division between shih and clerks had apparently become too great for the shih to accept this solution, and the government lacked the funds necessary to pay those student-officials who remained clerks all their lives the kind of salaries shih would find becoming. Thus the New Policies regimes were left with more shih than ever before, whose chances of a career in government were smaller than ever before. Just as the purges of opponents among the old guard kept them from placing their descendants in official positions and pushed them toward consolidating their status in local society, so did the lack of prospects make the new shih increasingly dependent upon their relation to local society to establish or maintain themselves as the best families. Wang's attack on private wealth must also have harmed the families of men who were trying to

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establish themselves as shih during what was supposed to be a transitional period, although this would have mattered less if the government had been able to offer all shih an official career.

My conclusion is simple. When the shih found themselves increasingly dependent on local society to maintain the material advantages they thought becoming to men of their status, they concluded that their interests lay with the kind of government that did not try to manage the wealth of society. They had an interest, to be sure, in the government's survival, for its institutions were necessary to their definition of themselves as shih and to the privileges that flowed from being recognized as such. The results would not necessarily have been to Ssu-ma Kuang's liking. One of the conditions for his balance of interests was, after all, a noncommercialized rural economy that tended to limit the social distance between rich and poor. But one may speculate that the ongoing commercialization of the economy, not balanced with checks on the wealthy, was vital to the transformation of the shih from a political to a cultural and social elite. And as the rich became richer, private interests became an even greater threat to the impartial functioning of public institutions, and local shih families made it increasingly difficult for the government to realize the minimal administrative duties Ssu-ma Kuang envisioned.

Without the prospect of official careers, learning became essential for distinguishing the shih from the common people, because it allowed shih to claim moral and cultural superiority over those who were merely wealthy or powerful. Being a shih still required claiming responsibility for the public good. For most shih this was accomplished merely by participating in the examination system, thus proving one's cultural training. For others it could be accomplished independently of government through private learning, such as Tao-hsueh , proving one's idealistic and moral commitment. The examination system thus provided the government with institutional means to ensure that the social elite had a vested interest in the survival of the state that recognized them as shih . The restoration of a Sung-style examination system in Chin, the system of state schools and official teachers in Yuan, and the school and examination system of Ming, with its formal acceptance of Tao-hsueh teachings, all served to establish ties between local elites and the government. The survival of the state had come to depend, just as Ssu-ma thought, upon the government's willingness to accommodate the interests of the existing social elite. But the society on which government was constructed was not as stable as Ssu-ma would have wished.

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Four
Chu Hsi's Sense of History

Conrad Schirokauer

Although Chu Hsi did not develop a fully articulated "philosophy of history," he was nonetheless highly sensitive to history and not only as a subject to be incorporated into his philosophy. Instead, his consciousness of history entered into his thinking on many levels, and his views on the nature of history decidedly influenced what he thought could and should be done to improve the state and society of his time.

In investigating Chu Hsi's sense of history, we must be aware of our own and bear in mind that the historical consciousness of Sung people was very different from that of people in the twentieth century. The widespread contemporary perception that, to quote the title of a recent book, "the past is a foreign country," while not completely unknown in the Sung, is far removed from the mental world of the majority of Sung scholars, whether they were inclined to philosophy or to history.^[1] Nor did Sung thinkers debate whether the philosophical quest can, or even should, be divorced from its own history.^[2] The deep alienation from antiquity that is the starting point for

Acknowledgments : The author wishes to acknowledge suggestions made by numerous friends and colleagues who did not attend the conference, including members of the University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies at Columbia University and participants in the Symposium on "Lebenswelt und Weltanschauung der chinesischen Oberschicht von der Sung bis zur frühen Ming-Zeit" II held in Bad Homburg, May 1988.

[1] See David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The title is taken from L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between . The exception in this case is Shen Kua (1031-1095), who compared Chinese society from the Six Dynasties through T'ang with the Indian caste system. See Denis Twitchett, "The Composition of the T'ang Ruling Class," in Perspectives on the T'ang , ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 54-57.

[2] Cf. Roy Mash, "How Important for Philosophers Is the History of Philosophy?" History and Theory 26, no. 3:287-99. Mash concludes that it is not intrinsic to philosophy and that its importance has been exaggerated.

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the hermeneutics of Gadamer, based on the notion that the past can be only partially recovered through a fusion of the "horizons" of our "lifeworlds," belongs to our mental world, not theirs.^[3] Chinese thinkers, notably Chu Hsi, did theorize about reading and interpretation but found the problematic involved in creating a "dialogical" relationship to the past more manageable than do many modern theorists.^[4] In the Sung, history was also not predominantly perceived in the ironic mode. The contrasts go on and on; one wonders what a contemporary theorist would make of Wang Yang-ming's statement that we recapitaluate all history in a day:

In a single day a person experiences the entire course of history. Only he does not realize it. At night when the air is pure and clear, with nothing to be seen or heard, and without any thought or activity, one's spirit is calm and his heart at peace. This is the world of Fu Hsi. At dawn one's spirit is bright and his vital powers clear, and he is in harmony and at peace. This is the world of Emperors Yao and Shun.^[5]

The greater accessibility of the past does not mean it did not pose problems. Despite the differences in mental worlds, there seems to exist a perennial tension between philosophers concerned with permanent truths valid for all time and historians whose very subject is change in all its manifold particulars, a "gap between philosophical coherence and historical factuality," in Leonard Krieger's terminology.^[6] Nietzsche was no doubt being un-

[3] Cf. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1985), esp. pp. 147, 157, and the very useful explication, Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). As Weinsheimer explains, "horizon is another way of explaining context" and includes many elements of which we are ourselves unaware. For various aspects of the tension between philosophy and history, also see the contributions to Hans Georg Gadamer, ed., Truth and History/Verité et Historicité: Entretien de Heidelberg 12-16 Sept. 1969.

[4] For "dialogical relationship," see Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 17.

[5] In the morning one reaches the Three Dynasties, and in the afternoon, "when one's spirit and power gradually become dull and one is confused and troubled by things coming and going," we are in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. After that things get still worse, but Wang ends on a note of optimism for the individual if hardly for history: "If a student has confidence in his innate knowledge and is not disturbed by the vital force, he can always remain a person in the world of Fu Hsi or even better." Ch'uan-hsi lu 3, no. 311, as rendered in Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings , trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 238. In the Sung, Shao Yung described history in terms of a year, beginning with the Three August Sovereigns as the spring of history, the Five Emperors as summer, etc., ending winter with the Warring States. Cf. Huang-chi ching-shih shu 6:15a, Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 487. This differs from Wang Yang-ming, not only in tempo, but also in that Shao did not say that an individual actually recapitulates history.

[6] Leonard Krieger, Time's Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 39. For Nietzsche, see Ofelia Schutte, "The Place of History in Nietzsche's Thought," in Bernhard P. Dauenhauer, At the Nexus of Philosophy and History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 99, quoting Menschliches AllzuMenschliches (Human All Too Human ).

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duly provocative when he remarked that all philosophers are congenitally deficient in lacking a sense of history, but the relationship between philosophy and history has more often than not been a difficult one, so that at times philosophers and historians talk past rather than to each other.^[7] Perhaps it is those who combine both interests who feel the tension most keenly. Thus we find Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (1738-1801) saying, "Histories are books that record facts; facts exhibit innumerable variations and are not uniform. If the text of a history is to follow the facts in their twistings and turnings, it must name the chapters for the facts and not be restricted by invariable forms."^[8] In Europe, only a little later, Hegel (1770-1831) noted the difficulty of combining philosophy "expected to strive after truth good for all times and ever" with the history of philosophy with its "constant change and transformations of historical world views."^[9] Chu Hsi did not focus on history as intently as did either Chang or Hegel, but he too encompassed history as well as philosophy and responded to the tensions between them.

History and Philosophy in Chu Hsi

In the Sung, the distinction between the philosophical and the historical approach to understanding was perhaps most clearly drawn in discussions dealing with the question of the proper relationship between the classics, repositories of eternal truths, and the histories, which record the past. Sung scholars did not debate the relationship between epistemology and narrativity (knowing and telling).^[10] The relationship between "history" as past and "history" as the record of that past was not a philosophical issue. Consistent with the original meaning of the character for "historian," they thought of history books as ideally faithful records of events.^[11] Absent in the Sung was the modern perception that what is considered an event is itself em-

[7] This happens in China too. For a Sung example, see Schirokauer, "Hu Hung's Rebuttal of Ssu-ma Kuang's Critique of Mencius," Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology (Taipei: Academica Sinica, 1982).

[8] Chang Shih I-shu 1, 19a-b as quoted and translated by David S. Nivison, The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (1738-1801) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 223-24.

[9] Hegel, Introduction, Geschichte der Philosophie , quoted in K. Löwith, "Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit," in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and History , p. 12.

[10] See Beiheft 25 (1986) of the journal History and Theory .

[11] The locus classicus is Li-chi XI, 1:5. Legge: "His actions were written down by the recorder [shih ] of the Left, and his utterances by the recorder of the Right." Bernard Karlgren, Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (reprinted Taipei: Cheng Wen, 1966), identifies shih as "a hand holding a style and writing on a wooden block."

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bedded in theory and defined by the nature and level of discourse. Shao Yung once compared history to painting:

The history brush is good for recording events
The painting brush is good for depicting objects.^[12]

The historian, like the painter, is engaged in representation. Therefore, Sung views on history as the record of the human past and on history as that past itself are necessarily very 'closely related. Chu Hsi's attitude toward history books is a strong indicator also of his attitude toward the history contained in those books.

Chang Chiu-ch'eng, primus in the examinations of 1132, expressed the views of many scholars who identified with the tradition of the Ch'eng brothers when he said, "By studying the classics we rectify our minds; by reading the histories we decide on our actions."^[13] For Chu Hsi too, classics and histories are complementary but of unequal value. Both the study of classics and that of history can lead to valuable results, and each has its potential pitfalls. Thus, contrasting the Tso-chuan and Kung-yang commentaries to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch'un-ch'iu ), he said:

Tso is historical learning; Kung-yang is classical learning. Although the historian (shih-hsueh-che ) records events in detail, he makes mistakes on matters of principle; the classicist (ching-hsueh-che ) has success with meaning but makes many errors in recording events.^[14]

That the status of these two types of books, with their very different contents, was far from a purely theoretical issue is evidenced by the struggles over the curriculum of the Classics Mat (imperial seminar, ching-yen ) in which classicists maintained that the classics held the key to good government, while historians argued that history was indispensable for statecraft. As Hu San-hsing (1230-1302) said in his introduction to Ssu-ma Kuang's Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ):

For a ruler not to know the Comprehensive Mirror is to want to order [the world] without understanding the source of order, to hate disorder without understanding the techniques for preventing it. To be a minister and not know the Comprehensive Mirror is to have no way to serve the ruler above or to govern the people below.^[15]

[12] Shih Hua Yin (Chant on history and painting), I-ch'uan chi-jang chi (Collection of songs of slapping an earthen piece by the I River), ed. and trans. into Japanese by Ueno Hideto (Tokyo: Meitoku, 1978), p. 168.

[13] Chang Chiu-ch'eng, Heng-p'u jih-hsin , 7b, 1925 reprint.

[14] Chu tzu yü-lei [hereafter YL ], ch. 83, no, 32. Peking: Chung-hua, 1986 ed., vol. 6, p. 2152; Taipei: Cheng-chung shu-chü ed., vol. 6, p. 3410.

[15] Hu goes on to say that it is also essential for the individual: "To be a man and not know the Comprehensive Mirror means that in planning for oneself one will without fail humiliate one's forebears and achieve nothing worth passing on to posterity."

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In this sense, history was foremost "public" or "applied" history,^[16] with the difference that the Sung scholars had much higher expectations concerning the ability of decision makers to learn from history than our most distinguished practitioners of "public history" have, and that few if any publicly despaired of the whole idea.^[17] Nevertheless, the conflict was intense as the issue of classics versus history became embroiled in a bitter political struggle. For a time, under Emperor Hui-tsung, history was actually banned.^[18]

Discussions of the proper roles of classics and histories were frequently stimulated by the Spring and Autumn Annals , itself both a classic and a history—or, to cite Su Ch'e or Yeh Shih, a classic in name but history in fact.^[19] Thus, as Chu Hsi noted in his remarks on the Tso and Kung-yang , it elicited both kinds of commentary. Invariably, Neo-Confucians give priority to the classics. This is how Ch'eng I put it:

Confucius edited the Odes , collated the Changes , and put in order the Documents . These all contain the Way of the sages but do not yet show the sages' application (or functioning, yung ). Therefore he made the Annals . The Annals are the sages' application.^[20]

Lü Ch'ien-chü, calling attention to this passage, interpreted it to signify that the classics and histories were seen as forming a single whole, with the classics considered as "substance" (t'i ) to the histories' "function" (or application, yung ).^[21] They are therefore complementary, but the classics are privileged. That this came to be a common view is suggested by Hu San-

[16] Cf. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers . New York: Free Press, 1986; also, "Public History's Past, Present, and Prospects," by W. Andrew Achenbaum in American Historical Review 92, no. 5 (1987): 1162-74.

[17] Compare Hegel: "Sovereigns, statesmen, and peoples are told especially to learn from the experiences of history, but what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments have never learnt anything from history nor ever conducted themselves according to theories which could have been derived therefrom." Introduction to History of Philosophy as quoted in K. Löwith, p. 10.

[18] History was removed from the Classic Mat, the civil service examinations, and the public school curriculum. Cf. Robert M. Hartwell, "Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China," American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (1971): 690-727, especially 717.

[19] Su Ch'e, Luan-cheng chi: Ying-chao chi (SPTK ), ch. 11, 11a. Yeh Shih, Yeh Shih Chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1961), 1, p. 221.

[20] Ho-nan Ch'eng shih i-shu , ch. 23. Er Ch'eng chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1981), I, p. 305. See ch. 6 (I, p. 95) for another statement by Ch'eng I that the classics are for containing the Way, and ch. 1 (I, p. 19) for the Annals as application of the text of the Classic of Poetry and The Book of Documents , as legal judgments in contrast with the laws contained in the Five Classics, and as the application to cure illness of the prescriptions contained in the Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents .

[21] Cf. his two contributions to Tu Wei-yün, ed., Chung-kuo Shih-hsueh lun-wen hsuan-chi (Taipei: Hua-shih ch'u-pan-she, 1976-80). The Ch'eng I quotation is given in vols. 1, p. 413, and 2, p. 1097.

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hsing who, even though he dedicated himself to studying The Comprehensive Mirror , began his introduction to that work by acknowledging that "commentators generally say, 'The classics are for conveying the Way, the histories are for recording events: they cannot be mentioned in the same breath.'"

Chu Hsi did not say this; nor did he comment on Ch'eng I's formulation. He did maintain, however, that all literature, and thus not just the classics, should convey the Way,^[22] and he too consistently ranked the classics higher than the histories and gave them clear priority in his educational curriculum.

Reading classics is different from reading histories. Histories concern skin-deep matters of no importance. You can make notes and ask others about them. However, doubts about the classics are like an acute disease. If the body is in pain, it cannot be ignored even for a moment. How can this be compared to noting down on paper doubts about history?^[23]

Chu Hsi insisted that the study of history had to be conducted in terms of a priori principles (li ). That otherwise it was a dangerous undertaking is indicated by his charge that Lü Tsu-ch'ien's preoccupation with history had led to the utilitarianism of Ch'en Liang.^[24] Preoccupation with history was one of the defects of the Chekiang scholars who "bend a foot in order to strengthen a yard" (i.e., make small compromises of what is right for the sake of large gains),^[25] whose "way of learning lies not in self but in books, not in the classics but in histories, and who dismiss Tzu-ssu and Mencius as limited, narrow, not worth considering, but follow Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Pan Ku, Fan Yeh [author of Hou Han shu ] and Ch'en Shou [author of San-kuo chih ]," men who "hold that Confucius is not superior to Yao and Shun, but Bodhidharma, [Ssu-ma] Ch'ien, and [Pan] Ku are superior to Confucius."^[26] It is a scholarship that "dispenses with the classics but studies the histories, neglects the kingly way but concentrates on hegemonic techniques, exhaustively discusses the successes and failures of antiquity and the present but does not examine the beginnings of the preservation of the

[22] Cf. Richard John Lynn, "Chu Hsi as Literary Theorist and Critic," in Wing-tsit Chan, ed., Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), pp. 337-43.

[23] YL 11, no. 96 (Peking ed. vol. 1, p. 189; Taiwan ed. vol. 1, p. 300). Trans. somewhat modified in Chün-chieh Huang, "Chu Hsi as a Teacher of History," paper presented at the Conference on Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, Princeton, N.J., Sept. 1984. Also see Ch'iu Han-sheng, "Lun Chu Hsi 'hui-kuei i-li' de li-shih che-hsueh (Historical philosophy of Chu Hsi), Che-hsueh yen-chiu 6 (1982): 51-57.

[24] Cf. Hoyt Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 182-83.

[25] Wang-ch'ih er chih-hsi, Mencius 3 B1, used by Chu Hsi in letters to Lu Te-chang, Lü Tsu-ch'ien, and others; see Wang Mou-hung, Chu Tzu Nien-p'u (TSCC ), 121-24.

[26] Twenty-fourth letter to Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Wen-chi 47, pp. 823-24.

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mind."^[27] Apropos of Lü Tsu-ch'ien's Ta-shih chi (Record of great events) he criticized Ssu-ma Ch'ien for including accounts of money-makers in his history and characterized the author of the Tso-chuan as "knowing where his interests lay and attaching himself to the powerful."^[28] In a moment of exasperation Chu Hsi even turned against history altogether: "To read history is merely like watching a slugging match. What is there worth looking at in a slugging match? Ch'en Liang ruined his life reading history.^[29]

Despite such disparaging remarks, Chu Hsi valued history highly as a vitally necessary intellectual pursuit. After all, Confucius himself, dissatisfied with mere theory or "empty words" (k'ung-yen ), was thought to have turned to "the depth and clarity of actual events" in editing the Spring and Autumn Annals .^[30] History had always occupied a prominent place in the Confucian tradition. Book-learning was important for Chu Hsi, and that included the histories.^[31] Indeed, in his respect for history he was much closer to the scholars of the Hunan school than to the Ch'eng brothers.

To be sure, Chu Hsi compared reading history without first having thoroughly understood moral principles to trying to irrigate fields using a pond containing only just over a foot of water: "When it is opened to irrigate the fields, not only will it not benefit the fields, but the foot of water will also be lost." To turn to history too early is wasted effort, but never to turn to history negates the whole purpose of the enterprise:

If people have read many books, thoroughly understood moral principles, and the details are clear in their minds, but they do not read history, examine past and present order, and note rules and regulation, then it is like the pond being full but not opening it to irrigate the fields.^[32]

The study of history was important, but it was subordinate in the sense that it was not an autonomous field of learning but an area for the application of what had been learned elsewhere. Philosophy came first. Chu Hsi's foremost philosophical concern was with eternal, timeless principles not dependent on history, truths contained in the Four Books and best grasped through right reading and self-cultivation. But these truths were immanent as well as transcendent, embedded in history even though they were super-

[27] Second letter to Shen Huan, Wen-chi 54, p. 957.

[28] YL 122, no. 17 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 2952; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4724).

[29] Huang Kan added, "Lü Tsu-chien taught students to read history; they too were ruined by history." YL 123, no. 16 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 2965; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4748). Names rendered in standard form.

[30] Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Shih Chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1969) 5:3297, trans. in Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 51. In Sung Confucian discourse "k'ung-yen" was clearly pejorative.

[31] Cf. Yü Ying-shih, "Morality and Knowledge in Chu Hsi's Philosophical System," in Chan, Chu Hsi , pp. 228-54, esp. pp. 233-37.

[32] YL 11, no. 130 (Peking ed. vol. 1, p. 195).

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historical. They structured history, and they alone made history morally meaningful and intellectually comprehensible. History had to be understood and studied in terms of these truths.^[33]

This attitude did not endear Chu Hsi to later historians in or out of his tradition. To make matters worse, he was held responsible for the enormously influential Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien kang-mu ), the redaction of Ssu-ma Kuang's magnum opus carried out by Chu's students supposedly according to a guideline attributed to him,^[34] a book that "transformed a great work of history into a textbook of political ethics."^[35] Today most people would agree with Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) that the book's arguments are like "the application of a rubber stamp,"^[36] and the Kang-mu , once enormously influential, is now often cited as a classic example of distortion of the historical record, a restructuring and distortion of the past by subjecting the record to inviolate principles held to be universally applicable—in the spirit of Chu Hsi.

But Chu Hsi was far more historical-minded than this. For one thing, there are other works that, although open to criticism, are more highly regarded today, including the Words and Deeds of Eminent Ministers of Eight Courts (Pa ch'ao ming-ch'en yen hsing lu ), a collection of anecdotes about Northern Sung statesmen, and the accounts of his immediate intellectual predecessors that form the Records of the Origins of the School of the Two Ch'engs (I-lo yuan-yuan lu ). Furthermore, a recent study of Chu Hsi's views on how history should be compiled demonstrates his concern for truth and accuracy as well as legitimacy and concludes by suggesting that he was not inferior to the greatest Sung historians.^[37]

[33] Cf. Ch'iu Han-sheng, "Lun Chu Hsi 'hui-kuei i li' de li-shih che-hsueh," Che-hsueh yen-chiu 6 (1982): 51-57. Also, Hou Wai-lu, Ch'iu Han-sheng, Chang Ch'i-shih et al, Sung Ming li-hsueh shih (Peking, 1984), pp. 407-21.

[34] For doubts about Chu Hsi's authorship even of the fan-li , see Ch'ien Mu, Chung-kuo Shih-hsueh Ming-chu (Taipei: Sanmin shu-chü, 1973), pp. 235-37. This is cited in note 5 of Chun-chieh Huang, "Chu Hsi," along with Chang Yuan, Sung-tai li-hsueh chia-ti li-shih kuan: i Tzu-chih T'ung-chien Kang-mu wei li (Ph.D. diss., National Taiwan University, 1975), which I have not seen.

[35] J. W. Haeger in Etienne Balazs and Yves Hervouet, A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), p. 75. The best critique in a Western language remains Otto Franke, "Das Tse tschi t'ung-kien und das T'ung kien kang mu , ihr Wesen, ihr Verhältnis zueinander, und ihr Quellenwert," in Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , Phil. Hist. K1, 1930, 103-44. For a modern Chinese evaluation, see Ch'ai Te-keng, Tzu-chih t'ung-chien chieh-shao (Peking: Ch'iu Shih Ch'u-pan-she, 1981), pp. 61-63, or the same author's Shih-hsueh ts'ung-k'ao (Peking: Chung-hua, 1982), p. 196.

[36] Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan , trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 100, citing Ogyu Sorai, Tomonsho , Bk. 1.

[37] T'ang Ch'in-fu, "Chu Hsi de shih-chu pien-tsuan ssu-hsiang," in special Chu Hsi issue, Shang-jao shih-chuan hsueh-pao , 1987, no. 2:95-116.

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More important, Chu Hsi as cosmologist lived in a dynamic universe of constant production and reproduction (sheng-sheng ). As a man deeply committed to the Sung, and as an official (even when out of office), he was bitterly aware of the drastic turn the history of his own dynasty had taken. As a memorialist he regularly cites positive historical models (not only the sage emperors of antiquity but also the Sung founder) to inspire the emperor, and he also uses history to warn His Majesty of the fate that befell those who, like the rulers of Shu of the Three Kingdoms Period, failed to reform. In discussing political matters or planning for local reforms, such as the communal granaries, he regularly took history into account.

Chu Hsi was foremost a moralist and a philosopher of self-cultivation and as such he is famous for his insistence on the "investigation of things (ke-wu )," but time was for him so much of a given that he, like his predecessors, defined things (wu ) as affairs (shih )^[38] —and shih occur within history.

More than that, as a Confucian, Chu Hsi not only looked to the past for his models but was much concerned with clarifying the Transmission of the Way (Tao-t'ung ), an enterprise to which he devoted his own life. Not only was there one Tao valid for all ages, antique and modern, but it was also always available even if left unactualized over vast periods of time. As Joseph Adler has recently emphasized, Chu Hsi not only extended the transmission of this Tao into the Sung but also pushed back its beginnings to Fu Hsi.^[39] History was not all of one piece: Chu firmly subscribed to the traditional qualitative divide between high antiquity and what came later. In his debate with Ch'en Liang, he insisted on the discontinuity between the golden perfection of the Three Dynasties and the inadequacies of Han and T'ang.^[40] The normative past may have been qualitatively different from what followed, but this was not to deny that antiquity was historical in the sense of having taken place in historic time and familiar space and of belonging to the human past. To think otherwise would have been to deny that the Way had ever been actualized.^[41]

The study of consciousness of history is almost as elusive an undertaking as the history of consciousness, but Chu Hsi certainly had a sense of his own distance from the past even as he felt kinship with the men of old—

[38] Cf. Chu Hsi's commentary to the Ta-hsueh (Great Learning), "Text of Confucius" 3; Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsueh: Neo-Confucian Reflections on the Confucian Canon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 92. Also see Hoyt C. Tillman, "The Idea and the Reality of the 'Thing' during the Sung: Philosophical Attitudes toward Wu," Bulletin of Sung and Yüan Studies 14 (1978): 68-82.

[39] Joseph Alan Adler, Divination and Philosophy: Chu Hsi's Understanding of the I-Ching (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1984), pp. 79-81.

[40] Cf. Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , pp. 145-49, 203-4.

[41] Tillman (pp. 203-4) has noted that Chu Hsi did not respond to Ch'en Liang's argument that Confucius had "washed the record of the Three Dynasties so that it would appear utopian," but we do not know the reasons for his silence.

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and this was not limited to the past of the sages. Thus, expressing his regret at being unable to meet T'ao Yüan-ming, who lived in a decadent age but whose poetry he particularly admired, Chu Hsi wrote:

I was born a thousand years too late!
My best friends lived a thousand years ago.^[42]

The title of the poem, as translated by Jonathan Chaves, "Homecoming Inn—Near the Rock Where T'ao Got Drunk," is a further reminder that even the landscape was full of history. It would seem that Chu Hsi could not have denied history even if he had wanted to do so.

Chu Hsi's sense for history comes out most clearly in some of his conversations with disciples, which include remarks on recent as well as older history and occasionally deal with historiography. Not one to accept extraordinary events just because they are recorded in the histories, he expressed doubt concerning the Shih chi account that in 262 B.C. 400,000 men were buried at Ch'ang-p'ing by a victorious Ch'in general. Chu Hsi was also very critical of the biased, partisan official historiography of his own time, going so far as to say, "In general the histories are all not factual; important matters they dare not enter and so they go unreported."^[43]

Historians have no monopoly on demands for accuracy, but at times Chu Hsi does sound like a historian. As a historian Chu Hsi cannot be compared to Ssu-ma Kuang, but too much emphasis has been placed on his disagreement with Ssu-ma over the legitimacy of the post-Han succession, an issue that in any case has become muted, since, as Hoyt Tillman pointed out, Chu Hsi shifted away from a strictly moralistic view and in his late sixties came to accord full legitimacy only to dynasties that unified China.^[44] Much less attention has been paid to his criticism of Ssu-ma from a historical, as opposed to a philosophical, point of view.^[45] To be sure, Chu Hsi was appreciative of the care Ssu-ma Kuang took in verifying his data; he could not and did not accuse him of the cardinal sin, already condemned by Confucius, of filling in blanks in the historical record in the absence of reli-

[42] Wen-chi , ch. 7, 15a. Trans. Jonathan Chaves in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 4 (1982): 202-3. Chu Hsi was, of course, neither the first nor the last to find the men of old more congenial than his contemporaries. See, for example, "Books," by Yuan Mei, which concludes: "Fortunately one need not belong to one's own time; / One's real date is the date of the books one reads!" Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Poet (New York: Grove Press, 1956), p. 85.

[43] YL 134, nos. 73, 74 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3214); and YL 128, no. 55 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3078; Taipei ed. vol. 8, p. 4933). Cf. Hou Wai-lu et al., Sung Ming Li-hsueh-shih , pp. 409-11.

[44] Cf. Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , pp. 171-72.

[45] It has been noted, however, by Naito Torajiro in his history of Chinese historiography, Shina shigaku shi (Tokyo: Komeisha, 1966), pp. 266-67, and Ch'ien Mu, Chu tzu hsin hsueh-an (Taipei: San Min, 1971), vol. 5, pp. 136-38.

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able information.^[46] But he did complain that Ssu-ma had deleted from the historical record unedifying episodes, such as that of Shang Yang's going through the motions of expounding "the kingly way" to his ruler, tailoring his argument to the limited capacities of the duke rather than forthrightly advising him to turn to the "way of the hegemon," and parallel cases of Chang Liang's inviting four elders to strengthen the heir apparent to the founder of the Han, or of Ch'en P'ing's getting the same emperor to use gold to sow dissension in Ch'u. It may seem strange to find Chu Hsi charging Ssu-ma with moralizing (though that may be justifiable), but that is what he does. Again he objects to Ssu-ma Kuang's omission of Chou Yafu's telling the knight-errant Chü Meng during the Revolt of the Seven Kingdoms (154 B.C. ) that obtaining his support was more important than conquering one of the rebelling kingdoms.^[47]

The gist of Chu Hsi's complaint is that "in preparing his book, Wen-kung [i.e., Ssu-ma Kuang] generally deleted what did not accord with his own ideas and did not understand that the ideas of others differ. This sort of thing is frequent in the Comprehensive Mirror. "^[48] As a result the reader loses the thread or is unable to apprehend the mores (feng-su ) of a period. This, says Chu Hsi, is not how Confucius made the Annals .

There was, of course, a widely held view that Confucius had sought to distribute praise and blame precisely by editing (and deleting information from) the Spring and Autumn Annals , and it is generally agreed that the Kangmu stands fair and square in that tradition. Chu Hsi did generally, but not always, disassociate himself from the view that the Annals contain Confucius's value judgments,^[49] but he was so confident that he and his Northern Sung predecessors had retrieved the true teachings of Confucius, lost for over a millennium, that he even filled in lacunae in the text of the Great Learning . Nevertheless, he could sound surprisingly skeptical:

We today do not even understand the intentions behind the court reports and appointments right before our eyes. How much less can men born a thousand and hundreds years later infer the mind of the Sage of so long ago? Barring the recall of Confucius's soul (hun ) and his explaining in person, I do not know what can be done.^[50]

[46] Analects XV:25.

[47] YL 83, no. 32 (Peking ed. vol. 6, p. 2152; Taipei ed. vol. 6, p. 3410); 134, nos. 19, 24, 32, 79 (Peking ed. vol. 8, pp. 3204, 3205, 3206, 3215-16; Taipei ed. vol. 8, pp. 5142, 5143-44, 5145, 5161-63). All the cases cited here are recounted in the Shih Chi and included in Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, 2 vols.).

[48] YL 134, no. 24 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3205).

[49] Cf. Yu-lei 83.

[50] YL 83, no. 44 (Peking ed. vol. 6, p. 2155; Taipei ed. vol. 6, pp. 3415-16).

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A similar healthy skepticism also underlies much of Chu Hsi's scholarship on the classics, such as his rejection of the authenticity of the introduction to the Odes (Shih ching ), his conclusion that poems earlier commentators had interpreted didactically were actually love songs, his rejection of the old text of the Book of Documents (Shu ching ) and dating of the K'ung An-kuo commentary, and his dating of the Record of Rituals (Li chi ) to the Ch'in-Han period. Participating in the critical scholarship that was one of the hallmarks of the Sung, he could tell a disciple, "There are so many fake books in the world that if we open our eyes and see through them, there will be few books worth reading."^[51] To quote Wing-tsit Chan, "No one before him, and none after him, has uprooted the authenticity and authority of so many works in so many fields."^[52]

To return to historiography specifically, Chu Hsi's insistence on accuracy and completeness in writing history was founded on the conviction that principle or pattern (li ) was both descriptive and prescriptive, that in the final analysis the story of the world and man was intelligible and made moral sense.^[53] Unlike the modern scholar who sees history as a mental construct that each generation is bound to refashion, Chu Hsi held that the historical record really can speak for itself. As his famous saying concerning the Annals has it, "Confucius simply described things as they were, and right and wrong became apparent of themselves."^[54]

Whereas we moderns grapple with the "norms built into the Chinese Confucian mirror of history,"^[55] those who fashioned that "mirror" thought of it as reflecting norms actually out there in the objective world, as did those who so energetically applied the abrasive of historical criticism, seeking to polish the mirror so that the norms might be as clear as possible.^[56] Then the past itself could serve as a mirror for the present, an idea found at

[51] YL 84, no. 28 (Peking ed. vol. 6, p. 2155; Taipei ed. vol. 6, p. 3470), referred to in Wing-tsit Chan, "Chu Hsi's Completion of Neo-Confucianism," in Etudes Song: Sung Studies in Memoriam Etienne Balazs , Ser. II, no. 1 (1973), p. 84. Reprinted in Wing-tsit Chan, Chu Hsi: Life and Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1987); see p. 134.

[52] Wing-tsit Chan, "Chu Hsi's Completion," p. 84, reprinted in Chu Hsi: Life and Thought , p. 134. Also see page 42 of that book.

[53] Compare Polybius, who saw his task as "interpreting how the outcome of events was in keeping with, or causally connected with, given moral conditions" and for whom "the lessons of history taught both goodness and effectiveness, for these were part and parcel of the same virtue." Cf. G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 101.

[54] YL 83, no. 7 (Peking ed. vol. 6, p. 2146; Taipei ed. vol. 6, p. 3400), trans. Kate Nakai, "Tokugawa Confucian Historiography: The Hayashi, Early Mito School and Arai Hakuseki," in Peter Nosco, ed., Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 66.

[55] The expression is Kate Nakai's (p. 66).

[56] Cf. Michael Freeman, "Die Entstehung der historischen Kritik (Shih-p'ing) und die 'neue Geschichte' der nördlichen Sung," Saeculum 23, no. 4 (1973): 351-73.

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the very beginning of Chinese historical record keeping in the Book of Documents (Shao kao ) as well as in a couplet in the Classic of Poetry quoted by Mencius and again by Emperor Shen-tsung in the introduction he wrote for Ssu-ma Kuang's great history:

The mirror of Yin is not far off;
It lies in the age of Hsia.

It was an image also frequently employed by Han and T'ang officials warning emperors to learn from history.^[57]

Chinese scholars are hardly alone in treating history as a mirror. Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) is perhaps the best known recent Western example, and still more recently the image has been brought up to date by an advocate of history who warns us, "The rear-view mirror of history is our only crystal ball."^[58] However wide may be the appeal of the mirror symbolism among historians at large, we should recall that in China it also figured in the language of philosophers. Beginning with the dictum that "the mind of the perfect man is like a mirror" in the Chuang Tzu ,^[59] it was widely used by theorists, Neo-Confucians among them, as a symbol and metaphor for the mind. Thus, Chu Hsi described the mind of the sage before it is stimulated from without:

In terms of basic substance, it is like a mirror with nothing reflected in it, simply blank, or like a balance with nothing added to it: simply level. In terms of function, since it is completely blank, there is no place for beauty and ugliness to hide their forms, and since it is perfectly level, heavy and light cannot be in error.^[60]

[57] Shih ching III, 3, 2, as trans. in Howard J. Wechsler, Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T'ang T'ai-tsung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 145. Also see Mencius 4A:2, and Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 19-20. Wechsler, p. 178 n. 38, notes that Hung Mai (1123-1202) pointed to Wei Cheng as belonging to a whole group of officials "who advised their rulers to regard former dynasties as mirrors."

[58] Page Miller, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, quoted in the New York Times , May 29, 1988, sec. 3, p. 13. Sung scholars could hardly have foreseen that a major European sinologist would one day propose that their own society be "used as a mirror image in reverse of everything that is unique in the history of the West." Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy , trans. H. M. Wright, ed. Arthur F. Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 21. It seems that here even the image of the mirror has turned into a mirror image.

[59] Chuang Tzu , ch. 7, as trans. in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , p. 207.

[60] Wen-chi 67:4a, as translated (with some modifications) in Adler, Divination , p. 127, where another similar instance of Chu Hsi's use of the mirror image is also noted. Most recently Donald J. Munro has drawn attention to the mirror image in Chu Hsi. See chap. 3 of his Images of Human Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton University Press, 1988).

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Elsewhere he applies the same image to the state of mind required for reading books in general,^[61] and another passage refers to reading history:

Generally, if, in reading books, you first read the Analects and Mencius and afterwards read history, it will be like [holding] a bright mirror on it and the beautiful and ugly cannot hide.^[62]

Beauty, moral and physical, is not just in the eye of the beholder. Traditional philosophers and historians alike sought a mirror, clear and bright, to reflect reality. Much had changed since the cosmic mirrors of the Han or those found in Shang tombs, but down to modern times there was a popular tradition that a mirror could be truer than the eye—as in reflecting demons.

Men In History

Chu Hsi did not slight or discount the role of impersonal forces in history, nor did he reduce history to the biography of great men. Historical change was real, but, consistent with his philosophy and view of the world, he emphasized the part played by great men and was much concerned with appraising the character of leading historical figures as the ultimate key to their accomplishments.

If Han Kao-tsu had followed the calendar of Hsia or ridden in a Shang carriage, he would still have amounted only to Han Kao-tsu. Yet today people say that Han Kao-tsu lacked only these details, and they do not discuss the fundamentals.^[63]

Chu Hsi's standards of appraisal were superhistorical, but this does not mean that Chu Hsi's historical judgments were simply mechanical exercises in applying moral standards, with the predictable result that most historical figures were found sadly wanting. While his historical dicta are of uneven interest, and while he seems generally more favorably disposed toward the Han than the T'ang, his assessments of historical figures, even those of the

[61] "Because the mind is not settled, it cannot see principles. If we want to read books today, we must first settle the mind and make it be like still water or a clear mirror. How can a cloudy mirror reflect things?" YL 11, no. 12 (Peking ed. vol. 1, p. 177).

[62] YL 11, no. 132 (Peking ed. vol. 1, p. 195). Chu Hsi continues, "If without having thoroughly read the Analects, Mencius, The Doctrine of the Mean , and The Great Learning , you go and read history, there will be no scale (ch'üan-heng ) in your mind and it will be deluded by everything."

[63] YL 45, no. 36 (Peking ed. vol. 3, p. 1157; Taiwan ed. vol. 3, p. 1838). Reference is to Analects XV:11. Yen Yuan asked about the government of a state. The Master said, "Follow the calendar of Hsia, ride in the carriage of the Yin, and wear the ceremonial cap of the Chou." Trans. D. C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 133. Also Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , pp. 146-48.

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very recent past, frequently show a sense of balance and are rarely completely one-sided. It is difficult to think of anyone he despised more than the much-hated Ch'in Kuei, whom Chu Hsi held responsible for appeasement of the Chin, who had brooked no opposition and forced out of office those who disagreed with him, including most Neo-Confucians and Chu's own father. Nevertheless, Chu Hsi did praise Ch'in's working style, finding him "good at working, firm and respectful, not engaging in thoughtless chatter, using only [the necessary] number of words in answering letters."^[64]

Chu Hsi was no admirer of Wang T'ung, a "symbol of utilitarian policies,"^[65] whom he excluded from the Tao-t'ung . He is highly critical of Wang's writings but also sensitive to Wang's historical predicament and therefore not unsympathetic. Chu finds Wang shallow, lacking in great substance, impatient, and yet he feels that Wang accomplished more than Hsun Tzu, Yang Hsiung, or Han Yü. When Wang realized that it was not possible for him to become a second Duke of Chou and bring about an era of great peace, he tried instead to continue Confucius's editorial work, but whereas in the Sage's time much material from the Three Dynasties was still available, all Wang had to work with were the inferior literary remains of later, lesser periods.^[66]

Chu Hsi could be very sensitive to historical circumstance. A case in point is his discussion of the proper way to deal with Empress Wu and her crimes. Here Chu Hsi disagrees with Hu Yin's Tu-shih kuan-chien (Observations on reading history), a book that had a great influence on the Kang-mu and in which, according to the Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu editors, Hu Yin "expected everyone to be like Confucius, Yen Yuan, Tzu-ssu, or Mencius. With regard to human affairs, it measured everything by the yardstick of the dynasties of Yü, Hsia, Shang, and Chou."^[67] As we might expect from a stern moralist, Hu Yin stated that Empress Wu should have been reduced to commoner status and ordered to commit suicide. Asked about this, Chu Hsi noted that the standpoint of the dynasty was incompatible with that of Empress Wu's son and successor, Chung-tsung. "How could the ministers and high officials kill the mother today and face the son tomorrow?" Chu Hsi further exhibited a historian's sense of historical context when he went on to reject the opinion of his friend Chang Shih that because of Chung-

[64] YL 72, no. 19 (Peking ed. vol. 5, p. 1819; Taiwan ed. vol. 5, p. 2897).

[65] Tillman, p. 95. Also see pp. 105-7.

[66] YL 137, no. 21 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3260; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 5235). Also see no. 42 (3266-67; 5246-47). At times (e.g., no. 50 [3169; 5251]) he attributes to Wang T'ung the same faults he sees in the Chekiang scholars.

[67] Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu tsung-mu 89:4b-6a as cited and translated in Winston Wan Lo, The Life and Thought of Yeh Shih (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1974), p. 147. An edition of the Tu-shih kuan-chien printed in 1514 and available in the Library of Congress has extensive marginal notations indicating what was incorporated into the Kang-mu .

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tsung's incompetence, the throne should have been transferred to a cadet branch of the imperial family. "In terms of posterity Chung-tsung was inadequate, but in terms of that time there was as yet no reason to remove him. . . . We must place ourselves in that time and empathize (ch'in-k'an ) with the period and the circumstances."^[68]

A proper understanding of history thus requires personal judgment; it cannot be simply derived from the rules, and indeed history is full of examples of times when ordinary standards must be suspended. This was true even in golden antiquity, as when Shun married without permission. Other cases when departure from the norm was clearly justified are King T'ang's banishment of Chieh, King Wu's punishment of Chou, or I Yin's deposition of his ruler, all of which go against the standard loyalty a minister owed his sovereign, and yet were proper under the circumstances of the time.^[69] Even the Duke of Chou committed fratricide. Since matters certainly have not improved since antiquity, there would hardly seem a period when the determination of right and wrong did not require a careful weighing or "moral discretion."

Ch'üan

Chu Hsi's views on ch'üan merit closer examination, for ch'üan lies at the heart of the problem of moral action past and present, public and private. How to adhere to timeless values while living and acting in an imperfect and changing world was a central and perennial Confucian concern, one to which Chu Hsi gave much thought.^[70] Indeed, one of the great strengths of his thought and an enduring source of his appeal was his sensitivity to alternatives and his ability to encompass the polarities of various issues and maintain a balanced position, to combine the firm certitude of a man whose morals are his metaphysics with remarkable flexibility in dealing with specific issues in scholarship, politics, and life.

The essence of the philosophical problem is that ultimately there are no

[68] YL 136, no. 59 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3247; Taipei ed. vol. 8, pp. 5213-14). Miura Kunio has pointed out that Ssu-ma Kuang's T'ung-chien employs Empress Wu's reign title while the Kang-mu uses Chung-tsung's nien-hao . Cf. Yoshikawa Kojiro and Miura Kunio, eds., Shushi ji (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun-sha, 1976), p. 488. Here the Kang-mu follows the views of Hu Yin rather than those of Chu Hsi. It would be interesting to know how frequently this happened.

[69] Yü-lei , ch. 37.

[70] Charles Fu has gone so far as to write: "It seems to me that the greatest contribution of Chu Hsi's own philosophy does not, as he claims, lie in metaphysics or theory of mind/nature but rather lies in his ability to tackle to [sic ] Confucian problem of 'situational weighing' of the constant moral standard or principle." See Wing-tsit Chan, Chu Hsi , p. 399. Fu does not provide a reference for his claim about Chu Hsi's "claim" concerning his own contribution to philosophy.

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rules or principles for the application of rules or principles, and that the search for such metarules or principles can only lead to an infinite regression. In this respect deductive and analogical reasoning are alike,^[71] and it matters not whether lessons are drawn from classics or history (or fiction): there is no way to avoid personal judgment. Therefore, there is a need for a profound person or a sage, with a mind like a mirror or a balance.

Ch'üan in Chu Hsi's thought is comparable to (but not identical with) Aristotle's phronesis : "practical wisdom" or "prudence, "the virtue of practical reasoning," which enables a man to decide on each particular occasion what would be the right thing to do.^[72] Paul Schuchman in a recent book on the subject writes, "The concern of phronesis is nothing more than the deepest concern of man himself—his own being human."^[73] Although Chu Hsi emphasized "the investigation of things," whereas Aristotle saw phronesis as the fruit of experience, the attainment of this kind of wisdom took a lifetime in both traditions.^[74]

With its root meaning of "steelyard, balance, to weigh," ch'üan is usually contrasted to ching , "the standard." Variously rendered as "expediency" (Chan), "exigency" (Legge, Cua, Langlois), "moral discretion," and "appropriate to the purpose at hand" (both D. C. Lau), "overriding conditions" (Dobson), "situational weighing" (Fu), "taking irregular action in accordance with exigencies" (Langlois), ch'üan comes into play when, for one reason or another, standard moral behavior (ching ) is impossible or inapplicable, and it becomes necessary, after weighing all the factors, to resort to something unusual or even ordinarily inadmissible. It does sometimes have the negative connotation of "expedient" in the sense of "self-serving," but when contrasted to ching in Confucian discourse it is used positively.

Chu Hsi discussed the difference between ch'üan and ching in considerable depth, and his ideas on this subject were frequently echoed by later writers.^[75] A locus classicus for Confucian ch'üan is Analects IX:30, where

[71] For a recent discussion of the logic involved in analogical reasoning, see Jean-Paul Reding, "Analogical Reasoning in Early Chinese Philosophy," Asiatische Studien (Etudes Asiatiques ) 40, no. 1 (1986): 40-56.

[72] J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 138.

[73] Paul Schuchman, Aristotle and the Problem of Moral Discernment (Bern: Peter D. Lang, 1980), p. 26. See p. 11, n. 1, for a select bibliography on phronesis in Aristotle. Among contemporary philosophers Gadamer has paid it particular attention.

[74] A young man can become an excellent mathematician, but "prudence involves a detailed knowledge, which comes only from practical experience, and practical experience is what the young man lacks—it comes only after many years." J. A. K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics Translated (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953).

[75] See Wing-tsit Chan's entry on "ch'üan " in Chung-kuo che-hsüen tze-tien ta-ch'üan and his Neo-Confucian Terms Explained (The Pei-hsi tzu-i) by Ch'en Ch'un, 1159-1223 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 129-34, which includes a number of historical examples, among them Chu Hsi's views on Chung-ts'ung. Also see Wei Cheng-t'ung, "Chu Hsi on the Standard and the Expedient," in Chan, Chu Hsi , pp. 255-72, or in Chinese, in Wei's Ju-chia yü hsien-tai Chung-kuo (Confucianism and contemporary China) (Taipei: Tung-ta t'u-shu kung-ssu, 1984), pp. 75-93. For another extensive philosophical analysis, see Yamane Mitsuyoshi, Shushi rinri shisokenkyu (A study of Chu Hsi's moral thought) (Hokkaido University Press, 1983). Chapter 6 is on ch'üan . See also Tillman, pp. 28-29. Also helpful, although it does not concern Chu Hsi specifically, is Anthony S. Cua, "Paradigmatic Individuals in Confucius," sec. 2, Arne Naess and Alastair Hamnay, eds., Invitation to Chinese Philosophy (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1972), pp. 49-53

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Confucius sets up a progression beginning with men with whom one can study, proceeding to those with whom one can pursue the Way, then citing those with whom one can take a stand, and finally culminating in those with whom one can ch'üan . "Weighing" is also an important theme of the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung yung ), where we are told that "the profound person achieves the Mean according to the situation at the time (shih chung ; shih = time)." Chu Hsi in his commentary (Chung-yung chang-chü ) explains:

The reason the profound person achieves the Mean is that he has the virtue of a profound person and can accord with the times so as to abide in Centrality. . . . After all, Centrality has no set substance but lies in according with the times. That is a constant principle.

Chu Hsi also frequently refers to Mencius IVA:18 concerning a man who rescues his sister-in-law from drowning even though he is violating propriety by touching her. Mencius explains that this action is ch'üan .

During the Northern Sung, Ch'eng I had given a good deal of thought to this issue and concluded that ch'üan was the application of the "standard" in time and place. Indeed, taking issue with the view of Han commentators that ch'üan was counter to ching , Ch'eng held that ching was equivalent to ch'üan .^[76] Since Chu Hsi accepted so much of Ch'eng I's philosophy, it is always instructive to consider points of disagreement. Chu Hsi shared Ch'eng I's positive evaluation of ch'üan as well as his predecessor's concern that the term had been misunderstood and abused. (Ch'üan from very early times figured in Legalist writings and such compounds as ch'üan-mou and ch'üan-shu [political maneuvering] have a Legalist ring.)^[77] He thought Ch'eng I feared that people would use it as a disguise, and he once com-

[76] Ch'eng I's views are discussed in Kusumoto Masatsugu, So Minjidai jugakushiso no kenkyu (Kashiwa shi: Hiroike gakuen, 1961), p. 124, and lshikawa Yasuji, Teii Ikawa tetsugaku no kenkyu (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1964), pp. 143-48. Chu Hsi's response to these views is analyzed in Wei Cheng-t'ung, "Chu Hsi."

[77] Cf. John D. Langlois, Jr., "Law, Statecraft and The Spring and Autumn Annals in Yuan Political Thought," in Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds., Yuan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion under the Mongols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 131-35. Also, ch'üan (Japanese "ken") in Hihara Toshikuni et al., Chugokushiso jiten (Dictionary of Chinese thought) (Tokyo: Kyubun shupan, 1983). For ch'üan-mou and shu in Chu Hsi, see, for instance, YL 83, nos. 127, 128 (VI, 3447-48), and 120, no. 110 (VII, 4655).

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plained to Chang Shih, "What the world calls ch'üan is merely going along with common practices and becoming used to evil." Chu Hsi objected to Ch'eng's formulation as denying an important distinction.

For Chu Hsi, the "standard" is associated with the constant (ch'ang ) and is always valid, but there are times when it cannot be carried out, and it is in such "variant" (pien ) circumstances that one must resort to what is merely "expedient."

The standard are the constant principles to be acted on in all ages; the expedient are the principles that penetrate change (t'ung-pien ) and are applied when the constant principles cannot be enacted and there is no other way out. They certainly do not differ from the standard in achieving the Mean, but in the end must be temporary not constant.^[78]

In another formulation Chu Hsi characterizes ch'üan as complying with the Way. Clearly it must accord with morality, and Chu Hsi faults Wang T'ung for separating ch'üan and i (duty). In this respect there is no distinction between ch'üan and ching , and Chu Hsi can speak of "ch'üan as not really separate from ching " and say, "When one accords with ch'üan, ching is present in this."^[79] Chu Hsi did not work out a final formulation of the relationship between the two,^[80] but he certainly was not a relativist: ch'üan is not arbitrary. The vicissitudes of life and history necessitate adjustments in human behavior, but these must suit what is called for at a particular time; "[the superior man] can maintain the Mean at any time."^[81]Ch'üan is timely, correct, grounded in the Way, which runs through and stands above the constant and the variant.

Ch'üan , "weighing," always involves individual human judgment. In sentencing a criminal, both the hard-natured judge who would execute him and the tenderhearted official who would show him mercy are wrong. What is required is a judicious weighing. Objectively, there is only one correct outcome, but that can be achieved only by the subjective wisdom of the judge.^[82]

The man rescuing his sister-in-law is the classical example of such an action. Others run the gamut from the trivial to the momentous issues determining imperial succession already noted. Some, as is discussed by

[78] YL 37, no. 46 (Peking ed. vol. 3, pp. 990-91; Taiwan ed. vol. 3, pp. 1579-80); also see no. 42.

[79] YL 37, no. 44 (Peking ed. vol. 3, p. 990; Taiwan ed. vol. 3, p. 1578); YL 137, no. 50 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3269; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 5251); YL 37, nos. 49 and 45 and 46 (Peking ed. vol. 3, pp. 990-92; Taiwan ed. vol. 3, pp. 1580-82).

[80] Wei (p. 80) differentiates between ching as contrasted to ch'üan and ching as equivalent to Tao and therefore on a higher level, while Yamane (pp. 123-24) suggests that in a sense ch'üan is contained in ching .

[81] The Doctrine of the Mean : 2, trans. Chan, Source Book , p. 90.

[82] Cf. Yamane, p. 115. Yamane stresses the subjectivity of ch'üan .

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Wei Cheng-t'ung, involve such difficult value conflicts as that between filial piety and religious belief. But Chu Hsi also cites the need to adjust one's normal habits to accommodate to unseasonable weather, such as responding to a winter heat wave by cooling oneself with breeze from a fan rather than dressing up and facing a fire as usual, or drinking hot rather than cold water. Perhaps he is suggesting that although everyone has some sense of judgment, it takes a sage to respond to the storms of history.

Ch'üan had long figured in interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Annals , from the Kung-yang commentary to Ch'eng I. In making his own judgments Chu Hsi does not propose any readily accessible touchstones. Departures from the norm were certainly not sanctioned because they succeeded or because they had beneficial results. Thus Chu Hsi clearly and consistently condemned T'ang T'ai-tsung for his fratricide. A vital difference between him and the Duke of Chou was in motivation: Chou Kung had no choice but to execute his evil and treacherous brother, whereas T'ai-tsung was contending for empire. Chu Hsi quotes Mencius on I Yin: "It [banishing a sovereign] is permissible only if he had the motive of an I Yin; otherwise it would be usurpation," and explains, "In the case of I Yin we can consider it appropriate, but not so in the case of others."^[83]

Given the absence of objective external criteria, only a sage or a worthy has the moral purity and wisdom required in really serious departures from standard norms: "If someone other than a great sage or a worthy employs ch'üan , he will in a little while suit his convenience and transgress."^[84] This was not only Chu Hsi's private view, which he shared with his disciples, but also what he told the emperor in an 1194 memorial:

Your humble servant has heard that there are constant and variant matters in the world and that there are "standard" and "expedient" methods to deal with them. The constant status of sovereign and minister, father and son, are norms that do not change. That the ruler commands and the minister enacts, that the father transmits and the son carries on are the standards of the Way. If there is misfortune and it reaches a point where we are unable completely to act as is normal, it is called variant. And when the methods to deal with this cannot be completely standard, it is called "expedient." When things are normal even sages and worthies do not go beyond maintaining the standard, and ordinary men can do it too. But when it comes to dealing with the variant by means of the "expedient," only a great sage or a great worthy can manage it without going wrong. That is not within the reach of ordinary men.^[85]

[83] YL 37, no. 47 (Peking ed. vol. 3, p. 991; Taiwan ed. vol. 3, p. 1581). Mencius VIIA:31 as trans. by D. C. Lau, Mencius (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 189.

[84] YL 37, no. 52 (Peking ed. vol. 3, p. 994; Taiwan ed. vol, 3, p. 1586). Also no. 28, pp. 986, 1573; no. 43, pp. 989, 1578.

[85] "Chia-yin hsing-kung pien-tien tsou-cha 1," Wen-chi 14, p. 203.

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By insisting that only a perfect man can deal with historical emergencies, Chu Hsi is reaffirming the ultimate priority of self-cultivation for bringing order to his own "variant" world. It is consistent with his repeated and well-known admonitions for the emperor to rectify himself and make his heart sincere so as to set in motion the salvation of the world as taught in the Great Learning . The link in Chu Hsi's thought between self-cultivation and ordering the world is basic and crucial. Failure to achieve the former has made it impossible to accomplish the latter.

The Course of History

History had to be taken into account if judgments were to be balanced and policies successful. Consistent with Chu Hsi's insistence on the need for and the difficulty of weighing changing circumstances was his perception that real and significant change had taken place in the course of history. There were, to be sure, limits to change. Arnaldo Momigliano has written of classical Western historiography:

The future, however uncertain and different from the past, was not expected to produce unrecognizable situations. It is implicit in the whole attitude of the Greeks and Romans toward history that the variety of events was somehow limited. . . the common assumption was that future events would not be so different as to make experience useless.^[86]

This would seem to apply equally well to Chu Hsi and his contemporaries and could be read backwards as well as forwards in time.^[87] Past experience was useful even though it could not be exactly repeated. Chu Hsi, as is well known, was not a radical restorationist. He did look back to high antiquity as an ideal, incomparably superior to even the best that followed, but he did not argue that the well-field system and other institutions of antiquity, valid for all time, could and should be brought back. Similarly, on the one hand, he made detailed studies of classical rituals, but sought, on the other, to accommodate the rules of propriety to the society of his own time, convinced, according to Kao Ming, "that the ancient rules of propriety were obsolete in the Sung dynasty."^[88]

What then had changed? Although it does not occupy a prominent place

[86] Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modem Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 173-74.

[87] For us the pace and intensity of change itself has changed, but this should not lead us to deny Chu Hsi's perception that the world had really changed and was continuing to do so.

[88] Kao Ming, "Chu Hsi's Discipline of Propriety" in Chan, Chu Hsi , p. 324. Also see Patricia Ebrey, "Education through Ritual: Efforts to Formulate Family Ritual during the Sung Period," in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , ed. de Bary and Chaffee, pp. 277-306.

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in his works, Chu Hsi does provide an answer, and as we may expect, it is an answer grounded in his physics and metaphysics. History is on a general downward course because of the quantitative and qualitative deterioration of the ch'i , the essential material force of the universe. At his most pessimistic Chu Hsi presents a vision of truly cosmic deterioration:

Someone spoke about the two ch'i and five agents combining in myriad transformations.

[The Master] said, "Things at last degenerate. From Ch'in and Han on, the two ch'i and five agents naturally became rather turbid, unlike their clarity and purity in high antiquity. For example, from the time of Yao to the present, the central stars [chung-hsing ] have already deviated by 50 degrees. From Ch'in-Han on, things have naturally degenerated. When [Han] Kuang-wu appeared, there was a slight correction, but afterwards it again became bad. Again, after [T'ang] T'ai-tsung appeared there was a slight correction, but afterwards it again became bad. In the end, it could not be as in antiquity."

Someone said, "Still, the fundamental was not destroyed."

[The Master answered], "Of course."^[89]

The enduring fundamental is principle, which is dependent neither on men nor on history. Ch'in swept away the institutions of antiquity but the Three Bonds and Five Norms are indestructible.

The deterioration of ch'i is a most serious matter, since ch'i as a prime constituent of the human endowment affects the quality of the men who guide and rule the world. Ideal sovereignty demands sagehood, and while attainable by all, an endowment of relatively turbid, low-quality ch'i makes the task more formidable. Moreover, even a sage may suffer from weak ch'i : Confucius himself remained poor and low in status because his ch'i , though pure, was thin; and his favorite disciple, Yen Hui, was even worse off, as was indicated by his early death.^[90] The chances of being blessed by excellent ch'i were slim. Because for Chu Hsi, in the final analysis, history is made by men, the deterioration of what makes men was crucial.

The idea of the long-term deterioration of ch'i is not incompatible with

[89] YL 134, no. 49 (Peking ed. vol. 8, pp. 3208-9; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 5149). This conversation is datable to 1197 when Chu Hsi, in political disgrace, had good cause for pessimism. Miura (Shushi ji , p. 4150) explains chung-hsing as stars that cross the meridian, On the importance of the meridian in Chinese astronomy, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China , vol. 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 229ff. Also see Miura Kunio, "Kishu to jisei—Shuki no rekishi ishiki" (Ether's force of destiny versus the trend of events: on Chu Hsi's understanding of history), Toyoshi Kenkyu 42, no. 4 (March 1984): 595-618.

[90] Wen-chi 56:33a-b (14th letter to Cheng K'e-hsüeh); YL 4, no. 96 (Peking ed. vol. 1, p. 79; Taiwan ed. vol. 1, p. 128). This idea was also perpetuated in Ch'en Ch'un, Neo-Confucian Terms , Chan, pp. 40-42.

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the view, also found in Chu Hsi, of history as consisting of recurrent alternations of order and disorder, so that "after the five hu disrupted China when disorder reached an apex in the Sui, T'ang T'ai-tsung necessarily appeared, and after the Five Dynasties [Sung] T'ai-tsu necessarily was born."^[91] History had its ups as well as its downs.^[92]

Chu Hsi was no fatalist.^[93] He did not emphasize or dwell on the deterioration of ch'i nor build a philosophy of history around it. It is fundamental to his thought that since people are constituted of principle as well as of material-force, and human nature is basically good, sagehood remains within reach of the individual. It follows that similarly the present is redeemable. Even after the passing of antiquity, the founders of the major dynasties, such as Former and Later Han and the T'ang, were able to reverse the downward course. But their accomplishment did not last. A major reason that the Han founder and others fell short is that they overcompensated in their attempts to counteract the defects of their predecessors:

Question: "That what is deficient should be added and what is excessive should be dropped is required by circumstance. But only the sage gets it just right; others add or drop too little or too much."

[The Master said], "The sage manages to attain principle in each case. For instance, in late Chou refinement (wen ) was at an extreme, so when the Ch'in arose it necessarily reduced it. The Chou was so soft that the Ch'in had to change and be domineering. The Chou was so delicate and fine that when the Ch'in arose it was earnestly plain, unemotional, and direct. These were changes required by the circumstances. But the Ch'in went too far in its changes and became so tyrannical. When Han arose it definitely was magnanimous."^[94]

Aware of the evils of the enfeoffment system (feng-chien ), the Ch'in eliminated it, but the Han at first reversed this policy until in turn it changed course under Emperor Wu. The next reversal took place under the Chin (or "Tsin") and in the state of Wu when the lineages reappeared. "That when Chin and Wu arose they completely utilized the lineages, was also because the circumstances made it inevitable."

In Chu Hsi's own dynasty the zigzag process continued as the pendulum swung back once more and stable balance remained as elusive as ever.

[91] YL 70, no. 186 (Peking ed. vol. 5, pp. 1172-73; Taiwan ed. vol. 5, p. 2822).

[92] This oscillating view of history is, of course, also very old in the West (cf. G. W. Trompf, n. 53 above) and very modern, as in the views of Arthur Schlesinger on American political history.

[93] Cf. Don J. Wyatt, "Chu Hsi's Critique of Shao Yung: One Instance of the Stand Against Fatalism," Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (1985): 649-66.

[94] YL 24, no. 144 (Peking ed. vol. 2, p. 599; Taiwan ed. vol. 2, p. 965).

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Yeh Wei-tao (Chia-sun) asked, "What are the overall circumstances of our dynasty?" [The Master] said, "Our dynasty examining the provincial commands (fan-chen ) of the Five Dynasties, took over the armies and all rewards and punishments. The prefectures and commanderies thus all became poor and weak, In the Ching-k'ang (1126-1127) disaster wherever the bandits passed, they overwhelmed. Thus [the statesmen] erred in their deliberations."

There had been, to be sure, an attempt to remedy the situation during the period of Wang An-shih's reforms, but that too had failed to attain the right balance. Chu Hsi's discussion concludes:

Now in the case of the Hsi-ning period (1068-1077), there was certainly an excess of carelessness and neglect; it was not an easy situation, but the changes did not attain the Way.^[95]

With such contemporaries as Ch'en Liang and Yeh Shih,^[96] Chu Hsi shared an apparently widely held view critical of excessive centralization of government, which was seen as draining local areas and authorities of the power and resources to deal with problems on a local scale. "We do not have the trouble of earlier times of 'the tail being too big to wag,' but if the authority of the prefectures and districts is too weak, they will not hold up in case of emergency." Disagreeing with a disciple who attributed this development to Wang An-shih, Chu maintained that there had been overcentralization from the very beginning of the dynasty. As proof that it had led to difficulties already in Jen-tsung's reign, Chu Hsi cited Fan Chung-yen's defense of a magistrate who had been forced to compromise with bandits because of lack of local funds and troops. Attacked by Fu Pi for opening the gate and cooperating with bandits, the magistrate had been justifiably defended by Fan Chung-yen.^[97]

Chu Hsi disagreed with those who would cure Sung overcentralization by seeking to return to the enfeoffment system of the Western Chou. In the first place, conditions had changed so that such an attempt at drastic

[95] Reference same as note 94. YL 128, no. 27 (Peking ed. 8, p. 3070; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 4918) is very similar: "[The Master] said, 'Our dynasty examined the defects of the fan-chen of the Five Dynasties and completely deprived them of authority [ch'üan ], taking over the armies and the finances as well as all rewards and punishments. The chou and chün thereupon became poor and weak. In the Ching-k'ang disaster, wherever barbarian horsemen passed, they overwhelmed.'" Concerning the Hsi-ning period, he said, "There was certainly too much carelessness and neglect which [Wang An-shih] wanted to rouse and raise, but he did not attain the mean."

