Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520327573

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Confucianism and Autocracy

Confucianism and Autocracy PROFESSIONAL ELITES IN T H E FOUNDING O F T H E MING DYNASTY

John W. Dardess

University of California Press • Berkeley Lot Angelet London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Daidess, John W , 1 9 3 7 Confucianism and autocracy. Professional elites in the founding of the Ming dynasty. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. China—Politics and government—1368-1644. 2. Neo-Confucianism—China. 3. Elite (Social science) — C h i n a . I. Title. ]Qi;o91983 951'.026 82-4822 ISBN O-52O-O4659-5 AACR2 ISBN 0-520-04733-8 (pbk.)

To my parents: John Dardess, M.D. Edna W. Dardess

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Confucianism as a Profession in FouiteenthCentuiy China Confucian Households as a Fiscal Category The Shih and Ju as Social Types

14

19

Confucianism as Professional Knowledge 24 The Training of Confucian Professionals 32 The Confucian "Service Ideal" 43 Confucian Professional Income 49 The Confucian Clientele, Professional Labor Control, and Problems of Public Service 54 The Confucian Professional Community 74 Confucianism in the Yuan-Ming Transition Confucianism in the Late Yuan Crisis 86 Che-tung Confucianism, Reform, and Militarization in the Late Yuan 105 Ming T'ai-tsu (Chu Yuan-chang) in Che-tung

vii

119

CONTENTS

3. T h e Che-tung Confucian Elite and the Idea of "World-Salvation" . Liu Chi

.131

133

Wang Wei

147

Sung Lien

156

Hu Han

173

4. M i n g T'ai-tsu: T h e Theory and Practice of Despotism

183

The Ruler as Ruler: Mechanisms of World-Control

185

The Ruler as Teacher: The Psycho-behavioral Reform of Mankind 5. Confucianism's Response to Ming T'ai-tsu

224 .

. 255

Confucian Conformity and Dissent in the Reign of Ming T'ai-tsu 256 From Sung Lien to Fang Hsiao-ju: Transition and Change in Confucian Professional Leadership 264 Doctrinal Revision and National Reform under Fang Hsiao-ju 278 Abbreviations Used in Bibliography and Notes . . . .

. 291

Notes

• 293

Glossary

.

.

.

.

• 327

Bibliography

• 335

Index

• 351 • viii •

Acknowledgments I MUST THANK the American Council of Learned Societies, whose grant allowed me to spend a research year ( 1 9 7 1 - 7 2 ) in Japan, where I made use of the unparalleled library holdings of the Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyujo in Kyoto, and Seikado Bunko in Tokyo. I am also grateful for the support of the University of Kansas's General Research Fund over several summers of writing and rewriting. The fund also footed the bill for the typing of the first draft. Special debts of other (and various) kinds I owe to Grant Barnes, Dan Bays, Anna Cianciala, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Fang Chaoying, Bob Friesner, Grant Goodman, Charles O. Hucker, Don McCoy, F. W. Mote, Mark Rose, Romeyn Taylor, Saeki lomi, and several conscientious readers whose identities are unknown to me, but whose suggestions concerning revision I followed more often than not. The remaining factual mistakes and interpretive inadequacies are, of course, my own responsibility. January 1982

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Introduction IN CHINA the years 1 3 5 0 - 1 4 0 0 saw the collapse of the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols, seventeen years of popular rioting and civil war, the founding of the Ming dynasty, its momentary collapse and more civil war (1399-1402), followed by its refounding under the Yung-lo emperor.1 The legacy of those years to the rest of the Ming (1368-1644) and to the Ch'ing ( 1 6 4 4 - 1 9 1 2 ) was a sustained principle of imperial autocracy, raised to a higher and purer level than at any earlier time in history. The question that prompts this book is why conditions in the last half of the fourteenth century appear to have been so propitious for the enhancement of political centralization and autocratic control. The problem is not simple, and it can be approached from more than one direction. C . William Skinners recent contribution attacks the matter from the lower end as it were, by showing that from the eighth century A.D. onward the Chinese political system failed to expand apace with the population and the economy and so gradually reduced its functions, sacrificing extent of control in the interest of maintaining at least a minimal degree of unity and security over China s large geographical space. In this context, the enhancement of imperial autocracy would have to be seen as an adjustment within the political apparatus, an effort to intensify its internal controls at the same time that its administrative capacities over society at large were becoming ever fewer and weaker.

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INTRODUCTION

An approach along these lines might help explain why the main features of Ming autocracy, once put into place, could manage to last some five hundred years. It is less helpful, however, in explaining the origins of that autocracy. The fourteenth century was a period not of growth but of economic and demographic decline in China, just as it was in western Europe, the Byzantine realm, and in the Middle East. China's population, somewhere in the 8 0 - 1 0 0 million range early in the fourteenth century, shrank to some 65 million late in the same century. In these depressed conditions, the administrative results that the autocratic early Ming regime was able to achieve in the fields of economic redevelopment, popular education, population transfer, tax reassessment, and the like were quite impressive. It therefore seems likely that the conditions that created the Ming political system must be separated from the conditions that later perpetuated it. This book looks into the Chinese social system for clues to the origin of the Ming autocracy. What classes or interests wanted it? Two possibilities can be dismissed at the outset. The Ming state was clearly not a military dictatorship, despite the creation of a powerful military machine in the wars of foundation. Nor, despite the humble peasant origins of the founding emperor, can the Ming system be construed as an instrument of social revolution, put together on behalf of a poor and downtrodden peasant mass. I began the project by examining a large and little-used body of source material, some 128 collected works (wen-chi), most of them authored by Confucian literati and ranging in date from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. I expected that these might somehow yield insights into the problem of the formation of the Ming. As I read these works, it slowly became evident that the essential point to be grasped was that the writers considered themselves inhabitants of a special social universe of their own. They obviously took themselves to be an extraor• 2 •

INTRODUCTION

dinarily select group. Yet it proved hard to explain exactly in what kind of social framework the reality of their sense of eliteness might best be understood. Did the writers constitute or represent a class in a socioeconomic sense? Were they "gentry class" spokesmen? and as such did they protect class interests in landholding, officeholding, and privileged fiscal exemptions? and could the founding of the Ming state be analyzed in those terms? Long ago, I began with that assumption. Then I found that arguing it would require that the writings of the literati be taken as fraudulent, or at least irrelevant to the real facts of the Ming founding. There is also the difficulty that local gentry theory (kyoshinron), as that idea has been developed in recent years in Japan, has so far been unable to make a firm conceptual link between the nature and structure of the Ming-Ch'ing imperial state and the socioeconomic interests of the dominant landholding classes of the countryside.2 Dennerline has shown quite clearly that the notion of a gentry class does not fit the social facts even in late Ming times. As for the early Ming, a Soviet scholar, A. A. Bokshchanin, has pointed out that the political order does not reflect any perceptible class interests very well. In social terms, then, the Ming founding appears to be an event impossible to explain. The key to the matter must lie in comprehending Confucianism as both philosophy and sociology at one and the same time. If one takes the Confucian writers and activists as a selfconscious elite within the compass, not of a social class per se, but of a profession in the sociological sense (as the Chinese counterpart of an ulema in the Islamic world), then far from dismissing them and their writings, one can use them to help explain the early Ming urge toward reform, centralization, and autocracy. The solution seems so obvious that it is odd it was not pounced upon long ago. One obstacle to it may have been

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Joseph R. Levensons widely read essay T h e Amateur Ideal in Ming and Early Ch'ing Society: Evidence from Fainting" (available in his Modem China and Its Confucian Past, New York, 1964), a brilliant study that unfortunately, through an idiosyncratic use of concepts, succeeded in firmly pasting the label "amateur" upon the Ming-Ch'ing Confucian elite. Amateur painters of a very special sort they may have been, but amateur Confucians they decidedly were not. The first chapter of this book argues systematically that there existed in fourteenth-century China something approaching a national community of Confucian public-service professionals, and that while the early Ming state reflects class interests very poorly, it does reflect quite accurately the identifiable interests of a national Confucian professional elite. The aim is to help solve the specific historical problem of the Ming founding, but the analysis should prove to have some relevance for other periods and contexts as well. The 128 collected works, the main source material for the first chapter, constitute a nearly full listing of all extant works by writers who flourished sometime between the years 1340 and 1400, with a much thinner representation from earlier and later times. These are but a fragment of the total output of fourteenth-century writing, most of which has not been preserved. The remainder cannot be taken as a true statistical sample. Geographical provenance, as determined by the writers' native places, shows an irregular distribution. Only 12 works, or 9 percent of the total, are by writers whose native places lay north of the Yangtze. The other 91 percent are by Southern Chinese, in whose milieu the Ming state originated. Excluding Szechwan and Yunnan (no examples), only 28 percent of all South China prefectures or the equivalent are represented by writers whose works survive. The distribution ranks Chin-hua prefecture (Kiangche, or Chekiang province) first with 19, then Chi-an (Kiangsi province) with 18, Hui-chou . 4 .

INTRODUCTION

(Kiangche) 1 1 , Soochow (Kiangche) 7, T'ai-chou (Kiangche) 6, Ning-po (Kiangche) 6, Shao-hsing (Kiangche) 6, Lin-chiang (Kiangsi) 5, Lin-ch'uan (Kiangsi) 5, Ch'u-chou (Kiangche) 4, plus 1, 2, or 3 each from eighteen other South China prefectures. The second chapter details the reactions of the Confucian professional community as a whole to the national crisis of the 1350s, and of an important regional segment of that community to the special manifestations of that crisis in the Che-tung "hinterland." The chapter shows how die Confucians—as professional men.who considered themselves uniquely competent to diagnose societal ills and prescribe remedial measures— responded to the popular uprisings and the Yuan dynastic breakdown. It further shows why the Confucian elite of Chinhua and Ch'u-chou prefectures (in Che-tung circuit of Chekiang province) played so strong a hand in the early stages of the Ming founding. It discusses in historical context die special interests of die Che-tung elite, and shows why those interests were well served by as extreme an autocracy as that of the early Ming. Chapter three moves from history into philosophy and provides an analysis of the work of four Confucian writers of Chetung, who wrote on die problem of national salvation just before the armies of the future Ming founder conquered their home territory. Three of die writers soon became top-level advisers in the new regime. They were the theoretical founders of the Ming autocracy, although their real interest was not so much in autocracy for its own sake as it was in the larger question of the reform and purification of the Chinese social system. The fourth chapter shows how the unusually long-winded founder of the Ming dynasty adapted die Confucian oudook generally, and the reform ideas of the Che-tung writers specifically, to the task of creating an autocratic political system for the purpose of effecting a program of national sociomoral regeneration. The revolting horrors the founder perpetrated in the • 5•

INTRODUCTION

course of pursuing that goal may have owed something to a violent streak in his personality, but even if that is true, that violence was expressed well within the moral and political framework devised by the Che-tung theoreticians. They had failed to foresee the terrible abuses the totalitarian order they built would almost certainly engender. The fifth and last chapter covers one final attempt by an elite movement within the Confucian profession to prescribe and carry out a nationwide reform, a matter that had been a Confucian preoccupation in one form or another for about half a century. After the collapse of that effort in the Yung-lo imperial usurpation of 1402, the familiar "Ming Confucianism" with its emphasis on significant but rather less ambitious questions began to take shape. The chapter describes the process of elite formation that led to this last attempt at national reform. It shows how the new elite generation of the 1380s and 90s tried, though it failed, to repair the theoretical errors of its predecessor, dismantle the totalitarian moral and political structure of the early Ming, and impose a quite different kind of normative order upon China. The sociological approach to Confucianism and its role in the Ming founding does not at all require that a static and ideal construct, devised in the West, be clamped as rigidly as a vise upon a group of real people acting in an alien historical and cultural context. What the modem sociology of the professions has to offer is a highly general set of logically connected propositions that appear applicable to certain kinds of occupational groups in certain times and places. Whether Confucianism, in an ideal and static sense, was in fact a profession is beside the point.' What matters is that the overall behavior of those who considered themselves Confucians was consciously aimed at, and in some ways achieved, a self-definition and a social role in which one can see a certain logical consistency. The pattern of • 6 •

INTRODUCTION

that consistency fells within the parameters of what in Western sociology goes by the name of profession. Rather than simply yielding a stale definition, that concept can be used to provide a comprehensive framework for an historical analysis and critique of the Confucian endeavor. Some further remarks are in order about the conceptual terminology deployed in this study. There is of course a risk of distortion whenever alien terms are imposed upon a source material, but either the risk has to be accepted or else there is no way to render systematically the recorded experience of one culture into the frame of reference of another. "Confucianism" is an example. The most often used Chinese equivalent of the fourteenth century is sheng-hsien chih tao, the "Way of the Sages and Worthies," a phrase that takes in not only Confucius, but also Mencius, the Duke of Chou, and all the other creators of normative civilized life. The substance of Confucian learning I call "knowledge base" or "body of knowledge" when speaking of it as a corpus of professional learning; "theory," with respect to its abstract, general, and systematized character; or "doctrine," with reference to the imperative that Confucian knowledge be firmly trusted, believed in, and put to work to ameliorate a range of social or individual ills. The Chinese equivalents for any or all of these are tao, the "Way"; chiao, "teaching"; or hsueh, "learning." I have, however, generally avoided the word "ideology," even though Confucian theory or doctrine often functions as ideology insofar as it "promotes an orthodox and simplistic view of issues in place of one that is skeptical and appreciative of the complexities of political life." 4 1 prefer to avoid it because however value-laden and heroically simplistic Confucian ideas may have been in their practical application, they were not ad hoc distillations from the general culture (as ideology tends to be), but were worked out by a distinct corps of professional experts • 7 •

INTRODUCTION

on the basis of the established system of doctrinal truth that they guarded and maintained. The word also has further complications that make it a likely source of confusion in a study such as this. An individual Confucian in Chinese is often rendered with reference to how good a Confucian he is judged to be. Thus we have sheng, "sage"; hsien, "worthy"; chiin-tzu, "gentleman"; hsiao-jen, "small man"; and the like. The strictly untranslatable terms jv (someone who studies, usually meaning the Confucian books) and shih (someone prepared to lead others) are neutral in this respect, unless qualified by some adjective (for example, chien-ju, "ignoble ju"). A terminological distinction between occupation and profession is not made in the sources; both are yeh. Inasmuch as this study deals with the ethos of the Confucian professional community, I have also tried to use its own frames of social reference and its own sociomoral terminology, and have provided translated excerpts from the original sources partly for that purpose. Yet I found unavoidable the intrusion of exogenous concepts, for which there are no good equivalents in the written Chinese language of the time. One case in point is "reform." There are some occasional approximations to that word (keng-hua, "change and transformation"; fu-ku, "restoring antiquity"; and the like), but nothing in routine use that corresponds to it consistently. By reform I mean the intended outcome of the application of expert Confucian knowledge to die remedy of public crises or abuses. Another such concept is "centralization," whose meaning the Ming founder approaches when he talks about "shaking the cords of the net" (chen chikang). Again, however, no Chinese concept in routine use matches very well the word in question. By centralization I mean a change from a state of diffusion toward the visible concentration of responsibility and decision-making authority • 8 •

INTRODUCTION

that, owing to the practical demands of canying out a reform, must normally accompany it. This study challenges, in some ways, an earlier view of the character and outlook of the Confucian elites who contributed to the Ming founding. A useful and influential study published by Ch'ien Mu in 1964 surveys the writing of Sung Lien, Liu Chi, Kao Ch'i, Su Po-heng, Pei Ch'iung, Hu Han, lai Liang, and Fang Hsiao-ju—all of whom figure in this book. He comes generally to the conclusion that the first five exhibited a certain "psychopathology" (hsin-ping), both in their disinclination to condemn the Mongol Yuan dynasty on nationalist or ethnic grounds and in their evident lack of emotional enthusiasm for the Chinese Ming house. The others he praises either for staunch Yuan loyalism (lai Liang), or for advanced antibarbarian views (Hu Han and Fang Hsiao-ju). In the light of the present analysis of Confucianism as a public-service profession, loyal to its own norms above all, a weak commitment or emotional attachment on the part of its elites to one dynasty or another is less a symptom of psychic illhealth than it is a likely manifestation of a latent tension between a profession and the organization that happens to employ it. The vehement position of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-70) in favor of dynastic loyalty was by no means a universally accepted part of the Confucian ethic in late Yuan and early Ming. Professor Ch'ien neglects to point out that the question of dynastic loyalty was openly discussed, pro and con, by such writers as Liu Chi, Wang Wei, Chou T'ing-chen, and Ch'en Mo. The last-named writer devoted an essay to a refutation of the view that the Confucian community had to assume a fanatical (chih-i) posture of loyalty to a failing dynasty.5 No such loyalty ethic bound die Confucians; individuals were free to choose for themselves how loyal they thought they should be. It was not along pro9

INTRODUCTION

Yuan or pro-Ming lines that the Confucian community split. Rather, as Ch'en Mo emphasized in his essay, the dividing line should be (and to a large extent was) drawn differently, with loyalists and non-loyalists of unselfish motive and behavior on one side, and fame- and favor-seekers on the other. The writers discussed the issue of dynastic loyalism much less than they did the terms and conditions of official service in general, however; and one has the impression that the identity of a dynasty was less important to them than the kind of environment and opportunity it provided, or promised to provide, for the advancement of the Confucian profession. Professor Araki Kengo's study of Sung Lien as a thinker also deserves some comment in this context, l o later generations, Sung Lien's renown was that of a literary craftsman and man of wide learning. Araki s concern is to discover why the Confucianists of later times held him in such low esteem as a man of ideas. He finds that the problem lies in Sung Lien's "eclecticism," in his easy willingness to assimilate Buddhist ideas as well as divergent Confucian thought systems, and in his consequent inability to project his ideas sharply enough to attract a permanent school of disciples. However, Araki believes that Confucian posterity treated Sung Lien unfairly. "People usually consider Ch'en Pai-sha [1429-1500] and his teacher Wu K'ang-chai [1392-1469] the forerunners of Ming Confucianism," he writes. "While there may be some good grounds for this, the 'mind-study that included Chu Hsiism' that prevailed in the late Yuan and early Ming helped change and revive the stagnant spiritual structure of mankind, and while it may appear heterodox, it is important to note that as it widened minds and brought about a self-liberating intellectual experience, it constituted a transitional phase in the formation of a new thought current and a new Confucianism" (p. 39). Professor Araki writes as a historian of Chinese thought, a mode which I definitely do not adopt in this book. In chapter • 10 •

INTRODUCTION

three, however, I discuss some of Sung Lien's ideas, and I must agree with Araki s observation that for Sung Lien and Wang Wei and their colleagues the true "substance" or knowledge-base of Confucianism lay in those areas where it tended to be compatible with Buddhism and laoism, and where its own various strains converged; and that the "substance" as thus conceived was expected to have "applicability" (yung) in the world of the time. Araki points out that this loose formulation of the Confucian t'i was at odds with the much stricter sense of orthodoxy that had led to its earlier formulations in the Sung. I should like to suggest in this connection that there developed in Yuan Confucianism a disinclination to perpetuate a "rabbinical" attachment to a fixed and detailed body of orthodox classical scripture and commentary. Efforts were made to adjust and expand the doctrine in accordance with the perceived needs of the Confucian community as times changed. However, the Chin-hua writers of the late Yuan (starting with Huang Chin, in the generation before Sung Lien's) explicitly stated that conciliation in matters of doctrine must lead to the formation of harmonious collegia! relationships among Confucians. Their reading of Sung history taught them that the attempt to define an exclusive intellectual orthodoxy had resulted in militant factionalism and petty wrangling, with disastrous consequences for the maintenance of unity and ethical controls within the profession as a whole. It was definitely Sung Lien's own aim to redefine the essence of Confucian doctrine in such a way as to imbed it firmly in the ethical structure of the Confucian community. But that emphasis led to a narrowness of a different kind. It led to a narrow "orthopraxy," a surprisingly intense concern for the observance of the highest possible standards of professional conduct. Truce and synthesis on the intellectual battlefront were more than counterbalanced by an all-out struggle to purge the Confucian ranks of all those thought to be morally deviant • 11 •

INTRODUCTION

or deficient. The mass butcheries of the Ming hardly seem at first glance to have had a connection with the demand of the elites for the imposition of ethical controls over the Confucian community, and yet T'ai-tsu s argument for despotic centralization is supported at almost every point by the ethically oriented world view that they had developed in conjunction with that demand. An important new work in the history of Confucian thought appeared just as this book goes to press. Wm. Theodore de Bary s Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mindand-Heart (Columbia University Press, 1981) deals fully and ably with a topic largely ignored in these pages—the historical process whereby, from around the late thirteenth century, the core of Confucian theory came to be focused upon the notion of htin-hsueh (the "learning of the mind-and-heart"). Though my own work lies rather in the field of social history, not the history of thought, it might now be more profitably read in conjunction with de Bary's.

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Confucianism as a Profession in Fourteenth-Century China

This CHAPTER sketches out the case for the existence of a selfcontained Confucian profession in Yuan and early Ming China. In brief, the argument is that Confucianism may be understood as a profession in the light of the following considerations: (1) the imperial state established "Confucian households" as a separate fiscal and juridical category, based upon the special functions they performed; (2) those who considered themselves to be Confucians firmly believed that they performed services of crucial importance to the continuation of civilized life; (3) the Confucian knowledge brought to bear upon the problems of civilized life was "professional" knowledge in that it consisted in an ordered body of generalized and abstract principles or truths, applicable to a wide range of concrete situations, that were beyond the comprehension of laymen; (4) acquisition of this knowledge demanded rigorous and extended formal education and training; (5) though abstract, Confucian knowledge was "useful" knowledge and demanded of those who acquired it that they apply it to the rectification of certain kinds of social malfunctions; (6) Confucian practi-

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tioners assiduously cultivated an air of disinterest and impartiality toward their clientele and its problems; and (7) Confucian practitioners constituted a community of professionals that was distinctly different and separate from family, locality, or public bureaucracy as employing organization. The cumulation of these features resulted in the development of a Confucian professional interest, and as subsequent chapters will try to show, this interest had a very strong impact upon the nature of the Ming state that was formally founded in 1368. Confucian Households as a Fiscal Category Not long after conquering South China, the Yuan state instituted a new and complicated household registration system. A prominent feature of that system was its segregation of certain categories of households from the main body of taxpayers. The special categories of households were made to perform on a hereditary basis various functions that the state considered necessary or important. Among these categories were households devoted to such designated occupations as salt manufacture, gold mining, hunting, medicine, artisanry, music, and the army, as well as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Depending upon the locality, these special households (chu-se hu) constituted a widely varying proportion of the total number of households, anywhere from about 1 percent to about 25 percent.1 The proportion of Confucian households to the total never fluctuated quite so widely from locality to locality. Generally, it lay somewhere within the modest range of a tenth to a half of one percent (o. 1 - o . 5%). For example, Hsien-chu county listed 151 Confucian households (ju-hu) out of a total of 27,110 taxpaying households; Tan-t'u county listed 33 out of a total of 28,462; Chia-hsing prefecture, 1,088 out of a total of 459,337-2 . 14 .

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These were insignificant totals, as the officials of the time were aware. Of the 1,140,000 taxpaying households of Che-tung circuit, a government report emphasized that only 8,724, or less than 1 percent, were ju-hu. Another government document stated that the Confucian households amounted to hardly a fifth the total number of Buddhist and laoist households.' This was a surprisingly small statistical base for Chinese Confucianism, something which is too often lightly equated or confused with Chinese civilization in general. Even in the early Ming period, when this system of registration was continued, roughly comparable rates still obtained. For Hui-chou prefecture in 1371, there were 59 ju-hu in a total of 1 1 7 , 1 1 0 ; in Hsuan-ch eng county, 43 out of a total of 31,44s. 4 Yet so much did these households dominate learned expertise that in the first Ming civil service examinations of 1371, of the 120 chin-shih who passed, 64 were men from registered ju-hu, as against only 49 from min-hu (taxpaying households of unspecified occupation), 5 from chun-hu (military households of Northwest China), and a scattering of men of other odd categories.5 These statistics strongly suggest the effective concentration of Confucian knowledge in a specially designated and extremely minute fraction of all registered households. From among what elements were the Confucian households originally recruited early in the Yuan period? Generally, as the early-fourteenth-century gazetteer for Nanking indicates, those allowed to become registered Confucians were members of "old families," including especially the higher-degree holders of the defunct Sung dynasty.6 Yuan official documents further state that the award of Confucian registry depended upon a candidate's ability to prove (1) direct descent from some higherdegree holder, university student, or ranking official of the Sung period, and (2) individual talent or competence as demonstrated by examination. In 1290, however, it was found that there were too many southern "talents" (hsiu-ts'ai) to admit all • 15 •

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of them into the special registry, and many men otherwise qualified by heredity (ken-chiao) and personal competence had to be arbitrarily denied the benefit of special Confucian registry. At best, they could be put on waiting lists, in the event that vacancies should appear in the regular registers.7 Yet as time went on, the Confucian registers in some localities shrank by attrition, leaving fewer registrants toward the end than at the beginning of the dynasty. The reasons for this attrition seem obscure. It may have resulted in part from the removal of fraudulent registrants. Some sources also state that many of the old families "disappeared," perhaps meaning that they failed to produce competent heirs. The Chien-ning county school had registered under it 75 ju-hu in 1290, but only 59 in 1297; likewise, Shang-yuan county dropped from 74 to 38 over the same period of time.8 Sung-yang county early on had 45 registered Confucian households; by 1359 "many of those households had died out," and efforts were made to discover more distant kinsmen "who were able to make an occupation of Confucianism" and put them on the registers.9 It is unknown how widespread a phenomenon this shrinkage was. At all events, it will be seen that it cannot be taken as indicative of a general decline of interest in Confucian study in the Yuan period. A family that merited registration under the ju-hu category was still obliged to pay land tax if it owned land, and commerce tax if it engaged in commerce. The main benefit of ju-hu registry was exemption from service obligations and immunity from minor litigation. The exemption meant in effect relief from the most onerous of a taxpayer's fiscal responsibilities, because "services" included not only such unpaid tasks as tax collecting, police work, and government-storehouse keeping, but also die obligation to undertake sales and purchases of certain goods at prices usually set at the government's advantage.10 Another im• 16 •

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portant benefit of ju-hu registry was that it provided automatic access to the state educational institutions. The ju-hu were placed under the jurisdiction of a prefectural or county-level Confucian school (ju-hsueh), or under one or another of the forty-odd "academies" (shu-yuan) early authorized by the state to operate in South China. Although it was ordered in 129 5 that those not registered as Confucians could not enter the state-run schools," it is possible that this restriction was relaxed over time. At least, as will be mentioned further on, there did take place a great growth of academies as well as of private schools in many parts of South China during the Yuan period. In the eyes of the government, the registry system served as the principal mechanism for identifying a special occupational group whose talent, ancestry, and Confucian knowledge made them a pool of qualified men that could be drawn upon to serve in official positions. In the Yuan and early Ming, official civil service examination degrees, the hallmark of later "gentry" status, were too sparingly issued to serve in this fashion. When the Yuan government instituted a civil service examination system beginning in 1315, the triennial quota for the highest (chinshih) degree was set at 25 for Northern Chinese and 25 for Southern Chinese, or an annual all-Chinese average of about 17 degrees altogether. This number represented a very great drop from the Northern Sung annual average of some 224, and was also far below the Ming and Ch'ing annual averages of about 90 and 100 respectively. Ming T'ai-tsu (r. 1368-98) held degree examinations irregularly, beginning in 1371, and issued during his reign a total of about 900 chin-shth degrees, an average of only about 30 per year.12 A few Confucian writers of the fourteenth century expressed dissatisfaction with this occupational registry system. Hsu Ch'ien complained that in antiquity the teaching profession was not "merely an occupation of ju families" as it was in his time." His • 17 •

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local compatriot Huang C h i n , possibly not a member of a ;u household himself, stated that die system worked to discourage die enrollment of deserving new recruits and failed to adequately control the activities o f those who did enjoy ju registry: Alas, it has long been the case that all the four peoples have lost their proper occupations. This particularly includes the shih. The problem is not that the shih are demeaned and constricted, because they enjoy higher incomes and more exemptions than they ever did in antiquity. The problem is that the shih do things nowadays that in antiquity they never did. In antiquity, with its dense population, anyone who acted as a shih or a gentleman (chiin-tzu) was permitted to be one, whereas now the determination is made solely on the basis of official registry. And so now, at a time when Confucianism (lit. "scholars' robes and ritual objects") shows every outward sign of flourishing, there remain many refined and learned men who cannot gain entry into the occupation, while at the same time not a few [who are registered as shih] are smug, complacent, idly prosperous, and devoted to commerce and the trades. Those few who make an effort to discipline themselves to take a proper leadership role in the world often [find themselves] ground down by paperwork, frustrated by the administrative stipulations, and compelled to suppress their capabilities and do things they are unsuited for. . . . Thus their true occupation is lost.14 Most writers, however, ignored the question of official registration in such a way as to give the impression that it did not count for much in their own conceptions of the Confucian profession. Biographies and epitaphs are normally silent on the question of the registry o f their subjects' families. In most cases, it is unknown whether or not the Confucian writers were themselves registered as ju. Discourses on the ju or the shih proceed as though the official registry system did not exist. Fourteenthcentury Confucian writing generally does not make the assumption that de facto membership in the shih or ju profession was limited to those officially registered as such. In theory the • 18 •

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ranks of the profession were open, inclusive, and eager for promising new recruits—quite the reverse of the situation that the statistics portray. The Shih and Ju as Social Types What the Confucian writers really thought of the makeup and role of their special profession becomes clear when it is considered in the light of the normative universe of social functions, the hierarchy of the "four [categories of] people" (ssu-min) that was itself an integral part of fourteenth-century Confucian theory. This theoretical hierarchy was based upon functional occupations iyeh), and the stratification of occupations was in turn based upon a judgment of the relative value of each occupation s contribution to the general well-being of society. In accordance with this scheme of values, the shih were placed at the top of the hierarchy, followed next by the peasants or farmers, then by the artisans, and finally by the merchants. (Occasionally the Buddhist and laoist clergies were added at the bottom of the hierarchy, making "six peoples" and six socially legitimate occupations in all.) In theory, when each of the four peoples strove to fulfill its allotted range of functions, then the "peoples' will" (min-chih) was said to be fixed or "determined" (ting), upon which social order and harmony should prevail throughout society as a matter of course. The authority and practical teachings necessary for the fulfillment of these functions had been laid down ages before by the various demiurges, sages, and worthies of antiquity, l o paraphrase Liu Ping on the point, the ancient demiurges Shennung and Hou-chi first taught men the techniques of agriculture, and that occupation still flourishes because the peasantry continues to make antiquity its teacher. The same goes for the

