Moral authority and rulership in Ming literati thought

Neo-Confucianism and the scholar-literati

The civil officials who governed the Ming realm numbered just over 5000 at the beginning of the dynasty, rising to around 24,000 by the end of the dynasty. These figures do not include a large number of local-level functionaries (Hucker, 1998: 29–30). A multi-level civil service examination system was implemented to recruit educated scholars to serve in the bureaucracy. While many were selected by recommendation, the examination system became the exclusive avenue to civil advancement by the middle decades of the 15th century (Hucker 1998: 30). The examinations tested scholars on their knowledge of the Confucian classics and their Neo-Confucian interpretations, and also on their ability to apply these moral teachings to the relevant policy issues of the day. The scholar officials who entered into government service in the Ming were eclectic in their own beliefs and pursuits but, largely because of the examination system, Neo-Confucian doctrines dominated political discourse. ² Aside from those officials who served in court, the examinations created a much broader literati community of those who attempted the examinations but did not succeed. This community grew in size over the course of the dynasty, as the odds of passing all levels of the examinations and entering into government service grew slim. ³

The Ming examinations were a continuation of institutions established in the Song dynasty (960–1279), ⁴ a period of considerable political and intellectual change. Neo-Confucian teachings emerged amidst a range of contentious topics of debate: the nature of government and the content of the examination system, the grounds of social values and moral authority, and the meaning of the classical tradition. The western term “Neo-Confucianism” refers to a set of doctrines that were called the Learning of the Way (daoxue 導學) or the Learning of Principle (lixue 理學), defined in large part by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) who was widely regarded as the pre-eminent authority on these doctrines. Neo-Confucian teachings reconfigured the classical traditions associated with Confucius, creating an accessible curriculum that became widely popular by the end of the 12th century. Neo-Confucians argued that the world was ordered by a coherent set of moral principles (li 理), which were understood by the ancient sages like Confucius, and thus could be interpreted through a careful reading of the classical texts. The point of scholarship, therefore, was to grasp for oneself these deeper principles that could thus be used to cultivate one’s person and bring order to the world. These teachings became widespread and influential enough that the Song court was compelled to honor Zhu Xi and his Song predecessors in the Confucian temple as sages along with Confucius. And in 1313, the Neo-Confucian writings and commentaries on the classics were accepted as the official curriculum of the civil service examinations, when the court of the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) reinstated the examinations on a smaller scale. ⁵

Emperors and the Great Learning

William Theodore de Bary (1981) and others have traced the evolution of the tradition of the Neo-Confucian moral admonition presented to the ruler from Song times down to the Ming and Qing. At the core of these teachings lay the principles of the Great Learning (大學). This text was one of the chapters of the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記), one of the classics that was believed to have been edited by Confucius (551–479 BCE), though was probably compiled significantly later. ⁶ Starting in the 11th and 12th centuries, Neo-Confucian scholars highlighted this text as a key document outlining the ideal socio-political order. ⁷ The Great Learning drew upon the authority of antiquity, emphasizing concentric circles of personal responsibility beginning with the cultivation of the mind of the individual through learning, and then expanding to encompass the person, clan, and state:

Those in antiquity who wished to illuminate their brilliant virtue, first ordered their state.

Those who wished to order their state, first regulated their family.

Those who wished to regulate their family, first cultivated their person.

Those who wished to cultivate their person, first rectified their mind.

Those who wished to rectify their mind, first made their intentions sincere.

Those who wished to make their intentions sincere, first extended their knowledge.

The extension of knowledge lies in the investigation of things.

When things are investigated, knowledge is extended.

When knowledge is extended, the intentions are made sincere.

When the intentions are made sincere, the mind is rectified.

When the mind is rectified, the person is cultivated.

When the person is cultivated, the family is regulated.

When the family is regulated, the state is ordered.