[96] Like Chu Hsi, Yeh Shih thought that the Sung had overcompensated for the defects of the Five Dynasties and T'ang. Cf. Lo, Yeh Shih , pp. 125-26.

[97] YL 108, no. 19 (Peking ed. vol. 7, p. 2682; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4266). This episode is also cited in YL 128, no. 77 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3082; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 4939) as demonstrating the ills of overcentralization prior to Wang An-shih.

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change would be terribly disruptive. "If living in the present we want to abolish present laws entirely and enact the government of antiquity, we will not experience its benefits but only have turmoil." Furthermore, coercion is especially to be avoided: "How can I deny that enfeoffment and well-fields are the institutions of the sage kings, the means to deal with the world altruistically; but I fear they are hard to implement. If force is used, I fear that unexpected evils will ensue." Finally and significantly, Chu Hsi pointed to the serious danger in the likelihood that the enfeoffment system would place in power the uneducated sons of the wealthy, resulting in the kind of misconduct and oppression that had taken place under the "kings" of the early Han.^[98] Worse still, "You may say that the province-district system is not as good as the fief system, but, without the right men, the fiefs will be passed on from generation to generation with no way to remove unsuitable men, whereas under the provincial-district system unsuitable men are out after completing their two- or three-year tour and may immediately be replaced by good men."^[99]

Chu Hsi's evaluation of Wang An-shih's controversial reform program was similarly measured and took history into account.^[100] Far from faulting him for making changes, Chu held that the dynasty's founding fathers

did not always exert themselves to devise models of sagely wisdom to leave for their descendants with the wish that they preserve them for a myriad generations. Thus, after [the institutional arrangements] had been in force for a long time, there were bound to be defects, and it was the responsibility of later men to put through changes.^[101]

Chu Hsi evaluated Wang's individual measures separately and on their merits. Some, like the scheme to have farmers raise state horses, had clearly

[98] YL 108, no. 20 (Peking ed. vol. 7, pp. 2682-83; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4266; YL 108, no. 18 (Peking ed. vol. 7, p. 2680; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, pp. 4262-63); YL 108, no. 19 (Peking ed. vol. 7, pp. 2680-81; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4263).

[99] YL 108, no. 16 (Peking ed. vol. 7, p. 2680; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, pp. 4261-62). Chu Hsi objected to proposals for the reintroduction of the well-field system for many of the same reasons. Even in antiquity it had been applied only in outlying regions, and Chu agreed with Hsün Yüeh that it could only be put into operation after a major upheaval had virtually eliminated the population. Cf. YL 55, nos. 19ff.; 98, nos. 118-19 ff.; Wen-chi 68; also Ch'en Ch'i-yün, Hsun Yueh and the Mind of Late Han China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 95-96.

[100] For an overview of Chu Hsi's opinions on Wang's reforms, see Ishida Hajime, "Shushi no kinei zengo kan" (Chu Hsi's views on the period of Wang An-shih's reforms), Gumma daigaku kyoikubu kiyo : Jinbun-shakai kagakuhen 30 (1980): 65-83. Also see the analysis of Wang An-shih in Peter K. Bol, "Chu Hsi's Redefinition of Literati Learning," in Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

[101] Chu Hsi commenting on a critique of Wang by Ch'en Shih-hsiu. Wen-chi , ch. 70 (p. 1284), quoted by-Ishida, pp. 67-68.

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failed. On similar grounds of impracticality he criticized a plan to drain mud onto fields (yü-t'ien ) and the military operation to seize Hsi Ho from the Ch'iang, a move aimed at the Hsi Hsia.^[102] He also objected to the restructuring of the bureaucracy, which he attributed, however, to Shen-tsung rather than Wang. He was also negative on changes made in education, with emphasis on the defects of the postreform policies and record. Other parts of Wang's program he viewed quite positively. Although not always consistent and concerned over the taxes involved in the hired-service system (mien-i fa ), Chu Hsi, according to Ishida, was on the whole favorably disposed toward Wang's policy in this area. Again, he noted a potential danger in spreading arms but was largely positive on the pao-chia system and approved of the idea behind the farm-loan program while trying to avoid its shortcomings in his own granary scheme.

In keeping with his view of the Sung's place in history, Chu Hsi favored institutions based on local cooperation over those involving coercion from the center. Ultimately, however, as we have already seen in the case of the enfeoffment system, all laws and institutions are potentially defective. In the final analysis, what really counts is the caliber of the people.

Recently there have been two [kinds of] defects: defects in the laws and defects of the age. The defects in the laws are very easy to remedy altogether, but the defects of the age lie in men. People all act with a selfish mind. How can there be change? During the Chia-yu period (1056-1063) the laws may certainly be called defective, but no sooner did Wang Ching-kung [An-shih] change them than many other defects arose. This is because people are difficult to change.^[103]

The problem began with Wang himself. Chu Hsi was generally respectful of Wang's scholarship: he included his commentaries in his ideal examination system curriculum and even, on Lü Tsu-ch'ien's insistence, admitted a brief item from Wang into the Chin-ssu lu^[104] However, he also felt that Wang had grossly misinterpreted the Chou li and that he did not understand principles. "He was virtuous in conduct but his learning was wrong." He even compared Wang to a quack who, if he prescribes insignificant medicine, will not kill anyone; but if he does not recognize the symptoms and kills the patient by prescribing aconite seeds or arsenic, he cannot disclaim responsibility on the grounds that he wanted the man to live. If Ch'eng Hao rather than Wang had been responsible for the reform program, he could have

[102] Discussed in H. R. Williamson, Wang An-Shih (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1935) 1, pp. 304-12.

[103] YL 108, no. 51 (Peking ed. vol. 7, p. 2688; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4275).

[104] IX, no. 20. Wing-tsit Chan, Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology Compiled by Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 233.

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handled matters without causing misery to the people.^[105] The problem lay not in the policies but in Wang's learning, which separated the inner and the outer.^[106]

Here and in his own policy proposals Chu Hsi tried to respond to the particular needs and possibilities of his time and to take into account the direction and flow of "the stream of history."^[107] He saw history as properly providing statesmen and scholars with an understanding of what was possible, as giving them a sense of direction and defining their mission:

In discussing learning we must clarify principle; in discussing government we must discern its mission (t'i , substance). The mission is what should be done according to the principle of a matter. Each matter has its imperatives. . . . In the southeast the country's great mission lies truly in recovering the Central Plain and avenging the enemy's insults.^[108]

Although Chu Hsi came to see recovery of the north as a long-term goal, which he was unlikely to live to see, it never ceased to be the ultimate objective. In 1194 near the close of his political career, Chu Hsi told the emperor, "When it comes to dealing with unusual situations by means of 'weighing' (ch'üan ) only a great sage or worthy can manage it without going wrong."^[109] By this time he was rather pessimistic, but his pessimism was tempered and counterbalanced by his faith in man.^[110] It was never too late.^[111]

Chu Hsi was a philosopher first and foremost, not a historian or statesman. As a philosopher he had a genius for taking into account both poles of basic polarities, confident of the ultimate unity of an organic universe. This universe was structured by a pattern that was both prescriptive and de-

[105] YL 130, no. 7 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3097; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 4965); YL 130, nos. 8 and 9 (Peking ed. vol. 8, pp. 3097-98; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, pp. 4965-66); YL 130, no. 4 (Peking ed. vol. 8, p. 3097; Taiwan ed. vol. 8, p. 4964).

[106] YL 108, no. 8 (Peking ed. vol. 7, p. 2679; Taiwan ed. vol. 7, p. 4260). Chu Hsi at least three times cited Yang Shih's criticism of Wang's learning as "separating inner and outer, divorcing the mind and its traces so that the Way has no function in the world and the work of ordering the world (ching-shih ) is all a matter of working one's way though with one's private cleverness." Wen-chi , ch. 54 (p. 969), "Reply to Lu Te-chang," no. 1; ch. 70 (p. 1286), "Tu liang Ch'en chien-i-me"; ch. 72 (p. 1333), "Su Huang men Kao-tzu chieh."

[107] For "stream of history," see Neustadt and May, Thinking .

[108] YL 95, no. 133 (Peking ed. vol. 6, p. 2449; Taiwan ed. vol. 6, pp. 3889-90).

[109] "Chia-yin hsing-kung pien-tien tsou-cha," no. 1, Wen-chi , ch. 14 (p. 203).

[110] "Thus with the Ch'eng brothers, and even with Chu Hsi in more trying circumstances later, there is a sense of political and cultural crisis, but also a stubborn, idealistic faith that man has it within his power to meet the challenge." Wm. Theodore dc Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 54.

[111] In his 1188 memorial Chu Hsi encouraged the sixty-one-year-old emperor by citing the example of Duke Wu of Wei (852?-758 B.C. ), who was still vigorous at ninety-five sui .

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scriptive, that could accommodate the tension between historical process and the moral order.^[112] He had a vision, but that vision did not blind him to the world of particulars, and unlike Aristotle, who relegated history to last place among the sciences because it deals in particulars, Chu Hsi ranked history above the "six arts.^[113]

[112] For a sensitive and perceptive discussion of this theme in Chinese literature, cf. Stephan Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 3.

[113] See Yü Ying-shih, "Morality and Knowledge," p. 237. The six arts are ceremonies, music, archery, carriage-driving, writing, and mathematics.

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Five
Community and Welfare: Chu Hsi's Community Granary in Theory and Practice

Richard von Glahn

Southern Sung political thought was marked by a loss of faith in state activism. Political commentators invariably decried the perceived trend toward greater autocracy and the equally dismaying divergence from the precepts and institutions laid out by the dynastic founders. Critiques of the misuse of power commonly were accompanied by a corresponding skepticism toward 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. Virtually all major political theorists of the Southern Sung explicitly rejected Wang's program of comprehensive reform. Yet Wang's policies could not fail to have a profound impact on the ideas of even his most fervent detractors.

Indeed, any justification for political activism had to come to terms with Wang An-shih's legacy. Despite the brief triumph of his ideological opponents, who dismantled many of the New Policies during their decade in

Acknowledgments : I wish to thank Professors Chikusa Masaaki, Shiba Yoshinobu, Kinugawa Tsuyoshi, and Sugiyama Masaaki for sharing their wisdom and knowledge with me. I also want to acknowledge my debt to Angela Sheng and Valerie Hansen for their encouragement, insight, and rigorous questioning of my assumptions and conclusions.

Abbreviations used in notes :

CHSC	Huang Sung chung-hsing liang-ch'ao sheng-cheng
CWKWC	Chu Hsi, Hui-an hsien-sheng Chu Wen-kung wen-chi
HMS	Tung Wei, Chiu-huang huo-min shu
HSCWC	Chen Te-hsiu, Hsi-shan Chen Wen-chung-kung wen-chi
SHY	Sung huí-yao chi-kao
WHTK	Ma Tuan-lin, Wen-hsien t'ung-k'ao
YLTT	Yung-le ta-tien

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power (1085-1094), Wang's brand of state activism enjoyed favor with later prime ministers such as Ts'ai Ching and Ch'in Kuei. On the other hand, the self-ordained exponents of Tao-hsueh , or "Learning of the Way," led by Ch'eng I, spurned state activism and instead hoped to induce social change through moral suasion and personal example. The Tao-hsueh circle, which eventually became the dominant force within Neo-Confucianism, abandoned statecraft for the pursuit of self-cultivation. The dilemma of how men of principle could, in immoral times, fulfill their duty to society was bequeathed unresolved to their Southern Sung heirs.

Chu Hsi, while upholding the primacy of moral cultivation, sought to reinvigorate the patricians' (shih ) role in the great tasks of ordering state and society. (In choosing to translate the Chinese term shih as "patrician," in contrast to the plebian min , I simply follow the broad distinction in Chinese political discourse between the rulers and the ruled.) Chu parted company with many of his colleagues in affirming both that existing institutions were inadequate and that the restoration of classical institutions was infeasible. Instead, Chu proposed a new vision of political activism grounded in both moral cultivation and the pressing social needs of the times. The community-granary (she-ts'ang ) concept that he and his disciples popularized illustrates the continuity as well as the disjuncture between Wang's utilitarianism and Chu's political activism. While inveighing against Wang An-shih's neglect of the fundamental requirements of moral self-transformation, Chu recognized that Wang was responding to a genuine and dire need for change. To his students he acknowledged the value of specific reforms undertaken by Wang to alleviate the misery of the rural population. Consequently many of Chu's contemporaries became suspicious that in promoting his community-granary concept Chu Hsi had fallen into the error of resurrecting one of the most criticized of Wang An-shih's policies, the "Green Sprouts" (ch'ing-miao ) rural credit program.

Yet the community granary was an authentic expression of Chu Hsi's political philosophy. In a marked departure from the spirit of the New Policies, Chu viewed the community granary as a means of freeing the organic rural community from its dependence on a state that had proven unresponsive to the predicament of the poor. Chu's unyielding conviction that the foundation of government must be moral knowledge and action was manifested in his determination to entrust the management of the community granary to local patricians steeped in the teachings of classical antiquity. Through institutions like the community granary Chu sought to realize the moral ethos, though not the specific social institutions, of the sage-kings.

In this chapter I trace the formulation of the community-granary concept through Chu Hsi's writings and actions. But other contexts are necessary to complete the picture. First, we must consider the problems to which the community granary was addressed, namely, the endemic cycles of in-

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debtedness and subsistence crisis afflicting rural society, and the failings of state efforts to deal with these problems. Second, I examine Chu Hsi's private and public advocacy of the community granary, and the actual history of the institution from Chu's own day to its eventual demise at the close of the Sung period. By way of conclusion I assess the place of Chu Hsi's ideas of community and political activism within the dominant strains of Sung political thought.

The Endemic Crisis of Subsistence

Legions of later hagiographers credited Chu Hsi with inventing the community granary, but Chu himself readily acknowledged that his ideas were inspired by his friend Wei Shan-chih (1116-1173). Wei, an abrasive and often arrogant gadfly, achieved renown largely for his strenuous but unsuccessful effort to convince the court to remove Wang An-shih's tablet from the Confucian pantheon and install those of the Ch'eng brothers in its place. Wei's prickly candor ensured that he would spend most of his life as a "retired scholar" in his native county Chien-yang, in northern Fu-chien. In 1150, when Chien-yang was caught in the throes of harvest failure and impending famine, Wei persuaded the granary intendant to make interest-free loans to indigent peasants. Afterwards Wei founded a granary at Ch'ang-t'an to collect loan repayments. Rather than reimbursing the Ever-Normal Granary Wei retained the repaid grain at Ch'ang-t'an in anticipation of future harvest failures.^[1]

Chu Hsi was reminded of Wei's granary in 1167 when he received a request to lend assistance to famine relief efforts in his adopted home county Ch'ung-an, adjacent to Chien-yang. Chu embarked on a ten-day tour of the county to assess the extent of damage and distress following heavy spring flooding. The magistrate also asked Chu and another local notable, Liu Juyü, to intercede with higher authorities to help speed the delivery of famine relief supplies. Upon Chu's request the prefect of Chien-ning sent six hundred piculs of rice upstream to Ch'ung-an and placed Chu and Liu in charge of distributing loans of grain to the needy. In the fall of 1168 the

[1] Li Hsin-ch'uan, Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu , 161/20b-21a; "Chien-ning-fu Chien-yang-hsien Ch'ang-t'an she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/18b-19a; "Yun-p'an Sung kung mu-chihming," CWKWC 93/22a. On Wei, see his funerary inscription composed by Chu Hsi, "Kuo-lu Wei kung mu-chih-ming," CWKWC 91/2a-5a; Chang Shih, "Chiao-shou Wei Yuan-fu mupiao," Nan-hsien hsien-sheng wen-chi , 40/12b-15b. On Chu Hsi's career and political thought, see Conrad Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Career: A Study in Ambivalence," in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett, eds., Confucian Personalities , pp. 162-68; Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Thought," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5 ( 1978): 127-48; Kusumoto Masatsugu, SoMin jidai jugaku shiso no kenkyu , pp. 246-67; Tomoeda Ryutaro, Shushi no shiso keisei , pp. 373-418. For a study of Sung disaster relief that focuses on the activities of Neo-Confucians such as Chu Hsi, see Wang Te-i, Sung-tai tsai-huang ti chiu-chi cheng-ts'e .

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new prefect, Wang Huai, suggested that the proceeds of loan repayments should be stored in the countryside for future emergencies rather than being shipped back to the prefectural seat. The following summer Chu and Liu presented a plan for establishing a "community granary" as a permanent institution for rural relief. Wang approved this proposal, and his successor agreed to subscribe public funds to support the project. By the time construction of the granary was completed, in the fall of 1171, Liu Ju-yü had left Ch'ung-an on official assignment. His place was filled by his son and several of his kinsmen, who drew up regulations for the operation of Ch'ung-an's community granary and served as its managers.^[2] The proposals by Wei Shan-chih and Chu Hsi to establish granaries in the countryside represented attempts to remedy the endemic crisis of subsistence that afflicted not only the poor frontier areas of northern Fu-chien but even the prosperous "rice bowl" plains of Chiang-hsi and Hunan. In the mountainous interior of Fu-chien, where lack of capital and labor resources ruled out intensive cultivation, the margin of subsistence was especially narrow. Three features of economic life in this region contributed to the subsistence crisis: (1) monocrop price fluctuations; (2) the annual cycle of peasant indebtedness; and (3) the ineffectiveness of market mechanisms in responding to acute food shortages.

In Fu-chien as in much of South China most peasant families subsisted almost entirely on rice, despite official encouragement of wheat cultivation. Since most of the high-quality, late-ripening rice was reserved for payment of rent and taxes, peasant households primarily consumed the inferior, early-ripening Champa rice. Champa rice was especially prominent in the subsistence regime of the hilly interior districts of Fu-chien and Liang-che because of its tolerance of poor soils and drought conditions.^[3] On the other hand, the ubiquitous spring floods of the Wu-i Mountains in northern Fu-chien often ruined the early-ripening crop, precipitating food shortages in the summer months. As a consequence of the inelastic demand for rice, the paucity of alternative food crops, and the long months of spring and summer during which the peasant household's supply of rice steadily diminished, the price of rice fluctuated violently according to the seasonal undulations of consumers' needs and the available supply of food. As single-

[2] "Chien-ning-fu Ch'ung-an-hsien Wu-fu she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 77/25a-27b; "Ts'ung-shih-lang chien T'an-chou Nan-yueh-miao Liu chun mu-chih-ming," CWKWC 92/25a.

[3] "Shen ch'ao-sheng chieh-po he-ti-mi chuang," HSCWK 10/8b-9b; Ku-lo-chih , in YLTT 7510/22a; Tai Pang-yung, "Ch'ang-sha-fu Ta-chueh she-ts'ang shih-mo," in YLTT 7510/22b; Shu Lin, "Yu Ch'en ts'ang lun ch'ang-p'ing," Shu Wen-ching chi , hsia/10b. On Champa rice, see Ho Ping-ti, "Early Ripening Rice in Chinese History," Economic History Review , 2nd series, 9, no. 2 (1956): 210-11; Francesca Bray, Agriculture , in Joseph Needham, gen. ed., Science and Civilisation in China , vol. 6, part 2, p. 486; Chang Hsueh-ch'eng and Wei Hung-chao, "Lun Sung-tai Fu-chien shan-ch'ü ching-chi-ti fa-chan," Nung-ye k'ao-ku , 1986, no. 1:65.

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crop producers, peasants depended on the harvest and market demand to ensure a sufficient income; as rice consumers, they were ensnared in a cycle of price movements and debt that threatened to eviscerate their subsistence resources.

The annual oscillation in rice prices proved entirely unfavorable to peasants on the margin of subsistence who needed to borrow grain to feed their families during the lean summer months. Peasants dependent on such loans were forced to sell cheap and borrow dear. To use an example from 1167, a peasant would contract a loan denominated in cash for one picul (66.4 liters) of rice during the spring, when his resources approached exhaustion and the price of rice reached its apogee of 5,000 cash per picul. By the time the peasant gathered in his harvest, however, prices dropped to the range of merely 1,200-1,300 cash per picul. Thus the peasant had to sell four piculs of grain simply to repay the principal on a loan of one picul, let alone interest charges ranging from 50 to 100 percent.^[4] Few alternatives existed in isolated rural areas where credit institutions were underdeveloped and moneylenders held sufficient leverage to demand and obtain exorbitant rates of interest. Compelled to sell his grain immediately after the harvest, when prices were low, the peasant once again lacked an adequate reserve of food for his family the following spring.

In a letter to Wei Shan-chih written in the 1160s, Chu Hsi commented that even after excellent harvests the "small folk" of Ch'ung-an bore a heavy burden of debt.^[5] In times of dearth sheer survival became the most pressing concern. Ordinarily Chien-ning and the other three inland prefectures of Fu-chien (T'ing, Nan-chien, and Shao-wu) enjoyed abundant harvests and low prices, unlike the coastal areas, which depended on imported grain from Kuang-tung to meet basic subsistence needs.^[6] Chen Te-hsiu, writing in the 1230s, reported that Chien-yang and Ch'ung-an counties were reputed to be surplus-producing areas, but when harvests fell below normal yields grain prices doubled.^[7] Of course imported grain could be ac-

[4] SHY, shih-huo 58/5a. For a similar example, dating from 1133, see WHTK 26/256. Roughly speaking, during the period of relatively stable prices between 1145 and 1205 (a trough preceded and followed by bursts of rapid inflation) postharvest prices ranged between 1,220 and 1,500 cash per picul, while spring prices typically rose to 3,000-4,000 cash/picul (rising as high as 5,000-7,000 cash/picul in famine years): Ch'üan Han-sheng, "Nan-Sung ch'u-nien wu-chia-ti ta pien-tung," Chung-kuo ching-chi-shih lun-ts'ung , pp. 235-63; Ch'üan, "Sung-mo t'ung-huo p'eng-chang chi-ch'i tui-yü wu-chia-ti ying-hsiang," ibid., pp. 325-54.

[5] "Yü Wei Yuan-fu shu," CWKWC 24/18a-b.

[6] In 1171, for instance, relief grain from public stores in Chien-ning was shipped to the coastal prefectures: SHY, shih-huo 61/125a. On grain deficits in coastal Fu-chien, see the documents cited in Shiba Yoshinobu, Sodai shogyoshi kenkyu , pp. 161-62 (summarized in Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China , p. 61), and Lin-t'ing chih (1258), cited in YLTT 7890/19b.

[7] "Tsou-ch'i po P'ing-chiang Pai-wan-ts'ang mi chen-t'iao Fu-chien ssu-chou chuang," HSCWC 15/20a-b.

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quired only at great cost. Even in coastal Hsing-hua prefecture, readily accessible by oceangoing vessels, the populace bitterly resented the "southern ships" from Kuang-tung, which brought rice during times of scarcity only to sell it at exorbitant prices.^[8] Chien-ning's remote location in the mountainous interior rendered dependence on imported foodstuffs even more unreliable. Most vexing of all was the problem of supplying food to the rural hinterland, which ironically suffered from the most acute shortages. The market system that functioned smoothly in funneling Chien-ning's rice to Fu-chou's metropolitan consumers proved less tractable in distributing relief grain to stricken peasants. In a letter to his friend Fu Tzu-te (1116-1183), prefect of Chien-ning in the mid-1170s, Chu noted with dismay that all available stocks of relief grain were distributed only within the county seat Ch'ung-an and the market town Huang-t'ing, with nothing left over for the countryside.^[9] The practice of barring the export of grain, though strictly speaking illegal, was widely employed by local officials anxious to shore up local grain stocks and prevent arbitrage.^[10] At the time of the 1167-1168 famine Chu recalled that in 1162 and 1163 the prefect had strictly enforced a ban on the shipment of rice out of rural areas, a measure that angered officials in Fu-chou who counted on Chien-ning to contribute to their food supply. Chu did not condone this practice; on the contrary, he believed that the government must have recourse to the marketing system to bring grain to distressed areas. Chu recommended that officials in Chien-ning prepare in advance to purchase rice in Kuang-tung or along the Liang-che coast to keep local granaries full.^[11] As a last resort he proposed that the authorities commission local magnates—who in normal times conducted a thriving trade in smuggled salt—to use their contacts to procure grain in eastern Kuang-tung and haul it over the mountains to Chien-ning.^[12] Yet in spite of all the efforts to ensure an ample supply of rice, subsistence crises—too minor to receive recognition in the official annals of famine relief—regularly beset Chien-ning.

[8] Liu K'o-chuang, "Hsing-hua-chün ch'uang p'ing-t'iao-ts'ang," Hou-ts'un hsien-sheng tach'üan wen-chi , 88/12a-13b.

[9] "Yü Chien-ning Fu shou cha-tzu," CWKWC 25/11a; see also "Ta Huang Tzu-hou," CWKWC, hsu-chi 7/la-b.

[10] For complaints about this practice and the resulting obstruction of the private grain trade, see CHSC 52/15b; "Ch'i chin-chih e-ti chuang," CWKWC 21/1b-2a; "Shen chu-ssu ch'i hsing-hsia Chiang-hsi pu-hsu e-ti," CWKWC, pieh-chi 9/22b-23a; P'eng Kuei-nien, "Lun Huai-Che han-liao ch'i t'ung mi-shang . . . ," Chih-t'ang chi , 5/12a-13b; "Tsou-ch'i fen-chou ts'o-chih huang-cheng shih," HSCWC 6/23b-24a; HMS 2/32-33 (for a fuller discussion of Tung Wei's opposition to the interdiction of grain shipments out of the locality, see chapter 7 in this volume).

[11] "Yü Lin Tse-chih shu," CWKWC 27/4a-5a.

[12] "Yü Chien-ning chu-ssu lun chen-chi cha-tzu," CWKWC 25/9a-1 la.

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The daunting problem of inadequate food reserves facing officials in the Fu-chien interior was compounded by the volatile social chemistry of the region. The ranges of the Wu-i Mountains, particularly in the south along the borders of Kuang-tung and Chiang-hsi circuits, had long been infamous for their lairs of fierce bandits, salt smugglers, and She tribesmen.^[13] Although salt was the staple of this surreptitious economy, the bandit princes of the mountains dealt in all kinds of contraband, from South Seas exotica to slaves. The law-abiding inhabitants joined together in "covenants of duty" (i-she ) to fend off the depredations of the bandits, but in so doing fell under the thrall of powerful magnates. The region justly deserved the epithet "ungovernable."^[14] T'ing, the southernmost of the interior prefectures, was considered the most barbaric: "Though part of our King's realm, in truth it differs not a whir from the 'haltered-and-bridled' [non-Han] jurisdictions beyond the pale of civilization" wrote Chu.^[15] At home at his retreat in Ch'ung-an in 1188 Chu Hsi witnessed the brutal mayhem of rioters who seized the granaries of the rich during a terrible famine.^[16] In founding his community granary Chu no doubt hoped to provide an alternative to the all too common survival strategies of migration, banditry, rent revolts, food riots, and infanticide and bring some measure of civilization to this remote and poor land.

The Failings of Normative Systems of State Welfare

Beginning in the early eleventh century, the Sung government developed a broad range of policies and programs to cope with periodic subsistence crises. The most common form of government assistance for stricken rural areas was to remit the Twice-a-Year land taxes and extraordinary levies such as the poll tax. Yet crop failures wrought havoc with the subsistence economy, not simply because of a decrease in the peasant's ability to pay his social dues, but also because of the resulting scarcity of food. The peasant's most vital concern again was not a problem of production but

[13] Hua Shan, "Nan-Sung Shao-ting Tuan-p'ing chien-ti Chiang, Min, Kuang nung-min ta ch'i-i," Wen shih che , 1957, no. 3:41-48.

[14] Huang Kan, "Chien-ning she-ts'ang li-ping," Mien-chai hsien-sheng Huang Wen-su kung wen-chi , 15/18a; Yuan i-t'ung-chih , cited in YLTT 7890/1 la; Pa-min t'ung-chih (1491), 61/18a. For similar covenants organized by local magnates in the Nanling Mountains of southern Hunan, see Richard von Glahn, "The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Geography, Settlement, and the Civilizing of China's Southwestern Frontier, 1000-1250," pp. 307-13.

[15] "Yü Chang Ting-sou shu," CWKWC 27/21a-b. Chu later commented that circuit intendants refused to enter T'ing out of fear of bandits and malaria: "Yun-p'an Sung kung mu-chih-ming," CWKWC 93/22a.

[16] "Yü Wang ts'ao shu," CWKWC 27/22b.

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rather one of consumption. The most important normative institutions of rural relief, then, were ones designed to increase the amount of rice in circulation: the Ever-Normal Granaries (ch'ang-p'ing-ts'ang ) and the charitable granaries (i-ts'ang ).

The Ever-Normal Granaries functioned as price-stabilizing mechanisms. The state attempted to maintain an equilibrium between returns to producers and costs to consumers through regular market intervention. As was noted above, grain prices reached their lowest level during the autumn harvest season and peaked during the spring and summer as the reserves of peasant households approached the brink of utter depletion. In the spring of years of dearth the state sold grain from the Ever-Normal Granaries to prevent exorbitant increases in food prices. The income from these sales was used in years of plenty to purchase rice immediately after the harvest, thus increasing demand and guaranteeing a satisfactory price to producers. In general the state purchased rice at prices slightly above (2-10 percent) the market rate in the autumn, and sold it at a discount of one-third off prevailing prices during the spring.^[17] The state also used the resources of the Ever-Normal Granaries to sell or loan grain to low-income households. Under both the "relief sales" (chen-t'iao ) and "relief loans" (chen-tai ) programs no individual was permitted to acquire more than three piculs (199 liters), in an effort to forestall rice brokers from hoarding food supplies desperately needed by the poor.^[18] During the Southern Sung, responsibility for the operation of the Ever-Normal Granaries rested with the granary intendant (t'i-chü ch'ang-p'ing shih ) of each circuit. Although the intendant submitted recommendations to the court on how the resources of the region under his jurisdiction ought to be used, only the court could authorize disbursement of Ever-Normal Granary stocks. The decision-making process in the famine relief administration often foundered in a web of interminable bureaucratic procedures. The crucial importance of timing in providing relief magnified the effect of administrative delays on the part of the state. Ssu-ma Kuang, writing in 1086, succinctly described the effect of the state's frequently dilatory response to petitions for relief:

At the beginning of the harvest season the cultivators need cash and are anxious to sell their grain. We should direct government officials to offer to purchase rice at a price slightly above the prevailing rate and thus prevent the stockpilers from procuring all of it. . . . Yet only after the granaries and storehouses of the stockpilers are filled to the point of overflowing does the government suddenly raise prices and buy grain. For this reason the cultivator markets his grain and obtains only a meager profit. When the government buys

[17] SHY, shih-huo 53/19a, 53/32a, 58/2b.

[18] Directive of 1086: HMS 2/26-27.

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grain, it usually sets a price above the market rate. Thus the profits all wind up in the hands of the stockpilers [who had bought grain cheaply from the cultivators and then sold it to the state]. Moreover, even though there are officials who wish to seize the opportunity to purchase grain, the magistrate must first notify the prefect, who must notify the judicial intendant, who in turn must notify the Court of Husbandry to obtain the authorizing directive and then send back a reply. The formal procedures carry on for months, while the opportunity has already been lost, and the price of rice has doubled.^[19]

In addition, the granaries' location in the prefectural and county seats restricted the geographic range of relief sales and loans. Complaints that the distribution of Ever-Normal Granary stocks never extended beyond the city walls were legion.^[20]

Aside from the price-stabilizing functions of the Ever-Normal Granaries, the state provided interest-free loans and direct subsidies (chen-chi ) through the charitable-granary system. The charitable granaries served as a perennial system of poor relief for the chronically indigent: orphans, widows, invalids, the homeless aged, and paupers. The system was established by imperial decree in the 1040s and funded through a 5 percent surcharge on the Twice-a-Year taxes of property owners.^[21] As a result agriculturally rich areas with a substantial tax base could accumulate considerable reserves, while the ability of charitable granaries in poorer districts to meet the needs of indigent inhabitants was constrained by their limited endowments. A local gazetteer from Hu-chou describes how the charitable granaries operated at the close of the twelfth century:

The charitable-granary rice payments are stored in the Western Granary to provide for the needs of registered paupers (ch'i-kai yu-chi-che ). The old, infirm, and ill who have no family to return to are also accepted there as inmates. . . . In 1133 the prefect Wang Hui rebuilt the granary within the Feng-sheng Gate. In all it consists of twenty-seven bays (chien ), and has become popularly known as the Beneficent Providence Asylum (li-chi-yuan ). [Wang] set aside arable lands, the rent from which would be used to support and maintain the asylum, and deputed the monk Hsing-ke to assume management of its receipts and disbursements. Approximately forty people resided permanently at the Beneficent Providence Asylum in 1201, each of whom received 500 cash and six tou (40 liters) of rice per month. In addition the asylum allocated one picul of rice per month to women who adopted abandoned children, and arranged for physicians to visit and administer to foster children.

[19] Ssu-ma Kuang, "Ch'i ch'en-shih shou-ti ch'ang-p'ing hu-tou pai-cha-tzu," Ssu-ma Wen-cheng-kung ch'üan-chia chi , 56/681. See also the corroborative appraisals of Southern Sung observers, such as Liao Kang, Ou-yang Shou-tao, and Wei Ching, in Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China , pp. 69-70.

[20] CHSC 26/25a; SHY, shih-huo 58/2b, 58/3b (both for 1164), 58/5b (for 1168); HMS 2/26.

[21] SHY, shih-huo 53/31b.

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As a part of their continuing campaign to provide for unwanted children, the asylum directors offered rewards of one hundred cash to anyone reporting abandoned children in the alleys of the city.^[22]

Besides their perennial responsibility for the chronically indigent the charitable granaries distributed food to the destitute during periods of famine or natural disaster. Unlike the Ever-Normal Granaries, the charitable granaries appear to have been dispersed evenly throughout rural areas.^[23] In the event of harvest failure the prefect sent out inspectors to determine which households were unable to meet their subsistence needs. Those who qualified for public relief were allowed to go on the dole beginning in the eleventh month, with each adult receiving one liter of rice every five days until the end of the third month of the following year.^[24] Distribution of grain was entrusted to Buddhist monks or the village officers. Despite the proximity of the charitable granaries to the people they supposedly served, corruption in the distribution process often thwarted the actual dispensation of relief grain. Contemporary observers often inveighed against the malfeasance of government supernumeraries and village officers.^[25] Tung Wei included in his Book for Relieving Famine and Reviving the People (ca. 1201-1204) a schedule of punishments for fraudulent relief claims, the heaviest of which was meted out to village officers who composed fictitious petitions for relief.^[26]

Although the central government strove to keep the Ever-Normal Granaries and the charitable granaries functionally distinct, in practice the two funds often were used interchangeably, resulting in administrative disorder and fiscal insolvency. A common complaint centered on the appropriation of charitable-granary endowments for purposes unrelated to charity. A well-intentioned edict of 1156 permitted the granary intendants to sell off charitable-granary stocks in danger of spoiling. Objections that once converted to cash the charitable-granary funds could be easily diverted to alternative uses went unheeded.^[27] The problem of misappropriation was even more acute in the case of the Ever-Normal Granaries, since the granary intendants managed a fiscal administration that extended well beyond the domain of famine relief. In 1172 the executive of the Board of Revenue,

[22] Chia-t'ai Wu-hsing chih , 8/6b-7b. Poor relief and poorhouses received sponsorship from the central government beginning in the first decade of the twelfth century: Hugh Scogin, "Poor Relief in Northern Sung China," Oriens Extremus 25, no. 1 (1978): 30-35.

[23] According to Chih-shun Chen-chiang chih (ca. 1330), 13/22a-24b, only two of Chen-chiang's ninety-six charitable granaries were located in the prefectural seat; the rest were distributed throughout "the markets, cantons, and wards" of its three subordinate counties.

[24] HMS 2/28.

[25] HMS 2/29; Fu-chou fu-chih , cited in YLTT 10950/5b.

[26] HMS 2/45.

[27] HMS 1/21.

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Yang Yen, reported that preliminary investigations had uncovered diversions of substantial Ever-Normal-Granary resources for unauthorized purposes. Yang dispatched investigators to each prefecture to impound and scrutinize local granary records for the preceding five years. Any cases of large disbursements of granary funds during years of normal harvests were to be turned over to the censorate for formal investigation.^[28] An audit of Hsin-chou's account-books revealed that 25,000 piculs, or 27 percent, of the prefecture's Ever-Normal-Granary stocks could not be accounted for.^[29] In light of the volume of memorials criticizing local misappropriations of granary resources to meet quotas for taxes and army supplies or other fiscal exigencies, such practices must have gained considerable currency.^[30] In the Southern Sung the state decentralized famine relief procedures in an effort to respond more efficiently to particular local circumstances. This devolution of relief administration was consistent with the growing autonomy of the village within the state apparatus of social control.^[31] The tu-pao system of rural administration, promulgated in 1095 and retained in its essentials under the pao-wu system in the Southern Sung, was based on a new administrative unit, the ward (tu ). The ward became the basic unit for land surveys, tax assessment and collection, disaster relief, assignment of service duties, and administration of justice. Each ward comprised a group of villages represented by a ward chief (tu-pao-cheng , also referred to as li-cheng ) selected on a rotating basis from among the first-rank master households and directly responsible to the county magistrate. The ward chiefs, together with other village officers and families of government officials (kuan-hu ), formed a new rural elite, the "influential households" (hsing-shih-hu ), a status duly recognized by the state.^[32]

Under regulations issued in 1163 the ward chiefs and quadrant officers

[28] CHSC 51/9b-10a. In 1150 the court formulated a strongly worded statement forbidding the apparently common practice of loaning Ever-Normal-Granary rice to rice brokers: HMS 2/26.

[29] SHY, shih-huo 53/32a. A later audit recovered another 12,900 piculs (perhaps returned by the miscreants). In all, 12,100 piculs, or 13 percent of Hsin-chou's granary reserves, were lost: CHSC 55/14a-b.

[30] In 1182 the Fu-chien granary intendant reported that the three most common abuses of the Ever-Normal-Granary system were: (1) untimely transfers of funds to other agencies; (2) allocation of funds for purposes unrelated to relief; and (3) disbursal of grain stocks to feed the chronically needy (properly the responsibility of the charitable granary system): SHY, shih-huo 43/40b.

[31] von Glahn, "The Country of Streams and Grottoes," pp. 218-23; Satake Yasuhiko, "Sodai kyoson seido no keisei katei," Toyoshi kenkyu 25, no. 3 (1966): 244-74.

[32] Sudo Yoshiyuki, "NanSo kyoto no zeisei to tochi shoyu," Sodai keizaishi kenkyu , pp. 545-46; Yanagida Setsuko, "Kyosonsei no tenkai," Sekai rekishi 9, 309-43; Yanagida, "Sodai keiseiko no kosei" Toyoshi kenkyu 27, no. 3 (1968): 272-91; Brian McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China .

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(yü-kuan )^[33] were required to draw up cadastral surveys known as fish-scale charts (yü-lin-t'u ) for the purpose of registering property holdings and determining which persons within their jurisdiction were eligible for relief purchases, loans, or subsidies.^[34] Chu Hsi's disciple Huang Kan, trying to cope with a severe famine in Han-yang prefecture in 1213-1214, directed village officers to group the population into the following four categories: category A possessed surplus food resources; category B had sufficient food to meet the household's needs; category C needed to make relief purchases; category D qualified for subsidies. Households in category C were permitted to purchase up to six tou of rice at half the prevailing price from the beginning of the eleventh month to the end of the third month, while those in category D received allowances of three tou per month beginning in the ninth month. Similar classification procedures, including the creation of "relief sale stations" (chen-t'iao-ch'ang ) scattered across the countryside, were implemented by Chu Hsi in 1180 during his tenure as prefect of Nan-k'ang. Compilation of the registers and supervision of relief sale stations were the responsibility of the quadrant officers and ward chiefs, while the canton clerk (hsiang-kuan ) supervised the activities of each ward within his bailiwick. The magistrate allocated grain for famine relief out of the stores of the Ever-Normal Granaries as well as the charitable granaries, further evidence of the functional confusion between the two systems.^[35]

Yet rather than making relief administration more responsive to local needs, decentralization created even more impediments to the efficient and equitable distribution of aid. Village officers responsible for compiling lists of needy households extorted fees from the indigent and entered on the relief roles the names of anyone who paid a bribe, whether needy or not.^[36] Tung Wei castigated quadrant officers and ward chiefs who would not request relief grain because of their reluctance to foot the bill for shipment costs from the county seat.^[37] Chu Hsi added the accusation that corrupt quadrant officers and ward chiefs siphoned off relief grain into the storehouses of the well-to-do.^[38]

As normative institutions of famine relief broke down, the state, not surprisingly, turned to coercive measures to appropriate private stores of grain

[33] Originally the quadrant officers were appointed to supervise police and fire-fighting activities within walled towns. In the Southern Sung, however, many localities divided their rural precincts into "quadrants" (yü ) roughly equivalent to the canton (hsiang ) unit. Thus the quadrant officers in many places served as the functional equivalent of canton clerks: Suds Yoshiyuki, "NanSo no hogoho," ToSo shakai keizaishi kenkyu , pp. 699-712.

[34] Ibid., p. 726.

[35] Shiba Yoshinobu, "Kosei no chiikishi—Kanyogun (1213-14) no jirei," Toyo gakuho 66, nos. 1-4 (1985): 309-10; Sudo, "NanSo no hogoho," pp. 726-27.

[36] Chou-hsien t'i-kang , 2/25.

[37] HMS 2/26.

[38] "Yü Hsing-tzu chu-hsien i huang-cheng shu," CWKWC 26/24a.

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for public assistance. Southern Sung documents are replete with pleas beseeching the "superior households" (shang-hu ) to put their surplus grain on the market. The term "superior household" designated the two highest brackets (out of a total of five) of property-owning taxpayers, a group that accounted for at most 10 percent of rural property owners.^[39] The most common, but least dependable, policy was that of "exhortations to share" (ch'üan-fen ). The government rewarded with honorary titles persons who sold their stocks of grain, but presumably local officials also resorted to informal pressures to draw hidden caches into the marketplace.^[40] In some instances the state mandated that the wealthiest households market a certain percentage of their stores,^[41] or sell rice directly to the state relief agencies under the rubric of "harmonious purchases" (ho-ti ).^[42]

Despite all of these injunctions, few parted with their hoards. The balance sheets for famine relief in two Chiang-tung prefectures in 1171 show that charitable granaries provided 75 percent of total relief resources. Private contributions ranged from 15 percent down to virtually nothing. Tung Wei, among others, pointed out that the policy of compulsory sales was counterproductive; it exacerbated scarcity by driving away grain traders. Tung advocated reliance on market incentives rather than government sanctions or subventions. In his capacity as a local administrator Chu Hsi did endorse coercive measures to compel the wealthy to sell grain during times of famine.^[43] But Chu readily admitted that market incentives produced better results than state-run relief programs.^[44] Beyond the immediate concern with famine crises, though, Chu stressed the need to confront endemic

[39] Estimate based on Umehara Kaoru, "Sodai no kadosei o megutte," Tohogakuho 41 (1970): 389.

[40] For various schedules of compensation, see HMS 2/37-38; Sung shih 178/4341.

[41] In 1164 owners of more than 10,000 mu of land in the lower Yangtze valley were required to sell 3,000 piculs, while those who possessed from 8,000 to 10,000 mu were ordered to sell 1,500 piculs: SHY, shih-huo 58/3a.

[42] In 1165, for example, the state purchased 300,000 piculs, roughly one-third to one-half of the annual income for the relief administration, through "harmonious purchases" in Liang-che and Chiang-hsi/tung: SHY, shih-huo 58/3b.

[43] The contrasting views of Chu Hsi and Tung Wei on "exhortations to share" are discussed in chapter 7 in this volume.

[44] Consider, for example, the following letter from Chu to Chao Ju-yü, ca. 1185 ("Yü Chao shuai shu," CWKWC 27/7a): "[Recently] considerable grain has come from Liang-che, and market prices have dropped sharply. The local people rejoice in their good fortune. But an astute and far-sighted person should be concerned that in the future the grain may not arrive in time; the prosperity of the entire circuit hangs in the balance. I say that we must take measures to ensure that there will be an ample supply of grain on hand. The government should raise prices and make purchases to induce grain merchants to come. Compared with the expense and losses incurred through government transport of relief grain over ocean routes and upstream to the interior, the cost [of higher market prices] certainly would not amount to much."

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problems, such as usurious rates of interest, which underlay peasant misery. Like Wang An-shih, Chu was determined to break the monopoly on credit exercised by a nefarious class of "engrossers" (chien-ping-che ).^[45] In Chu's mind this goal could be accomplished only by reinvigorating the moral ethos of village society.

Evolution of The Community Granary as An Instrument of Local Subsistence Relief

The inadequacy of the Ever-Normal and charitable granary systems hardly came as a surprise to Chu Hsi, who harbored an abiding skepticism of the efficacy of centralized, state-run relief institutions, particularly given what he viewed as the shallow-minded leadership of the current regime in Hang-chou.^[46] What caused Chu much greater unease was the failure of local notables to exercise the moral leadership proper to their station. At the time of the 1167 famine in Ch'ung-an, Chu despaired that "nowadays those who eat meat heedlessly give no thought to the plight of the people. It certainly is hard to give an explanation for this situation."^[47] Perplexed by what he saw as the anomalous moral indifference of the natural leaders of local society, Chu set out to create an institution that would restore the ruptured bonds between members of the rural community.

In keeping with the basic tenets of Confucian social theory, Chu Hsi strongly endorsed vertical solidarity within the family, clan, and village and underscored the reciprocal commitments to communal welfare incumbent upon members of these communities. This notion of a moral economy, in which the wealthiest members of the group bear a moral obligation to provide subsistence insurance to their less fortunate brethren, also is implicit in official admonitions enjoining the superior households to share their resources with the poor. Proclamations issued by Chu in his official capacities were entirely consonant with imperial decrees in this respect. While prefect at Nan-k'ang, Chu urged the superior households to provide for the welfare of their own extended household, including their tenants (tien-k'e ), bondservant fieldworkers (ti-k'e ), and sharecroppers (huo-k'e ).^[48] Once the needs of

[45] Wang's "Green Sprouts" loan program was expressly designed to wrest control over credit away from the engrossers; see chapter 2 in this volume. Tung Wei expressed great enthusiasm for the community granary as a means of achieving this objective: HMS, shih-i 91.

[46] For Chu's views on the political leadership of his day, see Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Career," passim.

[47] "Ta Lin Tse-chih," CWKWC 43/18a.

[48] This term frequently has been misread as designating bondservants who cultivate virgin lands using fire-field techniques. The recent work of Liu Ch'ung-jih demonstrates that huo-k'e were groups of tenants working the lands of a common landlord in areas of labor scarcity. Although their contracts specified various personal services owed the landlord, the huo-k'e were not bound to him: Liu, "Huo-tien hsin-t'an," Li-shih yen-chiu , 1982, no. 2:113-25.

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these groups had been met, the superior households were expected to sell any remaining surplus grain to the distressed population at large.^[49] Yet Chu himself admitted that the superior households failed to live up to their moral duty as paterfamilias.^[50] Indeed, in a memorial to the emperor written in 1188 Chu gloomily declaimed against the subversion of the bonds of mutual affection and dependence by suspicion and hostility: "In recent years we hear of cases where wives have murdered husbands, grandsons have murdered grandfathers, and bondservants have murdered their landlords."^[51] Existing social institutions had clearly failed to regulate social conduct.

In elaborating the concept of the community granary Chu Hsi stressed the importance of entrusting the granary's operations to men of high moral character, without whom any organizational plan was doomed to fail. At the same time, in his sample outline of regulations for community granaries, he detailed a complicated set of checks and superintendences designed to minimize the potential for peculation and favoritism. The execution of these meticulous procedures hinged on the cooperation of the magistrate's yamen, village officers, and a community headman (she-shou ) specially appointed to manage the granaries.^[52]

Chu's plan simply grafted the organizational structure of the community granaries onto the existing pao-wu system of rural administration. Eligibility for loans was determined by consulting the cadastral registers compiled by the village officers. In other cases the community headman, in consultation with members of discrete chia units, decided how much each family would be allowed to borrow.^[53] The index of economic deprivation varied considerably. In Ch'ung-an only those who had taxable property valued at less than six hundred cash were permitted to borrow grain, while in Ch'ang-sha the maximum standard was set at ownership of twenty mu of land.^[54] Chu insisted on restricting relief to those who lacked any source of income apart from cultivating the land. Thus he advocated the exclusion of superior households, soldiers, yamen clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, and Buddhist and Taoist clergy.^[55] Apparently those who drew up regulations for community granaries largely abided by these guidelines.^[56] Attitudes toward landless

[49] "Ch'uan-yu chiu-huang," CWKWC 99/10a-11a; "Ch'üan-nung-wen," CWKWC 100/ 11a.

[50] "Yueh-shu t'iao-mi chi chieh-lueh pang," CWKWC 99/26a-27a.

[51] "Wu-shen Yen-he tsou-cha," CWKWC 14/1b.

[52] Chu Hsi, "She-ts'ang shih-mu," in YLTT 7510/2b-7b.

[53] "She-ts'ang shih-mu," in YLTT 7510/2b; "Chin-hua she-ts'ang kuei-yueh," cited in HMS, shih-i 94; "Ch'ing-chiang-hsien she-ts'ang kuei-yueh," cited in HMS, shih-i 95.

[54] "She-ts'ang shih-mu," in YLTT 7510/2b; Lu-chiang chih , cited in YLTT 7510/23b-24a.

[55] "Yü Chien-ning chu-ssu lun chen-chi cha-tzu," CWKWC 25/9a-11a.

[56] "Chin-hua she-ts'ang kuei-yueh," in HMS, shih-i 94; Jui-yang chih , cited in YLTT 7510/ 32b.

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peasants were mixed. In Lin-chiang (Chiang-hsi) they were excluded, but in Nan-an (also Chiang-hsi) hired laborers could apply for assistance from the community granary.^[57] A community granary in sparsely populated Kuang-hsi permitted only landowners to receive loans.^[58]

Beyond fulfilling eligibility requirements, applicants also were required to obtain the sponsorship of several guarantors. Liability for defaulted loans fell upon the other members of the debtor's chia unit.^[59] In this as in many other respects the community granaries relied on the obligations of mutual responsibility imbedded in the pao-wu system, and indeed within the rural social structure as a whole. Custodians of the state granary systems, however altruistic their intentions might have been, could not hope to achieve such intimate contact with both the privileged rural elite and the small-holders, tenants, and bondservants who depended on them for relief.

Chu Hsi's community-granary concept, while gaining instant celebrity, did not in its own time enjoy the unalloyed praise lavished on it by later generations of Confucian intellectuals. Vigorous criticism was voiced by none other than Wei Shan-chih, who cautioned Chu against emulating the aggrandizing fiscal policies of Wang An-shih. The substance of Wei's objection was that in levying interest charges of 20 percent on loans to indigent peasants Chu essentially resurrected the much-vilified "Green Sprouts" program of rural credit assistance; Wei's own community granary exacted no interest whatsoever.^[60] Lü Tsu-ch'ien, visiting Chu's retreat at P'ing-shan in 1175, admired the workings of the community granary but chided Chu for relying on grain and funds supplied by the state. Luü professed that a collegium of local patricians (hsiang-jen shih-yu ) should subscribe the necessary capital and direct the granary's affairs.^[61] Even Chu Hsi's defenders expressed unease with some features of the system. His close friend Chang Shih (1133-1180) rebuked Chu's detractors for equating the community granary with Wang's policies, but at the same time warned Chu not to succumb to the temptation (as Wang An-shih had) to turn his granary concept into a universally applicable model for institutional reform.^[62]

Harsh criticism from his peers within the Tao-hsueh circle clearly stung

[57] "Ch'ing-chiang-hsien she-ts'ang kuei-yueh," in HMS, shih-i 95; Jui-yang chih , in YLTT 7510/32b. Chen Te-hsiu noted that "the distressed people who own no land" were excluded in Ch'ang-sha: "Ch'üan-li i-k'u wen," HSCWC 40/12a.

[58] Wang Hsiang-chih, Yü-ti chi-sheng , 113/3b.

[59] "She-ts'ang shih-mu," in YLTT 7510/3a. In Chin-hua each member of the chia was compelled to pay an equal share in compensation, with the headman paying a double share: "Chin-hua she-ts'ang kuei-yueh," in HMS, shih-i 94.

[60] The debate between Chu and Wei is summarized in Wang Po, "She-ts'ang li-hai shu," Lu-chai Wang Wen-hsien kung wen-chi , 7/9b-10b. Note the similarity between Chu's defense of interest charges and Wang An-shih's views on the same issue (chap. 2).

[61] "Wu-chou Chin-hua-hsien she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/17a.

[62] Chang Shih, "Ta Chu Yuan-huai mi-shu," Nan-hsien hsien-sheng wen-chi , 20/10a-13a.

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Chu. He countered Wei Shan-chih's objections by emphasizing that failure to collect interest would surely result in insolvency. Nonetheless, Chu modified the interest schedule to mollify his critics. In his 1182 memorial to the emperor he proposed that interest charges be reduced to 10 percent if the harvest fell below normal yields, or remitted entirely in the event of serious famine. Once accumulated interest receipts enabled the managers to repay the initial investors, no further interest would be collected.^[63] Many granary networks based on Chu's model forgave interest charges after the initial capital was paid Off,^[64] On the other hand, Lu Chiu-yuan, writing in 1188, regarded the community granaries as readily susceptible to bankruptcy because of the high rate of default in the event of harvest failure. In Lu's view there was no alternative except to replenish community granaries with periodic infusions of funds from price-stabilizing granaries.^[65] The interest issue continued to provoke heated debate in the thirteenth century. Liu K'o-chuang in 1233 again chastised Chu Hsi for charging interest and held up as a more exemplary model the interest-free community granary founded in that year in Hsing-hua.^[66]

Chu Hsi's manifest sympathy for Wang An-shih's stated intentions, if not for his concrete policies, made him all the more defensive about the community-granary concept. In 1185 he wrote an essay to answer his critics and demonstrate the substantial differences between the community granary and the "Green Sprouts" loan program. Chu identified four ways in which the community granary corrected flaws in Wang's policies: (1) instead of making loans in cash, the community granaries lent grain, thus sparing borrowers catastrophic losses due to the vagaries of commodity prices; (2) in an effort to make the credit system more responsive to local needs, Chu based it on the canton administrative unit rather than the county; (3) to guarantee sufficient autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic skulduggery, the operation of the granaries was entrusted to local patricians, not to government officials or their hirelings; (4) rather than serve the state, with its myopic priority on generating additional revenue, the community granary was predicated on a genuine sense of compassion for the distress of the unfortunate. Chu concluded that although Wang's system proved successful during Wang's tenure as magistrate of Ning-po, its inherent flaws resulted in disaster when Wang tried to introduce it on an

[63] "Hsin-ch'ou yen-he tsou-che (4)," CWKWC 13/17b.

[64] "Chin-hua she-ts'ang kui-yueh," in HMS, shih-i 94; I-ch'un chih (ca. 1221-1222), in YLTT 7510/13b-14a; P'o-yang chih (ca. 1214-1216), in YLTT 7510/18a-b; Yuan Hsieh, "Pa Wu Huai-fu she-ts'ang," cited in YLTT 7510/1 la-b.

[65] Robert P. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 155.

[66] Liu K'e-chuang, "Hsing-hua-chun ch'uang p'ing-t'iao-ts'ang," Hou-ts'un hsien-sheng wen-chi , 88/12a-13b.

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empire-wide scale. Ignoring Chang Shih's admonition on exactly this point, Chu remained confident that his proposals would succeed where Wang An-shih's failed.^[67]

In the final analysis, Chu repeatedly affirmed, the success of the community granary would depend on "enlightened laws imbued with compassion and benevolence, and selfless and trustworthy patricians of discerning intelligence."^[68] The detailed rules he presented to the court in 1181 were offered as a set of guidelines that ought to be amended as local conditions and customs dictated. Only after close investigation of prevailing circumstances could the patrician caretakers develop institutions that would satisfy the actual needs of the community.^[69] Chu's organizational plan was devoid of any bureaucratic ethos. Devotion to principled service, in his mind, implied, not unambiguous performance of delegated duties within a codified institutional framework, but rather a transcendence of bureaucratic behavior.

The Community Granary in Action

The original granary at Ch'ung-an prospered, but not until ten years after its founding did Chu begin to promote the community granary as a national policy for rural relief. In January 1182, while serving as intendant for Ever-Normal Granaries, Tea, and Salt in eastern Liang-che, Chu petitioned the emperor to adopt the community granary on an empire-wide basis. With little hesitation the court formally accepted Chu's recommendation and directed all prefectures throughout the realm to establish community granaries. But Chu's factional opponents at the capital succeeded in blocking state subsidies, effectively killing official sponsorship of the program. Lu

[67] "Wu-chou Chin-hua-hsien she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/17a-18b. The debate over the relative merits of the "Green Sprouts" system and the community granaries remained very much alive in eighteenth-century discussions of relief policies. While majority opinion still championed Chu's point of view, it is worth pointing out that Ch'ing commentators endorsed a far more significant role for the commercial system and merchants (as individuals or through their guilds) than Chu Hsi (or, indeed, Wang An-shih) would allow. See R. Bin Wong and Peter Perdue, "Famine's Foes in Ch'ing China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (1983): 312-15. For representative eighteenth-century views on this issue, see Ho Ch'ang-ling et al., Huang-ch'ao ching-shih wen-pien , 40/7a-16a.

[68] "Ch'ang-chou I-hsing-hsien she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 80/18a; see also Chu Hsi, Chu-tzu yü-lei , 106/4b.

[69] "Hsin-ch'ou yen-he tsou-che (4)," CWKWC 13/18a; "Chien-ning-fu Chien-yang-hsien Ta-shan she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/21a; "Shao-wu-chün Kuang-tse-hsien she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 80/9a. Two leading Japanese scholars interpret Chu's stress on the need for personal inspection and investigation as a concrete application of his epistemological imperative ke-wu , "investigation of things": Kusumoto, SoMin jidai jugaku shiso no kenkyu , pp. 252-64; Tomoeda, Shushi no shiso keisei , pp. 373-418.

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Chiu-yuan, in a letter written at the end of the decade, observed that "the authorities no longer post the edict on the yamen walls, and in far-off places no one has even heard of [the community granary]."^[70]

Although the central government failed to take an active role in the propagation of community granaries, the concept was championed by Chu Hsi's friends, students, and colleagues. For the most part, sponsorship of community granaries extended no further than isolated acts by individuals. When the granary intendant of Chiang-hsi issued a circular promoting community granaries, apparently the only person to respond was Lu Chiu-shao, brother of Chu Hsi's philosophical adversary, Lu Chiu-yuan. Given Lu's limited resources, his community granary encompassed only two of the forty-nine wards in the county.^[71]

Only in Fu-chien did community granaries receive significant official encouragement. In 1174 Chu reported that the concept had won the enthusiastic support of Liang K'e-chia, the former prime minister who had become prefect of Chien-ning the previous year. Apparently Chu's expectation that Liang's endorsement would lead to widespread adoption of his model went unfulfilled.^[72] But Sung Jo-shui, who became the granary intendant of Fu-chien in 1184, strongly urged local notables to establish community granaries. One of Sung's first official acts was to revive the granary founded by Wei Shan-chih. After Wei's death in 1171 local officials assumed control of the granary and eventually, through mismanagement, brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. Sung asked a friend in Chien-yang, Chou Ming-chung, to recruit "patricians among his fellow countrymen" who would manage the original granary plus a new one founded in a remote corner of the county.^[73]

The main impetus behind the proliferation of community granaries in Fu-chien came from Chao Ju-yü, a fervent admirer of Chu Hsi and twice governor of the circuit. Chao was one of the earliest proponents of the community granary. While prefect of Hsin-chou (Chiang-tung) in 1174 he proposed that half of the revenues intended for charitable granaries be

[70] For Chu's 1182 memorial, see "Hsin-ch'ou yen-he tsou-cha (4)," CWKWC 13/16a-18b; the imperial directive promulgating community granaries can be found in CHSC 59/12a-b. According to Chu, many local officials in Che-tung, where he was then serving as granary intendant, began to establish community granaries: "Ch'üfian-li she-ts'ang pang," CWKWC 99/ 23a-b. However, this activity apparently did not long survive Chu's resignation of this office early in 1183. For Lu Chiu-yuan's letter, see Lu Chiu-yuan, "Yü Chao chien (2)," Hsiang-shan hsien-sheng ch'üan-chi , 1/7.

[71] On Lu Chiu-shao and community granaries in Fu-chou, see Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen , pp. 152-53.

[72] "Chien-ning-fu Ch'ung-an-hsien Wu-fu she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 77/26b.

[73] "Yun-p'an Sung kung mu-chih-ming," CWKWC 93/22a; "Chien-ning-fu Chien-yang-hsien Ch'ang-t'an she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/19a; "Chien-ning-fu Ta-ch'an she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/20a-21 a.

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earmarked for distribution to community granaries in the countryside.^[74] Nothing came of this suggestion, but during his two tenures as governor in Fu-chien (1182-1186 and 1190-1191) Chao supervised the founding of numerous granaries throughout the four prefectures of the Fu-chien interior. But Chao sought to remold the community granaries to serve a purpose entirely different from Chu Hsi's original intention. Rather than promoting the granaries as a rural credit institution, he dedicated them to the specific goal of curbing the intractable evils of infanticide and child abandonment. Consequently, Chu and Chao engaged in a heated debate over the function of the community granaries, while Chao proceeded to sponsor "foundling granaries" (chü-tzu ts'ang ) as well as community granaries.^[75]

The widespread problem of infanticide emerged as a matter of national concern from the inception of the Southern Sung. The court was persuaded in 1138 to provide cash subsidies to families who could not afford to feed their infant children. At the same time the court gave its approval to the practice, widely employed in Fu-chien, of allowing nonagnatic kin to adopt children from indigent families.^[76] An administrative order of 1169 directed local officials in Fu-chien to supply indigent families with a thousand cash and a picul of rice for the nourishment of infant children. But the origin of the foundling granaries remains obscure.^[77] The practice of using land rents to endow foundling granaries perhaps originated with private individuals at the local level. By 1176, at the latest, Fu-chien governors were allocating land rents from "charitable estates" (i-chuang )^[78] to stock granaries expressly

[74] Chao Ju-yü, "Ch'i-chih she-ts'ang chi hsiang-min shu," cited in Chang P'u, Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i , 247/la-b.

[75] For a discussion of the conflict between Chu Hsi and Chao Ju-yü, see Watanabe Hiroyoshi, "Junki matsunen no Kenneifu: Shasogome no kontai to tairyo to," in Nakajima Satoshi sensei koki kinen ronshu , 2:195-217. A survey of institutions developed to provide for children is given in Imahori Seiji, "Sodai ni okeru eiji hogo jigyo ni tsuite," Hiroshima daigaku bun-gakubu kiyo 8 (1955): 127-51.

[76] CHSC 23/8b, 12a. In 1145 the court approved the use of Ever-Normal-Granary and charitable-granary reserves for the support of children of indigent families: SHY, shih-huo 62/ 29a-b.

[77] According to Lin-t'ing chih (1258), in YLTT 7513/12a, the court issued an order in 1135 to establish foundling granaries in the four interior prefectures of Fu-chien. I have found no contemporary corroboration of this claim (Wang Te-i, p. 174, n. 29, suggests that 1135 is a corruption of 1195). Chu Hsi noted in 1191 that even in his day the precise origin of the foundling granaries was uncertain. He cited documents indicating that the granaries were operating in the mid-1170's, but also mentioned claims for a slightly later date: "Yü Chao shang-shu lun chü-tzu-t'ien shih," CWKWC 29/4a-b.

[78] These charitable estates, which were public lands acquired by the state through eminent domain (principally lands whose owner died without an heir and lands attached to defunct monasteries), must be distinguished from the privately owned charitable estates set up to support fellow clansmen, typified by the famous model of the Fan clan. Prior to this time a portion of the proceeds from sales of such properties had been allocated to the Ever-Normal Granaries: SHY, chih-kuan 43/32b.