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artisans and the "fellow Emperor, and the merchants and Fo Kuei and T'ao Chu. Liu Ping felt that if these occupations followed the example of their teachers, then all the more must the shih as representatives of the leading occupation feel obligated to revere their own ancient teachers and sages." A clear statement of the social preeminence of the shih function was given by Wu Shih-tao in an essay entitled "On the shih" (Yuan shih). In that essay, he insisted that the shih ought to constitute an occupation quite above and apart from the other three. In a primitive sense die shih were no more than the spontaneous leaders of the people, the elite that by some unspecified process will always emerge from the undifferentiated social mass. "In any group," wrote Wu, "there will inevitably be some who have weight (chung). Those are the shih, and that's all there is to it." He explained that by "weight" he meant a combination of talent and intelligence, of worth (as contrasted to stupidity or simplemindedness) and refinement (as against commonness). In order that peace and order might prevail in the world, die system had been devised in antiquity whereby these emergent leaders of the people were further induced to study die doctrine (tao) that Heaven had given mankind in order that a secure and ordered existence might prevail in the world. Qualified in that doctrine, virtuous, skilled in learning, and able to advise and perform duties, the shih became the "net" (kang) that controlled the masses of the people (chungmin). As such, they were given exclusive access to officeholding. Wu justified this exclusivity on implicitly statistical grounds. That is, peasants were disqualified from office-holding because for the most part they "exerted strength, and were thick, dull, and lowly"; artisans, because they were "devoted to limited specialties and were unashamed to perform low tasks"; and merchants, because "through their love of profit and clever subterfuges they harmed the people." Whereas, according to Wu, few men in the lower-ranking occupations would know 20

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doctrine, many (but not necessarily all) of the shih would at least have studied it. It was this study that qualified a member of die shih occupation for office-holding. "Without study, one is not qualified to be [fully] human. Surely we cannot dress animals in human clothing, set them above men, and have them rule »16 men. Thus the shih in Wu Shih-tao's understanding constituted a very broad social category that was internally stratified, consisting in leaders of simple local groups at the bottom and imperial advisers or officials at the top. In theory, the further down in the hierarchy a shih was, the thinner his learning was likely to be, and the shakier his commitment to Confucian behavioral norms. Chu Yu, however, insisted that it should be the aim of any local shih to place himself, not necessarily physically but certainly attitudinally, above the constraints of particularistic local habits and mores (hsi). Through self-training ("changing die material self and internalizing the metaphysically-derived norms of human nature"), a shih must make of himself a "good shih of the world" and not remain bound by die customs of his locality or region.17 According to Su Po-heng, most shih were in fact no more than local men (hsiang-jen), because they failed to "nourish simplicity" and emulate the ways of die sages and worthies." Yii Chi linked a shih's rank to the geographical spread of his network of acquaintances. A "shih of the world" was one whose colleagues were spaced widely but thinly all through the realm. A "shih of the locality" was one whose colleagues were concentrated intensively in some one place. A "shih of the region" held an intermediate position. A "shih of die world" who came home to live in his native locale would of course soon gain the maximum possible number of acquaintances among the local shih.19 Thus the occupational term shih was not an exclusive label, accorded grudgingly to none but a select few. It was a widely inclusive term that took in even low-ranking men of dubious 21

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qualifications. By itself, the word shih implied nothing very specific about educational attainments, but simply referred to social leaders as a generalized occupational category. A word with somewhat the same range of meaning as shih was ju, often translated "Confucian." T h e term ju was used as an alternate name for those shih whose endeavors featured some sort of intellectual work or "study." While it was understood that among the shih there existed a spatial hierarchy of local, regional, and central types, among the shih-as-ju there was a related but rather different scale of ranking that focused upon depth, motivation, and competence in study. Wang Wei wrote two essays in which he discussed the ju concept. (One essay, entitled "On the ju," is practically identical to another essay of his, "On the shih.") From these essays we learn that in the highest sense the ju is one who, like the Duke of Chou or Confucius, commands a body of learning (hsueh) together with the requisite talent (ts'ai) for putting that learning into effect in the world so that "good order" (chih) results. Wang noted that the requisite learning, the "study of the Sages and Worthies," was of all arts the most difficult—not because it was specialized or technical, but because of its relentlessly comprehensive and all-inclusive character. Acquiring the body of learning demanded, not concrete experience primarily, but rather, intensive study of the Six Classics and the Four Books until one grasped from them the "principles" that informedand governed all phenomena. One fixed these principles in ones mind through "reflective thought" (ssu) to the point that it became possible to identify one's own mind, nature, and concerns with the nature and concerns of the world as a whole, "so that when regarding the world, there is not one object in it that is not oneself." The ju in the highest sense was this sort of ju. All of humanity was, in theory, his client. While Wang expected that all ju worthy of the name should possess this learning in roughly equal degree, he did allow for a • 22 •

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differential distribution of "talent," such that a good ju of small talent was at least qualified to hold an official position, while a good ju of large talent, rather than simply being employed by the state, could instead make use of the instrumentalities of the state to effect his purposes.20 However, Chu T'ung also allowed for a differential distribution of knowledge. Ideally, according to Chu, the learning of the "true Confucian" should encompass the entire range of literary, governmental, civil, and military affairs, too much to expect uniformity among the ju in the depth of what they knew. Where uniformity must obtain was in the field of ethical conduct. All ju must be the same when it comes to frugality, probity, and the like. "We should none of us engage in luxurious habits or corrupt behavior, or propose what is unorthodox for the sake of fame, or pervert the Way (too) for the sake of agreement, or calculate private profit. This is what we adhere to." 2 ' Wang Wei further pointed out that since the passing of the antique order, there had emerged a tendency to degrade the ju profession through specialization in the various subbranches of learning. Many ju of the fourteenth century were, in his opinion, "useless" ju: men who wore the scholars robe, bore themselves with an air of self-importance, but had no aims beyond reciting the classical texts, writing commentaries, and composing elegant poems and essays. "If you ask such a one about the affairs of the state and the world, he answers: 'I am a ju and I am not familiar with that.' Or, if he has some contact with affairs but trouble arises, then he says: 'I am a ju and cannot handle it.'" This, concluded Wang, was why the world mocked the ju and regarded them, quite justifiably, as "incompetent" (yii-k'uo). The "useless" ju was one of a company of lesser ju breeds that, after Hsun-tzu's critique, were variously called "small," "low," "base," "common," "rotten," "fraudulent," and so forth.22 A distinction, then, between shih and ju was most evident at the lower end of each system of stratification, with local 23

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pedants remote from real affairs as the low-ranking ju, and local notables involved with action but indifferently educated as the low-ranking shih. At the higher levels, the two terms were commonly interchangeable. The full "professionalization" of either occupation may be understood to occur at the point where shih and ;u became one and the same. From that apex where the leadership or management talents of the shih and the learning of the ju merged together in functioning individuals, the great net of social control could be spread over the world, presumably to its good order and great benefit. Confucianism as Professional Knowledge In order to grasp the outlook and pretensions of this "Confucian profession" better, and in order to develop an agenda for discussing it, it would be worthwhile at this point to adduce some of the literature on the sociology of the professions. This literature is of some value in helping to explain in a general way how Confucian doctrine was related to the formation of a community of a special type, and how this community in turn related itself to society at large. A minimal definition of a profession seems to involve two basic components: (1) the possession and development on the part of an occupational group of a discrete body of abstract, theoretical knowledge; and (2) a "service ideal," or sense of mission, such that it becomes imperative for the group to apply this knowledge regularly to the alleviation of some specified range of social needs and problems. Wilbert E. Moore defines a profession as "an occupation whose incumbents create and explicitly utilize accumulated general knowledge in the solution of problems posed by a clientele (either individuals or collectivities)."" On the basis of the asserted truth, validity, and practical efficacy of its special monopoly of abstract knowledge, a • 24 •

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professional community will always claim exclusive jurisdiction over the relevant range of its clienteles problems, and hence it will also demand a substantial degree of autonomy or freedom to handle those problems in the light of acquired professional expertise. The Confucian community of the fourteenth century can be viewed in the light of these defining characteristics. Let us first take up the matter of "Confucianism" as professional knowledge. It is of the essence of professional knowledge, as against other kinds of occupational knowledge, that it is general, abstract, and organized. This does not of course mean that the scope or depth or purpose of the knowledge is exactly the same for all members of a profession. The theorization and organization of knowledge are seldom achieved with absolute finality, but are usually always in die process of reinterpretation or development, the results of which are sometimes imperfectly communicated to, or actively resisted by, some members of the professional community. Thus it cannot be stated definitively exactly what fourteenth-century Confucian knowledge consisted in. Everything that the writers of the time wrote might be taken as embodying or reflecting a common core of theoretical knowledge or doctrine, but the lengthy investigation necessary to prove or disprove such an assertion cannot be entertained here. While some writers did try to identify and delineate a "core" of Confucian knowledge, many more did not. All that will be attempted here is to draw a range of statements about the basic substance of Confucian knowledge from those writers who were explicitly concerned with the problem. These statements do indicate that abstraction, generalization, and organization were essential characteristics of Confucian doctrine as understood at the time. "Confucianism" may be defined as professional knowledge of varying scope and depth of a body of abstract, general principles governing human nature and the social system. Its written • 25 •

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sources were the so-called Four Books and Five (or Six) Classics. Research into the meanings and interrelationships of these sources was continual. Huang Tse, for example, devoted a great amount of scholarship to such things as showing that a common system of thought, derived from the Duke of Chou, underlay both the Boot of Changes and the Spring and Autumn Annals, and that the imprint of changing historical conditions could be detected in the various strata of die Book of Rites and the Book of Odes.2* On a different level, lai Liang argued that each Classic marked out and dealt with one crucial branch of human affairs: the Odes with "constant human emotion"; the Rites with the "constant" human tendency to yield; the Book of Documents with communication from superior to inferior; the Changes with the range of possibilities for interaction between superiors and inferiors; and the Spring and Autumn Annals with judging human behavior." Wu Ch'en argued that the Four Books were more important as sources for knowledge than the Classics were, and insisted that these ought to be renamed the "Four Classics" out of respect for that fact.26 Wang Wei endeavored to be the first scholar ever to point out systematically the theoretical interconnections among the Four Books and the Five Classics. He laid it down that the principles of the Classics could conveniently be understood through the Four Books, such that the Doctrine of the Mean contained the principles of the Changes; the Great Learning, the principles of the Documents; the Mencius, those of the Spring and Autumn Annals; and the Analects, those of the Odes, Rites, and Music.27 Wang also sought to state explicitly the substance and function of the Classics. According to him, each Classic embodied a set of principles inherent in the mind, and each had a particular concrete social application. The Book of Rites, for example, reflected the systemic order that the mind possesses because the principles of the "Heavenly hierarchy" (t'ien-hsu) are inherent in the mind. At the same • 26 •

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time, the Rites was also an instrument for making discriminations, its function (yung) being to establish correct distinctions between the obscure and the illustrious, the inferior and the superior.28 While Wang Wei tried to deal with doctrine as a whole, Cheng Yuan-yu believed that each of the Classics was so complex as to justify scholarly specialization upon one alone as more than sufficient for a lifetime's work. Anciently, according to Cheng, only the Odes and the Documents were universally taught to all shih; the other Classics as optional choices for study had always required separate training under specialists.29 However, discourse about the nature and purpose of Confucian knowledge often proceeded in a very abstract fashion, detached from any particular classical source. There existed a fairly broad consensus among the writers that the substance of the "body of knowledge" (called tao, the Way) possessed primarily an ethical content. That is, tao contained normative, incontrovertible, and highly generalized principles controlling relationships among things. These principles were not arrived at inductively. They were not extrapolations from actual social experience, but a priori truths about relationships established by ancient authority. These truths were perceived as a set of valid insights into the inner nature of the cosmos. According to Hu Han, tao was a supreme and imperishable metaphysical principle that governed all phenomena. As his essay makes clear, however, humanity left to its own devices commonly ignores it or misapprehends it in the actual conduct of life. This is because humanity on the whole concerns itself with concrete particularities, which themselves can never serve as a starting point for knowledge of the tao. "If the tao were confined to concrete things," he wrote, "how would it differ from them?" Perception of the tao can only result from intense introspection of the mind, the "house of the gods" that is at once vacuous (i.e., devoid of miscellaneous information) and yet filled with the essentials of general knowledge. Having achieved • 27 •

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this inner vision, the mind of the adept then controls (t'ung) his own nature and emotions, whereupon "all principles of things (li) are complete; he merges himself with Heaven and Earth, and all things are directed by him." That is to say, the "core" of Confucian knowledge in Hu Han's interpretation consists in a set of ordered principles about die general nature of the cosmos. Acquisition of these principles results directly in the acquisition of power—over the self and all other phenomena. Humanity in general is of course subject to the operation of the cosmic principles of the tao, but the great divide between sages (the Confucian "professional model") and lay society as a whole lies precisely in the fact that most people do not know these principles. And it is by virtue of these theoretical principles, divorced from particularity, and not through the concrete facts of social interaction, that, as Hu Han states, the primary social relationships of father and son, ruler and subject, husband and wife, seniors and juniors, and older and younger brothers achieve their normative patterns. "By it [i.e., the tao], government and moral suasion are completed, rites and music rise and flourish, yin and yang are harmonious, ghosts and gods are serene. The empire and state by it are well ruled; otherwise there is disorder. Barbarians by it are subdued; otherwise they rebel. . . . Those who attain it are sages and worthies; those who lose it are the small men, the stupid, and the unworthy."50 l o what extent was the full vision of the tao available to all who would seek it? Was the amount of introspection necessary to achieve the vision easy or difficult to arrive at? The consensus seems to have been that the full range of general knowledge embodied by tao was exceedingly difficult to acquire. If the grand essence of the tao was unattainable in practice except for the very few, circumscribed manifestations of that tao were accessible to individuals of more limited capacities. According to Hsieh Su, various sagely authorities had long ago • 28 •

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taken tao and broken it down into specificfieldsof application. The emperors and kings of antiquity had used tao to create ruling systems (chih); Confucius had used it to create sociomoral doctrine (chiao); Yen Hui, Tseng-tzu, Tzu-ssu, and Mencius had used it to develop methods of study (hsueh). The tao behind these manifestations could be approached through some reasonable but still demanding amount of "contemplation and self-inspection" (ts'un-yang hsing-ch'a).n As Wang Wei put it, "What ought to be studied? The Way of the Sages and Worthies. The Sages and Worthies are distant, but their writings all remain. Their sayings can be verified and their Way can be sought. By effort one can reach it. If one knows the study and studies it, one may become a disciple of the Sages and Worthies even if he cannot reach them."'2 Wang I pointed out that one must enter the Way through a combination of inner "seriousness" and outer "righteousness." Seriousness was reached through "restraint and fear"; "investigating things and extending knowledge" led to the development of righteousness." The cultivation of inner seriousness also produced the necessary sagely attribute of desirelessness; from that state, actions might always accord with what was right (cheng), never deviating into the selfish or partial.M Thus knowledge in theory was a function of ethics, unattainable in the full sense except through the "work" (kung-fu) of ethical self-development. Wang Hsing wrote that the study of the classics involves not simply familiarity with their contents, but also an understanding of the tao and the hsin (mind) of the sages," something the texts convey subliminally, and which can only be apprehended through actual ethical reflection and practice. However, Hsu Ch'ien cautioned that the "extension of knowledge" did demand a detailed search outside the self. "We must seek out the knowledge we are after with a view to achieving complete knowledge. It's not just a matter of reverencing the expression 'extension of knowledge.' It doesn't mean we simply • 29 •

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know the oneness of principle without having actually to seek it out in its manifold manifestations." * The Confucian elites were eager to make sure that their body of knowledge retained an elusive and sacrosanct character. Warnings about the misapprehension and misuse of the doctrine are rife in the literature. "Today's learners read the Classics," complained Wang Hsing, and yet how many there are who flout the Way in what they write and say. And those shih who don't flout the Way, who ought to be able to approach those of antiquity, don't even do as well as those of the Han. Why is that? What the Sung Neo-Confucian fathers spoke of was the mind of the sage, and what they acted upon was the Way of the sage. But [today's thih] repeat the words but don't make that mind their mind; they talk about the Way, but don't make that action their action. Thus of course they fail to match the ancients. The Way of the sages is not outside die classical texts, yet it cannot be attained by reading and memorization alone." Wang Wei pointed out that while the Way was so abstract that it had "no sound or smell," it was "yet no different from what common men and women all know." Still, the fact remained that apprentice Confucians routinely misunderstood the technical terms that constituted the "core of study" (chianghsueh chih thu-yao). In the minds of the incompetently trained, he wrote, pliancy regularly passed as "benevolence"; resoluteness, as "righteousness"; temperament, as "nature"; dullness, as "sincerity"; flattery, as "loyalty"; inquisitiveness, as "wisdom," and so on, with lay meanings invading the realm of the professional terminology. In Wang's opinion, the routinization of Confucian study had gone so far that few believed that the body of knowledge was really applicable to the affairs of the world. "The books remain books, the men remain men, and the teaching becomes empty theory (k'ung-yen)."** Elsewhere, Wang Wei warned that the body of knowledge was easily susceptible to intellectual or literary trivialization. "Men nowadays who study • 30 •

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metaphysics ('nature and destiny') probe high and deep, but are unconcerned about its possible applications. Those involved in literary composition pride themselves foremost on their artfulness without returning to the root (i.e., the basic doctrine)." 39 Men regularly allowed the true knowledge core to be removed from the center of their concerns, with the ancillary pursuits of composition and textual commentary taking its place.'10 Worse, of course, was the willful debasement of Confucian knowledge on the part of self-seeking careerists. C h e n g Tuan-li wrote: Common learners perhaps read the Classics, but their aim is just to cull out quotations for use in their examination answers. They use the Classics simply to further their selfish desires for profit or success. . . . So naturally when they are put in charge of some unit of local government, they fail our expectations and depart from the Way, completely unashamed of their rapacity or pliancy. They give no thought to this matter because they have fallen in with common customs. No wonder the military men and the clerks deride these low ju for their uselessness. Yet surely this is not what the Way of the ju really consists in.41 Rarer but perhaps even more pernicious than simple corruption was misplaced idealism. According to Su Fo-heng, sincere but incorrect doctrine could create incalculable harm. While incompetent physicians ruin only single lives, erroneous Confucians ruin an entire age. It was more difficult, he stated, to write a sound Confucian work than it was to write a sound text on medicine. 42 In the light of the above statements, it may be concluded that at least the idea of a discrete body of Confucian knowledge existed in the fourteenth century. Although they varied somewhat in their descriptions of what this knowledge consisted in* writers did hold that this knowledge, however defined, was of such a nature that (1) mastery of it was difficult; (2) it was generally but intimately relevant to the conduct of all aspects of everyday social existence; and (3) it was at the same time remote • 31 •

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from the understanding of most human beings, who were unable to detach themselves from the particularisms of their everyday lives. It is exactly at the point of separation between general knowledge, which governs many particulars, and particular knowledge, which has no wider theory or organization, that the whole distinction between professional and lay knowledge emerges. In fact, the difference between occupation and profession hinges precisely on the notion that professional competence is something that cannot be acquired through individual practical experience, trial-and-error methods, or "on-the-job training." Special, usually formal education of "exceptional duration and perhaps of exceptional difficulty" is an imperative and inescapable part of a profession's requirement for all members.4' It was a Confucian claim that the transmission of its core of general ethical knowledge did demand formal schooling as well as serious individual effort. The Training of Confucian Professionals While fourteenth-century writing about doctrine tends to be positive and even ecstatic in tone, writing about education tends to be heavily critical and often scathing. The reason for this attitude is that as professional social theorists (and to some extent also activists), the writers did presume to know how the ideal social order (based on the model of classical antiquity) ought to look and how the people within that order ought to (unction and behave. Rigid controls over education (that is, over the recruitment and training of new professionals) were a central feature of that ideal order. Given the nonexistence of the ancient system in their own time, and the felt inadequacy of its current substitutes, verbal criticism by shih elites of the profession as a whole, and of its educational shortcomings, served in a • 32 •

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way as a means of maintaining standards and exposing or discouraging the incompetent, the devious, and the badly trained. It was with a pervasive sense of malaise that writers discussed current lapses in the process whereby professional knowledge, attitudes, and ethics ought to have been implanted in the younger generations. One focus of this discussion was a perceived breakdown in the normative relationship of master and disciple. Wu Ch'eng wondered why it was that the potters could stay true to their ancient designs, while the shih were neglecting to observe their ancient behavioral codes.44 What was going wrong? Liu Sung sadly noted that the master-disciple relationship pervaded society mainly at its lower levels, especially among the artisans, where pupils strove to copy their masters down to the last detail. Among the sons of the shih, such relationships did not prevail, because the young thought absolute subordination to a master in the fashion of the artisans to be too humiliating.45 Liu Hsien remarked further on the looseness of Confucian master-disciple ties to a Buddhist acquaintance: Since the disappearance of die Way of the Teacher in Confucianism ("the Way of the Sages and Worthies"), respectforteachers has come toflourishin Buddhism and Taoism, and above all in Buddhism. So strictly do Buddhist disciples serve their teachers that they willingly undergo privation and loneliness,forsakingthe normal joys of human existence in return for a ragged robe and a few scraps offood.They sprinkle and sweep and draw water and kindlingfortheir teachers, and do not resent the scolding andfloggingthey get in return. Many endure years of this; some even a whole lifetime of it. And what is their reward? Perhaps hearing the one phrase that will enlighten them, or experiencing die one thing that will make them understand, whereupon they tumble into someformlessvoid that is outside the ordinary understanding. Despite all this, Buddhism through the ages has never lacked seekers. Now Confucianism is something that exists precisely within the scope of everyday human life. Mastering the Way does not demand such self-abasement or such a long period of time. Yet what do we get

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from it? H i e whole system of social relationships and moral norms (kang-ch'ang); the modalities of rule and transformation from the rites, music, and literature; the impartial Way of the sovereigns, emperors, and kings; and the substantive teachings of its texts—the Nine Classics, the histories, and the commentaries. It is complete in its fundamentals and its details; its substance has been established and its applicability demonstrated. It is as large as Heaven and Earth, as bright as die sun and moon, and its pathways follow the courses of the rivers and mountains. It deals with matters familiar to all. Still, it is the case that the further in time from antiquity we come, the fewer are the shih who know the Way of the Teacher. In the Tang, Han Yii and Liu Tsung-yuan both singled out the disinclination of the shih to respect their teachers as Confucianism's great flaw. No one as yet has been able to rectify this matter.46

It was rather commonly believed that historically there had taken place a kind of cyclical process, wherein at certain periods the "Way of the leacher" prevailed over the secularizing demands of society, whereas at other periods a general social insistence upon the trivialization and fragmentation of the Confucian body of knowledge prevailed over the professional demand for integrity. Lii F u , for one, pointed out that after the passing of classical antiquity, the fading of the Way of the leacher (shihtao) led to the breakup and decline of study into the secondary arts of textual study and literary composition. Then the NeoConfucian movement of the Sung reestablished the integrity and autonomy of the teaching function. But with the Yuan dynasty's implementation of a civil service examination system based on this Neo-Confiicianism, the trend swung in the other direction, so that education once again had come to concern itself only with imparting the superficial minimum necessary to pass the examinations. The whole idea of "transmitting the Way and carrying on the profession (yeh) through exhausting [ones own nature] and the principles [of things]" had once again been lost.47 One possible remedy, suggested in cases where teachers served in private family schools, was for the teacher to impose • 34 •

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heavier discipline upon his pupils. Wang I urged Yeh Tzu-ch'i to do just this. The "rich" C h e n lineage, which had just engaged Yeh as its tutor, counted among its youth many who were "enmired in frivolities and captivated by idleness." leaching them mainly composition would only increase their faults. It was up to Yeh to teach them "virtuous behavior," using the "Way of the Teacher to challenge their arrogance and complacency, and expounding the classical teachings to open their minds to decorum and righteousness."48 The success of this approach, as Wang I did further point out, depended very heavily upon the personal qualities of the teacher. Probably, it also depended upon the extent to which the teacher was able to influence the organization and behavior of the lineage as a whole. The teacher Ch'en Hui, for example, besides tutoring the kin juniors, was also instrumental in establishing an endowed Confucian sacrificial system for the wealthy l a i lineage of Ning-po, which he served.49 Pedagogical authoritarianism had its pitfalls, however. It was not unknown for government-school students in the Yuan period to bring litigation against tyrannical teachers. ^ Wang Shu-ying discussed some cautionary cases, no doubt partly fictional: There used to be two schools in my home district. The teacher of one was licentious and tyrannical; the teacher of the other was conscientious but demanding. Each had a dozen or so pupils. The first teacher demanded that the pupils bring him wine and meats daily. These he would consume at home with singing and revelry, arrogantly caring nothing about what others might think. Yet he ruled his pupils with extreme severity, expecting them to conform exactly to every rule of deportment. He would scold and flog them without mercy for the slightest infractions, at the first sign of a smirk or whisper. Pretty soon the pupils could stand no more. Sobbing among themselves, they said: "The teacher, pieasure-loving and lacking in decorum as he is, nevertheless expects us to be perfect. We cannot be his pupils under such conditions." And so they simply walked off and deserted him. The other teacher was just as strict as the first in controlling his

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pupils, but eveiy day firom moming till night he would sit veiy formally and teach without any sign of relaxing. When die students proved unable to conform fully to his regimen, he grew angry and indignant and said: "When I was a pupil myself, I never dared disobey my teacher's instructions in the slightest. Since you pupils do not obey me, I cannot be your teacher any more." And so he simply walked out of the school. As a result, the pupils of both schools got no education at all." Ch'eng Tuan-hsueh remarked that a satisfactory teacherstudent relationship had to depend upon some delicate combination of strictness and cooperation, fear and affection, and familiarity and respect. Instruction was, he believed, especially difficult in the government schools, where the teachers were often young, inexperienced, and not very far advanced in their own studies, and the pupils were more than ready to scorn or humiliate them. 52 Most writers, however, laid the blame for bad or ineffective teaching upon the students. Chou Ting-chen, for example, wrote that students tended to look up to teachers when they were just beginning to learn, but when they got older and ambitious, then they rejected their teachers completely and went on to commit a whole further array of unethical acts." According to Wang Hsing, even such undeniably great teachers of the past as Han Yii and the Ch'eng brothers had students who "rebelled" against them. M In a number of short fictional tales he wrote, Wang Hsing used homely examples from such occupations as swordsmanship, shoemaking, and veterinary medicine to point up the ultimate rewards of serious-minded apprenticeship and the disasters that inevitably befall the partially trained. He urged students not to quit before completing their studies, as they often did from a misplaced sense of self-confidence. The successful completion of study, he believed, did not so much demand great aptitude as it did a persevering will." Similarly, Hsu Ch'ien singled out conceit and laxity in the students as the principal causes of poor Confucian training.56 Ch'eng Tuan-li, a career teacher in the academies and local • 36 •

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government schools of the late Yuan period, devised a means of removing some of these attitudinal vagaries in the master-pupil relationship. His "Daily and Yearly Study Syllabus"(Tu-s/iu fenmen jih-ch'eng), prepared with painstaking care and revised several times, spelled out in the most minute detail exacdy what students should study and how they should study it in order to prepare themselves for the civil service examinations. Ch'eng explained that parents and older brothers, eager to advance their charges as fast as possible, often pressured local government teachers into adopting the quickest possible methods of instruction. The syllabus method, though slow, was thorough and complete and, he insisted, less likely to lead to future disaster than the rapid methods. It would also put an end to parental pushing and would insulate teachers and students from improper interference from that quarter.'7 Ch'eng worked with a reformer's zeal, constantly promoting the wider adoption of his syllabus, and always on the lookout for signs that it was producing well-rounded and honest examination graduates. Yet Ch'eng's effort, practical as it may have been, did not begin to resolve the dissatisfactions of most writers with the current systems of Confucian instruction. A sound national system of professional education was, in fact, possible only in the context of the Confucians' Utopian model of social order. An important part of professional Confucian doctrine consisted in knowledge of the ideal institutional arrangements of antique society and the place and purpose of education within it. It was a matter of firm belief among many writers that the fundamental institution of the antique social system had been the so-called well-field (ching-t'ien) community of equal land allotments, according to which eight families together had cultivated, besides their individual portions, a ninth portion whose proceeds were devoted to the public good. The system had supposedly not only ensured a rational distribution of land and labor, and removed all cause for strife between rich and poor; it had also been the basic component in a • 37 •

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series of other interlocking systems. Each well-field community, for example, provided for its own education and its own defense;58 and, according to Wu Lai, it also dovetailed with a concurrent and higher-order system of "feudalism" (fengchien), a sort of well-field system writ large, consisting in hereditary fiefs populated by the well-field communities and distributed by the ancient rulers to their kinsmen and retainers.59 From the ninth portion cultivated by the farmers in common came the revenues that supported "feudalism" and central government and all the other accoutrements of higher civilization, including especially the educational system. The "public" proceeds also provided stipends for the shih, those men of superior moral and intellectual capacity who, after the age of forty,40 were taken away from their part-time agricultural work to serve as full-time teachers or officials in the governments of the regional lords or the king. Wang Wei endeavored to describe the antique educational system that was in some way or other integrated with the wellfield communities. He recalled an arrangement based upon units of twenty-five families, each unit supporting a school staffed by local worthies and open to all the educable sons and younger brothers of a given area. It was in these schools that the shih as commoners were confined. Gathered together here, the students were easily taught their long, graded, and comprehensive curriculum of subjects. Unless they departed to serve in an official capacity, their occupational lives were entirely circumscribed by their schools. Residing with their families in their native communities, and sustained from the proceeds of the well-fields' ninth portions, the shih had the time and the leisure to learn basic ceremonial behavior, the six practical arts, and finally, in the famous sequence outlined in the Great Learning, how to "investigate things and extend knowledge, make the will sincere and rectify the mind, cultivate the self and regulate the family, and rule the state and pacify the world."61 Sadly, this ideal had disintegrated long ago. Yii Chi ex• 38 •

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plained that with the disintegration of the well-field communities, the grandee and shih families lost their land allotments to the fanners, artisans, merchante, and others; private property (ssu-ts'ai) with its distributive inequalities emerged and brought about the current "mutual alienation" of the various occupational strata.62 The local school systems with their uniform and universalistic criteria broke down; the shih scattered, wandering away from their homes in search of education and employment. The failings of the modem shih were traced by many writers to this fundamental myth of the well-field collapse and the shih diaspora. Yet despite the constant references in fourteenth-century writing to the ideal of the well-field system, there was really very little enthusiasm for using it as a blueprint for thoroughgoing reform in the present. Rather, it served as a yardstick for negative judgments of modern shih conditions or behavior that most writers hoped to ameliorate by means short of actually restoring the well-field communities. The use of the model also suggests that the school system, however it was organized, was taken to be a principal mechanism of shih control, serving as a professionalizing link between community and government, and in part making up for the lack of any recognized professional organization among the shih or ;u themselves. The resemblance of fourteenth-century schooling to the antique ideal was feeble at best. Confucian education in the Yuan was provided to the public through an array of official schools, ranging from the Imperial University in the capital, to prefectura! and county-level schools in other urban locations, and to the so-called academies (shu-yuan) in the rural areas. Private schools (i-shu, chia-shu) were also built in the Yuan period in great numbers, and it is a fact of some significance that many of the leading Yuan intelligentsia taught in one or another of these rather than in the local government schools." Famous "centers" of Confucian learning were always acclaimed teachers, never schools as institutions. • 39 •