When the state is ordered, then all under heaven is at peace. (Zhu, 1983–1986: 1a–2a)

The precepts of the Great Learning were enshrined in the writings of the famous Neo-Confucian statesman, Zhen Dexiu (眞德秀, 1178–1235), who compiled a larger work, the Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (大學衍義), designed as a curriculum for the Song Emperor Lizong (理宗, r. 1225–1231) and his descendants. This work elaborated on the themes of the Great Learning, emphasizing the ruler’s personal cultivation. The text circulated in the subsequent Yuan Dynasty, though its prominence was limited (Chu, 1984: 116ff). It was in the Ming, however, that the Great Learning and Zhen Dexiu’s Extended Meaning became the standard catechism for rulers, emphasized both by scholars at court and by the ruler himself. When the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋, r. 1368–1398), sought to recruit the prominent scholar Fan Zugan (范祖幹) into his retinue, Fan admonished him that the ruler should not diverge from the text of the Great Learning. ⁸

His humble background and military emphasis notwithstanding, Zhu Yuanzhang, reigning as the Hongwu Emperor, was the first dynastic founder in Chinese history to emerge after the doctrines of Neo-Confucianism had become the widespread pedagogical and moral standard of the realm. Like the Neo-Confucians, he embraced an idealized vision of the order of high antiquity and a passionate conviction that this order could and should be restored within the realm. Hongwu was deferential to Neo-Confucian scholars like Fan Zugan and others throughout his tumultuous reign (Ditmanson, 2010). He was fond of the text of the Great Learning and twice had the palace walls painted with the text of the Extended Meaning. ⁹ Hongwu appeared to readily accept the moral restraints imposed by the precepts of the Great Learning, and at times he quoted the text himself at court in his discussions. ¹⁰ Anecdotes from the Veritable Records (實錄) indicate that the emperor was earnest and serious about the expectations of self-cultivation that were placed on him. On one occasion, he raised anxious concerns to his advisor Song Lian (1310–1381) when he feared that he had not cultivated his mind sufficiently to perform prescribed ritual sacrifices (Ho, 1976: 134; Zhang et al., 1974: 128:3786).

The theme of the ruler’s moral significance was perhaps most evident in the writings of Fang Xiaoru (方孝孺, 1357–1402), one of the most important young scholar-statesmen to emerge during the Hongwu reign. Fang was seriously concerned with the institution of the imperium and wrote several essays on the subject. At the center of imperial responsibility, he argued, was the ruler’s self-cultivation:

[The sages] all took the rectification of the mind as their basis. If the ruler rectifies the mind in regard to all under Heaven, then the wise will plan for him; the benevolent will protect him; the brave will fight for him, and those scholars with talent will all exert themselves in the application of their skills. Thus would it matter that the ruler not be knowledgeable? (Fang, 1996: 3.74)

Fang’s ultimate purpose in his essay on succession was to challenge earlier theories of succession and to argue more stringently for a moralist interpretation of history, even more than the Neo-Confucian authority Zhu Xi had. The proper function of the scholar, argued Fang, was to make sure that dynasties in history are properly named according to their moral stature. The assessment of the ruling family’s moral character, and thus the legitimacy of the dynasty itself, rested with the scholar historian.

Ming emperors were comfortable enough with the moral role assigned to them in the framework of the Great Learning that they shared in the discourse of self-cultivation and frequently dominated it. On some occasions, during lectures on the Great Learning, Hongwu joined in with his own exegesis of the text, offering expansive comments of his own (Huang, 1935–1937: 9.119). Later emperors followed suit. With great fanfare, the Yongle emperor presented his own compilation to his court, the Method of the Mind in the Learning of the Sages (Shengxue xinfa 聖學心法). This was a collection of imperial precepts modelled upon Zhen Duxiu’s Extended Meaning, and also upon the Models for Emperors (Difan 帝範), compiled by the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong (太宗, r. 626–649) (de Bary, 1981: 159–168). The Jiajing emperor (嘉靖, r. 1521–1567) composed his own work on moral self-cultivation, the Maxim of Seriousness and Oneness (Jingyizhen 敬一箴), and he compiled annotations on important works by earlier Neo-Confucian scholars (Chu, 2008: 193–194).