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dedicated to the nurture of infants. Local officials in Chien-ning prefecture had begun using revenues from charitable estates for this purpose two years earlier, in 1174.^[79]

Chu Hsi expressed his misgivings about the foundling-granary concept to Huang Wan, brother of his preeminent disciple, Huang Kan, in a letter of 1189:

The theory behind purchasing lands to provide revenues for the nurture of infants is excellent. On this issue Chou [Ming-chung] and Liu [Yao] [both were active in the establishment of community granaries in Chien-yang county] have made similar suggestions. Yet in my humble opinion to do so only solves a single problem. It would be far better to distribute loans of grain [through community granaries]. Then not only can one provide for foundlings, but simultaneously provide relief from dearth as well. Moreover, in the future we can expect the magnates to renege on payment of rents for foundling granary lands, and collecting delinquent rents will prove costly and time-consuming. These abuses are already evident in Chien-yang.^[80]

Chu recognized that tenancies on public lands nearly always fell into the hands of the rich and powerful, whose domination over clerks and petty bureaucrats made it unlikely that rents from these lands would be collected. No real benefit would issue from a relief system funded with revenues from public lands. Chu hammered away at this theme in a letter to Chao Ju-yü in the fall of 1190:

Support for foundlings in essence depends entirely on the payment of rents by tenants on various categories of public lands and rice collected as interest from people in the ward. Today most of these tenants are powerful and cunning patricians (hao-hua shih-jen ) or the sons and brothers of active officials whose power suffices to coerce both private individuals and public functionaries. Frequently they hedge and delay paying rent, to the point where even by the following summer or autumn they have not paid up and none dare press them to do so. The "influential families" (hsing-shih chih chia ) illegally request grain from the foundling granaries under false names. A single family obtains as much as ten or even a hundred piculs. The canton clerks know well enough that this is going on, but they are constrained by personal ties and unable to turn down their petitions.

[79] Yen-p'ing chih (ca. 1237), cited in YLTT 7513/11a; Chien-an chih (1198), cited in YLTT 7513/12b; "Yü Chao shang-shu lun chü-tzu-t'ien shih," CWKWC 29/4a-b. In 1173 the prefect of Fu-chou (Fu-chien), Shih Hao, petitioned the emperor to set aside income from government lands in the four interior prefectures of Fu-chien to support pregnant women and children under the age of three. But there is no indication that the court acted on Shih's proposal. In the same year the prefect of Chien-ning, Chao Yen-tuan, recommended subventions for children of the poor, but Chao made no mention of income from government lands: Shih Hao, "Fu-chou ch'i chih kuan-chuang ch'an-yung sheng-tzu chih chia cha-tzu," Mao-feng chen-yin man-lu , 8/5b-8a; SHY, shih-huo 66/11b- 12a.

[80] "Yü Huang Jen-ch'ing shu," CWKWC 28/11a.

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The second charge adduced by Chu, that the very usurers the system was supposed to circumvent garnered most of the loans from the foundling granaries, applied equally to community granaries, as Chu himself was forced to admit.^[81]

In the winter of 1190-1191, following a shortfall in that year's harvest, Chao agreed to a petition from local notables to cancel outstanding debts on loans made by community granaries in Chien-ning. Chao's action provoked instant outrage within Chu Hsi's camp. Chu, then serving as prefect of Chang-chou on Fu-chien's southern coast, immediately wrote to his close friend Liu Yao in Chien-yang, registering his dismay that Chao had subverted the integrity of the system. By forfeiting outstanding loans Chao had created a situation where "within a few years the canton clerks will merely administer empty granaries, and families requiring assistance to raise their children will no longer have any hope of getting grain."^[82] Huang Kan acknowledged that although the community granaries in Chien-ning had worked well for twenty years, now the "great houses" secured most of the loans under false pretenses. Poor peasants, seeing that Chao granted an amnesty to the big borrowers, decided not to repay their loans either. Thus in the summer of 1191 the community granaries had no stores, those with insufficient means were forced to borrow from usurers, and grain prices tripled. In the end food riots broke out and angry mobs put to death anyone found hoarding grain, though most of the "great houses" had fled to the safety of the county seat.^[83]

Despite Chu Hsi's strident objections, Chao Ju-yü continued to promote the foundling granaries. By the beginning of the thirteenth century over one hundred foundling granaries had been established in Chien-ning, T'ing, and Nan-chien prefectures. Even some granaries nominally designated as community granaries actually operated as foundling granaries. For example, the magistrate of Kuang-tse county (Shao-wu) set up a "community granary" expressly to provide for children of the poor. Like the foundling granaries, it was funded through rents on public lands rather than by donations from altruistic patricians.^[84] In 1191 the governor of Fu-chien pooled the funds for both granary systems. Henceforth the community granaries as

[81] "Ta Chao shuai lun chü-tzu-ts'ang shih," CWKWC 28/12a-b. Chu recounted the case of a "recently successful examination candidate" who had borrowed over one hundred piculs of grain from the community granary in Ma-sha-chen (Chien-yang) and after Chao declared an amnesty on community granary debts refused to make good on the loan.

[82] "Ta Liu Hui-po," CWKWC, hsu-chi 4A/5a.

[83] Huang Kan, "Chien-ning she-ts'ang li-ping," Mien-chai hsien-sheng Huang Wen-su kung wen-chi , 15/18a-b.

[84] "Shao-wu Kuang-tse-hsien she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 80/8b-9b; Li Lu, "Tai hsien-tsai she-ts'ang chen-chi-p'u hsu," Tan-hsien chi , 5/8a-10b.

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well as the foundling granaries would be funded by revenues, principally land rents, disbursed by the governor and the granary intendant.^[85]

As Chu Hsi and Huang Kan predicted, powerful magnates used their influence to gain tenancies on public lands and garner most of the granaries' lending capital, thus denying any real benefit to the poor. A court discussion of 1214 confirmed these trends.^[86] The outbreak of food riots in Chien-ning in 1188, 1191, 1194, and 1207 underscored the ineffectiveness of relief policies.^[87] By 1219 the community-granary system in Chien-ning had largely collapsed. In that year the prefect Shih Mi-chien established a new granary system, called the "liberal beneficence granaries" (kuang-hui-ts'ang ). Like the community granaries, the new granaries were widely dispersed throughout the countryside, but rather than providing loans to individual households they sold grain to stabilize prices. Shih at first considered rehabilitating the community granaries but ultimately gave up in the face of the insuperable problem of collecting delinquent loans.^[88] In 1232, when rebellion ravaged Chien-ning and the entire Fu-chien interior, the governor in Fu-chou dispatched "community granary" rice upstream to supplement local famine relief supplies.^[89] Thus in Fu-chien, where the first community granaries were founded, the concept had been turned on its head: rather than serve as locally controlled resources established to redress the failings of the state-run relief administration, the community granaries operated as just another arm of the state bureaucracy.

Local officials and private individuals continued to set up community-granary networks throughout the thirteenth century, particularly in Chiang-hsi and Hunan, but the limitations of Chu's original plan became more and more manifest. Though community-granary networks might last for a considerable length of time, almost invariably they underwent mutations, to the point where Chu Hsi would hardly have recognized them. This conclusion holds true even for the most successful ones. Wang Ying-lin (1223-1296), an enthusiastic proponent of the community granary, stated at the close of the Sung dynasty that the system worked best in Shao-hsing, Chin-hua (Wu-chou), Chen-chiang, Chien-ch'ang (Nan-k'ang-chün),

[85] Chien-an chih (1198), in YLTT 7513/12b; Yen-p'ing chih (ca. 1237), in YLTT 7513/11a-b. For the most part these revenues came from abandoned monastery lands that reverted to public ownership and were rented out to tenants: Yuan Hsieh, "Ch'ao-san tai-fu Chao kung muchih-ming," Chieh-chai chi , 17/24b; SHY, shih-huo 62/50a-b.

[86] SHY, shih-huo 62/50a-b.

[87] Watanabe, "Junki matsunen no Kenneifu," pp. 203-5.

[88] "Chien-ning-fu kuang-hui-ts'ang chi," HSCWC 24/13b-16a; Hsu t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien , cited in YLTT 7513/16a-b. A similar system was established in T'ing prefecture to replace the defunct foundling granaries: Lin-t'ing chih (1258), in YLTT 7892/20a-b.

[89] "Tsou-ch'i po P'ing-chiang pai-wan-ts'ang mi shen-t'iao Fu-chien ssu-chou chuang," HSCWC 15/20b.

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P'ing-hsiang (Yuan-chou), and Ch'ang-sha.^[90] Since we can study five of these cases (excepting Shao-hsing) across time, Wang supplies us with a representative sample to appraise the community granary's institutional viability.

The community granary in Wu-nu canton, Chin-hua, was perhaps the most long-lived of all. Founded in 1178 by a disciple of Lü Tsu-ch'ien, it endured into the second half of the thirteenth century. But by then the granary no longer was in the hands of the "venerable elders of the canton" but instead was operated by government clerks under the supervision of the county magistrate. Moreover, rather than conducting all transactions in grain, the clerks demanded that loans be repaid in cash. Fearing that borrowers would default, the clerks consented to lend grain only after poor harvests. Thus this granary network became an instrument of episodic famine relief rather than a provider of perennial credit assistance as Chu had envisioned.^[91]

P'ing-hsiang's community granaries, founded in 1181 and 1189, numbered eleven altogether. Like those in Chin-hua, P'ing-hsiang's granaries were held up as a model because of the active participation and leadership of local literati. However, by the early 1220s three of the granaries had closed, while three others no longer followed the guidelines specified by the founders. Some dealt in grain to stabilize prices, others lent grain at reduced interest, and a few granary managers used the granary stocks to supply soup kitchens. In one case the trustees had purchased about a hundred mu of land to provide a steady income and protect the granary's resources from exhaustion due to unpaid loans.^[92]

Fewer details are known about the community granary established by Liu Tsai and his fellow patricians in Chin-t'an county, Chen-chiang.^[93] Writing circa 1230, Liu boasted that the granary had prospered for more than twenty years, providing loans in rural areas as well as selling grain (to hold down prices) in the markets. Liu attributed the success of Chin-t'an's community granary to the division of responsibility among many persons who nonetheless could coordinate their respective tasks. Yet he expressed pessimism about the future survival of this institution, grimly noting that higher officials had their eyes on the granary stores and might commandeer them in the event of even minor food shortages.

[90] Wang Ying-lin, Yü-hai , 184/26b-27a. Chen Te-hsiu, writing roughly half a century earlier, stated that the most notable instances of successful community granaries were those in Chien-ch'ang and P'ing-hsiang: cited in Ku-lo chih , in YLTT 7510/22a.

[91] Wang Po, "She-ts'ang li-hai shu," Lu-chai Wang Wen-hsien kung wen-chi , 7/9b-12b. Although this text is undated, in another essay dated 1251 (ibid., 15/9b) Wang stated that the granaries existed in name only.

[92] I-ch'un chih , in YLTT 7510/13b-14a.

[93] See the texts and discussion in James T. C. Liu, "Liu Tsai (1165-1238): His Philanthropy and Neo-Confucian Limitations," Oriens Extremus 25, no. 1 (1978): 19.

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Chin-t'an's community granary directly inspired the Hu family of Chien-ch'ang to revive a community-granary network originally founded by the prefect of Nan-k'ang in 1215. Hu Yung, formerly one of Chu Hsi's students, visited Liu Tsai in about 1230 to observe the community granary at Chin-t'an and discuss the merits of different organizational principles with Liu. In Chien-ch'ang the canton clerks took charge of all granary operations, an arrangement that struck Liu as too centralized and susceptible to abuse.^[94] The Hu family still was active in the supervision of Chien-ch'ang's community granaries more than two decades later, but corruption had indeed crept into the system. The granary officers often lent grain to their own estate managers or embezzled grain by juggling the books. The prefect of Nan-k'ang attempted to reform the institution in 1252, but in the judgment of a local historian, "not all malfeasance could be weeded out."^[95]

A final case was that of Ch'ang-sha, where a community granary network had been in existence since 1196. In 1224 Chen Te-hsiu, heir to the mantle of Chu's philosophical tradition, increased the number of granaries from twenty-eight to one hundred, using funds diverted from the Hu-kuang General Commissariat (tsung-ling-so ). Chen discovered that the food supply situation in the city was far worse than in the countryside, however, and devoted most of his energies to stocking granaries for urban residents. In imitation of the community granaries, the operations of the new granaries within the city walls would be solely entrusted to substantial property owners, who also were expected to make contributions to the granaries' reserves.^[96] Within a fairly short time familiar abuses—expropriation by higher officials and peculation by village officers—began to undermine the granary systems.^[97] The same refrain recurs in many other late Sung assessments of the community granaries.^[98] Despite a few successful ventures in the closing years of the dynasty, notably in Fu-chou and Chi-shui in Chiang-hsi,^[99] by the beginning of the fourteenth century, Ch'eng Chü-fu (1249-1318) sadly observed, few survived.^[100] Ma Tuan-lin, in his encyclopedia of institutional history completed in about 1308, concluded that

[94] Ibid.; Liu Tsai, "Nan-k'ang Hu-shih she-ts'ang chi," Man-t'ang wen-chi , 22/8b-10a.

[95] Nan-k'ang chih , cited in YLTT 7510/15a-16a.

[96] "Ch'üan-li i-k'u wen," HSCWC 40/12a-13a; see also the texts translated in von Glahn, "The Country of Streams and Grottoes," pp. 433-34.

[97] Lu-chiang chih , cited in YLTT 7510/23b-24a.

[98] "Chao Hua-wen mu-chih-ming," HSCWC 44/11a; Lin Hsi-i, "Pa Che-hsi t'i-chu-ssu she-ts'ang kuei," Chu-hsi Chuan-chai shih-i-kao hsu-chi , 13/1b; Huang Chen, "Fu-chou Chin-ch'i hsien Li-shih she-ts'ang chi," Tzu-hsi Huang-shih jih-ch'ao , 87/17a-18b.

[99] On Chi-shui, see Chi-shui chih , cited in YLTT 7510/31b, and Lin Gh'en-weng, "Chi-shui i-hui she-ts'ang chi," Hsu-hsi chi , 4/29a-30a. On Fu-chou, see Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen , pp. 152-57.

[100] Ch'eng Chü-fu, "Pa Yu-shan Li-shih she-ts'ang shih-hou," Ch'u-kuo Wen-hsien kung Hsueh-lou hsien-sheng wen-chi , 24/1 a.

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all too frequently a noble idea had been turned into an instrument of tyranny.^[101]

As Chu Hsi emphasized at the outset, the long-term viability of the community granary hinged on its financial soundness. The Confucian abhorrence of usury, intensified by contemporary reproof of Wang An-shih's rural credit program, clashed with the community granaries' need for a margin of profit, especially given the high rate of default. Sympathetic critics observed that the large percentage of bad loans not only threatened the community granary's solvency, but also deterred potential contributors from risking their assets in such an unpromising venture.^[102] Consequently, community granaries tended to evolve in the direction of pure charity. Trustees commonly used the granary's capital to purchase lands whose rental income in turn would be dispensed as charity to indigent peasants. In other cases community granaries shed their credit functions and simply bought and sold grain to stabilize prices. In either event the community granaries duplicated welfare services performed by the state, and not infrequently were absorbed by the state bureaucracy. Chu Hsi's original idea, the creation of a self-governing rural credit association, was lost.

The Community Granary As Ideology

Voluntary mutual aid associations dedicated to the material well-being of their members of course antedated Chu Hsi's efforts to establish community granaries. The diffusion of Buddhism throughout Chinese society since the fifth century spawned a host of religious institutions, which administered to the material as well as the spiritual needs of the faithful. Everywhere Buddhist laity formed congregations (i-i, she-i ), which pooled money for religious devotions (such as making images of the Buddha), dispensed charity (particularly in the form of contributions for funeral and burial expenses), and took over formerly secular community observances such as the planting and harvest festivals (ch'un-ch'iu erh-she ). Though imbued with Buddhist beliefs and liturgy, these groups took on a life of their own independent of the sangha. Compared with the mass convocations typical of the sixth century, which encompassed the entire social hierarchy, the lay congregations of late T'ang and Sung times were smaller, more intimate gatherings bound together by explicit obligations of mutual aid. Many fell under suspicion as "profane cults" (yin-tz'u ) and became targets of state persecution. The monk Tsan-ning, in his history of Buddhism presented to the Sung court in

[101] WHTK 21/213c.

[102] Lu Chiu-yuan's reservations on this point are discussed in Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen , p. 155. See also Wang Po, "She-ts'ang li-hai shu," Lu-chai Wang Wen-hsien kung wen-chi , 7/11a; Jui-yang chih , in YLTT 7510/32b.

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999, took pains to distinguish associations he viewed as truly devoted to pious charity and good works from cults tainted by heterodox rites. Yet whether or not they received the approbation of Confucian officials or the Buddhist clergy, these congregations promoted sociability and a sense of community, strengthening collective self-interest and alleviating intramural conflict.^[103]

From the inception of Buddhism in China the sangha had dedicated itself to toiling in the "fields of compassion" (pei-t'ien ), that is, to performing charitable works. The promotion of charity among lay adherents was enhanced by the popularization of the plain teachings of Ch'an and Pure Land Buddhism during the Sung. The irresistible allure of gaining merit toward salvation prompted the faithful of high and low station alike to express their piety through individual acts of charity or by making donations to monastic orders engaged in charitable activities on a grander scale. Nowhere was this more true than in Fu-chien.

In Sung times Fu-chien was often referred to as "the land of the Buddha."^[104] The settlement of Fu-chien coincided with the flowering of Buddhist monastic institutions during the T'ang and even more so under the patronage of the Min kingdom in the tenth century. Consequently, the monastic orders were blessed with munificent gifts of lands and property and in some places garnered more than half of the income from cultivated lands. We know nothing about monastic landholdings in Chien-ning, but according to Yang I (974-1020), a native of P'u-ch'eng county, the prefecture numbered 912 monasteries in his day, or one for every one hundred households.^[105]

The Sung court, far less hospitable to the monastic orders than previous dynasties, attempted to strictly regulate the sangha and especially the disposition of the monasteries' wealth. In Fu-chien the state controlled the investiture of abbots for all except the forty largest (of more than five thousand) monasteries. Monks routinely were reduced to suborning local officials to gain an abbothood. Beyond petty corruption, though, the Sung state regularly appropriated monastic assets to meet public needs. In Fu-chien, beginning in 1152 the state audited the accounts of the monasteries, and all income regarded as "surplus" (tsan-sheng )—that is, in excess of the

[103] Chikusa Masaaki, "Tonko shutsudo 'sha' munjo no kenkyu," in idem., Chugoku bukkyo shakaishi kenkyu, pp. 477-557. See also Jacques Gernet, Les aspects économiques du Bouddhisme dans la société chinoise du Ve au Xe siécle , pp. 250-68.

[104] This discussion is based on Chikusa Masaaki, "Fukken no jiin to shakai," in Chugoku bukkyo shakaishi kenkyu, pp. 145-98.

[105] Cited in Chiang Shao-yu, Huang-ch'ao lei-yuan , 61/13a. In Fu-chou at the end of the twelfth century the ratio was 216:1 (Chikusa, "Fukken no jiin to shakai," pp. 149-50). Although the number of monks in Fu-chou had drastically declined since the early Sung, the number of monasteries had not.

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minimum required to support monks and acolytes, pay local taxes, and maintain temples in good repair—was transmitted to the Privy Purse.^[106] The year before, in response to the growing problem of theft of public lands by "influential households," the court ordered that the "permanent sustenance" properties of defunct temples (ch'ang-chu chueh-ch'an ) be used to support schools. Ch'ung-an's county school, built in 1180, received operating subsidies from the lands of five defunct monasteries.^[107]

Sung officials argued that since the avowed purpose of the monastic endowments was to perform good works and provide charity to the distressed, the state's expropriation of monastic wealth for public works and services amounted to no more than a rerouting of aid. The much weakened sangha was in no position to contest the will of the state. Without a doubt the actions of local officials and the court represented a concerted effort to place all welfare activities under the control and discretion of officialdom. The foundling granaries established under Chao Ju-yü's aegis served—implicitly, at least—this goal of secularizing social welfare. Providing for foundlings and orphans had traditionally been one of the major charitable undertakings of the monastic orders. Moreover, many indigent parents entrusted children they could not afford to feed to the care of the Buddhist clergy. Given Chu Hsi's well-documented antipathy to Buddhism, one wonders whether his sponsorship of the community granary and other social welfare institutions stemmed from a desire to wrest the hearts and minds of the populace away from a religion and social institution he detested. Chu himself did not speak to this issue, but tantalizing hints abound. In his later years Chu frequently wrote diatribes against the Buddhist clergy for usurping the place of public cults, particularly the sacrifices at the Altar of Grain and Soil (she-chi ).^[108]

Obviously, Chu did not have in mind lay Buddhist congregations when he set himself to the task of devising institutions that would heal the ruptured bonds of communal solidarity. A more likely source of inspiration was Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085):

When [Ch'eng Hao] was magistrate of Chin-ch'eng [Shansi] he organized the villages and settlements into units of five and twenty-five families to enable them to help each other with physical labor and to come to each other's relief in case of difficulty, and to make it impossible for the treacherous and wicked to hide in their midst. To the relatives and fellow villagers of orphans, the lame, and the homeless he assigned the responsibility to ensure that these un-

[106] Collection of tsan-sheng revenues was halted by the mid-1170s because of the debilitating impact on monastery finances: Chikusa, "Fukken no jiin to shakai," pp. 165-68.

[107] SHY, shih-huo 61/14a; "Chien-ning-fu Ch'ung-an-hsien hsueh-t'ien chi," CWKWC 79/14a.

[108] For examples see "Shu Shih-tsun shen-ming chih-hui hou," CWKWC 83/21a-22a; "Ch'ao-san Huang kung mu-chih-ming," CWKWC 93/9a-b.

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fortunates would have someone to turn to. . . . When villagers formed an association or held an assembly (she-hui ), Ch'eng drew up regulations for them that made clear the distinctions between good and bad [actions] so that the people might be encouraged to do good and ashamed to do evil.^[109]

Ch'eng Hao envisioned the revival of the regulated and well-ordered society of antiquity described in the classic Rituals of Chou (Chou li ). In his famous 1069 memorial to the throne Ch'eng emphasized among other things that in antiquity social cohesion derived from the natural human affection felt toward members of one's own community; intimate contact and camaraderie (ch'in-mu ) among fellow villagers produced a sense of integrity and shame (lien-ch'ih ) that induced all to conduct themselves in accordance with their station, thus eliminating conflict.^[110] Ignoring the complexity of Sung society, Ch'eng Hao exuded supreme confidence in the emperor's capacity, through moral example, to instill such virtues in his subjects.

Chu Hsi concurred with Ch'eng Hao on several key points. First, Chu affirmed that a well-ordered society required everyone to fulfill the duties and obligations of his station. Most of the world's troubles could be attributed to the failure to recognize and respect the distinctions and reciprocal responsibilities embedded in the natural social hierarchy. Primary responsibility for clarifying the social hierarchy and ensuring the cooperation of all its elements rested with society's leaders, the patricians, and above all the emperor, and Chu Hsi directed his prescriptions and exhortations to them.^[111] Seen from this perspective, the community granary was merely an articulation of the lineaments of the social hierarchy, a vehicle for the expression of the sense of compassion that defined the relationship between the upper and lower orders.

Chu also shared Ch'eng Hao's atavistic yearning for a reversion to a simple rural society unbesmirched by the sordid social flotsam—"displaced persons" (fu-min ) and "idlers" (yu-shou )^[112] —symptomatic of a society in decay. Social stability could be achieved only through a renewal of the ethic of the mutual interdependence of the upper and lower orders, an inter-

[109] Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Chin-ssu-lu chi-chu , 9/42b-44a, translation adapted from Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Reflections on Things at Hand , p. 225. The term she-hui ("associations and assemblies") did include groups involved in purely secular activities, but most commonly it denoted convocations devoted to a particular patron saint or celebrating specific religious festivals. See, for example, the catalogue of she-hui in Southern Sung Hang-chou in Wu Tzu-mu, Meng-liang lu , 19/8a-10a.

[110] Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Chin-ssu-lu chi-chu , 9/17b-18a (not translated by Chan).

[111] On Chu's emphasis on the principal role of the emperor, see Julia Ching, "Neo-Confucian Utopian Theories and Political Ethics," Monumenta Serica 20 (1972-73): 46-47, and Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Thought," pp. 131-33.

[112] Ch'eng Hao's words, cited in Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Chin-ssu-lu chi-chu , 9/34b.

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dependence nurtured by the sympathetic intimacy of personal ties. Thus Chu repeatedly stated that the superior households' chief obligation was to provide for the welfare of their own tenants and bondservants, and only secondarily to that of society as a whole. In the same fashion the community granary was a formal expression of the ethic of subsistence cementing the social hierarchy. Welfare institutions run by the state, Chu noted, lacked this moral ethos. He often complained that the benefits of public welfare institutions favored the idlers who gathered in the towns rather than the deserving needy, the peasantry. In his view only those engaged in honest toil and earning their living from agriculture should receive relief.^[113]

Chu Hsi also agreed with Ch'eng Hao's assertion that, human nature being immutable, the moral potential of mankind had not diminished since the Golden Age of the sage-kings. One of the central tenets of Tao-hsueh affirmed that latter-day patricians could aspire to realizing the ideal of sagehood.^[114] But Chu Hsi backed away from the proposition upheld by the Northern Sung progenitors of Tao-hsueh that contemporary statesmen should seek to revive the actual institutions of antiquity as described in the classics. Chu's dissent on this issue took several forms. To begin with, he regarded any institutional framework as insufficient in itself. Good government ultimately depended on the perspicacity of its leadership, whose discerning judgment derived from study and self-cultivation rather than familiarity with the laws. Furthermore, Chu regarded the age of the sage-kings as a unique phase of human history. The world that confronted him and his contemporaries differed substantially from that of antiquity, and government institutions had to be adjusted accordingly. Chu drew a distinction between the utopian vision of a moral and just society embodied in the ideal of antiquity, which had universal and eternal relevance, and the historical reality of antiquity, which passed away long ago.^[115]

At the same time, Chu stridently objected to the use of the precedents of recent history as models for social and political institutions.^[116] Robert Hart-well has coined the phrase "historical analogism" to describe the trend, current in late T'ang and Sung times, to utilize history as a fund of knowl-

[113] "Chien-ning Ch'ung-an-hsien Wu-fu she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 77/26b. Chu also protested that the foundling granaries favored urban-dwelling idlers over the rural peasantry: "Ta Kung Chung-chih," CWKWC 64/11a. This sentiment went back to the beginning of his political career. When Chu served as master of records in T'ung-an county in the mid-1150s he complained that T'ung-an's city-dwelling official households, wealthy families, government clerks, and merchants used their wealth to purchase land mortgages and thus dispossessed the peasantry: "Ta Ch'en Ming-chung," CWKWC 43/4a-b.

[114] Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi , p. 43.

[115] Ibid., pp. 42-44, 201-4; Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Thought," p. 129.

[116] For a fuller discussion of Chu's views on the use of history as a model for political action, see Conrad Schirokauer's treatment in chapter 4 of this volume.

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edge and experience from which statesmen could derive lessons applicable to similar situations in the present.^[117] From the mid-T'ang onwards these scholars traced the evolution of laws and institutions throughout history to provide guides for public policy and decision making in their own day. Their emphasis on historical contingency and cumulative change across time ramified into a conservative political orientation that militated against radical institutional innovation. Not surprisingly, practitioners of historical analogism, such as Ssu-ma Kuang, Chang Fang-p'ing, and Fan Tsu-yü, led the opposition to Wang An-shih's New Policies.^[118] In the Southern Sung historical analogism was embraced by utilitarian-minded theorists such as Ch'en Liang, who combined the conservatives' distaste for radical reform with admiration for the ability of the Han and T'ang rulers to use power to augment the might of the empire. In his debate with Ch'en Liang, Chu Hsi rejected both the utilitarian focus on the uses of power and the historical analogists' contention that political institutions could be evaluated apart from the men who operate them.^[119]

Thus Chu Hsi's political philosophy diverged markedly from the gradualist and conservative approach of historical analogism and also from the classical revivalism espoused by the eleventh-century luminaries of Tao-hsueh . Indeed, Chu's political ideas shared certain congruities with the nemesis of both of these orientations, none other than Wang An-shih. Chu, like Wang, denied that history restricted the scope of political activism to mere amelioration of the existing social and political order. Both men were inspired by the utopian integration of state and society detailed in the Rituals of Chou , yet neither believed that ancient institutions could be resurrected in the present day. Instead, Wang and Chu alike advocated study of "the Tao made manifest in affairs of government" as laid out in the Rituals

[117] Robert M. Hartwell, "Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China," American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (1971): 690-727. In chapter 3 in this volume Peter Bol contends that Ssu-ma Kuang was not a historical analogist in Harwell's sense of the term as one who "uses principles abstracted from historical models" to determine public policy. According to Bol, Ssu-ma Kuang used history, not to derive the "necessary principles" indispensable to proper government, but merely to prove their validity. Hartwell perhaps has overstated the case for the incipient development of a social science methodology in Sung times. Yet he also concedes the limits of analogism as employed by Sung political theorists: the methods of historical analogism focused attention on the particular crisis of the moment, and hindered the extrapolation of general analytical hypotheses from analogical propositions (Hartwell, 725-27). To my mind the concept of historical analogism is still valid if we understand by the term a positivist assumption that history served as an accurate guide in predicting the consequences of specific policies.

[118] The political conservatism of this group is also emphasized in Anthony W. Sariti, "Monarchy, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the Political Thought of Ssu-ma Kuang," Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (1972): 57; James T. C. Liu, Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih and His New Policies , p. 33.

[119] Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , passim, especially pp. 145-48, 212-13.

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of Chou and "modelling institutions on the intentions (i )" of the sage-kings.^[120] Internalization of the classical ethos of moral cultivation would provide the inspiration for political activism. This orientation, which perhaps could be termed "classical analogism," posited (1) contrary to the precepts of historical analogism, the range of political choices was not confined to the narrow spectrum of the recent past; instead it envisioned the creation of new institutions infused with the spirit of antiquity exemplified in the Rituals of Chou ; (2) contrary to classical revivalism, historical exigencies required institutions appropriate to the actual social context; thus Chu opposed the facile revival of mythic archetypes such as the "well-field" system of land allocation.^[121] In sum, classical analogism provided a justification for institutional change unencumbered by the strictures of recent history.

Beyond the shared assumptions justifying institutional innovation based on the prototypes in the Rituals of Chou , Wang An-shih and Chu Hsi parted company. Although Wang, like Chu, frequently affirmed the primacy of moral cultivation and education, Chu found his policies sorely deficient in this respect. Nonetheless, Chu Hsi held Wang in higher esteem than did most of Chu's contemporaries, including the utilitarian thinkers often classified together with Wang.^[122] Chu criticized Wang's most zealous detrac-

[120] Quotations are taken from Wang An-shih, "Chou-li hsin-i hsu," Wang Lin-ch'uan ch'üan-chi , 84/533, and "Ni shang-tien cha-tzu," ibid., 41/237. Chu Hsi emphasized studying the ideas of the Chou sage-kings contained in the Rituals of Chou in his 1188 memorial to the throne: Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Thought," p. 133; Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , p. 204. For Wang An-shih's concern to ground policy in "the original truth of the Classics," see Peter K. Bol, "Wang An-shih's Theory of the Activist State," paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March, 1984.

[121] For Chu Hsi's views on the infeasibility of reviving ancient institutions, see Chu-tzu yü-lei 108, passim. Chu's frequent discourses on the "well-field" system cogently illustrate his preference for developing institutions analogous in function to those presumed to have prevailed in antiquity rather than simply trying to revivify ancient institutions. Chu pointed out to his students that efforts to recreate the "well-field" system according to the precise details recorded in the Rituals of Chou would produce "not the land tenure system of the Three Dynasties, but rather that of Wang Mang" (the infamous usurper of the first century A.D. who tried to recast his government in the shape of the institutions specified in the Rituals of Chou ): Chu-tzu yü-lei 55/4b. In his response to a student's question about the passage in Mencius 3A.3 extolling the merits of the "well-field" system, Chu Hsi provided a succinct statement of what I describe as classical analogism (Chu-tzu i-shu, Meng-tzu huo-wen 5/3a): "In general, although it is said that Mencius traced the institutions handed down from the Three Dynasties back to their sources, he always grasped the essence of those institutions without becoming totally absorbed in their details; he patterned his ideas after the intentions [of the sages], without becoming mired in textual semantics. Now clarifying understanding and making manifest the simple truths [of antiquity] constitutes the only viable method of managing affairs of state. But how can we expect rigid pedants and petty scholastics who insist on the literal meaning of the text to be able to understand this?"

[122] Ishida Hajime, "Shu Ki no Kinei sengo ken," Gumma daigaku kyoiku kiyo, jimbun shakai kagaku hen 30 (1980): 65-82. On the disjuncture between Wang's political ideas and those of the utilitarian Ch'en Liang, see Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism , pp. 212-13.

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tors for insisting that "the precedents of the dynastic founders" were immutable and for their unrelenting hostility to institutional reform. In Chu's mind the perilous situation of the dynasty in Wang's day did indeed demand sweeping reform, but Wang's policies failed because of Wang's misguided faith in the rule of law, which led him into the folly of ignoring the moral character of the men he chose to execute his policies.^[123]

Chu Hsi strongly condemned Wang An-shih's use of the Rituals of Chou , accusing Wang of "merely selecting elements that were congenial to his own ideas while availing himself of the lofty reputation of the text to silence the voices of a host of critics."^[124] For example, Wang An-shih justified his Bureau of Markets and Exchange (shih-i-ssu ) as a means of replicating the Duke of Chou's Repository of Wealth (ch'üan-fu ), a public office that was supposed to intervene in the market to keep the supply and demand for goods in balance. Chu regarded Wang's classical analogism as a disingenuous attempt to enrich the state by collecting profits through the buying and selling of commodities, which the Duke of Chou had never intended.^[125] Wang An-shih, in Chu's estimation, violated the spirit of the Rituals of Chou by imposing institutional change from above through legislative fiat. Chu's concept of reform, symbolized by the community granary, was predicated on renewing the bonds of communal solidarity within local society, primarily through the agency of patricians rooted in moral and intellectual discipline. The Rituals of Chou provided appropriate models for institutional reform, but ultimately positive reform depended on the quality of leadership.^[126] This distinction constituted the crucial difference between Chu Hsi's community-granary concept and Wang An-shih's New Policies.

Yet it cannot be said that Chu Hsi's more locally centered approach to political activism was more successful in creating viable institutions. The community granary presupposed a commonly shared sense of social obligations, which did not exist. While Chu recognized the acute class antagonisms within Sung society, he was mistaken in his belief that conscious moral and intellectual effort alone could resolve these tensions. The upper orders—officials, "influential families," landlords, and even the patricians—failed to fulfill their assigned role; instead, they continued to exploit the poor and the desperate. As often as not, the community granary

[123] "Tu liang Ch'en lien-i i-mo," CWKWC 70/7a-14a; Chu, Chu-tzu yü-lei , 108/9a, 128/6b.

[124] "Tu liang Ch'en lien-i i-mo," CWKWC 70/10b.

[125] Chu, Chu-tzu yü-lei 130/2a.

[126] For a discussion of this point specifically related to the community granaries, see "Chien-ning-fu Chien-yang-hsien Ta-shan she-ts'ang chi," CWKWC 79/21a.

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became an instrument of, rather than a counterweight against, this exploitation. Still, Chu Hsi's reordering of government priorities, the narrowing of the focus of political activism from the broad domain of national administration to the confines of the locality, was a significant landmark in Chinese political and institutional history. The community granary stood midway between a faith in centralized government institutions, which animated the Northern Sung reform movements, and a quest for personal rectification and the corresponding contraction of the sphere of "world-ordering" to the family, the school, the patrician circle, and the local community, which characterized Neo-Confucianism in the late imperial era.

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Six
Charitable Estates as an Aspect of Statecraft in Southern Sung China

Linda Walton

Since the publication more than thirty years ago of Denis Twitchett's classic account of the Fan charitable estate,^[1] historians and anthropologists who have considered this and similar institutions of "clan property" have focused, understandably, on their relevance to the evolution of kinship structures.^[2] Here I propose to take a different approach: to look at charitable estates in Southern Sung China, both within and outside the setting of the descent group, to see what they reveal about ways of conceiving the relationships among kinship, the local community, and the state. I limit my discussion to two kinds of properties: charitable lands (i-t'ien or i-chuang )^[3] and charitable schools (i-hsueh or i-shu ), established either by members of a patrilineal descent group (tsu or tsung-tsu)^[4] or jointly by a larger coalition or community.

Recent research on the emergence of "localist" strategies in the Southern Sung—seen both in networks of affinal ties that linked elite families in one

[1] Denis Twitchett, "The Fan Clan Charitable Estate, 1050-1760," in David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, eds., Confucianism in Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959).

[2] For recent research on this topic, and for references to important work by Japanese scholars, see Patricia B. Ebrey and James L. Watson, eds., Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Hereafter cited as Ebrey and Watson.

[3] The translation of i as "charitable" here and throughout is based on the function of these institutions and follows long-established practice. Bear in mind, however, that i literally connotes "duty" (or "relationship-specific obligation") (as in i-chün or i-ping , "duty troops," voluntary military forces). Emphasis is on doing what is right and on fulfilling one's obligations. On the uses of this term in Southern Sung, see the discussion in the Introduction to this volume.

[4] For definitions and a useful discussion of both English and Chinese kinship terminology, see Ebrey and Watson, pp. 4-10. I have attempted to follow their suggestions as consistently as possible.

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area to each other and in broader patterns of social, economic, and political behavior with a local rather than national focus—has set out to demonstrate a contrast with the Northern Sung, when elite families set their sights on national politics and on ties with other elite families that would transcend local or regional boundaries.^[5] A further manifestation of this shift, it can be argued, was a change from reliance on central-government policies to deal with social and economic problems, characteristic of the Wang An-shih era, to increasingly local, voluntary, and private efforts to meet local needs. This change can be attributed at least in part to a loss of confidence, attendant on the fall of the Northern Sung, in the ability of the state to carry out policies that could deal successfully with problems at the local level. In education, the change can be seen in the proliferation of local academies (shu-yuan ) in the Southern Sung. The Southern Sung academy movement in an important sense grew out of dissatisfaction with the examination system and the official educational environment it fostered during the Northern Sung. Although the founding of academies followed Northern Sung precedents, the Southern Sung movement acquired a distinctive character and meaning because of changed intellectual, political, and social circumstances. Similarly, although the Fan charitable estate of the Northern Sung was cited repeatedly as a model for Southern Sung estates, the Fan estate was the premier example of only a few such estates in the Northern Sung; and the significance of these estates differed in the Southern Sung, not only because there were far more of them, but also because of the new social and political environment in which they were established.

Although anthropologists have generally assumed that jointly owned property, including endowed estates, is crucial in lineage formation and joint descent-group activities, some historians have begun to question this assumption.^[6] Recent research suggests that, at least during the Sung, property jointly owned did not necessarily play a central role in the organization and viability of patrilineal descent groups.^[7] It is true that apart from the Fan estate only a handful of endowed estates can be documented for the Northern Sung.^[8] However, I have found a relatively large number of cases

[5] See, for example, Robert Hymes, "Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou," in Ebrey and Watson, pp. 95-136, and Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Hymes extends arguments made by Robert Hartwell in "Demographic, Social, and Political Transformations of China, 750-1550," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42 (1982): 365-442.

[6] See Patricia Ebrey, "The Early Stages in the Development of Descent Group Organization," in Ebrey and Watson, pp. 40-44; 55-56.

[7] See Richard L. Davis, "Political Success and the Growth of Descent Groups: The Shih of Ming-chou During the Sung," in Ebrey and Watson, pp. 92-93.

[8] Shimizu Morimitsu, Chu goku zokusan seido ko (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1949), pp. 39-40, cites a half dozen Northern Sung charitable estates; Hymes, Statesmen , p. 130, n. 15, cites two Northern Sung estates in Fu-chou, Kiangsi; and Ebrey, "Early Stages," p. 42, cites another Northern Sung estate. Liang Keng-yao, Nan-Sung ti nung-ts'un ching-chi (Taipei: Lian-ching, 1985), p. 316, attributes the Yen estate in Chien-k'ang to the Southern Sung, but it should be considered late Northern Sung, unless it was established virtually on the founder's deathbed, for he died in 1130 (three years into the Southern Sung) at age seventy-seven. See Liu I-chih, T'iao-ch'i chi (SKCS ed.), 50.27a-28a.

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for the Southern Sung (see the appendix to this chapter); and since even these do not reflect a comprehensive search of all potential sources, many more cases may remain to be identified.^[9] Thus I would argue that, even if charitable estates were not yet crucial to lineage formation, and however short-lived many of them may have been, the institution already had a significant presence in Southern Sung local society. It was the subject of writings by prominent men who provided ideological justification for it in both classical and historical terms. Many of them sought to link the founding of estates with larger principles of "ordering the world"; and the way they presented and justified the establishment of charitable estates sheds some light on Southern Sung thinking about institutions and society. Evidence from charitable estates also supports the argument that localist strategies were emerging among elite families in this period. Whether in endowed estates for one descent group or in the fewer community estates designed to provide support for impecunious shih (or shih-ta-fu ) families, a new (or perhaps renewed) conception of the local community seems to have been evolving, along with a rethinking of the relationship among descent group, community, and state.

Sung Neo-Confucians, following the Great Learning , held that "bringing peace to the world" (p'ing t'ien-hsia ) begins with "rectifying the self" (hsiu shen ), proceeds to "regulating the family" (ch'i chia ), and on to "governing the state" (chih kuo ). One modern scholar has suggested that Sung men sometimes in effect placed another step between "rectifying the self" and "ordering the world": "transforming the community" (hua hsiang ).^[10] It is in this realm, as well as in that of "regulating the family," that the charitable estates were important, both as symbols and as practical guardians of the welfare of the group, whether the descent group or the local community. It

[9] The Southern Sung examples listed in the appendix have been gathered largely from secondary studies, especially those of Shimizu and Liang. Many of the primary sources are obvious, since they are inscriptions written to commemorate the establishment of a charitable estate. However, many other references are found in funerary inscriptions, and it is highly likely that a careful search of such writings, as well as other less obvious documents, would yield many more examples. Thus, I think it is reasonable to suggest that the list in the appendix could easily be expanded to at least double its size. But I would emphasize that the present study is not quantitative in nature.

[10] Inoue Akira (?), "Sodai ijo ni okeru sozoku no tokushitsu no zai kento," Nagoya daigaku toyoshi kenkyu hokoku 12 (1987): 60. Compare the discussion, in this volume's Introduction, of Chu Hsi's interest in institutions of the "middle level"—the level of the hsiang .

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has been suggested that the endowing of a charitable estate might have been in part a way to limit the obligations of the wealthier, more prominent members of a descent group to their less fortunate kin.^[11] But any such practical function need not preclude an equally or even more important symbolic function: to "bring together" the loosely allied or dispersed members of a patrilineal descent group (ho tsung-tsu ) through the support of ancestral rites or the maintenance of graves; or to affirm a sense of joint interests and common identity among the emergent local elite of an area through a community charitable estate. Much evidence from the Sung, especially Southern Sung, points to the strengthening of descent-group ties, a process engendered by the uncertainties of official careers dependent on the examination system and bureaucratic politics, as well as by the instability and insecurity of fife in a period of rapid social and economic change. Although endowed estates may have been neither critical to descent-group survival nor a major support of emerging local elite strategies in the Southern Sung,^[12] they were important symbolically in the proclaiming and strengthening of both descent-group and community ties. A study of charitable estates may thus reveal links between the changing relationships among descent group, community, and state during the Southern Sung, on the one hand, and attitudes and ideas concerning statecraft, understood in the broad sense of "ordering the world," on the other.

Estates for The Descent Group

One of the earliest and best-documented examples of a Southern Sung charitable estate founded to benefit members of one descent group is that of the Lou of Yin county in Ming-chou (Liang-che).^[13] It was set up in about 1160 by Lou Shou (1090-1162) after his retirement from office, in fulfillment of the earlier plan of his father, Lou I (chin-shih 1085), to establish a charitable estate for his descent group. Although the Lou had begun to rise as an official family in the mid-eleventh century when Lou I's grandfather, Yü, took a chin-shih degree in 1053, by Shou's generation in the early Southern Sung they had experienced financial hardships that forced them to rely

[11] Ebrey, pp. 41-42; Hymes, "Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy," p. 130.

[12] For a contrasting view of the role of charitable estates in local elite strategies and lineage organization in the late nineteenth century, see Jerry Dennerline, "Marriage, Adoption, and Charity in the Development of Lineages in Wu-hsi from Sung to Ch'ing," in Ebrey and Watson, pp. 170-209.

[13] See Fukuda Ritsuko, "Sodai gisho koko—Minshu Roshi o chushin to shite" (Nihon joshi daigaku shigaku kenkyukai), Shiso 13 (1972): 72-115. Reprinted in Chugoku kankei ronsetsu shiryo 14, no. 3 ge : 188-206. Pagination used in citations is from the latter. See also Linda Walton, "Kinship, Marriage, and Status in Song China: A Study of the Lou Lineage of Ningbo, c. 1050-1250," Journal of Asian History 18, no. 1 (1984): 35-77.

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on marriage relatives for support. Shou's brother Ch'uü (d. 1182) was a dependent son-in-law of his wife's family, and Ch'u's son, the famous Southern Sung official Lou Yueh (1137-1213), grew up in the household of his maternal grandparents.^[14]

Lou Shou did not write about his intentions in setting aside five hundred mou of land for the estate, so we must rely on the testimony of his nephew Lou Yueh. According to Yueh's account in his funerary inscription for his uncle, Shou established the estate as an act of filial piety, to fulfill the wishes of Lou I. Yueh also cited the model of Fan Chung-yen's estate, saying that his family had sought to imitate the Fan estate but had not been able to achieve the same level of support, since the Lou estate provided rice allotments only to those judged to need them, not to the entire group, as had the Fan estate.^[15] The Lou estate was designed to provide specifically for the descendants of Lou I, and not for those of other "branches" (p'ai ).^[16] After he achieved high office in the Southern Sung government, Lou Yueh was able to enlarge the estate, as others had tried to do and failed. However, in 1212, a year before Yueh's death, when the estate was only half a century old, official help was requested to punish individuals who had sold land and misappropriated income from the estate; ironically, the precedent of the Fan estate was also cited for this.^[17]

Accounts of the Lou estate in local histories dating from the Yuan emphasize its importance as a social model of harmonious relations within the descent group, extending its benevolent influence to society as a whole.^[18] Yet by the Yuan, wealthy families had encroached on the estate, and the Lou were relatively weak and in financial straits, dependent on official support to retain their lands. Local officials tried to protect the estate, ostensibly because of its utility as a model of Confucian social order; but, unlike the Fan estate, that of the Lou did not survive the Yuan.^[19]

Similar estates were scattered throughout Southern Sung China, but of over forty surveyed here, approximately half were clustered in the two circuits of Liang-che. This is in part due to the wealth of sources extant for this area, but it should also be seen as a reflection of the relatively high level of economic development that characterized the region by the Sung. The surplus resources necessary for the founding of a charitable estate or lands were more likely to be present in such an area. Although one writer claimed that five thousand mou were necessary to establish a particular

[14] Walton, p. 59.

[15] Lou Yueh, Kung-k'uei chi (TSCCHP ed.), 60:808.

[16] Fukuda, p. 103; Walton, p. 47.

[17] Wang Yuan-hung et al., Chih-cheng Ssu-ming hsu-chih (SYTFCTS ed.), 8.19b-20a (hereafter abbreviated Chih-cheng ).

[18] Chih-cheng , 8.19b.

[19] Ibid.

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charitable estate because it supported a large number of people,^[20] and the model Fan estate had been started with a grant of three thousand mou, the size of endowments varied greatly, partly because of variations in the productivity of land and the use of different methods of distribution and allocation of income. In the cases examined here, the amount of land ranged from one hundred to several thousand mou, so the Lou estate with five hundred mou was of medium size.

Although the Lou estate provided only a monthly allotment of rice to needy members of the descent group, most estates were more specific in their provisions, stipulating, for example, support for marriage and funeral expenses along with aid for sickness and poverty.^[21] Some estates subsidized the expenses associated with both male and female coming-of-age ceremonies (capping and hair binding, respectively) and also provided support for the births of sons and daughters.^[22] In about one quarter of the cases studied here, in addition to direct material support to individual households, estates supported schools for the education of the sons of the descent group. Support for education was of obvious importance to elite families who were concerned to maintain and enhance their status by succeeding in the examinations or by fulfilling in other ways the role of shih . Aid for the expenses of weddings and funerals might also be of special concern to elite families for the same motive. Similarly, support for ancestral rituals and for burial expenses or the purchase and upkeep of gravesites was important in the maintenance and display of elite status and perhaps in the strengthening of descent-group ties.^[23] A wide range of activities, related to status as

[20] Liu K'o-chuang, Hou-ts'un hsien-sheng ta-ch'üan chi (SPTK ed.), 92.20b.

[21] The estate belonging to ancestors of the Ch'ing scholar Ch'üan Tsu-wang, located like that of the Lou in Yin county, was set up to provide support for marriage and funeral expenses, as well as to aid the poor of the descent group. See Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Chieh-ch'i t'ing-chi (SPTK ed.), 21.4a. Others, such as the Ch'en of Chin-hua (Wu-chou) (Wang Mou-te, Chin-hua fu-chih [Taipei 1965 reprint ed.], 16.69a), the Chang of P'ing-chiang (Su-chou) (Liu Tsai, Man-t'ang wen-chi [SKCS ed.], 21.32a), both in Chekiang, the Chang of Han-chou in Szechwan (Chu Hsi, Chu-tzu ta-ch'üan [SPPY ed. ], 95 hsia : 38), and the Fang of Hsing-hua in Fu-chien (Lin Hsi-i, Chu-hsi chüan chai shih-i kao hsu-chi [SKCS ed.], 12.15a), also specified that income from the estate be used to provide support for marriages and funerals, as well as to aid the poor of the descent group.

[22] For example, the estates of the Hsing-hua Fang (Lin Hsi-i, 12.15a) and the Chao of T'an-chou in Ching-hu-nan (Liu K'o-chuang, 92.20a) both specified that income was to be used for these purposes as well as for weddings and funerals and for aid to the poor. The Shih of T'ai-chou in Liang-che designated income from their estate to be used for the marriage expenses of orphaned girls and for monthly support for wet nurses for abandoned infants (Chu Hsi, 92.6b).

[23] The Fu of Wu-chou (Liang-che) stipulated that income from their estate be used not only to aid members of the descent group, but also to provide support for rites (Huang Chin, Huang wen-hsien kung-chi [TSCCHP ed.], 7.14a). The Ch'en of Chen-chiang used half of the income from their estate for aid to the descent group and half for the upkeep of graves (Liu Tsai, 23.10b). Hsieh Tzu-ch'ang of T'ai-chou purchased mountain land for the interment of those members of his descent group who had no place for burial (Lin Piao-min, Ch'ih-ch'eng chi [SKCSCP ed.], 12.18b). Income from lands that supported the charitable school established by the Liu of Hsin-chou was eventually increased to provide support for the completion of grave-building (Chu Hsi, 80.2b).

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well as to basic economic welfare, could be supported by the income from charitable estates. For example, the Fang of Hsing-hua (Fu-chien) designated aid for rites of passage, such as the birth of children, cappings, weddings, and funerals; ancestral rites; a school; and for the "poor and hungry."^[24] The Sun of Chi-chou in Chiang-nan-hsi specified that income from their estate be used for food, clothing, medicine, burial, and ritual expenses.^[25]

By far the greatest number of estates simply designated that income from the estates be used to provide financial support to members of the descent group. Whether this was to be general support for all, as with the Fan estate, or only to those judged especially to need it, as with the Lou estate, is usually unclear. The model and precedent specifically cited in over a third of the cases examined was, not surprisingly, that of the Fan estate; and the largest single cluster of Southern Sung estates documented here was in Su-chou (Liang-che), the home of the Fan. Liu Tsai (1166-1239), writing about the estate of the Chang lineage of Su-chou, cited the example of the Fan estate and suggested that it was widely imitated by elite families in the Su-chou region in particular.^[26] Few families, however, could afford to allot the income from the estates indiscriminately, as had the Fan. Judging from the limited size of most of the estates (although, again, the information on this is sparse), it would not have been possible to provide support to the entire group, only to those in need and probably then only on an emergency basis.

Some estates were established as the direct result of misfortune and designed with the specific purpose of aiding the orphaned children of a close relative. For example, at the death of his elder brother, Sun Ch'un-nien (d. 1199) cared for the brother's children; after their deaths, he cared for their children in turn. The estate he set up in Yueh-chou (Liang-che) was called a "charitable residence" (i-chü ), and it provided regular allotments to his brother's and cousins' descendants, with any surplus designated for marriage expenses.^[27] In a similar case, the charitable estate founded by Ch'en Chü-jen (1129-1197), who had marriage connections with the Lou of Ming-chou, provided support for his cousin's children after the deaths of his uncle and two cousins.^[28] Ch'en Chü-jen's father had migrated to Ming-

[24] Lin Hsi-i, 12.15a.

[25] Chou Pi-ta, Wen-chung chi (SKCS ed.), 74.7a.

[26] Liu Tsai, 21.34b.

[27] Lu Yu, Wei-nan wen-chi (Wan-yu wen-k'u [WYWK ] ed.), 39.716-17.

[28] Lou Yueh, 89.1220-21.

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chou from Fu-chien, leaving lands behind in P'u-t'ien, Hsing-hua, which Ch'en Chü-jen set aside for his uncle's descendants in the form of a charitable estate. The estate founded by Wen I (1215-1256), the father of the famous Southern Sung patriot Wen T'ien-hsiang (1236-1283), was initially set up to aid his uncle's household after the uncle's death but was eventually extended to the entire descent group.^[29] Thus, a sense of obligation to specific kin, as well as more generalized concern for the welfare and status of the descent group as a whole, motivated the establishment of charitable lands and estates.

Benefits from the estates were not always limited to those linked by agnatic kinship.^[30] In some cases, affinal kin were specified as recipients of aid along with agnatic kin, although in most cases this appears to have been due to special circumstances. Income from the estate in Han-chou (Ch'eng-tu-fu) established by the elder brother of the famous general Chang Chün (1096-1164) was designated for aid to the poor among the descent group and for weddings and funerals of maternal kin (mu-tsu ).^[31] An estate in Su-chou (Liang-che) appears to have been established in part for affinal kin (yin-tsu ),^[32] and the estate of the Shu, established in the late Sung or early Yuan period, was set up for maternal relatives (wai-chia ) who had brought up and educated the founder of the estate.^[33] The contract for the estate of the Liu in Chien-ning (Fu-chien) stipulated that neither sons-in-law who "transgress the rites" nor daughters who marry "those who are not upright" would receive aid from the estate, even though they were poor.^[34] These restrictions imply that both sons who marry into the family and daughters who marry out ordinarily would be considered for aid.^[35]

In general, although the income from most estates was probably limited to agnatic kin, there appear to have been no customary restrictions on the allocation of estate income to others. Wives could also play an important role in founding estates. For example, the wife of a man in Mei-chou (Ch'eng-tu-fu) gave money and land to help with the expenses of weddings and funerals and to aid sickness and poverty for her husband's kin.^[36] After

[29] Wen T'ien-shang, Wen-shan hsien-sheng wen-chi (WYWK ed.), 11.374-75.

[30] There is at least one Northern Sung example of a wife who used her dowry to set up a charitable estate to benefit equally both her own and her husband's kin (Sung Lien, Sung hsueh-shih wen-chi [WYWK ed.], 42.738). Another late Northern Sung woman, highly educated and active in her husband's career as well as in their home, helped her husband establish a charitable estate for his agnates (Liu I-chih, 50.27b).

[31] Chu Hsi, 95 hsia . 38.

[32] Pien Shih, Yu-feng hsu-chih: ming-kuan p'ien (Yuan-wei pieh-ts'ang ed.), 18b-19a.

[33] Wu Ch'eng, Wu Wen-cheng chi (SKCS ed.), 77.12a-b.

[34] Yu Chiu-yen, Mou-chai i-kao (SKCS ed.) hsia. 30b.

[35] For the relevance of charitable estates to marriage strategies in the late Ch'ing, see Dennerline, "Marriage, Adoption, and Charity."

[36] Wei Liao-weng, Ho-shan hsien-sheng ta-ch'üan chi (SPTK ed.), 44.16b.

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her death, her husband added to it, and it was called the Compassionate Favor Estate. The wife of another man who founded a charitable estate for his agnatic kin helped her husband purchase six hundred mou of land to give to impoverished cousins by contributing proceeds from the sale of over twenty cosmetic trays she had received as presents.^[37]

To establish a charitable estate was not easy. As Lu Yu (1125-1210) put it: "It is not because it is not good that it is not done; it is because resources are insufficient."^[38] One reads frequently of estates being founded by sons of a father who had desired to do so, but had not been able to carry it out in his lifetime. The estate set up by Lou Shou is just one example. But if founding an estate was difficult, maintaining one was even more so. In fact, reference is often made to the Fan estate as having been preserved unlike so many others. In his inscription on the Compassionate Favor Estate in Szechuan, Wei Liao-weng (1178-1237) lamented the fact that, even though the estate was relatively small, the descendants of the founder had not been able to preserve it. An inscription On the charitable lands of the Hsieh in T'ai-chou (Liang-che) emphasized the difficulties in setting up the estate and the even greater difficulties in managing and continuing it, noting that the inscription was written as a warning to those who might consider charitable lands easily gotten and thus take lightly their responsibilities in managing them.^[39] Few estates, however, were maintained for more than a few generations; the Lou are representative, since they experienced problems with their estate within fifty years of its founding. The complaint runs through documents on charitable estates that members of the descent group abused their privileges and illegally dispersed resources for their own benefit, suggesting an inherent tension between the explicit motives presented for the founding of estates and the facts of kin-group life, property relations, and the interests of individual members that determined their subsequent fates.

According to most accounts, the founders of estates were motivated by an altruistic ideal: to help their kinsmen. At the same time, it is apparent that these ideals could not have inspired all members of the descent group, since it was most often members who contributed to the dispersal of the estate. The explanation for this phenomenon may lie in specific aspects of the landholding system, which is beyond the scope of this study and the expertise of the author; but the general point may be made that joint property was not subject to dispersal through the system of partible inheritance practiced in Chinese society, so this was a logical way to preserve land in larger units and to avoid the parcelization of landholdings among members

[37] Hu Yin, Pei-jan chi (SKCS ed.), 21.10a.

[38] Lu Yu, 21:4.

[39] Lin Piao-min, 12.19a.

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of a descent group.^[40] But while endowing a charitable estate could be easily justified and encouraged by Confucian ideas of familial obligation, and while an estate yielded economic benefits to the descent group as a corporate unit, particular households might well prefer receiving their small portion through inheritance to awaiting possible future benefits, very likely shared and not individually substantial. Considerable gain might also be had by a household that could surreptitiously direct much or all of the estate's income toward its own interests. This would explain why the generations following the establishment of a charitable estate might attempt in various ways either to claim their individual inheritances or to increase them through illegally taking advantage of its resources. The endowment of a charitable estate would presumably serve the economic interests of the descent group taken as a whole, as well as strengthen by symbolic means the sense of common identity among its members, particularly if some of the income from the estate were designated for support of ancestral rites. These benefits might be of particular value to elite households within the group. But to individual descendant households, retaining land for division by inheritance might seem economically preferable.

The Southern Sung writer Yuan Ts'ai described the problems of charitable estates straightforwardly, suggesting that charitable schools served far better to protect and preserve the descent group. According to Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life , charitable schools were better for very practical reasons:

The purpose of establishing a charitable estate is to aid poor kinsmen. If your lineage is an old one, its members are sure to be numerous. Not only will each person's share become less and less, but the unworthy young men will not use their shares to aid the cold and hungry. Furthermore, some will go so far as to mortgage their shares in the joint estate in a bout of drinking or a toss of the dice. They will then get less than half; what is the use then? Also, if members' income is generous, they will be well fed to the end of their days with nothing to focus their minds on except disturbing their communities and causing trouble for the authorities.

Thus it is better to use the land to endow a charitable school. If it is attached to a temple, you can endow "monk land." Someone qualified as a classicist can be selected to teach. [From the endowment] the meals for the students can be supplied, and help can be given when they are in need.^[41]

We can infer from Yuan Ts'ai's comments in the latter half of the twelfth century that charitable estates were widespread and that the problems and

[40] Shimizu 1949, p. 45 cites a rare example contained in the Ming-kung shu-p'an ch'ing-ming chi of the establishment of a charitable estate by official order as a means of dividing up an estate. (Cited also in Liang, p. 319.)

[41] Patricia B. Ebrey, trans., Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts'ai's "Precepts for Social Life " (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 229-30.

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abuses that led to their demise were also common knowledge.^[42] His account may also imply that charitable schools were less common, although their founding must also have been common enough that Yuan could presume this audience knew what they were.

Charitable schools were, in fact, often established together with estates; and in some cases, the estate was set up specifically to provide income to support the school, although schools could also be set up as adjuncts to estates. The Ch'en estate was established with a substantial endowment to support marriages and funerals, and to provide aid for people in need. A charitable school was founded at the same time, and teachers were invited to teach the sons of the family.^[43] A "charitable school-estate" (i-hsueh-chuang ) established by the Chao of Heng-shan in T'an-chou (Ching-hu-nan) provided funds for food, clothing, marriages, and funerals, as well as special payments to the poor, and support for the school.^[44] A shrine was set up at the school to honor Chao K'uei (1186-1266), who, although he attained high political rank, had been unsuccessful in his desire to establish a charitable estate. The school was quite extensive, including four student chambers (chai ) and an upper and lower division. It also functioned as a community school, since outsiders preparing to take the examinations were taught here, and the school regulations followed those of two famous Southern Sung academies, Yueh-lu and Stone Drum.^[45]

That a lineage school might be open to the community, like that of the Chao above, suggests that the barrier presumably separating the sphere of descent from the sphere of the larger community had a certain permeability. The authors of commemorative inscriptions likewise explicitly connected the two spheres when they linked a man's beneficial acts as an official with his private beneficence in establishing a charitable estate for his descent group. Chu Hsi praised the compassionate administration of Magistrate Liu, who held office in the neighboring county of Te-an when Chu Hsi was prefect of Nan-k'ang, and on later visiting Liu at his home at Yü-shan in Hsin-chou (Chiang-nan-tung) learned of the charitable school he had set up there:

My family was originally simple and poor, and I gained office very late, so I had not the means to be benevolent to the three tsu ["lineages": own,

[42] Shimizu, p. 25.

[43] Chin-hua fu-chih , 16.69a.

[44] Liu K'o-chuang, 92.20a-20b.

[45] Liu K'o-chuang, 92.20b. Other examples of linked school and estate include the "charitable estate-school" (i-chuang-hsueh ) of the Chiang in Chien-ning (Wei Liao-weng, 83.1b); the charitable estate and school established by Wu Fei (1104-1183) in T'ai-chou (Chu Hsi, 88.15a); the school established by Chang Kao in Su-chou, which was connected with the charitable estate begun by his father (Liu Tsai, 21.35a); and that of the Liu of Hsin-chou, who supplied the resources to establish a school for their own family, although local villagers were also allowed to attend (Chu Hsi, 80.2b).

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mother's, and wife's?]. In the past I had set aside land, built a dwelling, and invited known scholars to teach the sons of the tsu ; and local people who wanted to study were also allowed to come. Some among the elder and younger brothers took pleasure in using their property to aid it, but I still worried about whether it would continue or not. Then I went out again to [hold office in] Hsin-an and took my excess salary to add to it and to support its expenses; and it was completed. There was [also] support for grave-building and for those who were getting married. Thereupon I reported it to the prefecture, and the prefect was happy to hear of it. He made a proclamation to announce to the descendants that they must not subvert my will.^[46]

Thus official recognition of and support for an estate can also be seen as linking a descent-group estate to the wider community and even the state. Chu Hsi went on to criticize the behavior of contemporary shih-ta-fu and to compare them unfavorably with Magistrate Liu, who, despite having neither high rank nor great wealth, was benevolent to his kin. He directly connected this to his compassionate acts as an administrator dealing with famine in his jurisdiction: "And this can also be seen in his former days in government administration in Te-an."^[47] Chu also wrote of Shih Tun (1128-1182; chin-shih 1145), prefect of Nan-k'ang, who established a charitable estate for his agnates.^[48] In his funerary inscription for Shih, Chu immediately followed the reference to the founding of the estate with the words: "What he put first in government administration was loving the people."^[49] thus linking his charitable acts to his descent group to his career as a public administrator, or perhaps even encouraging us to see the former as a special category of the latter.

The same linkage is asserted for a private gentleman's charitable acts in an inscription by Liu Yueh (1144-1216) for an estate in his home county, Chien-yang (Fu-chien), belonging to the Hsiung, relatives of Liu's stepmother.^[50] According to Liu, the Hsiung produced many illustrious men, although the founder of the estate seems not to have been particularly prominent.^[51] Liu tells of a famine in the Ch'ien-tao period (1165-1174), when the Hsiung, unlike others, did not attempt to profit from the disaster, but sold their grain reserves at reasonable prices.^[52] As Liu presents it, the founder was then able to extend the "charitable consciousness" displayed in

[46] Chu Hsi, 80.2b.