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Nonetheless, official schools as institutions were legion in Yuan times. Deferring for the moment the question of the organization of public education, it may simply be noted here that from 1 3 1 5 the schools made it their mission to prepare their students for the civil service examinations, and to that end they mainly served as dispensers of the orthodox (Chu Hsi) NeoConfucian doctrines and whatever other knowledge or skills were required on those examinations. The perceived consequences of this arrangement deeply offended the professional sensibilities of the writers, whose standards of judgment were shaped by their knowledge of the antique ideal. Yuan Chueh, for example, singled out the academies for a stinging attack. He noted that the growth of the academies in the Yuan had been accompanied by a serious deterioration in the quality of the education they offered. They were doing no more than propagating the Four Books with Chu Hsi s commentaries for the students to memorize and recite. Nothing of any use was being taught, and the students remained in complete ignorance of basic history and institutions. Ill-equipped graduates of the academies then entered an overfilled job market ("clogged the selection system"), and "down to the day they die they never advance beyond the lowest positions for the very good reason that they never acquire an ability to develop themselves." 64 The debasement of educational standards was not a problem new with the Yuan, however. Hsu Ch'ien stated that ever since the decline of antiquity, the Sung era not excepted, the Confucian schools had done no more than supply students with "literary polish." Until there took place the complete "retraditionalization" (fu-ku) of education, with the reinstitution of the whole of the ancient curriculum, capable graduates would never be produced, and the state as a result could never achieve full social order.65 Teng Wen-yuan thought latter-day student life all too soft. T h e contemporary state's subsidization of the students shielded them from life's rigors, and its examination and other recruit• 40 •

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ment systems made success come too easily for them. This was in part why their learning was conformist and superficial.66 Wu Lai regretted the decline of the vigorous controversies that had at least enlivened the intellectual world of the Sung, and castigated the stale mediocrity and conformity that infected student habits in the Yuan.67 ChengTuan-hsueh, like Yuan Chueh a member of the faculty of the Yuan Imperial University, remarked upon a lack of integration of the schools with society and its practical needs. "In antiquity," he wrote, "all people could study regardless of status. But in the local government schools and academies of today, only the shih gain entry, and the peasants, artisans, and merchants are excluded. In antiquity, study was inseparable from everyday life, and what was learned in the home could be applied to the rule of the state. But today s learners strive to achieve a literary flashiness before they can even read and punctuate correcdy. They rush to pride themselves on this, unaware that this kind of thing is wholly useless."68 Huang Chin complained that the recent development of printing and the consequent availability and low cost of books had not improved intellectual standards at all; scholars had, to the contrary, grown increasingly shallow.6* Pei Ch'iung noted that although the Classics had been reprinted in quantity and were available all over the realm, hardly anyone really understood them.70 There seems to have been in the minds of the critics an unexpressed but probable link between the decline of the ideal school system and the degeneration of master-disciple attitudes. As education became less integral to social life, its relevance to the affairs of the real world shrank, and pedagogical procedures grew ever more artificial and formalized. Sung Lien wrote: In the time of the former kings, the Way was bright, virtue was excellent, and customs pure and fine. Those who were superiors were able in their every action to influence the gods and cause people to reform their minds and seek the good. This is why they were called "model elders." They manifested their virtue in their conduct and that • 41 •

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was all. No questioning of them by learners was ever necessary. Later [in history] there came questions and answers, but no question was ever put without some compelling reason for it. Nowadays, however, teachers who lecture are completely different. They sit upright holding their books, draw analogies and make references, and completely bewilder their students. Once they set their tongues in motion they talk on endlessly with no question ever having been asked of them. And so the students yawn and stretch and think of sleep, and have no idea of what the teacher is talking about. The saying "the more the lecturing, the obscurer the classics" is surely right.71 It may not go too far to say from these citations that the Confucian elites tended to believe that as the primeval communal solidarity of the antique well-field order broke down, the various social subsystems (including government, the military, etc., as well as education) drifted away from the societal whole, each pursuing its own ends with minimal reference to any of the rest. Thus the increasing unreality or irrelevance of modern education referred to by Sung Lien and others, and the deterioration of master-disciple relations, would appear to have been latently understood as a consequence of the relative independence of the educational system and of the increasing tendency of education to serve itself rather than the "real" needs of society. Obviously, then, if existing formal systems of education were necessary, but in themselves inadequate to ensure the transmission of Confucian knowledge, then there had to be some other means of training that would compensate for the deficiencies of the schools and in some way provide for the emergence of a small "knowledge elite" from the large mass of half-formed shih or ju. In fact, there existed a variety of informal means for the development of such an elite. Here it may simply be stated that the creation of Confucian elites in the fourteenth century depended upon some or all of the following factors: (1) residence in or contact with a locality with a strong

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learning tradition; (2) apprenticeship to or recognition by some famous teacher or influential official; (3) a better than average aptitude for self-tuition, literary expression, and broad philosophical understanding; and (4) a demonstrated ethical commitment to the highest-order norms of the profession. Looking ahead, it is important to note from the foregoing discussion that the Confucian writers did not see their profession in their own time as a body created automatically either by graduation from the national schools or by passing a nationally instituted series of written examinations. The Confucian professional was not viewed as someone who simply met the technical requirements for mastering an orthodox body of doctrine. A crucial result of this attitude was that as of the time of the Ming founding, nothing approaching an organized Confucian party or pressure group existed. T h e considerable power of the profession lay all but exclusively in its topmost elite, whose identities and roles derived, not from their representing a large and indiscriminate professional constituency, but precisely from the moral distance they were able to put between themselves and the mass of the partially trained and partially committed, whose outlook and behavior were contaminated by selfish drives and misplaced ambitions. This structure was no mere matter of dry sociology; it would come to exact a terrible price in human casualties. The Confucian "Service Ideal" The occupational community that has come to possess a discrete body of theoretical learning broadly applicable to some range of human needs or problems will also engender a "service ideal." It will acquire an absolutely compelling need that its qualified members be given special license to apply their unique learning regularly to the remedy of whatever problems • 43 •

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fall within the field of competence that it has staked out. When it receives such a license, it becomes a full-fledged profession. License to practice is usually granted by public authority. It gives the profession monopolistic control over its particular function and implicitly discourages competitors. It also concedes to the profession some large degree of autonomy in the actual performance of its work. In return for its public license, a profession must pledge itself to the notion of service as an ideal rather than a source of handsome remuneration. The professionalizing group must regularly seek to convince the general püblic that it devotes its energies altruistically to the public good and not to "personal or commercial profit." 72 As William Goode points out, the prestige of a profession depends on "its perceived capacity for self denial," 7 ' and on its ability to demand "real sacrifice from practitioners as an ideal and, from time to time, in fact." 74 However, for any profession there existe a conflict between the professed ideal of altruistic service and the necessity of charging fees or accepting salaries for the actual performance of such service. This makes it hard for a profession to continue to demonstrate that it exists primarily to provide an indispensable public service, and only as a by-product to generate income or profit for its members. The Confucians' service ideal encompassed an obligation to apply in a wholly disinterested way their professional knowledge and skills to the remedy of errors, abuses, and shortcomings in the social order. The devotees of the Way of the Sages and Worthies arrogated to themselves a generalized body of effective principles that applied to the whole field of human and social relations. Skilled shih and learned ju secured their leading place in the national hierarchy of occupations by virtue of their monopolistic control of those principles in the actual handling of society and its crises—of any sort and on any scale.75 Support for these propositions is not hard to find in the . 44 .

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Confucian literature. Little in the real world was said to have exceeded the scope of general Confucian principle, or li. "None of the affairs of the realm is beyond li," wrote Pei Ch'iung. "There is no need for private views or reckless actions that defy necessity and coerce those who do not yield. What comes from Heaven is easy, and what comes from man is difficult; the one leads to accomplishment, and the other to abuses."76 Wang Hsing stated that "when one has studied to the point where principles become clear, and has applied those principles to affairs, then grief or fear cannot arise, and outside events cannot disturb one's equilibrium." 77 The same writer insisted that it was quite impossible for the uninstructed layman even to understand principles, let alone act upon them. "When principles are clear," he wrote, "then we can distinguish affairs because we are no longer misled by things that seem right but are wrong, or seem wrong although they are right. For example, it may look right for a son to scold his father for beating a sheep, but actually in principle it is wrong. It may look wrong for a son to remove his father from an unseemly social situation, yet actually in principle it is right. How could one understand these matters unless one had studied?"78 Mere knowledge of principles was clearly not enough for the ;u, as Su Po-heng warned. "I have heard that the Way is rooted in the mind, and once we attain that, then it is possible to grasp [the theory of] ruling systems (chih). This is because ruling systems and metaphysics are complementary. But to discuss metaphysics exclusively and neglect ruling systems is to run the danger of developing a theoretic substance (t'i) without practical application (yung)." 7 ' "Practical application" was, however, usually carefully distinguished from vulgar or lay notions of instant success or spectacular quantitative results in the field of social endeavor. In fact, it appears characteristic of professions generally that, because they strive to maintain distance from and control over . 45 .

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their clients, one of the most serious violations of professional norms is quackery, or seeking to please the consumers of services in disregard of professional ethical codes.80 It follows from this that professional performance may not ordinarily be measurable by quantitative or objective standards of judgment, because these might give the edge to the quacks. If "visible mastery of the problem itself' cannot be tested adequately, then surrogate standards of judgment must be used in order to assess professional competence. According to William J. Goode, it commonly happens that when commitment to professional norms is high, and when there is a high degree of social interaction among the membership, then the yardstick of any individual member's success is the opinion of his professional peers. This procedure means of course that the profession will tend to protect members who are, in terms of the practical results they achieve, quite inept.81 Moore further points out that a profession with a strong sense of community and a great degree of peer control is likely to value conformity with peer norms more highly than actual success with clients.82 In this connection, the bias of the Confucian writers lay clearly in the direction of conformity with professional norms. Some definitions of Confucian model types emphasize their orientation toward knowledge or ethical norms rather than practical efficacy. Thus the "heroic shih" (hao-chieh chih shih) was, according to Huang Chin, one who "could make this Way his responsibility."8' A homely definition reported by Liang Yin said of die "gentleman" (chun-tzu) that he was "a man who, whenrighteousnessand profit waned within him, let righteousness win [at least] 60-70 percent of the time."84 Ch'eng Chii-fu found it hard to describe the functions of the ;u, but he indicated that these did include advising superiors as to the "distinctions between public and private, principle and law, advantage and harm, permissibility and impermissibility, and proceeding and stopping."8' More forthrightly, Hsieh Su averred that hav• 46 •

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ing internalized (fan-shen) the Way as found in the Classics, die gentleman may, depending upon circumstances, either "advance and restore the Three Dynasties [of antiquity], or withdraw and establish theory for future ages."86 Applying professional knowledge to reform the world, helping to bring it closer in line with the ancient model, was said by some to demand not so much a capacity to act ("talent," ts'ai) as it did individual conformity to professional ethical norms (te-hsing, the "virtuous nature"). It was the lay world that tended to overvalue talent. In antiquity, according to Chu T u n g , rulers gave men positions principally on the basis of their te-hsing; whereas in later ages, owing to the decline of doctrine, there emerged a new emphasis on "success and intelligence" (kung-li chih-li) and a belief that virtue was not an adequate qualification for applied administration.87 An extreme statement of the objective unmeasurability of Confucian professional competence may be found in Fang Hsiao-ju's appreciation of the life of his mentor Sung Lien, whom Fang believed had assisted in some profound but not easily accountable way in the founding of the Ming dynasty: Anyone can recognize nameable merit. Gentlemen can recognize merit that is hard to put a name to. But as for that invisible merit that benefits the world unawares, onlyfollowersof the sages can recognize it. . . . Mountains produce clouds, whose precipitation falls everywhere. People see the benefits of precipitation, without being aware that it was the mountains that originally made it all possible. The great ;u need not have had a brilliant role in dynasticfoundation;the effects of his contributions usually lie beyond visible events, and yet it is quite true to say that the world was actually regenerated through such a man, even though people generally may not be aware of it. In feet, without such a man die world cannot be pacified."* Thus effectiveness in an easily measurable sense was no true test of Confucian professional competence. Pei Ch'iung posited . 47 .

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two possible orientations for political-administrative goals: toward success and profit (kung-li), or toward benevolence and righteousness (jen-i). The achievement of the first kind of goal demanded men who were "clever" (ch'iao) and "closely in tune with men and events" (t'ung). The second kind of goal, based upon eternal principles rather than the desires of the moment, needed for its achievement men attuned to professional norms who might be (and might even style themselves as) "clumsy" (cho) and "out of touch" (yii) with regard to the key personalities and ongoing events in a given situation. "To follow the times is t'ung," wrote Pei, "and to follow the Way is yii." The term yii described those who "did not know changed circumstances and were always running against the current of the times." One who was simply t'ung with regard to those currents might well come to grief because of his slavish dependence upon changing circumstantial particularities. One who was yii possessed a more reliable base, and besides could with a little effort make himself t'ung enough to handle concrete situations where he had to.89 In sum, the basis of Confucian competence clearly lay in yii rather than in t'ung, in cho rather than in ch'iao, in "virtue" rather than in "talent." Talent, cleverness, and situational knowledgeability were felt to be one of the breeding grounds of the world's ills. Moore writes that "professionals apply very general principles, standardized knowledge, to concrete problems requiring solution or palliative measures."90 His understanding of the professional role seems close to what Pei Ch'iung sought to explicate. If this reading of the literature is generally correct so far, then fourteenth-century "Confucianism" falls within the range of the sociological concept of a profession by virtue of the abstractness and generality of its body of knowledge, the asserted applicability of that knowledge to a given range of social problems, and the asserted impossibility of routinely applying any easily visible or measurable criteria as a true test of actual perfor• 48 •

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mance. In addition, it should also be possible to detect as part of Confucianism's "service ideal" some sort of self-denying attitude toward the question of remuneration for services rendered. Confucian Professional Income There appears to exist a logical relationship between the abstract character of professional knowledge, the mental and emotional approach of the practitioner toward the problems of his clientele, and the kind of remuneration he earns. In a discussion of die question of professional "detachment," Everett C. Hughes remarks that normatively the practitioner takes personal interest, not in any particular case, but rather in the general range of cases of which the particular case constitutes a kind. "The deep interest in all cases," he writes, "is of the sort that leads one to pursue and systematize the pertinent knowledge. It leads to finding an intellectual base for the problems one handles, which, in turn, takes those problems out of their particular setting and makes them part of some more universal order."91 The logical bearing of these considerations upon the question of earnings may tentatively be stated this way: the abstractness of the professional's knowledge and his personal detachment from his clients (his source of earnings) will make it impossible for him openly to establish his fees upon a commercial basis of changing supply and demand (because the attitude of professional detachment is incongruous with concrete personal interest in that sort of market), or openly to limit his clients to the wealthy (he must demonstrate his interest in die general range of cases by acting at least occasionally for little or no remuneration). In general, professional earnings need to be set at some stable level sufficiendy modest to preserve at least the appearance that altruistic public service remains the profession's primary mission. • 49 •

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The question of professional income is, then, a derivative question. It follows from the normative professional attitude toward work. The crucial attitude is detachment. The good Confucian was wholly detached. It may be useful to expand upon this point for a moment. That the Confucian sought to distance himself emotionally and personally from the objects of his applied expertise is evident, at least as a norm, from a variety of expressions in the literature, l o Hu Han, only the ju could like those things that lacked color, taste, or smell.42 Sun Tso explained the difference between detachment and involvement as the difference between still water and rushing water. "The nature of still water is quiescence; it responds to things but doesn't pursue them. The nature of rushing water is action; it slams into things and doesn't accord with [their inherent character]."9' Hsieh Su warned that what the gentleman must control in himself is desire and anger. The more his mind preserves tao, the less will anger and desire affect his behavior.94 The good Confucian could not be permitted even the shortest of holidays from his professional attitudes. Yii Chi [minted out that only Confucius's disciple Yen Hui completely managed to "overcome the self and return to propriety" (k'o-chi fu-li), and yet that goal remained obligatory for anyone determined to emulate the Sages and Worthies. Even Ch'eng Hao thought he had banished his love of hunting from his mind, only to find himself tempted one day by the sight of a hunter near the road. "This is something naive or scheming students cannot be expected to understand," concluded Yii Chi. "The common mass thinks that by some low or ephemeral success one can approach [die sages], but assuredly that is not so."95 Cheng Yuan-yu put the matter clearly. "By preserving his mind," he wrote, "the ju is unencumbered by things, and so he can transcend human passion and falsity. Ordinary people are different; in confronting affairs they minutely calculate selfish advantage. Though aware • 50 •

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of the difference between right and wrong, they become swayed by rumor and reckless opinion, carefully look out for their own interests, and fail to concede any merit in contrary positions." 96 As for shih or ju remuneration, it was stated by Mencius and reiterated by many fourteenth-century writers that "constant minds" must have a "constant livelihood." The antique system was understood to have guaranteed the shih a minimum level of sustenance; they did not have to make a living. How under modem conditions the shih should support themselves was not an easily resolved matter. Kan Fu put it this way: Under the well-field system, everyone had fields for the production of food. Destitute shih could have recourse to farming. When they went out to serve, they received positions in line with their virtue, and their salaries were proportionate to their positions. Even if they were made gatekeepers or nightwatchmen, their income was always enough to relieve them from farming. When their positions were high, their sons and grandsons were given hereditary salary. In later ages, private-property accumulation arose, leaving many with no fields. Those who served in office got hereditary salary no more. Shih withoutoffice and no means of sustenance had to abandon the profession. However, by teaching others' children they could survive from the fees and be more or less like someone in office, though the meagemess of their income put them in the same class as gatemen and nightwatchmen. Men like this cannot practice their doctrine, but they are of some good in the world when they teach moral behavior and classical learning and do not flout the Way. This is better than office-seeking simply for the sake of income without extending benefits to the people.*7 Hsu Heng, one of the grand masters of early Yuan NeoConfucianism, believed that because it was not the ancients' intention that one go into teaching or government for the purpose of earning a living, modem shih who are needy ought instead to engage in farming, or even commerce if need be, to tide them over financially for a while. Hsu maintained that

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there was nothing wrong in commerce as long as one behaved according to "righteous principle." * Liang Yin was of a different opinion. Of peasant origin, he became a classics scholar and private tutor for examination candidates; and upon achieving some success in this, established for himself and his descendants what he called the "Liang family Book Estate" (Liang-shih shu-chuang). Of it he wrote as follows: Whenever a man is bom into the world, he must do something that benefits the state and the people. From the grandees, bureaucrats, generals, and local officials down to the runners and lictors and the peasants, artisans, and merchants, everyone must use his mind and his energy to make a living. No one can expect to live for nothing. As we who are shih depend upon others for our food and clothing, surely those of us who do not exert our minds and exhaust our energies are simply a burden on the people. Now, ordinarily an "estate" means fields and houses where grains and foodstuffs are stockpiled. But I have no fields to harvest and what I stockpile are simply books. My descendants who inherit this will have no grain taxes or other obligations, yet when their studies are finished they will have something to render to superiors and to contribute to the good order of the world. My concern for my descendants is thus so keen that I have no thought to set up landed property for them." Yii Chi praised his wife's relative Chou Wei-han for pursuing a livelihood that he considered close to the antique idea. Yii explained that in antiquity the shih supported their parents by farming while pursuing the studies that would prepare them for office-holding. Currently, however, many shih made a good living in the trades or commerce, occupations that in his opinion had an injurious effect upon study. Chou Wei-han looked after his estates and provided for his basic needs that way, without recourse to the devious arts of buying and selling. He was, said Yii, "a shih who is a farmer" (shih chih nung-che).100 Yeh Tzu-ch'i thought that the more a shih was oriented toward the norms of his profession, the poorer he was likely to

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be. "In a village of ten families," he wrote, "there will always be a few who are wealthy, but not necessarily any at all that are literarily competent. Why is Heaven so liberal in the one case but so parsimonious in the other? Precisely because literature and learning are the refined essence of Heaven and Earth." Rare as this competence was, it generated little income. "Anytime an artist paints a few strokes, a fortune-teller gives a word of advice, or a Buddhist chants a sutra, he can make a thousand cash. But the literary shih who works himself to the bone doesn't make a laugh's worth of income. It was not just in the Ch'in that the shih were demeaned."101 Some writers urged a shih ethic of non-attention to livelihood, of forbearance under extreme penury. In Chin-hua prefecture there existed something of a minor cult of shih poverty that dated from the Southern Sung. One of its heroes, the penniless Wang K'ai-chih, composed a "Ten-article Poverty Compact" (Fin-yueh shih-t'iao); and friends compiled for him a thesaurus of classical quotations about poverty that they entitled the "Foitified-in-poverty Collection" (Ku-ch'iung chi). Many years later, Wu Shih-tao wrote about this: "The lover of righteousness is Heaven to the people, and one who 'fortifies himself in poverty' sets a standard of restraint for the shih. One who spiritedly rushes to the aid of others in distress and is unbowed by overwhelming odds will have the resources to fortify himself in poverty; whereas one easily overborne and intimidated who ignobly hopes for wealth and status will be incapable of seeing the right and bravely accomplishing it."102 In a similar way, Huang Chin reminded his contemporaries that Fan Moch'eng was "the first of those in our area who could endure poverty despite his [official] status." Fan's material wretchedness was attested to by Chu Hsi; tax assessors could make him pay only a few lengths of cloth on the basis of a tombsite he owned.105 As will be noted later, Sung Lien took this local ethic of poverty very seriously. • 53 •

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From this sort of information, one can only conclude that shih income varied greatly, not so much on the basis of strictly professional earnings, but chiefly on the basis of differential access to other occupational sources of wealth. Unlike, say, a physician, a Confucian could not normally make a living directly from the practice of his profession. The problems he handled were not of a kind that freely attracted troubled clients from the public at large. Confucianism dealt with group relations and functioned in organized settings. Confucian income was thus made from teaching fees or official salary, or in some other manner not directly related to the practice of the Way. The writers do not give us in quantitative terms the real size of anyone's income. One may simply observe that there did exist a standard, which varied from the very stringent to the rather lenient, and which at a minimum did forbid the undertaking of any function primarily for the sake of its profitability. The Confucian Clientele, Professional Labor Control, and Problems of Public Service If a profession exists, then it must identify a clientele, a lay public that is the consumer of its particular range of services. Confucian theory (in the Great Learning) identified a hierarchy of publics, beginning with the practitioner himself and extending in ever-widening circles to encompass the family, the state, and eventually society or die world (t'ien-hsia). The range of services that Confucianism sought to deliver to those publics included regulation, education, and the resolution of crises. At the lower end of this hierarchy of publics, Confucian services could be delivered through private or informal arrangements of one kind or another. Tutors, for example, were regularly engaged by well-to-do lineages. It was also possible for a Confucian to provide services to his own family or lineage, . 54 .

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usually with the explicit aim that its reform might encourage other lineages to reform likewise. Wu Hai, for example, observed that such things as burial practices, rules of adoption, and the observance of familial relationships in his native Fukien bore no resemblance at all to the classical Confucian prescriptions. He complained that despite the Neo-Confucian revival, local customs remained contaminated by Buddhism and Taoism, astrology, and power rivalries. Local social reform had to be led, he believed, by shih such as himself; and when these reforms were carried out, then the people would "unite their minds and cleave to the Way, valuing righteousness over wealth, and preferring death to rebellion."104 Wu Hai tried to initiate such a reform by using Confucian knowledge to implement the ethical and organizational reform of his own family. In his preface to the family genealogy, Wu Hai ruled that it is up to the sons to befilialwhether or not the father is compassionate, and it is for fathers to be compassionate whether or not the sons are filial. Elder brothers must extend friendly guidance (yu) even when the younger brothers are irreverent, and younger brothers must be reverent even when the elder brothers do not extend friendly guidance. When one extends himself without expecting anything from others, then the way [of the family] can be made a success.105 It must be emphasized that behavioral principles like these were not developed spontaneously within the family or arrived at by trial and error, but were imposed upon it by a professionalizing member whose knowledge of correct relationships was derived from the general corpus of Confucian theory. Imposing something like strict Confucian family burial procedures in the face of "vulgar opinion and the desires of the women" who preferred Buddhism was no easy matter, as Ch'en Li attested.106 Thus, although Confucian theory focused upon the very familiar themes of human relations, it maintained its abstractness and distance even when the practitioner applied it to his own family. Theory dealt with human relations from the vantage point of a • 55 •

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superordinate body of general truths that would never have emerged by themselves from the lay world of social interaction. In order to fully carry out its service mission, however, the Confucian profession had to encounter and to deal with its public clientele at higher levels of interaction than this. Yet, dealing with its clientele as suprafamilial collectivities on a local, regional, or national scale demanded something that the Confucian profession, like professions generally, could not supply unaided. The delivery of services at these higher levels demanded the elaboration of a coordinated set of offices, roles, and tasks which the profession itself lacked the resources or the capacity to undertake. These costs of organization were, of course, borne by public authority (the state) through its power of taxation and its capacity for using incentives and sanctions to enforce its controls. In a series of steps that culminated with the implementation of the civil service examinations in 1 3 1 5 , the Yuan state in effect "licensed" the practice of Confucianism and afforded the Confucian community an opportunity to offer on a regular basis certain of its members for service as salaried professionals in the imperial bureaucracy. Moore notes that whenever a professional community regularly markets its labor to an employing organization such as the state, the "seller" will try to establish definite rules so as to limit the choices of the "buyer" to those individuals whom the community has by one test or another judged to be fit for marketing. One main purpose of this arrangement is to help ensure that die tasks and services performed by professionals in bureaucracy will continue to embody the uniform standards of knowledge and ethics upheld by the professional community outside.107 The seller's control of the professional labor market is necessary if the professional community hopes to maintain any semblance of unity and solidarity. Although the Yuan examinations and other systems of professional labor recruitment had been instituted along these lines • 56 •

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with the advice and assistance of Confucian officials themselves, there hardly existed a more controversial issue within the Confucian community than that of official recruitment procedures. In Confucian theory, the ideal marketing system for professional services was that known as pin-hsing, or "guestraising," an institution associated with the well-field society of antiquity. Under it, the best of the local shih upon completing their studies and securing character references were ceremoniously assembled by the regional "feudal" grandee, who could either appoint them locally or forward them to the royal court for selection and service there. This procedure gave local representatives of the Confucian community something approaching complete control over the marketing of its trainees. However, pin-hsing was one of the many casualties of the breakup of the well-field system. As Tung Chi explained it, the disappearance of secure livelihoods and orderly advancement procedures forced the ambitious shih into "itinerant persuading" (yushui), traveling from place to place toforcethemselves upon the attention of men of power and influence.108 This development took labor marketing away from the control of the professional community altogether and put it into the individual hands of die job-seekers themselves. According to Yü Chi, the decline of the "feudal" and the pin-hsing systems also led to the rise of the latter-day phenomenon whereby the control of bureaucratic selection and appointment at all levels devolved into the hands of the emperor.109 Within the framework of Confucian theory, therefore, it is evident that the civil service examination system constituted at best a compromise device. By testing the candidates on their command of Confucian knowledge, it restored a modicum of labor-marketing control to the Confucian community; but it by no means gave complete control to that community, because a candidate's success in the examinations was not necessarily related to his degree of inner commitment to Confucian professional norms. • 57 •

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In fact, in the view of the venomous attacks launched by many of die writers upon the examination system, it appears that there was something rather offensive in it. According to Chao Wen, die system ruined shih minds because men submitted themselves to it in die hope of future reward in "profit and salary," not for whatever intrinsic satisfactions it may have held.110 Chu le-jun conceded that the examination system served as a corrective to what would otherwise be a system of advancement through open bribery, but it tested nothing save the ability of the shih to conform to requirements. The examinations were not an antique institution; they emerged only after the "impartial way" (kung-tao) of empire had grown dim. The ancients would not have countenanced a system that amounted to "casting baited hooks" into society in the hope that some outstanding shih might swallow them.111 Kan Fu asserted that the ancient system of recommendations and trial positions was right. All that candidates do nowadays is "peddle their empty verbiage and trivial practices to the authorities" Those few who style their "occupations" (yeh) after the antique model generally do not pass the examinations."2 Before the examination system was revived in 1315, one welltraveled but very slow route to bureaucratic office for southern shih was by way of the corps of government-school teachers. The schools seem to have acted as a system of professional labor marketing which, down to 1315, did give some large measure of marketing control to the professional community. A few words describing these government schools may be in order here. In the Yuan period, South China (i.e., the entire subYangtze exclusive of Szechwan and Yunnan) was divided among die three provinces of Kiangche, Kiangsi, and Hukuang. These were further subdivided into 546 local government units (lu, fu, chou, hsieri). Each unit supported one government Confucian school (ju-hsueh). Each school was run by one regularly appointed teacher, with the exception of those 58

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schools at the prefectura! (Zu) level, which had three. There were 78 prefectures, and consequently the total southern teaching cadre numbered 702. In 1 3 1 7 this total was increased to 1,248 when the central government authorized the appointment of one administrator of school finances (chih-hsueh) for each school in the s y s t e m . A t least initially, both teachers and students were drawn from households that were placed under shih (or ju) registry. Besides these schools, which were located in the various administrative cities, there also existed a network of rural academies (shu-yuan), each headed by one government-appointed schoolmaster (shan-chang). A recent study suggests, in what is surely an undercount, a total of some 400 Yuan academies (i.e., built in the Yuan, or before, and operating in the, Yuan), of which some 75 percent were located south of the Yangtze.114 A grand total for South China of some 1,500 government-appointed school positions may not be too far off the mark. These positions in government educational service were assigned limited tenures and were carefully ranked. Appointments and promotions were controlled by a combination of provincial directorates of Confucian studies (ju-hsueh t'i-chiissu), provincial governments, and censorial and local officials. Candidates for promotion had to have formal recommendations and pass written tests. However, the career goal for most government teachers was promotion out of the educational service altogether and placement at the bottom of the regular civil administrative hierarchy. The rate of advance was regarded as quite slow; in 1332 Cheng Tuan-hsueh estimated that only some 1 o - 20 percent of all educational personnel ever managed to climb all the steps of the teaching hierarchy and receive appointment as assistant magistrates at the county level.1,5 The effect of the inauguration of the civil service examination system upon the educational service was to give it a new mission (preparing prospective examinees), as well as to open • 59 •

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up new routes of entrance and exit for its personnel. Teachers were eligible to take the civil service examinations, and by passing them they could jump upward at once into die regular bureaucracy. At the same time, nonteachers who failed the examinations were officially declared eligible for appointment at the bottom ranks of the teaching service.116 In the view of Wu Shih-tao, the overall impact of the examination system upon government teaching was nothing short of disastrous because it effectively destroyed the solidarity of the shih community. Before 1 3 1 ; , he noted, the shih went into teaching and had little opportunity to gain official position. Men of great talent and reputation humbled themselves, advanced slowly, and often received bureaucratic appointments only on the threshold of old age. So carefully were select teachers advanced into regular bureaucracy that the older generation never had its sense of moral honor outraged by the rapid promotion of the unworthy or the deviant. School discipline was easily maintained because the educational system served as the most prestigious route to power and was "systemically concentrated" (chih-chuan). What the examinations did was make it possible for unsavory and ambitious characters to elude these controls altogether. Examination pressures made it generally fashionable for students to cram oversimplified ideas and to develop stale and flaccid writing styles and bookish modes of argumentation. Master-student solidarity evaporated as young hopefuls rushed from teacher to teacher in search of the quickest and easiest methods of preparation. "It is very difficult," Wu wrote, "to embark upon the examination career and yet remain true to oneself and not revolt against the ideas of ones teacher." When the central government cancelled the examinations in 1336 and 1339, Wu professed himself hopeful that the schools might be able to recapture some of their earlier concentration and solidarity.117 Arguments favoring the examination system existed, of • 60 •