This brief discussion and examples point to a pattern of tentative cooperation that emerged between Ming emperors and their scholarly advisors on the subject of the ruler’s self-cultivation and its significance within the cosmological framework of the empire. This part of the Neo-Confucian formulation was less problematic. However, from the very beginning of the dynasty, the next step of the formula of the Great Learning—the regulation of family matters—was a point of serious and often disastrous contention between the court and the literati.

The Hongwu emperor placed great significance on the role of his family in the consolidation of the dynasty. Soon after the Ming was founded, he enfeoffed his sons with princedoms throughout the realm as military and political bulwarks. He saw this arrangement as a revival of the classical feudal order of high antiquity. ¹¹ Hongwu recognized the importance of the Neo-Confucian vision of family order as essential to the assertion of his legitimate rule. For example, during a court lecture on the Book of Changes (Yijing, 易經), the topic of family members was raised and the emperor held forth on his own views:

Regulating the family and governing the state are not two principles. One makes sure in a family that older and younger, inner and outer, each carries out his role to the fullest. Then matters are carried out according to principle, and the family is regulated. When a family is regulated, one extends this to the state, and then to the world. It is initiated, and then carried out. When I observe the essentials [in family matters], I see that they lie in being sincere and stern. With sincerity, one has the kindness of familial relations. With sternness, one avoids the drawbacks of the women’s quarters.

Hongwu prepared strict regulations for the princes and provided them with moral advisors selected from among the most promising scholars in his retinue. These were published in several versions, culminating in the Huang Ming zuxun (皇明祖訓), the Ancestral Instructions of the Great Ming, in 1395, which included instructions on personal morality and court protocol and specifications on civil, military, and other areas of governance of the principalities (Chan, 2007: 47). Hongwu particularly emphasized the cultivation of Zhu Biao (朱標, 1355–1392), the heir-apparent. In 1371, the emperor warned his son that, unlike other boys, the weight of the empire rested upon his self-cultivation. ¹² The heir-apparent and the other sons were provided with a strong education in the Confucian canon, instructed by Song Lian and other leading scholars of the realm.

Although Hongwu arranged for extensive moral guidance for his sons, he also granted them significant individual autonomy, which placed them largely beyond the reach of civil and military authorities (Langlois, 1979: 132–133). In managing and disciplining his sons, Hongwu was careful to stipulate that they were not under the authority of the bureaucracy and were not subject to its control. This autonomy that he granted to his sons eventually caused numerous problems as some of the princes proved to be reckless and profligate in their behavior. Over time, Hongwu found that they had abused the local populace, not followed ritual protocol, and had led dissolute lives in their palaces (Chan, 2007). In subsequent years, Hongwu found that he had to continue to curtail the autonomy that he had granted to his sons, though he remained very wary of criticism of them from his officials.

The Hongwu emperor, known for his ferocious and cruel temper, displayed remarkable tolerance toward officials who remonstrated with him on Neo-Confucian grounds. Outspoken men like Fang Xiaoru, Lian Zining (練子寧, d. 1402), Xie Jin (解縉, 1369–1415), and others were permitted to offer scathing indictments of his reign, apparently with impunity (Ditmanson, 2010). This tolerance, however, did not extend to comments on his family. In the 1370s, for example, Ye Boju (葉伯巨, d. 1377), a scholar from Ninghai (寧海) who had been recently appointed as a local school teacher, submitted a harsh report to the court that presented three charges against the emperor: “Your servant has observed that there are three grave errors in current policy. These are: lavishness in the princely enfeoffments; the overly strict use of punishments; and the too rapid implementation of policies.” In this highly critical report, Ye remained deferential to the ruler, likening him to the sun, his ministers to the moon, and the scholars and common people of the realm to the planets and stars that revolve around the center (Qianlong, 1983–1986: 1.1a–13a), but spelling out his concerns in much great detail.