[47] Chu Hsi, 80.3a.

[48] Chu Hsi 92.6a-b.

[49] Chu Hsi, 92.6b.

[50] Liu Yueh, Yun-chuang Liu Wen-chien kung wen-chi (Ming Hung-chih/Chia-ch'ing revised woodblock ed.), 8.1 a-2a.

[51] Of the 23 Hsiung listed in the standard reference for Sung biography (Ch'ang Pi-te et al., Sung-jen chuan-chi tsu-liao so-yin [Taipei: Hsin-wen-feng, 1974-1976] 4:3620-24; hereafter cited as SBM ), nearly half are from Chien-yang, including Hsiung Ho (1253-1312); but this list does not include the founder of the estate.

[52] Liu Yueh, 8.1a.

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his benevolence toward the community to his descent group by founding a charitable estate for them. The order of concerns traced here is extraordinary. One might expect to see a man described, on the model of the Great Learning or the Classic of Filial Piety , as having extended the caring learned in the family or kin group to a wider sphere through his charities to his community or his beneficence in office. Here instead a man first shows (and perhaps learns?) his altruism outside, then applies it at home. The reversal may in part simply reflect the real sequence of the Hsiung founder's own beneficent acts. But that Liu is ready to draw the connection in this direction, to see founding a lineage estate as the downward extension of a broader community-mindedness, or even perhaps as statecraft writ small, is striking. Perhaps beneficence to community and nation was for some in Liu's audience a more uncontroversially admirable starting-point than caring for kin. In what follows we will see similarly striking ties drawn between the two spheres, but now for estates that from the outset locate themselves on the community side of the kin-community line.

Community Charitable Estates

A close connection between charitable estates founded by and for members of one descent group and those founded to benefit a community of elite families was suggested by Shimizu Morimitsu, who argued that various kinds of descent-group institutions, such as the charitable school and charitable granary (i-ts'ang ), were directly modeled on earlier community institutions; others, such as charitable estates, originated within the descent group and were adapted as community institutions.^[53] The earliest community charitable estate I have been able to document for the Southern Sung was established in 1168 by chief-councillor-to-be Shih Hao (1106-1194) early in his political career when he served as prefect of Shao-hsing (Yüeh-chou, Liang-che).^[54] Since the Shih, like the Lou whom we have already seen, were from Yin county in Ming-chou, and since the two had marriage ties, Shih Hao may well have been influenced by the example of the Lou estate, although there is no direct evidence. He allotted funds from the prefectural treasury to purchase land and used the income from this land to grant worthy but impecunious local shih-ta-fu families aid for marriage and funeral expenses. This land was attached to the prefectural school and was managed by local administrators, who approved or denied requests for aid submitted by Shao-hsing families. Although the school preceptor and other school officials shared in the management of the land, they were not allowed to shift its resources to the support of students.^[55]

[53] Shimizu, p. 30.

[54] Chou Ying-ho, (Ching-ting ) Chien-k'ang chih (SYTFCTS ed.), 13,18b-19a.

[55] Ibid.

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This charitable estate became the model for a "community charitable field-estate" (hsiang-ch'ü i-t'ien-chuang ) established in Shih Hao's native Yin county during the late Ch'un-hsi period (1174-1189), when Shih Hao lived at home at the close of his official career.^[56] Shen Huan (1129-1181), a local scholar whom Shih Hao patronized and who was also one of the "Four Masters of Ming", disciples of the philosopher Lu Chiu-yuan, suggested to Shih Hao that the local elite of Ming-chou might follow the example of Shao-hsing and establish a community charitable estate to benefit local scholars.^[57] Shih Hao agreed with him, and the two of them, together with Wang Ta-chi (1120-1200) of the locally prominent Wang family, exhorted other leaders of local society to support the project. Later the prefect contributed official land and money, and the income was used to support local shih-ta-fu who lacked the means to pay for marriages and funerals. According to Shih Hao, however, and unlike the original community estate in Shao-hsing, the income from the estate was to be used not only for marriage and funeral expenses, but also to assist scholars in study by releasing them from financial concerns, and even to provide some security for officeholders, since "the days in office are few, and the days of retirement are many." In his preface to an account of the estate, Shih Hao suggested that its purpose was to encourage the self-cultivation of shih-ta-fu by providing financial assistance that would allow them to concentrate on the completion of their development as moral individuals.^[58]

In a commemorative inscription on the same estate, Lou Yueh mentions the Fan estate and that of his own family but declares the community estate superior, presumably because it was directed to the needs of the entire community of shih , not just of one descent group.^[59] Images of Wang Ssu-wen (chin-shih 1112), Wang Ta-yu's father and Lou Yueh's maternal grandfather, of Shen Huan, and of Shih Hao were honored at the estate. An inscription on the Former Worthies' Sacrificial Hall at the estate by Wang Ying-lin (1223-1296) explained that the sacrificial hall was begun in 1217 to honor the Three Worthies for their contribution to the local community by establishing the charitable estate, and stated: "The Great Learning considered this [kind of undertaking] to be the means to bring peace to the world [p'ing t'ien-hsia ]."^[60] Wang went on to make references to the "community compact" (hsiang-yueh ) of Lü Ta-chün and to Ch'en Hsiang's (1017-1080) achievements as a local teacher as exemplary models of the use of local means and resources to help people and thereby to "bring peace

[56] Yuan Chueh et al., (Yen-yu ) Ssu-ming chih (SYTFCTS ed.), 14.41a-45b.

[57] Ibid., 14.41a.

[58] Ibid., 14.42a.

[59] Ibid., 14.44a.

[60] Yen-yu , 14.45b.

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to the world."^[61] The gazetteer for the late Yuan lists extensive landholdings, income, and buildings for the estate, so it is apparent that it not only survived but, unlike most descent-group estates, continued to prosper.

A similar community charitable estate was set up in Chien-k'ang (Chiang-ning, Liang-che) in 1251 by the prefect Wu Yuan (1190-1257) to aid "poor" officeholding families with the costs of education, marriages, and funerals, and to support them through the vicissitudes of official careers.^[62] It was modeled on the community charitable estate of Yin county in Ming-chou, which, according to the sources on the Chien-k'ang estate, was attached to the local school, as the original one established by Shih Hao had been. Here, however, surplus income could be used to support students at the school. An inscription on this estate in the local history also cites the precedents of the Fan estate and the community charitable estate in Yin county, but remarks that the charity of Fan Chung-yen's estate stopped with the descent group, while the community estate extended charity further to the whole community of elite lineages.^[63] Elsewhere, at about the same time that Shih Hao established the community estate in Shao-hsing, Chao Shan-yü (1143-1189), serving as registrar of Ch'ang-kuo county in Ming-chou, exhorted wealthy families there to buy land, the income from which would be used to support the marriages and funerals of poor people (perhaps still of shih status?).^[64] Although the date is not clear, a similar institution, called a "charitable estate for scholars" (i shih-chuang ), was set up by Lei Te-jun, preceptor of the government school in Fu-chou (Fu-chien).^[65] He used surplus school grain to buy land, whose income was to aid poor scholars for marriages and funerals, in old age, and in sickness.

There were probably, given the limits of the sources available to us, a good many more such estates in Southern Sung China. Alongside them in the same period we may place the "charitable service" estates founded privately to lessen the burden of draft village service on local elites and others; the numerous private "normal-purchase" estates and granaries,^[66] founded

[61] For Ch'en Hsiang, see SBM 3:2518. Niida Noboru specifically linked the "community compact" of the Lu family to the conception of charitable estates. See Niida Noboru, Chugoku hoseishi kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1962), p. 142.

[62] Chien-k'ang chih , 28.24b-28a.

[63] Chien-k'ang chih , 28.26b-27a; 28a.

[64] Lou Yueh, 102.1429; T'o T'o et al., Sung shih (Taipei: Ting-wen), 247 (lieh-chuan 6): 8762.

[65] Wang Tz'u-ts'ai and Feng Yun-hao, Sung-Yuan hsueh-an pu-i (Ssu-ming ts'ung-shu ed.), 3.55b.

[66] An example is the Original Price Estate (pen-chia chuang ) of the Ch'en of T'ai-chou. The founder of this estate contributed funds to purchase grain when it was abundant and the price low, and then sold it at half the market price when grain became scarce and the price high. After the founder's death, his two sons divided up the property; and since each got 10,000 mou (10 ch'ing ), with the remainder going to the continuation of the estate, the Ch'en property must have been extensive. See Lin Piao-min, 12.15b-17b.

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to ease the impact of price swings on poor farmers; and the community granaries examined in chapter 5 of this volume by Richard yon Glahn. These institutions certainly differed in important ways. The community estates considered here, for example, resembled charitable-service estates in directing their aid largely at elite members in relative poverty or temporary difficulty, whereas normal-purchase institutions and community granaries aimed more broadly at improving the lot of the farming population as a whole. Yet all resembled one another in certain ways as well. All may be viewed, on the one hand, as indications of the consolidation of local elites' ties to one another and position within their localities. On the other hand, they should be seen as reflecting a new attitude toward the community and state: an attitude that emphasized local, voluntary efforts (even though these often involved the cooperation, if not the direct action, of local officials) to resolve local social and economic problems. Moving from the institutional to the ideological level, I will discuss the motives and justifications for the founding of charitable estates, gleaned from the accounts of contemporaries who composed inscriptions commemorating estates or their founders.

Charitable Consciousness

How did people explain or justify charitable estates? On what intellectual foundations were they based? What relation did these ideas have to attitudes toward the descent group, the community, and the state? Some tentative answers can be found in the background discussions contained in commemorative inscriptions for a number of estates. Perhaps the most fundamental and most frequently cited aim proposed in this literature is to strengthen the ties of the descent group by providing support for its members. Support is provided for ancestral rites, funerals, and graves, to maintain these symbols of descent-group unity; and also for marriage and schooling, matters vital to the group's status. While human compassion for the suffering of one's kin is often expressed, it is frequently couched in terms of reverence for ancestors.^[67] Similarly, writers refer to the unity of rich and poor as the reasons for the obligations of the rich, but this is generally done within the framework of kinship.

Such arguments concern relations within the descent group and the efficacy of charitable estates in uniting it (ho tsu or ho tsung-tsu ). But a number of writers went beyond kinship to discuss what they saw as classical and historical precedents, and to present charitable estates, even when limited to kin, as a contemporary revival of some of the basic principles of gover-

[67] See Liu Tsai, 23.10b, 21.32a, where he supports the same idea with a quotation from Fan Chung-yen, and 21.33b-34a; also Lu Yu, 21.3-4; Wei Liao-weng, 44.16a.

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nance that prevailed in antiquity under the sage-kings. The most extensive such discussion I have found is by the Neo-Confucian scholar Hu Yin (1098-1156), who wrote in detail about the era of the well-field system as a model of political economy and harmonious social relations:

In the good government of the illustrious kings of ancient times, they calculated the [number of] mouths and allocated land [accordingly], so that people would all receive clothing and food and there would be no extremes of poverty or wealth. The poor did not lack the means to sustain themselves; nor did the rich go beyond the limits of the [sumptuary] laws. All had the means of nourishment. Thus the well-field system, using righteousness to attain profit, was [the way to] make the world "public" [kung ] and to achieve harmony and peace. After the Ch'in opened up the dividing lines and destroyed the boundaries, people used their intelligence and strength to set up their own lands, and then oppressed each other in their [pursuit of] things. . . . If we examine the later results, "the city walls fell back into the moat,"^[68] and people held on to precious things only to lose their lives over them. Although the noble and mean were not equal, they were the same [in their pursuit of things]. When T'ang and Y6 established the feudal states, they divided the big and small into li [townships]. As we see in the book of Yü-kung, the li were simply the well-fields. When the Chou fell, the strong swallowed the weak. The many quickly were absorbed by the few, and the myriad states were consolidated and became six or seven. But the lords of these six or seven states were not yet satisfied in their hearts. They formed deceitful stratagems, sharpened their spears and knives; the dead covered the fields, and flowing blood filled the rivers. Ch'in Shih-huang-ti was the harshest of these. Finally, there was no one who did not turn against even those they loved most. This was because they abandoned righteousness and struggled over profit.

Mencius took the well-field system as the first order of humane government. . . . From the Han and T'ang on, the shih-ta-fu households who have been able to maintain themselves for several generations and not fall, if they have not simply inherited wealth, have managed their resources [in order to maintain themselves]. They wrote ritual rules so that those who occupied the positions of leaders would not dare to be selfish, and those below would not dare to act recklessly. All the sacrificing, banquets, funerals, and weddings were appropriately conducted. . . . And the grace of mutual support and mutual giving spread through the tsu

Today the gentlemen [shih ] in a district allow the households to the east to be poor and the households to the west to be wealthy. Those who carry out the Way must criticize this unevenness. How much more [ought one to criticize this] in the gathering of a household, where the elders have delicious food to eat and beautiful clothes to wear, and the younger have [only] chaff to eat and hemp to wear, and do not avoid hunger and cold? In the present dynasty, Fan Chung-yen set up a charitable estate [to counteract this] at Ku-su. It was

[68] A quotation from the I-ching , indicating doom.

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greatly regarded by the elite, and it was a model, from the household to the state.^[69]

Hu Yin concludes this inscription on the Shih charitable estate in Ch'eng-tu (Ch'eng-tu-fu) by returning to the theme of the well-field and "feudal" (feng-chien ) system, arguing that since it was not possible to restore these, the shih-ta-fu could establish charitable lands as a means to achieve some of the same ends.

Developing the same theme, Huang Chin (1277-1357) wrote in an inscription on a late Southern Sung or early Yuan charitable estate:

Ah! From what does the name "righteousness" (i ) come? Humanity means loving your kin. Doing the proper thing at the appropriate time is righteousness. It is what rites arise from. This being so, I have heard that the ancients in establishing rites used the well-field system to pool their resources (li ). They used the community (pi-lü q and the clan (tsu-tang ) to attain social stability. After that, they helped each other in emergencies and celebrated each other's joyous events, were sympathetic with each other at deaths and funerals, and nourished the sick. [But] this was still not sufficient to exhort people to love their kin. Therefore there were the regulations for the patrilineal descent line [tsung-fa ], and the meaning of these lay not simply in residing together [but in following appropriate mourning rituals].^[70]

Another Sung writer, in an inscription on an estate in Fu-chien, similarly praised the era of the well-field system and the descent-group organization that evolved at the same time:

[They] helped each other in hard times. . . . The established teachings of the sages always arise from treating kin as kin and treating elders as superiors. . . . The people submitted to and practiced the admonitions from above. And "commiserating consciousness" could regularly begin from those near at hand. This was the origin of the Three Dynasties' moral transformation [chiao-hua ].

Later, the boundaries were opened up and the tsung lost continuity. Many dispersed to the four directions, and deaths and moves were not reported; the benevolence of treating kin as kin narrowed. How could the "good heart" not remain? It was simply because of historical trends [not because of the disappearance of the innate "good heart"]. The point was reached when rites and righteousness were not heard or seen, cultural transformation [feng-hua ] was not practiced, and the selfish heart triumphed. Feelings for the distant and for those outside begin with bones and flesh [i.e., with kin] because of their nearness. [Yet] people did not take care of their brother's poverty but [only] struggled over profit.^[71]

[69] Hu Yin, 21.8a-10a.

[70] Huang Chin, 7.14b.

[71] Yu Chiu-yen, hsia . 29b.

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After describing these historical changes as a falling away from the pristine society of antiquity, and then giving details of the establishment of this charitable estate, the writer returned to the theme of the unity of the tsung , echoing ideas expressed by his contemporaries above:

Men's lives begin with their parents. Extending this on a large scale, numerous generations, even though they are distant, all are of the same vital energy [ch'i ]. Who lacks a heart that empathizes with this? . . . The regulations for the patrilineal descent line [tsung-fa ] have declined, and the gentlemen [shih chün-tzu ] lack the land to fulfill their intentions of being kinlike and harmonious; there is only the charitable estate, the one thing, that still is able somewhat to unite the descent group [tsung-tsu ] and receive the dispersed. . . . And the family law of Fan Chung-yen is most complete. . . . The wealthy put out capital in order to help their kin, the poor have food, and thereby their conduct is good. It is the way of correct [cheng ] mutual encouragement.^[72]

As seen in this inscription and in many others, the Fan estate is cited as a model and a precedent for charitable estates founded in the Southern Sung and later in the Yuan; but here, as in other writings cited above, that reference is embedded in a broader discussion of classical and historical institutional models, in particular the well-field system. The main argument was succinctly put by Wei Liao-weng:

The ancients resided in communities [pi-lü ] and cultivated the well-fields. Income and expenditures were shared, and savings were always put aside for aid. When the surplus was insufficient, they always aided each other. [Even in] adversity they always contributed to accumulation [of a surplus]. There was none who did not enable men to live and be nourished in order to help complete the virtue born of Heaven and Earth. In later generations those who produce wealth for themselves are hard; and when individuals in distress knock at their doors, they refuse them. . . Mencius said: "He who lacks a commiserating heart is not a man."^[73]

Thus a community institution, the putative well-field system of antiquity, was cited as an ideal of communal support and so as a model for charitable estates. Southern Sung and Yuan men here put forward explicitly the notion of a retreat or withdrawal, though without particularly negative connotations, from public action and national institutions to a sort of statecraft of the family and community at the local level. Returning to the well-field system was recognized as impossible, but the charitable estate was for these writers an imperfect but historically possible means to accomplish some of the same ends. Similarly, a Yuan writer, Ch'en Kao (1314-1366), describing a charitable estate and school in the Yuan, argued:

[72] Yu Chiu-yen, hsia . 31a-b.

[73] Wei Liao-weng, 42.16a.

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In the era of the Three Dynasties, [those of the] same community [tang ] helped each other, [those of the] same prefecture [chou ] were charitable toward each other, and those in office were punished for not being compassionate and thereby correcting the shortcomings. In those days people all knew to divide surplus and supplement insufficiencies, and to help people in need. Since then the way of the world has declined and kingly government is not carried out. Each person is selfish about his wealth, weighing and calculating, counting and comparing, hesitating to pay out. This extends even to their bones and flesh [kin]. Even though someone is in extremity, cold and hungry, on the brink of death, still they keep distant and do not pity him, remain unmoved and do not think themselves responsible. In such circumstances, to take one's property and use it to succor those in difficulties can only be considered having the heart of a benevolent man. . . . The heart of Ch'en [who established a charitable estate] was humane, indeed! Formerly Fan Chung-yen established a charitable estate at Ku-su. Several hundred years have passed and it still remains, but is seldom heard of. The one who carried on the tradition was Ch'en. He heard of the Fan estate and took it up as [a model]. Even though the rules were not precisely the same, still each had its own strengths, and the benevolence of this [commiserating] heart was the same. If one could cause the wealthy people of the age all to have hearts like Ch'en's, and the people to be generous toward their tsu and compassionate toward their neighbors, then charity would spread far and wide. How can one not see generous customs as supplementing [or: compensating for the lack of] kingly government?^[74]

Like the Southern Sung authors already cited, this Yuan writer explicitly linked voluntary and local initiatives, no matter whether in private within the descent group or in public through community estates ("to be generous toward their kin and compassionate toward their neighbors"), to an ideal of "kingly government." The maintenance of social order in the past was understood as a natural reflection of "kingly government." Charitable institutions, a manifestation of "generous customs," it was suggested, were logical and laudable "supplements" (in the sense of compensation for a current deficiency or lack) to "kingly government." Although this statement is of Yuan origin, and may in part reflect the background of a period when Chinese authors felt that "kingly government" had in a profoundly literal sense disappeared, still the ideas represented here flow logically out of Southern Sung discussions of the motives behind charitable estates. In these discussions and in others justifying charitable estates, no contradiction is recognized between the proper needs of an individual descent group and those of the community; rather, it could more accurately be said that the welfare of the two was seen as linked.

[74] Ch'en Kao, Pu-hsi chou-yu chi (Ching-hsiang lou ts'ung-shu ed.), 12.7a-b.

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Charitable estates for both descent group and community may be seen as part of a single evolving Southern Sung "statecraft" tradition, in that both sought to use economic aid and mutual support to stabilize and harmonize social relations. The Confucian idea that the order of the state was linked to harmonious relations within the family, and the Mencian notion that social order depended on economic welfare, provided ideological backing for both lineage and community estates. Ostensibily the Sung state recognized its own responsibility for charitable institutions, but in fact in Southern Sung the state had neither the means nor—since its attitude toward large and potentially powerful local organizations was necessarily ambivalent—the will to provide support for elite descent groups, however impoverished they might be. Thus with the rise of local elites in the Southern Sung it fell to their members, as individuals and as descent groups, to secure and protect their own resources; and this they attempted to do in part through charitable estates. Descent group and shih community need not be at odds here, since in most cases by the Southern Sung extensive affinal ties linked the elite members of different descent groups in a single locality. Thus a community estate could be seen as partly the extension of a descent group's corporate holdings through a network of marriages, with the added advantage that, like that network but unlike descent-group lands, this estate served only the elite and not its masses of poorer kinsmen.^[75] A clear example is the community charitable estate established in Yin county, Ming prefecture, where the web of marriages among local elite families has been amply documented.^[76]

Southern Sung descent-group and community charitable estates were products of private, local, voluntary efforts. This was true even when local officials like Shih Hao took the lead in a community estate's founding. Both kinds of estates were designed to provide material assistance that would allow individuals to survive at a level commensurate with their status. But more important, they were intended to promote consciousness of a common identity, rooted in descent in the case of lineage estates, or in the common position in society and relation to the state shared by the shih in the case of community estates. These motives were explicitly linked to notions of governance and of the proper ordering of society by founders and commemorators who claimed a classical and historical basis for charitable estates, arguing that they represented, in changed historical circumstances, the principles of communal economy and social harmony seen in the idealized society of antiquity, particularly in the well-fields. A specific historical con-

[75] On local elite marriage networks in Southern Sung, see, for example, the work of Robert Hymes cited above in note 5.

[76] See Walton, "Kinship, Marriage, and Status."

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sciousness, rooted in awareness of their own historical circumstances—the fall of the Northern Sung, the failure of state power and of the aggressive state-based reform associated with Wang An-shih and his disciples—informed these writers' perception of charitable estates and enabled them to present them as latter-day reflections of classical social and political norms, and so as experiments in governance in their own right.

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Appendix: Southern Sung Charitable Lands and Estates

Name	Prefecture	Land	Source
Chang	Su-chou	400 mou	Liu Tsai, Man-t'ang wen-chi 21.23a-26a
Chang	Han-chou		Chu Hsi, Chu-tzu ta-ch'üan 95.1705
Chang	Jao-chou		Chou Pi-ta, Wen-chung chi 64.19a
Chang			Liu K'o-chuang, Hou-ts'un hsien-sheng ta-ch'üan chi 192.10a-1la
Chao	Ch'ü-chou		Liu K'o-chuang, 155.12b
Chao	T'an-chou		Liu K'o-chuang, 92.19b-21b
Ch'en	Chen-chiang-fu	140 mou (120 tan )	Liu Tsai, 23.7b-9a
Ch'en	Chi-chou		Su Yu-lung, Lung-ch'üan hsien chih 10.45b
Ch'en	Wu-chou	1,000 mou	Wang Mou-te, Chin-hua fu chih 16.69a-b; Lu Yu, Wei-nan wen-chi 21.3-4
Ch'en	Hsing-hua-chün		Lou Yueh, Kung-k'uei chi 89.1220-21
Cheng			T'o T'o et al., Sung shih 465 (biog. 224); Chou Pi-ta, 7.18b
Cheng	Su-chou		Pien Shih, Yü-feng hsu chih: ming-kuan p'ien 18b-19b
Chi	Su-chou	several ch'ing	Teng Wei, Ch'ang-shu hsien ch'ing chih 9.55a-56b
Chiang	Chien-ning-fu		Wei Liao-weng, Ho-shan hsien-sheng ta-ch'üan chi 83.1a-3b
Chiang			Ming-kung shu-p'an ch'ing-ming chi , p. 265
Ch'ien	Su-chou		Lu Chen, Ch'in-ch'uan chih 8.14b-16a
Chu			Hsu Yuan-shu, Mou-chu chi 11.6a-6b

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Name	Prefecture	Land	Source
Ch'üan	Ming-chou		Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Chieh-ch'I t'ing chi 21.3a-4b; Huang Tsung-hsi, Sung-Yuan hsueh-an 74.26b
Chung	Chen-chiang-fu		Liu Tsai, 31.29b
Fang	Hsing-hua-chün		Lin Hsi-i, Chu-ch'i hsien-chai shih-i kao hsu-chi 12.14b-16b
Fu	Wu-chou	400 mou	Huang Chin, Huang Wen-hsien kung chi 7.14a-15b
Hsiao	Chi-chou	1,000 tan	P'ing Kuan-tung, Lu-ling hsien-chih 28.21b
Hsieh	T'ai-chou		Lin Piao-min, Ch'ih-ch'eng chi 12.17b-19a
Hsiung	Chien-ning-fu		Liu Yueh, Yun-chuang Liu Wen-chien kung wen-chi , 8.1a-2a
Kuo	Lin-chiang-chün	2 ch'ing	Ch'üan Tsu-wang, 92.1a-3a
Lin	Fu-chou (Fu-chien)	100 mou	Liu K'o-chuang, 166.1a-5a
Liu	Chien-ning-fu		Yu Chiu-yen, Mou-chai i-kao, hsia 29b-31b
Liu	Lin-chiang-chün		T'o T'o, 437 (biog. 196)
Liu	Hsin-chou		Chu Hsi, 80.2a-3a
Lou	Ming-chou	500 mou	Fukuda Ritsuko, "Sodai Gisho koko—MinshuRoshi o chu shinto shite"
Lu	Wu-chou		Wang Mou-te, Chin-hua fu chih 16.18b-19a
Mao, Tung	Mei-chou	100 mou	Wei Liao-weng, 79.10b-12b
Pi	Su-chou	466 mou	Ch'en Tsao, Chiang-hu chang-weng chi 21.1la-12a
Shih	Yueh-chou		Lu Yu, 37.56-57
Shih	T'ai-chou		Chu Hsi, 92.4a-7a
Shu	Lung-hsing-fu	100 mou	Wu Ch'eng, Wu Wen-cheng chi 77.1 lb-14a
Sun	Chi-chou		Chou Pi-ta, 74.3b-7a
Wang	Jao-chou		Sun Ti, Hung-ch'ing chü-shih chi 38.1a-13b

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Name	Prefecture	Land	Source
Wen	Chi-chou		Wen T'ien-hsiang, Wen-shan hsien-sheng wen-chi 11.373-77
Wu	T'ai-chou		Chu Hsi, 88.8b-16a
Yeh			Ch'en Ch'i Chiang-hu hsiao chi 41.9b-10a
Yü	Ming-chou		Ch'üan Tsu-wang, 21.3a

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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

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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."

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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

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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.

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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.

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Eight
The Historian as Critic: Li Hsin-ch'uan and the Dilemmas of Statecraft in Southern Sung China

John W. Chaffee

When in the late Ch'ing dynasty Li Hsin-ch'uan's (1167-1244) long-lost history of the early Southern Sung, the Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era (Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu ), was rediscovered and published for the first time in over six hundred years, the editor wrote in his preface that beyond its value as a source for Sung history "it is particularly beneficial for the study of statecraft" (yu yu pi yü ching-shih chih hsueh ).^[1] This remark is striking, for Li has not usually been considered a "statecraft" thinker; nor did he ever, to the best of my knowledge, use the term ching-shih ("world-ordering") to describe his concerns. Yet it is not surprising, for Li was a historian whose sharply defined interests in contemporary history and problems of government could have proved attractive to Ch'ing statecraft thinkers.

Unlike many of his peers, Li had little interest in a life devoted to painting, art, philosophical discourse, or even, for many years, government service. Grand works of historical synthesis like Ssu-ma Kuang's Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ) or the didactic Neo-Confucian "String and Mesh of the Comprehensive Mirror " (Tzu-chih

Acknowledgments : The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided a summer fellowship for the preparation of this chapter.

[1] Wang Te-i, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," appended to Li Hsin-ch'uan, Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu (hereafter HNYL ), 200 ch. (Taipei: Wen-hai ch'u-pan she, 1968), pp. 6775-76. The editor was one Hsiao P'an of Jen-shou in Szechwan, and I have been unable to discover other information about him. It is noteworthy, however, that he used two versions of the Yao-lu in producing his: one from the library of a Yen family of Hsin-fan (also in Szechwan), which was copied from a version of a Yu family in Shanghai, the other a handcopy purchased by the late Ch'ing reformer Chang Chih-tung. (Ibid.)

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t'ung-chien kang-mu ), initiated (though not written) by Chu Hsi (1130-1200),^[2] held little attraction for him. No more did the histories of dynasties past. His concern, rather, was with the Sung, specifically with the time since the "southward crossing" (nan-tu ) that marked the beginning of Southern Sung, with its political and institutional history, and finally with achieving the greatest possible exactitude of historical detail.

In his preoccupation with recent history, Li Hsin-ch'uan was not alone. Whether because of the lack of dynastic history projects—the official histories of the T'ang and Five Dynasties having long since been written—or because printing and the blossoming of scholarship had multiplied the sources and increased the challenge of writing modern history, many of the best histories written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries dealt with the Sung, such as those by Li T'ao (1115-1184), Wang Ch'eng (d. ca. 1200), Chen Te-hsiu (1178-1235), and Hsu Meng-hsin (1126-1207).^[3] Yet none of them, except possibly Li T'ao, could compare with Li Hsin-ch'uan in singularity of purpose or magnitude of accomplishment.

Like Li T'ao, Li Hsin-ch'uan was a man of Szechwan, born in 1167 in Ching-yen county of Lung-chou, a salt-producing prefecture in the western part of the Red Basin. His family's rise to bureaucratic prominence appears to have begun with his father, Li Shun-ch'en (d. 1182),^[4] an 1166 chin-shih who served with distinction in local Szechwan posts before taking a position at the capital in 1179, where he remained until his death three years later.^[5] The author of a well-regarded book on the Classic of Changes ,^[6] Shun-ch'en was also known as an ardent patriot.^[7] When he took up his duties in the

[2] See Yves Hervouet, ed., A Sung Bibliography (Bibliographie des Song ) (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1978), pp. 75-76.

[3] These were the Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien , 520 ch., the Tung-tu shih-lueh , 130 ch., the Huang-ch'ao pien-nien kang-mu pei-yao , 30 ch., and the San-ch'ao pei-meng hui-pien , 250 ch.

[4] For Shun-ch'en's biography, see T'o T'o et al., Sung shih (hereafter SS ), 495 ch. (Taipei: I-wen yin-shu kuan, 1962) 404/7b-8b; Lou Yueh, "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing-chi," Kung-k'uei chi (hereafter KKC ), 112 ch. (TSCC ed.), 60:812-13; and Wang Te-i, "Li Hsiu-yen hsien-sheng nien-p'u" (hereafter Nien-p'u), addendum to the HNYL , pp. 6700-10. Of the earlier history of his family, we know only the names of his grandfather and great-grandfather (Li Fa and Li Hsi).

[5] Nien-p'u, p. 6707. This was as an administrator in the Accounting Office. He also served as an examining official in 1180 and 1181 and was named the Imperial Clan Registrar (Tsung-shih-ssu chu-pu ) in 1181. Ibid., pp. 6708-9.

[6] This was the I pen-chuan , 30 ch. For Lou Yueh's high opinion of it, see KKC 60:812.

[7] This was owing mainly to a lengthy essay written in 1162 upon the accession of the emperor Hsiao-tsung, in which Li argued the restorationist cause by way of ten examples of' southern military victories during the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties periods (Chiang-tung sheng hou chih chien shih p'ien , in Nien-p'u, p. 6701); and to an examination-policy-question essay in 1166 so bellicose in its condemnation of the peace-making the court was then undertaking with the Chin that his examination rank was reduced (SS 404/7b; Nien-p'u, p. 6701).

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capital he was accompanied by Hsin-ch'uan and two younger sons, Tao-ch'uan and Hsing-ch'uan, and it was there that Hsin-ch'uan's devotion to history began.

When I, Hsin-ch'uan, was fourteen or fifteen years of age, I accompanied my late father to an official post at the temporary capital [Hang-chou], and there I had an opportunity to steal a look at imperial records stored in secret in golden cupboards in a stone room.^[8] While leaving we passed by the court, where I overheard the discussions of renowned high ministers. Each recalled that for the period since the crossing of the river, annals had yet to be prepared. As a result, the actions of brilliant sovereigns, virtuous ministers, famous Confucians, and fierce generals were still a jumble and had yet to be made manifest. For a span of seventy years, the history of the military and of taxation, changes in the systems of rites and music, and the records of officials had all been lost. This was extremely regrettable.^[9]

Hsin-ch'uan made it his calling to rectify this situation and spent the next thirty years in private scholarship, interrupted only by one, unsuccessful try at the examinations in 1196. For many years he was overshadowed by his brothers, both of whom obtained the chin-shih degree. Little is known about the younger, Hsing-ch'uan, but Tao-ch'uan had a distinguished career as an official and was known as a loyalist, as an author, and as a prominent supporter of Tao-hsueh , the Learning of the Way, in the early thirteenth century. His collected sayings of Chu Hsi (Chu-tzu yü-lu ) became the prototype for the later standard collection of Chu's talk, the Categorized Conversations of Master Chu (Chu-tzu yü-lei ).^[10]

Li Hsin-ch'uan did become an official in 1225, but this did not disrupt his scholarship: now he worked as an official rather than a private historian. His output was impressive. This included eleven histories, nine of them

[8] This was possible because his father, Li Shun-ch'en, was then the registrar of imperial clan affairs (tsung-cheng-ssu chu-pu ). See "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing chi," KKC 60:812.

[9] Li Hsin-ch'uan, Preface to vol. 1 of Chien-yen i-lai ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi (hereafter CYTC ), 20 ch. (TSCC ed.). He was writing in 1202.

[10] Already in 1204 Li Tao-ch'uan made a claim to a voice in state affairs by publishing Ten Studies of Chiang-tung (Chiang-tung shih-kao i shu ), a book whose title echoed his father's essay (n. 7 above) but which, instead of analyzing famous battles, discussed the military and fiscal preparations needed for recovery of the north. After serving in local posts, Tao-ch'uan, partly in recognition of his outspoken loyalty during the Wu Hsi rebellion of 1206, was promoted to professor of the Imperial University, from which in 1211 he submitted a memorial advocating the Neo-Confucian interpretation of history and proposing that Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Four Books be taught in the university (Tao-ming lu [Chih-pu-tsu chai ts'ung-shu ed.], hereafter TML , 8/6b-9a; see also Nien-p'u, pp. 6720-21). This was accepted in part, and he went on to serve as tea and salt supervisor for Chiang-nan-tung, where he fell afoul of an impeachment; he was en route to a local post at the time of his death in 1266. The most complete account of Tao-ch'uan's life is Huang Kan, Mien-chai chi (SKCS ed.) 38/24b-33a. See also SS 436/17a-19b, and Nien-p'u, passim, especially pp. 6728-32.

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dealing exclusively with the Southern Sung; four works on the classics; and his collected shorter writings.^[11] All that remain today are four: Li's magisterial history of the first thirty-seven years of the Southern Sung, the two-hundred-chapter Record of Important Affairs , mentioned above; his study of Southern Sung institutions and history, the Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Period (Chien-yen i-lai ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi ) in two parts of twenty chapters each;^[12] the Correction of Errors in Old Information (Chiu-wen cheng-wu ), four chapters, which contains miscellaneous historical notes for the Northern and early Southern Sung;^[13] and his history of the Tao-hsueh movement, the Record of the Way and Its Fate (Tao ming lu ), covering the 140 years from the naming of Ch'eng I as imperial tutor to the emperor Li-tsung's edict praising Tao-hsueh .^[14] Such is the value of these works, however, as to make Li probably our most important source for the history of the early Southern Sung.

It should be remembered that the writing of history was a political and not just a scholarly act. The historian described and judged the past, considered to be a mirror for the present. When one dealt with the recent past, as Li did, the mirror of history could easily become a lens for examining current issues. That had its dangers, especially for those who were not official historians. When in 1205 an acquaintance warned Li that powerful ministers were often hostile to "private histories," he was alarmed enough to break off collecting materials for the second volume of the Miscellaneous Records until after the death of the dictatorial chief councillor Han T'o-chou two years later.^[15] Generally, however, Li persevered, convinced that there were many events of the recent past "that are unheard of and unknown."^[16] events that his contemporaries needed to understand.

Most of his contemporaries were receptive.^[17] In 1212 the military commissioner of T'ung-ch'uan circuit, Hsu I (d. 1219), submitted a memorial asking that the Record of Important Affairs be submitted for imperial consid-

[11] See Wang Te-i, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," pp. 6771-88, cited in note 1 above.

[12] See note 5 above. The two parts are dated 1202 and 1216. Li is said to have written a third and fourth part as well, but these are now lost. See Hervouet, Sung Bibliography , pp. 179-80.

[13] Written in 1244; all extant editions are from the Yung-lo ta-tien .

[14] This was written in 1239, with eleven items in chapter 10 added during the Yüan. In addition to these three works, there still exists a 3-chapter fragment of Li's 22-chapter history of Hsiao-tsung's reign, the Hsiao-tsung yao-lüeh ch'u ts'ao . See Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6780.

[15] Preface (1216) to volume 2 of CYTC . See "Chia-t'ai chin ssu-shih," CYTC 1.6:88-89, for Li's own account of Southern Sung prohibitions of private histories.

[16] Preface to volume 1 of CYTC .

[17] Li's biography in the Yüan Sung Dynastic History provides a more mixed evaluation, describing him as talented and truthful but also criticizing him for overemphasizing Szechwanese and underrepresenting southeastern literati. SS 438/11a.

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eration. Hsu effusively praised the exhaustive character of Li's research and the judiciousness of his historical judgments, and he pointed out that Li, having long ago turned his back on the examinations, was without political ambitions.^[18] More praise came from Lou Yueh (1137-1213).^[19] Then came imperial recognition of Li's work, numerous recommendations from highly placed friends, and eventually a career as an official historian, which began in 1226 and lasted until shortly before his death.^[20]

Although our knowledge of Li Hsin-ch'uan's life is sketchy,^[21] two aspects stand out. First is the profound intellectual influence of his father and brother. In his father we see the likely inspiration for his interests in history and the Book of Changes as well as his concern with the threat of the Chin. And in Tao-ch'uan he had an example of courageous loyalty to the dynasty as well as a connection to the Tao-hsueh movement, with which he himself became increasingly identified late in life. It was with some justice that Lou Yueh viewed Hsin-ch'uan's scholarship as part of the Li family learning.^[22] Second, since Hsin-ch'uan's life alternated between the local elite society of Szechwan and the higher circles of Hang-chou society, his writing tended to focus on either the capital bureaucracy and court or Szechwan. His work in the archives and his many personal contacts at court led him to view matters of government largely from the point of view of an insider. But Sze-chwan was special, so much so that his Yuan biographer charged that "in his annals he constantly esteems the literati of Szechwan and is contemptuous of those from the southeast."^[23]

While I would take issue with the substance of this charge, it is true that much of Hsin-ch'uan's most detailed and valuable writing concerns the history of his southwestern region. Moreover, even when he was living in Hang-chou, fellow Szechwanese seem to have formed a critical, though by no means exclusive, core of his relationships there,^[24] and when he was even-

[18] CYTC , introductory chapter (chüan shou ), pp. 1-2.

[19] Lou wrote that although he had never met Li Hsin-ch'uan, he had read all of his Record of Important Affairs and "thenceforth knew that the rewards of Heaven would basically be free from error" (i.e., errors in the judgments of history: the phrase in Chinese is Jan-hou chih t'ien chih pao-shih pen wu ch'a-t'e ). See "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing-chi," KKC 60:812. For other praise by Li's contemporaries for his historical work, see Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6779.

[20] Mien-chai chi 35; Nien-p'u, p. 6731. For other praise by Li's contemporaries for his historical work, see Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6779.

[21] In his fourteen-year official career he served alternately in Szechwan (1226-1231, 1233-1238) and the capital (1231-1233, 1238-1240) and rose to the position of director of the Imperial Library. His formal retirement actually occurred in 1243, after three years of a temple guardianship. Nien-p'u, pp. 6738-65.

[22] KKC 60:812. For an earlier reference to Lou's essay, see note 19.

[23] SS 438/11a.

[24] For example, when Li Shun-ch'en died in Lin-an in 1182, the Szechwan literati there collectively aided the family and sent the Li boys back to Szechwan with their father's body. Nien-p'u, p. 6709.

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tually named an official, his many recommendors were overwhelmingly officials from Szechwan.^[25] Thus, much as his family helped to shape his intellectual concerns, his long residence in Szechwan and the capital provided a focus for much of his writing. Also leaving traces on his writing and thinking were such major events as the disastrous war begun by Han T'o-chou in 1206, which called into question the previous restorationist consensus. Earlier he had also watched the prohibition of Tao-hsueh as "spurious learning" (wei-hsueh ) from 1195 to 1205, and later would see it enshrined by the state under the emperor Li-tsung ("Ancestor of Principle," r. 1225-1264).

Li Hsin-ch'uan was one of those rare historians whose works were widely read and influential in his own day. But just what was his influence, and what influence could he have hoped to exert? What, in fact, was he saying about the problems of government in his time? How is his work related to the intellectual and political life of his time, particularly to the Tao-hsueh movement? Here I make an attempt to explore the answers to these questions, based on a reading of his various prefaces, his one extant memorial (from 1238), the Record of the Way and Its Fate , and the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , particularly its sections on the court, political affairs, the government, and the military.

A Neo-Confucian Historian?

When toward the end of his life Li Hsin-ch'uan was preparing his history of the Neo-Confucian movement, the Record of the Way and Its Fate , it must have seemed to him and others that he was ideally suited for the task. As a young man he had witnessed, at least from afar, some of the movement's stormiest periods, and had written about it as early as 1202, in the first part of the Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country . As the director of the Imperial Library and dean of Chinese historians, he had at his disposal all of the relevant documents from the imperial archives. As the brother of Li Tao-ch'uan and as a friend and collaborator of the late Huang Kan he had had close ties with core members of the movement.^[26] Finally, Li's political benefactors were men such as Yü Ssu, Hung Ch'i-k'uei, and particularly Wei Liao-weng, who rose under Cheng Ch'ing-chih in the early 1230s, when the Neo-Confucians' influence at the court reached its apogee.^[27]

[25] Eighteen of the 26 mentioned in Ts'ui Ch'ing-hsien, Kung yen-hsing lu (quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6738-40) have entries in Ch'ang Pi-te et al., Sung-jen chuan-chi tzu-liao suo-yin (Taipei: Ting-wen shu-chü, 1974-76), and of them, 14 were from Szechwan and another had served there.

[26] Together Li and Huang had edited Chu Hsi's Chou-i pen-i and Li Tao-ch'uan's Recorded Conversations of Master Chu in 1219; see Nien-p'u, pp. 6733-34. In addition, Li Hsing-ch'uan in 1238 wrote a continuation to the Yü-lu , the Chu-tzu yü-lu hou-hsü , in 41 chapters (ibid., p. 6757).

[27] Ibid., p. 6751.

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While Hsin-ch'uan's promotions at the Imperial Library occurred slightly later, his association with these Neo-Confucian ministers was clear.

Nevertheless, it remains a question whether Li Hsin-ch'uan was Neo-Confucian in his thought. He most certainly was an ardent Confucian, and as such he frequently attacked Buddhism. In the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , he relates with evident approval Shih Hao's objection to an attempt to reconcile Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism by the emperor Hsiao-tsung, who argued that Buddhism cultivated the heart, Taoism nurtured life, and Confucianism governed the world. All three, responded Shih, were the proper domain of Confucianism, which used the investigation of things to bring peace to the world.^[28] In discussing the famed attack on Chu Hsi by Lin Li (chin-shih 1142) in 1188, Li traces Lin's opposition to Tao-hsueh back to 1170, when he had Supported a minister charged with publicly (and thus improperly) mourning the death of his deceased brother, a Buddhist monk^[29] Li attacks Buddhist monastaries for maintaining vast landholdings harmful to the people.^[30] Most revealing is an essay Li wrote, ironically, for a Buddhist temple in Hu-chou in 1234. He did so quite unwillingly and used the occasion to denounce Buddhism and the monk, one Tsung Wei, who had persuaded him to write it. At one point he says to Wei: "The country establishes schools in the prefectures and counties in order to clarify human relationships; this is the proper business of Confucians. In establishing schools, is there any reason not to oppose the flourishing of monks?"^[31]

There is also little doubt that Li Hsin-ch'uan sympathized politically and identified personally with the Tao-hsueh scholars. This is evident already in 1202, before the formal lifting of the "spurious learning" prohibition. In his generally gloomy essay on the "rise and decline of Tao-hsueh, " he praises Chou Pi-ta (1126-1204), who was left chief councillor in 1188-1189, as "a minister who gathered together the worthies, and under whom the scholars of the four quarters increased at court."^[32] In other essays, too,

[28] "Yüan-tao pien i ming san-chiao lun," CYTC 2.3:379-80. Hsiao-tsung relented to the extent of changing the name of his essay from "Distinctions within the Original Tao" to "A Discussion of the Three Teachings."

[29] The minister was the left chief councillor Ch'en Chün-ch'ing, his accuser Yü Yun-wen. See "Yeh Cheng-tse lun Lin Huang-chung hsi Wei Tao-hsueh chih mu i fei cheng-jen," CYTC 2.7:432-34. Wang Te-i notes that the item's last sentence, which explicitly traces the beginning of the false-learning prohibition, is missing from the earliest edition of the CYTC . ("Ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi i-chi hsiao-k'an chi" [appended to the CYTC ], p. 636.) Nevertheless, the Ch'en anecdote, which is appended to Li's account of the 1188 memorial, was evidently included to help explain Lin's opposition to Tao-hsueh .

[30] "Seng-ssu ch'ang-chu-t'ien," CYTC 1.16:231.

[31] "An-chi chou Wu-ch'eng hsien Nan-lin Pao-kuo-ssu chi," from Hu-chou fu-chih chin-shih chih . Quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6752-53.

[32] "Tao-hsueh hsing-fei," CYTC 1.6:79-80.

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he consistently defends those attacked as supporters of Tao-hsueh and criticizes those who attacked them.^[33]

And yet one looks in vain in Li for the hallmarks of much of Neo-Confucian writing: an emphasis upon self-cultivation and the quest for sagehood, a concern with the history of the transhistorical Tao, and a search for principles (or coherence) both within history and in the universe at large. Despite his partiality to governmental and Szechwanese affairs, Li was remarkably catholic in his interests and generally made no attempt to fit his findings to some preconceived pattern. He repeatedly voiced his concern over the loss of historical records, however inconsequential they might appear. Even in his preface to the Record of the Way and Its Fate , Li cites as one reason for the work the sheer importance of gathering materials.^[34] He is ever concerned with particulars. Perhaps a "true" Tao-hsueh man could even have applied to Li Hsin-ch'uan Ch'eng Hao's criticism of Hsieh Liang-tso (1059-1103): "When I studied in Lo-yang I recorded the good deeds of the ancients in one volume. When Master Ch'eng Hao saw it, he said that I was trifling with things and losing my purpose."^[35]

Along with a certain cast of mind and range of interests, the followers of Tao-hsueh had from earlier in Southern Sung shared a public program. A good idea of their agenda is conveyed in Li Tao-ch'uan's memorial of 1211, included by Li Hsin-ch'uan in the Record of the Way and Its Fate . If one compares this memorial with Hsin-ch'uan's preface to the Record itself, the special political ramifications of Hsin-ch'uan's own intellectual stance stand out in sharp relief.^[36] We may consider the memorial first. Tao-ch'uan begins by asserting that the ordering of the world is tied to human talent and so in turn to the clarity of learning. But learning had declined after Confucius and Mencius and was only regained in the Sung, when in Ho-nan and Lo-yang great Confucianists again made the learning of Confucius and Mencius clear to the world. Yet the flourishing of talent and good government of the world that followed as a result had recently been negated: "Powerful officials have seen to it that this learning is prohibited, and for more than ten years, the literati's vital forces (ch'i ) have daily declined,

[33] See CYTC 1.6:80-81 ("Hsueh-t'ang wu-shih-chiu jen hsing-ming"); 1.6:81-82 ("Yü-pi chih yen chiu shih"); 2.7:432-34 ("Yeh Cheng-tse lun Lin Huang-chung hsi Wei Tao-hsueh chih mu i fei cheng-jen"); and 2.8:444-48 ("Hui-an hsien-sheng fei su-yin"), the last a defenseof Chu Hsi's frequent refusals to accept appointments.

[34] TML , Preface, 1a.

[35] Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Reflections on Things at Hand , Wing-tsit Chan, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 52.

[36] "Li Chung-kuan chi hsia ch'u hsüeh-chin chih chao fen Chu-tzu Ssu-shu ting Chou Shao Ch'eng Chang wu hsien-sheng ts'ung-ssu," TML 8/6b-9a. Most of it is also quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6720-21.

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their discussions have daily grown more vulgar, and their spirit has daily deteriorated."^[37]

What then is to be done? Tao-ch'uan has three suggestions. First, the emperor should formally and publicly rescind the prohibition against "spurious learning" and declare it mistaken, so as to dispel any fears that it might be renewed. Second, Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Four Books should be distributed to the Imperial University for use in its curriculum. Why Chu's commentaries? Through a process of chain reasoning, Tao-ch'uan argues that the greatest form of learning is to arrive at the highest goodness, that this is best done through the reading of books, that among books none are better than the sages' classics, first among which are the Four Books, and finally that these are best explained by Chu's commentaries. Were they to be used, it would improve education not only at the university but among all the literati. Third, sacrifices should be established to Chou Tun-i, Shao Yung, the Ch'eng brothers, and Chang Tsai at the Temple to Confucius, as a way of "manifesting the sagely dynasty's intention to exalt Confucianism and rectify learning." If the emperor should undertake these changes, Tao-ch'uan assures him, "The hearts of men will rise and we should see the world's talents increasing day by day and the world's governance improving year by year."

Except for the establishment of Chu's commentaries on the Analects and Mencius as part of the educational curriculum, Tao-ch'uan's proposals were not accepted, apparently because of the continuing influence at court of opponents of Neo-Confucianism,^[38] but they are noteworthy for framing a Neo-Confucian agenda and one that was eventually to be realized (though not fully in the Sung). The agenda is largely educational and ceremonial, not specifically political. By 1239, when Li Hsin-ch'uan wrote his preface to the Record of the Way and Its Fate , the court had become far more accommodating to Neo-Confucianism, and precisely along educational and ceremonial lines. Li-tsung's accession, his 1224 edict in praise of the Ch'eng brothers and Neo-Confucianism, and the promotion of leading Neo-Confucian scholars, all had made Neo-Confucianism the new orthodoxy. But whether that orthodoxy had any influence on policy is questionable.^[39] The question itself points to the paradox facing Li Hsin-ch'uan. For while Neo-Confucianism had gained ritual and intellectual acceptance— significantly, the "rise and decline of Tao-hsueh " of his 1202 writing had become "the decline and rise of Tao-hsueh " in his 1239 preface^[40] —this had not

[37] TML 8/7a.

[38] That, at least, is Wang Te-i's explanation. Nien-p'u, p. 6721. On the commentaries, see TML 8/10a and n.15 above.

[39] See James T. C. Liu, "How Did a Neo-Confucian School Become the State Orthodoxy?" Philosophy East and West 23 (1973): 501-3.

[40] CYTC 1.6:79-80; TML , Preface 1a.

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resulted in improved governance. To the contrary, as Hsin-ch'uan had suggested in his memorial of 1238, the problems of the empire were almost unprecedented in their gravity.

How, then, does Li Hsin-ch'uan resolve this paradox? He does so through a continued commitment to Tao-hsueh , but one which differs from that of Li Tao-ch'uan and other adherents of the Ch'eng-Chu school in several important particulars. First, like Tao-ch'uan, he appeals to the authority of the sage philosophers, but his argument then takes a different turn:

Master Ch'eng said, "After the death of the Duke of Chou, the Way was inactive; after Mencius died, learning was not transmitted." The Way (Tao ) is learning (hsueh ) and learning is the Way. But why did Master Ch'eng distinguish them? In general, the task of sages and worthies [in positions] above is to realize their Way through acting righteously, and the task of sages and worthies [in positions] below is to arrive at their Way through learning. Rejecting the Way is not learning; rejecting learning is not the Way. Therefore learning, the Way, and loving men constitute the teaching of the sage-teachers, and guiding [others] in illuminating Tao-hsueh (or the Way and learning) is the responsibility of the former worthies. The two are never separated.^[41]

In thus playing with the Tao-hsueh name, Li Hsin-ch'uan was creating a dichotomous unity of the Way and learning, which had not, to the best of my knowledge, appeared elsewhere in Neo-Confucian writing. That his intentions were more than purely philosophical is clear in the succeeding passage, in which he takes supporters as well as opponents of Tao-hsueh to task: "Unfortunately, over the past several decades, artful, heterodox, and flattering small men have used the name of Tao-hsueh to ruin superior men, and [even] those called the disciples of the superior men have lacked a profound knowledge of what is the Way and what is learning."^[42]

Second, Li Hsin-ch'uan argues that a proper understanding of history requires recognition of the roles played by both fate (or the decree of Heaven) and human agency. He cites the Confucian dictum "If the Way is to advance, it is so decreed; if the Way is to fail, it is so decreed" and shortly thereafter elaborates, with a qualification: "In general, what is connected to the security of the world and to the prosperity of the state is made by Heaven and is not something conferred by the followers of Ts'ai Ching, Ch'in Kuei, or Han T'o-chou. However, the influences [of such people] remain."^[43]

This reference to three (in Li's eyes) villainous chief councillors serves as a prelude to Hsin-ch'uan's own history of Tao-hsueh during the Sung:

[41] TML , Preface 1a-b.

[42] Ibid., 1b.

[43] Ibid., 2a.

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The rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during the Yuan-yu era (1086-1093) was related to the presence and absence of Ssu-ma Wen-cheng (Ssu-ma Kuang); the rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during Shao-hsing (1131-1162) was related to the employment and banishment of Chao Chung-chien (Chao Ting); and the rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during Ch'ing-yuan (1195-1200) was related to the staying and retiring of Chao Chung-ting (Chao Ju-yü). At those times [i.e., when they were gone], the Tao-hsueh of the sages and worthies encountered extreme difficulty, yet righteousness and principle within men's hearts could not be taken and destroyed. Mencius said, "Between the sage and the Way of Heaven is fate (lit. "the decree"), but therein also lies human nature. Therefore the gentleman does not describe it as fate."^[44] According to Confucius, those who possess the world and the state can know what should be guarded against. According to Mencius, those who cultivate their characters and protect the Way can know their responsibilities.^[45]

Li's argument here is that while fate (or Heaven) determines the general course of history and the Way, people make a difference and must not allow fatalism to suppress their sense of moral obligation. Indeed, he ends his preface with a stirring plea against hypocrisy and opportunism:

Turning to the gentlemen of this generation, some first declare their adherence [to the Way] and later deviate, while others start with doubts but end in belief. Considering each, those who adhere and then deviate all issue forth according to selfish concerns of short-term advantage, while those who doubt and then believe proceed through exciting their minds and [maintaining their] patience to expanding the limits of what is possible and resting in that.^[46]

Disparaging those who toady to their contemporaries for personal gain, Li says that the ideal of seeing the light of the good, steeling one's heart, and acting without regard to life and death or fortune and calamity can best be realized through the Way and learning, or Tao-hsueh .

Returning to Li Hsin-ch'uan's paradox—how to reconcile the apparently successful rise of Neo-Confucianism with alarming contemporary problems—his answer, I suggest, was to cast doubt on the permanence of that rise. In contrast to the linear character of Li Tao-ch'uan's history of the Way, in which the fulfillment of the rediscovered Way had been hampered by the "spurious learning" prohibition, but could certainly be realized,^[47] Hsin-ch'uan describes an episodic process of rise and fall in

[44] This is from VII, B, 24, 2 of Mencius ; D. C. Lau, trans., Mencius (London: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 198-99. Ibid., 1b.

[45] TML , Preface 2a.

[46] Ibid., 2a-b.

[47] Similarly, Yuan historians in explaining Li-tsung's personal shortcomings portrayed his sanctioning of Neo-Confucianism as a critical, if partial, step in the creation of a Neo-Confucian state. SS 45/19b. Cited by Liu, "State Orthodoxy," p. 504.

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which a successful outcome is by no means certain. Characteristically for him, the heart of that process lies not among the philosophers and literati of the countryside but at court among those who govern: thus his references to the leading political figures Ssu-ma Kuang, Chao Ting, and Chao Ju-yü.^[48]

To be sure, learning as well as the (active, political) Way were essential if Tao-hsueh was to succeed, and throughout the Record of the Way and Its Fate we are treated to vivid portraits of scholars pursuing their learning, often amidst persecution and suffering: of Ch'eng I after he was forbidden to teach, of the efforts of his disciple Yin T'un to protect Ch'eng's family at the fall of the Northern Sung, of Chu Hsi's desertion by students at the height of the "spurious learning" persecution, and of his steadfastness at the time of his death.^[49] They are overshadowed, however, by the politicians. In marked contrast to Huang Tsung-hsi's seventeenth century Sung-Yuan hsueh-an , which has greatly influenced subsequent interpretations of Sung Neo-Confucianism and which focuses upon major thinkers and their intellectual descendants, the Way and Its Fate is organized around official documents concerning the Neo-Confucians sent to and from the court. Even apart from the sources, there is ample evidence to support the conclusion that in the dialectic between learning and (the enacting of) the Way, Li's highest interest and sympathies lay with the latter. Although he includes in the Way and Its Fate an intellectual genealogy of the Neo-Confucians and also a geographical analysis of the Neo-Confucian movement,^[50] the rest of his commentary, as well as his accounts of Tao-hsueh in the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , concentrate upon court politics and policy, not upon ideas. Even his treatment of Chu Hsi is revealing, for he is at pains to explain Chu's repeated reluctance to hold office and bemoans his lack of political success.^[51] After describing Chu's death in 1200, Li writes:

In the course of four reigns, [Chu Hsi] served outside [the capital] for only nine periods of evaluation and stood in court for forty-four days. [This shows] the difficulty of enacting the Way. That such a man maintained the transmission of the Way and established the utmost humanity to become the great master of a myriad generations, and yet was not employed [in government], this magnifies [our] loss.^[52]

[48] One might even speculate that he was alluding in these references to the demotions, beginning in 1236, of Neo-Confucian ministers, including his friend and benefactor Wei Liaoweng, who was forced to resign his post as Inspector of the Armies for Chiang-nan, Huai-nan, Ching-hsi, and Ching-hu, and died shortly thereafter. Nien-p'u, pp. 6755-57. On the reversal of Neo-Confucian fortunes in the late 1230s, see Liu, "State Orthodoxy." TML , Preface 2a-b.

[49] TML 2/5a-7a; 3/16b-18a; 7B/3b-4a; 7B/22b-24a.

[50] See TML 5/2a-3a and 7b/20a.

[51] See especially "Hui-an hsien-sheng fei su-yin," CYTC 2.8:444-48.

[52] TML 7b/24a.

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It would be misleading to interpret the Way and Its Fate or Li's other writing as simply a call to action, but they are partly that. It is clear that he saw the political realm as primary. Within that realm he certainly sided with the cause of Tao-hsueh , but even there that support could be qualified, for he mistrusted labels. Just as men like Han T'o-chou would mislabel their opponents and pervert the truth, so could men claim the learning of the Way, only to turn their backs on it later, or even proclaim it with cynical and selfish intentions. As we shall see in the next section, Li like many other Southern Sung thinkers also mistrusted grand plans for reform of government—the shadow of Wang An-shih loomed large—though often not specific reforms. Institutions, structures, and history mattered, to be sure, and often helped determine the success or failure of undertakings. What mattered most, however, was the talent, learning, and above all the righteousness of individuals, and this was true whether one was dealing with local administration, finance, the military, or the affairs of court—or the learning of the Way.

Perceptions of Government

In the second book of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , Li Hsinch'uan recounts a revealing exchange in the summer of 1177 between Emperor Hsiao-tsung and two officials from the Bureau of Military Affairs, Wang Huai (1126-1189) and Chao Hsiung (1129-1193).^[53] The conversation began with an exchange of information about current agricultural conditions: a plague of locusts in Huai-pei and a plentiful harvest of silkworms and wheat, which had lowered prices for silk and grain. But a reference by Wang and Chao to the Mencian claim that the Way of Kings began with the masses' suffering neither hunger nor cold^[54] elicited a complaint from the emperor about the shih-ta-fu (literati and officials) of the day: "In the present generation of shih-ta-fu , many are ashamed to talk about agriculture. Now agriculture is the foundation of the state. The shih-ta-fu enjoy lofty discussions (kao-lun ) but pay no attention to real [matters]. They are ashamed to talk of them." When the ministers concurred on the importance of agriculture by citing Mencius,^[55] Hsiao-tsung elaborated upon his criticisms:

Today the shin-ta-fu secretly take the airs of Western Chin and use the flattering and obstructive speech of Wang Yen. Do they not know that the Rites of

[53] "Hsiao-tsung lun shih-ta-fu wei yu Hsi Chin feng," CYTC 2.3:378-79.

[54] Mencius I, i, 3; Lau translation, p. 51.

[55] Specifically his prescription for a well-ordered society, in which families cultivated five mou of mulberry trees and a hundred mou of fields. Mencius I, i, 3; Lau translation, p. 51.

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Chou speaks of finance, as does the Book of Changes , and that the Duke of Chou and Confucius never neglected matters of finance?

To Wang's and Chao's protests that although such a state of affairs had previously existed, things had improved under Hsiao-tsung's benign influence, he replied:

In recent years there has been some slight change, but it is far from complete. . . . The shih-ta-fu shun talk of restoration, [as if] not knowing that of their family's [i.e., the Sung's] one hundred mou of fields, fifty have been usurped. . . . With regard to their own families' affairs, shih-ta-fu are all extremely knowledgeable; concerning the affairs of the state, they avoid speaking. . . When [you] ministers see the shih-ta-fu , you may convey to them my words.

Hsiao-tsung's analogy to Western Chin is striking, for the obvious and common Southern Sung analogy was to the Eastern Chin, the first of the southern dynasties.^[56] Although he was in part attempting to steel the shih-ta-fu's resolve in the cause of restoration, by invoking the Western Chin he was also raising the possibility of dynastic collapse if the shih-ta-fu proved unwilling to reform. Moreover, the emperor referred to Wang Yen (256-311), a brilliant Neo-Taoist "pure talk" (ch'ing-t'an ) devotee and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who at the fall of the Western Chin was bitterly blamed for having caused it.^[57] This was a barb aimed not only at ministers given to vague generalities, but possibly also at Neo-Confucians talking—vacuously, it seemed to some—of principle and the Way.

In any event, Li Hsin-ch'uan shared Hsiao-tsung's dislike of "lofty discussions" or, in his historical writings at least, of philosophical speculation. Like many other Chinese historians, he was at heart a student of government, and his writings are filled with institutional detail and illustrative anecdote. The Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country itself is more a handbook of government than "miscellaneous records from the court and countryside." Although its two parts differ in the amount of space given to specific topics, each comprises twenty chapters arranged to form an orderly topical progression: imperial virtue, sacrifices and ancestral temples, rites, enactments, court business, current affairs, miscellaneous matters, recent history, bureaucratic organization, recruitment, finance, the military, and border defense. Throughout there is an underlying concern with the func-

[56] For example, Li Shun-ch'en's above-mentioned "Chiang-tung sheng hou chih chien shih p'ien" was set in a north-south framework, and several of his examples came from the Eastern Chin.

[57] See Hsiao Kung-ch'uan, A History of Chinese Political Thought . Volume 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D ., trans. F. W. Mote (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 646-47, on the issue of Wang's guilt.