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course, but these were usually made from the in-house vantage point of the bureaucracy, and they tended to emphasize either (1) the function of the examinations as a device for broad social control, subjecting to the rigors of Confucian training large numbers of ambitious men who would not have undergone such training otherwise, or (2) the fact that the examination graduates, however they may have been regarded by the Confucian community outside, came to constitute a "Confucian community" of their own within the bureaucracy, a relatively small group conscious of their distinction from die majority of Yuan bureaucrats by virtue of their Confucian experiences and entry through demonstrated intellectual achievement. As far as the government teaching service is concerned, however, there seems little reason to doubt Wu Shih-taos assertion that the examination system helped to demoralize it. Other writers, however, pointed out that the role of the government schools had been negligible even in their heyday. Early in die Yuan, l a i Piao-yuan wrote that die teachers in the local schools of antiquity were not appointed by the government at all, but were selected by the people themselves. "It was just that a man gained local acclaim for his learning and behavior, and others catching wind of this would come voluntarily to offer tuition and follow him." Official appointments to local teaching posts were a product of recent times, yet even so, the county schoolmasters, because of their superior character, used to compel more deference and respect than the county magistrates, even though they lacked their power. At the moment, however, the teaching posts were ranked so low that many potentially good teachers were ashamed to accept them, and the local officials who made the appointments did not consider the posts important. 118 Later on, Ch'en Kao argued similarly that in theory the county schoolmaster did not strive to achieve surface order as the magistrate did, but went further and deeper to instill goodness (shait) in the population as a whole. While in theory • 61 •

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teaching was more effective than ruling in achieving social order, the reality was something else: H i e master of a county school has the official title of chiao-yii, and since he is in charge of teaching for the whole county, his job is surely important. Yet his rank and salary are lower than those of an academy head. Consequently, the government assigns these posts carelessly, and the incumbents do not perform conscientiously. Few of them really fulfill their tasks; most simply serve time while waiting for a better appointment. The worst of them even peculate school funds. All this stems from die force of conditions, however, and is not entirely the fault of the masters. The few who do serve conscientiously do no more than follow the current practices of memorization, recitation, and composition, and give tests and grade the students in accordance with the civil service examination standards. Of course they do manage to produce successful examination graduates who then take office in the bureaucracy. But this encourages an atmosphere of competitive struggle and does nothing to improve moral behavior (tehring). This pursuit of trivia is totally at variance with the educational ideas of the ancients, and it can hardly be expected to transform society and improve customs." 9

Although the total population of the shih or ;u in fourteenth-century China is not known, it is likely that only a small fraction of diem could have taken "professional" jobs in bureaucracy or in government teaching. In the Yuan period, it is evident that some significant proportion of the surplus of Confucian trainees was marketed into "subprofessional" bureaucratic jobs as clerks. It is common for professions in general to spawn one or more "subprofessions," or auxiliary occupations that perform the routine or low-level tasks that do not demand full professional training. The work of subprofessional groups is ordinarily placed under some degree of professional supervision and control.120 Functionally, this relationship characterized the distinction between Confucian bureaucrats, with their presumed general knowledge of social control, and the clerks, with their particularistic command of discrete information and le• 62 •

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galistic detail. By the fourteenth century, however, there already existed a history of bitter conflict over the appropriate roles of the two sides, such that the new need to place professional labor on the subprofessional market inevitably raised a series of agonizing questions among the writers.121 Confucian theory was unclear about the propriety of this arrangement. Some writers were adamantly opposed to it. Wu Shih-tao argued that in antiquity there were clerks to handle documents and registers and below them the runners to carry orders and messages. But they were not shih. They were simply menials ruled by others and could not exercise rule themselves. Wu maintained that the powers of the local officials ought to be increased so that the clerks could be put back in their proper place of subservience. They could not legitimately serve as a recruiting pool for officialdom, as in fact they did serve in the Yuan.122 In a note to a kinsman, Hu Han wrote that the Yuan policy of hiring Confucian students as clerks was not heartily welcomed by the better students. For students practicing the ceremonies and studying the classics to suddenly take up the registers and files of the clerkly occupation was a major degradation. "They are not eager to do this," wrote Hu. "If they were, they would not be our students." His kinsman, a tailed examination candidate, had no choice but to become a clerk "in order to support his parents."121 A wider variety of writers, however, insisted that there were some practical advantages in having Confucian trainees undertake subprofessional tasks, at least temporarily. Wei Su thought the existing antagonism between ;u and clerks unfortunate. He pointed out that both had their faults, even while they reviled each other. The ;u were too fond of vapid metaphysical talk and too ignorant of real life, while the clerks were ignorant of larger principle and were inclined to be oppressive toward the people. This split would have to be healed by the shih serving in clerical positions, because they alone were capable of grasping both • 63 •

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general principles and detailed knowledge, of "comprehending the substance and applying it in specific cases" (ming-t'i shihyung).'24 C h e n g Tuan-li disputed a prevalent idea that ;u should be used simply as a sort of cosmetic in the world of the clerks; rather, they should directly apply Confucian principles to the execution of their tasks.125 He did insist, however, that unless Confucian training consisted in something more substantive than the development of literary proficiency, then the students who take up jobs as clerks, suddenly faced with the intricacies of bureaucratic procedure, will come to think that the way of government lies in that and not in the Confucian principles that they were originally exposed to. He insisted that no one should feel shame at being a mere clerk. He thought that the current attitude of looking askance at low jobs and considering financial accountancy an affair for "small men" was not characteristic of antiquity; furthermore, it was directly responsible for the present-day fiscal inequities that the people were suffering under. Properly educated ju could, despite assertions to the contrary, perform all the practical tasks that the clerks perform and at a lower cost to society because they were less likely to engage in corruption. 126 Similarly, Kao Ch'i thought that the divergence of outlook between clerks concerned only for technical or legalistic details and ju interested only in useless ideas was wrong. That divergence was, in his opinion, really the fault of those ju who disdained any detailed handling of legal and tax matters; yet it was only ju serving as clerks who could dispel the atmosphere of treachery and evil, propagate benevolence and righteousness, augment the prestige of their superiors and form good relationships with their inferiors, and so put a whole new face upon the work of government. 127 l o summarize, then, the Confucian professional community was intimately concerned with the question of the marketing of its labor for state employment. Specifically, that concern

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was centered about (1) the qualifications of its trainees for official, educational, or clerical tasks; (2) the degree to which Confucian knowledge would be used by incumbents in discharging those tasks: and (3) those modes of recruitment that would best insure that abstract Confucian principles were in fact applied to concrete cases by adequately trained professionals holding one position or another. While the Confucian community hoped to gain control over these variables, one has the impression that it did not feel it was succeeding very well. The examination system in particular was believed to contaminate the whole marketing process by shaping the educational system to fit its narrow requirements, and by offering advantages to men whose personal ambitions and self-seeking careerism were in too many cases stronger than their strictly professional orientations. Turning from the question of recruitment to that of employment in the imperial bureaucracy, it is safe to state that theory held trained Confucians to be uniquely qualified to hold positions as bureaucratic officials. As Moore and others have pointed out, professionals who work in an employing organization normally seek some measure of autonomy in the discharge of their allotted tasks. They want sufficient freedom to put their "exceptional knowledge" to use in whatever ways they deem best, with a minimum of interference from the public, from clients, or from the employing organization itself.121 It goes without saying that the greater the control of the professional community over the marketing of its labor, the greater the likelihood that the employed professionals will enjoy a large measure of autonomy in their work. l o a point, the organization that employs professionals may endorse and support their belief in dedicated service and their demands for work autonomy. Eventually, however, the interests of bureaucracy and those of professionalism will diverge. According to Richard H. Hall, what will probably happen is that the autonomy of the professionals working in a bureaucracy will • 65 •

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shrink as professional attitudes come into conflict with bureaucratic structure.lw Unlike professions, which value collegiality and equal competence, bureaucracies feature a formal hierarchy of functions (offices), centralized authority, and consequently a special capacity to make and enforce decisions. When it comes to assigning people to the key control positions within a bureaucracy, purely professional qualifications may count for little. Management itself has been explained as "more a craft than a profession.""0 Management is a set of tasks whose discharge depends crucially upon such things as budgetary control, efficient technique, interpersonal skills, intuitive judgment, and familiarity with specific rules and procedures. Either these qualifications are innate, or they are learned as a craft is learned, at the place of work itself. There is no abstract body of managerial knowledge that must be formally mastered before a person may be assigned a position of authority within a bureaucracy. 1,1 Consequently, bureaucratic authority is heeded, not because it displays sheer competence in the professional manner, but because it forces compliance by dispensing rewards and punishments (promotions, demotions, etc.). This clearly distinguishes it from professional authority, which, as Wilbert C. Moore states, "in its pure form is in the nature of advice . . . [and] does not normally cany administrative or legal sanctions."1,2 Professionals who work in bureaucracy and hope to advance upward in its hierarchy of offices may have to sacrifice some of their professional attitudes. Goode writes that the professional in such instances "becomes less directly dependent upon the professional community for his career advancement, so that the ordinary sanctions of that community may have less impact." The loyalties of professionals in bureaucracy may, as Moore states, become divided between the "nominal client" (the bureaucracy itself) and the "interested client" (the public at large)114—a distinction very accurately reflected in the well66

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known tension between kuo-chia (state, dynasty) and t'ien-hsia (empire, society) in Confucian thought. More commonly, perhaps, "where comfortable organizational routines take command, the salaried professional . . . may lose sight of client needs more quickly than his solo brother." Bureaucracy may erode the professional ideal of service as much or more than it threatens the professional norm of work autonomy. In either case, however, organizational loyalties may easily overtake and supplant loyalty to the profession. Confucian thinking in the fourteenth century seems to bear out these propositions. Where there occurred conflict between bureaucratic organization and the Confucian profession, writers almost invariably rallied to support the demands of the profession (autonomy and the service ideal) against those of the bureaucracy (conformity to organizational requirements). Two lines of Confucian argumentation may be adduced to support this assertion. The first is that some writers singled out certain Yuan offices as especially attractive to the professionally-minded because, more than other offices, they permitted the relatively unhindered exercise of discretionary "expertise." The Censorate was a case in point. Hsu Ch'ien declared that even low positions in the Censorate were desirable owing to their minimal restrictions upon achieving one's "will" ( c h i h ) . I n the explanation of Wu Hai, every dynasty must have some pivotal institution that controls (kang-chi) the whole of the governing process, and in the case of the Yuan that institution was the Censorate and its various component bodies.1,7 Li Ch'i wrote that the immediate prospects for Yuan examination graduates (chin-shih) were not very good; usually they were appointed to subordinate positions in local government, where they were closely controlled by superior officials and manipulated by the clerks, with crafty local people ever ready to ferret out their intentions. Highranking chin-shih, however, were sometimes appointed Cen• 67 •

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sorate secretaries, positions which, though humble, did allow diem to argue freely with their superiors, to get to know current affairs intimately, and thus "truly achieve their will."1,8 Confucian professionalism was also allowed a significant degree of autonomy in high-level advisory or educational organs in the Yuan government: the Imperial Seminar, the literary academies, and in the Imperial University. High informal professional rank in the Yuan period (the "leading scholar-literati of the age") was almost without exception correlated with office-holding in one or another of these high-level advisory organs." 9 Local government offices, especially county magistracies, had been a principal seat of Neo-Confiician activism in the Sung dynasty. Starting with Chou Tun-i and Ch'eng Hao and continuing with Chu Hsi and many others, local government was the place where the leading proponents of this professionalizing philosophical movement had at some stage in their careers directly interacted with their interested clients (the people at large), and sought to demonstrate thereby the special relevancy and utility of this "orthodox" body of knowledge. Under Yuan rule, however, it was widely felt that formal and informal constraints on local officials were too severe to allow much of a role to professional discretion. Writers who dealt directly with this problem favored relaxing the constraints. Wu Shih-tao, who had served as a county magistrate and knew the problems at first hand, argued that because the Yuan administrative laws were so detailed and specific, it was the general practice to fill local positions with men of mediocre talent. If the qualifications for local official appointments were raised, then, he felt, it would be possible to simplify the laws and allow the officials appropriate decision-making powers in certain issue areas.140 Tai Piao-yuan wrote that in antiquity the officials had had exclusive competencies (ch'iian-chuan), the regulations were very general, and it was therefore easy to recruit and appoint good men because they were given a chance to exercise • 68 •

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their talents fully.141 In a very long discussion, Wu Lai recommended that carefully selected local officials should be given broad jurisdiction over appointments to local staff positions, local government operations, financial management, and local defense. The Yuan central government had, he pointed out, taken these rightful powers away from the local officials as a consequence of the Li T'an rebellion of 1262. 142 In the minds of these and also various other writers, the detailed bureaucratic regulations and centralized personnel control characteristic of the Yuan resulted in denying to the professionally-minded the enjoyment of exactly those local offices where die practitioner ought to have had the closest possible relationship with the public client, where he should have had enough autonomy of action to prove his mettle and demonstrate most visibly the "usefulness" of his general Confucian knowledge. This perceived loss for professionalism, especially at the local level, leads directly to a related line of contemporary argumentation. A wide range of pre-Ming Confucian opinion asserts that the bureaucracy was the agent primarily responsible for having brought about the disintegration of the Yuan dynasty in the middle decades of the fourteenth century. The developments that eventually led to the fall of the Yuan were touched off by the rebel messianists known as the Red Turbans, or Red Armies, whose riots and Ear-ranging forays over the years 1 3 5 1 - 5 4 left many undefended cities and market towns in ruins. These events have been described elsewhere, and will not be detailed here.143 What is surprising, in view of all the apparent ferocity and destructiveness of these risings, is that the writers were generally agreed that they were so poorly conceived and badly organized as hardly to have posed a threat to the existing order at all. For example, when the risings first broke out in the south, the Confucianist Cheng Yii warned his students that "the emperor had not lost his virtue" and that therioterswere merely an aggregation, "a crow-gathered crowd," able to achieve some • 69 •

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temporary success in taking cities only because "after so many years of peace the military has grown arrogant and lazy and hasn't been able to put up a defense."144 Rebel messianism, according to Chou T'ing-chen, was spread by "repulsive elements" (ch'ou-lei) and offered no real challenge to civilization because it appealed only to "petty villagers" (lu-ching hsi-min), to the "simple-minded" and the "stupid."145 To Liu Sung, the rebels were just a "random mob of rustics."146 From their hideouts in the mountains, Liu wrote, the rebels "fight with staves, eat grain out of their hands, put the old and weak in the vanguard, and use their magico-religious propaganda to fortify themselves in their dispersion. The evil they cause is certainly great, but they have no real strategy at all."147 It was Chao Fang's view that the Red Turbans lacked any dramatically convincing pretext for their risings, and having failed (as of 1355) to produce any powerful leaders, were no match for the great rebels of earlier times in spite of all the destruction they caused. They hardly merited the effort of pacification. What gravely threatened civilized order was not the rebels, but rather the consequences of the government's clumsy attempts to suppress them. Chao believed that the emperor was not to blame; as everyone knew, he was a man of compassionate concern for all his people. Why then all the difficulty? For the past fifty years, stated Chao, the central bureaucracy had failed to pay close attention to the needs of the realm ("did not calculate the empire's advantages and disadvantages"). This was why at the local level customs degenerated, government decayed, and improper official exactions grew until thieves and robbers finally mobbed together to prey upon society at large. But if the government could purge and reform itself and, after a careful assessment of conditions, act with resolution and vigor, then "even though the people may be on the verge of revolt they can be stopped and will not be rampaging all over as they are now."148 • 70 •

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That the Yuan bureaucracy was largely responsible for the disorder in the realm was a widely shared opinion. Ch en Kao sought to show that society was truly threatened only when the rapacity and brutality of the Yuan officials and loyalist armies grew so unbearable as to drive segments of the peaceful population, quite against their inclination, into open rebellion: The subprefectural and county officials are those closest to the people, and whether the people are orderly or rebellious, or prosperous or destitute, inevitably depends upon how those officials act. Ever since the insurrections broke out, ail such military necessities as rations and weapons have been exacted from the people. The military personnel are, however, addicted to violence and tyranny and have no concern for the people's sufferings. At every moment they put demands on the local officials, and humiliate and maltreat them if they fail to respond with alacrity. Consequendy, even those local officials who are knownforresolution and fearlessness have no way to resist, and have no choice but to alleviate their own problems by placing ruinous demands upon the people. Daily they apply lashes to wounded skins and bodies and see to it that die exactions are made. On top of this, the corrupt connive in evil and the people are put in further straits. As a result, the weak emigrate and the strong turn to rebellion. This, precisely, is why all the good people ("all our infants") areforcedto become enemies even though they live in secure areas.149 Despite the apparent gravity of the situation he described, Ch'en Kao professed some optimism about the prospect of a Yuan dynastic restoration. Liu Sung asked in 1357: "As to the origin of banditry and rebellion: aren't these brought on by [official] greed and oppression? . . . The people get to the point where they can no longer bear it and then they rise up in flocks. In trying to deal with them, officials eager for short-term advantage rather than farreaching plans rescue greed with more greed and abate oppression with more oppression. This is like adding more fuel to stop a pot from boiling; no wonder the rebels can't be put down." 150 He asserted elsewhere that the "stupid people" who earlier 71

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joined in the messianic insurrections were still "our people" and should have been pardoned. Fear of official punishment made them flee into hill country and there maintain a life of permanent outlawry. Few really wanted this; most were forced into "endangering their wives and children, savaging their kinsmen, abandoning theirfields,and burning down their homes to become rebels."151 Writing as early as 1349, when Fang Kuo-chen had just emerged as a pirate leader on the Kiangche coast, Chu Te-jun stated that the local people had gone into piracy because of destitution brought on by overdemand and corruption in the government maritime grain requisitions.152 He further asserted in 1350 that popular feeling had grown so "abnormal" (pien-i) that existing administrative methods were no longer sufficient to maintain order. Like Chao Fang later, Chu believed that the bureaucracy was dangerously out of touch with popular realities. 1 " Cheng Yuan-yu wrote that the rebellions of 1352 and after had come about because local officials did not "soothe and cherish" their people.154 More will be said on this subject in the following chapter. It may suffice here to note that blame for these cataclysmic events was imputed to what may be described as corruption, organizational conformity, and professional incompetence in late Yuan bureaucracy. In short, in order to reach its public clientele, the Confucian profession had to permit its qualified members to accept positions in state bureaucracy. It did this hesitantly. The harder it was to get those positions, the easier it was for the profession to ensure die quality of the candidates; but then the public suffered, because not enough Confucian officials were reaching it. The easier those positions were to get, the harder it was for the profession to control the appointees. When the appointees escaped the controls of the profession and succumbed to bureaucratic custom, then the bureaucracy turned to serve its own 72

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Southeast China in the Late Yuan • 73 •

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ends and not the public goals the profession espoused. Again, die public suffered, and these wounds were not negligible. In the opinion of the writers, they killed the Yuan dynasty. The Confucian Professional Community So far, we have tried to understand fourteenth-century Confucianism as a profession, or a community of people sharing a common body of organized knowledge and a common service ideal centered upon an exclusive claim to competence in handling its given range of critical social problems. It remains to explain in just what sense the Confucians of the time constituted a "community." According to William J. Coode, a professional community, like some other kinds of community, possesses a common identity, shared values, a jargon "understood only partially by outsiders," a common set of role definitions, and (mainly informal) modes of applying internal social control. But unlike most other kinds of community, a professional community normally reproduces itself, not biologically, but rather by a process of controlled in-migration, whereby a younger generation of trainees is consciously selected by the profession from the ranks of lay society in accordance with various objective criteria. In addition, the professional community is "a community without physical locus," one whose boundaries are socially rather than geographically circumscribed.155 According to R. M. Maclver, professions are organized around function rather than territory or kinship, and consequently professional communities achieve "an integration not of form but of spirit" by virtue of their ethical orientations.156 The assertion that recruitment into the professional community follows essentially objective criteria appears somewhat problematical. Reuschemeyer points out that many features of the modern professions "seem to be in fact aspects of upper-class . 74 .

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or upper-middle-class life and subculture."157 While professions do define themselves functionally, this need not rule out strong supporting roles for kinship and geography in their makeup. For example, it appears that many Confucian recruits in fourteenth-century China were drawn from families with wellestablished local genealogical identities, or wealth, or a family tradition of Confucian study, or all three. The officially sanctioned quasi-hereditary character of the occupation notwithstanding, there were probably just enough exceptional cases (peasant recruits such as Liang Yin and Wang I) to make a plausible case for the validity of Confucius s precept that "in study there are no class distinctions." At all events, ranking local families usually encouraged only those sons who showed some signs of academic aptitude to embark upon a Confucian career. What confuses somewhat the case for a Confucian professionalism firee of ascriptive kinship qualifications is the fact that the principles of kinship in the abstract were a prominent part of the Confucian "body of knowledge." This knowledge embraced not only the normative rules of interaction among kin, but also the science of genealogy and rules for the compilation of genealogical records. However, professional opinion generally had it that the purpose of genealogical research was not to support claims to illustrious ancestry, but rather to encourage families everywhere to set down only what reliable knowledge they had about their forebears, in order to inculcate honesty and objectivity along with a heightened degree of ancestor-consciousness in society generally. What the writers claimed to value in these matters was conscientious recording and the willingness of ranking families to acknowledge kinship ties to their poor or obscure relations (and in some instances even to infamous ancestors). In theory, at least, an established genealogical identity was less an ascribed qualification for a prospective Confucian trainee than it was a mark of some objective achievement in social self-awareness and right-guided moral endeavor. Local genealogical information is one of the most plentiful • 75 •

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varieties of data to be found in the Confucian written works (wen-chi) of the fourteenth century. Evidence of ancestral moral achievement or hereditary academic commitment was certainly acceptable as informal certification for Confucian recruits. On the face of it, the Yuan system of special registration for shih households was not in basic conflict with this notion. Similarly, it is true only in a limited sense that the Confucian profession considered itself a community free of all physical or geographical boundaries. One acknowledged boundary was the Creat Wall frontier in the north, beyond which lived a population whose nomadic "customs" precluded amenability to Confucian social guidance. There existed little urge to "missionize" in the steppes, even in the Yuan, when Mongolia was administratively attached to China as a province. What missionizing urge existed was instead expended upon foreigners in China, upon the marginal societies of the southern frontiers, but most of all internally, upon Chinese society itself. Within China itself, the idea of a free-floating and unbounded Confucian community had at best a tenuous hold. The ethically based community of the shih, in Confuciuss phrase, did encompass "all within the four seas [as] brothers." In the fourteenth century, however, the community was in fact highly regionalized. This spatial fracturing was, in Liu Sungs explanation, due to purely physical obstacles; interregional links were weak because the shih lacked the goods and conveyances of the merchants, the free transport facilities of the officials, the widely demanded luxuries of the artisans, and the sanctioned wandering and begging habits of the Buddhists.1,8 However, from the well-field community model discussed earlier, and from the various disparaging comments made about uprooted and wandering shih, it appears that lack of physical mobility was not felt to be any insuperable bar to the formation of a universal professional body. It may be useful to show how some of the writers believed this could be the case. • 76 •

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The principal vehicle for creating and maintaining a uniform professional community across the length and breadth of China was the state-supported system of education, which, in other contexts, writers maligned so heavily. That system dispensed writing skills, behavioral precepts, and something approaching a standardized Confucian knowledge to students everywhere. One recognized purpose of the official Chu Hsi orthodoxy was that of achieving geographical integration through doctrinal uniformity. According to Yii Chi, the establishment of this orthodoxy was one of the Yuan's great achievements because it actively dampened urban (t'ung-tu hui-i) tendencies toward profiteering (kung-li) and heterodoxy, and it also prevented every rural locale (hsiang-ch'ti) from developing idiosyncratic ideas out of a sense of rivalry or pure localism. In Yii Chi's opinion, only a universally valid orthodoxy could command intellectual confidence, and only under the sway of such an orthodoxy would a man's place of residence not be a hindrance to his arriving at a correct understanding of the true Way of Heaven and Earth. 1,9 In an inscription of 1372 dedicating the rebuilding of an official Confucian school in the extreme south, Wu Ssu-tao also alluded to the connection between orthodoxy and geographical integration: There is no near or far in the teaching of the sages. Shih-lung is very far from China [proper], yet here they show the same devotion to the familial relationships and to agriculture. Had they not built a school, appointed teachers, and assiduously studied the Way of the sages, so that the ignorant might be awakened to an appreciation of theritesand music, then they would never have changed their customs and inclined themselves toward kingly transformation. They would simply have remained rustic and barbarian.160 Wu Shih-tao (otherwise a vehement critic of the examination system) also saw this integrating function in the official orthodoxy. "Now that the [Yuan] examination system has been revived," he stated, "orthodox learning (cheng-hsueh) is revered; • 77 •

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and when even [people of] distant regions and border areas know how to hold their books and recite, all the more should we natives [of the center] become enthusiastic."161 Hu Ping-wen noted that Chu Hsi s doctrines were honored all over the empire and even outside it, "wherever transportation can reach."162 One problem with the promotion of this official orthodoxy was that it was felt to achieve universality at the expense of depth and complexity. "Since the doctrine espoused by the [Yuan] court issues from a single source," noted Wu Shih-tao, "all students consider themselves Chu Hsi followers. But there are original men who are ashamed to bend themselves to that, and while outwardly they conform, inwardly they dissent. How few men there are who manage to uphold our doctrine and actually carry it out." I6 ' The inadequacies of the government schools as agencies for the transmission of orthodox learning were to some extent compensated for by the development of informal regional or local "schools," wherein the advanced Chu Hsi learning was handed down through direct master-disciple chains. Thus Chu Hsis legacy was inherited and further developed by his son-in-law Huang Kan, whose disciples in turn established regional branches of the orthodox learning in Nan-ch'ang (Kiangsi), Chin-hua (Kiangche), and also in Fukien and in North China.164 The "true transmission" (cheng-ch'uan) of the Chu Hsi learning propagated through these local chains of teachers aimed to clothe the orthodoxy in an aura of special sanctity and to preserve its core values and full complexity from the secularization and simplification that threatened it in the official schools. From the early decades of the fourteenth century, however, concern for the preservation of Chu Hsi orthodoxy came gradually to be supplanted by a new interest among the professional elites in the elaboration of larger philosophical syntheses. The earliest and most famous synthesizer of the Yuan period was Wu Ch'eng (1249-1333), who attempted to reconcile the divergent Confucian doctrines of Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan. • 78 •

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Wu Cheng's philosophical efforts were definitely universalistic in their intended scope of application, yetChu-Lu synthesizing had, or came to have, a definite regional center of propagation and development. Wu s native prefecture of Lin-ch'uan (Fuchou) in Kiangsi was also the home of Lu Hsiang-shan. Wu's ideas were propagated most energetically after his death by Yii Chi and Wei Su—also Lin-ch'uan men, and among the most eminent of the Southern Chinese literati of their time. All three were active in the posthumous rehabilitation of native son Wang An-shih, rebuilding a local temple dedicated to his memory and supervising the reprinting of his collected works.165 According to Liu Yueh-shen, Wu Ch'eng synthesized the philosophies of Lu and Wang, "uniting those points upon which they were similar." If Wu Ch'eng's ideas were carried out, predicted Liu, "the world will have endless blessing and Linch'uan will have endless renown."166 This pattern of linkage between universal and local, involving the synthesis of divergent Confucian thought systems, also occurred in a few other prefectures of South China. In Chinhua prefecture, for example, three Sung Confucians, whose persons or ideas Chu Hsi had attacked at one time or another, were rehabilitated and presented as standards of achievement for local aspirants to higher knowledge. Thus the remaining works of T'ang Chung-yu were edited and published, and his biography was written. T'ang was made Chin-hua's exemplar in the study of antique political institutions (ti-wang chih hsueh), a pursuit different from but now said to be compatible with Ch'en Liang's doctrine of effective state action (shih-kung chih hsueh). Their ideas were in turn taken to be congruent with the metaphysical studies of Lii Tsu-ch'ien, whose writings in this field were asserted to be fully the equal of Chu Hsi's own. Lii, Ch'en, and T'ang were Chin-hua natives. Huang Chin deplored the hard divisions that had separated all these men and their students when they were alive in the Southern Sung period. "Who would have guessed," he wrote, "that in the very middle of their • 79 •

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various disagreements a grand unity existed all the time?"167 Wang Wei, the most energetic of the Chin-hua doctrinal conciliators, urged colleagues and acquaintances in several South China prefectures—Lin-ch'uan, Ssu-ming (Ningpo), Yungchia (Wenchow)—to devote themselves to the continuation of their home-grown philosophical traditions and to the synthesis of divergent patterns of Confucian thought. The factional spirit that the promotion of any one man's point of view demanded was, he felt, inimical to the totality of truth.168 Doctrinal synthesis thus came to be viewed as a means of maintaining vitality—without sacrificing national uniformity or provoking sectarian struggles. A community, whether unbounded or segmented or localized or whatever, must of course have means of communication. For the Confucian professional community, writing was surely the most valued form of communication. This was because writing could best withstand the frictions of both space and time, and also because it was, in the absence of other convenient teste, a leading indicator of a man's professional commitment and competence. It is no exaggeration to say that the national Confucian body was sustained by an enormous flow of paper. Collected short papers (wen-chi)—which constitute the main source for the writing of this chapter—were the principal vehicle for the exchange of ideas and evaluations among the shih of the fourteenth century. These show a great variety in quality and focus, despite the surface sameness that they all share. Generally the wen-chi are the collected writings of an individual, in most cases gathered and edited posthumously by his students, friends, or heirs. Some are very short and fragmentary; others are quite long. Some are sloppily edited; others have been put together with great care. All the wen-chi, however, are miscellanies divided according to the rigid categories of accepted literary genre, which are pièces d'occasion for the most • 80 •

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part. They include hsu ("prefaces" to the works of others; "messages" to students or acquaintances about to undertake some journey or official mission); chi ("inscriptions" for temples, official establishments, schools, city walk, or the homes, pavilions, and studios of private individuals); lun ("discussions" on various themes, with many related genres); together with colophons to books or paintings; poems; letters; biographical sketches; and epitaphs and other commemorative pieces for the dead. It appears that each short paper was prepared in at least two copies, one going to the specific addressee, and the other retained by the writer himself. Aspiring young authors showed their collections around, and hoped that eventually some famous personality might be well enough impressed to write a preface (hsu) for them, and so advance their prospects. As Chao Hui-ch'ien had occasion to complain, one's collected writing could not win credibility or much of a readership until it had a prefacefromsomeone well known.169 Even so, it was the quality of one's writing that was scrutinized especially closely in the process of peer-evaluation. In the Yuan, one of the more important steps toward the formation of a national professional community was undertaken informally by those high Confucian elites who attained posts in the capital, not in administration but in the Imperial University or in one of the literary academies such as the Hanlin, the Chi-hsien, or the iCuei-chang. These men were, in Yii Chi's phrase, the "shih of the world." As suited their professional centrality, they conformed themselves to Confucian norms to a high and visible degree. That is, they set a standard of conduct and expertise and used their Confucian knowledge to maintain a certain critical distance from current official policy and organizational routine. They cultivated a following of aspirant elites by acting as teachers and patrons, by making introductions at the capital for local compatriots, and by prefacing writings and composing encomiums for the luckless but deserving. In effect, • 81 •