The emperor did not seem troubled by the second and third arguments against his administration, and they were similar to other criticisms that his officials had presented. However, the criticism of his treatment of his sons he took as a personal insult and as an attack on his clan:

How dare this petty fellow try to divide my own family? When I see this, my heart is enraged! How much more will my sons feel when they see it! Quickly bring him to me, that I may shoot him with my own hands. I will eat his flesh!

Thus, while Hongwu had proven himself receptive to admonition in the cultivation of his own moral character, he clearly regarded criticism of his sons as an invasion into family matters. Not only did he see this as a breach of protocol, but he was deeply suspicious of the motives behind such criticism. His violent response to Ye Boju, in contrast to his measured responses to other types of moral criticism, indicates that this issue was a highly volatile one. The exchange was sensitive enough that it was omitted from the Veritable Records of the Hongwu reign. The only record comes from the writings on him by his fellow townsman, Fang Xiaoru, who wrote Ye’s biography.

This tension about the boundaries of the imperial family and the relationship to the bureaucracy apparently remained unresolved upon Hongwu’s death in 1398. The relationship between the ruler and the princely domains, and the authority of civil officials to negotiate that relationship, came to a head with the rebellion of Zhu Di 朱棣, the Prince of Yan 燕王.

The usurpation of 1402

In 1402, after a protracted civil war, Zhu Di, the uncle of the youthful reigning Jianwen emperor (建文, 1377–1402, r. 1398–1402), seized the throne from his nephew and declared himself the Yongle emperor. He ordered a comprehensive revision of the records after he ascended the throne, and so the accounts of the late Hongwu and the Jianwen reigns are not reliable (Chan, 2005). The revised Veritable Records and other official documents blamed the death of Jianwen on meddling officials who prevented the imperial family from resolving their affairs. The records were revised to indicate that when Zhu Biao, the rightful heir-apparent, suddenly died in 1392, the Hongwu emperor had wanted to appoint Yongle as his successor, but had been pressured to name Zhu Biao’s incompetent son Jianwen instead. Thus, Yongle’s usurpation had interrupted the excessive interference by officials in the order and solidarity of the imperial family.

Jianwen’s leading advisors had argued vociferously for reining in the authority of his powerful princely uncles, and the court frequently sought to bring the princes’ domains under closer bureaucratic scrutiny. Four of the princes were reduced to commoner status for alleged crimes, two of them exiled, while a fifth prince killed himself while under investigation (Dreyer, 1982: 159ff). In launching his attack on Nanjing, Zhu Di submitted a letter to his nephew the emperor, accusing his advisors of “malicious designs” that had disenfranchised the prince’s brothers. He declared that these actions “were not in accord with your heart, and actually were the deeds of evil officials” (Chan, 1976: 44). His entire campaign, he argued, was based upon the premise that his nephew had fallen victim to the influences of treacherous officials (jianchen 奸臣), whom he named and severely punished upon his ascent to the throne. These points were spelled out in an official document, The Record of Obeying Heaven and Suppressing the Troubles (奉天靖難記), produced for the court a few years after the usurpation. ¹³

Because of the unreliability of the surviving documents, the facts of the civil war and the usurpation are difficult to reconstruct. While many particulars are not known, it is clear that officials from the top levels of the bureaucracy were deeply involved in the contestation and negotiation between the emperor and his uncles, and in the civil war that ensued. In counties along the battle route and at the capital, many died taking a principled stand of loyalty defending the reigning emperor. On the other hand, others supported the prince for their own reasons, and some officials inside the capital at Nanjing opened the gates for the arriving armies of the prince.

Although Yongle rewrote the history of his ascent, the court soon lost the master narrative of the events of 1402. Over subsequent decades, scholars and officials at the court and in the provinces repeatedly called for the restoration of Jianwen’s records, insisting that honors be granted to his loyalists. Yongle’s son was pressured to grant amnesty to the loyalists, and soon afterwards biographies were written about them and their written works were published. One of the earliest memorials to the throne on the Jianwen martyrs recorded in the Veritable Records was submitted in 1493 by Wu Shizhong, a supervising secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for War. ¹⁴ Finally, in the 1570s, the Wanli emperor, bowing to an empire-wide interest in Jianwen and his loyalists, ordered that the martyrs be honored throughout the empire.