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tioning of court, palace, bureaucracy, and army, and with their structures and procedures. Like a modern political scientist, Li explores how decisions were made, how policies were implemented, and how information moved through the bureaucracy and empire. For example, in an entry on postal communications between Lin-an and Szechwan, he describes the government's attempts to maintain an express system for imperial pardons, urgent military messages, and the like. Mail from Hang-chou to Ch'eng-tu was supposed to take eighteen days, but with delays and general inefficiency it actually took as long as two months. In a move that would have warmed the hearts of entrepreneurs anywhere, an enterprising official in Szechwan in the 1190s established a "communications store" (pai-p'u ), using a relay system of forty "hard-walking men," which offered bimonthly service and made the trip in a month. The result, which Li relates with evident approval, was a moneymaking venture and an improvement in the court's knowledge of Szechwan affairs.^[58]

Li Hsin-ch'uan was also remarkably fond of statistics. Thus we see him dwelling, with no apparent purpose, on the number of families producing two or more grand councillors or on the career patterns of outstanding examination graduates.^[59] For scholars in our statistics-conscious day, however, his information is often invaluable and not to be found elsewhere, as when, for example, he provides a breakdown of the civil and military services in 1213 according to method of entry.^[60] Likewise, his chapters on taxation and finance provide a wealth of economic data on a broad range of topics.^[61]

But what were Li Hsin-ch'uan's overall perceptions of the Southern Sung government? Did he view it as basically healthy, despite its problems, or did he, like some modern scholars, see it as being in a state of systemic decline, with a surfeit of clerks and officials, an increasingly demoralized bureaucracy and literati, and a deteriorating military situation? Unfortunately, there are no simple answers to these questions. One problem is that Li had a fierce antipathy to the long chief councillorships of Ch'in Kuei and

[58] "Chin-tzu p'ai," CYTC 2.9:455. Whether or not one can infer Li's own ideas and attitudes from the material in CYTC is a methodological question raised at the Sung Statecraft Conference, for the work is not didactic in the way that the TML , for example, is. The CYTC is, however, educational in purpose, for Li, as was noted earlier, was concerned with instructing his contemporaries in recent history. I believe we may assume, therefore, that items were included in the work because they were instructive. Li frequently appends his own commentary to items, often thereby making explicit his own position, but even where he does not, most items make a particular point. In this case, for example, the inefficiency of the government's express system is sharply contrasted with the speed and efficiency of the pai-p'u .

[59] See CYTC 1.9 and 2.11 for examples. See, too, Yamauchi Masahiro's criticism of Li's occasional problems with statistics in Hervouet, A Sung Bibliography , p. 179.

[60] "Chia-ting ssu-hsüan tsung-shu," CYTC 2.14:528.

[61] See CYTC 1.14-17; 2.16.

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Han T'o-chou, so it is difficult to know to what extent his criticisms were aimed at them and to what extent they reflected a sense of general decline. He also avoided large generalizations and was sensitive to the complexities that often undercut them. He has won praise for his willingness to make positive judgments of individuals and their actions.^[62]

Nevertheless, in Li's writing on key issues, such as local government and personnel management, criticism predominates. Most of his accounts of local administration focus on fiscal matters and with few exceptions detail failed attempts at reform. Two such reforms were the boundary-survey system (ching-chieh fa ), intended to strengthen and equalize the agricultural tax base through a comprehensive cadastral survey,^[63] and the charitable-service system of Ch'u-chou, an experiment in financing service obligations through the creation of charitable estates.^[64] In both cases the emperor approved, but attempts to enact the proposed reforms fell victim to local elite resistance and, for the boundary system at least, to opposition within the bureaucracy. Li also describes two administrative innovations that were implemented: a system of evaluating local officials through praise and blame (tsang-fou ) inaugurated by Hsiao-tsung in 1162,^[65] and a requirement that prefects submit five recommendations on how to benefit the people, first instituted in 1156 and later revived in the late 1180s.^[66] But the latter proved inconsequential and the praise-and-blame provision led to abuses by the evaluators. As one prefect impeached under the system told the emperor: "Before the officials I am guilty; before the people I am not."^[67]

Conspicuously absent from Li's treatment of local government in the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country are a number of topics that received detailed attention from other writers: government education, local justice, and agricultural conditions,^[68] as well as voluntary associations of the kind that had been championed by Chu Hsi—local academies, community com-

[62] See Nien-p'u, p. 6699.

[63] "Ching-chieh-fa," CYTC 1.5:69-70. "Fu-chien ching-chieh-fa," CYTC 1.5:74-75, describes unsuccessful attempts in the 1180s and 1190s by prefects in southern Fu-chien (Chu Hsi included) to enact the system, which had originated in the 1140s.

[64] "Ch'u-chou i-i," CYTC 1.7:92-93. For a discussion of this system, see Brian McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 168ff. On charitable estates more generally, see chapter 6 in this volume.

[65] There are three items in CYTC on this: "Ch'un-hsi tsang-fou chün-shou," 1.5:75-76; "Ch'ing-yüan pa tsang-fou," 1.6:82; and "Ch'ing-yüan tsang-fou hsien-ling," 1.6:82.

[66] "Pien-min wu shih," CYTC 1.6:84.

[67] CYTC 1.5:76.

[68] The one exception is the entry "Ch'en Tzu-chang kung Shao-hsi yen," CYTC 1.8:101-2, which describes agricultural practices in Huai-nan and recounts the actions of two local magnates, one of whom lost his legs when he refused to give the invading Jurchen information about conditions in the Sung, the other of whom built a dike of several hundred li , which greatly increased the agricultural capacity of the region.

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pacts, community granaries,^[69] and altars to former worthies.^[70] Since most discussions of these institutions come to us from the southeast and Li focused upon Szechwan, his silence may in part reflect regional differences. Yet he must have known of his brother Tao-ch'uan's experiences as preceptor of the Feng-chou prefectural school and about the community-granary system, modeled on that of Chu Hsi, that Tao-ch'uan instituted in 1215 while serving in Chiang-hsi.^[71] This suggests, rather, that because his primary concern was the government and its workings, he simply did not include material that was not related directly to it. This primary concern with the doings of the state in this work, however, was not merely the accidental result of what Li happened to be writing about at the moment: as we have seen, it seems to pervade his other writings, including the Record of the Way and Its Fate , where by the nature of the subject one might otherwise least expect to find it.

Fiscal affairs receive a great deal of attention, with four chapters devoted to them in the first volume and one in the second.^[72] The first item, a summary of tax revenues from the beginning of the dynasty to 1194, strikes a somber note as Li describes the continual rise in exactions, interrupted only by the loss of the north, and goes on to discuss the accretion of various irregular taxes. He concludes that these taxes "make difficult the livelihood of the people."^[73] Other entries cover a multitude of topics, with no single unifying theme. Instead, Li pragmatically evaluates individual systems and attempts at reform on their own merits. Usually he talks of structures, but in one interesting case turns to procedures and approves the rejection of a proposed reform in the methods of collection of the basic tax (shang-kung ch'ien ). Submitted by one Sun Ta-ya, a zealous official who had gained prominence by uncovering treacherous activities, it would have followed a Han precedent of collecting the tax monthly instead of yearly, and was rejected on the grounds that it would prove difficult to administer in distant circuits and therefore inequitable.^[74] The general tone of these chapters, however, is decidedly pessimistic, as Li repeatedly expresses concern about

[69] Chu Hsi's support of voluntary community granaries is mentioned briefly in "I-tsang," CYTC 1.15:206-7, but this comes at the end of an account of the government granary system. For more on the granaries, see chapter 5 in this volume.

[70] These are discussed by Robert P. Hymes in "Lu Chiu-yüan, Academies, and the Problem of the Local Community," in Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 432-56.

[71] Nien-p'u, pp. 6716, 6725.

[72] CYTC 1, ch. 14-17; 2, ch. 16.

[73] "Kuo-ch'u chih Shao-hsi t'ien-hsia sui-shou shu," CYTC 1.14:187. Among the irregular levies Li discusses are the ching-chih , the tsung-chih , and the equitable loan system (ho-mai ).

[74] "Sun Ta-ya hsien chu ts'ui shang-kung-ch'ien wu ko," CYTC 2.16:557-58.

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policies that had or would "stir up the people" (jao min ), complains of government waste and inefficiency, and makes observations on the peoples' suffering—both from government practices and from the oppression of powerful families.

Li's views on personnel selection and control are equally bleak, marked by a sense of a cumbersome bureaucracy open to abuse. In his chapters on court affairs and the selection of scholars, he frequently makes the point that there are too many officials.^[75] He did not generally blame the regular examinations; nor did he find recruitment by protection, recommendation, facilitated degrees, and the like intrinsically objectionable; rather, he blamed their overuse. The resulting superfluity of officials produced long waits for posts (five to six years for prefectships in the southeast) and the control of desirable posts by the powerful.^[76] Li also describes ways officials enriched themselves and their friends: taking official funds away with one when leaving office,^[77] lavish gift-giving by prefects and intendants to high officials passing through their territories, and so on.^[78]

In Li's writing on the central government, many of these same themes appear. His interest in institutional processes is evident in his treatment of the chuan-tui system, whereby officials at the capital were required to attend court in rotational sequence.^[79] Used particularly by Hsiao-tsung, who "esteemed human talent," the system, Li says, was popular with talented court scholars, who thus had the opportunity to be seen by the emperor, and unpopular with those of "rough" qualities and with the shih-ta-fu generally, who did their utmost to avoid appearing. He presents a wealth of revealing anecdotes about leading political figures: an allegation that Ch'in Kuei betrayed Yü-wen Hsu-chung, a former Sung official who as a Chin official was serving as a Sung secret agent;^[80] an amusing account of a young Chao Hsiung pumping a Chin envoy for intelligence concerning the Chin;^[81] Chao as chief councillor tenaciously defending his late mentor, Yü Yun-wen (1110-1174), from Hsiao-tsung's criticisms and winning posthumous hon-

[75] And too many clerks. The clerk problem, however, merits only one short note. That is "Chou hsien liu," CYTC 1.12:160-61.

[76] "Chin-sui t'ang-pu yung ch'ieh," CYTC 1.6:58. The Szechwan prefectships for Tzu-chou and Sui-chou were reported to be reserved for protégés of the vice chief councillors. See "Chao Shan-yu ch'a chou feng ts'ai," CYTC 2.8:449-50.

[77] "Chien-ssu chun-shou chih kuan chiao hai k'u-chin," CYTC 1.6:85.

[78] "Yü-pi yen chien-ssu hu-sung chih chin," CYTC 2.12:486. Despite an attempt by the emperor to ban this practice in 1203, Li estimates that the value of such gifts averaged 380 strings of cash but reached as high as 3,400 strings in Ch'eng-tu-fu and double that in Chien-k'ang-fu.

[79] "Pai-kuan chuan-tui," CYTC 1.9:103-4.

[80] "Yü-wen Hsiao-min ssu-shih," CYTC 1.8:95.

[81] "Chao Wen-shu t'an-che ti-ch'ing," CYTC 2.8:440-42.

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ors for him.^[82] In a more somber vein, Li portrays a bureaucracy beset by favoritism, whether in the recommendation of men for office, or in showing undue leniency to officials found guilty of rapacity, or in the lax enforcement of the provisions detailing the liability of guarantors for the misdeeds of those they have guaranteed.^[83] It was also a bureaucracy in which, under Han T'o-chou at least, scholarly inquiry was sharply curtailed.^[84]

What are Li's solutions? This is hard to answer, for his language is usually descriptive and rarely prescriptive. However, from his emphasis on the selection and promotion of officials I believe we can infer that much of the answer for him lay in the ancient Confucian dictum of using good men. He praises Hsiao-tsung for working to reduce the size of the bureaucracy,^[85] but his greatest praise is for men like the war hero Chang Chün (1096-1164), whose personnel recommendations Li considers outstanding.^[86] In a slightly different vein, he argues in the Way and Its Fate that following the death of Ch'in Kuei, the continuing influence of Ch'in's faction made a correct discussion of national issues impossible. Only in the countryside, among the "literati of the mountains and forests," was the intellectual climate better.^[87] The right men were not being used.

In 1238, toward the end of his long life, Li Hsin-ch'uan submitted a memorial on current conditions, which remains the most comprehensive political statement that we have from him.^[88] He was writing at a time when the southeast was suffering from drought and economic hardship, a result in part of the Sung's first taste of war with the Mongols,^[89] and his tone was one of alarm:

Your minister has heard that after wars there are necessarily bad years. Now the many who have been killed and the weight of taxes have produced among

[82] "Chang Yu erh ch'eng-hsiang tz'u shih pen-mo," CYTC 2.8:439-40. Shortly before his death, when he was serving as commander of Sung military forces in the west, Yü Yun-wen had incurred Hsiao-tsung's wrath by refusing to invade the Chin on the grounds that the Sung forces were unprepared. This is described in "Hsiao-tsung ch'u Yü ch'eng-hsiang ch'u-shih hui-fu," CYTC 2.8:443.

[83] "Shao-hsi hsü chien-shih Chia-t'ai pa fan-chu," CYTC 1.6:82-83; "Chien-yen chih Chia-t'ai shen yen tsang li chih chin," CYTC 1.6:86-88; "Pao-jen ching-kuan lien-tso," CYTC 1.8:99-100.

[84] This is most apparent in Li's writings on the false-learning prohibition, especially "Hsüeh-tang wu-shih-chiu jen hsing-ming," CYTC 1.6:80-81, but also appears in his description of Han's attempt to control private histories cited in note 9 above.

[85] "Hsiao-tsung ko jung-kuan," CYTC 1.5:71-72.

[86] "Chang Wei-kung chien shih," CYTC 1.8:98.

[87] TML 5:41-42.

[88] SS 438/10a-11a. His memorial is also quoted in full in Nien-p'u, pp. 6698-99 and 6759.

[89] See Charles A. Peterson, "Old Illusions and New Realities: Sung Foreign Policy, 1217-1234," in Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 204-39.

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the people a spirit [ch'i ] of anger and discontent. Superiors acting against the harmony of yin and yang have brought things to this extremity. Your majesty and your great ministers should sweep out the ministers of chaos and begin again with the people on a plan to purify the bad and welcome the good. However, the abuses of law have yet to be lightened and the people's energies have not been inspired toward virtue, so reforms have been impossible, and the peril is extreme.^[90]

The causes of the drought, continues Li, are to be found in various forms of misgovernment: in ever-increasing "equitable" (i.e., forced) purchases of grain, in not returning people and property scattered (by war) to their proper places, in unregulated taxation, in the hoarding of commodities, and in the insatiable appetites of great armies. A grasping and rapacious state, the implicit problem of much of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , is here explicitly cited as the cause of current misfortunes. However, Li then turns the argument from the state to the emperor himself by citing the example of King T'ang of the Shang dynasty, who had also faced a seven-year drought. T'ang had sacrificed at Sang-lin and accepted responsibility for the six problems of his court, thus ending the drought.^[91] Similarly, Li suggests, the emperor should sacrifice and accept responsibility for the six problems that his court faces: contradictory edicts, unceasing demands upon the people, the profligate building of palaces, a surfeit of concubines, bribery, and the flourishing of sycophants. Correcting just one of them would be sufficient to end the drought; correcting all six would restore Heaven's heart.

Although the emperor accepted Li's memorial, there is no evidence that he reformed his or the empire's ways, for the "Ancestor of Principle" had a rather unprincipled reputation.^[92] What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the way in which Li, for all of his perceptions of social and political problems, took individual virtue as the essential starting point for any solutions. Whether this was because of an aversion to institutional solutions of the Wang An-shih variety shared by many Southern Sung thinkers, or because the examples of Ch'in Kuei and Han T'o-chou made the case for the importance of the virtue of rulers (or its lack) appear self-evident, this view, I would argue, underlay Li's attitude not only toward problems of

[90] SS 438/10a.

[91] The Huai Nan Tzu , Book 9, section 3, 4a, offers this account: "At the time of King T'ang of Yin there was a seven-year drought. When he offered himself as sacrifice on the outer reaches of Sang-lin, the clouds from all quarters of the world gathered and rain fell for hundreds of miles around. Embracing simplicity and offering his sincerity, he moved the heavens and earth." Cited by Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), p. 173.

[92] See Liu, "State Orthodoxy," p. 503, and more recently, Richard L. Davis, Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 131-35.

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government but also toward one of the other great issues of his day: the problem of the north.

The Problem of The North

In his bibliographical note to the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , the Japanese scholar Yamauchi Masahiro characterizes Li Hsin-ch'uan's purpose as "to record honestly and without any fear of repression the true facts concerning the governmental organization of his province, using these facts in order to criticize the government for having given in to the State of Chin."^[93] Given the broad range of topics covered by the work, this may be an overstatement, but it is indisputable that Li attached great importance not only to the affairs of Szechwan but also to the challenge of the Chin. As we have seen, he came out of a family tradition of ardent irredentism, and a desire to recover the north appears repeatedly in his other writings.

Particularly revealing of the tumultuous, often disheartening times in which he lived were Li's writings on the Chin, war and peace, and the military. Here we can discern a process of change in his thinking, beginning with the first part of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , which appeared in 1202, proceeding through 1216, when the second part was finished, and culminating in his 1238 memorial. Li wrote the first part of Miscellaneous Records near the end of the forty-two-year peace that separated the second and third Chin wars. Han T'o-chou was firmly in power, and the shadow of the "spurious learning" prohibition was only beginning to lift. Li's selections in this part are extremely varied, with many more chapters devoted to institutional and fiscal matters than in the second part.^[94] Indeed, most of his discussion of local government comes from the earlier part. When he addresses the problem of the Chin, it is usually in military terms: analyzing the funding and deployments of armies and navies and the campaigns and battles of the two anti-Chin wars.^[95] His discussion of the peace treaties ending both wars is highly critical of peace advocates (with the general Chang Chün coming in for conspicuous praise both times),^[96] though his position is by no means simple-minded, for he testifies to the Sung's vulnerability in horse procurement,^[97] and to the financial burden

[93] Hervouet, Sung Bibliography , 179.

[94] The first part contained three chapters on government institutions and four on taxation and finances; the second had two and one respectively.

[95] See especially ch. 18 on the military and 19-20 on "border incidents."

[96] See "Lung-hsing ho-i," CYTC 1.5:71; "Ching-k'ang Chien-yen Shao-hsing ta-ch'en ho-chan shou-p'i shuo," CYTC 1.19:289; and "Keng-wei chia-shen ho-chan pen-mo," CYTC 1.20:299-306.

[97] "Ch'uan Ch'in mai ma," CYTC 1.18:278-79. For a lucid recent analysis of this issue, see Paul J. Smith, "Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: The Szechwan Tea Monopoly and the Tsinghai Horse Trade, 1074-1224" (Ph.D, diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983), especially chapter 3.

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that an expanded military establishment imposed upon the population.^[98] Nor does he allow his criticism of the Lung-hsing Treaty of 1164 to obscure his general admiration for Hsiao-tsung and his reign.

The second part of the Miscellaneous Records differs dramatically. By 1216 Han T'o-chou had long since fallen, and Shih Mi-yuan (1164-1233) was firmly established as chief councillor, with policies that Li probably considered an improvement—only probably, because he spends little time in dealing with Shih or the Chia-ting (1208-1224) court.^[99] Instead, he concentrates on the 1206-1208 war with the Chin and its ramifications in Szechwan. This war hangs like a pall over Li's writings henceforth. And well it might. For one thing, it ended in defeat, for the Chin responded to the Sung invasion of the north with a counterattack that severely pressed the Sung forces up and down the Yangtze for most of a year, until the assassination of Han T'o-chou made possible a peace agreement, which returned things to roughly the status quo ante. (The Chin received Han's head.) Most distressing of all, this was one war that the Southern Sung had chosen to fight. Buoyed by reports from the north of a restive Chin population on the brink of rebellion, Han's war policy attracted considerable support from leading officials and scholars, including Yeh Shih (1150-1223), who in 1195 had been one of the fifty-nine barred from office because of his support for "spurious learning." Indeed, the edict announcing the war used language of a rather Neo-Confucian character: "Heaven's Way is fond of restoration, and the Middle Kingdom has a principle requiring [that things] be corrected. The people's hearts are devoted to obedience, and ordinary men will all [fight to] avenge their grievances."^[100] Moreover, to underscore the irredentist reasons for the conflict, on the eve of the war the court retracted Ch'in Kuei's noble title of Prince (wang ).^[101]

What went wrong? This question clearly preoccupied Li Hsin-ch'uan in the years that followed, and he offers several answers. The unexpected strength of the Chin and their success at learning of Sung plans in advance through their spies are recognized as factors. More important, in Li's eyes, were the poor leadership of the Sung armies and the villainy of Han T'o-chou. In an essay on the origins of the war, Li describes the cowardly unwillingness of certain officials to take or remain in key command posts in

[98] "Ch'ien-tao nei-wai ta-chün shu," CYTC 1.18:262-63.

[99] Political caution may also have played a role here. It is interesting to note that though the TML includes documents dating as late as 1230, Li's accounts of the political background of events relating to Tao-hsueh essentially end with Han T'o-chou's death.

[100] Cited in Nien-p'u, p. 6717.

[101] CYTC 2.18:577.

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Huai-nan.^[102] However, it was Han who, according to Li, bore the greatest responsibility, for during his long years in power he had squandered the empire's resources, and once at war he had recklessly thrown troops into battle without contingency plans for retreat or pity for the people.^[103] He is also portrayed, like Ch'in Kuei, as fearful of competent generals, dismissing Ch'iu Ch'ung (1135-1208), for whom Li has the highest regard, in the midst of the war.^[104] In a scene reminiscent of Julius Caesar's assassination, Han was slain in a palace garden on an early autumn morning as he was going to court, the victim of a plot by fellow ministers, the heir apparent, and the emperor himself. Their explanation was that they were "eliminating cruelty" (ch'ü-hsiung ).^[105]

As bad as the war was, for Li Hsin-ch'uan at his home in Lung-chou the related rebellion of Wu Hsi was far more immediate and threatening. As vice-pacification commissioner for Szechwan and prefect of the strategically critical prefecture of Hsing-chou, Wu Hsi was responsible for Sung forces in the Han River and northern Szechwan, that is, the western flank of Sung defenses. Contrary to normal Sung practice, the position had become almost hereditary, for Wu Hsi's father, Wu T'ing, had held it for nineteen years, from 1175 until his death in 1194. The capable Yang Yu-chung was then appointed and, according to Li, was more honest and more successful at suppressing banditry than Wu T'ing, but because of Kuang-tsung's skepticism regarding the military abilities of civil officials, he was soon replaced by Wu Hsi.^[106] In the discussions preceding the war, Wu Hsi was a vocal supporter of invading the Chin, arguing that his forces could retake Shan-hsi.^[107] Yet in the fourth month of 1206, two months prior to the commencement of hostilities, he sent an envoy to the Chin court proposing that he be named Prince of Shu in return for his support and four prefectures, which he would turn over to them.^[108] The deal was made, and on 12/20 of

[102] He is particularly critical of Cheng T'ing, who was initially the commander in Hsiang-yang, and Hsu Shen-fu, who refused to take a command in Chin-ling chen (near Chien-k'ang fu). "Chia-t'ai k'ai-pien shih shih," CYTC 2.9:456.

[103] "K'ai-hsi ch'ü-hsiung ho-ti jih-chi," CYTC 2.7:434-37.

[104] "Li Chi-chang lun Ch'iu Tsung-ch'ing pu tang pa tu-fu," CYTC 2.9:456.

[105] Ibid. See Davis, Court and Family , pp. 89-92, for a discussion of the assassination, and Kinugawa Tsuyoshi, "'Kaishi yohei' o megutte," Toyoshi kenkyu 36, no. 3 (1977): 128-51, for a general treatment of the war.

[106] These details are from an item about the dangers of a Wu family hereditary command: "Chao Tzu-chih, Ch'iu Tsung-ch'ing, Yang Ssu-hsün pu yü Wu-shih shih-hsi," CYTC 2.9:453. For Wu's career, the military conditions leading up to the rebellion, and as an analysis of its consequences, see Ihara Hiroshi's articles: "Nan So Shisen ni okeru Goshi no seiryoko; Go Sei no ran zenshi," in Aoyama hakushi koki kinen Sodai shi ronso (Tokyo: Seishin, 1974), pp. 1-33; "Nan So Shisen ni okeru Go Sei no rango no seiji doko," Chuo daigaku bungakubu kiyo shigaku 5 (1980): 105-28.

[107] CYTC 2.18:575.

[108] CYTC 2.18:576. The offer of four prefectures is mentioned in Wu Hsi's biography in SS 475/24a.

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that year, Wu received the Chin edict and seals and a week later declared himself Prince of Shu and the rightful ruler of Szechwan under the Chin.^[109]

Wu's rebellion proved a complete failure. Han T'o-chou's reaction on hearing of it was to offer him an enfeoffment of reeds and mud.^[110] The two expeditionary forces Wu Hsi sent from his headquarters in Hsing-chou—to K'uei-chou and Ch'eng-tu—were easily defeated, and three months after his rebellion began he was killed by an underling, An Ping, whose service to the Wus had begun with Wu T'ing but who could not countenance Wu Hsi's rebellion.^[111]

Yet while it lasted, the rebellion severely tested the mettle of the officials and literati of Szechwan, for pending the outcome, to declare oneself for or against it was to risk death. Some, like Li Tao-ch'uan, resigned their posts rather than accept the authority of Wu, and one official, Yang Chen-chung, committed suicide. (In describing them, Li Hsin-ch'uan is quite specific in his judgments of those who were worthy of praise.)^[112] But a number went over and many equivocated. Recounting the loyal response of Yang Chü-yuan, an official in Ch'eng-tu who openly opposed the rebellion, Li notes that only in Ch'eng-tu was the Sung K'ai-hsi reign name maintained.^[113]

Despite the speedy failure of the rebellion, its impact on Szechwan was considerable. The region's fiscal coffers had been emptied, yet heavy military expenses continued, even though Szechwan's director of revenues, Ch'en Feng-ju, had some success in reducing them.^[114] In the meantime, Szechwan literati, Li Hsin-ch'uan among them, produced a flood of accounts and histories of the rebellion. Li mentions some nineteen that he used in writing his own massive account, the Tung-ch'ui t'ai-ting lu .^[115]

It is difficult to say with confidence just how the 1207-1208 war and rebellion changed Li Hsin-ch'uan's thinking about foreign policy and the military. Clearly, however, the entries in the second part of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country are more parochial. For example, in the chapters on border defense (18-20) most entries deal with uprisings by non-Han groups in southwestern China—though this may be mainly a reflection of Li's long residence there. More important is the apparent silencing of the irredentist ideal, for the war that began with high hopes for the recovery of the north not only fizzled out at great cost but, in Szechwan at least, raised the spectre of dynastic collapse. Li seems also to gain a renewed appreciation for the importance of controlling the military, whose leadership he por-

[109] SS 475/24a; CYTC 2.18:579.

[110] CYTC 2.18:580.

[111] CYTC 2.18:579-80; SS 475/25a-b. An's assassination of Wu is described in "An Kuan-wen chu Hsi shih-shun," CYTC 2.9:457-58.

[112] See especially "Shu-shih li-kung li-chieh ts'u-ti," CYTC 2.9:458-59, and SS 475/25b.

[113] "Tung Chen yen Yang shih-lang wei k'en t'ung-ch'ing," CYTC 2.9:457.

[114] "Ssu-ch'uan hsüan-tsung-ssu k'ang-heng," CYTC 2.16:562.

[115] "Tung Chen yen Yang Shih-lang wei k'en t'ung-ch'ing," CYTC 2.9:457.

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trays as frequently corrupt, incompetent, and susceptible to secret plotting with the Chin.^[116] A case in point is his mention of Hsiao-tsung's comparison of Southern Sung literati and officials with those of the Western Chin, noted above. Surely Li's targets here were at least in part those contemporaries who were then rendering the empire vulnerable to the barbarians. Against such fears, his irredentist hopes must have receded into the background.

Too little of Li Hsin-ch'uan's writing after 1216 has come down to us for us to say with certainty whether he maintained this more pessimistic outlook in his later years. As Charles Peterson has shown, irredentism remained a powerful if somewhat chastened force after 1208, sustaining the Sung literati and officials through their long war with the Chin in 1217-1224 and in their final ill-fated forays into the north in 1233-1234, which helped to finish the Chin but which also left the Sung facing the might of the Mongols alone.^[117] Undoubtedly, Li's opinions of these events were complex and varied. But it is noteworthy that in his 1238 memorial, discussed above, his tone is even more pessimistic and his concerns are with the ever-increasing exactions of the government and the discontent of the people, not with strategies for strengthening the military and reconquering the north. Indeed, the military comes in for some of his most trenchant criticism: "All of this arises in the wake of great armies, before their power has dissipated; and the more power they amass, the greater the extremity."^[118]

Li Hsin-ch'uan was writing in the wake of the Mongol advance south of the Huai River in 1236 and the heavy fighting that accompanied it.^[119] This undoubtedly deepened his sense of foreboding. Yet his pessimism here is not unlike that in the second part of the Miscellaneous Records , for in both his concern for the internal health of the empire preempts his irredentism. Only here there is a much greater sense of urgency: he does not say so, but the Mongol threat has called into question the very existence of the Sung.

With that in mind, let us return briefly to the subject of the Record of the Way and Its Fate , which Li was even then compiling. This work may now be viewed not simply as a history of Tao-hsueh but also as an attempt to per-

[116] See, for example, CYTC 2.9:453 and 2.16:562. In addition to Wu Hsi's plots with the Chin, Li describes charges brought against Wang Ta-ts'ai, the Supreme Commandant of the central Yangtze region, who executed a number of his subordinates who had taken part in an abortive though authorized attempt to seize Ch'in-chou in Chin territory in early 1214. CYTC 2.10:467.

[117] "First Sung Reactions to the Mongol Invasion of the North, 1211-17," in John Winthrop Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), pp. 215-52, and "Old Illusions and New Realities," in China Among Equals , pp. 204-39.

[118] SS 438/10b.

[119] These events are treated at length by Richard Davis in "Ventures Foiled and Opportunities Missed: The Times of Li-tsung," draft chapter for the Sung volume of The Cambridge History of China .

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suade, first, the emperor, and second, court officials, to pay more than lip service to it. While Li may not have been a Tao-hsueh thinker, he was committed to Tao-hsueh as an answer to the problems of the day. This did not mean that it was enough for the court simply to accept Tao-hsueh as the prevailing orthodoxy, for that had happened piecemeal over the preceding thirty years.^[120] Rather, it was necessary for the "sages and worthies above" to realize the Way through righteous action. This prescription was consistent with Li's thought expressed in earlier writings like the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country . In his late writings, however, driven by events and perhaps by elevation to high official rank, the historian has assumed a minister's voice, the critic has become an advocate.

[120] See TML , ch. 8-10.

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Nine
Wei Liao-weng's Thwarted Statecraft

James T. C. Liu

During the the thirteenth century the Sung dynasty lacked the kind of innovative political energy it had displayed earlier. Chief councillors, acting as surrogate emperors, one after another cast long shadows over court and bureaucracy,^[1] while most officials, occupied in routine and often corrupt administration, had no influence on policy. Some idealists, long frustrated, withdrew from active political service and tried to do what they could for society by devoting themselves to teaching, charitable deeds,^[2] the welfare of kin, and the like. Few pursued the study of statecraft even theoretically.^[3]

The great Chu Hsi had passed away in 1200. Few of his disciples or later followers emulated his example of political involvement and struggle. Simi-

[1] The Southern Sung, remarkably without fear of usurpation, had four such councillors: Ch'in Kuei, Han T'o-chou, Shih Mi-yuan, and Chia Ssu-tao. For a recent summary condemnation of Ch'in, see Tseng Ch'iung-pi, Chien-ku tsui-jen Ch'in Kuei (Honan Province, 1984). A revisionist view, though not generally accepted, is Kinugawa Tsuyoshi, "Factional Reaction to Ch'in Kuei's Policy" (in Japanese), Tohogaku 45 (1973): 245-94. For Han, in the absence of specific studies, see Ch'en Teng-yuan, Kuo-shih chiu-wen (Peking, 1962) 2:491-96. For Shih, see Richard Davis, Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou (Durham, N.C, 1986). For Chia, see Herbert Franke, "Chia Ssu-tao, a Bad Last Minister?" in A. F. Wright and D. Twitchett, eds., Confucian Personalities (Stanford, 1962), pp. 217-34; also Miyazaki Ichisada in Toyoshi kenkyu 6 (1941): 54-73.

[2] Charitable deeds and philanthropy during the Sung are still understudied. See Wang Te-yi, Sung-tai tsai huang ti Chiu-chi cheng-ts'e (Taipei, 1970); James T. C. Liu, "Liu Tsai: His Philanthropy and Neo-Confucian Limitations," Oriens Extremus 25 (1978): 1-29, also available in Chinese in the Journal of Peking University , 1979, no. 3:53-61 and no. 4:41-55, and in an abridged Japanese version prepared by Umehara Kaoru in Toho gakuho (Kyoto) 37 (1978): 86-119.

[3] It is significant that few scholars at the time showed interest in Cheng Ch'iao's T'ung chih or other reference works indispensable to statecraft studies. Later, Ma Tuan-lin's Wen-hsien t'ung-k'ao was also neglected by his contemporaries.

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larly, the trend among intellectuals not affiliated with his school was inward-looking. An outstanding exception was Yeh Shih (1150-1223), an institutionalist who is often called a utilitarian. Although he was prestigious, his statecraft views were neglected.^[4]

In the dismal time of the late Southern Sung, however, a pair of great names emerged: Chen Te-hsiu (1178-1235) and Wei Liao-weng. Heralded as superior scholars and upright officials, they won the respect even of their enemies. Both men had to fight hard in their formidable struggle to infuse Neo-Confucian ideals into an inept court and a degenerate bureaucracy in time to meet the Mongol threat looming on the horizon. Although they did not succeed, they did earn the respect of later generations. Both men were honored by the inclusion of a number of their memorials in the monumental reference work on statecraft, The Anthology of Memorials of Successive Eras (Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i ), compiled in the mid-Ming.^[5] Of the two, however, Chen has had the broader and longer-lasting influence.^[6]

There have been intriguing disagreements, however, in historical assessments of Wei Liao-weng. Many of his contemporaries respected him as the leading successor to the Neo-Confucian tradition of Chu Hsi, Chang Shih (1133-1180), and Lü Tsu-ch'ien (1137-1181). Some credited him with original, if minor, contributions to theory.^[7] After Wei's death, legend would have it that his spirit was seen in company with that of Chu Hsi in the Wu-yi mountains.^[8]

On the negative side, Wei was already disparaged at the height of his career for his inability to effect any real change in government. He was even ridiculed on stage, impersonated as drunk and motionless, and mocked: "You always talk about the Chung Yung (Centrality and Commonality or Doctrine

[4] Winston W. Lo, The Life and Thought of Yeh Shih (Gainesville, Fla., 1974), and Hsiao Kung-ch'üan, Chung-kuo cheng-chih ssu-hsiang shih (Shanghai, 1945) 2:156-60. Wei Liao-weng held Yeh Shih in high esteem and got him to write an inscription for his study. The two shared an interest in the classics dealing with rites. Cf. Wei's letter to Yeh, Ho-shan hsien-sheng ta-ch'üan wen-chi (SPTK reduced-size edition; hereafter Works ) 32:276-77; also Works 41:349, and Shushigaku taikei (Compendium of the Chu Hsi School) 10 (Tokyo, 1976): 10, 118-19.

[5] See Huang Huai and Yang Shih-chi, Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i (Taipei reprint, 1964; hereafter LTMCIT ).

[6] For the political experiences of Chen and Wei, see Ch'en Pang-chart, Sung-shih chi-shih pen-mo (punctuated ed., Peking 1977; hereafter SSCSPM ) 3:1059-66. For Ch'en's great influence in the Ming, see Hung-lam Chu, "Ch'iu Chun and the Ta-hsüeh yen-i pu : Statecraft Thought in Fifteenth-century China" (Ph.D diss., Princeton University, 1984), and chapter 10 of this volume. On Wei, see the annals of Emperor Li-tsung in Sung Shih (punctuated ed., Peking, 1977; hereafter SS ) 41:783-45, 890, and his biography in 196:12965-71.

[7] Huang Tsung-hsi and Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Sung Yuan hsueh-an (WYWK ed.; hereafter SYHA ), preface, p. 15, and Wang Tzu-ts'ai and Feng Yun-hao, Sung Yuan hsueh an pu-i (Taipei, 1962; hereafter SYHAPI ) 80:4-6.

[8] Ch'u Jen-huo, Chien-hu mi-lu (Pi-chi hsiao-shuo ta-kuan ed. multiple series, Taipei, 1974; hereafter PCHSTK ), p. 6125.

― 338 ―

of the Mean ) and the Ta-hsueh (Great Learning ), but what's the use? With so much food and drink in you, you cannot move or even stir." Did a political enemy secretly instigate this slander? A complaint was made, but in the absence of proof the metropolitan prefect merely flogged the offending actors. This episode did not affect Wei's favorable image in the formal histories, but in the late Ming some critics, notably Hsieh Chao-chih in his much cited work Wu tsa-tsu , charged Wei with multiplying empty words of no real value.^[9]

A reappraisal is in order. While Wei does not exemplify effective or successful Confucian statecraft, he does illustrate the hard struggle facing those who would implement it in difficult circumstances. Wei's philosophical and scholarly concepts are in line with his Tao-hsueh affiliation. Under the influence of Fu Kuang, a disciple of Chu Hsi, Wei emphasized nature and principle (hsing-li ), moral principle (i-li ), innate knowledge (liang-chih ), and innate capability (liang-neng ). He insisted on personal practice (kung-hsing ) to be conducted with sincerity (ch'eng ) and reverence (ching ). His moralistic stand is crystal clear even if he seems to have broken little new ground in moral philosophy. He was a leading classical scholar, focusing particularly on the classics dealing with rites,^[10] but he had reservations about The Rites of Chou (Chou li ), on which Wang An-shih (1021-1086) had relied as the main authority for classical institutions. Wei agreed with some early Southern Sung research that the text of the Rites of Chou had been contaminated by the insertion of Ch'in and Han materials^[11] similar to the apocryphal books called wei (woofs) that claimed to complement the classics (ching , warps). Following the views of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072), Wei argued that such books should be dismissed.^[12] Although he was a textual purist, he was not equally strict in philosophy but was open even to Taoism and Buddhism.^[13]

Wei's interest in Taoism is related to his studies of the Classic of Changes (I ching ), for which he became especially well known after his middle years. While Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085) and Ch'eng I (1033-1107) had relied

[9] Lo Ta-ching, Ho-lin yü-lu (punctuated ed., 1983) 3:378 and 294; and Hsieh Chao-chih, Wu Tsa-tsu (PCHSTK ), pp. 1122-23.

[10] SYHA 80:77. For sources on Fu Kuang, see Ch'ang Pi-te, Wang Te-yi, et al., Index to Biographical Materials of Sung Figures (in Chinese) (Taipei, 1975) 4:3606; SYHAPI 80:20, editorial comment by Feng Yun-hao; and Works 54:460. Wei's l-li yao-i (The Essence of the Classic I-li ) is discussed by Liu Ts'un-yan in Yves Hervouet, ed., A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), pp. 34-35.

[11] SYHA 11:40, and SYHAPI 42:8.

[12] James T. C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu (Stanford, 1967), pp. 87-92; SYHA 20:78, and SYHAPI 80:19-20. However, SYHAPI makes the exaggerated claim that the apocryphal books became extinct through Wei's efforts. For a brief survey of these books, see Ch'en Teng-yuan, Kuo-shih 1:423-31.

[13] Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds. Yuan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion under the Mongols (New York, 1982), pp. 13 and 22.

― 339 ―

chiefly on three commentaries, Wei drew on sixteen,^[14] and he applied the resulting precepts to an interpretation of activities ranging from politics to wei-ch'i (encircling chess, Japanese go ). He did not, however, use this classic to explain natural disasters, and his rationalist outlook on life also led him to eschew the theory of numbers advanced by Shao Yung (1101-1077).^[15]

Wei's commitment to Neo-Confucianism led him to promote this school by petitioning the court to establish a hall of honor for Chou Tun-i (1017-1073) and Chang Tsai (1020-1077) along with the Ch'eng brothers, the four thinkers whom Chu Hsi had singled out as transmitters of the Way.^[16] Yet Wei did not consider these promotional efforts very effective, for he observed that notwithstanding halls of honor in various localities and the spread of Neo-Confucian books, the Confucian Way still did not prevail.

Wei found the cause for this in the corruption of education by the system of civil service recruitment. Students heading for the examinations concentrated on composing poetry rather than on acquiring knowledge, on memorization instead of understanding, on imitation even to the point of plagiarism in place of thinking matters through for themselves. Their basic impetus was wrong, for they did not aim at learning but selfishly sought positions in government and the attendant income.^[17] How could they become good officials?

No wonder, according to Wei, Confucian advice was often brushed aside as bookish and impractical in government circles. Since bureaucratic politics showed little tolerance for honest and straightforward opinions, hypocrisy was rampant. Officials often pretended surface agreement, but acted out their real intentions behind the scene. Flattery was habitual, and debased practices were widely imitated.^[18]

Those who studied to become bureaucrats and those already in government took their cues from court politics. There honest remonstrance was rare, and the value of learning was ignored.^[19] Politics, as described by Wei's disciple Mou Tzu-ts'ai (n.d.), was going from bad to worse. At first, some upright gentlemen (chün-tzu ) would attack some crooked ministers (mean-spirited or small-minded persons, hsiao-jen ), but then the upright would proceed to attack one another and even ask some of the corrupt ones for help, especially when the latter pretended to be moving closer to the upright.^[20]

In the end, much depended on the emperor himself. This is precisely

[14] SYHAPI , preface, 49-51; 80:80, 84, and 95.

[15] Works 17:161 and 54:460; SYHAPI 80:15-18; and LTMCTI 61:11-15, LTMCTI 313:21.

[16] Works 15:138-41; LTMCTI 115:1-2 and 274:21-22; also SSCSPM 80:879.

[17] SYHA 80:84-89 and 93-94.

[18] Works 16:135 and 151-54; also SYHA 80:93-94.

[19] Works 16:153 and SS 437:12967.

[20] SYHAPI 80:28-29.

― 340 ―

why Wei, like Chu Hsi earlier and also like such contemporaries as Chen Te-hsiu, gave much thought to the role of the emperor. Like many Neo-Confucians, he emphasized the cosmic importance of mind as "the supreme ultimate" (t'ai-chi ) of man and the importance of man, since the human mind is "the supreme ultimate of heaven-and-earth."^[21] Beyond this there is no "spiritual intelligence" (shen-ming ) of heaven-and-earth. Similarly, the imperial mind is the key to human welfare, but the imperial mind is also the mind of everyone: "Where the imperial mind, the mind of the millions, and moral principle are satisfied, that is called heaven. Not to be ashamed before men is not to be ashamed before heaven, not to stand in awe of men is not to stand in awe of heaven."^[22] The emperor, according to Wei, should look into signs of change in his time, fulfill the mandate of heaven, honor the governing principles, and strictly enforce the laws.^[23]

What should be the cardinal role of learned scholar-officials? Most important, according to Wei, they should rectify (ke ) the sovereign. They should assist him in everything, that is, in all his daily activities as well as when he is at rest. All this is entailed by learning.^[24] Wei rejected the popular distinction between substance and function (t'i and yung ) as unclassical and overly subtle.^[25] Moral principle (i-li ) is absolute. It governs "the rules of statecraft" (ching-shih chih kuei ) of all the good sovereigns, the learning taught by the sages and worthies for the renewal of the people and revived by Chu Hsi.^[26]

Learned scholar-officials should not hold back from offering their opinions, for how can they be sure that they will not be accepted?^[27] Even when for some reason an official is sent out to a provincial post, the emperor might still place trust in his opinions, a situation preferable to serving at court without such trust.^[28]

What hurt, as Wei pointed out, was the common misconception that learned scholar-officials were behind the times and ignorant of practical realities, bookish in their literary expressions, and incapable in administrative matters. On the contrary, Wei claimed, they knew best how to govern.^[29] While the emperor enjoyed literary composition and calligraphy, Wei urged His Majesty to realize that these did not constitute real learning for state affairs.^[30]

[21] For the mind as the supreme ultimate, see Shao Yung, Huang-chi ching-shih shu 8B:251-61, Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1963), p. 493.

[22] Works 16:152; SYHA 20:93; and SS 437:12967.

[23] SS 437:12967.

[24] SYHA 80:93.

[25] SYHA 80:77.

[26] Works 54:460.

[27] SYHA 20:82.

[28] SYHAPI 40:14.

[29] Works 17:160; SYHA 80:92.

[30] Works 16:154; SYHA 80:92.

― 341 ―

Wei was very cautious when it came to putting his thoughts in writing. As he explained, "Today I feel right about something, thus correcting a past error. How can I be sure that a few years from now I will not feel that way about my present thoughts? Highly conscious of this possibility, I find it hard to write lightly."^[31] Although he said this apropos of classical studies, it may also explain his reticence in writing about political theories. However, his philosophical and political concerns are clearly visible in what he did write, such as his memorials. This becomes clear when these are examined in the context of his career and the political conditions of the time.

Wei became caught up in a paradoxical situation produced by the symbiosis between ideological authority and the power of throne and bureaucracy in the Confucian state, for his scholarly fame and social prestige were political assets that made him eligible for positions at court, but the court's motive was merely to exploit his reputation in order to improve its own image. He was granted high office, but was not given much of a share in decision making. His political proposals were often met by seemingly practical criticism or set opposition or both. If some of his proposals were too idealistic to be feasible,^[32] others aroused opposition because they disturbed vested interests or even threatened to upset the power structure. His opponents would therefore join to remove him from court by transferring him to a post in local government or assigning him to the military front.^[33] This was not hard to do, for Wei was not close to the throne and did not have significant support in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy.

Wei's experience in local government was happier than at the center, since there he was free to initiate as long as his measures were of no direct concern to the central authorities. Here bureaucratic politics rarely interfered.^[34] Thus, in local office, Wei proved to be something of an activist.^[35]

[31] SYHA 80:81-82.

[32] Ch'en Teng-yuan, Kuo-shih 1:417-18. Cf. Encylopedia Britannica (15th ed., 1974), "China, History of," pp. 336-37.

[33] Wei's biography, SS , ch. 196, and SYHAPI 80:28-29.

[34] A number of Neo-Confucians, though thwarted at court, did well as local or regional administrators. Examples include Chu Hsi at Nan-k'ang and eastern Chekiang, Fan Ch'eng-ta at Ch'u-chou, Chen Te-hsiu at Fu-chou. Kao-tsung, the first Southern Sung emperor, once wondered why one of his ministers who had done very well in regional administration turned out a complete failure at court, but the emperor did not receive an honest answer. See Li Hsin-ch'uan, Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu (Kuo-hsueh chi-pen ts'ung shu ed.) 81:1333. In late Southern Sung there were officials who would serve elsewhere but not at court. Chao K'uei, in declining a court post, said, "I would rather be banished beyond the southern mountains for my offense [in declining], as I find it impossible to disobey the explicit injunctions of my father not to serve at court." See Chou Mi, Ch'i-tung yeh-yü (Peking, 1983) 18:338.

[35] The discussion that follows is based on Wei's SS biography; on SS 437:12966-68; on SYHAPI 80:12; and on a survey of the commemorative inscriptions for local institutions in Works , ch. 43 through 50. See especially 43:5b-7b, 7b-9b; 44:13a-15b, 23a-24b; 45:5b-9a, 9a-11b; 48:4b-6a, 12b-15a.

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He tried, through frequent written appeals and through community ceremonies in honor of elders, to promote ethical social relations and harmonious communal feelings, with a typically Neo-Confucian eye to healing such ills as a local love of litigation. In this, of course, he was following in the footsteps of Chu Hsi among many others. At the same time, Wei established or promoted the sorts of local institutions that likewise seem to place him, as an administrator, in a specifically Neo-Confucian line of descent. Among these were a charitable cemetery, a rest home for the homeless disabled, and in particular a system of community granaries (she-ts'ang ). Both the records of his own service and his commemorative inscriptions for the projects of others reflect an interest in the creation of institutions working at the interface between the local community and the lowest level of the bureaucracy and devoted to social welfare or, like his own Ho-shan Academy, to education.^[36]

In justifying such institutions Wei at times adopted a classicist stance. Thus price-regulating granaries were made necessary, he argued, by the loss of the ancient system of land allocation that assured fields to every cultivator and a cultivator to every field. This was part of a larger process of decline by which "emperors lost the Way of being rulers" and "few were able to apply [the Classics] to governing."^[37] The implied reference to contemporary emperors and statesmen seems clear. Wei was deeply interested in local affairs and established what contemporaries thought an excellent record in local office, though his fame in this did not fully match that of his friend Chen Te-hsiu.^[38] But his own discussions partook of broader Neo-Confucian conceptions by placing local reform in a context of what was potentially achievable—because classically it had been achieved—for the empire as a whole, by emperors and statesmen in proper possession of the Way. Although the court saw fit to call on Wei to serve there again, he never had the opportunity to apply his ideas on an empire-wide basis. Despite his prestige, he lacked firm political footing and thus would slip from power without much to show by way of accomplishment. Neo-Confucian statecraft and power politics were simply incompatible.

What, then, stood in the way of the Confucian Way? The Son of Heaven, according to Wei, should care what heaven-and-earth, that is, his subjects the people, do.^[39] In accord with moral principles, he should lodge the Confucian Way in the laws.^[40] Unfortunately, this was not the way things were.

[36] For the Ho-shan Academy, see Works 47:1a-2b.

[37] Works 48:5b.

[38] Lo Ta-ching, Ho-lin yü-lu , pp. 192-93, mentions that local people had dedicated a shrine to Chen during his lifetime (a so-called sheng-tz'u ). There is no record of any such honor for Wei.

[39] Works 15:141-42 and 16:152-53; and LTMCTI 5:5-9. Wei also advised the emperor explicitly against indulgences. LTMCTI 195:13-14.

[40] SYHAPI 80:9 and LTMCTI 214:18-20.

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As Wei said, the emperor made decisions after consulting only two or three persons. Others could not get close to him to give him frank advice.^[41] The majority of officials, not taken into confidence, merely followed routine and tried to uphold a false image of the government. Most officials could also refrain from speaking up by pointing to a court rule that had forbidden slanderous and sarcastic remarks (pang-shan ) since the late Northern Sung. Directed especially to the government-supported students in the capital, it could be extended so that any criticism could be misconstrued and silenced under the allegation that it was slanderous or sarcastic.

As Wei saw it, the dysfunction of the court basically stemmed from the emperor's lack of respect for officials. Citing historical examples, Wei traced the roots of this defect back to the early Northern Sung.^[42] What, then, could an idealistic official do? Wei's answer was to resign. Although Wei himself did not elaborate on this, resignation in protest amounted to a strategic retreat enhancing an official's own self-respect as well as his prestige in the eyes of others, including perhaps even the emperor. In the course of time, changes might take place at court leading to his recall and placing him in a strong position to express his opinions. He could then insist on his own policies as the price of his participation.

This strategy, of course, was as old as Confucianism itself and, for that matter, was adoptable by all kinds of idealists. Chu Hsi had resorted to it, but it was made most explicit by Wei's friend Chen Te-hsiu. When the hypocritical politics of accommodation was in vogue, the government tried to recruit prestigious scholar-officials merely to improve its image. Rising against this, Chen declared to a friend, "Scholar-officials like us must quickly resign so the court will realize that there are some people in the world who will not submit just to become subordinate officials."^[43]

Wei had no strategy, however, to deal with men close to the emperor. The best example was Shih Mi-yuan (1164-1233), who as chief councillor for twenty-six years, the longest tenure in history, acted as a surrogate emperor.^[44] On one occasion, Wei discussed with Shih the promotion of worthy scholar-officials, and Shih expressed the reservation that this would spark factionalism. The term "faction" had an extremely negative connotation after the reform and counterreform politics of the Northern Sung. Nevertheless, Wei replied that upright gentlemen and mean-spirited people often fall into separate factions (but he did not enter into any theoretical discussion, such as Ou-yang Hsiu's famous thesis defending the faction of good men). Shih admitted that this was so, and Wei went on to challenge

[41] SYHA 80:82.

[42] Wei Liao-weng, Ho-shan pi-lu (Pei-pu ts'ung-shu ed.), p. 3755.

[43] SS 437:12959.

[44] Davis, Court and Family , p. 93.

― 344 ―

him, "Who would admit that he is a mean, small-minded man?" Shih made no further comment, apparently lost in deep thought.^[45]

Once at a party for court officials, the host remarked that participating in court affairs was like attending a banquet: invited guests should not contravene propriety and criticize a well-intentioned host for this mistake or that error. No one else said anything, but Wei observed that guests should not be forced to obey a host when something unreasonable that went against human feelings was involved. Shih heard about this conversation, realized that accommodating Wei would not work, and had him dismissed.^[46]

Nor did Wei have a strategy to enlist support from other bureaucrats. As he observed, most officials, their integrity weakened and undermined, were morally lax. Accommodation had become the established style; conformity, the honored pattern. The thing to do was to follow set precedents. Duplicity made matters worse as formalities served to cover up selfish motives; face-to-face flattery preceded backbiting; claims of undeserved credit for oneself compounded the false blame heaped on others. Quick advancement was all that counted.^[47] In truth, the bureaucrats, though educated in Confucianism, were simply not the Confucian officials they were supposed to be. This harsh reality was fatal to Neo-Confucian ideals. It was impossible for an idealist like Wei to draw support from such a debased, deceitful, and divisive group of officials, men who were never interested in public-spirited discussion, let alone concerted political action. The impetus to correct matters had to come directly from the emperor.

Theoretically, four broad options were available to the central government in the Sung period (or are, for that matter, in China today):^[48] (1) Moral rectification through education and exhortation; this was tried at least nominally from time to time, to no avail. (2) Administrative discipline by strict rewards and punishments; rarely carried out, attempts to do this were largely blocked by officials in collusion for mutual protection. (3) Vigorous reform to overhaul the whole system; no one advocated this after Wang An-shih's controversial reforms had been blamed for the fall of the Northern Sung. (4) Remedialism, that is, a gradualist policy of reform through incremental improvements. Wei chose remedialism. This was the underlying theme of the famous memorial he submitted after the death of Shih Mi-yuan when the court asked all officials for their views.^[49] His ten points were as follows:

[45] SYHA 80:95.

[46] SS 437:12968; cf. Works 19:180-85.

[47] See note 17.

[48] Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), ch. 2 and 3.

[49] Works 18:166-79 and SYHAPI 80:12-13. As in the case discussed above in note 14,SYHAPI here again makes an exaggerated claim when it says that as a result of Wei's memorial, all the old-style court institutions were restored. LTMCTI , in contrast, chose not to include this memorial, perhaps owing to its length.

― 345 ―

1. Restore coordination among the Chancellery, the Secretariat, and the Review Bureau so that the flow of documents will no longer be monopolized and abuses will be eliminated.

2. Restore separate reporting by the military commissioner, thereby removing the chief councillor from control over defense matters and permitting others to present their views.

3. Resume use of the grand hall (tu-t'ang ) as the place for ranking officials to meet, dine, and converse so that they will no longer wait on the chief councillor at his private residence or hover around his house waiting for a chance to call on him.

By these three measures Wei intended to block a chief councillor from again monopolizing power and becoming in effect a surrogate emperor. The memorial continues:

4. Restore the role of court aides (shih-ts'ung ), allowing them on informal occasions freely to express their thoughts to the emperor.

5. Restore the imperial lectures (ching-yen ) so that the emperor will benefit from serious study rather than simply having some readings explained to him in line with his well-known fondness for literature.^[50] Emphasis should be on what was most meaningful, namely, what the ancient sages and worthies had transmitted. Also of prime importance were His Majesty's self-cultivation and his realization of how departures from sound institutional practices had damaged successive states in the past.

In support of this point, Wei cited a number of his Neo-Confucian predecessors, ending with Chu Hsi and Chang Shih. Indeed, this is the closest he came in this memorial to a summation of the essence of his Neo-Confucian philosophy. Wei then turned to his next points:

6. Restore the independence of the censorial and policy-criticism officials (t'ai-chien ) so that they will neither slavishly repeat what the councillors told them to say nor evade responsibility by submitting bland collective memorials without signing their individual names, and also so that they would be prevented from distorting matters, causing more harm than good.

7. Restore the proper functions of edicts and decrees by insisting on careful drafts without the least interference by the councillors so that the documents would clearly state the grounds for bestowing due rewards and punishments.

[50] SYHA 80:95.

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The preceding four proposals were intended by Wei to establish various officials around the throne to support the emperor by playing their roles, thus creating, to put it in modern terms, a pluralistic dynamism.

8. Restore the practice of listening widely to opinions from below, by, for instance, requiring all court officials to attend court audience in rotation. Wei argued forcefully that the emperor should engage himself in state affairs. Not a single day should go by without an audience, and not a single individual at court should be without something to say. All improper blocks should be removed from the channels of communication so that access to the throne would always be open.^[51] Such access should be extended to the students of the Imperial University (T'ai-hsueh ), whose opinions, at times strong, should not be ignored.

Here again Wei is calling for more interplay at court, more pluralistic dynamism. The balance of the memorial deals with the military:

9. Restore military discipline by punishing corrupt officials.

10. Restore the accountability of theater commanders and hold them responsible for their wrongdoings.

Although Wei hardly goes beyond remedialism through restoration, it would be a gross underestimation merely to say that the memorial was trite. Under the political circumstances, he could not make his memorial any stronger, but he also could not water it down below a certain minimum standard. Furthermore, what may sound trite to later generations was nevertheless entirely appropriate under the circumstances. By pointing out what was missing at court and attacking what was wrong with the establishment, Wei exposed himself to counterattack. This is why he kept using the word "restore" throughout his ten points. By calling for a return to the old system when the dynasty was doing well, and by invoking the inviolable sanction of the imperial ancestors, he created a protective umbrella against charges that he was saying anything wrong. This brilliant strategy won Wei many recommendations and great fame, so the emperor felt it desirable to recall him to a high position at court.

This did not mean, however, that the court was ready to implement his ideas. In six months' time, Wei submitted more than twenty additional separate memorials on specific matters dealing with fiscal, currency, economic, administrative, personnel, political, and military matters and including concrete proposals and even technical corrections. If he offered no program of institutional or large-scale change, neither did he have the authority to do so. Nor was the time opportune. As it was, his specific recommendations, although hardly drastic, were not enacted.^[52]

[51] Cf. LTMCTI 98:11-19.

[52] Works 15:145-50; 19:185-90; 20:194-95; 22:208-10; and SS 437:12969.

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Wei's attitude toward the external crisis and the foreign policy alternatives of war, peace, or diplomacy was also moderate. Sharing in the consensus of "pure-minded discourse" (ch'ing-i ), Wei had been hawkish toward the Chin when they were about to fall before the Mongols, but he would not go so far as to advocate an anti-Chin alliance with the Mongols. Then, after the fall of the Chin, he opposed entering into a friendly alliance with the Mongols. His central concept was self-reliant preparedness for defense. Any other policy, whether of peace or of war, would be as illusory as it was dangerous.^[53] Again, the court ignored his ideas.

Although Wei got nowhere, his enemies nevertheless considered him a threat and by a tricky set of maneuvers eased him out. First, under the pretext of using his military knowledge, the court suddenly appointed him inspector-general of the mid-Yangtze theater.^[54] When another vacancy occurred in the lower Yangtze theater, he was also concurrently placed in command there. An uproar by a few officials and many protesting Imperial University students who wanted Wei retained at court did not help. Recognizing the maneuver to undermine him, Wei declined the military appointment five times, to no avail. He could have insisted on resigning in protest, as he had in the past, but he decided that he might have a chance to achieve a good record, and so he went.^[55]

More trouble ensued. Wei encountered innumerable difficulties in getting enough funds appropriated, staff organized, plans laid out, discretionary power granted, orders issued, and headquarters set up in Chiang-chou (modern Chiu-chiang). Then, a sudden order caught up with him, telling him, only three weeks after he had arrived at his post, to report back to the court as a mere signatory military commissioner. He had been made to look utterly ridiculous. Ridicule was indeed a powerful weapon against prestige. Realizing he had lost, Wei resigned, pleading illness. To appease him, the court subtly made him a prefect with the title of regional pacification commissioner, first at T'an-chou in Hu-nan, soon changed to Shao-hsing in Liang-che, and eventually at Fu-chou in Fu-chien,^[56] where he died. Although Wei was a native of Szechwan, the court granted his family a residence in Su-chou, a city that rivaled the capital both economically and culturally.

Wei's statecraft was thwarted throughout his career. To win in the game of power politics, scholarship, fame, knowledge, moral earnestness, and eloquent reasoning were not enough, but as an idealist he could not or would not use the necessary tricks. Many idealists, through the generations, sim-

[53] Wei's opinions are best found in K'uang-chung Huang, Wan Sung Ch'ao-ch'en tui kuo-shih ti cheng-i (Taipei, 1978), passim.

[54] LTMCTI 225:13-15 and 260:24-26.

[55] Works 26:236-42; 27:243-54; and 29:255.

[56] Works 25:230-34 and SS 437:12970.

― 348 ―

ply stood at the edge of the game table anxiously wringing their hands, but Wei struggled tenaciously, gathering his chips, devising a strategy, going to court, trying his hand. His Ming critics did not understand that success in local government was not transferable to court politics, that the troubles of absolutism were compounded by bureaucratic politics, that gradual re-medialism was the only feasible avenue to improvement, and that in advocating restoration of early Sung practices, Wei was resorting to the best possible strategy. Criticism of Wei that stemmed from high-sounding statecraft theories while ignoring actual political circumstances has been pointless and unfair.

― 349 ―

Ten
Chen Te-hsiu and Statecraft

Wm. Theodore de Bary

Chu Hsi, Chen Te-hsiu, and the Moralization of Politics

Until recently there has been a tendency, when discussing Neo-Confucian political philosophy, to speak of it as a system aimed almost exclusively at the "moralization of politics." This moralistic "idealism" then has been set in contrast to a more utilitarian "realism," which gave greater recognition to the historical circumstances conditioning human action and especially to the power factors affecting the actual conduct of government. If the latter, more "realistic," approach is identified with the practice of "statecraft," it would seem that Neo-Confucianism, as represented by the Ch'eng-Chu school, has stood in opposition to it.

As examples of this prevalent modern view we may take two expressions of it by influential historians. First, John K. Fairbank:

In politics the Neo-Confucianists believed that the ruler must gain understanding of true principles of government and become a sage by moral self-discipline. In practice the new Neo-Confucian orthodoxy put its primary stress upon the moral development of man. It became an ever more effective mechanism, through the study of the classics and the examination system, for the Confucian doctrines of loyalty and social conformity.^[1]

Another account stresses the same moralistic approach, but instead of finding it such an effective instrument of social control, belabors its inability to cope with real problems. Describing the futility of any attempt to deal rationally with affairs of state at the Ming court, Ray Huang laments:

[1] J. K. Fairbank, The United States and China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 71-72.

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Even technical problems brought before the emperor's court had to be reduced to moral archetypes of perfect good and absolute evil before they could be deliberated upon. Only when thousands of hidden motives and private interests had been restrained and neutralized by the teachings of the Four Books could the empire be held together. The moment the bureaucrats started to quote the text of the canon to wage a verbal civil war, the most vital organizational principle was abandoned.^[2]

This view of Chu Hsi as mainly concerned with the "moralization of politics" would not have gained such currency were there not some substance to it. In the Ming period a compilation by Yü Yu (1465-1528)^[3] of Chu Hsi's political doctrines, entitled "Chu Hsi's Major Instructions for World Ordering (or Ordering the Age)" (Wen-kung ching-shih ta-hsun ),^[4] opened with a quotation from Chu's memorial of 1188, which I have cited in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart as representing the essence of Chu Hsi's advice to the emperor Hsiao-tsung. It appears in Yü Yu's compilation as the first of six quotations from Chu Hsi under the heading "The Ruler's Art of the Mind" (jen-chu hsin-shu ):

Why does your minister presume to suggest that your Majesty's mind-and-heart is the great root of all matters under Heaven? [It is because] all matters under Heaven, with their myriad transformations and innumerable manifestations, depend without exception on the mind of the ruler. This is a natural principle. Thus if the ruler's mind is correct, all matters without exception will follow from this correctness; and if this mind is incorrect, not one of these matters can attain correctness.^[5]

It was for this reason, Chu Hsi goes on to state, that the sage-emperor Shun admonished rulers to exercise the utmost refinement and singleness of mind in making judgments and holding to the Mean. This was the same message Chu had conveyed earlier in his sealed memorial of 1162, which he identified as the essential message transmitted by the sages "from mind-to-mind," and which he also associated with the teachings of the Great Learning .^[6] Farther on in his important preface to The Mean , Chu spoke of these same instructions on refinement and singleness of mind as the core of

[2] Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 79.

[3] Yü Yu (or Hu) 1465-1528, a disciple of Hu Chü-jen and critic of Wang Yang-ming. See Goodwich and Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography (DMB ), 1624-26; Ming shih (Beijing, Chung-hua Book Co., 1974) 282: 7233; Huang Tsung-hsi, Ming-ju hsüeh-an 3:36-37.