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they operated a kind of unofficial selection system that awarded recognition to professionally-minded men whom the routine organizational procedures had victimized or ignored. Wei Su showed some of the dimensions of this downward reach of die high literati in his preface of 1342 for a local compatriot, one Ai Fen-ku. Ai came to the capital to present a reform proposal to die central administration. Wrote Wei (at the time an expositor attached to the Imperial Seminar): Among the "four peoples" it is the shift who bear responsibility for Heaven, Earth, men, and things. Even if they live in remote huts, their concern is always for the whole realm and for posterity. . . . Ai is an obscure village thih, but he knows popular conditions and the abuses of government, and even more can suggest remedies from his knowledge of the classics and histories. He came hundreds of miles to present this plan, one with real substance to it, and all we high officials can do is bury it. I have no excuse to offer. I can only preface the draft of his plan and return it to him.170 Similarly, in 1350 Wei prefaced Liu Chih-i's effort to gather into an anthology the best writings of the undistinguished shih of the Yuan. The work was intended as a rival to Su T'ien-chueh's anthology of writings by the highly placed, the work known today as the Yuan wen-lei."1 The formation of a network of Confucian professional elites was, thus, a matter of cooptation, a process not integral but tangential to die acquisition of bureaucratic office. An advisory position in the capital gave centrality and visibility to the handful of topmost elites, but otherwise the informal professional ranking system did not necessarily coincide at all with office-holding. In sum, the Confucian community of fourteenth-century China rested upon an ethical foundation of collegiality and consensus; it was professedly an unbounded unity in both space and time. As Hsu I-k'uei explained it, because no seeker of the Way is sufficient unto himself, he must search everywhere for colleagues (yu). "The men of old," he wrote, "did not think they • 82 •

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were self-sufficient. That is why they were broad in seeking colleagues: from the shih of the district nearby, to those of the region further away, and even further to those of the world. They made colleagues of them all, and still they were not satisfied, so they even made the men of antiquity their colleagues." 172 The ethic of collegiality comes near to placing any one member in a position of equality with all other members. Informal ranking, based upon peer judgment, establishes a hierarchy whereby some, owing partly to their greater collegiality, become more equal than others. It is shortsighted to consider the unified professional community a "spurious" construct, as some have done. Bucher and Strauss, for example, have taken issue with Goode and have argued that codes of ethics, licensing systems, and professional associations "are not necessarily evidence of internal homogeneity and consensus" but are, rather, the "historical deposits of certain powerful segments." m Professions, they maintain, are continually wracked by internal conflicts organized around constantly changing social movements, which they style "segmente." Most professional leadership is in fact leadership, not of the whole community, but of one or another of its contending segments, whose fate determines individual careers and places severe limits upon the broad ethic of collegiality. It is undeniable that the fourteenth-century Confucian community exhibited some of these features. Yet Confucian unity was not exacdy a sham. Against the state, and against lay society, a Confucian community existed that was very conscious of its oneness and its special character. Its ideological "segmental" conflicts, which were pronounced in the Sung period, had through the general consensus of that community softened considerably by the fourteenth century. Professions cannot be understood to feature either consensus or segmental conflict as unchanging characteristics; whether they are at any moment harmonious orfilledwith internal strife would appear to depend • 83 •

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to a great extent upon the changing character of the larger social environment in which they play out their roles. In conclusion, this chapter has attempted to argue that the sociological conception of a profession is relevant to an understanding of those who in the fourteenth century styled themselves ;u or shih. The conception of a profession serves to bring together into logical interrelationship central aspects of the shih ethos which their writing makes available but does not always fully explain. It allows us to take seriously what they say without dismissing it or forcing it down unlikely interpretive paths. It also serves to emphasize for purposes of historical analysis the legitimacy of the idea of a "self-sufficient" Confucian community whose ties to office-holding or landholding, though important, were marginal rather than central to its composition and outlook. This means that when the activities or opinions of the Confucian elites are taken up for study and scrutiny, one may legitimately expect to discern lying behind them a strictly professional interest, and not necessarily an interest that must somehow be tied to economic or bureaucratic or other extraneous considerations. Because the observance or nonobservance of professional ethics constituted the principal focus of conflict within the broad ranks of Confucianism in the late Yuan and early Ming periods, one of the main tasks the professional elites of those times undertook was that of creating a "pure" Confucian community, eclectic and harmonious in questions of doctrine, but resolutely united against those whom they perceived to be fraudulent, opportunistic, insincere, or eager to exploit the community for the sake of private power or profit. In many ways, as will be discussed later on, the new Ming dynasty made common cause with these ethically-oriented Confucian professional elites. • 84 •

Confucianism in the Yuan-Ming Transition

Tkis CHAPTER has two main purposes. They are placed as subsections in descending order of scale. The first purpose is to relate what the Confucian writers of South China generally had to say about the nature of the crisis that wracked the Yuan dynasty from 1 3 5 1 onward, and in particular to indicate their perceptions of the impact of the crisis upon their own profession. The views of the writers on the causes of the erosion of Yuan central power in some ways resemble the opinions later expressed by Chu Yuan-chang (Ming T'ai-tsu), the founder of the Ming dynasty. Because the founder's analysis of the Yuan breakdown figured so strongly in his rationale for his own autocracy (as will be related in a later chapter), consideration of Confucian thinking on the matter provides a means for assessing the degree of convergence between the climate of professional opinion and the actual policies of the Ming state. The second aim of the chapter is to advance a preliminary explication of the regional structure of the Confucian community in South China, in order to show how and why the occupation by the future Ming forces of a particular part of the country at a crucial early stage in its history may well have been decisive for that dynasty's markedly autocratic and centralizing pro85

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clivities. What is attempted here is the laying of some groundwork for understanding the special variants of Confucianism that developed in the prefectures of Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou, and how these variants (to be discussed in the next chapter) could come to have so pronounced an influence upon the early Ming order. Confucianism in the Late Yuan Crisis The "late Yuan crisis" refers to the rebellions of 13 51 and after, Prime Minister loghto s national mobilization of bureaucratic and other resources to suppress the rebellions, and the decentralization of Yuan power that resulted from loghto's dismissal early in 1355.' These events appear to have imposed two sets of problems upon the Confucians. First, throughout the crisis, antirebel mobilization and regional pacification created large new employment opportunities for the shih and ;u, either as staff advisers to the important regional officials, or as minor officials in their own right. Second, when the fall of loghto brought about an end to central control of antirebel operations, various parts of South China either went over to a nominally loyalist regional autonomy or else underwent occupation by one or another of the anti-Yuan rebels who promised a new dynasty and perhaps a revival of a centralized national order. Here the shih were faced with a choice between Yuan loyalism (symbolic allegiance to the center) and the hope that die dynasty might eventually recentralize itself somehow; or disloyalism and the equally precarious possibility that a given rebel regime might come to serve as an effective engine for national reunification. The writers were clearly uneasy, first of all, about the widened employment opportunities afforded by the mobilization. Obviously, this was because die higher rates of recruitment in • 86 •

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the emergency situation made especially difficult the Confucian community's continued control of the marketing of its labor, a control that was tenuous enough even in peacetime. Wartime opportunity was often grasped by the less tractable personalities, men eager for action and at best marginally amenable to the ethical controls of the Confucian community. Ambitious "shih of resolve" (chih-shih, the original of the Japanese shishi) found some scope for their talents. As T'ung Chi wrote to his friend Hsu Chin-ming, a failed examination candidate: When there are many troubles in the world, things favor the shih of resolve, but not the productive population. It is not that such shih think the world's troubles to be fortunate; it is just that in no other times could they prove themselves. . . . During the eighty years of the Yuan unification, the shih of resolve could only retreat to the woods and mountains and live there in obscurity. There were countless such men. But those were good times for productive livelihoods. Now after a long era of peace, of military slackness and official corruption, risings have suddenly broken out, and war and famine have spread through half the southeast. And so now the shih of resolve can at last roll up their sleeves and pursue success and reputation.2 Others, too, voluntarily uprooted themselves from their peacetime pursuits. Liu T'ien-chi of Yung-hsin (Kiangsi), bored with teaching in his native village, left it to seek wider horizons and some fíame.' Kung Han-fu was a man of "high spirit" and a "heroic" (hao-chieh) outlook; during the wars he took a position as clerk in Ch'a-ling (Hunan) and so kept himself occupied. But the return of peace (ca. 1365) closed off the outlets for men of Kung's makeup. What could he do? Perhaps move to the tribal frontiers and help put down the lawlessness there.4 Liu I-chen of Wan-an (Kiangsi), earlier an examination candidate, "followed the army off to the borders with sword in hand" when the wars broke out, but he died without achieving the "success and reputation" he sought.' 87

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The staffs of the Yuan officials, dealing with pacification and emergency administration in the provinces, swelled with new shih appointees. Wu Hai, however, no doubt exaggerated when he said of his native Fukien that in the recent years of rebels, war, and famine, the number of officials and clerks had increased "at least thirty times" over the prerebellion level.6 Sung Hsi wrote that the wars had brought three previously hidden things to surface: armies, money, and talented southerners. The previously unemployed Wu Ching-min of Ningpo, first taken into military administration, was later rewarded with the further posts of commerce tax collector and salt official. 7 Li Ch'i remarked that before the civil wars there was a fixed quantity of bureaucrats, and even men of high talent might never gain a position. But the wars and the rise of the militarists changed all that; even men of paltry ability from the most isolated areas have been able to find ways to advance.8 lai Liang described a friend who though unemployed loved to dabble in military strategy and could unerringly predict die outcome of battles, lai believed the man would soon find a job; the wars had already provided jobs to many men earlier consigned to private life.9 An acquaintance reminded Hsieh Su: "Surely you remember the late Yuan when central control fell apart, the North China plains were in rebellion, the warlords formed opposing states and fought each other, and an urgent need arose on all sides for men of talent?" However, the acquaintance went on to remark unfavorably upon the kinds of men the fortunes of war dredged forth. Yet there was no discrimination in the selections made, lalents suitable for ruling only counties were put in charge of prefectures; talents suitable for ruling only prefectures were made regional governors. Some with the talent of generals were kept buried in the ranks; some with the talent of prime ministers were kept chained to the clerical account books. Some with the titles of gTandees and nobles were men • 88 •

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Chao Fang was ethically uncomfortable with the staffing systems that developed during the wars. In order to survive in a world of strife on the outside and intrigue on the inside, it appeared to Chao that an official could no longer simply exhaust his "allotted duty" (chih-fen) in cooperation with his moral cohorts (yu) as the antique model demanded. Because the notion of "success and reputation" had supplanted that of "proper duty," an official nowadays was obliged to seek out and surround himself with "guests" (k'o), that is, adherents eager to share in riches and honor, who will protect him if he gives them tasks and rewards them for their accomplishments." It was in this vein that Wu Hai criticized Kung Shih-t'ai, a well-known figure of the late Yuan, whose fame was based upon a rare dual competence in literary expression and practical administration. One of the highest ranking Southern Chinese in Yuan government, Kung Shih-t'ai proceeded to Fukien in 13 59 in order to arrange maritime grain shipments to the beleaguered Yuan capital in the north. In Fukien he attracted around himself a large staff of ambitious southern "guests" and students. Wu Hai, a local Confucianist, wrote a letter to Kung in which he stated that it had become all too easy to rise into officialdom, not only in Fukien but throughout the empire, because men like Kung were too eager to satisfy every supplicant. When Kung arrived in Fukien, wrote Wu, "crowds of men flocked indiscriminately to your gate like water down a gully." Most of them were treated to their satisfaction. Wu Hai could not understand how Kung could take on so many adherents, or what justification he had for advancing them so fast. He feared that the deterioration in the customs (feng-su) of the shih and the officials as evidenced through Kung would end in the complete ruin of the Yuan dynasty.12 • 89 •

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What remains of the literary output of Kan Fu (of Yii-kan, Kiangsi) dates mainly to the civil-war period, and is heavily devoted to describing the ethical strains of official advancement in the conditions of the time. Kan Fu himself would have nothing to do with advancement, as he stated through the device of a colloquy. His protagonist remarks that in antiquity the shih of die Way did not have to struggle for fame; they were propelled upward through a sequence of recommendations and so gained the positions that suited them, together with a proper salary. They could not have remained hidden even if they wanted to. But times have changed. Now that the Way is in decline, only the smooth and the glib, the flatterers and the sycophants, succeed, l o behave in the antique fashion nowadays only invites ridicule: Asforyou, Kan-tzu, you are nothing but a commoner. You have no sponsors or protectors to help you rise into officialdom, and yet you maintain purity and high resolve and deprecate prevailing customs. You care nothing for the [values of the] present age and energetically follow the models of high antiquity. I would say you are exhausting yourself for nothing. Why not give in to things, and do what you can to gain some fame? l o this suggestion, "Kan-tzu" replies: You are a shih addicted to worldly custom. You know nothing of the Way of the gendeman. . . . We calculate for a myriad ages, not just for this one. All of the gentlemen of antiquity whom we remember today were men who did not go along with their own times. Do you want me to devalue myself and follow others? Do you want to slay me with fame and profit in this age?" It was a matter of great fhistration to Kan Fu and his circle that try as they might, they could not rise on what they took to be their outstanding literary abilities. They found the potential sponsors whom they approached to be hostile older men who were "jealously fearful that they will be upstaged." Conse• 90 •

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quently, they suppressed the junior talents, "cutting down their spirits and frustrating their behavior so that they cannot advance and achieve anything or be of any use to the world; and if this isn't the case, then why is literature (wen-hsueh) now so flimsy and talents so few? Surely the blame does not fell upon the learners, but upon the decline of the age and the deterioration of customs." M Kan Fu wrote that men fully prepared in doctrine and literature languish in obscurity while "the defiled and crooked, ignorant of the Six Classics, seize up dregs and filth and thus gain the respect of the ignorant and the common." This has happened because there is no more Han Yu or Ouyang Hsiu for other learners to model themselves upon, and to make the right selections among the mass of upward-striving shih. "Can it be that things have come to this because Heaven does not protect this culture (ssu-wen)? In any event, the gentleman who knows the Way will prefer to remain in obscurity and not compete." 1 ' Prospects seemed a little better with the contending anti-Yuan warlords; if they were "worthy strongmen" (hsien-hao) who aimed to found a dynasty, they would surely defer ceremoniously to those shih of true talent and knowledge who alone could aid effectively in such an enterprise. Several in Kan Fu's circle went off to seek positions in one rebel government or another, and Kan Fu sent them with his blessing.16 Although few writers voiced Kan Fu's antiloyalist sentiments, many shared his belief that the professional community ought not to market its labor at all if the state as buyer insisted upon exercising its own insupportable preferences. In this behavior, however, the state was simply responding passively to the breakdown in the moral cohesion of the community itself. "Since the wars," wrote Liu Sung, "the shih and officials who used to abide in their proper occupation have either discarded it for something completely different, or have let it fall into abeyance."17 Liang Yin stated that "with peace not yet at hand in the empire and armies marching through one after the other, • 91 •

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men s practices have grown bestial, customs have become perverted, and decorum is in retreat." 18 Speaking of the early war period, Liu Hsia wrote: At that time, how abrupt were the changes in the way of the world! Fathers and sons ignored each other; brothers separated and scattered; and ruler and subject, husband and wife—all forsook the proper relationships. Many Confucians (ju-che) wore short coats and long swords and marched with the armies. By attaching themselves to the powerful they could acquire high tides, achieve their ambitions, and slaughter men as though they were cutting grass. Hsu I-k'uei noted that during the wan, many aspiring scholars dropped what they had learned and bought the military texts to learn about tactics, or the ancient texts on power strategy so that they might "wag their tongues like the diplomatists." 19 In a memorial to the emperor in late 1 3 5 5 or early 1 3 56, Cheng Yii went further to make the accusation that "in recent years the shih and officials have been greedy for gain and fearful of loss; they have vainly taken salary in disregard of their official duties. Probity and sense of shame constantly decline, and customs degenerate, with the result that disaster has arisen with bandits in revolt and the people getting slaughtered." 20 From young T'ang Su ( 1 3 3 1 - 7 4 ) , head of a Confucian academy in the city of Hangchow, came a gush of figurative images of heroic and lonely protest against the corrosive anarchy of the times: Ever since Heaven tired of civilized order, and armed rebels spread through the world, the outstanding and talented shih of the age have been making their intellectual powers something to fear. Things have come to the point where everyone heedlessly packs away the Six Classics and brings out the military texts; turns his back upon the Duke of Chou and Confucius and makes the strategists and diplomats his teachers; and looks to the right and left in order to ingratiate himself with current custom. Anyone purveying the concepts of benevolence and righteousness is regarded as pedantic and out of touch with the world; if he should die of cold or hunger, no one would notice. • 92 •

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Alas, the Way of the gentleman is at an end. If any shih exists who alone is fragrant when the others stink; plain when the others are resplendent; stolid when the others are intricately complex; silent when the others are clamorous; gathered-in and self-contained when the others are outgoing and on the surface; immobile when the others are frantically rushing about; and uninvolved while the others splash in filth, he will build himself a refuge on a hill or ariver,and there sing and recite, never allowing any but the sagely precepts to enter his breast and form on his lips. He will turn the marvels of the Changes, savor the taste of the Odes, and wear the robe of the Spring and Autumn Annals so as to nourish his substance and be of use if the times avail; he will preserve his stolidity and offer it only if the right buyer comes. He may be put in straits by the times, but not by the Way; he may be in need bodily, but not in his mind. He will be content, sufficient unto himself and unsubdued.21 Wang Wei of Chin-hua prefecture also found the crisis conditions so unsettled as to compel him to withhold his services. Before the wars, he confessed, he had "sought only profit and salary" and that without success. Now that the wars had come, his only choice, and an unwilling one, was to go into seclusion. It is wrong to withdraw in good times, he wrote, but wrong also to seek favor in a bad age when doctrine goes unheeded and men whose "brave acts bring success and calculating intelligence brings fame" rule the field. Wang could only retire into study and the "writing of books for future generations." 22 Cheng Yii, summoned to duty in the Hanlin Academy by the troubled Yuan court in the winter of 1355 - 56, made his acceptance contingent upon a thoroughgoing reform of the court's official selection procedures. He urged the court to put an end to cliquism (p'eng-tang) and seek out the worthy. Endorsing the complaints sincere and conscientious shih were making about the conditions of wartime official advancement, Cheng bargained for reforms; by not accepting the offer at once, he hoped to "stifle somewhat the custom of competitive gogetting (pen-ching chih feng)."23 It is important to note here the implications of this tendency . 93 .

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on the part of the Confucian professional elite to deny their services to society at a time when society was in dire distress and presumably in the greatest need of those services. Of what use was Confucianism if its leading practitioners could not take an active part and minister to the social patient in his hour of crisis? It would appear that this problem must be understood in the light of the sociology of Confucianism, that is, in the light of its inherently ambiguous position with regard to power and organization. The profession, informally organized according to a collegia] principle, found its elites in those members who best exemplified in their own persons the collegia! and other ethical norms. The profession could not, in these circumstances, organize itself in the fashion of a power organization and act on its own to reach a wide social clientele, partly because, in so doing, it would have to take orders from colleagues, and also because professional knowledge (or some crude approximation of it) would now be imposed by force rather than freely sought on its own merits. The Confucian community dealt best with a power organization at a distance, either treating it as a proximal client through which the ultimate public client might be ministered to, or else assuming those formal offices within it that allowed some scope for the exercise of professional judgment and discretion. In brief, the Confucians could not handle large-scale social chaos until someone else who stood above and beyond the profession first laid the appropriate organizational groundwork. That outsider was commonly called the "sage" (shengjen)—an ancient epithet not necessarily descriptive of the moral-intellectual qualities of the successful warlord and his heirs, to whom it was regularly applied. Two essays by Liang Yin go at the question of just how Confucians should act in times of civil crisis. His prescriptions were stem. No matter how capable Confucians were, they could neither seize power for themselves, nor flee from diffi. 94 .

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culty or mortal danger. In one essay Liang argued that, at least in theory, those ;u who have enough stamina and discretionary talent are perfectly capable of assuming such a function as military c o m m a n d , even though they may lack the strictly military skills. Such ju should be able to contribute to the task of pacification because they will be able to utilize effectively the narrower specialists in such fields as strategy, diplomacy, or finance. This Confucian general is not in Liangs view a "sage" or a potential dynastic founder, however; he is one who is given his appointment by some power organization that is already in existence. 24 In t h e other essay, Liang Yin took care to condemn most forms of voluntary seclusion, including especially seclusion undertaken for the purpose of ethical self-development, which involves an indefinite denial of the service obligation: The sage is ruler of the world, and when his pure virtue accords with Heaven, then the Way of Heaven accords with him. The [Confucian] gentleman cannot reconstruct the world, but he can reconstruct himself. He brings security to himself when he cultivates virtue and waits for Heaven [to effect appropriate changes in the world]. The masses of ordinary men cannot reconstruct themselves; they follow desire, and by violating Heaven's virtue they cut short their own lives. . . . The teaching of the Sages and Worthies about self-cultivation focuses itself upon the regulation of the seven emotions [including desire], and so their teaching is also a method for prolonging life. Now, some argue that it is definitely a good thing when the shih as recluse disdains both renown and turmoil and abides in carefree noninvolvement, because in that way he can regulate his seven emotions and preserve his Heaven-given nature. When he comes forth to serve a ruler and regulate the people, it will be because his loyalty and his desire for success and fame have been aroused. He will find himself in turmoil rather than quietude, in toil rather than in ease. He rpay exhaust his energy and his spirit. How can he prolong his life this way? I would simply say that "prolonging life" demands doing what must be done. It certainly does not mean disobeying Heaven in one's own selfish interest. If one can accord with centrality and righteousness, • 95 •

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then one has achieved long life even if one's life is unfortunately cut short. Similarly, one has cut his life short even if he preserves himself by refusing the call of centrality andrighteousness.Ruling the seven emotions has nothing to do with whether or not one advances in officialdom. When one regulates the seven emotions, he thereby nourishes virtue, he nourishes intelligence, and he nourishes life. With virtue the self is cultivated, with intelligence government is regulated, and with life longevity is achieved.25 In the view of Liang Yin, then, when Heaven in conjunction with the "sage" begins the process of reinstituting political order, then the Confucian may no longer in good conscience withhold his services, but must contribute them even if he puts himself in considerable personal danger in so doing. In the conditions of the times, however, it was not altogether easy to discern whether Heaven intended to restore the Yuan, or give its Mandate to some new dynastic founder. Confucian activists on the whole made the safer choice, and sided with the Yuan. It was in part through the unhappy experiences of such activists in Yuan service that gradually the intention of Heaven to replace the Yuan with another dynasty came to be discovered. For example, Wang Wei complained that although crisis conditions had opened many new job opportunities, these were for the most part at the lowest possible levels, and no regular means were devised by the government for discovering talent among this mass and advancing that talent upward into positions of responsibility.26 Many shih who took a position as adviser or secretary on the staff (mu-fu) of one or another Yuan official found grounds to complain of the powerlessness often inherent in such positions. Thus, in about 1360, Tseng Chien confessed to his friend Ch en Kao that the Confucians (ju-che) were always getting jobs with heavy responsibility but no power to act: Before the wars, when we foresaw what was going to happen and could have done something about it, we found we had no power to act • 96 •

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and were simply ignored and not taken seriously when we spoke of it to others. Only now, with the realm in total chaos, with the situation worsening beyond the point of salvation, do they seek out and employ Confucians. Yet they restrict us on every side so that they cannot exhaust our talent, and on top of that they blame us for being ineffectual, full of talk but short in practical accomplishments. So what shall we do now, go into retirement with our principles in our sleeves, or take positions and bear the recriminations?27 This dilemma appears to have had either of two psychological effects upon the staff men. Neither effect boded well for the future of Confucian cooperation with the faltering Yuan. One psychological reaction was described as follows by Liang Yin: When my superior does something right, then I will say that I had a hand in shaping his policy when I report it outside. When my superior does something wrong, then I will tacitly let it pass, figuring that I am only a subordinate whose words do not command obedience, who has no autonomy of action, and who is overmatched in strength. Rather than make myself conspicuous and so incur certain humiliation, I had better be agreeable and go along. That way I will keep my job and protect my salary. So my duties are very easy.2* The opposite extreme of exploding in righteous anger was cautioned against by Li Ch'i: The thih of heroic temperament is one who plants himself between Heaven and Earth and cannot tolerate the slightest obstruction. If anyone stands the least bit in his way, his only thought is to give full vent to his anger. The heroes of antiquity were like this too, waving their arms and gnashing their teeth whenever they met obstacles. Yet one must not react to the point of refusing to do any more good simply on account of some small setback, and thereby abandon one's longcherished principles. This is how the common mass would act. It is not how a shih gentleman should act. The gentleman seeks to have no shame in his mind. Though we have not been able to have things just as we would like since the onset of the civil troubles, our place in the world is still the same. Surely we cannot change our basic attitudes simply because of some momentary humiliation.29

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Despite these evident strains between the integrity of the Confucian professional ethos and the actual conditions of state service in crisis conditions, the principle of loyalty to the incumbent dynasty managed to exert a strong pull upon the majority of the writers. This remained the case even after 1355, when South China was reduced to a patchwork of growing rebel movements in the interior and autonomous loyalist provinces along the coast. It cannot be said that the writers were impatient to see the Yuan fall and the Mongol court driven out of China. The reasons for this continued loyalty to the Yuan appear somewhat complex. A voice from the South China interior maintained that loyalty as a principle supplied its own imperative. Chou T'ing-chen was a private teacher in An-fu (Kiangsi), a locality that was cut off from contact with the central government through much of the civil-war period. Chou took upon himself the task of chronicling local events, fingering the rebel opposition, condemning the evil and treachery in Yuan local officialdom, and yet bursting with joy and relief at the news of government victories. Moments of renewed contact with the center always stirred new hopes in Chou. When an edict of amnesty issued in la-tu (Peking) by Ayushiridara upon his formal investiture as heir apparent reached An-fu by roundabout route four months later, Chou exclaimed: "1 was so excited that I forgot my illness." ,0 When Yuan circuit censors reappeared in 1357 after a five-year absence, Chou and the other shih of "loyal indignation" were relieved and glad that Yuan local government would at last be purged of its evil elements." Chou reported with some feeling the journey of l a i Hua-ming, nephew of a man killed when his local self-defense system was overrun by rebels after "successive years" of effective resistance, lai fled south via Kwangtung, sailed by sea to the Yuan capital, and sent up a memorial that was, according to Chou, outspokenly critical of government abuses and personally damaging to the emperor and heir apparent. Yet after 1368, when the capital fell to • 98 •

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the Ming forces, Tai returned home and "wept as he described how the capital was taken.'"2 Thus, for Chou T'ing-chen, loyalty to a dynasty was an imperative that could not be compromised no matter how villainous or weak that dynasty might become. The reason for such an absolute view appears in Chou s account of the suicide of an entire shih family upon the fall of their city to rebels in 13 5 3. That act, related Chou, was entirely untypical of the local gentry (chin-shen), most of whom would do anything to preserve themselves, even sell their wives and daughters into prostitution in order to live off their earnings. Only through suicidal demonstrations of that sort could it be proved that "innate principle" (t'ien-li) still existed, that humanity was still a cut above the society of the beasts, l o Chou it was clear that dynastic loyalty to die end was necessary to preserve intact die inherent structure of moral imperatives (the Three Bonds); he insisted that one could not neglect the obligation of subject to ruler without also damaging the other parts of the structure, the obligations of sons to fathers and of wives to husbands." While few writers shared Chou T'ing-chen's vivid sense of the interrelatedness of familial and political morality, there is other evidence that loyalism remained a serious force even in circumstances where the Yuan government was in no position to enforce its will or provide basic security. Some shih circles in Kiangsi, for example, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the rebel warlord Ch'en Yu-liang to submit nominally to the Yuan dynasty in return for the title of regional "king" (wang) at the time of his conquest of the Kiangsi area in 1358." Presumably, had Ch'en made such a submission, he could have legitimated a regional autonomy under die guise of Yuan loyalism and thus made it easier for larger numbers of Kiangsi shih to join his cause. When Ch'en made it clear that his intentions were otherwise, he presented the shih with some difficult choices. Liu 99

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Sung reports that the Yang, a scholar-official family of T'aiho, Kiangsi, broke apart in violent internecine strife between pro- and anti-Yuan sides when Ch'en Yu-liang conquered the area in 1358." There did take place a certain leakage of shih from occupied Kiangsi toward Fukien after Hsiao Yin, one of the local shih, returned from investigating various regimes throughout the south and reported that the ex-peasant Ch'en Yu-ting of Fukien was the most reliable, righteous, and loyal of the coastal satraps (or "heroes," hao-chieh).56 There exists in the collected writings of the period a fair amount of material describing in detail the tenuous communications links maintained among the Yuan court, the loyalist militarists of North China, and the various regional warlords along the China coast. These links were apparently sufficient grounds for some to justify warlord service as Yuan service.'7 Among the coastal loyalists, Ch'en Yu-ting was a relative newcomer. The chief wielders of power were Chang Shihch'eng in the Yangtze Delta and Fang Kuo-chen along the Chekiang coast to the south. Both of them were ex-bandits whom the Yuan court had tried to annihilate on several occasions, only granting them "recognition" after 1 3 ; ; and the collapse of central power.38 The existence of a network of quasiautonomous regional lords under a symbolic, nonassertive monarchy was not totally hostile to certain Confucian visions of what the orthodox "antique" political order had been like. Kao Ch'i, a well-known writer from the Delta area, detected an antique flavor in Chang Shih-ch'eng's new Yuan-conferred tide of Grand Commandant (t'ai-wei). Kao averred that this title was only nominal in later dynastic tradition; but with Chang it had once again become a position with real substance to it. Aware of the autonomy that Chang Shih-ch'eng enjoyed, the Confucian writers of his area strove to encourage a loyalist attitude in him. They likened him to the grand hegemons of Spring and Autumn times, and were ever eager to advertise any • 100 •

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signs of high-minded purpose and interior cultivation they thought they found in him. w The best apology for a figure like Chang Shih-ch'eng emphasized the fact that his occupation of the Delta made another mass rebellion of the Red Turban type unlikely; that under his sway "rebellion became compliance and danger became security.'"'0 Yang Wei-chen interpreted his loyalty to Chang much more broadly; he vehemently criticized Chang for failure to purge unruly generals, failure to provide basic security for the population, failure to organize local militias and thus unify the minds of his armies, and failure to employ outstanding talents in his high administration. Chang furthermore acted wrongly in recruiting his bureaucracy, not through recommendations or an examination system, but simply by taking on the thousands of self-seeking "guests" that flocked to his capital in Soochow. Yang Wei-chen's strictures were loyal, however, and were not intended as a challenge to Chang's power.41 Yet those who looked too closely at the concrete acts of the autonomous warlords might be led to conclude with Chu Yu that "despite the efforts of the emperor, the regional officials have no regard for the dynastic order (kuo-t'i) and act only for their private ends, deceiving their followers without and deceiving their own minds within."42 In short, the Confucian community's support of the principle of Yuan loyalism began to weaken and unravel whenever it became clear that the ideal of continued loyalty to the center meant acquiescence in the face of permanent regional autonomy. Except through a willingness to accept a fictional centralism, or belief in the remote possibility of some future recentralization, Confucian apologists for such figures as Chang Shih-ch'eng found it hard to reconcile their commitment to the "public" character of government with the "private" and "selfish" interests that the regionalists actually defended. From approximately the. 1360s onward, as Yuan central authority shrank more and more, post mortem analyses of the • 101