In time, the Jianwen reign and the martyrs became an important icon symbolizing the ideal of the close relationship between ruler and minister. In the widespread commemoration of the martyrs of 1402, loyalty was the central value. However, inherent in that value lay the notion that sustaining the proper imperial succession was the prerogative and the responsibility of the scholar-statesmen of the realm. The maintenance and ordering of the imperial clan, then, was not to be walled off and governed merely by the ruler and his relations, as envisioned by the founder. Rather, as a central feature of the political order and the legitimacy of the realm, it was the proper concern of the scholar officials who safeguarded the realm.

By the late 15th century, increasingly colorful stories circulated about the usurpation, emphasizing confrontations between the Yongle emperor and the loyal officials of Jianwen. In several of these accounts, the Yongle emperor is advised that it will be necessary to enlist the prominent official Fang Xiaoru to draft the edict of his enthronement, in order to provide legitimacy. By then, Fang’s prerogative of moral authority was widely recognized. Fang’s refusal became a model for scholarly intransigence on the matter. In one 16th-century version of the account, the Yongle emperor claimed that he was merely emulating the Duke of Zhou, a paragon of the ancient Zhou dynasty, who supported his precarious nephew King Cheng:

Fang Xiaoru: “Where is King Cheng?”

Yongle: “He burned himself to death [in the palace].”

Fang: “Why don’t you establish King Cheng’s son as emperor?”

Yongle: “The nation requires a mature ruler.”

Fang: “Then why don’t you establish King Cheng’s younger brother as ruler?”

Yongle: “These are my family’s affairs and that’s all.” (Elman, 1993: 24–25)

In the years after the usurpation, the Yongle emperor went to great lengths to consolidate his authority and to create a legitimate aura for his reign. On the one hand, he purged the bureaucracy of supporters of Jianwen or associates of the loyalist. On the other hand, he sought to engage the literati through large compilation projects like the Great Encyclopedia of the Yongle Era (Yongle dadian 永樂大典), the Great Compendium of the Five Classics (Wujing daquan 五經大全), the Great Compendium of the Four Books (Sishu daquan 四書大全), and the Great Compendium of Nature and Principle (Xingli daquan 性禮大全). In the aftermath of the violence of the usurpation, the officials of the Yongle court were much more subdued and compliant and far less prone to the kinds of vocal moral remonstrance that marked the Hongwu and Jianwen reigns (Ditmanson, 2010).

The issue of succession soon emerged again as a point of contention, however, when Zhu Gaoxu (朱高煦, 1380–1426), the second son of the emperor, began to vie for succession to the throne over the designated heir-apparent, the Hongxi emperor (洪熙, r. 1424–1425). Numerous officials were punished for warning the emperor of Zhu Gaoxu’s ambitions. After Hongxi’s death after less than a year on the throne, Zhu Gaoxu openly rebelled against Hongxi’s son and successor, the Xuande Emperor (宣德, r. 1426–1436). At the urging of officials, Xuande personally lead his troops to suppress his rebel uncle’s uprising. These events underscored not only the volatility of Ming succession, but also the vehemence with which the officials of the court were determined to assert their authority within the process, only a few years after the civil war.

The Tumu debacle and the crisis of succession

The next major crisis in the Ming court came about in 1449 when the Zhengtong Emperor (正統, r. 1437–1449) was persuaded by his eunuch advisors to personally lead his armies against Esen (1429–1462), ruler of the Oirat peoples of western Mongolia, whose military power along the northern borders posed a significant threat. After Zhengtong was captured and held for ransom, the officials of the court sought to minimize the disruption by quickly placing Zhengtong’s brother as the Jingtai emperor (景泰, r. 1450–1457). The crisis continued when Zhengtong was released and returned, only to find his brother unwilling to relinquish the throne and soon installing his own son as the heir-apparent. The situation came to an end when Zhengtong was forcibly restored to the throne through a dexterous palace coup, led by a handful of prominent officials, who installed him under the new reign title of Tianshun (天順, r. 1457–1464).