[4] Completed in 1514, published in Chia-ching 5 (1526) by the Hu-kuang pu-cheng-ssu, and included in the Hsueh-hai lei-pien , Tzu pu, Ju-chia section.

[5] Chu Hsi, Hui-an hsien sheng chu wen-kung wen-chi , Kyoto, Chubun shuppansha ed. 1977 (hereafter abbreviated as Chu, Wen-chi ) 11:21b (p. 677). The second page number given refers to the overall pagination common to this and earlier single-page reprints.

[6] Chu, Wen-chi 11:3b-4a (pp. 644-45).

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the "tradition of the Way" (tao-t'ung ) handed down from the sages. Since these ideas also found a prominent place in Chu Hsi's lectures to the emperor on the classics,^[7] there is good reason to accept them as the consistent core of Chu's political doctrine, communicated in writings and lectures directed personally at the reigning ruler.

Less noticed perhaps in later times was the fact that Chu Hsi, especially in his memorials, followed up this generalized advice with more specific recommendations concerning current policy matters. Many of these could be categorized as lying within the realm of practical statecraft. In the memorial just cited they included such items as reform of the inner palace, better selection of ministers, improvement of official discipline, reorganization of the tax system, the strengthening of military administration, and so forth. The detailed contents of Chu's memorials have been discussed by Conrad Schirokauer in his articles on Chu Hsi's political career and need not be elaborated on here.^[8] Inasmuch as they concerned matters at court, these were often not policies with which Chu himself could be actively involved, and insofar as they spoke to issues of that particular moment in history, they might well have had less meaning and less urgent import for later generations who did not encounter these questions in quite the same form. (Those just cited were in fact deleted in the Ming "World Ordering" version, which simply strung together Chu's more general statements.)^[9] From this point of view the more concrete the case dealt with, the more knowledge of historical circumstances was required to grasp its significance; and the more generalized the advice, the more likely it was to be taken by later Neo-Confucians as timeless wisdom.

Indeed, the further removed one was from Chu Hsi in time and place, the truer this became. What Chu had to say about rulership and its responsible exercise was more likely to attract attention if found encapsulated in a few well-chosen words in his commentaries on the Four Books or Reflections on Things at Hand , with which most literate persons were familiar, than if it appeared in relatively less accessible memorials referring to events of a bygone era. Pithy sayings found in Chu's version of the Great Learning (Ta-hsueh chang-chü ) easily came to stand for the heart of his teachings, as did also the quotations anthologized later by Chen Te-hsiu in his Heart Classic (Hsin ching ).^[10] One can easily understand how, in the eyes of the great Korean scholar Yi T'oegye, these would in turn come to be admired as the

[7] Chu, Wen-chi 15:1a-21b (pp. 849-88).

[8] Conrad Schirokauer, "Chu Hsi's Political Career: A Study in Ambivalence," in A. Wright and D. Twitchett (eds.), Confucian Personalities (Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 162-88.

[9] Yü Yu, Wen-kung hsien-sheng ching-shih ta-hsun 1:1a.

[10] Chen Te-hsiu, Hsin ching , early Ming edition in the National Central Library, Taipei. See Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , p. 228, n. 2.

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very essence of Chu's teaching, and be incorporated in Yi's Ten Diagrams of the Sages' Teaching (Songhak sipdo ).^[11] which formed the centerpiece of his instructions to the Korean king, carrying on the tradition of the lectures from the Classics Mat as prime vehicles for the Learning of the Emperors.

With this Neo-Confucian tradition of "world ordering," as Yü Yu characterized it above, we could thus identify a doctrine for the moralization of politics through the ruler's self-cultivation and especially his own mind-control. What Chu called the "handling of the mind" (hsin-shu ) or the "method of the mind" (hsin-fa ) was expressed, he said, in the sixteen-word injunction of the sages, urging "refinement and singleness of mind" and "holding fast the Mean." As explained in Chu's lectures from the Classics Mat, the "handling of the mind" was also identified with the method of self-cultivation in the Great Learning ,^[12] and as found in Chu's preface to The Mean , this formula was directly linked to his distinction between the human mind and the mind of the Way, with the former seen as susceptible to selfishness and apt to err, while the latter was unselfish and public-spirited.^[13] The "handling" of the mind represented one's individual skill in making such distinctions and handling oneself accordingly. It was a humane art and not a mechanical science.

In the Learning of the Emperors (Ti-hsueh , short for Ti-wang chih hsueh , "Learning of the [Sage] Emperors and Kings"), which was propounded in the lectures from the Classics Mat, in Chen Te-hsiu's Heart Classic , and in Yi T'oegye's Ten Diagrams , this "moralization of politics" was directed first of all at the conscience of the ruler or the sense of noblesse oblige in "noble men" (chün-tzu ) called to serve in government. It rested on the assumption that the moralization of politics was to be accomplished by the exemplary conduct of the ruler in holding himself to the strictest moral accountability in his personal conduct and in the exercise of power.

Traditionally this principle had been known as "transforming [the people] through moral edification (chiao-hua )," and it was no accident that the language used by Chu Hsi concerning the crucial influence of the ruler's correctness of mind (quoted by Chu in his memorials, repeated by Chen Te-hsiu in the Heart Classic , and again by Yü Yu) came from the Han Confucian Tung Chung-shu, who had been such an advocate of this kind of moralization through chiao-hua .^[14] In his lectures from the Classics Mat, however, Chu expressed reservations about the contemporary practice of

[11] Yi T'oegye, "Songhak sipdo," in Yi T'oegye chonjip (Tokyo: Ri Taikei kenkyukai, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 260-61.

[12] Chu, Wen-chi 15:17a (p. 881).

[13] Chu Hsi, "Chung-yung chang-chu hsü," in Ssu-ssu chi-chu , Chung-kuo tzu-hsüch ming-chu chi-cheng ed. (Taipei, 1978), pp. 37-40.

[14] Tung Chung-shu, Tung Tzu wen-chi (Chi-fu ts'ung shu ed.) 1:5b; Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , p. 115.

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chiao-hua , and preferred to speak of "renewing the people,"^[15] as he did in his commentary on the opening lines of the Great Learning .^[16] By "renewing the people," Chu meant helping the people to return to their original moral nature, that is, to "the mind of the Way." Elsewhere in his commentary Chu Hsi used the expression hsiu chi chih jen or hsiu shen chih kuo , meaning the ordering of men or of the state through self-discipline.^[17] Since he saw this as essentially a process of renewing the people's original good nature and assisting them in their own self-cultivation, Chu Hsi insisted that the ruler was not imparting to, or instilling in, the people anything they did not already possess.^[18] In other words, this moralization was actually meant to be, not a process of indoctrination, but a voluntaristic process of revivification.

The later adoption of Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Four Books as the most basic texts in Chinese education—indeed in East Asian education generally—was no guarantee that his moral philosophy would gain universal adherence, or that its essentially voluntaristic spirit would always be respected. On the contrary, such idealistic professions were inherently susceptible of abuse, whether through excessive zeal, platitudinous recitation, or hypocritical exploitation. Nevertheless, if Neo-Confucians in later times continued to subscribe to these principles, as they did down into the nineteenth century, we cannot assume that it was all mere lip service. In his discussion of the Ch'eng-Chu school in the early Ch'ing period, no less a scholar than Hellmut Wilhelm acknowledged the sincerity and consistency with which its leading spokesmen held to these ideals.^[19] All the more reason then for us to question whether his rendering of this basic concept as "culti-

[15] Chu, Wen-chi 15:15a, 17a (pp. 877, 881).

[16] Ssu-shu chi-chu , pp. 7-8, 12.

[17] Ta-hsueh chang-chü Preface; also 10:32. Comm. on P'ing t'ien-hsia. Hsiu-chi chih jen is a favorite expression of Chu Hsi's and apparently original with him (see Morohashi Tetsuji, Daikanwa jiten [Tokyo 1960], 721-104). It conveys the sense of ordering human society through the transforming power of personal example. Chih-jen is to be understood, not as a separate activity, like governing or controlling others, but as a process of self-governing for both individual and society. The expression does not appear in the Complete Works of the Ch'eng Brothers (Erh Ch'eng ch'üan-shu ), according to Ni Teizensho sakuin , Kyushu daigaku Chugoku tetsugaku kenkyushitsu, 1974.

[18] In his commentary on Mencius 5A:7 concerning the role of those who become aware or enlightened first and their obligation to assist in the enlightenment of the people, Chu cites with obvious approval the view of Ch'eng I that the leader is only awakening in the people something already possessed by them as their inherent nature, and not sharing with or imparting to others something possessed by him alone. "These are principles they already have of themselves; all I can do is awaken them." Ssu-shu chi-chu, Meng Tzu 9:93 (p. 744).

[19] See Hellmut Wilhelm, "Chinese Confucianism on the Eve of the Great Encounter," in M. Jansen (ed.), Changing Japanese Attitudes to Modernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 284. Although in general Wilhelm tends to emphasize the Confucian's accommodation to the state and dynasty, he recognized significant exceptions.

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vating one's personality and controlling the people" adequately conveys its meaning.^[20] Our doubts are only heightened by Wilhelm's explanation of the Learning of the Emperors as "emperorology," a term he says was coined by a modern Japanese scholar of Neo-Confucianism.^[21] While a testimony to Wilhelm's own scrupulousness as a scholar in acknowledging the proximate sources of his information, it does not reassure us as to his familiarity with the central importance of this concept in its early Neo-Confucian formulation.

Chen Te-hsiu's admonitory verse at the conclusion of his Heart Classic opens with this declaration: "The sixteen words transmitted from Shun to Yü are the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart for all ages." There follows Chen's concise formulation of the sage's Learning of the Mind, fraught with a sense of the danger that threatens from the human mind if selfish desires run unchecked by the mind of the Way, and overborne with a sense of the difficulty man has in perceiving and keeping to the mind of the Way. Hence the need for skill in making precise moral judgments, for the finesse of the discriminating mind (in contrast to the Buddhist mind of nondiscrimination on the higher level of truth and indiscriminate adaptability on the lower). Constant vigilance is required to guard against the subtle seductions of sensual desire and selfish ambition. Chen urges the ruler to be single-minded in his determination to suppress the passions, to attack this enemy relentlessly, and to subdue even the slightest thought that deviates from propriety and rites.^[22]

I have written earlier of the special quality of rigorism in Chen Te-hsiu's Heart Classic . When it speaks of subduing selfish desires and conquering the self, it does so with a religious intensity approaching that of Western puritanism.^[23] This may reflect the particular influence on Chen of Chou Tun-i, who had spoken of the sage as being wholly "without desires" (wu -yü ), somewhat in contrast to Mencius's more moderate doctrine of simply limiting or reducing the desires (kua-yü ). In a discussion of the tradition of the Way (Tao-t'ung ), Chen dwells on the importance of reverence in this connection:

[20] Wilhelm cites it as quoted by the Yung-cheng emperor in 1735. It is not impossible that the emperor himself understood hsiu chi chih jen as Wilhelm interprets it, but if it had been identified as a quotation from Chu Hsi, both the original meaning and Yung-cheng's own interpretation could have been distinguished. See Wilhelm, p. 285.

[21] Ibid., p. 391, n. 43 reads: "Ti-wang hsueh . The term was coined by Fumoto Yasutake [sic ]." There follows a reference to an article by Fumoto Yasutaka in ToyoGakuho 32, no. 1 (Sept. 1948). Actually, quite apart from its usage in the Sung (discussed by me in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 29-30, 93-98), the modern usage of the term derives from Fumoto's teacher, Morohashi Tetsuji, as Fumoto himself acknowledged to me.

[22] Hsin ching , 21b-23a.

[23] See Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 78-81, 124.

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When one has committed himself to the Way, to what should he then devote his practice of it and apply his effort? If we look to remote antiquity we can see that in the one word "reverence" as passed down through a hundred sages is represented their real method of the mind-and-heart. . . . The violence of the physical passions surpasses that of runaway horses: reverence is like lassoing them in. The wildness of the feelings is worse than a river in flood: reverence is like dikes to hold them back.^[24]

And again:

If selfish desires are given free rein, principle is obscured by desires and inhumaneness follows as a matter of course. Thus in the seeking of humanehess what is of first importance is to "subdue the self" (k'o-chi ). . . . What, then, does it mean "to subdue"? It is like attacking and vanquishing in battle. When selfish thoughts first appear and the original mind has not yet been lost, then principle and desire stand opposed to each other, like two armies ranged in battle. If what is straight wins, what is crooked loses. If principles dominate, desires must be subordinate. The violence of armed conflict and the dangers of war are well known to all, but unless one knows the Way he will not be prepared to guard against the danger of selfish desires, which wound more grievously than a double-edged sword and burn more fiercely than the hottest fire. Therefore, if one is dedicated to the Way, he will value nothing more than the seeking of humaneness, and in seeking humaneness he will put nothing before conquering the self.^[25]

Since elsewhere Chen affirms the goodness of human nature and, like Chu Hsi, recognizes no ultimate evil in the world, it is important to remember the context of Chen's statements—that he is primarily addressing the ruler. The human weaknesses he so vigorously attacks are not necessarily typical. They are those of rulers and dynasties, and by extension, of the ruling class who assist them, magnified in proportion to the power they hold. Plausibly, the educated elite might recognize themselves in such characterizations, and depending on the historical and cultural circumstances, respond to the challenge of such a lofty ideal of service. On the other hand, a morality prescribed for such an elite leadership class would have its own limitations. One might anticipate signs of strain and rejection if it were generalized and prescribed among persons who could not see themselves in the same role or failed to find in themselves the weaknesses or excesses that had called for such a stern rigorism in the first place.^[26]

James T. C. Liu draws attention to a similar quality in the thought of Wei Liao-weng.^[27] Wei's experience of political life, like Chen's, was deeply

[24] Chen Hsi-shan wen-chi (Kuo-hsueh chi-pen ts'ung-shu ed.) 26:448-49.

[25] Ibid., 33:583-84.

[26] See Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , p. 124.

[27] See chapter 9 in this volume.

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affected by the frustrations of dealing with unworthy rulers, whose incompetence was matched only by their self-indulgence and depravity. Chen and Wei were fellow leaders of the Learning of the Way in the early thirteenth century and shared a deep mutual sympathy.^[28] Hence we have reason to believe that Chen was not alone in his sense of engagement in an almost Manichean struggle with evil. Rather than being peculiar to him, it was shared by other Neo-Confucian idealists, whose attempts to "moralize politics" went down to defeat at the hands of perverse rulers, not of rebellious subjects.

It may be, however, that more is at work here than just the chronic and deep-seated Chinese inclination to choose up sides between good and evil, heroes and villains, as Ray Huang would have it. In a proclamation issued by Chen Te-hsiu when he was prefect of Ch'üan-chou in 1232, the moral idealism of the Neo-Confucian approaches a kind of medieval religiosity when it speaks of the virtues of filial devotion. Chen cites for particular approbation cases of extraordinary filial self-sacrifice, approaching in their extravagance the extreme altruism and self-abnegation identified with the bodhisattva in popular Buddhism. Chen feels the greatest admiration for two young men who managed somehow (if this can be believed) to extract their own livers for use as medicine by ailing parents. Another young man, reminiscent of the famed Twenty-Four Filials, sliced flesh from his thigh to provide special nourishment for a parent. Chen honored and feasted him at the prefectural residence, before sending him home with a marching band and flags flying. The daughter of a chin-shih degree holder likewise cut flesh from her thigh to serve a sick parent, prompting Chen to extol her virtues in a special commemorative essay.^[29]

Examples such as these may evoke skepticism from the modern historian, as indeed they could have raised doubts in the mind of more rational Confucians in Chen's own time. I recall nothing in the life and writings of Chu Hsi himself that would sanction such acts of near self-immolation. Though proving the point conclusively would require more research in Chu's voluminous writings than anyone today is likely to think worth the effort, it seems safe to say that Chu would have regarded these actions as going to an extreme, if not verging on actual violation of the canon against disfiguring the body one has received from one's parents.

The foregoing should suffice to demonstrate Chen's actual belief in the possibility of such extraordinary moral heroism. It bespoke for him the kind of idealism and rigorism he wished to celebrate in his Heart Classic . In this light one could certainly believe that the moralization of politics was a powerful element in the Neo-Confucian thinking of his time.

[28] Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 17, 87, 150.

[29] Chen Te-hsiu, Cheng ching (Ming reprint of 1242 ed.), 386-89a.

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Still, one may wonder whether there could not have been more to it than that. The views expressed in Chen's Heart Classic drew heavily on The Mean and Chu Hsi's preface to it. For Chen, however, the Learning of the Mind was equally identified with the Great Learning , to which in fact Chu Hsi had given first priority among the Four Books. And in the Learning of the Emperors, especially as enunciated in lectures on the classics for the ruler, it was Chen's Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (Ta-hsueh yen-i ), rather than the Heart Classic , that played such a conspicuous role at court and represented for later generations Chen's views on government. The next question, then, is whether in this major work of Chen's we may find advice to the ruler less moralistic in tone, and in content more conducive to a realistic "statecraft."

Chen Te-hsiu and the Extended Meaning of the Extended Meaning

In my earlier work I have already brought out the importance of Chen's Extended Meaning to the Neo-Confucian Learning of the Emperors as taught at the Chinese court in the Yuan and Ming periods.^[30] Another perspective on the matter comes from the great Korean scholar-statesman Chong Tochon (1342-1398). At the founding of the Yi dynasty, he showed his awareness of the larger corpus of Neo-Confucian statecraft thought by drawing on the models and lessons of the Northern Sung, including those associated with Wang An-shih, for the institutional reforms he instituted in Korea in the early Yi dynasty.^[31] No doubt he was himself aware of Chu Hsi's own enlightened understanding of Wang's problems and programs and did not regard this kind of statecraft as foreign to Chu's thinking. At the same time, when it came to the conduct of the lectures on the classics at the Korean court, Chong specified Chen Te-hsiu's Extended Meaning of the Great Learning as the primary text.^[32] In this latter case, he must have thought Chen's work best suited to the instruction of the ruler, while in the former case Chong was outlining a grand program of state reform, which it would be the business of ministers to carry out (Chong in fact had quite decided views on the separation of the functions of king and prime minister).^[33]

Chen's own intentions and the basic terms of his discourse are indicated

[30] Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 124-26, 152-185.

[31] See Chong Tochon, Sambong jip (Seoul, 1971), esp. ch. 6 Kyongje mongam (1395), pp. 128-203; and ch. 7 Choson kyongguk chon (1394), pp. 204-252; also Chai-sik Chung, "Chong Tochon, Architect of Yi Dynasty Government and Ideology," in W. T. de Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush (eds.), The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 59-88.

[32] Chong Tochon, Sambong jip , pp. 204-8.

[33] Chong, Sambong jip , pp. 161-62; Chung, "Chong Tochon," p. 67.

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most concisely in his memorial on presentation of the Extended Meaning to the throne in 1234:

I have heard that in the Way of the sages there is substance and function. To root it in the self is substance; to extend it to the world is function. Yao, Shun, and the Three Kings' conduct of government, the Six Classics, and Confucius's and Mencius's conduct of teaching, did not go beyond this. The Great Learning is most clear and complete in its presentation of substance and function, root and branch, and their order of priorities. Therefore, recent scholars [the Ch'engs and Chu Hsi] have said that today, for perceiving the ancients' method of learning one need only rely on this work, with the Analects and the Mencius to supplement it. What are spoken of as the "investigation of things," the "extension of knowledge," "making one's intention sincere," and "cultivating the person"—these are the substance. "Regulating the family, ordering the state, and keeping peace in the world" are its function [application]. The learning of the ruler must be based on these if he is to understand the fullness of substance and function.^[34]

The question for us here is whether and how Chen's work carried out these intentions in ways that might differ from the heavily moralistic approach of his Heart Classic . This might come either from giving greater attention to the intellectual and cognitive side of self-cultivation (in contrast to moral discipline) or from dealing more specifically with the institutional/ functional side of government. Inasmuch as Chen believed substance and function, learning and practice, to be inseparably related, for us to draw any line between them might tend to prejudice the issue unless we first recognize that we are dealing with differences in emphasis and degree, not basic differences in kind. As Chen says in his preface to the Extended Meaning , the Confucian approach to rulership has always "taken the human person as its basis and extended this to all-under-Heaven."^[35] What this means is that one should take the same holistic approach to government as to the human person. A truly humane government will reflect in its aims and functions the varied needs and potentialities of the full human personality.

From this standpoint the structure of the Extended Meaning is revealing. Chen opens with a first chapter (chüan ) devoted to the purposes and priorities of human governance, followed by three chapters dealing with the aims and priorities of learning (here meaning primarily what the ruler should learn). Chapters 5-27, a major portion of the work, are entitled "Investigating Things and Extending Knowledge." Under this heading there is a breakdown into two main subdivisions, the first explaining the "Art of the Way" or the "Way and Its Practice" (Tao shu ) and the second, "Distin-

[34] Hsi-shan hsien-sheng Chen Wen-chung kung ch'üan-chi ed. of Ta-hsueh yen-i ; "Piao-p'ing cha-tzu," 7b-8a.

[35] Hsi-shan hsien-sheng Chen Wen-chung kung wen-chi, Kuo-hsueh chi-pen ts'ung-shu ed. (Taipei, 1968) 29:516, "Ta-hsueh yen-i hsu."

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guishing Human Talent" (pien jen-ts'ai ), that is, how one recognizes and evaluates talent, virtue, and competence in those chosen to share the rulers' responsibilities in governing. Much of this "learning" involves moral judgments and can hardly be considered value-free investigation. Nevertheless, in addition to quoting basic principles from the classics, a large part of the documentation offered by Chen is historical in nature, and even allowing for the perennial moralistic concerns of the Confucian historian, it still represents a substantial body of information, which Chen expected the ruler and his ministers to acquire in order to develop an informed capability for making political judgments.

The next major division of the work is clearly concerned with those two of the Eight Items or Steps in the Great Learning's method of cultivation that deal directly with moral discipline: "Making one's Intentions Sincere" and "Rectifying the Mind-and-Heart." In contrast to the preceding twenty-two chapters devoted to the development of knowledge, only seven chapters are given to moral cultivation as such, and these are of relatively modest size. They dwell on the primary virtue of reverent seriousness (ching )—primary in the sense of being, not a first step in learning but a fundamental orientation of mind, a respect for life, which should underlie and inspirit all learning and conduct. The more specific topics addressed here are identified under the heading "Restraining Wayward Desires." They are summarized by Chen in his preface as: "restraining drunkenness, restraining lewd desires, curbing wasteful amusements, and curbing extravagance."^[36] As I summarized this section in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy :

"Restraint of the desires" draws out the sorry record of imperial decadence and debauchery: drinking to the point of debility; sex to the point of exhaustion; extravagant entertainment; wasteful outings and excursions; destructive hunting parties; overexpenditure on luxurious palaces, etc.—all to the mournful accompaniment of warnings from Confucian ministers who go unheeded by irreverent and inattentive sovereigns.^[37]

From the examples given by Chen and the conclusions drawn, one knows that these are vices of the court; though certainly not unknown in society generally, they are of concern to Chen here primarily for the effect on others of the ruler's conduct and the moral tone it establishes for society at large. The same is true of the single chapter devoted to "cultivating the person," which is understood in the narrow sense of how his personal bearing and comportment affect others, that is, whether they set an edifying example for the people.

Similarly, with the concluding portion of the work—seven chapters entitled "Regulating the Family"—Chen does not present this in general

[36] Chen, Wen-chi 29:516.

[37] Ta-hsueh yen-i , imp. ed. of 1559, ch. 31-34; de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , p. 123.

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human terms, as for instance Chu Hsi does in his discussions of the same topic in the Great Learning , the Elementary Learning (Hsiao hsueh ), Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu lu ), or The Family Ritual (Chu tzu chia-li ). Instead, he once again focuses quite specifically on the problems of the ruling house—the emperor's management of his own household. The cases cited illustrate the dangerous consequences that follow from not limiting the number and power of those kept in the inner palace—wives, concubines, and eunuchs, especially—who exploit the weaknesses of the ruler and utilize the stratagems that lead to his undoing. The more positive side of these discourses has to do with proper selection of wives for their virtue and wisdom, protecting the rights of legitimate wives, arranging for the legitimate succession and defending it from attempts to subvert it, and providing for the education of the imperial family.^[38]

From this brief characterization of the work, which I think the fuller summary provided in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy would bear out,^[39] one can see how Chen's massive compilation consistently focuses on the person of the ruler, his court, and his family. It is only in the section dealing with the judging of human talent—in other words, with the choice of ministers—that Chen gets into the larger governmental process as a problem of political communication and consultation. Therein one gets a brief glimpse of Chen's views concerning the importance of open discussion at court, of maintaining an atmosphere that encourages the airing of all issues and claims. In this way flattery, slander, cliquishness, and misappropriation will be exposed. Corruption cannot stand the light of open discussion, so truth will emerge for the emperor to see.^[40]

Significant though this exception is, it does not substantially alter the more general preoccupation of the Extended Meaning with the immediate person and family of the ruler. Earlier Chen had stated that investigating things, extending knowledge, making the intention sincere, and rectifying the mind represent the substance of the Way, while regulating the family, ordering the state, and keeping peace in the world represent function. Later Ch'iu Chün would observe that Chen had dealt only with "regulating the family" and not with the other two aspects of function. This constituted Ch'iu's grounds for supplementing the Extended Meaning by another, even more massive, compilation, devoted to "ordering the state and keeping peace in the world."^[41]

Chen for his part, however, had already said at the end of his preface for the Extended Meaning , after having discussed the regulation of the family

[38] Ibid., ch. 36-43.

[39] Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 106-23.

[40] Ta-hsueh yen-i 27:25a.

[41] Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 181-82.

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under four subheadings ("taking seriously the matter of imperial wives and consorts," "strictness in dealing with the inner court," "settling dynastic succession," and "providing proper education for conjugal relatives of the emperor") that "if these four ways can be followed, then the ordering of the state and the keeping of peace in the world will require nothing more than can be found therein."^[42] Although Chen may well have meant by "four ways" the four major methods of self-cultivation rather than simply the four concerns discussed under "regulation of the family," it is striking that he should limit his treatment of "function" or "practice" to these in-house, almost housekeeping, items.

One might indeed conclude from the greater attention given to those matters identified as "substance" that Chen's work was primarily concerned with substance rather than function, yet neither Chen nor Ch'iu Chün thought so. Chen considered that he had dealt with function sufficiently by addressing the immediate problems of the ruler's house, presumably on the assumption that proper regulation of the family was the model for administration of the state.^[43] Ch'iu did not question this but only "supplemented" it from his own more extensive experience of central-government administration. Modest though he was in making this claim (a normal low posture for Confucian scholars to assume), Ch'iu was nevertheless making a major contribution of his own to the literature of statecraft.

The point here, however, is not Ch'iu's contribution but Chen's. The latter's work would seem, next to Ch'iu's, more truly modest in scope and substance, unless we take into account Chen's relative position in the line of statecraft thinkers emerging out of the earlier Learning of the Emperors. By this I do not mean to suggest that the statecraft thought of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries had the Learning of the Emperors as its only—or even its major—source. I mean only that there is a clear line of descent from the genre of Ti-hseh , as well as the lectures on the classics at court, through Chen and Ch'iu, into the statecraft thought that became hybridized with other strains of Neo-Confucian scholarship in later times.

In this perspective relevant comparisons to Chen Te-hsiu, in the first instance, are Fan Tsu-yü's earlier Learning of the Emperors (Ti-hsueh )^[44] and Chu

[42] Hsi-shan wen-chi 22:516.

[43] Chu Hsi's first entry in the chapter on "Governing the State and Bringing Peace to the World" in Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu lu ) is a quotation from Chou Tun-i: "There is a foundation for the government of the world. It is the ruler's person. There is a model for the government of the world. It is the family. . . . It is difficult to govern a family, whereas it is easy to govern the world, for the family is near while the world is distant. . . . In order to see how a ruler governs an empire, we observe the government of his family." Chin-ssu lu chi-chu 8:1a-2a, trans. Chan, p. 202. Chu Hsi's Commentary on this passage in the T'ung shu underscores the point (Chan, p. 203).

[44] See Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 93-98.

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Hsi's lectures from the Classics Mat. Fan Tsu-yü was primarily a historian, but had he not also been something of a political thinker, we would have difficulty understanding how Ch'eng I could have called Fan's Mirror of the T'ang (T'ang chien ) the greatest thing since the Three Dynasties.^[45] Chu Hsi, on the other hand, can be seen as primarily a philosopher, but one with a strong sense of history. Between the two a precedent had already been set for the exposition of principles drawn from the classics followed up by examples drawn from the histories. In Chu Hsi's case the best illustration of this is found in his Elementary Learning (Hsiao hsueh ), each major section of which is divided into citations from the classics and histories respectively. Yet, with Fan and Chu, though both had addressed the problems of rulership, and both did so on the basis of the criteria in the Great Learning , neither in my opinion had provided such extensive historical documentation, dealing specifically with the actual conduct of rulership in earlier dynasties, as did Chen in the Extended Meaning .

While recognizing the priority of the classics as the source of principles to be applied to the study of history, Chu Hsi (and Chen Te-hsiu) recognized the claims of history vis-à-vis classical models. On the one hand, Chu Hsi denies that dynastic rule is sacrosanct when measured against the perfection of sagely institutions; on the other hand, he accepts the fact of the historical evolution of centralized rule and doubts whether, given the radically different circumstances of the Sung, it is possible to reestablish the feudal system or the well-fields.^[46] These classic models may serve as a measure of the inadequacy of Sung dynastic institutions, and on that basis Chu is even bold enough to say that the ancestral precedent of the Sung founder (i.e., the Sung "constitution") may be set aside in order to deal with unacceptable evils in the present age.^[47]

Yet history is irreversible, except by a perfect sage, and instead of advocating a wholesale revival of the feudal institutions of the Three Dynasties, Chu Hsi places his hopes on the modification of existing institutions and an improvement in their conduct. The authority of classical principles remains unimpugned, but classical models may be adjudged impracticable in view of the irresistible force of historical change. Thus Heaven's decree (t'ienming ) is made manifest not only through the moral imperative in human nature (the "mind of the Way") but through the historical imperative dictated by Heaven's disposition of the given circumstances in which men's consciences must act.

[45] See Chu Hsi, in Mao Hsing-lai, Chin-ssu lu chi-chu , Ssu-k'u shan-pen ts'ung-shu ed. (Taipei: i-wen shu-chü, n.d.), ch. 3.

[46] Chu Tzu-yü-lei 97:14b (p. 3964); 98:21a (p. 4021); 108:1b-2b, p. 4260-62. Chan, Reflections , p. 235-37. See also chapter 4 of this volume.

[47] Chu, Wen-chi 70:9a (p. 1279); "Tu liang Ch'en lien-i i-mo"; and Ishida Hajime, "Shushi no kinei zengo kan," Gumma daigaku kyoikubukiyo : Jimbun-shakai kagakuhen , no. 30 (1980): 67-68.

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In this respect the significance of Chen's contribution to statecraft thought, as it pertains to imperial rule, is threefold. First, there is indeed a notable increase in the attention given to historical documentation for the actual conduct of rulership in the imperial dynasties. Though it should not be overdrawn, this contrast may be seen in relation to Chu Hsi's discussion of rulership in any of the works cited above, and it holds true also in relation to Fan's more historical Ti-hsueh . Granted that Chen's voluminous research has to do mostly with Confucian moral issues, it nonetheless places a significant value on historical scholarship and on the "investigation of things" as the major focus of Chen's work. Thus even Chen's discussion of "substance" gives a high priority to cognitive learning, to the "extension of knowledge" as a major requisite even of the "moralization of politics."

Second, the record of imperial rule as established in so many historical instances by Chen is long, detailed, and—in the sense that one might have wished it to be exemplary—not very edifying. On the contrary, to see it as edifying for the ruler would require one to believe that the long, sorry record of imperial rule, relieved only rarely by examples of worthy sovereigns or meritorious ministers, might have some shock value. For readers other than the emperor it must have been a rather gloomy recital of depressing spectacles in dynasty after dynasty. Indeed, one wonders if it did not have such an effect on the emperor himself.

Third, if I am right about the foregoing, I do not see how it could have failed to have an effect on Ch'iu Chün's own perception of the problem. It seems to me highly likely that, even sharing the concern of both Chu Hsi and Chen Te-hsiu with the "whole substance and great functioning" of the way of rulership, the lessons to be drawn from Chen's work, as from Ch'iu's own observation of the continued failings of dynastic rule in the Ming, would have prompted him to undertake his extension of the Extended Meaning into those areas of governmental administration not dealt with by either Chu or Chen. In this he could be fulfilling their basic intentions, while also making a more thoroughgoing, "realistic" assessment of problems that had proven to be more deep-seated than their remedies alone could treat. Finally—and at this stage it can only be a tentative hypothesis, as is the preceding third point—it would seem to me that Chang Chü-cheng's reading of the Extended Meaning , referred to earlier, must have also been in the same sober light and should have elicited from him as well a much more "realistic" approach to the practical solution of such problems.

Chen Te-hsiu and the Classic on Governance (Cheng Ching)

In terms of their public careers, the actual service of Chen Te-hsiu at court was not much longer than Chu Hsi's. For both of them personal experience

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of local administration was probably more significant. Since later statecraft thought was itself often concerned with concrete problems at the local level, the writings of Chu and Chen pertaining to their conduct of local administration may be considered relevant here. In fact, it could well be that one of Chu Hsi's distinctive contributions was made by articulating his goals on this level and preserving his writings on local problems. These were included in his Collected Writings to an extent not done before by leading scholars,^[48] and were later referred to by his followers, along with his more philosophical writings, as an integral part of his thought concerning the "whole substance and great functioning of the Way."

The same is true of Chen Te-hsiu's efforts in this direction. There is a work attributed to him, entitled the Classic on Governance (Cheng ching ), which was published as a companion piece to his Heart Classic in early editions.^[49] It is similar to the latter in its selection of passages from the classics and histories, but dissimilar in its inclusion of many of Chen's own proclamations, instructions, precepts, and exhortations as a local official. This part was cited by the editors of the Imperial Manuscript Library Catalogue in the Ch'ing period as evidence that the work could not have been compiled by Chen himself, since he could not have been presumptuous enough to call his own writings a "classic."^[50] True as this may be, we have no reason to doubt that the contents are in fact representative of Chen's thought, or to question whether this practical aspect of it, the actual implementation of Confucian values in governmental administration, was, in his eyes, anything but an essential complement to his more moralistic Heart Classic .

In its structure the Classic on Governance is divided into two main parts: (1) material drawn from the classics and histories, and (2) material concerning Sung administration and Chen's own part in it.^[51] The section on the classics is relatively brief. It consists of quotations from the Book of Documents (Shu ching ), Rites of Chou or Institutes of Chou (Chou kuan ), Analects of Confucius (Lun-yü ), Mencius (Meng tzu ), Great Learning , and the Tso Commentary (Tso chuan ). Although these are not without a strong moralistic tone themselves, they deal for the most part with the actual process of governing and secondarily with the instruments of government. Thus they are quite dis-

[48] See Ron-guey Chu, "Chu Hsi and Public Instruction," in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 252-73.

[49] Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy , pp. 88-90.

[50] Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu tsung-mu t'i-yao (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933) 92:1914.

[51] The edition of the Cheng ching referred to here is the Ming reprint of the Sung edition of 1242 in the National Central Library, Taipei. See Chung-yang t'u-shu-kuan shan-pen shu-mu (Taipei, 1967), p. 439; Hervouet, Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1978), p. 172.

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tinguishable from the contents of the Heart Classic , which treats of self-cultivation and especially the discipline of the mind-and-heart.

In keeping with this difference in emphasis, among the excerpts from the so-called Four Books those from Confucius predominate over those from the Great Learning , the Mean , and Mencius . The one passage from the Great Learning is the famous line from the fourth chapter, attributed to Confucius, having to do with the avoidance of litigation; there is no quotation from the more metaphysical The Mean , and Mencius, who was much cited in the Heart Classic for his doctrines concerning the mind and human nature, is quoted here only on matters directly related to governance: for instance, on the superiority of instruction over regimentation (here the cheng of the title, "governing," is understood in a pejorative sense as relying primarily on force and bent on acquiring the people's wealth) (7A: 14), a view somewhat balanced by the saying that "virtue alone is insufficient for governing; laws alone cannot carry themselves out" (4A: 1).

Representative of the more numerous quotations from the Analects (twenty-seven in all) are famous lines found early in that work, and the concluding quotation:

To rule a country of a thousand chariots there must be reverent attention to business and trustworthiness; economy in expenditure and love for men; and the employment of the people at proper seasons (1:5).^[52]

If you lead them with regimentation (cheng ) and regulate them with punishments, the people will evade the penal laws and have no sense of shame. If you lead them with virtue and regulate them with rites, the people will have a sense of shame and correct themselves (2:3).^[53]

If you are magnanimous, you will win the multitudes: if you are trustworthy, people will entrust you with responsibility; if you are earnest, much will be accomplished; if you are kind, you will be able to employ the services of others (17: 5).^[54]

There follow selections from the annals and histories relating to governance or administration. The first is from the Tso Commentary (Tso chuan ), pertaining to the twenty-fifth year of Duke Hsiang and the advice given to Tzu-ch'an by Jen-ming concerning the conduct of government (wei cheng ):

"The people should be looked upon as one's children. If you see someone being inhumane to them, he should be taken off as a hawk pursues a sparrow. . . ." Tzu Ta-shu then asked Tzu Ch'an about governance and Tzu Ch'an replied: "Governing is like the work of the peasant. One must give thought to it day and night, giving thought to how it should be begun and how brought to com-

[52] Cheng ching , 4a.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Cheng ching , 7a.

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pletion. Then labor at it morning and evening, but without going beyond what one has given thought to, just as the peasant keeps within his bounds. Thus one's errors will be few."^[55]

From the Han period the example is given of Ts'ao Ts'an in the state of Ch'i who, after consultation with scholars and the people, adopted a self-limiting policy of laissez-faire administration and nonintervention in the activities of the people, with the result that the people themselves became self-limiting and the state of Ch'i enjoyed peace and security.^[56]

Other Han examples follow. A prefect in Szechwan followed an easy and relaxed policy with respect to demands put upon the people, but being in an area with many "barbarians" in the local populace, he made extraordinary efforts to provide schooling. He set up an education officer in the capital of Ch'eng-tu and subordinate officers in the counties, with the result that there was a great improvement in public morality and a diminution of civil strife and contention.^[57]

In Ying-chou,^[58] the prefect Huang Pa made a special effort to achieve the transformation of the people through moral instruction. In addition he made a point of keeping in office a senior official, despite his being aged and unwell, because he was especially knowledgeable about corrupt practices and could prevent or detect them. There was a consequent easing of demands on the people's resources, an improvement in administration, a rise in the general level of prosperity, and an increase in population.^[59]

Still in Han, during the reign of Hsuan-ti, in an area much afflicted by famine and brigandage, the prefect Kung Tsui adopted a lenient policy in order to win over brigands, reassure the people, and encourage agriculture, animal husbandry, sericulture, and reforestation.^[60]

Other examples include a prefect who undertook extensive irrigation projects in order to bring more land under cultivation; set up procedures to settle disputes over water rights (including inscribing the rules on stone and placing them in disputed areas of rice paddies); urged economy on the subordinate officials of the prefecture and county; and personally investigated alleged wrongdoing. The result of these efforts was a great stimulation of agriculture, the resettlement of people on the land, an increase in the population, and a decrease in banditry and litigation. By such means the

[55] Cheng ching , 9a; tr. adapted from James Legge, The Chinese Classics , 2nd ed., v. 5, 9:517.

[56] Cheng ching , 10a.

[57] Cheng ching , 10b-11a.

[58] In Ching-hsi North. See Hope Wright, Geographical Names in Sung China (Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1956), pp. 147, 183.

[59] Cheng ching , 11ab.

[60] Cheng ching , 11b-12b.

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prefect won the affection of the people, who spoke of him endearingly as a father to them.^[61]

In a dozen other historical instances of prefectural officials cited by Chen, constant moral principles are given specific application in dealing with particular local problems. There is the familiar recital of the virtuous officials who treat the people as if they were their own children, encouraging a feeling of love and trust between subofficials and the people, along with cases in which such officials take concrete steps to simplify administration and reduce the number of laws and punishments. There are others who make an active effort to persuade litigants to settle their differences through compromise and to resolve family disputes amicably; who take steps to improve the roads in order to facilitate communication and the exchange of goods; who promote education through the building and repair of schools; and who foster the values of family life by encouraging men and women of marriageable age to complete the wedding formalities, even with some of the costs being met at public expense, rather than have them cohabit promiscuously (something Chu Hsi too found to be prevalent in his time).^[62]

The discussion thus far pertains to the first third of the material included in the Classic on Governance but represents what, formally speaking, constituted the Classic proper. The remaining two-thirds deal with Sung dynasty administration and are identified as supplements to the Classic itself.

First there is a list of enactments in the Southern Sung period, many of which have to do with tax collection. For instance, there is the case of She county in Hui-chou,^[63] which had a notorious reputation for the difficulties experienced in tax collection until a certain prefect devised a method for staging collections at periodic intervals in different localities, rather than trying to collect taxes all at once throughout the subprefecture. This eased the task of collection on the part of the subofficials involved and enabled the keeping of much more accurate records.^[64]

In Feng-ch'eng in Lung-hsing,^[65] the use of intermediaries as tax collectors had opened the door to various abuses. To deal with this the responsible official devised a new type of tax register, which provided spaces for specific entries of the names of all those involved in the process and the details of each one's part in it.^[66] Similarly in T'an-chou (modern Ch'ang-sha) the use of intermediaries for tax collection created opportunities for corrupt practices. Here part of the solution was to have a registry of certified tax

[61] Cheng ching , 13ab.

[62] Cheng ching , 13b-18a.

[63] Hsi subprefecture in Hui-chou, Chiangnan E., Wright, p. 56.

[64] Cheng ching , 19ab.

[65] Feng-ch'eng in Hung-chou, Chiangnan W., Wright, p. 44.

[66] Cheng ching , 19b-20a.

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agents with a record of their transactions according to a form stipulated line-by-line.^[67]

Other cases illustrate the variety of means that may be effective in accomplishing official purposes. One of them is to reassure local elders and pao-chia leaders as to the benevolent intentions of the officials by entertaining them socially, letting grievances be aired in an atmosphere loosened up by convivial drinking and the pledge of cooperation celebrated with wine.^[68] In another case where bribery was rampant, the solution was to post a schedule of standard fees for the issuance of certain certificates.^[69] And last, after other means had been exhausted, recourse to the law and the discriminating use of punishments was recognized as legitimate.

Concluding this section is a brief commentary by Chen Te-hsiu himself in which he gives general endorsement to these practices, but singles out for special praise the way in which tax registers were prepared with such detailed specifications for use in She county.^[70] Precise record-keeping is one of the keys to good government. "Simplification of the law" may be one of the Confucians' (and Chen's) prime aims in government, but this applies mostly to penal law, and Chen feels no such inhibitions answering to the need for greater legalistic precision and detail in matters of civil administration.

The fourth and last section of the Classic on Governance , devoted to Chen's own public pronouncements, is also the longest. It includes the following:

1. Instruction of the prefect of Ch'ang-sha to his deputies and staff (1222), together with a farewell poem to the twelve magistrates who attended this instructional session

2. Proclamation on local customs (at T'an-chou, 1222)

3. Proclamation as prefect of Ch'üan-chou Commandery (1232)

4. Proclamation of instructions (at Ch'üan-chou, 1232)

5. Instructions to prefectural and county colleagues (Ch'üan-chou, 1232)

6. Subsequent proclamation of instructions (Ch'üan-chou, 1232)

7. Proclamation as intendant of Fu-chien (Fu-chou, 1233)

8. Proclamation as prefect of Ch'ang-sha, encouraging the people to establish a charitable granary (Ch'ang-sha, 1222-1225)

Although these documents occupy more than half the book, their contents must be dealt with here in selective and summary fashion.^[71] Of the

[67] Cheng ching , 20a.

[68] Cheng ching , 20ab.

[69] Cheng ching , 20b.

[70] Cheng ching , 21ab.

[71] My discussion here is limited to the contents of those works of Chen's widely circulated and admired in later times. His Collected Writings (Chen Hsi-shan hsien-sheng wen chi ) contain much additional information concerning Chen's political thought and practice. In general, however, the points made here can be confirmed by evidence in his other writings. A more complete study of Chen's work is now under way by Ron-guey Chu at Columbia. I have benefited from discussing these matters with him and seeing some of his preliminary studies.

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three to be presented in abridged form, I cite the first ("Instruction at Ch'ang-sha," 1222) for its four precepts to be observed and ten evils to be shunned by local officials. These were often repeated by Chen, and were widely quoted in later times as standard precepts for official conduct.

Four Things [to be observed]

1. Discipline oneself through incorruptibility.
2. Govern the people through humaneness.
3. Preserve the mind through impartiality.
4. Perform one's duties with diligence.

Ten Harmful Things

1. Partiality in rendering judgment.
2. Failure to investigate judicial cases thoroughly.
3. Prolonged and wrongful imprisonment.
4. Cruel punishment.
5. Calling witnesses indiscriminately.
6. Entertaining false charges.
7. Double taxation.
8. Accepting bribes.
9. Allowing subofficials to enter [and disturb] villages.
10. Purchasing goods at unfair prices.

Among Chen's other proclamations the set of instructions issued at Ch'üan-chou (document no. 5 above)^[72] is most comprehensive in scope and variety.^[73] His opening passages serve as a commentary on the Four Things to be observed or emulated, as cited above. Chen's text may be paraphrased and summarized as follows:

Incorruptibility . Ch'üan-chou is known as a center of foreign trade. Exotic items and luxury goods are readily available. Often they are used by

[72] Chen was prefect of Ch'üan-chou in 1216-1219 and again from 1232 to 1233.

[73] Chen Te-hsiu's collected works, Hsi-shan hsien-sheng Chen Wen-kung wen-chi (SPTK ed., 40: 22a-25b) contains an abridged version of this instruction, where a substantial portion at the end entitled "Matters of Encouragement and Instruction" is deleted. The same is true for the version found in the Essays of Instructions for the Subordinate Officials (Yü liao-shu wen ) (TSCC ed.), a short compilation of Chen Te-hsiu's political writings [compiler, date, not yet identified]. However, the Ming anthology, Chen Te-hsiu's Instructions on Government (Hsi-shan cheng-hsün ), by Peng Shao, has the unabridged version. Peng also compiled a work called Chu Hsi's Instructions on Government (Chu Wen-kung cheng-hsün ). The two works were printed as companion volumes under the title Instructions on Government (Cheng-hsün ) [preface dated 1476].

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powerful families as gifts to bribe officials. It is not often recognized what dedication to virtue is required to preserve incorruptibility. Even if an official has other virtues, if he is susceptible to bribes he is like a woman who, however beautiful she may be, can be bought. Therefore one must be watchful over one's own integrity when alone.^[74]

Humaneness . As Chu Hsi said, even a scholar of low rank, if he has a mind to love the people, can benefit them. The same is true for those who only keep records or perform police duties, and how much the more for those in higher position. The greater the impact of their actions on others, the greater their need to be sensitive to the sufferings of the people, especially when it comes to inflicting torture and punishment on them.^[75]

As you yourself desire to live in peace, you should not disturb the people's lives; as you yourself desire wealth, you should not deprive others of their property. Thus it is said [by Confucius], "What you do not wish done unto you, do not do to others." This, in the school of the Sage, is called "reciprocity (shu )." Vigorously applying oneself to this, one can achieve humaneness.^[76]

Thus incorruptibility is based on the principles of reciprocity and humane-ness.

Impartiality . According to Chen, impartiality is grounded in the universal principles of Heaven, which are fixed and not subject to manipulation for the sake of selfish gain or partiality. Those who think they can bend principles to suit their own purposes

do not realize that the reason right and wrong are unalterable is that they are Heaven's principles, and the reason one cannot substitute leniency for severity of punishment is that these are fixed by laws of the state. Making right wrong, or vice versa, violates heaven's principles; substituting leniency for severity, or vice versa, violates the laws of the state. How could an official with responsibility for governing the people have peace of mind knowing that he has overturned the principles of Heaven and violated the laws of the state?^[77]

Diligence; hard work . On the fourth of Chen's principles, diligence or industriousness, he supports the work ethic as applicable to all classes of society. The success of every human endeavor depends on industriousness and diligence. Hard work is a constant necessity for the peasants, and officials

[74] Cheng ching , 35b.

[75] Cheng ching , 36a.

[76] Cheng ching , 36b.

[77] Cheng thing , 57a.

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whose support derives from the peasants' very "flesh and blood" bear a heavy obligation to apply themselves with equal effort. Chen is especially outspoken in condemning the degenerate trend toward much drinking, partying, and gambling among officials. One should apply oneself to the people's needs every day, from morning to night, and limit one's diversions only to authorized holidays.^[78]

In concluding this section on the Four Things to be observed, Chen urges his colleagues to examine their consciences and reform, in Neo-Confucian terms to "cleanse their minds-and-hearts" (hsi-hsin ) and "renew themselves" (tzu-hsin ). If they do not, public criticism of them is bound to be forthcoming, and Chen himself will see that it is not silenced.^[79]

Raising the Moral and Educational Level

The next document deals with matters of instruction and encouragement to the people. It first addresses the need for improving mores and education, in which the highest priority is the promotion of filial piety and brotherly respect. Officials are asked to report cases of exemplary conduct so that they may be honored and rewarded. It is in this connection that Chen reports the cases of extraordinary self-sacrifice (feeding parents one's own flesh, etc.) mentioned earlier. Those guilty of unfilial or unbrotherly behavior should be reprimanded, and in extreme cases punished with the rod in public or assigned to penal servitude. First recourse, however, should be had to remonstration and remediation; punitive measures are to be the last resort.

In this connection Chen also discusses lawsuits within kin groups. He says it has been his practice, in dealing with such suits, to seek reconciliation through persuasion. In cases of disputes over the division of family property, he tries to persuade parents or elders to make a fair division and only intervenes himself to settle the matter when the disputants remain at loggerheads. Subordinates are asked to follow this example.

Next Chen addresses the problem of education, mainly in terms of formal schooling. Although this should have the highest priority, Chen believes that many local officials neglect it.

School lands are often taken over by the powerful, or the income from such lands is embezzled by subofficials or diverted to other purposes. In other cases stipends are provided in the name of "nourishing scholars," but the recipients are allowed to stay at home, enjoying their money and rice, without having to do any work at school. Others may reside in school but never do any reading or recitation; or if they do, their studies are only of what serves to

[78] Cheng ching , 37b.

[79] Ibid.

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prepare them for the civil service examinations and not of the classics and histories. All this is in violation of the state's original intent to train talent for future usefulness.^[80]

Since Chu Hsi especially, and other Neo-Confucians as well, had placed great emphasis on the maintenance of a proper school system, these observations of Chen's are significant evidence concerning the reasons for repeated failures to achieve this major Neo-Confucian goal. Chen's solution is to "straighten up" the administration of schools in the following ways:

1. To keep a strict record of the income from school lands, and leave nothing unaccounted for.

2. See that all the income so derived is applied to the support of scholars.

3. See that those in charge of education set up a fixed curriculum.

4. Every ten days (the 10th, 20th, 30th) of the month, conduct a review and discussion of the texts, letting the students themselves ask questions.

5. On the day of the review students should be asked about the lessons taught.

6. In addition to preparation for the civil examinations, there should be instruction in the classics and histories, so that students understand their moral significance and application to contemporary affairs.^[81]

According to Chen, Ch'üan-chou has had a great reputation for the high level of learning and virtue among its educated persons. When he arrived to take up his duties, Chen received many letters from local persons discussing current problems in an informed way. There must be other such persons of whom, as yet, he has no knowledge, especially persons of strict integrity who would rather live in poverty than compromise themselves by seeking power or position. Such persons should be invited, in a most respectful manner, to teach in school and serve as a model for the young.^[82]

Cleaning up the Penal System

Imprisonment involves precious human life. No one should be imprisoned except through statutory procedures, and the local magistrates should personally see to this, not leaving investigation and interrogation up to clerks, who often extract involuntary confessions and use these to extort money from the families of those so accused. Torture is often used in the process. Prisoners, kept without enough food, clothing, and covering, often starve or die of cold. Those locked in cangues get blisters on their necks, which then become festered. Conditions in prison cells are crowded and unsanitary. Chen gives a long recital of these evils, but even so, he says, it is far from complete. Local magistrates should hold human life dear and see that these

[80] Cheng ching , 40a.

[81] Cheng ching , 40ab.

[82] Cheng ching , 40b.

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abuses cease, making personal inspections of prison conditions and punishing those guilty of violations.

Recognizing that local magistrates are fully occupied with many duties, Chen has allowed their assistants to handle interrogations and approved the appointment of separate judicial officers. Nevertheless, this has led in some cases to a complete delegation and dereliction of the magistrate's responsibility, which Chen now wishes to correct.^[83]

Fairness in Taxation

In this section Chen expresses his concern over, and intention to stop, prevalent abuses in the collection of taxes: demands for payment of taxes well in advance of the official due-date; the use of irregular grain measures other than the taxpayer's own; holding the heads of pao-chia units responsible for the collection of back taxes; failure to keep an accurate record of taxes collected or to give certified receipts to the payer; the imposition of surcharges on various illegitimate pretexts. Chen's policies reflect a concern for fairness, humane treatment, and strict legality. To one largely unfamiliar with the subject they appear also to show an interest in getting at and dealing with actual facts, but whether this amounts to any special competence on Chen's part is a judgment better rendered by those more knowledgeable in Sung fiscal matters than I.^[84]

Prohibiting Harassment of the People

It was Chen's policy for local subofficials to deal with villagers through the heads of pao-chia units rather than sending armed runners into the villages to deal with matters themselves, often in an abusive way. Having discovered increasing violations, he wishes to reiterate and reinforce the policy. Respect for local autonomy is a basic principle; just as the prefecture does not interfere in the affairs of the subprefecture, neither should the latter interfere in those of the village.

Chen also prohibits the extraction of involuntary donations, or purchase of goods at less than the market price, on such occasions as the emperor's birthday, the lamp festival, and so forth. He invites those so exploited to bring suit against offending officials. A similar abuse has appeared in connection with the procurement of materials or by donations extracted from temples and monasteries at less than market price, for the navy shipyard, and for municipal building construction. Chen wishes to regularize such procurement through advance planning and publicized procedures. He expresses special concern over the harassment of temples and monasteries, which he regards as socially beneficial institutions entitled to government

[83] Cheng ching , 41b.

[84] Cheng ching , 43b-45a.

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protection.^[85] This might seem inconsistent with his Neo-Confucian opposition to Buddhism expressed in other writings, but even Chu Hsi, who was less tolerant than Chen, distinguished between doctrinal error, which is to be opposed, and personal or social virtue, which is to be respected.

Chen has prohibited the payment of fines in lieu of the statutory punishment because it allows the rich to go unpunished and discriminates unfairly against the poor. He reiterates this position now. He also finds that there are violations of his order to allow households to subdivide as they wish. Instead, special offices have been set up in some subprefectures to enforce registration of subdivisions and collect illicit fees for same. Another abuse is the repeated imposition of new responsibilities on the heads of pao-chia units, burdening them intolerably.^[86] Sympathy for and fair treatment of pao-chia heads is a theme running through this set of public policy declarations.

Charitable Granary (i-lin) at Ch'ang-sha (1222-1225)

It has occurred to Chen that although there exist local granaries that loan grain to the people, these are only available to those who own land. He wishes to set up a program whereby the well-to-do would contribute grain through the Ever-Normal Granary system, so that, by a combination of public and private efforts, loans of grain could be made available to landless peasants.

Chen urges that this be done on the grounds of both principle and practicality. For principle he draws on Chang Tsai's "Western Inscription" (Hsi-ming ) and its doctrine of the brotherhood of men as offspring of Heaven-and-earth, sharing one body composed of the same physical substance and sensitivity of feelings. Humans should act for the mind-and-heart of Heaven-and-earth, which cares equally for all. Moreover, this charitable granary would, by improving the lot of the landless, ease their distress, obviate conflict, and ensure social peace. Since Chen's proposal is for entirely voluntary donations, and the system is to be operated by local people, without official interference, it avoids the coercive and counterproductive features that may well have vitiated earlier programs. Such negative features that Chen rules out are the fixing of contributions on the basis of official assessments of household production and the sale of grain at low fixed prices. There would be no attempt to control the market price, and the whole process would be voluntary without any official oversight. In this regard Chen's provisions were even more liberal than Chu Hsi's grain proposal for famine relief through community granaries (she-ts'ang fa ). Since they resemble the provision of Tung Wei's Book on Relieving Famine of 1201-

[85] Cheng ching , 47b. He calls such temples "bastions of civic virtue" (liang-min chih pao-chang ).

[86] Cheng ching , 46a-47b.

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1204, Chen may be following this precedent, though his plan is directed at rich households in general (rather than merchants, as in Tung Wei's case) and Chen presents it as if it were an idea that has come to him in direct response to local needs and conditions.^[87]

Conclusions

Chen's Classic on Governance shares with his other works an equal concern for classic Confucian principles, their historical exemplification, and their contemporary application. The latter interest is especially manifest in this work on local governance, since it includes documents of actual administration that are more direct, explicit, and candid in facing existing evils than it was possible for Chen to be in discussing imperial rule in the Extended Meaning .

In this respect we may note that a breakdown of the contents of the Classic on Governance shows it to consist of eight (double) pages of quotations from the Confucian classics, ten from historical works of the Han-T'ang periods, four more from the Sung, and a total of thirty-three based on Chen's own administrative experience in the years 1222-1233. Although we cannot be certain how much the composition of this work reflects Chen's own conscious design, it would not, I think, be going too far to say that this combination of classical, historical, and contemporary interests is indeed representative of his thought. The same could be said too of his combination of interests in imperial rule and local governance, shown in his writings as a whole. The one gap, relatively speaking, lies in central administration, which is precisely the gap Ch'iu Chün sought to fill later in his supplement to the Extended Meaning of the Great Learning .

In regard to the theoretical basis of his work, it is noteworthy that Chen draws on the specific concepts and doctrines of Neo-Confucian thinkers in arguing the case for the reforms he advocates. The Ch'eng-Chu doctrine of Heaven's principles and man's moral nature and physical endowment is cited as the basis for the universal principles underlying his concepts of justice and equity in the application of the law, and Chang Tsai's doctrine of universal brotherhood, based on the parenthood of Heaven-and-earth, is the theoretical ground cited for his social welfare proposals.

This distinctly reformist use of Neo-Confucian principles stands in contrast to a prevalent modern view that the Neo-Confucian philosophy of principle was inherently authoritarian, conservative, and protective of the status quo. Of course, from a modern revolutionary point of view, even reformism has been seen as essentially conservative, being only meliorative rather than radically corrective of the old order; but having seen the reac-

[87] Cheng ching , 52a-55a.

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tionary purposes to which revolutionary ideals themselves have been put in the twentieth century, we may question whether the revolutionary claim serves as an adequate criterion of evaluation.

In this perspective I think we may credit Chen Te-hsiu with having contributed further to the development of Neo-Confucian political thought in several ways. He carried the "moralization of politics" into specific areas of government where factual knowledge could be brought to bear in acting upon his moral concerns. These areas were the actual conduct of imperial rule and local governance.

His concerns with imperial rule were focused on those institutions having to do most directly with the emperor's own person and daily life: the organization of the imperial household. Although he did not, in the Extended Meaning , carry this out to the same extent in regard to institutions of civil administration, it would be a mistake, it seems to me, not to recognize the actual importance, and even the urgent priority, of dealing with the personal aspect of imperial rule in a dynastic system. It was more than a mere truism that little could be accomplished in such a system unless the ruler put his own house in order. In many respects Chen Te-hsiu was following through on Chu Hsi's expressed concerns about imperial rule, but Chen seems to have gone beyond Chu Hsi in focusing attention on the systemic problems affecting the moral and political life of the ruler. To me this would constitute evidence that Chen, the political moralist, was, on the basis of personal observation and historical scholarship, underscoring the importance of institutional reforms as a necessary "extension" of the moralization of politics so emphasized in Chu Hsi's discussion of the Great Learning .

As for Chen's contributions to local governance, I would not say that Chen made any specific advance over Chu Hsi. One can find a precedent in Chu's life and writings for much that Chen speaks to in the Classic on Governance . Nevertheless, there is something noteworthy in the way Chen articulates specific Neo-Confucian principles as relevant to local problems. Even Chu Hsi could only do this indirectly, because in his time people were not yet familiar with these principles in their Neo-Confucian formulation, and Chu Hsi more often had to appeal to simpler classical concepts.

Another noteworthy feature of Chen's writings on local governance is his frank acceptance of the need for law. Like Chu Hsi, his primary reliance is on education and moral suasion, and he avoids evoking the threatening spectre of the law as a coercive force. Rather, he often speaks positively about state law as embodying universal principles and offering the protection of basic human rights, especially versus inhumane judicial and penal procedures. This is a long way from the classic Confucian opposition to law as essentially punitive, or grudging acceptance of it as only the final recourse against recalcitrant individuals.

― 377 ―

When I speak of "human rights" here, it cannot have quite the same meaning as in our own time, but the restraints Chen would put on the exercise of official power are seen as rooted in fixed principles—that is, they demand respect for human nature as the endowment in man of Heaven's principles. Though not couched in terms of "rights" or "entitlements," with all the legalistic connotations these have in the modern West, Chen's language does assert that the ruler is obliged to respect Heaven's principles as embodied in man, and since Heaven was seen as the creative power in the universe and the source of all authority, the idea as expressed by Chen comes close to asserting that "all men are endowed by their Creator" with certain "inalienable rights."

Pending further studies of Ming statecraft thought in the areas Chen dealt with, it is difficult to assess the extent of his influence or the significance of his contribution. (The same proviso would have to be made with regard to further developments in Korean statecraft thought, since Chen's work was taken most seriously there.) Yet it does not require further research to demonstrate the failure of the Neo-Confucians' effort to make sages of Ming rulers. Indeed, they missed by such a wide margin that the gap between moral ideal and flawed reality must have become increasingly apparent even to the most dedicated Confucians. Since their concept of loyalty included a large measure of self-criticism, forthright remonstrance at court, and honesty in the keeping of the historical record, one wonders if the more intensive development of statecraft studies in the late Ming did not reflect a diminished confidence in the ability of rulers and ministers as individuals to find simple moralistic solutions to their problems, as well as an increasing awareness of the need to deal with the institutional limitations of dynastic rule.

Perhaps this realization itself would not have come about had not the actual conduct of imperial rule been so insistently measured against the high standards of sagely government. Such a possibility certainly comes to mind when one considers the high regard in which Chen Te-hsiu was held by the Ming scholar-statesman Chang Chü-cheng (1525-1582),^[88] whose situation and views had much in common with the Korean Chong To-chon cited earlier. Chang has often been seen as the epitome of practical statecraft in the Ming. A strong prime minister determined to remedy the weaknesses of Ming rule, he has even been called a Confucian Legalist.^[89] Yet Chang Chü-cheng, when recommending texts to be used for the preparation and recruitment of scholars for government service, included Chen's

[88] For Chang Chü-cheng, see DMB , pp. 53-61, and the following note.

[89] See Robert M. Crawford, "Chang Chü-cheng's Confucian Legalism," in W. T. de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 367-413.

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Extended Learning and Models of Literary Form (Wen-chang cheng-tsung ) along with the Great Compendia of the early Ming, Chu Hsi's Outline and Digest of the General Mirror (T'ung-chien kang-mu ), and Yang Shih-ch'i's anthology of distinguished memorials through the ages (Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i ).^[90] Although it could not be claimed that any of these works speaks for the statecraft thought of Chang himself, his selection of two works by Chen Te-hsiu out of the six so recommended reflects at the very least the high esteem in which Chen was held by this most famous of practicing scholar-statesmen of the Ming.^[91]

Less important as a statesman but more so as a student of statecraft was Chang's predecessor Ch'iu Chün (1420-1495), active at the Ming court about a hundred years earlier. An orthodox Ch'eng-Chu follower, he produced an excellent digest of Chu Hsi's basic aims in learning, the Chu Tzu hsueh-ti , while also compiling a monumental supplement to Chen's Extended Learning , the Ta-hsueh yen-i pu . Whether or not the latter compares as a statecraft document with the work of the major ching-shih chih-yung scholars in the seventeenth century (a question deserving of further study), even the brief account of Ch'iu's Supplement given in the Dictionary of Ming Biography suggests the serious nature and wide scope of Ch'iu's study of institutions and their practical operation. It is there characterized as "a comprehensive handbook of public administration, dealing with every aspect of government function, including military defense, public finance, personnel management, transportation, water control, etc. Under each entry the historical background is presented, different approaches to every problem are discussed, the author's opinion is enunciated, and, wherever possible, considerable numerical data are appended. Aside from its practical use, the work is noted for the painstaking research behind it and for its historical value. Being widely read, it exerted a genuine impact on Ming scholarship."^[92]

Although there are major differences in emphasis between Ch'iu's Supplement and Chen's earlier work, which we cannot go into here, it seems significant to me that Ch'iu saw his efforts as an extension of Chen's and not as something of an entirely different order. It was, after all, his own choice to identify himself with Chen Te-hsiu, to see his own enterprise, in effect, as of the same genre and continuing the same tradition as Chu Hsi and Chen Te-hsiu.