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Yuan system began to replace the earlier criticisms of specific and remediable Yuan shortcomings. Some of this comment sought to show that anti-Yuan sentiment had actually emerged very early among some of the literati. Thus many years later Pei Ch'iung confessed that already in the 1340s he had decided privately that the flow of Chinese history involved a regular alternation between day and night, between eras of centralization and civilization and eras of anarchy and chaos, with the daylight of the Sung having been ended by the darkness of "barbarian" (i-ti) rule under the Yuan. 4 ' On the face of it, this confession indicates that for some there had existed a certain conflict between their "private" opinions and the public stance of support for the Yuan that as professionals they had been obligated to adopt. Nevertheless, discussion of the Yuan collapse (including Pei Ch'iung's) on the whole either assumes a tone of outrage and disappointment or at least aims at dispassionate analysis. An example is Chou T'ing-chen, whose vehement loyalism was mentioned earlier. In Chou's diagnosis, the fell of the Yuan came about because deviousness in officialdom put a premium upon favoritism and bribery. Because rewards and punishments were misused, it was the evil and the calculating who got their way, and everyone serving in office ineffectually in peacetime simply devoted himself to plunder and selfenrichment [during the wars]. The great righteousness of the rulersubject relationship was of no concern to them. Thus when faced with die rebels they surrendered to them, offered them their «fives and daughters, and shamelessly begged them for mercy. And even then they bullied others with their smart strategies, not regretting anything, even in death." Pei Ch'iung's critique also placed blame upon officialdom for the disaster and absolved the monarchy. He stated that there had been too much unrestrained luxury and official greed in the late Yuan, and the clerical subbureaucracy was especially guilty • 102 •

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of pressing the people into greater and greater desperation until the empire was lost. He insisted that the last Yuan emperor was not to blame, for he had sincerely aimed at good rule and had conscientiously encouraged upright officials both in the court and outside. Pei placed responsibility for the Yuan fall upon the military and the bureaucracy itself: it was the generals, die central and local officials, and even the prime ministers who traduced ("sold") the emperor. It was the bureaucracy that freely passed bribes and trafficked in injustice, perverting the equal application of the laws and bringing about the ruin of high principle. Insatiably devoted to enriching itself, officialdom gave no real thought to the crises confronting the state.45 Wu Hai transposed the problem of the Yuan breakup into a sort of moral algebra of inverted values: Even before I was twenty I had the feeling that die world was poised on the edge of a precipice. But whenever I mentioned that, most people thought I was mad. Thirty years later, unfortunately, my premonitions proved correct. Theriseand fall of dynasties depends upon men. [Thirty years ago] the high officials esteemed what was insubstantial and external. They took obsequiousness as "worth," sycophancy as "loyalty," bragging as "highmindedness," clever quickness as "talent," false slander as "wisdom," andflatteryas "reverence." The whole world emulated this fashion because the ;u elite led in it. These customs and preferences were the basis for achieving fame in the late Yuan. It was therefore not by accident that the dynasty fell. I was young, simple, and naive, and atfirstI thought that the times were treating me badly. But when I found out what was actually going on, I realized in shock that the whole world admired false values, and few indeed abided in the truth. So I kept to myself all the more, and refused to involve myself in the customs of the time.* Wu Hai, however, appears to have been unique in his reasoning that value inversion must have a source, that this source lay in the eager study of heterodox works by "common ju and debased shih," and that the remedy for this must lie in the • 103 •

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prohibition and destruction by the state of all heterodox literature. 47 N o writer was careful to distinguish the proximate causes of the Yuan collapse from what were seen to be the undesirable features of Yuan rule. Liang Yin's discussion of the Yuan collapse emphasized its bureaucratic corruption, which was in turn occasioned by an inadequate dedication to C o n f u c i a n doctrine: The Yuan possessed the largest empire ever known. Even the most distant regions submitted to it. Qubilai established a ruling system that was based in lenience and benevolence and was furthermore comprehensive and detailed, l o the extent that this much of his system was transmitted intact to his successors, it should have produced no flaws. However, the essence of good rule lies in employing worthies whatever their origins; in making the study of antiquity a prerequisite for entering officialdom; and in using decorum, righteousness, probity, and sense of shame as the four mainstays of the state. Qubilai, however, determined that no Chinese could become prime minister, and so all the prime ministers were ethnic Mongols (kuo-tsu). He did not set up remonstrating officials, and so the avenue of loyal and firank advice was blocked, and the many shih of literary culture that each generation produced were buried in low positions, with their potential usefulness untapped. Those favored for employment were men of clerical expertise. Owing to these features of the system, each emperor's court carried out a government of mediocrity and irresolution. A custom of candid outspokenness was not developed among the shih. Officials engaged in corruption, and clerks falsified documents. Surely it was not clearly perceived that ideal rule could not be approximated or the many parts of the empire preserved in this fashion.48 To summarize this subsection, then, it may bear pointing out that the professional C o n f u c i a n elite (i.e., the writers), in their response to the late Yuan political crisis, showed on the whole less direct concern for the crisis itself than for the altered conditions of employment that the crisis occasioned. Both in their communications with one another, as well as in their • 104 •

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more generalized discussions, what preoccupied them was the question whether and to what extent "talented" and ethically qualified Confucians could achieve the organizational positions that would permit them to take appropriate action to meet the crisis. They said little of what they would do once in office; this question they tended to approach negatively, by way of searing criticisms of the "unprofessional" conduct of incumbent personnel. One may go so far as to say that the writers perceived the whole cataclysm of the Yuan collapse from the not altogether broad-based viewpoint of the strictly professional interest of the Confucian community. It is therefore understandable that they so consistently laid the blame for the disasters of the late Yuan upon gross careerism and the crass pursuit of material interests in an officialdom where they found the Confucian voice routinely stifled or ignored. The establishment of the Ming autocracy was, in part, explicitly shaped in accordance with the thesis that a bureaucracy will restrict the professional role and so bring about social disaster unless it is kept under stringent central controls. Che-tung Confucianism, Reform, and Militarization in the Late Yuan The focus of the chapter now shifts from Confucianism in South China generally to a consideration of a geographically particularized case. The purpose in this is not to elaborate a "case study" for its own sake; rather, it is to show how and why Confucian elites from the prefectures of Chin-hua and Ch'uchou (in Che-tung circuit, Kiangche province) came to have a much greater role and influence in the Ming founding than those of any other locality. The actual political and social theory that was developed by the Che-tung writers in the late Yuan and early Ming will be 105 •

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taken up in the next chapter. Here, there are two questions that demand attention. First, it needs to be shown that the Che-tung elite were in some ways exceptional in that they had had concrete participatory experiences in local reform in the 1340s and 1350s before the onset of the general crisis of the midfourteenth century. These activities, though confined to the local level in the late Yuan, were continued (often by the same actors) under the auspices of the emerging Ming dynasty after 1360. Both the theory and the practice of reform evident at the local level in Che-tung in the late Yuan became an integral part of the Ming approach to national reform during the reign of the founder, Ming T'ai-tsu. Second, it would appear desirable to advance an hypothesis that would help explain the peculiar regional character of Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou Confucianism, and also account for why Ming T'ai-tsu should have chosen to cooperate as closely as he did with Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou Confucian elites. Since a detailed study of Che-tung local reform has been undertaken elsewhere,49 a summary account may suffice here. In 1342 there was launched in Shao-hsing prefecture (in Chetung circuit) a drive to reassess and reallocate the state laborservice obligation among the landholding population. Even though the drive was undertaken at a time when the Yuan court had come under the direction of Toghto, a "pro-Confucian" chancellor, there is no indication that central government had anything directly to do with it or was particularly concerned about conditions in Shao-hsing. After Shao-hsing, further fiscal reform in Che-tung was for some reason delayed until 13 50, when the circuit censors set in motion a new drive in Chin-hua prefecture, which was the Che-tung circuit capital. The reform of the labor-service allocation in Chin-hua was explicitly copied after the 1342 reform in Shao-hsing. In conjunction with the officially sponsored drive in Chin-hua, there was also instituted—entirely at the behest of the local Confucian commu• 106

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nity in this case—a similar service-allocation reform in Lungch'iian county (in Ch'u-chou prefecture). There are, at the outset, three things to be noted about these late Yuan efforts at local fiscal reform. The first is that they were carried out through the cooperation of two different groups: enthusiastic bureaucrats at the regional and local levels of Yuan government, and the resident communities of Confucian elites. The second point is that neither in intent nor in effect did the reforms increase local supplies of unpaid labor for the performance of state-related tasks. In fact, at least in Chin-hua, the reform resulted in a net decrease in the supply of such labor. T h e third point is that the fiscal reforms were explicitly conducted as exercises in Confucian sociomoral reform, where Confucian knowledge was concretely applied in order to alleviate certain perceived social derangements. One derangement in question was an iniquitous distribution of local service obligations, such that the smaller landowning households incurred disproportionately heavy and even ruinous liabilities, while the larger escaped their due share. The smaller households were often the older local families of good moral reputation (and also, apparently, a preferred source of professional recruitment). The larger households were often newly-risen "rich" families who had not yet accumulated moral capital commensurate with their landed holdings. The ill in all of this lay, in the view of the reformers, in the fact that local government had failed to readjust its service-duty rosters periodically in order to bring them in line with changes in the amounts of land held by the obligated households. It had failed to maintain a regime of distributive justice owing to the existence of corrupt relationships between the large households and the record-keeping clerical personnel in the government offices. This covert arrangement between local government and die rich had two principal effects. It meant a decentralization in the • 107 •

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power of local government, in that the magistrate as responsible official either ignored or connived in decisions actually made by subordinate personnel. It also frustrated government's primary mission of providing security in livelihood through distributive justice as a public good to all the people as a collectivity. Public goods are by definition not marketable; they are generalized quantities rather than specific items, laxes, services, and other coerced payments for such goods are so calculated as to reflect each obligated unit's ability to pay, as determined from a statistical report of holdings. Each payment, regardless of its size, should ideally buy an equal amount of the public good in question. What was wrong in the iniquitous distribution of the service burden was that local government came to engage itself in a marketing operation, selling its protection to some of the people in accordance with prevailing market rates (the size of the bribe). In so acting, it was no longer really a government dealing in public goods, but more like a private business selling its commodities to the highest bidders on a one-to-one basis. Such a practice was utterly repugnant to the Confucian idea of the purpose of government, and to its own mission of impartial public service. By thus rewarding the evil and punishing the good, government would, in the Confucian view, inevitably foster social decay and eventually provoke social violence. The exhausting task of gathering new statistics, compiling new registers, and reassigning service duties was not all that was required in the fiscal reforms undertaken in Shao-hsing, Chinhua, and Lung-ch'iian in 1342- 50. The sociomoral revitalization of the public was also necessary, because the public had to be mobilized behind the reform efforts. Those disadvantaged by, or neutral toward, the existing corruption (presumably the majority) had to be encouraged to come to their county seats and declare their holdings to the officials. Then, the pressure of this mobilized public had to be applied to the recalcitrant, those who stood to lose both standing and material benefits from the • 108 •

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reforms. Mobilizing the moral resources of die public against the recalcitrant minority took various forms: divination and magic together with community ritual in Shao-hsing; the formation of pao-chia units of mutual surveillance in Chin-hua; and open litigation and trial in Lung-ch'iian. The cooperation of the local Confucians was essential in these matters. It was they who advised the officials on the implementation of these procedures, aided in rallying the local public, and, above all, wrote the inscriptions and other public memoranda that justified local reform in the light of universalized Confucian doctrine, and celebrated the names and good works of all who directed and helped in it. The role of the Confucian writers in providing communications and moral exhortation for the work of the reform deserves emphasis. The writers effectively exploited a fundamental weakness in the antireform side, that is, its inherendy covert character and, directly connected with that, the very great difficulty it had in publicizing itself or justifying its behavior by appeal to some abstract and widely recognized standard of values. It seems that it is in this context that one should look for the motivations of both sets of reformist actors: the regional and local Yuan officials, on the one hand, and the local Confucians, on the other. Obviously, reform work was rewarding, but in what sense? As for the participating officials, it may be pointed out that they included a varied ethnic assortment of Mongols, Central Asians, and Northern Chinese. At least one of the Mongols (Tai Buqa, who directed the reform in Shaohsing) and one of the Central Asians (Yii Ch'ueh, who did the same in Chin-hua) held the chin-shih degree, and both may also be considered members of the professional Confucian community by virtue of their active interest in scholarship and publication. Others of the reforming officials held no degree, but combined an expertise in accountancy with a definite zeal • 109

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to implement Confucian ideas (e.g., Liu Hui, who directed reform in Yu-yao, a county dependent upon Shao-hsing). Yet others were simply amenable to local professional advice. Successful reform work did not lead to immediate raises in rank or salary. Where biographical career records are available, the reforming officials are approvingly depicted as organizational "mavericks" who all along consistently followed the Confucian imperatives whenever these came into conflict with existing bureaucratic regulations. Therefore, the conclusion seems inescapable that the reforming officials found their rewards either in the open exercise of the recentralized local power that the task of reform occasioned or in the visible acclamation and literary publicization accorded them by the community of Confucian writers. The motivations of the local Confucian activists should probably be assessed similarly, l o the extent that they were representatives of ju households and thus exempt from laborservice requirements themselves, they most likely had no personal financial stake in the reforms. Regrettably, information on this point is lacking. Yet it does appear, at least on the surface, that the reward for their voluntary activity in the cause of local fiscal reform came mainly in the form of enhanced prestige, both for the community as a whole (by way of demonstrating anew the efficacy of its body of knowledge) and for the individual participant (widened reputation). 50 In these local fiscal reforms there may be discerned a definite conjuncture of tendencies, a small-scale paradigm of a ruling system that would later be extended upon a national scale by Ming T'ai-tsu. The principal parts of this paradigm were these: (1) an awareness of a striking inadequacy in the ability of the bureaucracy to deliver public goods; (2) a belief that this inadequacy stemmed from corruption, that is, covert and profitable private arrangements at the public's expense; (3) a zeal to reform the situation, that is, to reapply the public and universal • 110 •

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norms safeguarded by the Confucian community, in order that the bureaucracy might be redirected to its appropriate (unctions (from these considerations there followed a series of operational consequences, that are also part of the paradigm); (4) the mobilization of the public through the "village drinking ceremony," pao-chia, and other devices; (5) the development of interrelated sets of property and service registers (the "rat-tail," "fish-scale," and other types of register developed by die local reformers were later applied nationally under the Ming); (6) the exposure of the public enemy and his pacification through persuasion, threat, humiliation, confiscation, or physical punishment; (7) the coercive suppression of the clerical subbureaucracy, using surveillance and punishment to curtail its activities, without offering any material inducements to good behavior, such as an adequate salary income; (8) the raising up of "autocratic" local officials, who ignored organizational constraints from above or below whenever necessary in the interest of centrally directing the complex and demanding work of reform; and (9) the development of a crucial professional-client relationship between the Confucian community and the local officials, a relationship based on voluntary advice and consent rather than institutionalized power. Later on, when Ming T'ai-tsu made one of his principal aims the general reform of Chinese society, he acted very much in the style of an organizational nonconformist, refusing to tie himself down with the formal institutions that he created. He constantly sought, and sometimes acted upon, professional Confucian advice when he judged it to be sound and disinterested. From the point of view of the professional interest of the Confucian community, there surely was no more effective way to market its elite labor and discharge its service obligation than this. Through an advisory relationship with a receptive autocrat, one who would not permit formal bureaucratic procedures to interfere in the implementation of public goals, the • 111 •

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profession could bring its expert knowledge to bear most concretely upon the diagnosis and cure of the ills of the whole society. The central authorities in the late Yuan appear to have had little interest in the question of fiscal reform. It was primarily the concern of certain regional and local officials. It is important, therefore, to explore the geography of fiscal reform, in order to show why reform was carried out with such élan in localities like Shao-hsing, Chin-hua, and Ch'u-chou. This line of inquiry should also make it possible to suggest why the future Ming dynasty adopted as much of the reform cause as it did. In the context of the physical-economic geography of South China, as analyzed by G. W. Skinner, the reforming localities can be seen to have straddled two "macroregions," the Lower Yangtze and the Southeast Coast. The economic "core" of the Lower Yangtze macroregion takes in the large cities of Nanking, Soochow, and Hangchow together with Shao-hsing and Ningpo (Ch'ing-yuan, Ssu-ming) prefectures, and includes Chinhua prefecture in its "hinterland." The Southeast Coast macroregion has its "core" along the coast south of Ning-po (including in it the prefectures of T'ai-chou and Wen-chou); Ch'u-chou prefecture lies in its "hinterland."51 In the nineteenth century, the flow of commercial transactions tended to tie Chin-hua with the Lower Yangtze core and its cities, and Ch'u-chou with the Southeast Coast core and its seaports. Some random Sung and Yuan data suggest that this was also the pattern in the fourteenth century. Despite intensive irrigation development in the Southern Sung period, Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou with their narrow valleys appear to have been barely self-sufficient in grain production; their economies were to a great extent geared to the export to the cores of specialty products such as structural timber, furniture, charcoal, lacquer, silk, porcelain, and processed fruit." Various writers pointed • 112 •

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out that overall living standards were much lower in Chin-hua than in the Yangtze Delta core." Late in the thirteenth century, Wang Fo asserted that Chin-hua was in a precarious position in its grain production, and marginally located with respect to transport routes.54 In 1340 the central authorities were notified that grain shortage and famine existed in both Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou." Ch'u-chou was described by Wang I as "the most remote of the seven prefectures of Che-tung," 56 and by Wang Wei as "the most isolated part of Che-tung." Wang Wei went on to relate that "its customs are simple and substantive, its grain tax meager, and it has always been an easy place to rule. But its rugged topography provides a haven for outlaw elements who band together to attack and kill."" The wilderness nature of much of Lung-ch'iian county (in fact of much of the whole "hinterland" in question) has been vividly described by Nils Falmgren, who visited the huge ruins of its village ceramic industries in die troubled mid- 1930s. M This "hinterland" character of Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou cannot easily be extended to Shao-hsing or, as will be related, to Tz'u-ch'i in Ning-po prefecture, which were also reform locales, but situated, according to Skinner's analysis, at the southeasternmost edge of the Lower Yangtze core. However, information from the twelfth century has it that Shao-hsing was, unlike the Delta area, a rice-deficit locality.w According to one fourteenth-century writer, its dependency of Yii-yao suffered from poor soil, a shortage of foodstuffs, and a population that could not provide much in tax revenues.60 Yet Tz'u-ch'i county, Yii-yao's immediate neighbor to the east, was described by another fourteenth-century writer as a rich producer of fish, salt, rice, and various vegetable products.61 Thus, except for the Tz'u-ch'i anomaly, one can tentatively correlate fiscal reform with hinterland location or some lesser degree of marginality with respect to the macroregional core areas. What lends strength to this hypothesis is the fact that late in • 113

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the twelfth century there also took place a local fiscal reform movement (called i-i, "righteous" or shared service) that centered upon these very same localities. Like the reforms of the fourteenth century, those of the twelfth involved the equitable reallocation of service obligations, although the system used was quite different. The i-i reforms began in a rural district of Chin-hua county, where the leading landowners established a community fund in property. This fund provided an income supplement to those in the group who rotated among themselves the duty of rendering unpaid rural services for the state. Local government itself, however, in contrast to the fourteenthcentury reforms, took no part at all in the management of the property or in the allocation of service duties. This "self-help" movement was widely publicized, and several Confucianminded local officials eagerly encouraged its adoption on a wider basis. From its point of origin, and with official encouragement, i-i spread among the other counties of Chin-hua prefecture, and into Ch'u-chou and Shao-hsing and other parts of the Che-tung region. By the early thirteenth century, the government began to take a direct managerial role in establishing it in parts of the Yangtze Delta, Kiangsi, and Fukien. Eventually, i-i fell prey to corruption and mismanagement, and local governments reassumed control of the service-levy allocations. By the fourteenth century, i-i had all but disappeared.62 Curiously, it was never mentioned by the fourteenth-century writers as an antecedent or a precedent for their own reforms. Yet the fact remains that both in the twelfth and in the fourteenth century, reform of the labor-service allocation seemed to be an especially pressing issue in places of no particular importance as producers of tax revenue for the state. Why would that be? Administrative geography may offer a clue. In the fourteenth-century Yuan, the province of Kiangche (excluding the Fukien area) was divided into twenty-five prefectura! level units. Each such unit was further subdivided into a varying • 114 •

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number of local (county-level) units. If one takes the given prefectura! totals of households, and in each case divides these by the number of units of local government that administered them, one can rank the prefectures according to their varying ratios of households per unit of government. This procedure yields some wide disparities. At the top of the list, Chia-hsing prefecture in the Lower Yangtze core had 142,000 households per unit of local government, while at the bottom of the list, Ch'ih-chou prefecture at the extreme northwest border had 11,000 households per unit of local government.65 Where along this scale did the reforming localities lie? Ning-po prefecture, which included Tz'u-ch'i county, ranked rather high (1:48,000, in seventh place), but the other localities ranked quite low (Chin-hua fifteenth, 1:32,000; Ch'u-chou twentysecond, 1:19,000; Shao-hsing twenty-third, 1:19,000). What these figures suggest is that the reform prefectures tended to be places with (relatively) large total populations, small taxable outputs, but intensive levels of administrative control.64 These factors made the cost-burden of government very heavy in the reform prefectures—for example, some seven times heavier in Ch'u-chou than in Chia-hsing. The comparatively high cost of government in Shao-hsing, Chin-hua, and Ch'u-chou helps explain why reallocating the rural service levy emerged there as the leading reform issue. One further variable, which would also apply to Tz'u-ch'i, was the existence in those places of Confucian elites (either residents or officials) who were professionally concerned enough about the problem of distributive equity and population control to assist in one way or another in the implementation of reform. The reform localities shared with much of the rest of South China the unsettling experiences of the Red Turban rebellions ( 1 3 5 2 - 5 4 ) and the breakdown of Yuan central authority (after 1355). Local cooperation between the Confucians and the 115 •

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Yuan officials, established in the course of the fiscal reforms, was strengthened in the face of the new crisis. Shao-hsing, Chin-hua, and Ch'u-chou responded fairly rapidly to the Red Turbans, and they either put up a successful military defense against them or else recovered their territories after a few weeks of rebel occupation. Generally, militia forces were mobilized, and weapons and rations were acquired from the public on the basis of the statistics compiled during the reforms, with each household being made to contribute in proportion to its actual level of income. Much worse were the strains that occurred after the Red Turban wave had come and gone. Shortly after the fall of Prime Minister Toghto, the "core" regions (the principal grain- and revenue-producing parts) of the Lower Yangtze and Southeast Coast fell under the control of the new loyalist warlords Chang Shih-ch'eng and Fang Kuo-chen, respectively. The effect of this political decentralization upon the "hinterland" economies is not very clear, in part because the Confucian writers seldom interested themselves in commercial questions. However, there must have occurred some disruption of the existing relationships between cores and hinterlands. As one obvious case in point, the world-famous celadon export industry of Lungch'iian county (Ch'u-chou prefecture) was utterly dependent upon the seaports of the Southeast Coast for reaching its markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.65 When Tz'u-ch'i, Shao-hsing, Chin-hua, and Ch'u-chou established regimes that professed loyalty to the Yuan center and yet bitterly opposed the pro-Yuan regionalists Chang and Fang, the equally bitter proregionalist local opposition that they stirred up may have reflected to some degree the commercial, industrial, and labor interests of the hinterlands in the uninterrupted continuance of trade flows. Just as in the case of fiscal reform earlier, the action of the hinterland Confucians after 1355 was clearly connected with 116

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the continuing need to safeguard equity in the local subsistence economy. Their action was based upon the implicit belief that the hinterland localities could afford secession from the cores and survive independently on their own subsistence resources. In cooperation with "nonconformist" individuals (opponents of die central policy of accommodating the regionalists) in Yuan bureaucracy at the lower levels, the reformers took up arms in order to prevent the fall of their localities to the regionalists. They conducted a series of military operations, inconclusive for the most part, against the local opposition, whom they took to represent the forces of evil, violence, and unrighteousness. In Tz'u-ch'i, Yii-yao, and the Shao-hsing prefectural capital, local professional elites and cooperative Yuan officials maintained themselves by armed force until 1358. By that time, two of the leading officials were murdered by their proregionalist bureaucratic enemies, and the third decided to surrender peacefully to Fang Kuo-chen rather than subject the local population to the ravages of all-out resistance. Chang Shih-ch'eng then incorporated the Shao-hsing prefectural seat into his larger regional domain, and the boundary between him and Fang was drawn between Shao-hsing and its former dependency of Yii-yao. In Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou, a Yuan official by the name of Shih-mo I-sun led an antiregional variety of Yuan loyalism until 1357, when the Yuan court openly declined to give serious endorsement to the insistence of his Confucian advisers that the dynasty act to eliminate Chang and Fang and undertake the large-scale political reintegration of the realm. When the court finally issued its clear refusal to go along, the local Confucians definitely lost interest in the loyalist cause they had been ardently supporting up to that time. It was these disappointed centralizing loyalists whom Ming T'ai-tsu recruited for his own cause three years later. Since the local Confucians could in fact dispense with the integration of core and hinterland and seek to survive on the • 117 •

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meager resources of the hinterland alone, what interest did they have in working for political reintegration on a national scale? Why was permanently localized power an obviously unacceptable state of affairs for them? Opinion had it that purely local reform was an impossibility. A local reform could not occur in the absence of a preexisting national (or universal) value system, one that was potentially available to people in all localities. If, furthermore, a local reform undertaken in the light of such a value system failed to inspire imitation and adoption elsewhere, then undesirable consequences would surely follow. Failure of a local reform to spread would mean that what was implemented was something other than a universal and public standard of values (one that did not appeal to the universal human moral conscience), or else it would mean that the particularistic forces of evil (entrenched local or regional interests) were powerful enough to smother it. Moreover, the existence of reform (of an adequate supply of public goods), even on a relatively large scale, was always perceived to be in danger of collapse. The forces of evil, while embodied in purely local, selfish, or particularistic interests, did also possess an inherent capacity for generalization and geographic spread, much along the lines of a cancer in the body. The writers denied even the theoretical possibility that isolated reform localities could hold out indefinitely against such a rampant disease unless they were resolutely aided by a national political apparatus that would forcefully intervene on their behalf. According to Liu Chi, the decision of the Yuan center not to oppose Chang and Fang was tantamount to an invitation to general anarchy, because it was made evident to all that the greed and violence they displayed had paid handsome dividends to them in the form of official reward and recognition.66 Thus, while such general values as justice, impartiality, and good (i, kung, shan) were universal, and struck responsive chords in human minds everywhere, they 118 •

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were at the same time extremely vulnerable to corrosion and suppression, especially when men at large escaped the restraining controls of punishment and reward as exerted through some universal political center. It was understood that public goods were highly perishable and could not easily endure a prolonged decentralization or fragmentation of political authority. Ming Tai-tsu (Chu Yuan-chang) in Che-tung And what of Chu Yuan-chang, future founder of the Ming dynasty, and his connections with the centralizing reformers of Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou? There are two themes that deserve scrutiny here. One is the geographical structure of the subYangtze empire that Chu established in the years 1355-60. The other is the process by which Chu recruited Confucians for his regime, including especially his recruitment of the Chinhua and Ch'u-chou reformers in 1359-60. The purpose of this section is to elucidate die peculiar conjunction of circumstances that acted powerfully to give the early Ming state its reformist thrust, its centralization, and its untrammeled autocracy. Chu Yuan-chang and his rebel army, natives of the warravaged Huai region north of the Yangtze, evacuated it in July 1355. The army needed food, and Chu and his entourage of obscure ju advisers needed opportunities for wider conquest. They seized the commercial town of Ts'ai-shih on the south bank of the Yangtze and secured its provisions. However, the troops "had no mind to advance and conquer." They expected to return to their native Huai. In order to prevent that, Chu had all the boats set adrift and compelled his army to march to the nearby prefectural city of T'ai-p'ing, which they took without • 119 •

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difficulty. The local rich were made to present "gifts" of gold and silk, but the troops were sternly forbidden to loot, and the city was left undamaged for the most part.67 Located some forty miles southwest of Nanking, T'ai-p'ing prefecture ranked low on most counts in the hierarchy of prefectures of Kiangche province. A low producer of revenue, it ranked low in population (twenty-first among the twenty-five prefectures), but carried a rather heavy administrative burden (one unit of government per 25,000 households). There is undoubtedly a close connection between its relatively intensive level of administration and the success it had in defending itself against two separate Red Turban incursions in 1352. Its local garrison was given special training, and another unit was sent in to provide additional support. Of its 76,000 registered households, some 7,200 went over to the rebel side briefly, but were won back by the government on the promise of amnesty and grain relief. Twelve thousand local militiamen were raised. Agricultural production was little disrupted. As T'ao An described it, "even though large expenses were incurred . . . , T'ai-p'ing was a paradise in the midst of wide-scale devastation."68 Yet, only three years later, the same officials who had earlier handled the Red Turban crisis so well were unable to prevent Chu's easy capture of the city. It is possible that they were demoralized by loghto's dismissal and the collapse of the Yuan pacification effort seven months earlier. However, one of the local officials committed suicide when T'ai-p'ing fell; Chu called him a "righteous shih" and had him buried with honors. At T'ai-p'ing, Chu recruited new ;u, whose level of education and circle of colleagues were considerably greater than those of his earlier advisers. It is here, in fact, that the informal network organization of the Confucian community first demonstrated its operational usefulness for the state-founding process. Two important recruits were Li Hsi and his student T'ao • 120 •

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An. Both had failed at the highest examination level, and both had been made heads of local Confucian academies (shuyuan). Both were scholars and writers. Both had considerable knowledge of the leading families of die region, including Nanking; and both had extensive contacts with other ;u in other parts of South China. Wu Lai, one of the leading Chinhua Confucians, had once commented favorably on some writing of Li Hsi's. T'ao An corresponded with ju in such Carflung places as Yii-yao, Ning-po, and Hangchow. Yet another ju recruit was Wang Kuang-yang, a poet, calligrapher, and successful chin-shih, who had been a student of Yii Ch'ueh, the director of the 1350 fiscal reform in Chin-hua.69 These men could conceivably have made things very difficult for their young conqueror (Chu was twenty-seven, T'ao fortythree, and Li in his eighties). They could have declined to cooperate with him, in one way or another. Instead, they joined him, apparently voluntarily. T'ao reportedly advised Chu that most of the other warlords had no aim other than to achieve dominance by any means and enjoy luxury as long as they could; but since Chu had avoided needless slaughter and demonstrated a will to rescue mankind, the founding of a new dynasty was not an impossible goal for him.70 After much struggle and hardship, Chu Yuan-chang and his "Huai bandits" conquered the city of Nanking in April 1356. Among Chu's ju recruits at Nanking were Hsia Yii and Sun Yen, members of a famous local poetry circle. Sun Yen, for all his bullying ways, was an attractive character who played an important role later in recruiting the Ch'u-chou Confucians for Chu's regime.71 A week after taking Nanking, Chu's forces conquered Chen-chiang prefecture, about forty miles to the east. There a retired Yuan official, Ch'in Ts'ung-lung, was attracted to Nanking through the mediation of his grandnephew, a commander in the service of one of Chu's generals. Ch'in was given no • 121

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formal post, but was housed near Chu (Chu first lived in the home of a silk merchant and later made his headquarters in the old Kiangnan Branch Censorate building), and advised him on an informal and confidential basis. At conference meetings, Chu and Ch'in would pass secret messages back and forth on a lacquered slate.72 This arrangement became fairly typical of the way in which Chu would employ future ju of stature; one strong inducement for joining him was the apparent, and certainly flattering, opportunity he afforded them of influencing policy at the very highest level. The direction of further territorial expansion lay generally southward from Nanking. After Chiang-yin and Ch'ang-chou on the fringe of the Delta rice-basket were taken, and a frontier against Chang Shih-ch'eng was secured, Chus forces moved southward and took Ning-kuo prefecture in May 1357, Huichou in July, and Chien-te in April 1358. These were all "hinterland" localities that had still been under the control of Yuan officials at the time they were conquered. These places yielded very little in the way of new Confucian cadres. Ning-kuo and Chien-te for some reason lacked strong local Confucian communities. Hui-chou, however, boasted a very well known tradition of Confucian study. Yet, even though Chus generals were under orders to find and recommend them for service, the Hui-chou Confucian elite, almost to a man, declined to render any (ten years later, they were compelled to serve).7' From die writing of Chao Fang, Wang K'o-k'uan, Shu Ti, T'ang Kuei-fang, and others of the Hui-chou elite, one gains a strong sense of the repeated military occupations and the destruction and ruin that Hui-chou, Ning-kuo, and Chien-te had undergone since the onset of the Red Turban insurrections of 1352. Chu Yuan-chang's conquest brought yet more hardship and ruin, and die Hui-chou elite seem to have seen it as their principal mission to give advice and apply pressure to the 122 •

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military men and civil officials that Chu posted, in order to prevent further damage to the local society and economy. From Hui-chou and environs, Chu's forces pressed southeast during 1358-59 and conquered first Chin-hua and then Ch'u-chou. In Chin-hua this onslaught caused more pillage and destruction than any previous upheaval of the civil-war period. Far from welcoming this new force, many of die elites Bed rather than submit to the mercies of an army that was at the time heavily dependent upon local plunder and impressment for its supply and transport needs. Shortly after the conquest of Chin-hua, however, Chu Yuan-chang came in person from his capital in Nanking to oversee military operations and organize a branch provincial government. Pillage was halted, military needs were met through more regular bureaucratic means, and some degree of local security was restored. The elites then began to return home. The Chin-hua Confucian elites showed much less reluctance to serve than their confreres in Hui-chou. In January 1359, Wang Wei and six others were appointed "secretaries" (yuan-shih) in the new branch provincial government.74 The future Ming founder held discussions with two of the local teachers on the nature and significance of the Great Learning, an important Confucian text.75 Hu Han and several others were called in by General Li Wen-chung (the founder's nephew) to discuss the "study of the sages"; the general, aged twenty, appropriately treated Hu Han, agedfifty-two,as a pupil his master.76 In February the new Chin-hua prefecture! government reopened the Confucian school and appointed Sung Lien and five others as "Masters of the Five Classics," that is, as its teaching faculty.77 In a long and rather arrogant letter, seemingly datable to December of the same year, Sung Lien declined this appointment mainly on the grounds that it was beneath his dignity to assume such a low-ranking task. "A teacher of classics

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is easy to find; a teacher of men is rarely encountered" he wrote, quoting an old proverb.78 If he were holding out for some higher position in this incipient dynastic organization, his strategy worked; in March 1360 Sung Lien accepted the first of a series of advisory positions at the central level, which he held until his retirement in 1377. The conquest of Ch'u-chou came about in December 1359. One by one, the principal operatives and Confucian advisers of Shih-mo I-sun, the "centralist" Yuan commander, were persuaded to desert him and join the rebel movement of Chu Yuan-chang. The persuasions emphasized that Chu was the only leader under whom the local elite (shih) could hope to establish "success and reputation," that his recent victories proved that "Heaven s intent" was in his favor, and that continued resistance would cause needless destruction.79 By March 1360 most of the major figures in Shih-mo s staff—Hu Shen, Chang I, Yeh C h e n , and especially Liu Chi—came to Nanking and enrolled themselves as subjects of what eight years later became the Ming dynasty. Chu accorded posthumous honors to Shih-mo, who, deserted by his best men, died fighting in the Yuan cause in August 1360. 80 In effect, the transition from Yuan to Ming in Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou placed a determined new power apparatus at the disposal of what had clearly become a failed reform movement, and gave it a wholly new lease on life. At the incipient "national" level of Ming rule, the prospective dynastic founder made known his aim to eliminate eventually all of the autonomous regional forces. At the local level, Ming power emphatically aligned itself with the old proreform element. These facts are best understood in connection with the peculiar strategic constraints the future Ming state labored under in the years 1355-60. In those years, the armies conquered a base area in South China that assumed a rough T-shape. The • 124 •

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top of the T stretched along the Yangtze from Ch'ih-chou in the west to Chiang-yin toward the Yangtze mouth. The shaft of the T extended southward from Nanking, the capital, and took in economic "hinterland" territory down as far as the prefectures of Chin-hua, Ch'u-chou, and Ch'u-chou. Although die city of Nanking was located in the "core" of the Lower Yangtze macroregion, it stood at the westernmost edge of that core and, as F. W. Mote has pointed out, lacked sufficient agricultural surpluses in its immediate vicinity. In ordinary times it was well located with respect to several ricesurplus "cores," but in the 1350s these were all occupied by hostile regional forces. Mote writes: "Chu Yuan-chang's success, a triumph over economic odds, was achieved through organization and planning; he gradually attached to his movement districts providing wealth to his nearer rivals, and then he utilized his resources more efficiently than they had done."81 Thus the emerging Ming forces had to operate on very thin margins of grain and other surpluses. These resources were not significantly concentrated (as they tended to be in the macroregional cores), but were dispersed among a large number of landowning households or other small centers of accumulation. How did the Ming forces support themselves in these conditions? There evolved a combination of measures. First of all, idle land had to be brought under production. In Nanking, an office for irrigation and agricultural resettlement was established in 1356, which in the next yean rebuilt dikes and waterworks and resettled war refugees on vacant land. In 1360 these resettled fields were surveyed and taxed. In Ch'u-chou prefecture some 57,000 mou of vacant fields were opened to military cultivation, and the former-soldiers were further made to assist the local civilian population in farming operations. Some similar arrangements, probably on a smaller scale, were worked out in 125

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Ch'u-chou.82 Second, very heavy rates of taxation and other obligations were laid upon the people. In 1357 Chu Yuanchang negotiated personally with Tang Kuei-fang, a leading member of the Hui-chou Confucian community, and managed to convince him that despite die distress of the area, the armies had to have their grain and other support." T'ang stated in his writings that Chu Yuan-changs officials laid tax and service burdens upon the households in accordance with their assessed income, among the services imposed was that of shipping grain over seventy-five miles of unimproved stream to neighboring Chien-te prefecture in 1359, 1360, and 1362. T'ang also remarked approvingly upon the vigorous efforts made by Chu's local officials to effect a "reform" order in Hui-chou; besides trying to allocate the various requisitions equitably, they savagely repressed the clerical personnel, leaving them "fearful and cringing" and unable to "perpetrate their evils upon the people."84 In Chin-hua, Chu Yuan-chang announced that in view of the military shortages he would have to collect a double rate of grain tax until Chang Shih-ch'eng and the Yangtze Delta were conquered, when he promised a tax holiday.8' Wine-brewing was prohibited on pain of death.86 Commerical tax barriers, placed on the eastern borders, laid a very high rate of 10 percent ad valorem on salt and other goods moving upstream from the domains of the warlords Chang Shih-ch'eng and Fang Kuochen.87 In Chin-hua, where a rural service reform had been carried out in 1350 under Yuan auspices, a wholly new and updated reform was effected in 1361 by Wang ICai, a Confucian-minded former clerk whom Chu Yuan-chang had recruited atT'ai-p'ing in 1355. 88 In Ch'u-chou, Sun Yen was given wide discretionary powers over local military andfiscalaffairs and the making of official appointments. An epitaph written by Sung Lien states that so • 126 •

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strict and uncompromising was Sun Yen's rule there that "the villainous clerks, the large lineages, and those who used to domineer all drew back their hands, put out their tongues, and feared him as though he were a god, not daring to say anything. For hundreds of li around everyone cringed in trepidation, just as if he were standing right on their doorsills."89 Hu Shen, earlier one of the "reform" leaders, levied a special new tax in silver on the richer Ch'u-chou households in order to help meet Chu Yuan-changs military needs.90 From data of this kind one may conclude that because Chu Yuan-chang's army and regime occupied a base region that lay mainly in an economic "hinterland," they had to extract grain, money, and labor services at abnormally high rates, that is, at around double the rates that had prevailed in the late Yuan. Owing to the small scale of local resource accumulation, there were no administrative shortcuts that could be taken and yet yield the required sums. Only through access to the maximum number of taxpaying households could the burgeoning Ming state survive. Obviously, "unreformed" local governments could not furnish the regime the needed intensity of access, and this fact goes far to explain why the Ming should have taken over so much of the local fiscal reform program that had been developed in the region through the cooperation of Yuan officials and Confucian elites in the years 1342-50. The Ming forces could not afford corruption. They could not afford an unequal allocation of fiscal obligations, because such an arrangement would have hidden die true sources and locations of wealth from them. Along with an unavoidable policy of fiscal equalization, the Ming authorities also applied harsh and even brutal controls to discourage waste, looting, tax resistance, and official and clerical malfeasance. For these measures, there were precedents in the earlier fiscal reforms. The Ming thus made common cause with the reformist elements in Chin-hua • 127

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and Ch'u-chou because it really had no choice. The real difficulties would come much later, when this very severe approach was imposed as nationwide policy. In general conclusion, it may be stated that die Confucian community of South China held a range of largely consistent views on the nature of the late Yuan crisis and on the appropriate responses to be made to it by the Confucians themselves. The Yuan bureaucracy was held primarily responsible for the disasters, and it was generally understood by the writers that a return to security and order would require a thorough reform of that bureaucracy, or possibly its replacement by some new one. Furthermore, the writers expressed great concern that the new and heavy labor demands (or employment opportunities), occasioned by the Yuan bureaucracy in the course of its efforts to handle the crisis, had the effect of corrupting the ethical bonds of the Confucian community and further weakening the already tenuous informal control of the Confucian elite over the placement of educated labor in government service. The writers of Che-tung (Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou) emphatically shared these views. What makes them a very special case is that they developed their views of the current predicament well beyond the level reached by their colleagues elsewhere. Unlike most of the Confucians, they had voluntarily participated in local reform in the late Yuan, and this experience radicalized and politicized them. They also acted to preserve the ethical bonds of the local Confucian community by withdrawing their political allegiance or by shifting it to the Ming when the terms of continued Yuan service came into clear conflict with their professed and ethically rooted goals of reform and centralization. When Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou were overrun by the Ming armies in 1359, those local Confucian elites who had earlier participated in reform, or had placed their communications 128

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skills at its disposal, entered into the service of the emerging dynasty. From Chin-hua, the main personalities were Sung Lien, Wang Wei, and Hu Han; from Ch'u-chou, the key man was Liu Chi (Hu Shen, Chang I, and Yeh Ch'en died or were killed very early). Their recruitment brought to a close the ongoing process of bringing new Confucian professionals of skill and reputation into the central level of the regime. The reform-minded Confucians of Che-tung, with the exception of Hu Han, came to constitute a top stratum of advisers and operatives that became a national professional elite with the Ming reunification of China in 1368. It is in some large part through the experience, advice, and support of these men that the whole set of phenomena linked with reform (i.e., popular mobilization, centralization of power, coercion, psychological incentives) came to constitute the framework of national policy during the long reign of the Ming founder, 1368-98. When we say that the Che-tung Confucians were an exceptional minority we have not begun to measure the actual influence their views had, not only on Chu Yuan-chang, but also, with the founding of the Ming, on the Confucian community at large. They were a militant "segment" of the profession, and at a crucial period in China's history they succeeded in leading it. The importance of their ideas for the entire thrust of early Ming policy is such as to warrant a substantive examination of their writings on the question of national reform, or as they often styled it, "saving the world." That examination is the burden of the following chapter.

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DIE OBJECTS of scrutiny here are four Confucian writers of the Che-tung "hinterland": Liu Chi from Ch'u-chou prefecture, and Wang Wei, Sung Lien, and Hu Han from its neighbor Chin-hua. Their home region may have been marginal in the context of China's national economic landscape, but it was a central part of the base area occupied by Chu Yuan-chang at an early point in the Ming founding. Furthermore, neither before nor after the Ming founding was the place of the four writers in the national professional community of Confucianism marginal either. Both Liu Chi and, especially, Sung Lien had already achieved national reputations in the late Yuan. And the concerns of all four writers were focused, not on purely local or regional matters, but rather on the grand question of the formation and direction of the totality of the Chinese sociomoral order. Nowhere else but in Chin-hua and Ch'u-chou in the late 13 50s were the Confucians addressing themselves to the matter of national salvation with anything like the sustained intensity of these four writers, who clearly felt personally responsible as professionals for the rescue of humankind from what they saw to 131 •

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be its insane penchant for self-destruction. While they sought no obvious personal or material advantages in the chaos of the times, we will see that they certainly had a strong professional interest in it. Out of the disorders they created what amounted to an artificial crisis of civilization. They portrayed the political disintegration of China luridly and menacingly, so as to underscore all the more heavily the potential curative role of Confucian doctrine. Their analyses of China s ills were not pragmatic or even candid, but rhetorically persuasive and professionally "interested" to the highest degree. Their ideas on national salvation were inspired by their unhappy experience with local fiscal reform and antirebel resistance in the early 1350s. They drew ominous conclusions from the refusal of the Yuan central authority to elevate their centralizing reform efforts to the level of national policy. That fhistration is what prompted their writing. And the story might have ended right there, had the founding of the post-Yuan dynasty in China taken place in some different way than it did. As it happened, the Ming founder was early on disposed to think that the Confucian elites could be a crucially important source of knowledge and advice in helping him to create a new and unified dynastic order. He recruited them eagerly, and it came about that the writers of Che-tung entered his service at a time when the future Ming state was itself a "hinterland" regime, and thus particularly receptive to systematic bodies of ideas that, while national in focus, were in fact strongly colored by the special circumstances of their place of origin. Liu Chi and Sung Lien, and to some extent Wang Wei, achieved central positions in the new Ming state, with personal access to and, as circumstantial evidence suggests, some advisory influence over the much younger man who became the first Ming emperor. There is no doubt that Liu Chi and Sung Lien were the two leading Confucians of the early Ming, universally esteemed by the Confucian community at large. There • 132 •

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are good grounds for arguing that the extremely autocratic centralization of the early Ming state was not simply the brainchild of the founder, but had its theoretical basis already prepared for it by the Che-tung writers. It is, therefore, important to take up their ideas, as examples of Confucian professional endeavor and for their historical significance as influences on die formation of the Ming dynasty. Liu Chi (1311-1375,) Although Liu Chi has in some respects become a fairly well known figure in Western scholarship on China, 1 there as yet exists no study of his ideas on national salvation. The following represents a first attempt at explaining them. Upon resigning from Shih-mo I-sun's service in the cause of reform in 1357, Liu retired into the mountains of his native county of Ch'ing-t'ien, continued to resist the coastal warlord Fang Kuo-chen and his "bandit" adherents, and wrote out his general reform philosophy in a work he called the Yu-li-tzu. He adopted "Yu-li-tzu" as a nom de plume; the element yii-li is explained in a preface of 1386 to mean a "ruling order of enlightened achievement."2 That work, together with a few miscellaneous papers, constitutes a comprehensive set of statements about the inner nature of the cosmos, human nature, the social order, the techniques of rule, the failings of the Yuan, and what an aspiring dynastic founder must do, or avoid doing, to make the world a safe place again. The Yu-li-tzu was presented as a statement of its author's unachieved will for world-salvation, and was dedicated to future generations as a guide to right action.1 At the end of the work as we have it, Yii-li-tzu (i.e., Liu Chi) explains his chosen mission. In retirement, while he is "hiding his traces in the woods and mountains, with the trees, rocks, and wildlife for companions, his house desolate and the paths overgrown," • 133 •

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someone tempts him by describing at length the wealth or other enjoyments he might derive from becoming a recluse or a rich landowner, a merchant, a powerful official, a free-lance militarist or a general, a Buddhist monk, or a Taoist adept. All these careers Yu-li-tzu rejects as false. At a time when "the Way of Heaven is all but extinct," when men's fraudulent ideas and vicious drives have made the world a shambles, he states that his "will" (chih) is to study the Way of the Sages and the institutions of the Former Kings and from these devise a "world-saving government"; to "develop the laws and regulations and rites and music in anticipation of the rise of a true king."4 For all the apparent unorthodoxy of the Yu-li-tzu text, this is as ringing a statement as may be found of the Confucian professional role at the highest level of the social system. The special competence of the Confucian profession to handle social crisis on the largest scale is inevitably predicated upon the judgment that the lay public, left to its own devices, will simply destroy itself with its mindless and frenzied particularisms. For Liu Chi, this state of affairs simply reflects certain tendencies in the cosmic system. Two essays in dialogue form, entitled "On Heaven" and "On Thunder," though not incorporated in the Yii-li-tzu, complement it in that they seek to confound a fatalistic belief that Heaven wilfully uses the forces of nature to punish mankind, and that against these human effort cannot prevail. Liu vehemently denies that Heaven can warn, punish, or purposively intervene in any way in human society. Although Heaven's principle is such that it has a mind to love good and hate evil, and while it has an original bias in favor of ordered conditions, its material substance (ch'i) ceaselessly oscillates between the positive and negative extremes of yin and yang. As ch'i moves toward the yin extreme, it loses balance, its circulation becomes blocked, it throws the seasons out of sequence and the stars out of position; it gasps and retches, and thunder, lightning, disease, flood, drought, and rebellion ap• 134 •

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pear on earth. Inescapably infected with this cosmic sickness, men "crazily rebel against what is normal, they become deranged and stagger about because they have contracted the diseased ch'i of Heaven and do not know what they are doing." But Heaven no more wills this state of affairs than men will that worms should infest their stomachs. Heaven s disasters are not intentional, because the victims are entirely random. A harmless peasant gets killed by lightning, while the world's teeming hordes of villains are punished, if they are punished at all, by human authority and not by thunderbolts from Heaven. Yet Heaven s derangement, awesome as it might look, has its limitations. It never occurs that all of mankind catches its disease. A small minority (presumably the Confucian elite) can preserve the unchanging Heavenly standards throughout, and with the cooperation of sage leaders, so cause it that the cosmic disorders are kept away from the world. Using "intuitive principles" (shen-tao), the sage, or dynastic founder, foresees the onset of trouble, and like a practiced physician, administers medicines to cure society's illnesses long before they become fetal. The malignant forces of nature are all susceptible of containment and neutralization by the expert. Such techniques as flood control, grain storage, or penal action, properly handled by the sage, are sufficient to protect mankind from the effects of cosmic disarray.5 A Yii-li-tzu colloquy, however, does emphasize that as a matter of observable statistics, the evil things of the world far outnumber the good: Tao-tzu ("Master Thief") asked Yii-li-tzu: "Is it not so that the Way of Heaven is to love good and hate evil?" Yii-li-tzu answered: "It is." "In that case," lao-tzu continued, "there ought to be more good things in the world than evil. Yet among birds there are many crows and kites but few phoenixes; atnong animals, many wolves but few unicorns; and among plants, many brambles but few grains. Of these categories, can the former be good and the latter evil? Among those • 135 •

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creatures that stand erect and eat their food cooked, the villainous are many and the benevolent and righteous few: Can the villainous be good and the righteous evil? Could it be that what Heaven considers good, men consider evil, and vice versa? Or is it that Heaven cannot control die destinies of things and lets them be good or evil as they like? Perhaps Heaven cheats and humiliates the good, and recoils in fear from the evil? Through history, times of rebellion have been many and periods of peace and order few. Whenever gentlemen and small men clash, victory goes mostly to the small men and seldom to die gendemen. How could Heaven love good and hate evil and yet be this perverse?" Yii-li-tzu did not respond, Tao-tzu withdrew and said to his followers: T h e gentleman's partiality toward Heaven is notorious, but now I have reduced him to silence."6

That did not mean to imply that the good was unrealizable, but only that it was a grim certainty that the utmost exertions were required to occasion its triumph. Those exertions, in order to have effect, would have to be guided by a body of valid general knowledge about the predictable collective patterns of behavior of the Chinese masses. How the masses react under a variety of conditions is one of the themes of the Yii-li-tzu. Liu Chi does not understand the Chinese masses to be a reliable bulwark of spontaneous moral righteousness. Instead, he thinks of them as possessed of a fathomless unintelligence. Rebel leaders of all kinds can always gain a following among the masses, even though their own aims are deviant or self-serving and do not at all represent the people s true interests. The reason for this is that the masses are not conscious of the true conditions of their well-being. Deceivers can easily coax them out of a secure environment; thieves can take advantage of their very docility to lead them astray.7 The masses will acquiesce in the bloodiest tyranny, if it is harsh and determined enough.' They will respond favorably to a corrupt government, as long as thefavorssold by the officials are not too exclusive and are fairly easily bought by the wider public.9 136 •

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What prods the masses into rebellion against a legitimate government is inefficient or negligent mistreatment, not outright tyranny. The degree of mistreatment necessary to provoke the masses is a matter of their perception rather than an objective quantity; for example, the people will revolt, even when idle and prosperous, if they consider a reform of fiscal allocations to be threatening to their prosperity.10 Liu Chi found it instructive to regard human society as comparable in its collective behavior to the animal. A bee colony, for instance, yields honey to its keeper as long as the keeper continues to provide "public goods" to the bees: a general environment secure from the elements, from predators, and from overcrowding. When through negligence this protection is no longer provided, the bees will abscond. The lesson of beekeeping applied directly to political rule. "Those in the state who rule over the people," concluded Liu, "can take this case as a mirror." 11 The good ruler of men follows the same basic principles that apply to successful animal husbandry. Government and people are as beekeeper to the swarm, zoo-keeper to the zoo, or monkey-keeper to the monkey colony.12 The tendency of the people is such that they will fall readily into a condition of peace and docile contentment as long as those who rule them visibly persist in their obligation to create security by removing sources of harm or danger from their environment. Exactly there, in a nutshell, lies the entire task of reform. It was also a predictable characteristic of mass behavior that, given anarchic conditions like those of the 1350s, the people would at some point respond in a positive way to a new effort at dynastic foundation. This was because a political system was not a forcible intrusion from above into human society. Rather, human society has a latent, unthinking, but virtually automatic tendency to form itself into a body politic. Whether in fact society will follow this tendency depends upon whether there exists an imperial candidate of sufficient magnetism or "capac• 137

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ity" to draw the flow in upon himself. If he does, then the law of "virtue" will operate in society as a hydrographic system on land, draining off allegiances into the ocean-ruler: Yu-li-tzu said: "Men's political capacities link themselves together in a sequence of increments, just as springs and rivulets link into rivers and oceans. The ocean that forms from the amassing of small rivulets is boundless and yet unaware of its great size. Precisely for that reason it is endlessly receptive and large beyond compare. This is exactly how die Sage handles virtue. . . . "The Son of Heaven is the ocean, the grandees and high officials are rivers and streams, the local officials are creeks, and the common people are springs and rivulets. There is an enormous distance between the rivulets and the ocean, and yet they always flow toward it. Wills are aroused and emotions communicated, just as insects chirp when the vapors arrive, or foundations get damp when the rains come. The ruler need only have virtue and capacity and everyone in the realm will go over to him. With virtue he receives them, and with capacity he finds places for them. If his virtue is narrow he cannot attract people, and if his capacity is limited he cannot give them security. If he tries to receive too many people when his capacity is small, the results will be disastrous. He would be like a minnow trying to cope with storm waves at sea. Unless one's size is like the ocean s, one cannot take in the rivers."" Yet it was easier to set in motion the flow that draws society into a political system than it was to provide adequate room to capture it permanently: Someone asked how men are attracted. Yu-li-tzu said: "The Way attracts worthies; food attracts the masses; pools attract fish; thickets attract animals; garbage attractsflies;profit attracts merchants. Things are best attracted by what they like; that way, everything in the world can be attracted. Don't worry if some people refuse to come. Your concern should be to provide security for those who do come, for the real harm is done when security cannot be provided. "There was once a man of Yueh who spent three years learning the technique for summoning demons. In the north comer of his house he built an altar for them. But so many demons came he could not feed them, and they began to make such mischief that the din could • 138 •

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be heard outside. One night the man died and his house burned down. All the neighbors laughed."14 When the ruler has taken his place at the receiving end of society's drainage system and has provided security to everyone he has attracted, then he can begin to radiate back into society his powers of moral transformation. If the people retain some shred of moral conscience (liang-hsin), then the ruler should be able to reform them: The Sage establishes moral doctrine in such a way that the people's latent goodness is drawn forth and extended. His sympathy moves people and fosters them. . . . Heaven, Earth, and parents give birth to the people, and the ruler-teacher completes them. If the people do not respond, then though they are called men they are indistinguishable from beasts.15 Yet despite his view that human society was endowed by nature with a latent tendency to come together in an ordered system, it is clear that Liu Chi believed that this tendency could not materialize in fact without coercive and expertly manipulative intervention by knowledgeable human leaders. Several entries in the Yii-li-tzu openly attack what their author considered to be "vulgar" Confucian misconceptions of the real character of imperial power and control. Against die uncompromising Confucian partisans, for whom only the idealized moral polities of high antiquity supplied valid guides for the present, Liu Chi urged the adoption of the fully historical Han and T'ang dynasties as models. For most orthodox Confucians, the Han and T'ang were mere power states, tyrannies. Liu Chi insisted that the undeniable shortcomings of those dynasties be laid aside and their successes emphasized. After all, he argued, the antique polities now shine as they do because long ago Confucius quite properly slanted his pen in their favor. Even so, die antique states were as much power regimes as the later ones. It was not the case (as "common Confucians" thought) that the • 139 •

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sage emperor Shun made rebels submit merely by a symbolic display of virtue. That was worse than nonsense; it was actually an insidious argument used to justify imperial weakness and temporizing in the face of challenges to its authority.16 Liu Chi did, however, acknowledge a gradual deterioration in the moral and institutional cohesiveness of the social order since the days of high antiquity. The Yii-li-tzu has it that under the rule of the sages Yao and Shun, the people were tightly bonded to the state, like sand mixed with lacquer. Later, under the Three Dynasties of antiquity, the bond was a little weaker, like sand mixed with glue, separable, but only under the pressure of extreme evil. Under the hegemons of Spring and Autumn times, the adhesion was like sand and water, solid when frozen but a gushing flood when let loose. Nowadays the bond has become as fleeting and unstable as sand held in the fist, and that is why the masses have an increasing tendency toward rebelliousness.17 In these circumstances it was impossible to turn back the clock and reinstitute the totalistic socioeconomic controls of high antiquity. Government had perforce to confine itself to more limited methods of peace-keeping. A government that rejected proposals for fiscal aggrandizement and executed corrupt officials did as well as the hegemons had done at their best, and that was good enough.18 What government can still do, and must do, is destroy evil. To let the evil survive, as the Buddhists would do, is in fact inhumane (pu-jen). 19 In Liu Chi's opinion, modern conditions dictated that the state must sharply curtail its fiscal or economic involvement in the social system and strive to maintain minimum standards of order and security through deceptive or manipulative strategies, or through penal intervention. Liu argued that building a dynasty was a process of power accumulation. The ruler did not create power and transmit it downward; rather, society created power and sent it upward to • 140 •

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the ruler. The ruler is the man who places himself at the mouth of the power flow. Having power, he may then use force. Power and force were, according to Liu, not mutually exclusive but closely interdependent. The dynamic interplay between power (te) and force (li) is analyzed as follows in the Yii-li-tzu: Great power overcomes small power, and small power overcomes non-power. Great power overcomes great force; small power evenly matches great force. Force generates opposition, while power generates force. When force is engendered from power, then nothing in the world can withstand it. Thus force is something that prevails only momentarily, whereas power may prevail more and more through time. Force is not the monopoly of any one person. It can be used by anyone. It is only great power that can capture all the various forces. Thus while power cannot be exhausted, force by itself soon comes to an impasse.20

However, it was also the case that the dynastic founder must be given wide latitude for deceptive maneuver and opportune calculation. The wise founder will avoid the tactical mistake of rushing too obtrusively to get to the mouth of the stream. He will disguise his true objectives as long as he can in order to avoid becoming a political "target" too soon. He should not get ahead of events, but follow in their wake.21 It was, furthermore, unrealistic to ask the ruler to achieve complete sincerity (hsin) in his exercise of power. It was enough if in devising strategy and making decisions he merely "had recourse to" (chia) the virtues of benevolence and righteousness. An approximation to virtue suffices because nowadays it no longer requires extreme good to found a dynasty, or extreme evil to destroy one.22 The intelligent ruler will dissimulate in other ways too. For example, when using force in some purely aggressive act, he must by all means mask his behavior with convenient pretexts in order to avoid the imputation ("name") of naked theft or conquest. 2 ' What justifies these devious methods is that they will effectively guide the unthinking masses, with the least cost and • 141 •

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effort, toward the sound goal of security and order. The pervasive stubbornness of human evil demanded such a strategy. While evil could not simply be left alone to corrode and destroy all creation, neither was it feasible to eradicate it through moral reform. A number of Yii-li-tzu anecdotes heavily stress the point that human greed fixes itself so powerfully upon desired goods that nothing short of death will ever pry it loose.24 The insanely tenacious desire for material things is dehumanizing; a father will rightly refuse to mourn a son whose gluttony ends in killing him." Liu Chi s formula for the construction of an effective ruling order, then, focuses itself upon a highly perspicacious gamesmanship. The ruler takes individuals, groups, and the mass collectivity as they are, and wins by consistently taking tactical advantage of their inherent drives, capabilities, and limitations. The ruler need not be strictly speaking a Sage (a figure who in Liu's definition is driven by the same greed that drives "small men," except that the object of the Sage's greed is moral principle rather than lucre).26 Liu Chi's ruler relies less on moral principle than upon a detached expertise. The player of the dynasty-founding game cannot succeed unless he understands the innate powers of all the pieces, their responses to certain moves, and the consequences of their misuse. The depth and extent of his understanding of the pieces grow only as his emotional and psychological distance from the game widens and his view of the whole picture opens up. For example, the ruler will probably have an inner circle of favorites, but he must understand that these must be handled with greatest brutality. Favorites will always try to take advantage of their privileged position to control access to the ruler and act outrageously toward others. They are vicious, snappish, silkdressed dogs, who, unless restrained, will make it impossible for a virtuous ruler to attract worthy men to his cause.27 It is safe to deal roughly with favorites, because no matter how hard they • 142 •