Ch'iu Chün's work was included in the compendium of statecraft scholarship compiled by Ch'en Jen-hsi (1579-1634), the Ching-shih pa-pien lei-

[90] On Yang Shih-ch'i (1305-1444) and the Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i , see DMB , p. 1537.

[91] See Chang Wen-chung chi , Tsou-shu 4, cited by Wang Yün-wu in Ming-Ch'ing chiao-hsüeh ssu-hsiang (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1971), pp. 128-29.

[92] Wu Chi-hua and Ray Huang in DMB , pp. 250-51.

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tsuan of 1626, along with such works of mainline Neo-Confucian scholars as Feng Ying-ching's (1555-1606) Huang-Ming ching-shih shih-yung-pien (1604); Chang Huang's (1527-1608) T'u-shu pien (1613); and Feng Ch'i's (1559-1603) Ching-chi lei-pien , demonstrating the link between earlier Ming "world ordering" thought and late Ming statecraft scholarship. Further, some connection between the moralization of politics and statecraft is suggested by the fact that Feng Ying-ching's compilation leads off with seven essays of the founding Ming emperor, T'ai-tsu, on the "Method of the Mind" as applied to rulership.^[93]

A full evaluation of this tradition will require much further study of Neo-Confucian scholarship over the twelfth to seventeenth centuries. That there was a discourse and a dialogue being carried on is now clear. To my knowledge the first scholar to discern this was Kusumoto Masatsugu (1896-1963), whose early studies have detailed accounts of Chu Hsi's practical activities, expressed in terms of Chu's concept of "the whole substance and great functioning" (ch'üan-t'i ta-yung ) of human nature. Kusumoto then traced the discussion of this concept down through such thinkers as Chen Te-hsiu and Ch'iu Chün into later centuries.^[94] In doing so he emphasized the continuity of conceptual thought, a necessary step at that time, if only to establish for modern readers the basic terms of the Neo-Confucian discourse. If we are to go beyond this by looking for a more cumulative development, it would require taking into account more than Kusumoto did both the discontinuities in and the accretions to this tradition from age to age.

Here, then, is my reason for revisiting Chen Te-hsiu: to consider whether his understanding and use of the "whole substance and great functioning," especially in its functional or practical aspect, may serve as one important link between Chu Hsi and the statecraft thinkers of the seventeenth century. Until now the latter have been treated primarily as "realists" or "legalists" who broke away from Neo-Confucianism. Further study of statecraft thought in the early and mid-Ming periods, against the background of Chen Te-hsiu's contributions, may show that there is here greater continuity with, and development from, the past than there is simply a reaction against it. Should this prove true, it might mean that the Neo-Confucian moralization of politics came to something after all, albeit in a form for which Sung scholars had only begun to perceive the need.

[93] See Wolfgang Franke, Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1968), p. 195, no. 6.6.6; DMB , pp. 161-63, 1141; Ssu-k'u t'i-yao 78:1741.

[94] Kusumoto Masatsugu, Chugokutetsugaku kenkyu (Tokyo: Bungensha, 1975), pp. 327-505 (researches originally published in 1937 and 1953).

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Glossary

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cheng (correct) inline image

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Feng Ching inline image

Feng-chou inline image

feng-chuang inline image

feng-hua inline image

feng-su inline image

Feng Tao inline image

Feng Ying-ching inline image

fou-lang inline image

Fu inline image

Fu-chien inline image

Fu-chou (in Fu-chien) inline image

Fu-chou (in Chiang-hsi) inline image

Fu Hsi inline image

fu-ku inline image

fu-min inline image

Fu Pi inline image

fu-ping inline image

fu shu inline image

Fu Tzu-te inline image

H

Han inline image

Han Cheng-yen inline image

Han Ch'i inline image

Han-chou inline image

Han-chung inline image

Han T'o-chou inline image

Han Wei inline image

― 385 ―

Han-yang inline image

Han Yü inline image

Hang-chou inline image

hao-hua shih-jen inline image

heng inline image

Heng-lun inline image

Heng-shan inline image

Higashi Ichio inline image

ho-mai inline image

Ho-nan inline image

Ho-nei inline image

Ho-pei inline image

ho-ti inline image

ho tsu inline image

ho tsung-tsu inline image

Ho-tung inline image

Hou Han shu inline image

Hsi inline image

Hsi-ho inline image

Hsi Ho inline image

Hsi-Hsia inline image

hsi hsin inline image

Hsi-ming inline image

Hsi-ning inline image

Hsia inline image

hsiang inline image

hsiang-ch'ü i-t'ien-chuang inline image

Hsiang-fu inline image

hsiang-jen shih chün-tzu inline image

hsiang-jen shih-yu inline image

hsiang-kuan inline image

hsiang-li inline image

Hsiang-yang inline image

Hsiang Yü inline image

hsiang-yueh inline image

Hsiao (family) inline image

hsiao (filiality) inline image

Hsiao hsueh inline image

hsiao-jen inline image

Hsiao Kung ch'üan inline image

Hsiao P'an inline image

Hsiao-tsung inline image

Hsiao-tsung yao-lüeh ch'u ts'ao inline image

Hsieh inline image

Hsieh Liang-tso inline image

Hsieh Tzu-ch'ang inline image

hsien inline image

Hsin-an inline image

hsin ch'i inline image

Hsin ching inline image

Hsin-chou inline image

hsin-ch'ou inline image

hsin fa (New Policies) inline image

hsin-fa (method of the mind) inline image

Hsin-fan inline image

hsin-shu inline image

hsing inline image

Hsing-chou inline image

Hsing-hua inline image

Hsing-hua-chün inline image

hsing-li inline image

hsing-shih chih chia inline image

hsing-shih-hu inline image

Hsing-yuan-fu inline image

hsiu chi chih jen inline image

Hsiu-chou inline image

hsiu shen inline image

hsiu shen chih kuo inline image

Hsiung inline image

Hsiung Ho inline image

Hsiung Pen inline image

Hsu Chi-chih inline image

Hsu Hsi inline image

Hsu I inline image

Hsu Meng-hsin inline image

Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien inline image

hsuan-fu shih inline image

hsuan-hsueh inline image

Hsuan-ti inline image

hsueh inline image

Hsueh Hsiang inline image

Hsun Tzu inline image

Hsun Tzu inline image

hu (barbarians) inline image

hu (measure) inline image

Hu inline image

Hu-chou inline image

Hu Chü-jen inline image

Hu Hung inline image

Hu-kuang inline image

Hu San-hsing inline image

Hu Yin inline image

― 386 ―

Hu Yuan inline image

Hu Yung inline image

hua hsiang inline image

Huai-nan inline image

Huai-nan tsa-shuo inline image

Huai-nan-tung inline image

Huai-pei inline image

Huang-ch'ao pien-nien kang-mu pei-yao inline image

Huang Chen inline image

Huang Chin inline image

Huang Kan inline image

Huang Lien inline image

Huang-Ming ching-shih shih-yung-pien inline image

Huang Tsung-hsi inline image

Huang Wan inline image

Hui inline image

Hui-chou inline image

hun inline image

Hung Hao inline image

Hung Tzu-k'uei inline image

Hung fan chuan inline image

Hung-wu inline image

huo-k'e inline image

I

i (duty; being principled; moral obligation; righteousness) inline image

i (intentions) inline image

i (whole) inline image

i chia inline image

I ching inline image

i-chuang inline image

i-chuang-hsueh inline image

i-chü inline image

i-fa inline image

i-hsueh inline image

i-hsueh-chuang inline image

i-i (congregations) inline image

i-i (duty service) inline image

i-ko inline image

i-lei inline image

i-li inline image

I li inline image

i-lin inline image

I-lo yuan-yuan lu inline image

i lun inline image

i-p'ei inline image

I pen-chuan inline image

i-ping inline image

i-she inline image

i-shih-chuang inline image

i-shu inline image

i so tang hsu inline image

i-tien inline image

i-ts'ang inline image

i tuan inline image

I Yin inline image

J

jan-hou chih t'ien chih pao-shih pen wu ch'a-te inline image

Jan-ming inline image

Jao-chou inline image

jao min inline image

jen chih ch'ang ch'ing inline image

jen-ch'ing inline image

jen-chu hsin-shu inline image

jen jen inline image

Jen-shou inline image

Jen-tsung inline image

Ju inline image

K

K'ai-feng inline image

k'ai-ho lien-san chih fa inline image

K'ai-hsi inline image

kan-p'u inline image

kan-tang kung-shih inline image

kang-yao inline image

Kao Ming inline image

Kao-ti inline image

Kao-tsu inline image

Kao-tsung inline image

Kao Tzu inline image

k'ao ku i cheng chin inline image

kao-lun inline image

ke inline image

ke-wu inline image

k'e-hu inline image

k'e-mi inline image

k'e-shang inline image

k'o inline image

k'o chi inline image

k'o yeh inline image

ku chin i kuan inline image

ku chin t'ung t'i inline image

ku wei inline image

ku wen inline image

― 387 ―

Ku-su inline image

kua-yü inline image

kuan inline image

kuan-ch'a ti-fen inline image

kuan-hu inline image

Kuang-hsi inline image

kuang-hui inline image

kuang-hui-ts'ang inline image

Kuang-tse inline image

Kuang-tsung inline image

Kuang-tung inline image

Kuang-wu inline image

kuei-mo inline image

k'uei inline image

K'uei-chou inline image

k'uei-shou inline image

kung inline image

kung-chia inline image

kung-hsing inline image

kung ssu chieh i inline image

Kung Ts'ui inline image

Kung-yang chuan inline image

k'ung-yen inline image

Kuo (family) inline image

kuo (state, nation) inline image

kuo-chia inline image

kuo-t'i inline image

Kusumoto Masatsugu inline image

L

la inline image

Lan-hui inline image

lao inline image

Lao tzu inline image

Lei Te-jun inline image

li (measure) inline image

li (principle; pattern) inline image

li (profit) inline image

li (ritual; proper rules of social relations) inline image

li-cheng inline image

Li chi inline image

li-chi-yuan inline image

Li Chi inline image

Li Ch'i inline image

li chih inline image

Li-chou inline image

Li Fa inline image

li fa-tu inline image

Li Hsi inline image

Li Hsin-ch'uan inline image

Li Hsing-ch'uan inline image

Li Kou inline image

li min inline image

Li-nien t'u inline image

Li Shun inline image

Li Shun-ch'en inline image

Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou-i inline image

Li Tao-ch'uan inline image

Li T'ao inline image

li t'ien-hsia inline image

Li Ting inline image

li ts'ai inline image

Li-tsung inline image

li yü shih, ping yü nung, ho wei i, ts'u wang-cheng chih hsien wu yeh inline image

Liang inline image

Liang-che inline image

liang-chih inline image

Liang K'e-chia inline image

liang-neng inline image

liang-shui inline image

Liao inline image

lien-ch'ih inline image

lien-san inline image

Lin inline image

Lin-an inline image

Lin-ch'uan inline image

Lin-chiang inline image

Lin-chiang-chün inline image

Lin Li inline image

Liu inline image

Liu Chih inline image

Liu I inline image

Liu Ju-yü inline image

Liu K'o-chuang inline image

Liu Tsai inline image

Liu Tsao inline image

Liu Tso inline image

Liu Tsung-yuan inline image

Liu Yao inline image

Lo-yang inline image

Lou inline image

Lou Ch'ü inline image

Lou I inline image

― 388 ―

Lou Shou inline image

Lou Yü inline image

Lou Yueh inline image

Lu (family) inline image

Lu (state) inline image

Lu Chiu-shao inline image

Lu Chiu-yuan inline image

Lu Shih-min inline image

Lu Yu inline image

Lun-yü inline image

Lung inline image

Lung-chou inline image

Lung-hsing inline image

Lung-hsing-fu inline image

Lü inline image

Lü Ch'ien-chü inline image

Lü Hui-ch'ing inline image

Lü Sheng-ch'ing inline image

Lü T'ao inline image

Lü Ta-chün inline image

Lü Tsu-ch'ien inline image

M

Ma Jung inline image

Ma Tuan-lin inline image

Mao inline image

mao-ts'ai inline image

Mei-chou inline image

Mei-shan inline image

Meng tzu inline image

mien-i inline image

mien-i fa inline image

min inline image

min-hu inline image

ming inline image

Ming (dynasty) inline image

Ming (prefecture) inline image

Ming-chou inline image

Ming-shan inline image

Mou Tzu-ts'ai inline image

mu inline image

mu i fa inline image

mu-tsu inline image

N

Naito Torajiro inline image

Nan-an inline image

Nan-chien inline image

Nan ching inline image

Nan-k'ang-chün inline image

nan-tu inline image

Ning-po inline image

Ning-tsung inline image

nung-t'ien shui-li t'iao-yueh inline image

O

o ti inline image

Ou-yang Hsiu inline image

Ou-yang Shou-tao inline image

P

Pa ch'ao ming-ch'en yen hsing lu inline image

pai-p'u inline image

p'ai inline image

Pan Ku inline image

pang-shan inline image

P'ang Chi inline image

pao inline image

pao-chia inline image

pao-chia fa inline image

pao-wu inline image

pei inline image

pei shu inline image

pei-t'ien inline image

pen-chia chuang inline image

pen-ch'ien inline image

Pen lun inline image

pen yü inline image

P'eng-chou inline image

Pi (family) inline image

pi (invariably) inline image

pi-lü inline image

p'i ti inline image

pien inline image

pien feng-su inline image

pien-hsiu chung-shu t'iao-li ssu inline image

pien jen-ts'ai inline image

ping-chien inline image

Ping-chih inline image

P'ing-hsiang inline image

P'ing-shan inline image

p'ing t'ien-hsia inline image

P'o-yang inline image

pu chih inline image

pu i ch'ang-chih chü-pi inline image

pu i chia inline image

pu k'o inline image

P'u-ch'eng inline image

P'u-t'ien inline image

― 389 ―

P'u Tsung-meng inline image

P'u Tsung-min inline image

S

Saeki Tomi inline image

San-ch'ao pei-meng hui-pien inline image

San-kuo chih inline image

Sang Hung-yang inline image

Sang-lin inline image

Shan-chou inline image

Shan-fu inline image

Shan-hsi inline image

Shan-yang inline image

shang-hu inline image

Shang-kuan Chün inline image

shang-kung ch'ien inline image

shang ming inline image

Shang Yang inline image

Shao-hsing inline image

Shao kao inline image

Shao-wu inline image

Shao Yung inline image

She inline image

she-chi inline image

she-hui inline image

she-i inline image

she-shou inline image

she-ts'ang inline image

she-ts'ang-fa inline image

Shen-fa inline image

Shen-hsi inline image

Shen Huan inline image

Shen Kua inline image

shen-ming inline image

Shen shih inline image

Shen-tsung inline image

sheng inline image

sheng-sheng inline image

sheng-ts'ai inline image

sheng-ts'ang inline image

Shih (family) inline image

Shih (Ming-chou family) inline image

Shih (Ch'eng-tu family) inline image

shih (affairs) inline image

shih (circumstances) inline image

shih (historian) inline image

shih (literatus, gentleman) inline image

shih (to serve) inline image

Shih chi inline image

Shih ching inline image

shih chung inline image

shih chün-tzu inline image

Shih Hao inline image

shih hsueh inline image

shih-hsueh-che inline image

Shih-huang-ti inline image

shih-i inline image

shih-i fa inline image

shih-i-ssu inline image

shih-i wu inline image

Shih Mi-chien inline image

Shih Mi-yuan inline image

shih ta-fu inline image

shih-ts'ung inline image

Shih Tun inline image

shu (commoners) inline image

shu (reciprocity) inline image

shu (techniques) inline image

Shu (state) inline image

Shu (family) inline image

Shu ching inline image

Shu lun inline image

shu-yuan inline image

Shun inline image

Sogabe Shizuo inline image

Songhak sipdo inline image

ssu inline image

Ssu-ch'uan inline image

Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu inline image

Ssu-ma Ch'ien inline image

Ssu-ma Ch'ih inline image

Ssu-ma Kuang inline image

Ssu-ma Wen-cheng inline image

ssu-nung-ssu inline image

ssu wen inline image

Su Ch'e inline image

Su-chou inline image

Su Hsun inline image

Su Shih inline image

Su wen inline image

sui inline image

Sui-chou inline image

Sun inline image

Sun Ch'un-nien inline image

Sun Fu inline image

Sun Ta-ya inline image

― 390 ―

Sung inline image

Sung Jo-shui inline image

Sung-Yuan hsueh-an inline image

T

ta t'i inline image

ta-fu inline image

Ta-hsueh inline image

Ta-hsueh chang-chü inline image

Ta-hsueh yen-i inline image

Ta-hsueh yen-i pu inline image

Ta-hui inline image

Ta-shih chi inline image

t'ai-chi inline image

t'ai-chien inline image

T'ai-chou inline image

T'ai hsuan inline image

T'ai-hsueh inline image

T'ai-ning-fu inline image

T'ai-tsu inline image

T'ai-tsung inline image

tan inline image

T'an-chou inline image

tang inline image

T'ang (dynasty) inline image

T'ang (sage-king) inline image

T'ang chien inline image

Tao inline image

Tao-hsueh inline image

Tao ming lu inline image

Tao-shu inline image

tao te inline image

tao-t'ung inline image

T'ao inline image

T'ao Yuan-ming inline image

te inline image

Te-an Fu inline image

te hsing inline image

Te-hsing inline image

Teraji Jun inline image

Ti-hsueh inline image

ti-hsueh inline image

ti-k'e inline image

ti-wang chih hsueh inline image

t'i inline image

t'i-chü ch'ang-p'ing shih inline image

t'i-chü ch'ang-p'ing-ssu inline image

tien-k'e inline image

T'ien Ch'ang inline image

T'ien-chih inline image

t'ien-hsia inline image

t'ien-hsia li-hai inline image

T'ien K'uang inline image

t'ien-ming inline image

t'ien-ti inline image

T'ing inline image

tou inline image

ts'ai inline image

ts'ai-chien chü inline image

Ts'ai Ching inline image

Ts'ai Ch'ueh inline image

ts'an-chih cheng-shih inline image

Tsang Sun-ch'en inline image

Tsan-ning inline image

tsan-sheng inline image

tsang-fou inline image

Ts'ao Ts'an inline image

ts'e inline image

Tseng Kung inline image

Tseng Kung-liang inline image

Tso chuan inline image

tsu inline image

tsu-tang inline image

tsu-tsung inline image

tsung inline image

tsung-chih inline image

tsung-fa inline image

tsung-ting-so inline image

Tsung-shih-ssu chu pu inline image

tsung-tsu inline image

tu inline image

tu-chih p'an-kuan inline image

Tu Ju-hui inline image

tu-pao inline image

tu-pao-cheng inline image

Tu-shih kuan-chien inline image

T'u-shu pien inline image

tu-ta t'i-chü ch'a-ma ssu inline image

tu-t'ang inline image

t'ui pen-mo inline image

t'un-t'ien inline image

Tung inline image

Tung-ch'ui t'ai-ting lu inline image

Tung-tu shih-lueh inline image

Tung Wei inline image

T'ung-chien kang-mu inline image

― 391 ―

t'ung-chih chien-yuan inline image

T'ung-ch'uan inline image

t'ung pien inline image

t'ung-shang inline image

t'ung-yung yu wu inline image

tzu inline image

Tzu-ch'an inline image

Tzu-chih t'ung-chien inline image

Tzu-chih t'ung-chien kang-mu inline image

Tzu-chou inline image

tzu-hsin inline image

tzu-jan inline image

Tzu-kung inline image

Tzu shuo inline image

Tzu-ssu inline image

Tzu Ta-shu inline image

tz'u ts'ao inline image

U

Umehara Kaoru inline image

W

wai-chia inline image

Wang (family) inline image

wang (king, prince) inline image

Wang An-shih inline image

Wang Ch'eng inline image

Wang Ching-kung inline image

Wang Hsiao-po inline image

Wang Huai inline image

Wang Hui inline image

Wang Ku inline image

Wang Kuang-lien inline image

Wang Mang inline image

Wang Shao inline image

Wang Ssu-wen inline image

Wang Ta-chi inline image

Wang Ta-ts'ai inline image

Wang T'ung inline image

Wang Yang-ming inline image

Wang Yen inline image

Wang Yen-sou inline image

Wang Ying-lin inline image

Wang Yü-ch'üan inline image

wei (stern majesty) inline image

wei (woof) inline image

Wei inline image

wei cheng inline image

Wei Cheng-t'ung inline image

wei-ch'i inline image

Wei Ching inline image

wei-hsueh inline image

Wei Liao-weng inline image

Wei-lieh inline image

Wei-nan inline image

Wei Shan-chih inline image

wei t'ien-hsia kuo-chia chih i inline image

Wen (family) inline image

Wen (sage-king) inline image

wen inline image

Wen-chang cheng-tsung inline image

Wen-chou inline image

wen hsueh inline image

Wen I inline image

Wen-kung ching-shih ta-hsun inline image

Wen-ti inline image

Wen T'ien-hsiang inline image

Wu (family) inline image

Wu (duke) inline image

Wu (emperor) inline image

Wu (state) inline image

wu (thing) inline image

Wu Chi inline image

Wu-chou inline image

Wu Fei inline image

Wu Hsi inline image

Wu-i inline image

wu-ting mai-mai t'ung-k'uai, wu-chih fang-chih ch'ien-pen inline image

Wu Shih-meng inline image

Wu-ti inline image

Wu T'ing inline image

wu ts'e inline image

wu-yü inline image

Wu Yuan inline image

Y

ya-ch'ien inline image

Yamashita Ryuji inline image

Yamauchi Masahiro inline image

yang inline image

Yang Chen-chung inline image

Yang-chou inline image

Yang Chü-yuan inline image

Yang Hsiung inline image

Yang I inline image

Yang Shih inline image

― 392 ―

Yang T'ien-hui inline image

Yang Yen inline image

Yang Yü-chung inline image

Yao inline image

Yeh inline image

Yeh Shih inline image

Yeh Wei-tao inline image

Yen inline image

Yen Hui inline image

Yen Ling inline image

Yen Yuan inline image

Yi inline image

yin (privilege) inline image

yin (shade) inline image

Yin (County) inline image

Yin (dynasty) inline image

Yin (duke) inline image

Yin Chu inline image

Yin Ch'un inline image

yin-ssu inline image

yin-tsu inline image

yin-tz'u inline image

Ying-ch'eng inline image

Ying-chou inline image

Ying-tsung inline image

yu inline image

yu-shou inline image

Yu Ssu inline image

yu wei inline image

yu wei che inline image

yu yu pi yü ching-shih chih hsueh inline image

Yuan inline image

Yuan-feng inline image

yuan-kuan chiu-i chih fa inline image

Yuan Mei inline image

Yuan Shuo-yu inline image

Yuan Ts'ai inline image

Yuan-yu inline image

yueh inline image

Yueh inline image

yueh chih inline image

Yueh-chou inline image

Yueh-lu inline image

yung inline image

Yung-cheng inline image

Yung-hsing-chün inline image

yü (desires) inline image

yü (quadrant) inline image

Yü (ancient hero) inline image

Yü (family) inline image

yü-kuan inline image

Yü kung inline image

yü-lin t'u inline image

Yü-shan inline image

yü-t'ien inline image

Yü-wen Hsu-chung inline image

Yü Yu inline image

Yü Yun-wen inline image

― 393 ―

Works Cited

Abbreviations of Collectanea

SKCS	Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu (Wen-yuan-ko edition).
SKCSCP	Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu chen-pen .
SPPY	Ssu-pu pei-yao .
SPTK	Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an .
SYTFCTS	Sung-Yuan ti-fang-chih ts'ung-shu .
TSCC	Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng .
TSCCCP	Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng ch'u-pien .
TSCCHP	Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng hsu-pien .

Achenbaum, W. Andrew. "Public History's Past, Present, and Prospects." American Historical Review 92, no. 5 (1987): 1162-74.

Ackrill, J. L. Aristotle the Philosopher . New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Adler, Joseph Alan. "Divination and Philosophy: Chu Hsi's Understanding of the I-Ching." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1984.

Ames, Roger. The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983.

Ando Tomonobu inline image . "O Anseki to Bukkyo—Shozan yinseiki o chushin to shite ," TohoShukyo 28 (1966): 20-34.

Atwell, William. "The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in China and Japan." Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (1986): 223-44.

Bartlett, Beatrice. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council of Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

Bastid, Marianne. "The Structure of the Financial Institutions of the State in the Late Qing." In The Scope of State Power in China , edited by Stuart Schram, pp. 51-79. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

― 394 ―

Beattie, Hilary. Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T'ung-ch'eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Birdwhistell, Anne D. Transition to Neo-Confucianism: Shao Yung on Knowledge and Symbols of Reality . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

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

———. "Wang An-shih's Theory of the Activist State." Paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, D.C., March 1984.

———. "Ch'eng I and Cultural Tradition." Paper presented at the Regional Seminar on Neo-Confucianism, Columbia University, February 5, 1988.

———. "Chu Hsi's Redefinition of Literati Learning." In Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage , edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 151-85.

———. "1086 and 1986: Reversing the Verdict?" Unpublished manuscript.

Bray, Francesca. Agriculture . Joseph Needham, gen. ed., Science and Civilisation in China , vol. 6, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Broman, Sven. "Studies on the Chou Li ." Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 33 (1961): 1-88.

Chaffee, John W. The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of the Examinations . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Ch'ai Te-keng inline image . Tzu-chih t'ung-chien chieh-shao. Peking: Ch'iu-shih ch'u-pan-she, 1981.

———. Shih-hsueh ts'ung-k'ao inline image . Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1982.

Chan, Ming K. "The Historiography of the Tzu-chih t'ung-chien : A Survey." Monumenta Serica 31 (1974-75): 1-38.

Chan, Wellington K. K. Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ch'ing China . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Chan, Wing-tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

———, trans. Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology Compiled by Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien . New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.

———. "Chu Hsi's Completion of Neo-Confucianism." In Etudes Song: Sung Studies in Memoriam Etienne Balazs ser. II, no. 1, 1973. Reprinted in Wing-tsit Chan, Chu Hsi: Life and Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1987).

———, trans. Neo-Confucian Terms Explained (The Pei-hsi tzu-i by Ch'en Ch'un, 1159-1223) . New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

———[writing as Ch'en Jung-chieh inline image ]. Chu tzu men-jen. Taipei: Tai-wan hsueh-sheng shu-chü, 1982.

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Index

― 415 ―

A

Accommodation, 343 -44

Adler, Joseph, 201

Administrative Regulations Commission, 168

Adoption, 240

Agriculture, 168 , 176 , 322 , 325 (see also Irrigation);

commercial, 3 , 47 (see also Commerce, in grain)

Altar of Grain and Soil, 248

Amnesties, 155

An Lu-shan rebellion, 13 n20, 14 , 78

An Ping, 333

Analects , 365

Ancestral rites, 258 , 264 , 270

"Ancient prose" movement, 13 , 14 , 17 , 139 , 140 , 189 . See also Ssu-ma Kuang, and ancient style; Wang An-shih, and ancient style

Ando Tomonobu, 133 n9

Antiquity, 73 , 164 . See also History; Three Dynasties; Well-field system

Apocryphal books, 338

Aristotle, 209 , 220

Armament, 80

Armies, 1 , 20 , 81

Atwell, William, 57

Authority: agents of, 37 , 41 -42;

ch'üan used for, 10 n11, 62 ;

hierarchical relations of, 155 , 158 , 177 ;

source of, 37 -40;

of tradition, 73 , 164 ;

uses of, 40 -41. See also Texts

B

Bandits, 179 , 227

Bartlett, Beatrice, 30

Bastid, Marianne, 123

Beneficent Providence Asylum, 229

Biography, 206

Board of Revenue, 230

Bodhidharma, 198

Bol, Peter, 10 n11, 12 , 13 , 31 , 38 , 47 n69, 51 ;

on Ssu-ma Kuang, 16 , 19 , 39 n57, 53 , 251 n117

Bondservants, 234 , 250

Book of Changes . See Classic of Changes

Book of Documents . See Classic of Documents

Book of Poetry . See Classic of Poetry

Border threats, 1 , 140 , 141 n20, 333 . See also Chin dynasty; Mongols

Borrell, Ari, 24

Boundary-survey system, 325

Bribery, 141 n20, 173 , 369 , 370

Buddhism, 354 , 356 ;

as challenge to Taohsueh , 23 -24;

and charitable works, 246 -48;

opposition to, 1 n1, 14 , 56 n82, 61 , 316 , 374 ;

Wang An-shih's interest in, 132 , 133 n9, 181

Burdening (lao ), 16

Bureau for Commentaries on the Classics, 169

Bureau of Markets and Exchange, 253

Bureau of Military Affairs, 29 , 121 n98, 141 n20, 171 n93, 322

Bureau of Policy Criticism, 152

Bureaucracy, 18 , 19 , 29 -31, 344 ;

expansion of, 49 , 86 -87;

financial, 78 , 81 ;

in Ming, 187 ;

size of, 327 , 328 . See also Bureaucratic elite; Bureaucratic entrepreneurship; Centralism; Corruption; Ssu-ma Kuang, on

― 416 ―

Bureaucracy (cont .)

bureaucracy; Wang An-shih, and bureaucracy

"Bureaucratic absolutism" (Sariti), 43

Bureaucratic elite, 77 , 78 , 125 , 127 . See also Elites

Bureaucratic entrepreneurship, 43 , 87 -88, 101 , 103 , 107 , 109 , 110 , 120

C

Cadastral surveys, 232 , 235 , 325

Capping ceremony, 260 , 261

Centralism, 16 , 17 , 18 -19, 20 , 66 ;

criticism of, 216 ;

of Northern Sung, 12 , 13 , 44 , 254

Chaffee, John, 29 , 41

Chan, Wing-tsit, 204

Ch'an Buddhism, 24 n35, 247 . See also Buddhism

Chancellery, 29 , 108 , 114 , 345

Chang charitable estate (Han-chou), 260 n21, 262 , 277

Chang charitable estate (Jao-chou), 277

Chang charitable estate (Su-chou), 260 n21, 261 , 277

Chang Chiu-ch'eng, 196

Chang Chü-cheng, 187 , 363 , 377 -78

Chang Chün, 262 , 328 , 330

Chang Fang-p'ing, 47 , 79 , 117 n89, 156 n62, 251

Chang Hao, 21 , 129 n1

Chang Hsiao-po, 284 n12

Chang Hsueh-ch'eng, 195

Chang Huang, T'u-shu-pien by, 379

Chang Kao, 265 n45

Chang Liang, 203

Chang Shang-ying, 109 n72

Chang Shih, 207 , 211 , 236 , 238 , 345

Chang Tsai, 11 , 22 , 40 , 137 , 318 , 339 ;

doctrine of universal brotherhood, 374 , 375

Chang Tun, 109 n73

Chang Tz'u-shan, 118

Chang Wan, 109 n72

Chang Yen, 284 n 12

Ch'ang-p'ing, 202

Ch'ang-sha, community granary at, 244 , 245 , 368 , 374

Ch'ang-t'an, 223

Change: and constant principles, 211 ;

in Sung, 3 -4, 46 , 50

Change, economic, 1 , 3 , 46 , 80 , 123 -24, 126 -27. See also Economic development

Change, historical, 186 , 206 , 213

Change, political, 140 . See also Reform

Change, social, 2 , 3 , 46 , 61 , 187 -192, 222 , 258

Change, technological, 3 , 80

Chao (state), 149

Chao charitable estate (Ch'ü-chou), 277

Chao charitable estate (T'an-chou), 260 n22, 265 , 277

Chao Hsien, 103 -4

Chao Hsiung, 322 , 327

Chao Ju-yü, 239 , 240 -42, 248 , 320 , 321

Chao K'uei, 265 , 341 n34

Chao Shan-yü, 269

Chao Ting, 320 , 321

Chao Yen-tuan, 241 n79

Charitable acts, 266 -67, 274 , 336 ;

in Buddhism, 246 -47

Charitable cemeteries, 342

Charitable estates: acquired by state, 240 -41, 240 n78;

and community ties, 255 , 257 -58, 265 -67;

and descent-group unity, 258 , 260 , 270 ;

as "duty estates," 25 , 55 , 255 n3;

historical models for, 26 , 270 -74, 275 ;

income from, 261 ;

justification for, 257 , 274 -75;

and kinship relations, 262 -63;

and landholding system, 263 ;

list of, 277 -79;

maintenance of, 263 ;

and maintenance of elite status, 260 -61, 275 ;

and marriage strategies, 262 n35;

Northern and Southern Sung, 256 , 256 -57n8;

reasons for establishing, 261 , 263 -64, 270 , 275 ;

rice allotments provided by, 259 , 260 ;

for scholars, 269 ;

size of, 260 ;

and Sung state, 275 -76;

Yuan, 259 , 272 , 273 -74. See also Charitable schools; Charitable-service estates; Community charitable estates; Fan charitable estate; Lou charitable estate

Charitable granaries, 229 -30, 238 , 368 , 374 . See also Community granaries; Ever-Normal Granaries

Charitable lands, 255

Charitable schools, 255 , 261 n23, 264 , 265

Charitable-service estates, 269 , 270 , 325

Chaves, Jonathan, 202

Che-tsung, 103

Che-tung men, 36

Chekiang scholars, 198 , 207 n66

Chen Te-hsiu: career of, 363 -64;

Classic on Governance by, 29 , 364 -67, 375 , 376 ;

and community granaries, 244 n90, 245 , 374 -75;

compared with Chu Hsi, 376 ;

compared with Wei Liao-weng, 355 -56;

― 417 ―

education, 371 -72;

on filial piety, 356 , 371 ;

four precepts and ten evils of, 369 -71;

and historical scholarship, 311 , 363 ;

on human nature, 355 ;

on human rights, 376 -77;

on imperial rule, 27 n38, 340 , 363 , 376 ;

influence of Chou Tun-i on, 354 ;

influence on Ming statecraft, 377 -79;

and "investigation of things," 358 , 363 ;

on law, 376 ;

and Learning of the Emperors, 352 , 357 , 361 ;

on learning of the mind, 354 ;

as link between Chu Hsi and Ming statecraft thinkers, 57 , 379 ;

on local administration, 29 , 341 n34, 364 , 367 -75, 376 ;

mentioned, 225 ;

Models of Literary Form by, 378 ;

and moralization of politics, 363 , 376 ;

on official abuses, 373 -74;

on penal system, 372 -73;

as prefect of Ch'üan-chou, 356 , 368 ;

on resignation in protest, 343 ;

as respected and influential figure, 337 , 342 ;

and rhetoric of Tao-hsueh , 10 ;

as statecraft thinker, 361 , 363 ;

on Tao-t'ung , 354 -55;

on taxes, 367 -68, 373 . See also Extended Meaning of the Great Learning; Heart Classic

Chen-tsung, 30 , 42

Ch'en charitable estate (Chen-chiang), 260 n23, 277

Ch'en charitable estate (Chi-chou), 277

Ch'en charitable estate (Hsing-hua), 277

Ch'en charitable estate (T'ai-chou), 269 n66

Ch'en charitable estate (Wu-chou), 260 n21, 265 , 277

Ch'en Chih-chien, 104

Ch'en Ch'un, 209 ;

Neo-Confucian Terms Explained , 9 , 10

Ch'en Chü-jen, 261 -62

Ch'en Chün-ch'ing, 316 n29

Ch'en Fu-liang, 21 , 57

Ch'en Hsiang, 268

Ch'en Jen-hsi, Ching-shih pa-pien lei-tsuan , 378

Ch'en Kao, 273

Ch'en Kuang-ch'ung, 146 n34

Ch'en Liang: Chu Hsi on, 199 ;

as decentralizer, 21 , 27 , 33 , 216 ;

intellectual heirs of, 36 ;

interest in laws and institutions, 33 -34;

and meaning of Tao-hsueh , 11 ;

notion of ssu , 33 , 52 -53;

opposition with Chu Hsi, 8 -9, 31 ;

and Southern Sung statecraft, 57 ;

utilitarianism of, 40 , 198 ;

view of history, 39 -40, 251

Ch'en P'ing, 203

Ch'en Sheng-chih, 117 , 118

Ch'en Shih-hsi, 102 , 217 n101

Ch'en Shou, 198

Ch'en Shun-yü, 106

Ch'en Tzu-ch'iang, 284 n 12

Ch'en Tzu-lung, 57

Cheng (government), 140

Cheng charitable estate (Su-chou), 277

Cheng Ch'iao, Tung chih by, 336 n3

Cheng Ch'ing-chih, 315

Cheng Hsuan, 65

Cheng shih (affairs of government), 14

Cheng-shu (the arts of politics), 11

Cheng T'ing, 332 n102

Ch'eng, King, 73 , 177

Ch'eng brothers, 137 , 196 , 318 , 339 ;

academic descendants of, 23 , 34 , 282 , 292 ;

and Chu Hsi, 199 , 200 , 219 n110;

and orthodox line of transmission, 11 , 12 . See also Ch'eng Hao; Ch'eng I

Ch'eng Chih-shao, 102

Ch'eng Chiung, 34 , 282 , 308

Ch'eng-Chu school, 19 , 283 , 349 , 353 , 375 . See also Neo-Confucianism

Ch'eng Chü-fu, 245

Ch'eng Feng-ju, 333

Ch'eng Hao, 218 -19, 248 -49, 250 , 317 , 338

Ch'eng I, 313 , 318 ;

and Annals , 197 , 198 , 212 ;

on ch'üan and ching , 210 -11;

and learning of the mind, 38 ;

and "moral conduct," 138 ;

opposition to state activism, 21 , 222 ;

and political authority, 38 , 43 -44;

portrait of, in Tao ming lu , 321 ;

on renewing the people, 353 n18

Ch'eng Min-sheng, 82 n8

Ch'eng-tu, 94 , 105 , 110 n74, 333

Ch'eng Yang-chih, 136

Chi charitable estate (Su-chou), 277

Ch'i (state), 63 , 64 , 366

Ch'i (material force), 9 , 214 -15

Chia I, 66 , 147

Chia Ssu-tao, 51 , 336 n1

Chia-ting court, 331

Chiang charitable estate (Chien-ning), 277

Chiang-nan, 114

Chiao-hua (transforming through moral edification), 352 -53

Chief councillors, 29 , 42 n61, 336 , 345 . See also Chia Ssu-tao; Ch'in Kuei; Han T'o-chou; Prime ministers; Shih Mi-yuan

Chieh-chou, 88

Chien (simplicity), 16

Chien-ch'ang, 243 , 245

― 418 ―

Chien-k'ang, 269

Chien-ning (Fu-chien), 226 , 242 , 243

Chien-ping , 85 n17. See also "Engrossers"

Chien-yang (Fu-chien), 223 , 225 , 226

Chien-yen i-lai ch'ao-yueh tsa-chi . See Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Period

Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu . See Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era

Ch'ien charitable estate (Su-chou), 277

Ch'ien-lung, 44

Ch'ien Mu, 131

Chih (institutions), 14

Chikusa Masaaki, 133 n9

Child abandonment, 230 , 240 , 260 n22. See also Foundling granaries

Chin (state), 158 n70, 182

Chin dynasty, 4 , 192 , 314 , 328 n82, 334 ;

appeasement of, 207 ;

fall of, 347 ;

intelligence, 327 , 331 . See also Chin wars; Jurchens

Chin-hua, 243 , 244

Chin-ssu lu , 218

Chin-t'an, 244 -45

Chin wars, 328 n82, 330 -32, 334

Ch'in dynasty, 66 , 67 , 69 , 149 ;

centralized prefectural system of, 66 ;

enfeoffment system of, 215 ;

engrossers in, 175

Ch'in-feng, 93 , 94 , 98

Ch'in Kuan, 44

Ch'in Kuei, 222 , 329 , 336 n1;

and appeasement of Chin, 207 ;

Li Hsin-ch'uan on, 319 , 324 , 327 , 328 , 331 , 332

Ch'in Shih-huang ti, 271

Ching (the standard), 209 , 210

Ching-hsi-Huai-nan water conservancy, 102

Ching-hu, 108

Ching i chü (Bureau for Commentaries on the Classics), 169

Ching-k'ang disaster, 216

Ching shih , 2 , 36 , 55 , 56 -57. See also "Ordering the world"; Statecraft

Ch'ing dynasty: fiscal administration, 79 , 123 , 187 ;

growth of "public sphere," 2 , 49 , 51 ;

state-building, 2 , 36 , 52

Ch'ing-li reforms, 60 , 81 , 138 n17, 140 , 148

Ch'iu Ch'ung, 332

Ch'iu Chün, 57 , 360 , 361 , 363 , 375 , 378

ChobobChou Ii. See Rites of Chou

Chou Ming-chung, 239 , 241

Chou Pi-ta, 316

Chou Piao-ch'üan, 118

Chou Po-ti, 81

Chou P'o, 64

Chou Tun-i, 318 , 339 , 354 , 361 n43

Chou Ya-fu, 203

Chou Yin, 118

Chronological Charts (Ssu-ma Kuang), 152 , 157 , 158 , 158 -59n70

Chu, Ron-guey, 369 n71

Chu Chiao, 290

Chu Hsi: as administrator at Nan-k'ang, 232 , 234 , 302 , 341 n34;

advice to Hsuan-tsung, 350 ;

antipathy to Buddhism, 248 ;

on authority of texts and mind, 38 ;

career in local administration, 363 -64;

on ch'üan , 10 n11, 208 -12;

"classical analogism" of, 22 , 26 , 31 , 250 -52;

on classics and histories, 196 -98, 203 -4;

commentaries of, 210 , 283 , 284 n14, 308 , 318 , 351 , 353 ;

and community compacts, 23 ;

and community granaries, 218 , 235 , 237 ;

compared with Ch'en Liang, 9 , 33 ;

compared with Wang An-shih, 32 , 251 , 253 ;

as cosmologist, 201 ;

on course of history, 213 -16;

critical of centralization, 27 , 28 , 216 ;

debate with Ch'en Liang, 8 , 201 , 251 ;

disagreement with Ssu-ma Kuang, 202 -3;

emphasis on self-cultivation, 21 , 32 , 213 , 352 ;

on factions, 28 n40, 45 ;

famine relief policies of, 223 -26, 281 , 302 -4, 306 , 309 , 374 ;

and foundling-granary concept, 241 -42;

historical judgments of, 206 -8;

on human nature, 215 , 353 ;

I-li ching-chuan t'ung-chieh of, 25 n36;

on imperial rule, 340 , 350 , 351 , 363 , 376 ;

and institutional innovation, 23 -25, 26 -27;

and "investigation of things," 201 , 209 , 238 n69;

lack of political success, 122 , 321 ;

lectures from Classics Mat, 352 , 361 -62;

Li Tao-ch'uan's portrait of, 321 ;

Lin Li's attack on, 316 ;

locally centered approach of, 36 , 52 , 54 , 122 , 218 , 253 -54, 364 ;

memorials of, 27 -28, 45 , 201 , 350 , 351 ;

mentioned, 43 n65, 138 , 336 , 343 , 345 , 356 , 360 ;

and "middle level" for political action, 24 -25, 27 ;

and Ming statecraft, 357 , 379 ;

mirror image used by, 205 -6;

as moralist, 201 ;

and "moralization of politics," 28 , 350 ;

and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, 11 , 12 , 36 ;

and Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror , 200 , 310 -11, 378 ;

political views of,

― 419 ―

222 , 251 -52, 350 -51;

praise for charitable estates, 265 -66;

preface to The Mean , 350 , 352 , 357 ;

priority of philosophy over history, 199 , 219 -20, 362 ;

and Records of the Origins of the School of the Two Ch'engs , 200 ;

on recovering the north, 219 ;

Reflections on Things at Hand by, 351 , 360 , 361 n43;

on "renewing the people," 353 ;

and social relationships, 25 n36, 234 , 249 -50, 281 ;

on study of history, 198 -200;

on Su Hsun, 60 ;

and Tao-t'ung , 201 , 351 ;

and "urging sharing," 303 -4;

view of history, 41 , 194 , 202 -4, 219 -20, 362 ;

view of learning, 190 ;

view of state institutions, 28 , 234 ;

view of Wang An-shih, 218 -19, 252 -53;

view of Wang T'ung, 207 ;

on Wang An-shih's reforms, 26 -27, 216 , 217 -18;

on well-field system, 252 n121, 362 ;

and Words and Deeds of Eminent Ministers of Eight Courts , 200 . See also Ch'eng-Chu school; Community compacts; Community granaries; Great Learning; Tzu-chih t'ung-chien kang-mu

Chu-tzu yü-lei , 312

Chu-tzu yü-lu , 312

Chu Yuan-chang, 187

Ch'u (state), 149

Ch'u-chou, 325

Chuan-tui system, 327

Chuang tzu , 56 n82, 132 , 205

Chung (loyalty), 55

Chung (state of mind), 182 -83

Chung charitable estate (Chen-chiang), 278

Chung-tsung, 207 -8, 209 n75

Chung yung . See Doctrine of the Mean

Ch'ung-an (Fu-chien), 223 , 224 , 225 , 226 , 234 , 235 , 238 , 248

Chü Meng, 203

Ch'üan (authority), 10 n11, 62 . See also Authority

Ch'üan (to weigh), 10 n11, 208 -12

Ch'üan charitable estate (Ming-chou), 278

Ch'üan-chou, 368 , 369 , 372

Ch'üan fen. See "Urging sharing"

Ch'üan-shu (Su Hsun), 59

Ch'üan Tsu-wang, 260 n21

Chün-hsien (centralized prefectural) system, 66

Chün-t'ien (equitable field) system, 90

Circuit intendancies, 99 , 100 , 104 , 108 , 121

Cities, 3 , 48

Civil service, 125 -26, 191

Civil service examinations, 3 , 197 n18. See also Examination system

Classic of Changes , 1 n1, 74 , 132 , 157 , 182 , 197 , 271 n68, 311 , 338 -39

Classic of Documents , 132 , 169 , 197 , 205 , 293 -94, 364 . See also Shu thing

Classic of Filial Piety , 132 , 267

Classic of Poetry , 1 n1, 68 , 197 n20, 205 . See also Shih ching

Classic on Governance (Chen Te-hsiu), 29 , 364 -67, 375 , 376

"Classical analogism," 22 , 26 , 31 , 41 , 253 ;

compared with historical analogism, 252

Classical Chinese, 6

Classical revivalism, 251 , 252

Classics: authority of, 37 -38, 39 , 73 , 362 ;

and histories, 196 -98, 362

Classics Mat, 196 , 197 n18, 352 , 361 -62. See also Imperial Seminar

Clerks, 49 , 173 , 191 , 327 n75

Coercion, 67 , 72

Coming-of-age ceremonies, 260

Commentaries, official, 169

Commerce, 1 , 3 , 34 , 47 , 48 ;

in grain, 293 , 294 , 298 -99, 301 , 306 ;

role of state in, 100 , 114 ;

state revenue from, 77 , 78

Commercial-tax stations, 78

Commercialization, 185 , 186 , 187 , 192

Commoners, grades of, 89 -90, 90 n26. See also Shu

Communist Party, 186

Community, 257 , 267 , 275 ;

translation of she and hsiang , 54 . See also Local communities

Community charitable estates, 267 -70, 275

Community compacts, 6 , 25 , 32 , 47 , 281 , 309

Community granaries: absorbed by state bureaucracy, 243 , 246 ;

in Chiang-hsi and Hunan, 243 ;

in Chien-ning, 242 ;

Chu Hsi's plun for, 22 , 27 , 122 , 222 , 236 , 238 , 374 ;

compared to Green Sprouts policy, 23 , 222 , 236 , 237 , 238 n67;

corruption in, 245 ;

criticism of, 236 -37;

decline of, 243 , 245 -46;

eligibility guidelines for, 235 -36;

in Fu-chien, 243 ;

funding of, 242 -43;

inspired by Wei Shan-chih, 223 ;

instituted by Li Tao-ch'uan, 326 ;

as instrument of exploitation, 253 -54;

interest charges in, 236 , 237 ;

mentioned, 25 n37, 238 n67, 240 , 270 , 281 ;

as middle-level institution, 55 , 254 ;

and social hierarchy, 249 ;

sponsorship of, 239 ;

success of, 243 -45;

supported by Tung Wei, 309 ;

Wei Liaoweng's system of, 342 . See also Foundling granaries

― 420 ―

Compass, 3

Compassionate Favor Estate, 263

Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government (Ssu-ma Kuang), 134 , 152 , 158 n70, 166 , 187 , 198 , 203 , 310 ;

compared with Wang An-shih's works, 186 ;

introduction to, 196 , 205 ;

on learning from history, 157 ;

on political hierarchy, 131 , 155 ;

and timeless principles, 181 . See also Tzu-chih t'ung-chien kang-mu

Comprehensive Treatise (Ssu-ma Kuang), 157

Compulsory grain sales, 232 -33

Confucian ideology, 49 , 234 , 275 . See also Cultural orthodoxy; Neo-Confucianism; Tao-hsueh

Confucian utilitarianism, 40 . See also Ch'en Liang; Utilitarianism

Confucianism, and Buddhism, 1 n1, 316

Confucius, 38 n53, 63 , 73 -74, 157 , 163 , 197 , 198 , 202 . See also Spring and Autumn Annals

Conservatism, 20 , 221 . See also Ssu-ma Kuang, as conservative

Contingency. See Historical contingency

Continuity, 4 , 26 -27, 31 , 69 , 73

Contracts, 3 . See also Community compacts; Yueh

Corruption, 17 , 91 , 173 , 287 , 327 , 339 , 360 ;

in famine relief, 230 , 232 , 245 ;

in military, 333 -34

Council of State, 140 , 141 n20, 166 , 168 , 170

Councillors. See Chief councillors; Ch'in Kuei; Han T'o-chou; Shih Mi-yuan; Ts'ai Ching

County magistrates, 100 , 102 , 106

Court of Agricultural Supervision, 91 , 100 , 109 ;

control of granary administration, 97 , 101 , 108 ;

and debt repayment policies, 113 -14;

personnel, 102 , 104 , 106

"Covenants of duty," 227

Crime, 70 , 169

Crisis, 14 . See also Deficit crisis; Subsistence crisis

Crop failures, 227

Cultural orthodoxy, 59 , 61 , 61 n9, 73

Cultural transformation, 16

"Culture," as keyword, 5

Currency, 116 , 124

Custom, 68 , 69 , 73 , 154 -55

D

Dardess, John, 36

de Bary, Wm. Theodore, 12 n18, 21 , 22 , 29 , 38 , 57 , 122 ;

Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart , 350 , 359 , 360 ;

use of term "Neo-Confucian," 11

Debt, 89 -90, 113 -14, 116 -17, 122 , 223 , 224 , 225 . See also Green Sprouts policy

Decentralization, 6 , 20 ;

and famine relief, 231 , 232 ;

in intendancy system, 100 ;

and state control, 110 ;

in Szechwan tea monopoly, 109 -10, 120 n95;

in T'ang, 27

Defense, 78 , 81 , 97 , 156 . See also Foreign policy

Deficit crisis, 82 , 83 , 144

Delegation (jen jen ), 15

Descent groups, 55 , 256 , 260 ;

and ancestral rites, 258 , 270 ;

and charitable schools, 264 ;

establishment of charitable estates, 255 , 262 ;

and inheritance of land, 263 -64;

institutions of, 267 ;

relationship to community, 257 , 265 -66, 275 ;

and well-field system, 272

Despotism, 46

Diamond Sutra, 133 n9

Diligence, 370

Directorate of Military Affairs, 100

Disaster relief, 109 , 111 -12, 223 . See also Famine relief

Discontinuity, 4 , 201 . See also Change

Discourse, 57 , 78 ;

Confucian, 8 -9;

of metaphysics, 9 ;

on public and private, 47 , 52 -53;

social and political, 9 , 58 , 222 . See also "Languages"

"Discourses on Salt and Iron," 53

Doctrine of the Mean , 206 n62, 210 , 283 , 337 -38

Drought, 287 , 288 , 289 , 329

Duty (i ), 1 , 298 , 307

Dynastic legitimacy, 41 n60

Dynasties, rise and fall of, 19

E

Eastern Chin, 323

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, 126

Economic activism, 76 , 89 , 136 , 302 , 309 ;

Chou dynasty models for, 84 n15;

defined, 77 -78;

and economic growth, 79 -80;

and New Policies, 81 , 84 -85, 125 ;

relation to military weakness, 81 ;

from T'ang through Northern Sung, 125 . See also Famine relief; Managing wealth; New Policies

Economic development, 78 , 79 n4, 124

Economic issues, language of, 35

Economy, as serf-regulating process, 295

Education: Chen Te-hsiu on, 371 -72;

corrupted by civil service recruitment, 339 ;

― 421 ―

of elite, 1 , 126 , 161 ;

and localism, 256 ;

and maintenance of elite status, 260 ;

and New Policies, 145 , 169 , 190 ;

role of state in, 14 , 180 ;

Wang An-shih's view of, 135 . See also Examination system; Imperial University; Schools

"Eight great prose masters of T'ang and Sung," 61

Elementary Learning (Chu Hsi), 360 , 362

Elites: and government service, 4 , 125 -26;

growth of, 1 , 3 ;

hereditary, 125 , 138 -39, 189 ;

involvement in politics, 13 -14;

local-ism of, 4 , 31 , 50 ;

in Ming and Ch'ing, 4 ;

mobility strategies of, 126 ;

in Northern and Southern Sung, 4 , 46 , 255 -56;

role in community compacts, 24 ;

strategies for maintaining status, 260 ;

view of state and society, 1 -2. See also Bureaucratic elite; Local elites

Elvin, Mark, 80 , 126

"Emperology" (Wilhelm), 354

Emperor: authority of, 37 , 42 ;

as moral leader, 27 -28;

need for self-cultivation, 345 ;

relation of, to officials, 42 n61, 343 . See also Rulership

Encirclement, 80 n6

Endowed estates, 256 , 257 . See also Charitable estates

Enfeoffment system, 215 , 216 -17, 218

"Engrossers": campaign against, 86 , 145 , 174 -75;

as cause of rural poverty, 115 ;

in Chou, 84 ;

concern with, before Wang An-shih, 47 ;

and Green Sprouts policy, 112 -13, 117 ;

New Policies campaign against, 85 ;

and rural credit, 90 , 93 , 234 ;

and State Trade Agency intervention, 86 ;

use of term, 85

Equitable field system, 90

Equitable Tax Policies, 169

Equitable Transport and Price Equalization Policy, 168

European state-building, 49 , 124

Ever-Normal Granaries: abuses of, 231 , 231 n30;

and capitalization for Green Sprouts loan fund, 91 , 92 ;

centralized surveillance of, 121 ;

and charitable granaries, 230 , 231 n30, 232 ;

failure of, 91 ;

geographic range of, 229 ;

origins of, 292 ;

and rice prices, 228 , 295

Ever-Normal Granary intendancies, 77 , 89 , 92 , 100

Ever-Normal Granary intendants: appointments of, 106 ;

attributes of, 101 , 102 -3, 107 ;

and bureaucracy of famine relief, 228 ;

careers of, 103 -4;

conflicting roles of, 111 -12, 113 ;

control over, 108 -9;

and fiscal intendants, 170 ;

as intermediaries between center and localities, 105 -6;

investigation of, 109 , 114 ;

misappropria-tions by, 230 ;

system of mutual surveillance, 108 , 108 -9n72;

terms of, 103 -4

Ever-Normal Granary System, 90 , 92 n33, 97 , 112 , 223 , 374

Ever-Normal reserves, 178

Examination system, 129 , 192 ;

and ancient prose movement, 146 ;

and change in literati, 126 , 189 -90;

criticism of, 139 ;

expansion of, 138 , 188 ;

and local academy movement, 256 ;

and New Policies, 169 , 173 ;

reform of, 60 ;

Ssu-ma Kuang's view of, 132 , 180 ;

Wang An-shih's views on, 132

Examinations, language of, 13

Executions, 42 n61

Expediency, 62 , 211 , 212

Explanations for Characters (Wang An-shih), 133 , 134 n10, 181 , 186

Exploitation, 121 , 176 , 253 -54, 373 . See also "Engrossers"

Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (Chen Te-hsiu), 357 , 375 ;

Ch'iu Chün's supplement to, 57 , 360 , 361 , 363 , 375 , 378 ;

and Learning of the Emperors, 357 ;

as Ming text, 378 ;

on moral cultivation, 359 ;

preface to, 359 , 360 ;

preoccupation with ruler, 360 ;

on regulating the family, 359 -60, 360 -61;

structure of, 358 -60;

substance and function in, 361 , 379 . See also Ch'iu Chün

F

Fa (law), 10 n11, 164

Faction, connotations of term in Southern Sung, 343

"Faction of superior men," 45

Factionalism, 19 , 44 -45, 343 ;

during Ch'ing-li reforms, 141 , 141 n20;

in New Policies, 50 , 118 , 125

Fairbank, John K., 349

False learning, 328 n84. See also Neo-Confucianism; "Spurious learning" prohibition

Fame, 15

Family Ritual (Chu Hsi), 360

Famine of 1167-1168, 226

― 422 ―

Famine relief, 176 ;

approaches to, 284 -85, 309 ;

bureaucracy of, 228 ;

Chu Hsi's efforts toward, 32 , 223 ;

decentralization of, in Southern Sung, 231 , 232 ;

historical cases, 284 -91, 293 -94;

Huang Chen's thinking on, 34 ;

language of, 35 , 307 ;

market approach to, 115 , 293 , 294 -95, 297 , 298 -99, 309 ;

moral obligation approach to, 280 -81, 286 , 290 -91, 301 , 309 ;

role of private households in, 297 -99;

Southern Sung views on, 47 , 302 -3;

Ssu-ma Kuang on, 178 ;

"strategies" and "techniques," 292 -93;

in Sung political debate, 6 ;

three forms of, 294 -95;

Tung Wei's theory on, 115 . See also Charitable granaries; Community granaries; Ever-Normal Granary System; Green Sprouts policy; Tung Wei

Fan charitable estate: and evolution of kinship structures, 255 ;

mentioned, 268 ;

as model, 240 n78, 256 , 259 , 261 , 269 , 271 -72, 273 ;

preservation of, 263 ;

size of endowment, 260

Fan Chen, 183 n134

Fan Ch'eng-ta, 341 n34

Fan Ching-jen, 183 n134

Fan Ch'un-jen, 108

Fan Ch'un-ts'ui, 103 n59

Fan Chung-yen: charitable estate of, 273 , 274 ;

defense of factions, 44 ;

establishment of prefectural government schools, 23 ;

on imperial authority, 43 ;

Ou-yang Hsiu's campaign for, 139 ;

and overcentralization, 216 ;

as reformer, 14 , 17 ;

reforms of, 59 , 140 , 141 . See also Ch'ing-li reforms; Fan charitable estate

Fan Kuan, 40

Fan Tsu-yü, 39 , 251 , 361 -62, 363

Fan Yeh, 198

Fang charitable estate (Hsing-hua), 260 n21, 260 n22, 261 , 278

Fang Hsuan-ling, 70

Fang Tse, 103 , 118

Farmers, taxes of, 156

Farming Loan fund, 87

Farming loans. See Green Sprouts policy

Fei Shih-yin, 284 n 12

Feng-ch'eng (Lung-hsing), 367

Feng Ch'i, Ching-chi lei-pien by, 379

Feng Ching, 116

Feng Tao, 188

Feng Ying-ching, Huang-Ming ching-shih shihyung-pien by, 379

Feudal system, 66 , 215 , 272 , 362 . See also Three Dynasties

Feuerwerker, Albert, 76 , 79 , 104 n24

Filial piety, 55 , 157 , 189 ;

Chen Te-hsiu on, 356 , 371 ;

and religious belief, 212

Finance Commission, 151 , 156 , 170

Finance Ministry, 114

Finance Planning Commission: and bypassing of local officials, 177 ;

chronology of, 168 ;

creation of, 84 n16, 85 ;

and Green Sprouts loans, 92 , 96 , 112 , 113 ;

and "managing wealth," 170 ;

role in reforms, 100 ;

and rural debt, 90 ;

staffing of, 134 ;

and suppression of engrossers, 174

Financial administration: Li Hsin-ch'uan on, 326 ;

Ming and Ch'ing, 123 -24;

Northern Sung compared to Ming, 122 ;

Ssu-ma Kuang's view of, 156

Fish-scale charts, 232

Five Classics, 197 n20

Five Dynasties, 46 , 138 , 155 , 215 , 216

Five Norms, 214

Flood relief, 97

Floods, 223

Food riots, 227 , 242

Foreign policy, 80 , 135 , 347 . See also Chin wars

Foucault, Michel, 7

Foundling granaries, 240 -43, 248 , 250 n113

Four Books, 34 , 38 , 199 , 283 , 308 , 318 , 350 . See also Great Learning

"Four Masters of Ming," 268

Freeman, Michael, 21 -22

Frontier defense, 78 , 80 , 119

Frontier regions, decentralization in, 109

Frontier trade, 93

Fu, Charles, 208 n70

Fu charitable estate (Wu-chou), 260 n23, 278

Fu-chien (Chiang-hsi): community granaries in, 239 , 243 ;

rice supplies in, 225 -27

Fu-chien (Fu-chou), as "land of the Buddha," 247

Fu-chou, 130 n2

Fu Hsi, 73 , 194 , 201

Fu Kuang, 338

Fu Pi, 108 , 118 , 60 , 216 , 283

Fu-ping (state militia), 71 -72

Fu Tzu-te, 226

Fumoto Yasutake, 354 n21

Funeral expenses, 260 , 262 , 265 , 268

― 423 ―

G

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 194

Gentleman, role of, 13 -14, 15 , 24 -25, 26

Gentleman activists, 51 -52

Geopolitical system, Asian, 80

Golas, Peter, 48 , 53 , 79 n4, 89 -90

Government, defined, 140

Government Trading Policy, 169 , 175

Grain, 47 , 84 . See also Famine relief; Rice

Grain-sales stations, 306

Granary system, 91 -92. See also Ever-Normal Granary System

Graves, 258

Great Learning , 203 , 213 ;

and charitable acts, 267 ;

Chu Hsi and, 350 , 351 , 357 , 358 , 376 ;

criteria for rulership in, 362 ;

linkage between inner and outer worlds, 22 ;

mentioned, 206 n62, 283 , 338 , 364 ;

and Neo-Confucian ideology, 38 , 257 ;

self-cultivation in, 352 , 359

Green Sprouts policy: bookkeeping for, 106 ;

centralized control of, 115 ;

compared to community granaries, 23 , 122 , 222 , 236 , 237 , 238 n67;

conflicting social and fiscal objectives of, 111 -13, 114 ;

critics of, 114 -18, 178 ;

deferred payments in, 113 -14;

defined, 168 ;

dismantling of, 119 , 120 n94, 122 ;

and economic activism, 100 ;

and engrossers, 85 , 117 , 175 , 234 n45;

exploitation of, 96 , 97 ;

flaws noted by Chu Hsi in, 237 ;

impact of, 119 ;

interest charges in, 96 , 236 ;

legislation, 90 , 90 n28;

loan administration in, 9 ;

and loan eligibility, 112 -13;

obstructionist movement against, 108 , 118 ;

opposition to, 92 , 106 , 108 , 288 n19;

and organization of borrower households, 92 ;

purpose of, 92 -93, 96 ;

representative of New Policies economic approach, 77 , 89 ;

revenue versus relief in, 112 ;

and rural debt, 89 ;

Ssu-ma Kuang's criticism of, 178 ;

and Sung state-building, 49 . See also Ever-Normal Granary System

Guest households, 90 n26, 92 , 112

Guild merchants, 93

Gunpowder, 3

H

Han Cheng-yen, 103 n59

Han Ch'i, 60 , 103 n59, 141 n20;

criticism of Green Sprouts policy, 92 n33, 96 , 97 , 112 -13, 117

Han Chiang, 141

Han-chung tea trade, 94 , 99

Han dynasty, 53 , 63 , 215 ;

appraisal of, 206 ;

examples from, 147 , 366 ;

expropriation policies of, 71 ;

inability to restore ritual in, 155 ;

inadequacies of, 201 ;

oppression in, 217 ;

political literature of, 61 ;

rulers of, 159 n70;

succession to, 202

Han Hsuan-ti, 366

Han Kao-ti, 64 , 65

Han Kao-tsu, 206

Hah Kuang-wu, 214

Han-lin academy, 152 , 166 n83

Han T'o-chou, 284 , 319 , 329 , 330 ;

assassination of, 331 , 332 ;

and curtailment of scholarly inquiry, 328 ;

and hostility to private histories, 313 ;

opponents of, 324 ;

perversion of truth by, 322 ;

policy on war with Chin, 315 , 331 -32;

sources on, 336 n1

Han Wei, 183 n134, 288 n19

Han Wen-ti, 66

Han Wu-ti, 85 , 147 , 167

Han-yang prefecture, 232

Hah Yü, 13 n20, 60 , 61 , 73 , 207

Hang-chou, 4 , 314

Hartman, Charles, 61 n9

Hartwell, Robert: on elites, 4 , 31 , 46 , 78 , 78 n3, 125 ;

on difference between Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang, 131 -32;

"historical analogism," 250 ;

on regional administration, 104 n61, 120 n95

Hatch, George, 17 , 40 , 56 n82

Heart Classic (Chen Te-hsiu), 351 , 354 -58, 364 , 365

Heaven, 37

Heaven-and-Earth, 38 , 39 , 137

Heckscher, Eli, 124

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 195 , 197 n17

Heng-lun (Su Hsun), 59 , 69

Herbs, 107

Hereditary elite, 125 , 138 -39, 189

Higashi Ichio, 129 , 130 n2, 131 , 135 , 168 n89

Hired Service policy, 168 n89, 169 , 173 , 176 , 184

Hired-service system, 180 n 125

Historical analogism, 41 , 250 -52;

of Ch'en Liang, 251 ;

of Ssu-ma Kuang, 132 , 251 n 117. See also "Classical analogism"

Historical consciousness, 193 , 201

Historical contingency, 251 ;

Su Hsun's thesis on, 59 , 60 , 62 -63, 70 , 72 , 74 -75

Histories, 310 -11;

official, 311 ;

private, 313 . See also Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of

― 424 ―

Histories (cont .)

Government; Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era

Historiography, Western, 213

History: alienation from, 193 -94;

authority of, 39 , 41 , 65 , 69 ;

and biography, 206 ;

Chu Hsi's view of, 213 -16;

and classical models, 362 ;

in Confucian tradition, 199 ;

downward course of, 214 -15;

learning from, 205 ;

as mirror, 204 -6, 313 ;

and morality, 19 ;

Sung view of, 40 , 195 -96;

Wang An-shih's and Ssu-ma Kuang's views of, 135 ;

writing of, 41 n60, 313

Ho-pei Fiscal Intendancy, 91

Ho-shan Academy, 342

Honorary titles, 233

Horse procurement, 88 , 94 , 111 , 120 -21, 330

Horses, 80 , 81 , 95 , 216 . See also Tea and Horse Agency; tea and horse trade

Hou Han shu , 198

Hou Wai-lu, 133 n10, 137 n15

Households, grades of, 90 n26, 92 , 112 , 169 . See also Influential households; Superior households

Hsi-chou, 93

Hsi-ho circuit, 94 , 98 ;

horse-marketing region, 120

Hsi-Hsia, 80

Hsi-ming (Chang Tsai), 374

Hsi-ning, 93 , 120

Hsia (state), 156 , 180

Hsia Sung, 141 n20

Hsiang, Duke, 365

Hsiang (community), 54 , 257 n10. See also Community; Localism

Hsiang Yü, 64 -65

Hsiang-yueh. See Community compacts

Hsiao (filial piety), 55 . See also Filial piety

Hsiao charitable estate (Chi-chou), 278

Hsiao Kung-ch'ü, 135

Hsiao-tsung: absolutism of, 43 n65;

and bureaucracy, 327 , 328 ;

Chu Hsi's advice to, 45 , 350 ;

comparison of Sung literati with Western Chin, 322 -23, 334 ;

criticism of shih-ta-fu , 322 -23;

mentioned, 311 n7;

system of praise and blame, 325

Hsieh Chao-chih, Wu tsa-tsu by, 338

Hsieh charitable estate (T'ai-chou), 278

Hsieh Liang-tso, 317

Hsieh Tzu-ch'ang, 260 n23

Hsien (wise men), 15

Hsin (mind), 10 n11

Hsin ching . See Heart Classic

Hsin dynasty, 186

Hsing-hua prefecture, 225

Hsing-ke (monk), 229

Hsiung charitable estate (Chien-yang), 266 -67, 278

Hsiung Pen, 109 n73

Hsu Chi-chih, 284 n12

Hsu Hsi, 109 n73

Hsu I, 313

Hsu Meng-hsin, 311

Hsu Shen-fu, 332 n102

Hsu tzu-chih t'ung chien ch'ang-pien , 86

Hsueh Hsiang, 88

Hsun Tzu, 85 , 164 , 207 , 287

Hsun Yueh, 217 n99

Hu family (Chien-ch'ang), 245

Hu Hung, 39 , 40

Hu-kuang General Commissariat, 245

Hu-Kuang Supply Master, 121 n98

Hu San-hsing, 196 -98

Hu Yin, 271 -72;

Tu-shih kuan-chien of , 207 , 208 n68

Hu Yuan, 61

Hu Yung, 245

Huai-nan, 114

Huang, Ray, 123 -24, 349 -50, 356

Huang Chen: as administrator of Fu-chou, 280 ;

and Chu Hsi's approach to famine relief, 304 ;

compared with Tung Wei, 34 -35, 302 ;

exhortation to wealthy householders of Fu-chou, 292 , 303 , 304 -6;

on famine relief as moral duty, 280 -81, 286 , 298 , 299 ;

famine relief policies of, 34 , 304 , 306 -7, 309 ;

as follower of Chu Hsi, 34 , 281 ;

influence of Tung Wei on, 307 ;

on moral responsibility, 307 ;

"urging sharing" approach to famine relief, 297

Huang Chin, 272

Huang Chü, 39 n57

Huang Kan, 232 , 241 , 242 , 304 , 315

Huang Lien, 96 n43, 120 n94

Huang Pa (prefect), 366

Huang-t'ing, 226

Huang Tsung-hsi, 321

Huang Wan, 241

Hui, King of Liang, 53

Hui-tsung, 49 , 197

Human nature, 21 , 40

Humanehess, 370

Hunan school, 199

Hung Ch'i-k'uei, 315

― 425 ―

Hung Hao, 289 -90

Hung Mai, 205 n57

Hung-wu, 123

Hymes, Robert, 22 , 31 , 46 , 53 , 122 , 123 , 126

I

I (duty), 1 , 25 , 54 -55;

and ch'üan , 211 ;

and kung , 55 ;

in Lu Chiu-yuan's declaration, 1 , 55 ;

and moral obligation, 287 ;

translated as "charitable," 255 n3

I-thing . See Classic of Changes

I-chuang (duty estates), 55

I-i (duty service), 54

I li , 134

I-ping (duty troops), 54

I-ts'ang (duty granaries), 55

I Yin, 208 , 212

Impartiality, 370

Imperial authority, 30 , 42 -44;

and factions, 44 -46;

Su Hsun on, 62 , 72 . See also Ch'üan (authority)

Imperial autocracy, 42 , 46

Imperial extravagances, 176

Imperial family, as model for state, 360 , 361 n43

Imperial household, 83 , 360 , 376

Imperial lectures, 345

Imperial Library, 60 , 314 n21, 315 , 316

Imperial mind, 340

Imperial rule. See Rulership

Imperial Seminar, 39 , 196

Imperial stipends, 156

Imperial succession, 207 -8, 211

Imperial tutor, 43 -44

Imperial University, 29 , 312 n10, 318 , 346 , 347

Industry, taxation of, 78

Infanticide, 227 , 240

Inflation, 81

Influential households, 231 , 241 ;

exploitation of poor, 253 ;

theft of public lands, 248

Inheritance, 18 ;

partible, 263 -64

Inner Asia, 94 , 107

Institutional history, 2 , 311

Institutional innovation, 22 -23, 36 , 251 , 252

Institutionalists, 20 -21

Institutions: classic models for, 362 ;

confidence of Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang in, 138 ;

in Li Hsin-ch'uan's works, 322 ;

in Ou-yang Hsiu's "On Fundamentals," 14 , 15 , 16 ;

in Su Hsun's proposals, 18 ;

in Wang An-shih's views, 19 , 131 , 135 , 164

Integration, of non-Chinese, 180

Intellectual history, 2 , 4 , 46 -47

Interest rates, 96 , 117 , 234

International trade, 80 . See also Commerce

Investigating commissioners, 168

"Investigation of things," 201 , 209 , 238 n69, 316 , 358 , 363

Investment, 79

Iron industry, 3

Irredentism, 330 , 331 , 333 -34

Irregular grain measures, 373

Irregular taxes, 326

Irrigation, 93 , 97 , 102 , 106 n66, 126 , 366 ;

in New Policies, 144 , 168

Isolationism, 80

J

Japan, 124

Jen jen (delegation to others), 15

Jen-ming, 365

Jen-tsung, 42 , 60 , 216 , 287 -88

Jones, Susan Mann, 126

Ju , 132 , 151 , 158

Judgment, 211

Jurchens, 4 , 80 , 111 , 120 . See also Chin dynasty

K

K'ai-feng, 4 , 100 , 102 , 106 , 109 , 169

K'ai-hsi reign, 333

Kansu corridor, 80

Kao Ming, 213

Kao-tsung, 187 , 289 , 292 , 341 n34

"Keywords" (Williams), 5 ;

Confucian, 10 , 10 n11;

of grain commerce, 298 -99;

of moral obligation, 287 , 298

Khitan, 3 , 80 , 289

Kinship groups, lawsuits within, 371

Kinship structures, 255 . See also Descent groups

K'o Chang-i, 165 n81

Korean statecraft, 357 , 377

Krieger, Leonard, 194

Ku-wen. See "Ancient prose" movement

Ku Yen-wu, 52

Kuan (official): paired with min , 7 , 53 ;

and ssu and kung , 51

Kuang-tsung, 332

Kuang-tung rice, 225 , 226

K'uei. See Shame

Kuhn, Philip, 126

Kung (public), 1 ;

as most basic value, 150 n43;

paired with ssu , 7 , 52 -53;

referring to government, 54 , 55 n81

― 426 ―

Kung-yang commentaries, 196

Kuo charitable estate (Lin-chiang), 278

Kuo-chia (state), 140 ;

paired with t'ien-hsia , 7

Kuomintang, 186

Kusumoto Masatsugu, 379

L

La-tea Act, 96 n42

Labor service, 48

Land: distribution of, 17 -18, 90 , 174 ;

expropriation, 51 ;

inheritance of, 263 -64;

ownership, 89 -90, 256 ;

survey, 169

Land taxes, 20 , 79 n5, 176 , 227

Land tenure, 70 -72, 252 n117

Langlois, John, 36

Language, 5 , 6 , 7 , 13 , 35 , 45 ;

of moral obligation, 287 -89, 292 -93, 298 , 300 , 307 ;

of moral self-cultivation, 34 , 35 ;

of philosophers, 205 ;

of self-interest, 298 -99, 300 , 302 . See also Discourse

Language of interpretation (Pocock), 5 , 10 n11

"Languages" (Pocock), 9 -10, 35 , 287

Lao (burdening), 16

Lao Nap-yin, 43 n65

Lao tzu , 132 , 133 n9

Law, 33 -34, 56 , 70 , 376 . See also Fa

Lawsuits, 371

Learning, 142 , 157 , 165 , 188 , 190 , 339

Learning of the Emperors, 27 n38, 352 , 354 , 357 , 361

Learning of the Emperors (Fan Tsu-yü), 361 , 363

"Learning of the mind," 38 , 354

Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, 354

Learning of the Way. See Tao-hsueh

Legalist writings, 210

Lei Te-jun, 269

Levering, Miriam, 23

Li (principle or pattern), 9 , 165 , 186 ;

in Chu Hsi's thought, 204 ;

source of, 38 , 39

Li (profit), 53 , 281 . See also Profit

Li (ritual), 10 n11, 38

Li Ao, 13 n20

Li Chi, 110

Li chi (Record of ritual), 69 , 204

Li Ch'i, 94 , 98 , 101

Li Hsiao-po, 109 n72

Li Hsin-ch'uan: accounts of local administration, 325 ;

antipathy to Ch'in Kuei and Han T'o-chou, 324 -25;

on bureaucracy and personnel selection, 327 -28;

connections to Szechwan, 314 -15;

emphasis on affairs of Szechwan, 330 ;

emphasis on individual virtue, 329 ;

on fiscal affairs, 326 ;

on history of Tao-hsueh , 29 , 30 , 41 , 45 , 313 , 319 -21;

at Imperial Library, 315 -16;

interest in Classic of Changes , 314 ;

interest in history, 311 , 314 , 317 ;

interest in institutions, 29 , 311 , 322 , 323 -24;

on learning, 317 -21;

life and career of, 311 -12, 314 , 315 -16;

memorial on current conditions, 328 -29, 330 , 334 ;

on military affairs, 330 -34;

on misgovernment, 329 ;

mistrust of plans for reform, 322 ;

and rebellion of Wu Hsi, 332 -33;

recognition of, 313 -14;

on responsibility of emperor, 329 ;

as "statecraft" thinker, 310 ;

statistical data from, 324 ;

and Tao-hsueh movement, 9 , 11 , 12 , 308 , 315 -19, 334 -35;

on taxes, 326 , 329 ;

Tung-ch'ui t'ai-ting lu by, 333 ;

on understanding of history, 319 ;

works of, 312 -13;

writings on Chin, 330 . See also Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Period; Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era; Record of the Way and Its Fate

Li Kou, 10 n11

Li Shun, rebellion of, 94 , 110

Li Shun-ch'en, 311 , 314 n24, 323 n56

Li-tai ming-ch'en tsou i (Anthology of Memorials of Successive Eras), 337

Li Tao-ch'uan, 312 , 315 , 317 -18, 326 , 333

Li T'ao, 311

Li Ting, 109 n72

Li Ts'an, 90

Li-tsung, 313 , 315 , 318

Liang-che circuit, 102 , 114 , 259 , 261 , 262

Liang K'e-chia, 239

Liang Tuan, 118

Liao (state), 3 -4

Liao Kang, 229 n19

Liberal beneficence granaries, 243

Lin charitable estate (Fu-chou), 278

Lin Li, 316

Lineage estates, 25 , 40 . See also Charitable estates; Descent groups

Lineages. See Descent groups

Literary reform, 13 , 59 , 60

Literati: and localism, 191 -92;

role of, 138 , 149 ;

and state school system, 164 . See also Examination system; Shih (gentleman or literatus)

Liu, James T. C., 44 , 131 , 136 , 171 n93

― 427 ―

Liu An-shih, 133 n10

Liu charitable estate (Chien-ning), 262 , 278

Liu charitable estate (Hsin-chou), 261 n23, 265 n45, 278

Liu charitable estate (Lin-chiang), 278

Liu Chih, 118 -19, 171

Liu I, 101

Liu Ju-yü, 223 -24

Liu K'o-chuang, 237

Liu Shu, 151 n49

Liu Sung dynasty, 157 n67

Liu Tsai, 244 , 245 , 261

Liu Tsao, 290

Liu Tso, 96 n43, 102 , 118

Liu Tsung-yuan, 13 n20, 74

Liu Yao, 241 , 242

Liu Yueh, 266 -67

Lo, Winston, 99 , 100 n52, 104 n61, 108 , 134 n10, 165 n81

Lo-yang exiles, 21

Loan eligibility, 236

Local academies, 22 , 23 , 25 n37, 32 , 256 , 265

Local administration, 126 , 127 , 341 n34;

Chen Te-hsiu's precepts for, 369 -71;

Li Hsin-ch'uan's treatment of, 325 -26

Local autonomy, 373

Local communities: as middle level for political action, 24 -25, 26 , 27 , 52 , 54 , 257 n10;

rise in power of, 46

Local elites, 50 , 122 , 125 , 127 , 192 , 244 , 253 , 258 , 275 . See also Literati; Shih

Local notables, moral indifference of, 234 -35

Localism: of Chu Hsi, 253 -54;

of gentry, 31 , 127 ;

in Southern Sung, 4 , 50 , 255 -56;

and statecraft thought, 364 . See also Community; Local communities

Localist strategies, 255 -56, 257

Lou charitable estate (Ming-chou), 258 -60, 261 , 263 , 267 , 278

Lou Ch'ü, 259

Lou I, 258

Lou Shou, 258 -59, 263

Lou Yueh, 258 , 268 ;

praise of Li Hsin-ch'uan, 311 n6, 314

Lou Yü, 258

Loyalty, 55

Lu, defense of, 63 , 64 , 65

Lu charitable estate (Wu-chou), 278

Lu Chiu-shao, 239

Lu Chiu-yuan, 1 , 28 n39, 39 , 268 ;

on community granaries, 237 , 239 ;

on "putting the world in order," 55 , 56 n82

Lu clan, 64

Lu Hsin, 84 n15

Lu Shih-min, 99 n51, 101 , 103 , 103 n59

Lu Tien, 133 n10

Lu Yü, 263

Lü, Empress, 64

Lü Ch'ien-chü, 197

Lü Hui-ch'ing, 85 n17, 97 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 171 n92

Lü I-chien, 141 n20

Lü Kung-chu, 43

Lü Sheng-ch'ing, 109 n73

Lü Ta-chün, 23 -24, 268

Lü T'ao, 98 , 118 , 119 , 120

Lü Tsu-ch'ien: criticism of Chu Hsi's community granaries, 236 ;

emphasis on history, 198 , 199 n29;

as institutionalist and Tao-hsueh thinker, 20 -21;

mentioned, 218 , 244 ;

and Southern Sung statecraft, 57 ;

Ta-shih chi by, 199

Lü Wen-ch'ing, 102

M

Ma Jung, 65 -66

Ma Tuan-lin, 245 -46, 336 n3

McMullen, David, 13 , 46 -47

Managing wealth, 131 , 170 , 173 , 178 -79

Manchuria, 4

Manchus, 80 n6

Mao charitable estate (Mei-chou), 278

Market economy, 3 , 77 , 233 , 374 . See also Commerce; Famine relief, market approach to

Marriage, 4 , 125 , 262 n35;

expenses, 260 , 262 , 265 , 268 ;

networks, 275

Marxist historiography, 130 , 131 n4

Memorial system, 29 , 30

Memorials, language of, 54

Mendus, 40 , 74 , 132 , 133 n9, 133 n10, 198 , 212 , 365 ;

on agriculture, 322 ;

Chu Hsi on, 206 , 210 ;

on ch'üan , 210 ;

debate with Kao Tzu on human nature, 300 ;

doctrine of limiting desires, 354 ;

on moral obligation, 288 -89;

rejection of profit, 53 ;

on social order and economic welfare, 275 ;

and well-field system, 271

Mercantilism, 124 , 125 , 126

Merchants, 301 , 375

Meridian, 214 n89

Metallurgy, 80

Metaphysics, 9 , 12 , 57

Military, corruption in, 333 -34

Military affairs, 330 -34

― 428 ―

Military strategy, 59 , 62 , 70 , 71 -72, 75

Military training, 176 n114

Military weakness, 18 , 48 , 81

Militia, 168 , 176 . See also Pao-chia policy

Miller, Page, 205 n58

Min (the people), 53 , 139 , 140 , 188 ;

contrasted with shih , 222 ;

paired with kuan , 7

Min kingdom, 247

Mind, 10 n11, 38 -39

Mind-and-heart, 354 , 365

Ming-chou, charitable estates in, 261 -62, 267 -68, 275 . See also Lou charitable estate

Ming dynasty, 45 , 338 , 349 , 363 ;

examination system, 192 ;

fall of, 80 n6;

financial administration, 122 ;

relation of emperor to officials in, 42 n61;

relationship between state and society in, 187

Ming-shah tea trade, 96 n43

Ming statecraft, 337 , 379 ;

influence of Chen Te-hsiu on, 377 -79

Ming T'ai-tsu, 379

Mining, 80

Ministerial authority, 43 , 44

Ministry of Finance, 108

Mirrors, 204 -6, 209 , 313

Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Period (Li Hsin-ch'uan), 313 , 315 , 316 , 334 , 335 ;

accounts of Tao-hsueh in, 321 ;

bibliographical note to, 330 ;

on border defense, 333 ;

criticism of state, 329 ;

as handbook of government, 323 ;

treatment of local government, 325 ;

on war with Chin, 330 , 331

Miura Kunio, 208 n68

Momigliano, Arnaldo, 213

Monastic wealth, 247 -48

Monetary economy, 3

Mongols, 4 , 328 , 334 , 337 , 347 . See also Yuan dynasty

Monopsony, 95 , 119 . See also Szechwan, tea trade; Tea monopoly

"Moral conduct," 138

Moral cultivation, 22 , 28 , 359 . See also Self-cultivation

Moral entrepreneurship, 122

Moral obligation, and famine relief, 280 -81, 286 , 298 , 299 , 301 , 307 , 309

Moral responsibility: of administrators, 290 -91;

of emperor, 287 -88, 292

Moral transformation, 190 , 222

Morality, 19 , 31

"Moralization of politics," 349 -50, 352 , 356 , 363 , 376 ;

and Ming statecraft, 379

Morohashi Tetsuji, 354 n21

Mou Tzu-ts'ai, 339

Moulder, Frances, 124 , 125

Munro, Donald, 38 , 205 n60

Music, 163 , 165

Mutual dependency, 281

N

Naito Torajiro, 42 , 202 n45

Nakai, Kate, 204 n55

National University, 169 , 173

"Natural" custom, 18

Natural desires (yü ), 16 , 52

Naval technology, 80

Neo-Confucianism, 21 , 28 , 257 , 318 , 320 ;

as hybrid, 361 ;

Korean, 351 -52, 357 ;

late imperial, 254 ;

and the "moralization of politics," 349 -50, 356 ;

reformist use of, 375 -76;

use of term, 11 . See also Learning of the Emperors; Tao-hsueh

Neo-Taoism, 157 n67, 323

New laws. See New Policies

New Policies: administrative model, 99 -100;

and agricultural production, 144 ;

blamed for fall of Northern Sung, 344 ;

chronology of, 168 -69;

creation of new fiscal agencies, 100 ;

and economic activism, 76 -77, 78 , 82 , 99 , 135 -36;

educational reforms, 145 , 190 ;

Higashi's account of, 130 n2;

launching of, 84 n16, 85 ;

and mercantilism, 125 ;

military strategy, 93 ;

opposition to, 94 , 103 , 118 , 119 , 187 , 221 , 251 (see also Ssu-ma Kuang);

origins of, 81 ;

as program for larger ends, 168 ;

rescission of, 180 -81;

and rural debt, 90 ;

and staffing of posts, 101 ;

supporters of, 141 n20;

and suppression of engrossers, 175 . See also Finance Planning Commission; Green Sprouts policy; Tea and horse trade; Wang An-shih

New Text school (Han), 62

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 194

Ning-tsung, 283

Nivison, David, 43 -44, 45

Normal-purchase estates, 269 -70

Northern Sung, 3 , 12 , 14 , 17 , 21 , 49 -50;

defined, 3 ;

fall of, 276 , 344 ;

financial apparatus, 78 -79, 122 . See also Centralism

Numerology, 132 , 133 n9

― 429 ―

Obligatory-service system, 184

Office for the Management of Frontier Finances, 100

Office of Expenditure Reductions, 83

Officials: abuses by, 373 -74;

career patterns of, 324 ;

employment of, 161 -62;

prove-nance of, 129 ;

recommendation system for, 180 ;

recruitment of, 23 , 327 ;

resignation in protest, 343 ;

salaries of, 91 , 130 , 161 , 173 ;

selection of, 327 -28. See also Corruption; Promotion

Ogyu Sorai, 200

Olsson, Carl, 30

"Ordering/managing the age," 56 n82, 350

"Ordering the world," 1 , 56 , 254 , 317 ;

and charitable estates, 257 , 258 ;

and Ming statecraft, 379 ;

and Neo-Confucianism, 350 , 352 . See also Ching shih ; Statecraft

Organizations, success of, 110 -11

Original Price Estate, 269 n66

Orphans, 248 , 260 n22, 261 . See also Child abandonment

Orthodoxy. See Cultural orthodoxy; Tao-t'ung

Ou-yang Hsiu: and ancient style movement, 146 ;

on apocryphal books, 338 ;

attack on Feng Tao, 188 ;

campaign for Fan Chung-yen, 139 ;

defense of factions, 44 , 45 , 150 , 343 ;

on delegation of power, 43 ;

exile of, 60 -61;

on human values, 136 , 137 ;

"On Fundamentals," 14 -16, 39 , 43 , 53 , 61 , 139 , 140 n18;

against Green Sprouts policies, 108 , 112 n76, 118 ;

position on Council of State, 140 ;

on public and private, 53 ;

reform initiatives of, 81 ;

role in literary and examination reforms, 60 -61;

on role of state, 14 -16;

and Su Hsun, 59 , 60 -61;

on timelessness of ancient models, 39

Ou-yang Shou-tao, 229 n19

Owner households, 89 , 90 n26, 92

P

Pan Ku, 198

P'ang Chi, 141 , 141 n19, 141 n20, 150 n43

Pao-chia policy: described, 168 -69;

as model for community compacts, 23 -24;

Ssu-ma Kuang's criticism of, 179 ;

and Sung state-building, 6 , 49 ;

and tax collection, 176 ;

in Wang An-shih's reforms, 82

Pao-wu system, 231 ,235, 236 , 373 , 374

Peasantry, 90 , 120 . See also Rural poverty

Pen lun. See Ou-yang Hsiu, "On Fundamentals"

Penal system, 372 -73

P'eng-chou tea producers, 120

People's Republic of China, historiography of, 135 , 187 . See also Marxist historiography

Peterson, Charles, 334

Pettifogging, 126

Philanthropy, 266 -67, 274 , 336

Philosophy, 5 ;

and history, 193 , 194 -95

Phronesis, 209

Pi charitable estate (Su-chou), 278

P'ing-hsiang, community granary system in, 244

Pocock, J.G.A.: language of interpretation, 5 ;

notion of "languages," 9 -10, 35 , 287 ;

on term "statecraft," 56

Poetry, 139

Polarity, in Sung sociopolitical argument, 35 , 46 , 129

Policing. See Pao-chia policy

Political activism, 22 . See also Localism

Political hierarchy, 131

Political thought, 12 , 35 . See also Chen Te-hsiu; Chu Hsi; Li Hsin-ch'uan; Ou-yang Hsiu; Ssu-ma Kuang; Su Hsun; Tung Wei; Wei Liao-weng

Political unity, 148 -49, 152

Polybius, 204 n53

Population growth, 1 , 2 , 3 , 48 , 50

Porcelain industry, 3

Postal communications, 324

"Praise and blame," 131 n7, 132 , 203 , 325

Prime ministers, 43 -44. See also Chief councillors

Printing, 3

Private interests, 34 , 89 , 96 , 128 , 174 , 186 ;

Ssu-ma Kuang's defense of, 149 , 150 , 184 ;

Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang on, 82 , 184 . See also Public and private interests

Private sector, growth of, 47 , 76

Profit, 1 n1, 53 , 292 , 299 -300, 301 . See also Ssu

Promotion, 155 , 166 , 328

Prose, 60 , 61 , 139 . See also "Ancient prose" movement

"Provisioning," 124 , 125 , 126 -27

P'u Tsung-meng, 109 n73

P'u Tsung-min, 94 , 98 , 103

Public and private interests, 33 , 54 ;

in Ch'ing, 126 ;

opposing views of Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang on, 32 , 82 ;

Ssu-

― 430 ―

Public and private interests (cont .)

ma's view of, 18 , 136 , 149 -50;

in Sung, 47 , 52 -53. See also Private interests

"Public space" (Rankin), 2 , 49 -50, 51 -52, 54 , 58

Public sphere, 51 -52, 54 , 55 n81, 58

Public-spiritedness. See Kung

Public welfare institutions, 250 . See also Famine relief

Punishment, 163

Pure Land Buddhism, 247

Pure Talk, 323

R

Rankin, Mary, 49 -50, 51 -52, 54 , 55 n81, 58

Record of Examinations into the Past (Ssu-ma Kuang), 157

Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era (Li Hsin-ch'uan), 310 , 313 -14

Record of the Way and Its Fate (Li Hsin-ch'uan), 313 , 315 , 317 , 321 ;

as call to action, 322 ;

concern with government institutions in, 326 , 328 ;

preface to, 318 -20

Reflections on Things at Hand (Chu Hsi), 351 , 360 , 361 n43

Reform, 14 , 77 , 82 ;

compared with remedial-ism, 344 ;

failure of, 276 . See also Literary reform; New Policies

Reformism, 21 , 375 -76

Refugees, 289

Regional administration, 120 n95, 121 . See also Decentralization; Ever-Normal Granary intendants

Regional armies, 20

Regional military governors, 47

"Relief grants," 294

"Relief loans," 294

"Relief sales," 294 , 295 , 299 , 304

Remedialism, 344 , 345 , 348

Rent revolts, 227

Restoration movement, 40 , 103 , 118 , 119 , 311 n7

Revenue, 1 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 20 , 49 , 79 , 112 ;

ts'ai , 15

Review Bureau, 29 , 345

Revolt of the Seven Kingdoms, 203

Rice, 3 , 259 , 260 , 329

Rice prices, 224 -26, 228 , 295 -97, 303 , 306 -7, 374

Rice trade, 296

Rites, 337 n4. See also Ritual

Rites of Chou : contaminated by later materials, 338 ;

integration of state and society in, 249 , 251 -52;

as model for institutional reform, 22 , 253 ;

official commentaries on, 169 ;

as Wang An-shih's authoritative text, 38 , 39 , 73 , 96 , 131 , 253 ;

Wang Anshih's commentary on, 131 , 181 , 186 , 218

Ritual: authority of, 42 , 73 ;

and custom, 69 ;

in methods of sages, 163 ;

role of, in cultural transformation, 16 ;

role of, in sustaining relations of authority, 155 ;

role of state in, 14 ;

rules of, 25 n36, 158 n70;

in true learning, 165

"Ritual action" (li ), 38

Ruler: conduct of, 153 -54, 158 -59, 352 ;

mind of, 350 ;

moral responsibility of, 287 -89;

and ruled, 222 ;

self-cultivation by, 352

Rulership, 358 , 360 , 379 ;

Chen Te-hsiu on, 363 , 376 ;

Chu Hsi on, 351 , 362 , 363 , 376 ;

Fan Tsu-yü on, 362 , 363

Rural administration: tu-pao system, 231 ;

paowu system, 231 , 235 , 236

Rural credit, 101 , 122 , 175 , 224 . See also Green Sprouts policy

Rural debt. See Debt

Rural economy, 192 , 222

Rural poverty, 115 , 116 -17. See also Subsistence crisis

Rural property owners, 233

S

Sacrifices, 248

Saeki Tomi, 136

Sage-kings, 14 -16, 42 , 222

Sagehood, 148 -49

Sages, 69 , 74 , 142 , 150 , 164 ;

four methods of, 163 ;

Su Hsun on, 65 , 66 , 69

Salt, regulation of, 88 , 118

Salt, Shensi, 94 , 107

Salt administration, 108 , 108 -9n72

Salt industry, 101

Salt monopoly, 78 , 103

Salt smuggling, 226 , 227

San-kuo chih , 198

Sang Hung-yang, 167

Sariti, Anthony, 43 , 135 , 158

Schirokauer, Conrad, 41 , 122 , 351

Schlesinger, Arthur, 215 n92

Scholar-officials, 130 ;

and emperor, 43 , 340 . See also Literati; Shih (gentleman or literatus)

Schools, 22 -23, 126 , 144 -45, 164 , 190 , 316 , 372 . See also Charitable schools

― 431 ―

Schuchman, Paul, 209

Secretariat, 29 , 168 , 345

Secretariat-Chancellery, 108 , 114

Self-cultivation, 13 , 22 , 41 , 213 , 222 , 352 , 358 . See also Chu Hsi; Moral cultivation

Self-interest, 1 n1, 18 , 54 . See also Private interests

Self-regulation, 286 , 295 , 299

Service exemption, 87 , 116 , 176

Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, 323

Shame, 287 , 293 , 298 , 299 , 307

Shan-chou, 129 , 130 n2

Shang-kuan Chün, 116 n88, 117

Shang Yang, 203

Shao-hsing: charitable estates in, 267 , 269 ;

community granary system in, 243

Shao Po-wen, 56 n82

Shao Yung, 11 n12, 22 , 318 ;

on history, 194 n5, 196 ;

Huang-chi ching-shih shu , 56 n82

Sharecroppers, 234

She (community), 54

She county (Hui-chou), 367 , 368

She tribesmen, 227

She-ts'ang. See Community granaries

Shen-hsi: border problems in, 141 n20;

economy linked to Szechwan's, 109 -10;

fiscal intendant of, 88 ;

guest merchants, 94 ;

salt, 94 , 107 ;

tea trade, 95 , 95 n42, 98 , 100 , 109 -10, 119 ;

value of currency of, 84

Sheri Huan, 268

Shen Kua, 109 n73, 193 n1

Shen-tsung: accession of, 82 ;

blamed for New Policies, 181 ;

and bureaucracy, 86 -87, 218 ;

and creation of Finance Planning Commission, 85 ;

and famine, 112 n76;

and frontier grain supplies, 84 ;

and Green Sprouts policy, 117 ;

and moral responsibility of emperor, 288 ;

and revenue crisis, 83 , 96 ;

and Ssu-ma Kuang, 160 , 166 , 205 ;

and Wang An-shih's advice, 152

Sheng-ts'ang granaries, 91

Shih (affairs), 201

Shih (circumstances), 62

Shih (gentleman or literatus): change in meaning of, 138 -39;

and charitable estates, 257 , 271 -72;

dependence of, on local society, 192 ;

education and employment of, 160 -62;

hereditary, 188 , 275 ;

new and old, 189 -90;

without official position, 191 -92;

opposition to New Policies, 187 ;

political and social meanings of, 188 ;

proper role of, 13 -14, 185 ;

role of learning for, 188 -90;

and support for ruler, 159 ;

translated as "patrician," 222 . See also Elites; Gentleman, role of; Literati

Shih charitable estate (Ch'eng-tu), 272

Shih charitable estate (T'ai-chou), 260 n22, 266 , 278

Shih chi (Ssu-ma Ch'ien), 63 , 202 , 203

Skih ching , 132 , 169 , 197 , 204

Shih Hao, 241 n79, 267 -68, 275 , 316

Shih Mi-chien, 243

Shih Mi-yuan, 29 , 30 , 44 , 45 , 331 , 336 n1, 343 -44

Shih-ta-fu , 322 -23. See also Local elites; Shih (gentleman or literatus)

Shih Tun, 266

Shimizu Kiyoshi, 146 n33

Shimizu Morimitsu, 267

Shu (commoners), 139 , 188

Shu charitable estate (Chi-chou), 262 , 278

Shu charitable estate (Lung-hsing), 278

Shu ching , 65 , 68 , 204 ;

K'ung An-kuo commentary, 204

Shu-lun (Su Hsun), 68 , 69

Shu-yuan (academy), 22 , 256 . See also Local academies

Shun (sage), 68 , 74 , 194 , 208

Silk, 94 , 107

Simplicity (chien ), 16

Six arts, 220

Six Dynasties, 90

Skinner, G. William, 2 -3, 46 , 48 , 76

Slave trade, 227

Smith, Paul, 136

Smuggling laws, 122 n99

Social contracts, 23

Social harmony, 275

Social history, 2 , 4

Social relationships, 25 n36, 32 , 137 , 234 , 249 -50

Social welfare, 97 , 250 . See also Community granaries; Foundling granaries

Society, relation of state to: meaningfulness of phrase, 6 -7;

in Northern and Southern Sung, 26 , 31 , 48 , 50 ;

in the People's Republic of China, 187 ;

political theory on, 126 -27;

role of texts in, 131 ;

from Southern Sung on, 187 ;

Sung view of, 2 , 57 ;

Wang An-shih's and Ssu-ma Kuang's views of, 140 , 170 , 182 , 183 -84

"Society," use of term, 5 , 6 , 7 , 140 . See also T'ien-hsia

Sogabe Shizuo, 81

― 432 ―

Soldiers, 14 , 20

South Sea trade, 3

Southern Sung: allegiance to Wang An-shih line, 50 -51;

analogy to Chin, 323 ;

and disintegration of bureaucratic elite, 125 ;

institutional innovation in, 22 -23;

institu-tionalists, 20 -21;

inward turn in, 12 -13, 21 -22, 38 ;

local-level action in, 25 , 26 -27;

and loss of faith in state activism, 19 -20;

office holding in, 104 n61;

as pivotal time in social and political discourse, 58 ;

and return to centralist concerns, 28 ;

revenue-collection strategies in, 20 ;

T'ang models for, 13 n20

Southerners, 3

Spring and Autumn Annals : as authoritative text, 37 -38;

ch'üan in, 212 ;

as classic and history, 197 ;

commentators on, 10 n11, 14 ;

events in, 199 ;

as guide to reform, 14 ;

Kung-yang commentary , 196 , 212 ;

mentioned, 206 ;

praise and blame in, 203 ;

as Ssu-ma Kuang's authoritative text, 131

Spring and Autumn period, 63 , 291

"Spurious learning" prohibition, 330 , 331 . See also Tao-hsueh , prohibition of

Ssu (private): negative connotations of, 52 ;

paired with kung , 7 , 52 -53;

positive connotations of, 53 -54. See also Private interests; Public and private interests

Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 167 , 198 ;

metaphor of water flowing downward, 299 -300;

Shih chi , 63 ;

use of history, 39 n57, 41

Ssu-ma Ch'ih, 130

Ssu-ma Kuang: analogy between the state and a building, 152 , 179 -80;

and ancient style, 18 , 134 , 142 n21, 146 -51, 151 n48;

appointment to Council of State, 171 ;

attack on idealizing of antiquity, 147 ;

attitude toward texts, 134 ;

"Be Careful about Habits," 155 ;

belief in institutions, 138 ;

on bureaucracy, 18 , 19 , 135 , 156 , 180 ;

career of, 130 , 140 , 141 n19, 166 , 166 n83;

Chu Hsi's criticism of, 202 -3;

compared to Ch'en Liang, 33 ;

compared to Tung Wei, 308 ;

compared to Wang An-shih, 31 , 32 ;

as conservative, 129 , 135 , 185 ;

criticism of Green Sprouts policy, 97 , 115 , 115 -16n86, 117 , 178 ;

criticism of pao-chia policy, 179 ;

criticism of New Policies, 166 ;

criticism of Wang An-shih, 128 , 169 , 177 -81;

debate with Wang An-shih, 167 ;

defense of factions, 44 , 150 ;

defense of private interests, 53 , 149 , 150 , 177 ;

defense of Rites of Chou , 131 ;

disagreement with Wang An-shih, 166 , 171 ;

on dynasty's founders, 163 ;

early essays of, 146 -47;

on education and examination system, 155 , 180 , 189 ;

exile in Lo-yang, 21 -22;

on famine relief, 228 -29;

on filial piety, 189 ;

on fiscal affairs, 156 ;

"Five Guidelines" of, 152 ;

on foreign policy, 135 , 156 , 177 , 180 ;

and hierarchy of authority , 155 , 158 , 177 , 182 ;

on hierarchy of social relationships, 137 ;

as historian, 129 , 151 , 152 ;

historical analogism of, 132 , 251 ;

as idealist, 137 n15;

on importance of correct administration, 154 ;

influence on thirteenth-century Tao-hsueh thinkers, 30 -31;

on learning from history, 157 ;

in Li Tao-ch'uan's history of Tao-hsueh , 320 , 321 ;

and literary matters, 134 ;

on managing wealth, 178 -79;

as materialist, 136 , 137 n15;

mentioned, 19 n26, 32 , 52 , 100 n53;

as moralist, 136 , 137 n15;

northern origins of, 129 -30;

"On Wealth and Profit," 156 ;

patrons of, 141 ;

philosophical orientation of, 136 -37;

political advice of, 152 -55;

on political unity, 148 -49, 152 ;

political vision of, 135 , 183 -84;

on poor and wealthy, 115 , 135 , 178 , 185 , 186 ;

PRC view of, 135 ;

on public and private, 18 , 32 , 82 , 136 , 149 -50, 151 n45, 184 ;

on reform, 18 , 81 ;

and reform of promotion system, 166 ;

relationship with Ou-yang Hsiu, 146 n34;

as representative of large landlords, 130 , 131 n4;

and rescission of New Policies, 180 -81;

resignation in protest of Green Sprouts policy, 117 -18, 118 n91;

on ruler, 43 , 153 -54, 158 -59;

as scholar of Spring and Autumn Annals , 131 ;

spiritual interests of, 182 ;

on state, 16 , 18 -19, 21 , 27 , 131 , 148 , 150 , 182 , 186 ;

on taxes, 116 , 156 ;

and timelessness of history, 39 , 181 ;

and twelfth-century literati, 190 , 192 ;

use of history by, 251 n117;

view of commercialization, 185 , 186 , 192 ;

view of deficit crisis, 83 ;

view of Ju, 146 ;

writings of, 132 n8, 132 -33n9, 146 -51, 182 . See also Chronological Charts; Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government

Ssu-nung-ssu projects, 97

State: ancient, 14 -15;

and basis for proper social life, 15 ;

challenges to, 1 ;

decline in

― 433 ―

power of, 2 -3, 46 , 50 ;

defined, 140 ;

and elites, 126 -27;

as keyword, 5 ;

options of, 344 ;

translation for kuo-chia , 7 ;

unity in model of, 185 -86;

use of term, 6 , 7 . See also Society, relation of state to; State activism

State activism, 12 -13, 15 , 16 , 21 , 78 , 128 , 135 , 221 -22. See also Economic activism

State-building: in Europe, 124 ;

in Northern Sung, 49 -50

State Trade Agency, 85 , 86 , 93

State trade policy, 93

Statecraft, 129 n1, 338 , 340 ;

and history, 196 ;

and Learning of the Emperors, 361 ;

Ming and Ch'ing, 36 , 52 , 55 -57, 129 n1, 310 ;

significance of term, 2 ;

Su Hsun's model of, 67 ;

thwarted, 347 -48;

as utilitarian approach, 349

Statecraft school, 56 , 57

Statecraft studies, 33 , 336 n3

Steel industry, 3

"Stem majesty" (wei ), 67

Stone Drum academy, 265

Su Ch'e, 61 , 85 n17, 91 , 118 -19, 197

Su-chou: charitable estates in, 261 , 262 ;

as residence of Wei Liao-weng, 347

Su Hsun: assessment of Green Sprouts policy, 116 ;

on authority of history, 65 -66;

biographical information on, 59 ;

on ch'üan and shih , 62 ;

Ch'üan-shu by, 59 ;

and contingency, 64 ;

on custom, 10 n11, 68 -69;

essays of, 59 -60, 65 -66, 68 , 69 , 75 ;

on factions, 44 ;

Heng-lun by, 56 , 69 ;

as institution builder, 18 ;

on institutions and politics, 67 -68;

"Judging the Situation," 65 , 66 , 68 , 69 , 72 ;

on land institutions, 17 -18, 70 -72;

on military, 18 , 70 , 71 -72;

on need for sage, 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 ;

opposition to coercion, 67 , 72 ;

relationship with Ou-yang Hsiu, 60 -61;

on separation of state from society, 17 ;

statecraft model of, 67 ;

statecraft writing of, 59 ;

on strategy, 63 -65, 67 ;

on taxation, 72 ;

on time and continuity, 74 ;

view of history, 39 ;

view of learning, 138

Su Shih, 61 , 138 , 294 -95

Subsistence crisis, 222 , 223 -27

Substance and function, 358 ;

in Chen Tehsiu's work, 361 , 379 ;

distinction rejected by Wei Liao-weng, 340

Sui dynasty, 3

Sun charitable estate (Chi-chou), 261 , 278

Sun Ch'un-nien, 261

Sun Fu, 10 n11, 14 , 37 , 61 , 131 n7

Sun Sheng, 47 -48

Sun Ta-ya, 326

Sung history, Tao-hsueh chapters of, 11

Sung Hsiang, 141 n20

Sung Jo-shui, 239

"Sung learning," 13 , 28 , 36 , 57 ,

Sung-Yuan hsueh-an (Huang Tsung-hsi), 321

Superintendency of State Trade, 93

Superintendency for Tea and Horses. See Tea and Horse Agency

Superior households, 233 , 234 -35, 250

Surangama Sutra, 133 n9

Szechwan: 94 , 105 , 109 -11;

and Li Hsin-ch'uan, 311 , 313 n17, 314 , 326 ;

and rebellion of Wu Hsi, 332 -33;

silk, 107 ;

tea trade, 93 , 94 -95, 98 , 99 , 107 -8, 118 , 119 , 120 ;

and war with Chin, 331

Szechwan tea trade, 93 , 94 -95, 98 , 99 , 107 -8, 118 , 119 , 120

T

Ta-hsueh . See Great Learning

Ta-hsueh yen-i . See Extended Meaning of the Great Learning

Ta-hui, 23 , 24 n35

T'ai-tsu, 215

Talent, 161

T'ang, King, 208

T'ang dynasty: Buddhism, 247 ;

civil service examinations in, 3 ;

economic activism in, 82 ;

economic expansion in, 78 ;

fiscal institutions in, 47 , 78 , 81 ;

inability to restore ritual in, 155 ;

inadequacies of, 201 ;

intellectual history of, 46 ;

intellectual life of, 13 n20;

land ownership in, 90 ;

and models for "ancient style" writing, 139 ;

officials, 13 n20;

penal code, 70 ;

poetry, 133 ;

political thought in, 13 ;

prose, 60 , 61 ;

role of state in, 2 , 3 , 27 ;

rulers of, 159 n70;

tax system, 110 , 174

T'ang-Sung transition, 3 , 46 -47

T'ang T'ai-tsung, 214 , 215 ;

fratricide of, 212 ;

and moral obligation of ruler, 289 , 290

Tanguts, 80 , 81 , 120 , 156

Tao. See Way, the

Tao-hsueh : as answer to policy problems, 334 -35;

canonical texts of, 38 ;

and change in nature of shih , 190 ;

and classical revival-ism, 251 ;

common terminology of, 9 , 10 ;

discourse on public and private, 52 -53;

as dominant intellectual current, 35 ;

as fac-

― 434 ―

Tao-hsueh (cont.)

tion, 45 ;

as "False Learning," 284 ;

forerunners of, 137 ;

ideal of sagehood in, 250 ;

and imperial authority, 44 ;

influence of Buddhism in, 24 n35;

influence on, of Wang An-shih and Ssu-ma Kuang, 190 ;

institutional-reformist side of, 22 , 57 -58;

interest in self-cultivation over statecraft, 222 ;

lack of influence on policy, 122 ;

and language of moral responsibility, 34 , 307 -8;

and "learning of the mind," 38 ;

under Li-tsung, 315 ;

mentioned, 192 , 236 ;

and moral transformation, 33 ;

and orthodox transmission, 11 , 12 ;

and political concerns, 28 , 30 -31, 334 -35;

program of, 317 -18;

prohibition of, 315 , 316 , 317 -18, 320 , 321 ;

readings of term, 10 -12;

set apart from institutionalist camp, 20 -21;

shift toward, 187 ;

and "statecraft school," 57 ;

variation in, 308 . See also Chu Hsi; Li Hsin-ch'uan, on history of Tao-hsueh ; "Spurious learning" prohibition

Tao-hsueh ch'i ("false moralism"), 12 n17, 41

Tao ming lu . See Record of the Way and Its Fate

Tao te chen ching lun , 133 n9

Tao-t'ung (Han Yü), 11 , 61 , 207 , 351

T'ao River Valley, 93

T'ao Yuan-ming, 202

Taoism, 61 , 316

Taoist canon, 133 n9

Tax collection: Chen Te-hsiu's views on, 367 -68, 373 ;

and pao-chia system, 169 , 176

Tax farming, 126

Tax revenues, 79 , 90

Taxation, 72 , 116 , 156 , 176 , 326 , 329 , 367 -68, 373 ;

excessive, 81 , 369 ;

and famine relief, 309 ;

in New Policies, 169

Taxes: agricultural, 78 , 156 ;

cash, 179 ;

commercial, 77 -79;

inequitable exchange rates for, 116 ;

irregular, 326 ;

land, 20 , 79 n5, 176 , 227 , 229 ;

Ming and Ch'ing, 79 , 123 ;

poll, 227 ;

T'ang, 47 , 110 , 174 ;

on tea, 121 -22. See also Hired Service policy

Te (virtue), 287

Tea, 3 , 19 n26, 98 , 121 -22, 119 ;

southeastern, 81 n7, 108 , 111 , 120 . See also Tea and Horse Agency; Tea and horse trade; Tea markets; Tea monopoly

Tea-guild magnates, 86

Tea and Horse Agency: abuses of, 119 ;

attempts to dismantle, 96 n43;

autonomy of, 105 , 107 -8, 110 -11;

and bureaucratic entrepreneurship, 89 , 107 -8, 109 , 120 ;

centralization of control, 121 ;

decline in productivity of, 120 -21;

dominant position of, 101 ;

expansion of operations, 107 -8;

incentive system, 98 -99;

loss of extraregional markets, 120 ;

opponents of, 118 -19;

organizational success of, 111 ;

pressure on, from revenue quotas, 121 -22;

silencing of critics, 118 ;

as sole purchaser of Szechwanese tea, 95 ;

during Southern Sung, 120 -21;

transition to revenue-producing agency, 98

Tea and Horse intendants, 98 , 100 , 101 -5, 107

Tea and horse trade, 93 , 94 n40, 98 -99, 100 , 111 , 119

Tea Market Agency, 95 n42

Tea markets, 95 , 96 n42, 99 , 107 -8, 111

Tea monopoly, 78 , 81 , 96 , 118 -19

Tea plantations, 122

Technology, 3 , 80 , 125

Tenants, 90 , 234 , 250 , 301

Teraji Jun, 136

Textiles, 107 , 118

Texts, 9 , 38 , 122 , 131 , 134 , 142 -43

Thompson, James, 110 -11

Three Bonds, 214

Three Dynasties, 201 , 207 , 252 n117, 272 , 274

Ti-hsueh. See Learning of the Emperors

T'i (substance) and yung (application), 197 . See also Substance and function

Tibet, 81 , 93 , 95

T'ien Ch'ang, 63 , 64

T'ien-hsia , 14 , 140 , 144 ;

paired with kuo-chia , 7

T'ien K'uang, 60

T'ien-ti , 38 . See also Heaven-and-Earth

Tillman, Hoyt, 8 , 11 , 21 , 33 , 45 , 53 , 201 n41, 202

Timelessness, 39 , 158 , 181 ;

in Chu Hsi's thought, 199 , 208

T'ing prefecture, 227

Tithing policy. See Pao-chia policy

Titles, 14

Torture, 372

Trade. See Government Trading Policy; Tea and horse trade

Translation, 5 -6, 7 , 10 n11, 56 ;

of term Tao-hsueh , 10 -12

Transmission of the Way. See Tao-t'ung

Transportation, 124

Tribute Transport and Distribution Act, 86

― 435 ―

Ts'ai-chien chü (Office of Expenditure Reductions), 83

Ts'ai Ching, 49 , 108 , 111 , 222 , 319

Ts'ai Ch'ueh, 104 , 109 n72

Tsan-ning (monk), 246

Ts'ao Ts'an, 366

Tseng Kung, 142 , 142 n21, 165

Tseng Kung-liang, 117 , 118

Tsinghai, 81

Tso-chuan , 196 , 199 , 365

Tsung , 272 -73. See also Descent groups

Tsung-ling-so (directorates-general), 20

Tsung Wei, 316

Tu Ju-hui, 70

Tu-pao system, 231

Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror , 205

T'un-tien (garrison), 71 -72

Tung charitable estate (Mei-chou), 278

Tung Chung-shu, 352

Tung Wei: academic forebears, 292 ;

affinity with Chu Hsi's thought, 283 , 284 ;

A Book for Relieving Famine and Reviving the People , 230 , 281 -82, 283 -85, 307 , 374 ;

compared with Huang Chen, 31 , 34 -35;

compared with Huang Chen and Chu Hsi, 282 , 295 , 302 ;

compared with Ssu-ma Kuang, 34 , 308 ;

enthusiasm for community granaries, 234 n45, 309 ;

on Ever-Normal Granaries, 292 ;

on grain commerce, 233 , 291 , 296 , 306 ;

influence on Huang Chen, 307 ;

intellectual background of, 282 -83;

and language of Tao-hsueh , 10 , 34 ;

life and career of, 282 ;

market approach to famine relief, 115 , 293 , 294 -95, 297 , 298 -99, 309 ;

on moral responsibility of officials, 287 -90, 292 , 298 , 302 ;

on persuasion of merchants, 297 , 301 ;

principles of famine relief, 284 , 285 -87, 290 ;

relation to Tao-hsueh circle, 307 -8;

on role of private households in famine relief, 297 -99, 300 ;

view of commerce, 48 , 301 -2, 309 ;

view of profit, 34 , 53 , 299 -300

Twice-a-Year land tax, 227 , 229

Twitchett, Denis, 76 , 125 , 255 ;

on T'ang fiscal institutions, 47 , 78 , 78 n3

Tzu-ch'an, 365

Tzu-chih t'ung-chien . See Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government

Tzu-chih t'ung-chien kang-mu (Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror), 200 , 310 -11, 378

Tzu-kung, 63 , 64

Tzu shuo . See Explanations for Characters

Tzu-ssu, 198 , 207

U

Übelhör, Monika, 23 , 24

Umehara Kaoru, 130

Unity, 185 -86

Universal brotherhood, 374 , 375

Universal Charity Granary, 91

Urban population, 47 -48, 168 , 250 n113

Urbanization, 48 , 79 n5

"Urging sharing," 281,295 , 297 , 300 , 302 , 306 ;

in Chu Hsi's program, 303 -4

Utilitarianism, 20 -21, 198 , 207 , 222 , 252 , 337 , 349 . See also Ch'en Liang

V

Vagrancy, 112 n76

Viceroys, 111 , 120 n95, 121

Vimalakirti Sutra, 133 n9

Virtue, 287

Voluntary associations, 24 -6, 325 -26

Von Glahn, 12 , 19 , 21 , 31 , 32 , 122 ;

"classical analogism," 22 , 26

W

Wakeman, Frederic, 80

Walton, Linda, 25 , 26 , 40 , 122

Wang An-shih: as administrator of Yin county, 130 , 143 -44;

advice to emperor, 171 -72;

and ancient style, 133 , 145 ;

on antiquity, 40 , 160 -61;

appointment to Finance Commission, 151 ;

attack on private interests, 82 , 191 ;

attacks on "engrossers," 47 , 85 -86, 145 ; 174;

attempt to achieve coherent system, 165 , 181 , 185 -86;

and authority of classics, 129 , 132 , 142 -43;

on authority of emperor, 43 ;

belief in institutions, 138 ;

biographical sources on, 130 n2;

and bureaucracy, 43 , 82 , 86 -88, 169 ;

career of, 129 -30, 140 , 141 n19, 151 -52, 166 , 166 n83;

Chu Hsi's view of, 252 -53;

classical analogism of, 251 -53;

commentaries of, 132 , 133 n9, 134 n10;

compared with Ssu-ma Kuang, 18 , 19 , 32 ;

concern with local government, 130 ;

condemnation of Annals , 37 ;

creation of new institutions, 99 , 164 ;

on customs, 73 -74;

debate with Ssu-ma Kuang, 128 , 166 -67;

and decentralization of tea monopoly, 19 n26;

"The Duke of Chou" by, 164 ;

as eclectic thinker, 132 -33;

on economic management, 84 ;

and education, 24 , 144 -45, 161 , 162 , 164 , 190 -91;

on employment of literati, 160 , 161 -62;

"The En-

― 436 ―

Wang An-Shih (cont .)

grossers," 85 , 86 n18;

enshrined and removed from Confucian pantheon, 50 , 223 ;

entrepreneurial strategy of, 101 ;

on examination system, 173 ;

and executive control of reforms, 100 ;

on expansion of state, 49 ;

fiscal theory of, 89 ;

foreign policy of, 135 , 177 , 180 ;

on government responsibility for social welfare, 185 ;

on government revenue, 173 -74;

and Green Sprouts policy, 23 , 90 -91, 96 -97, 113 , 117 -18;

and historical change, 186 ;

influence of, 222 ;

interest in Buddhism, 132 , 133 n9, 181 ;

"law for appointments and transfers to distant offices," 105 , 110 ;

on learning from sages, 142 -44, 160 -61, 163 , 164 , 166 , 186 ;

legacy of, 221 , 322 ;

as literary man, 133 , 185 -86;

as magistrate in Chekiang, 90 ;

on managing wealth, 170 , 173 ;

as materialist, 137 n15;

military program of, 218 ;

"Myriad-Word Memorial of 1058," 83 , 87 , 88 n24, 104 -5, 141 , 151 , 160 -62, 189 ;

official appointments of, 170 , 171 ;

and official salaries, 130 ;

"On Attaining and Using Unity" by, 165 , 165 n81;

"On Ritual and Music" by, 165 , 165 n81;

opponents of, 21 , 24 , 172 ;

pao-chia system of, 82 ;

philosophical orientation of, 136 -37;

political vision of, 183 -84;

PRC view of, 135 ;

preparation of commentaries, 181 ;

on private interests, 82 , 174 , 184 ;

promotion of Mencius, 132 ;

promotion of state institutions, 22 -23, 129 , 160 , 164 ;

as radical, 185 ;

as reformer, 16 , 36 , 50 , 82 , 135 , 185 , 217 -18, 357 ;

as representative of small landlords, 130 , 131 n4;

"Request for a Finance Planning Commission," 84 ;

on Rites of Chou , 37 -38, 39 , 131 , 181 , 253 ;

scholarship of, 218 -19;

as scientist, 136 , 137 n15;

southern origins of, 129 -30;

Southern Sung allegiance to, 50 ;

Southern Sung aversion to, 329 ;

spiritual interests of, 181 ;

and state activism, 135 , 221 -22;

on state and society, 15 , 16 , 19 , 32 , 131 ;

supporters of, 53 -54, 172 ;

theories of political economy, 83 ;

utilitarianism of, 222 ;

view of deficit crisis, 83 -84, 144 ;

view of human nature, 165 n81;

view of learning, 128 -29, 165 ;

writing of, 132 -33, 145 -46. See also Explanations for Characters ; Green Sprouts policy; Hired Service policy; New Policies; Pao-chia policy; Rites of Chou

Wang charitable estate (Jao-chou), 278

Wang Ch'eng, 311

Wang Hsi, 37

Wang Hsiao-po, 94 , 110

Wang Huai, 224 , 322

Wang Hui, 229

Wang Ku, 102 , 118

Wang Kuang-lien, 91 , 102

Wang Mang, 84 n15, 186 , 252 n117

Wang Shao, 53 -54, 93 -94, 180

Wang Shun-po, 1 n1

Wang Ssu-wen, 268

Wang Ta-chi, 268

Wang Ta-ts'ai, 334 n116

Wang Ta-yu, 268

Wang T'ung, 207 , 211

Wang Yang-ming, 194

Wang Yang-ming school, 54

Wang Yen, 322 , 323

Wang Yen-sou, 116 , 117

Wang Ying-lin, 243 -44, 268

Wang Yü-ch'üan, 136

War. See Chin wars; Mongols

Wards, 231

Warring neighbors, 42

Warring States, 61 , 63 , 147

Water conservancy, 109 , 168

Way, the (Tao ), 8 , 69 , 136 , 142 -44, 146 , 150 , 158 -59

Wealth. See Managing wealth; Private interests; Profit; Revenue

Wei, Duke Wu of, 219 n1 11

Wei Cheng, 205 n57

Wei Cheng-t'ung, 212

Wei Ching, 229 n19

Wei Liao-weng: call for pluralistic dynamism, 346 ;

as classicist, 338 , 342 ;

compared with Chen Te-hsiu, 355 -56;

critics of, 337 -38, 348 ;

dismissal of, 321 n48, 344 ;

emphasis on historical models, 26 , 273 , 346 , 348 ;

as example of thwarted statecraft, 347 -48;

and expansion of imperial authority, 30 ;

experience in local government, 341 -42;

on factions, 44 , 45 ;

foreign policy of, 347 ;

historical assessments of, 337 ;

on importance of imperial mind, 39 ;

influence of Ssu-ma Kuang, 30 ;

inscription on Compassionate Favor Estate, 263 ;

interest in local institutions, 342 ;

interest in rites, 338 ;

on learning for state affairs, 340 ;

on military, 345 , 346 ;

as Neo-Confucian, 337 , 338 , 339 , 345 ;

― 437 ―

political benefactor of Li Hsin-ch'uan, 315 ;

praise of Yeh Shih, 12 ;

reforms of, 29 -31, 44 ;

rejection of substance-function distinction, 340 ;

remedialism of, 344 -46, 348 ;

on role of emperor, 342 -43, 339 -40;

on role of scholar officials, 340 ;

and Shih Mi-yuan, 343 -44;

studies of I ching , 338 -39;

tolerant of Taoism and Buddhism, 338

Wei-lieh, King of Chou, 182

Wei Shan-chih, 223 , 224 , 236 -37, 239

Weighing. See Ch'üan (to weigh)

Weinsheimer, Joel, 194 n3

Well-field system: 14 , 15 , 26 , 213 , 217 , 252 , 252 n121, 271 , 362 ;

and descent-group organization, 272 ;

model for charitable estates, 273 , 275 ;

Su Hsun on, 70 -72;

in Sung rhetoric, 40 -41

Wen , 138 , 139 , 147

Wen charitable estate (Chi-chou), 279

Wen I, 262

Wen T'ien-hsiang, 262

Wen Yen-po, 171 n93

Western Chin, 322 -23, 334

Western Chou, 216 -17

"Western Inscription" (Chang Tsai), 374

Wheat cultivation, 224

Wiens, Mi Chu, 126

Wilhelm, Helmut, 353 -54

Williams, Raymond, 5 , 6 n6

Wine monopoly, 78

Wineshops, 107

Wood, Allan, 10 n11, 14 , 37 , 38 , 42 -43

World-ordering. See "Ordering the world"

Wu, Empress, 207 -8

Wn, King, 208

Wu, Silas, 30

Wu (state), 63 , 64

Wu (things), 201

Wu charitable estate (T'ai-chou), 279

Wu Chi, 291 n28

Wu Fei, 265 n45

Wu Hsi rebellion (1206), 312 n10, 332 -33, 334 n 116

Wu-i Mountains, 224 , 227

Wu Shih-meng: opposition to tea monopoly, 118

Wu T'ing, 332 , 333

Wu Yuan, 269

Y

Yamashita Ryuji, 135

Yamauchi Masahiro, 330

Yanagida Setsuko, 89

Yang Chen-chung, 333

Yang Chü-yuan, 333

Yang Hsiung, 132 , 132 n9, 207 ;

T'ai hsuan by, 182

Yang I, 247

Yang Shih, 11 n15, 219 n106, 282

Yang Shih-ch'i, 378

Yang T'ien-hui, 119 , 120 n94

Yang Yen, 231

Yang Yu-chung, 332

Yao (sage), 68 , 73 , 74 , 194

Yeh charitable estate (T'ai-chou), 279

Yeh Shih, 12 , 21 , 57 , 197 , 216 , 331 , 337 , 337 n4

Yeh Wei-tao (Chia-sun), 216

Yen charitable estate (Chien-k'ang), 257 n8

Yen Hui, 214

Yen Ling, 102

Yen Yuan, 206 n63, 207

Yi dynasty, 357

Yi T'oegye, Ten Diagrams of the Sages' Teaching , 351 -52

Yin Chu, 60

Yin county, 130 , 143

Yin privilege, 130 , 189

Yin Tun, 321

Ying-tsung, 157 , 159 n70

Yuan dynasty, 1 , 4 , 11 , 25 n37, 36 , 80 , 192 ;

charitable estates, 259 , 272 , 273 -74

Yuan-feng Treasury, 97

Yuan Shao-yu, 284 n12

Yuan Ts'ai, Precepts for Social Life , 264 -65

Yuan-yu era, 119

Yueh (state), 63

Yueh (contract), 23 , 47

Yueh Fei, 42 n61

Yueh-lu academy, 265

Yung-cheng emperor, 354 n20

Yung-cheng period, 187

Yü . See Natural desires

Yü charitable estate (Ming-chou), 279

Yü Ssu, 315

Yü-t'ien policy, 218

Yü-wen Hsu-chung, 327

Yü Yu, 350 , 352

Yü Yun-wen, 316 n29, 327 , 328 n82