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are thrashed, they are utterly dependent and will always come cringing back again. While strenuously engaged in building his regime, the ruler should not compel unwilling men to serve him. Eventually, he will get all the worthy volunteers he needs, and besides, officials forced to serve will be psychologically incapable of wholehearted devotion to the state's affairs.28 Although the contending ruler will almost assuredly be unable to attract men of the highest ethical standards to his cause, this is no reason for alarm. What he really needs to assist him are men of practical talent, and as long as his regime is merely one of several competitive regimes he has no choice but to tolerate these men if, as is likely, they turn out to be greedy, immoderate, or excessively zealous.29 A destructive excess of zeal may be forgiven. A man whose house was plagued by rats obtained a cat, which in a month not only destroyed all the rats but killed all the man's chickens as well. Urged by his son to get rid of the cat, the man replied: "You don't see that my trouble lay in having rats, not in not having chickens. The rats stole my food, ruined my clothes, gnawed holes in my walls, and damaged my utensils. I was about to starve and freeze. I am not bothered by die lack of chickens; I can no longer eat chicken, but I am still far from starving or freezing. Why should I get rid of the cat?'" 0 What is dangerous and ultimately fatal to any political system is the tendency it has to allow a clear understanding of things to become distorted by the preconceptions and personal interests and rivalries of the officials who offer plans and advice. Only the ruler's tireless vigilance can prevent the blurring of the hairline boundary between illusion and reality." Only by keeping a profit-and-harm calculus clearly in mind can the ruler find the truth and ignore what is specious. Like bitter medicine, the real facts are often unpleasant, but in the end they are beneficial.32 He must therefore be on the alert against sycophantic and deceitful villains; no state can tolerate a single one 143 •

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of these, because they attract hangers-on and inspire imitators, just as rotten meat attracts flies that produce maggots, which in turn produce more flies." The ruler must in addition have a sure grasp over his own psychological dispositions and a good insight into the predictable disposition of others. In dealing with his officials, he must not take his suspicion and guardedness to extremes; "a man who does," wrote Liu Chi, "relies wholly on himself and no one else. Planners and knowledgeable people will avoid him. The wise will act stupidly, the clever clumsily, the honest furtively, and men who are low and devious will predominate at court.'"4 An overly suspicious man attracts sycophants, who reinforce his suspicions and destroy his true intelligence, so that eventually his mind becomes unhinged from reality and his state falls to ruin." The ruler must also deny himself the luxury of selfesteem. "Now suppose we have a man who allows his volatility to surface, arrogantly priding himself on his own ability and habitually denigrating anything done or suggested by anyone else. When such a man holds forth at court, those who fear him will agree to everything he says, while those who have alienated themselves from him will keep silent. At this point such a man will boast to himself that he is right, without realizing that he has made himself a receptacle for hatred." " Anger is a sure sign that the ruler has an inadequate mastery of the ruling art. It generates disobedience; orders shouted in anger will be assented to by inferiors, but they will go away confused and resentful, and will scream at their own subordinates out of exasperation. The result will be that orders will not be followed correctly, as it will not be understood further down what the ruler's anger was all about. "The greater the anger, the wider the disobedience, to die point where not even the threat of sword or stick will make ones intention understood."'7 The above are some, but not all, of the themes in the Yii-litzu. It may be convenient at this point to conclude by advanc• 144 •

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ing a brief analysis of that work as a Confucian professional statement. First of all, it was generally accepted as a Confucian work. Wang Wei, in his preface to it, stressed that it was "artfully composed to be sure, but not in violation of the Way of the Sages." Second, it was asserted that the ideas developed in it were in fact adopted and acted upon in the course of founding the Ming dynasty, although Hsu I-k'uei surely exaggerates in his preface of 1386: When Liu Chi wrote this book he wrote for posterity, and could hardly have anticipated that he would personally put it into practice. Nevertheless, it is because his potential Yuan career went into this book that the Yuan fell, and it was because this book manifested itself in his Ming career that the Ming rose. As the hiring or not hiring of this man was the key to what happened in state and society, this book is no mere private conceit." As a guide to national reform, or "world-salvation," the Ytili-tzu is not concerned with formal organization, with the articulation of specific or detailed goals, with Confucian sociomoral transformation, or with the makeup and role of the Confucian community per se. Its Confucianism is mainly limited to the adoption of the generalized, high-order goals of unity and security. Its overriding concern is with developing a practical strategy adequate to achieving those high-order goals in a discouragingly perverse sociomoral environment. The strategy itself cannot be morally good, because given a chance to compete openly and on equal terms with the good for control of the unstable masses, the evil can regularly be expected to triumph. The Yii-li-tzu propounds the view that in these circumstances the world can be saved from self-annihilation only by a founder who is not passionately or emotionally involved in his work, but is detached enough from it to be able to observe and learn, not just isolated facts, but also the repetitive general proclivities of collective social behavior, and to devise his strat145

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egies accordingly. The successful dynastic founder is an apiarist with sixty million bees, a zoo-keeper with sixty million animals, a physican with sixty million patients, l o all of these he must supply some minimum degree of security, sustenance, and health. Tliey are too many to reach singly, yet he must somehow find the pulse, prescribe the treatments, and issue the drugs. His needles must find their way deep into the internal organs to destroy diseases at their source; and he is a "thief of the realm" if he applies remedies in the absence of proper diagnosis.'9 Accordingly, the prime requirement for world-salvation is what in modern words would be called information control. It is evident that Liu Chi is concerned to remove two sources of distortion in the transmission of information. One source is the presence of self-seeking villains in the governing apparatus. The other is emotional or psychological impediments to static-free information-handling in the mind of the ruler himself. The ruler s mind must be accurately tuned to receive all information sent up to him, and it must be clear to send comprehensible remedies down to the operational levels in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Unless the mind of the ruler is "rectified," his emotions (mainly anger), personal desires, illusions, and prejudices will surely if unintentionally jam the vital channels of information reception and transmission. The whole Confucian goal of world-reform through centralization thus becomes psychologically determined, in that it simply cannot be achieved in the absence of the strictest mental and emotional self-discipline on the part of the one man who must rule.40 From 1360 until his death under suspicious circumstances in 1375, Liu Chi was closely involved in national-level affairs as an adviser, strategist, and investigator for Ming T'ai-tsu. He also took an active part in high-level political infighting, an exceedingly dangerous game. His fame, and indeed his legend, has much to do with the unusual fact that he was an active imple146

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menter of many of his own theories. And, as will be seen in the chapter on Ming T'ai-tsu, his argument that political centralization depends closely upon the psychological disposition of the ruler was fully shared by the Ming founder himself. Wang Wei (1323-1374) Wang Wei of Chin-hua prefecture was another Confucian professional from the Che-tung "hinterland" who wrote on national-level reform during the Y u a n - M i n g interregnum. In the winter of 1358-59, as the armies of the future Ming founder moved toward Chin-hua, Wang Wei took his family into the south part of his native I-wu county for safety. "My friends had dispersed, I had no books to read, and I was despondent," wrote Wang. "So I recalled things I had seen and heard earlier and wrote them down as sayings. My wife liked them, so I have titled them 'Words from the Wine Cup' (Chih-tz'u), and offer them to those who share my resolve."41 T h e Chih-tz'u is a collection of statements cast as definitive doctrinal utterances, aimed at providing a sense of mission to the shih in a time of anarchy and impending dynastic change. It shares some important assumptions with Liu Chi's work, although its focus is quite different. China's crisis of civilization was called by Wang the "seven losses" and "seven deaths." T h e losses were serious but not fatal: flood and drought; county officials collecting extra taxes; clerks taking endless graft; powerful families amassing properties; onerous service levies removing men from their farm work; village self-defense systems being organized; bandits plundering the people's wealth. Beyond these were the "seven deaths" that meant life could no longer be lived: cruel clerks beating and killing people; law courts victimizing the innocent; the wanton destruction of the guiltless; the open rampaging of bandits; private murder; famine and pestilence in the air. This crisis of 147 •

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"seven losses and no gains, seven deaths and no revivals" was what the Yuan had finally come to. In the circumstances, it was "surely impossible to have the state at peace and the punishments laid aside."42 It was from this horror that the world had somehow to be saved. Like Liu Chi, Wang Wei believed that the restitution of public security demanded the building of a new and centralized dynasty. But whereas Liu Chi was preoccupied with the highlevel strategies such a dynasty would have to pursue, Wang's emphasis lay much more heavily on creating a central role for the Confucian professional elite in the founding process. His aim was to show how Confucian doctrine must serve as the basis for achieving a convergence of will and effort on the part of individual Confucians, the Confucian community, and the founding emperor and his machinery of state. That effort had to begin with the formation of individual Confucian elites through their own determined acts of selfcreation. Each aspirant to such status must establish contact with the body of eternal principle (tao) through the use of his mind and its divine capacity for "reflective thought" (ssu). Wang wrote: Though the human body is small and insignificant, the mind is the largest and widest [entity of all]. The encompassing of Heaven and Earth, the enveloping of ancient and modern, the regulation of human principles, and the effective handling of events and crises are all made possible by the mind. For this, the sages had a "mind study" (hrin-hsueh). First they sought to release the mind, then to nourish it, and finally to exhaust it. Thus, when mind-study is discarded, men might just as well have no minds at all. With no mind, the body has no ruler, and one simply becomes an object and cannot be called a human being.41 Wang argued that it was extremely unsafe for the majority of would-be Confucians to satisfy themselves with merely a token • 148 •

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acceptance of the ethical norms of the profession. He warned that the world held no places of refuge for the uncommitted. 'Trouble and disaster are brought on by failures in speech and behavior. Thus the gentleman is cautious about these, looking at his feet as if they had been cut off, at his tongue as though it had been knotted."44 The Confucian elites must put themselves psychologically at a distance from the system of rewards and punishments that keeps die majority in line. T h e gentleman keeps his vessel as though it were empty, and then rank and salary dare not control him. He internalizes his Way as though he were stupid, and then success and fame cannot motivate him. Rank and salary are stepping-stones to disaster; success and fame are the sedan-chairs of calamity."45 Like Liu Chi, Wang saw the world of his time as suffused with evil, although his understanding of it was in closer conformity to orthodox thought. Wang stated that men were free to choose between good and evil. "A man's wanting to do good comes from the vehemence of his determination and that is all." The criminal can become a sage if he "inverts" the goal of his unswerving pursuit.46 However, Wang also insisted that die existence of good and evil in men was not a matter of single, isolated acts but the cumulative result of habitual patterns of behavior; and that Heaven does indeed reward or punish men to a degree precisely calibrated to the amount of good or evil they have accumulated.47 It is not necessarily unjust that a good man should encounter disaster, or an evil man fortune; a reason for the skewness will probably be found in the accumulations of good or evil in the history of the man's family.48 This cumulative theory of good and evil, especially including the notion that an innocent descendant may jusdy suffer for the guilt of his ancestors, was very close to Ming T'ai-tsu's views on the matter. The idea, shared by Confucian theorists and despot alike, that the truly innocent (personally and ancestrally) would surely not 149 •

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incur disaster or punishment, helped to open the way to the wholesale and indiscriminate travesties of justice of the early Ming period. Wang's fear of evil infections within the Confucian community was nothing short of paranoid. He did not credit to good and evil an equal potency of contagion; instead he tended to see good as passive and always under the threat of subversion by evil. "Man is bom with [a metaphysically] good nature; the tragedy is that profit and desire can transform him without his realizing it."49 As small termites cause pillars and beams to collapse, as tiny gnats drive off whole herds of oxen and sheep, so a few "small men" can inject unimaginable disaster into a healthy environment. "If one small man is tolerated within a crowd of gentlemen, he will in most cases end in destroying their accomplishments," he wrote.50 The opposite was clearly not the case; the transforming powers of good over evil were nowhere to be seen. To deal with the problem of evil in the Confucian community, Wang Wei plotted out two complementary courses of action. One course was for the professionally committed, the good shih or "gendemen," to follow on their own. They must be circumspect in dealing with colleagues; they must be very careful about giving and receiving things, "lo take what one should not is to injure probity; to give what one should not is to injure benevolence. Giving or taking depends upon righteousness; and the space beween what is right and what is profitable is smaller than a hair's breadth."" In dealing with colleagues, the shih must maintain a middle course between overfamiliarity on the one side and coldness on the other. "Ifthere is overfamiliarity, there is irreverence, and with irreverence comes deception. If there is coldness, there is fear, and with fear comes alienation. When reverence (ching) is followed, then feelings are true and right, and a stable collegiality can be maintained."" On their own authority, however, the shih in Wang Wei's • 150 •

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view could not do more than cultivate good in themselves and avoid evil associates. Because the shih could not impose coercive sanctions upon their erring members ("small men"), the community's other course of action was to look to public authority (the state) to perform that function. Driven by their desire for wealth and rank, assertive and capable "small men" exploit the Confucian community in order to qualify themselves for office-holding. As officials, they regularly band together into factions (p'eng-tang) to further their personal interests, and this process is what brings about the imperilment and collapse of the state." Therefore the state has a clear interest in their thorough destruction; "just like a peasant uprooting weeds, though the weeds be small, they must be eliminated."54 In order to achieve a tight congruity of interest between the Confucian elite ("gentlemen") and public authority as represented by the state, it was obviously inadvisable for the elite to place trust in the bureaucracy, where hostile forces were so likely to be entrenched. On the strength of that fundamental mistrust, Wang Wei could only raise the ruler to a supreme place over that apparatus and make him sole executor of the collective will of the professional community. The theoretical structure of autocracy as Wang sketched it out came quite close to Ming T'ai-tsu's later views on the same subject, and while it cannot be proved that Wang directly influenced T'ai-tsu, the basic similarity of their approaches is in itself a fact of some importance, for it shows that the Confucian elite of Che-tung and the founding Ming emperor inhabited pretty much the same intellectual universe, and that the Ming despotism was not a system arbitrarily clamped upon an unwilling Confucian elite. Wang's statements deserve discussion as important evidence in that general argument. According to Wang, "ruler and people really constitute the same office" because "without people no ruler can be set up, and with no ruler, the people cannot achieve unity."55 But how 151

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can it be learned that unity is what the people really want? The ruler knows what the people want, but not by listening to their demands; he knows what they want because he listens to Confucian professionals like Wang Wei who tell him what they want. According to Everett C. Hughes, "professionals do not merely serve; they define the very wants which they serve."56 Writing elsewhere, Wang Wei stated (in line with Hughes's observation) that direct communication between ruler and people is not necessary, inasmuch as the people have no concrete idea of what really benefits them anyway: The infant has no superfluous desires, and yet the desires he has must be satisfied. He doesn't talk, and yet one must understand what he doesn't say. Likewise does the sage rule the myriad people, devoting himself to letting them achieve their [unspoken] will. In regulating affairs, he must above all complete their nature. . . . When the sage rules the world, he steeps the people in virtue and righteousness, and yet they are unaware of the benefit; he guides them with laws and regulations, and yet they are unaware of the sanctions. " The people's ignorance of what the ruler does for them is linked to the collective character of the public goods the ruler provides. The ruler "enriches the masses but not individual men; he gives security to the world, but not to individual households. He acts thus . . . because he lacks selfishness (or partiality: ssu)."58 The source of information that dictates to the ruler what the people want is not the people themselves, but the superordinate body of generalized knowledge that Wang called the "Way of total credibility that pervades Heaven and man and links ancient and modern." He added that it was "the origin of all principles, the root of all action, existing without change and moving without ceasing; unchanging, it has constancy, and unceasing, it lacks limits."59 The ruler delivers public goods and so creates social order by acting in the light of this body of principle. "In ruling the world, the sage uses benevolence and righteousness (jen-i) and rites and music (li-yueh) and no more. • 152 •

THE CHE-TUNG CONFUCIAN ELITE

Jen and i fill what people already have and thus he rules what is internal (i.e., minds). Li and yueh refine what people must do and thus he rules what is external (i.e., visible behavior). When internal and external are ruled conjunctively, the world is transformed."40 The high-order policy of the state was reformist in intent but essentially passive in application. The state should not have free initiative to do new things; it should not act except in response to the emergence of societal errors. "When the great origin of the Way arose in Heaven," stated Wang, "there were no abuses for a myriad generations. Later, with the rise of abuses, there were losses to the Way; biases and omissions appeared, and government groped blindly and was not carried out. [Finally], the former kings [of antiquity] leveled the biases and rectified them; they simply repaired abuses and that was all."61 The role of the state, then, was to achieve reform, which meant correcting abuses as they arose, and thus state action was conceived by Wang Wei as primarily penal and regulative in character. The ruler has to use suppressive mechanisms in order to cause good to triumph over evil. These mechanisms Wang styles "sharp implements." The sage keeps his tools sharp and so "projects himself' (tzu-chih) to die extent that he is heard and obeyed. Thereby he becomes "master" (tsai) of the world. The sharp implements the ruler controls include the bureaucracy, which he appoints and to which he apportions specific tasks. Through his bureaucracy, the ruler institutes the twin devices of regulatory system (chih-tu) and moral suasion (chiao-hua), and through them inculcates harmony in the "temper" (ch'i) of the realm. Systems exist to ensure the minimization of financial expenditure, the reduction of taxation, and the enrichment of the public. Moral suasion allays strife and "purifies" the application of punishments and rewards.62 However, it is not the public at large, but rather the bu153 •

THE CHE-TUNG CONFUCIAN ELITE

reaucracy itself, which the ruler must regulate directly. Wang wrote: In nets it is the main cords that keep everything together, and in clothes it is the collar that does the same thing. When the cfnds are raised, the meshes open out; when the collar is shaken, the rest of the garment unfolds. The Way is the collar of government, so the sage cultivates the Way and does not cultivate government. The officials are the main cords of the people, so the sage regulates the cords and not the people. The ruler should initiate moral suasion in a way that is subliminal and diffuse "so that the people cannot trace it." T h e bureaucracy should devise laws and regulations openly and clearly "so that the people do not violate them." 6 ' It is thus crucial to the success of centralized government in providing unity and security to the realm that the ruler have police powers over the bureaucracy. Wang argued that the ruler must control bureaucracy by rejecting erroneous ideas, reducing expenses, advancing the virtuous and meritorious, rewarding the worthy, and punishing the villainous. But in doing these things, the ruler will in fact face situations of the highest complexity, which demand great discernment and circumspection in their resolution. T h e complexities he will face center about the confusing entanglement of good and evil among the officials he deals with. The sage • - • does not always investigate boastful and unfounded talk. He does not always approve those who agree with him, nor does he always reject those who defy him. Yet the man who dissents is not always right, and the man who agrees is not always wrong. Not all inarticulate or ineffectual men are stupid; not all who are eloquent and decisive are intelligent. In discovering the truth, the mind of the realm can be satisfied only by finding the good (shan).M We come now to the point Liu Chi reached by a somewhat different route, the idea that the psychological disposition of the • 154 •

THE CHE-TUNG CONFUCIAN ELITE

ruler determines whether centralization and reform can occur. Wang Wei clearly states that the ruler must adopt the professional attitudes of impartiality and objectivity. "Only the most tranquil can regulate the things of the realm, and only the emptiest can contain them all. Tranquillity is the substance of the Way, and emptiness is its implement. Unless one is tranquil he cannot surmount what is active; unless one is empty [of bias, emotion, etc.], he cannot take in what is full."65 In order to make the system work, the ruler has the enormous psychic burden of removing all "human desire" from his thoughts and actions, all sense of a personal ego. "The enlightened ruler will have three fears," wrote Wang. "He will fear that because he sits in the revered position he may not hear of his faults; he will fear that because he achieves his intentions he may become arrogant; and he will fear that though he hears the decisive opinions (chih-yen) of the world, he may fail to act upon them and carry them out." 66 From the court and bureaucracy down to the broad masses of the people, the social system could en joy unity and concord only to die extent that the ruler's mind was rectified.67 The next logical step in the argument, not developed by Liu Chi, was emphasized by Wang Wei. How does the ruler rectify his mind? Can he rectify it unaided, or does he need professional help? Wang argued that the highest-order public service that the Confucian elite might perform was that of advising the ruler in his crucial task of psychological self-reform. This service was also the most difficult. Not any Confucian was competent to purge sloth, covetousness, arrogance, anger, jealousy, delusion, suspicion, or greed from the ruler's mind. Only a "great man," wrote Wang, can rectify the ruler. As all men are the ruler's hierarchical inferiors, no one can force him to change; only the "great man" who uses his powers of virtue to sympathetically induce the desired changes can transform him. 68 So tactically complex did Wang consider the rectifica• 155 •

THE C H E - T U N G CONFUCIAN ELITE

tion of the ruler to be that he devoted a special essay to the matter, addressing it to a Confucian from die Huai area who accompanied Chu Yuan-chang's forces to Chin-hua and had personal access to the future Ming founder.69 One of Wangs own contributions was a set of rhymed exhortations for the ruler to keep posted before him, urging him to rise at dawn, wear the correct vestments, refuse temptations, accept advice, discriminate between honest and specious minds, and destroy evil before it spreads.70 In sum, Wang Wei constructs a centralized political order for the sake of providing the social whole with unity and security. That order comprises the following elements: (1) laws and regulatory devices whereby the bureaucracy controls the population; (2) judgment and discipline, with which the ruler controls the bureaucracy; (3) moral suasion, through which the ruler controls the world indirectly; and (4) disinterested professional advice, which select members of the Confucian community give the ruler as "nominal client" so that the public as "interested client" may receive from the state those basic services that the professional elite have determined to be in the public's best interest. Both the ruler and his advisers are placed by Wang in a position of autonomy, outside the usual constraints of bureaucratic organization, unaffected by its punishments and rewards. The heavy emphasis he places on psychology is explicable by the fact that whether centralization succeeds in its purpose or not depends entirely upon the degree to which the ruler's mind may be persuaded to accept and act upon the professional advice that he receives. Sung Lien

(1310-1381)

In the same years that Liu Chi worked on his Yu-li-tzu and Wang Wei penned his Chih-tz'u, Sung Lien of Chin-hua prefecture wrote two tracts. The first was a work entitled Lung156

THE C H E - T U N G C O N F U C I A N E L I T E

men-tzu ning-tao chi, or "Record of Lung-men-tzu's Consolidation of the Way." Lung-men-tzu, the "Master of Lungmen Mountain," was, like Liu Chi s Yu-li-tzu, a nom 1* 5fc«37 Ning-kuo prefecture: Confucianism in, 122; Ming conquest of, 122 Ning-po prefecture: administrative burden in, 115; wen-chi produced in, 5 Ou-yang Hsiu, 9, 91, 267, 278 Ou-yang Hsuan, 265 Palmgren, Nils, 1 1 3 Ran Ku, 158 Pan Mo-ch'eng, 53 Fei Ch'iung, 9; on Confucian principle, 45; on &11 of Yuan, 10203; on printing the classics, 41; on professional competence, 4 7 -

INDEX 48; on student degeneracy in Ming, 258; on Yuan rule, 102 Pin-hsing, 57 Bo-i, 294*131 FV> Kuei, 20 Profession, professional: authority, 66; clienteles, 66-67; community, 74-84; competence, 4 5 49; definition of, 2 4 - 2 ; , 74; detachment, 4 9 - 51; employment, 65-67; income, 49-54; knowledge, 25, 32; labor marketing, 56-65; peer evaluation, 8 1 - 8 2 ; service ideal, 43-46; training, 32-43, 58-60;, use of the concept, 3 - 4 , 6 - 7 Qubilai, 104 Red Turban rebellions, 69-72, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 120, 122, 188-90 Reform: Che-tung writers on, 1 7 9 80, 184, 2 5 1 - 5 3 ; and the geography of macroregions, 1 1 2 - 1 5 ; Hu Han on, 177-78; in local fiscal systems, 1 0 5 - 1 2 , 114; in Ming, 124-28, 195-96, 22440, 2 5 1 - 5 3 ; and regional decentralization, 1 1 8 - 1 9 ; Sung Lien on, 171; use as a concept, 8 Reuschemeyer, Dietrich,74-75 Schools. See Confucian schools Sealed Blanks case, 248, 261-62, 265, 270 Shang-yuan county: ju-hu in, 16 Shao-hsing prefecture: administrative burden in, 115; fiscal reform in, 106, 108, 110; loyalism in, 1 1 6 - 1 7 ; macroregional character of, 113; wen-chi produced in, 5 Shen-nung, 19 Shih, 19-24, 41, 44, 46, 62, 76, 8 1 - 8 2 , 84, 86-87, «o?, 1 5 0 -

51, 167, 199, 205, 2 1 8 - 2 0 , 253, 257-58. 278 Shih-mo I-sun, 1 1 7 , 124, 133 ShuTi, 122 Skinner, G. William, 1, 1 1 2 Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 158 Ssu-ma Kuang, 278 Ssu-min, 19 Strauss, Anselm, 83 Subprofessionals, 62-64, .213 Sung Hsi: on employment in late Yuan crisis, 88 Sung Lien, 9, 1 0 - 1 1 ; on accepting office, 163-64; career in Ming, 1 7 1 - 7 3 ; on centralization in Ming, 196; on classical texts, 160-61; on Confucian careers, 158-60; on early Ming rule in Ch'u-chou, 1 2 6 - 2 7 ; o n ethic of shih poverty, 53, 165; on evil, 165-69; on function of political systems, 169-70; joins Ming, 123-24; on ;u, 310074; on Lung-men-tzu and Yen-shu, 157; national stature of, 47, 1 3 1 , 157, 172, 251, 265-67, 276; on pedagogy, 4 1 - 4 2 ; on redefining Confucian doctrine, 1 1 ; on world reform, 1 6 4 - 7 1 ; on writing, 1 6 1 - 6 2 Sung-yang county: ju-hu in, 16 Sun Tso: on detachment, 50 Sun Yen, 121, 127 Su Po-heng, 9; on doctrine, 31; and Fang Hsiao-ju, 259, 267; on ;u, 257; on punishment, 259-60; on shih, 21; on die Way, 45 lai Buqa, 109 Tai Liang: on Confuciih texts, 26; on employment in late Yuan crisis, 88 lai Piao-yuan: on-education in Yuan, 61; on local office in

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INDEX Yuan, 68-69 T'ai-p'ing prefecture: administrative burden in, 1 io; economy, 120; Ming conquest of, 119-20; recruitment in, 1 2 0 - 2 1 T'ang Chung-yu, 79 T a n g Kuei-fang, 122, 126; on teachings, 2 9 4 ^ 1 T'ang Su: on employment in late Yuan crisis, 92-93 Tan-t'u county: ju-hu in, 14 Tao, 7, 27-29, 45» 148, 161 Taoism, Taoists, 1 1 , 14, 19, 33. 55. 134,198-99,211,238 T'ao An: on civil war in T'ai-p'ing prefecture, 120; joins Ming, 121 T'ao Chu, 20 Temiir, 305050 leng Wen-yuan: on school life, 40-41 Ti and yung, 11, 45 Tien-hsUt, 67, 174 Toghto, 86, 106, 116, 120 Tseng-tzu, 29 Tung Chi: on legal perversion in Ming, 259 T'ung Chi: on Confucian recruitment, 57; on employment in late Yuan crisis, 87 Tzu-ssu, 29 Tz'u-ch'i county: economy, 113; fiscal reform in, 113; loyalism in, 116-17 Wang An-shih, 79 Wang Ch'i, 273 Wang Hsien, 273, 276 Wang Hsing: on the classics, 29; on Confucian principle, 45; on study, 30; on teaching and learning. 36 Wang I (1303- 54): on the Ch uchou region, 1 1 3 ; on tao, 29; on teaching, 3;

WuigiTai, 126 Wing ICai-chih, 53 Wing Ko-k'uan, 122 Wing Kuang-yang, 121 Wang Li: on social degeneracy, 257 Wang Min, 273-74, 3221144 Wang Rd: on the Chin-hua economy, 1 1 3 Wing Shen, 322040; and Fang Hsiao-ju, 276-77, 287 Wing Shu-ying, 3221156; and Fang Hsiao-ju, 272, 273; on teaching, Wing Wei: on the Ch'u-chou region, 113; on Confucian behavior in crisis, 148-49; on Confucian texts, 26-27; on employment in late Yuan crisis, 93, 96; on good and evil, 148-5»; on i d e J system of education, 38; joins Ming, 123, 251; on Liu Chi's Yü-li-tzu, 145; on political systems, 151—54; o n psychology of rule, 154- 56; purpose in writing Chih-tju, 147; on thih and j'u, 22-23; on study, 3 0 - 3 1 ; on synthesis in Neo-Confucian thought, 80; on tao, 29 Wei Su: on clerks, 63-64; as NeoConfucian synthesizer, 79; on recommendation, 82 Well-field system, 37-39. 57. 76. "175-77. 3 2 5 n 93 Wen-chi, 4 - 5 , 76, 80-81 Wilensky, Harold L„ 162 Wu Ch'en: on Confucian texts, 26 Wu Cheng: on thih behavior, 33; as synthesizer, 78-79 Wu Hai: on employment in late Yuan crisis, 8 8 - 8 9 ; o n fall of Yuan, 103-04; on social reform, 55; on Yuan bureaucratic positions, 67 Wu ICang-chai, 10

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INDEX Wu Lai: on intellectual controversy, 41; on local Yuan office, 69; on well-fields, 38 Wu Fo-tsung: on centralization, 196; on Ming reform models, 196 Wu Shih-tao: on clerks, 63; on ethic of shih poverty, 53; on local Yuan office, 68; on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, 7 7 - 7 8 Wu Ssu-tao: on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, 77 Yang Wei-chen: on Chang Shihch'eng, 101 Yaoand Shun, 140, 202, 216 YehCh'en, 124, 129 Yeh Chien-t'ai, 273 Yeh Chin-weng, 298m 03 Yeh Fo-chii, 262, 270 Yeh Tzu-ch'i: on income, 5 2 - 5 3 Yellow Emperor, 20

Designer: Compositor Printer: Binder: Text Display:

Yen Hui, 29, 50, 276, 277 Yuan Chueh: on academies, 40 Yuan dynasty: disintegration of, 6 9 - 7 2 , 8 6 - 1 0 5 , »85-87. " 9 . 247, 285; legitimacy, 1 7 3 - 7 4 . 282; and local fiscal reform, 1 1 2 ; as model for Ming institutions, 1 9 4 - 9 5 ; operational procedures in, 2 2 8 - 2 9 , 247. 285 Yuan T'ai, 264 Yung-lo emperor, 1, 6, 288 Yu-thui, 57 Yii Chi: on income, 52; on NeoConfucian orthodoxy, 77; as Neo-Confucian synthesizer, 79; on recruitment, 57; on self-dedication, 50; on shih, 2 1 , 39; status in Yuan, 265; on well-fields, 39 Yii Ch'ueh, 109, 1 2 1 Yii Hsun, 322040 Yii-yao county: economy, 1 1 3 ; fiscal reform, 110; loyalism in, 1 1 7

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