Philip de Heer’s (1986) thoroughgoing study of these events yields much important information about the dynamics of court politics surrounding the imperium, and confirms the general pattern of contentious engagement by scholar-officials in matters of succession and their impact on the structure and behavior of the imperial family. This study demonstrates first of all the dominant role that leading officials played in negotiating the resolution of the crisis and managing the process of succession. On the one hand, the process illustrates deep contention and contestation in how the crisis was to be resolved. On the other hand, the decisions that were made point to a larger rough consensus about the priorities of the bureaucracy in this process. The impetus that drove rapid official action after the capture was the clear sense that even a temporary vacancy of the throne could not be tolerated and that the polity would be greatly destabilized by the absence of the emperor, even for a short period. The structure of power within the realm necessitated his rapid replacement. The importance and the welfare of the Zhengtong Emperor were subordinated to the continuation of the orderly functioning of the court.

The installation of the Jingtai emperor had marked a departure from the prescriptions of primogeniture as laid out by the Ming founder in the Ancestral Instructions. An earlier plan to place Zhengtong’s young son on the throne as the new emperor, with Zhengtong’s brother as a regent, was deemed too risky. The Ancestral Instructions also forbade the establishment of a regent. Leading officials determined that some sort of departure from the regulations was now unavoidable (de Heer, 1986: 42–48). The unease within the capital led them to the conclusion that the circumstances required a mature ruler. The Jingtai reign was rocked with controversy over these arrangements, especially after Zhengtong’s return in 1450. Prominent officials expressed misgivings that the principles in the Ancestral Instructions had been violated, arguing that cosmic imbalances had resulted from Jingtai’s enthronement. Jingtai’s appointment of his own son as heir-apparent divided opinions further, with some arguing that Jingtai was acting according to his natural moral inclinations (de Heer, 1986: 75).

De Heer’s study shows that the Zhengtong, Jingtai, and Tianshun reigns were marked by a continuation of the active and vocal literati engagement in the imperial clan and imperial succession that characterized the early years of the dynasty. The debates over the succession and the resolution of the crises were based upon a combination of Neo-Confucian moral arguments and the Ancestral Instructions of the founding Hongwu Emperor. Here we see an important pattern that emerged since the earlier crisis of 1402. Whereas the Yongle Emperor had claimed the mantle of representing Hongwu’s will in his usurpation, it was now the officials of the court who insisted that they were the rightful guardians of the legacy of the founder.

The developing authority claimed by mid-Ming scholars over the role of the emperor is seen clearly in the work of Qiu Jun (丘濬, 1421–1495), whose political career developed during the extended succession struggles of the mid-15th century. From 1465, Qiu served in the elite Hanlin Academy for a quarter century, and was appointed to help draw up the official account, the Veritable Records (實錄), of these years. He then served as one of the lecturers and advisors to the Hongzhi Emperor (弘治, r. 1487–1505). ¹⁵ Two months after the young emperor’s succession to the throne, Qiu presented him with his monumental 164-chapter work on governance, the Expanded Explanations of the Great Learning (大學衍義補), Zhen Dexiu’s earlier work discussed earlier. Like Zhen, Qiu gave careful attention to the matters of the cultivation of the imperial person and the imperial family. But his work expanded beyond this to link these basic principles to the administration of the realm. As Chu Hung-lam has argued, although Qiu’s work was presented to the emperor, it was intended to be instructive to the officials of the realm as well (Chu, 1984: 158ff). In his other writings, Qiu paid further attention to the important symbolic moral role of the ruler. In his Correct Outline of History (Shishi zhenggang世史正綱), he stressed the principles of orthodox succession, drawing upon Fang Xiaoru’s ideas from the early Ming. The moral order of the families of the realm, he argued, depended upon the moral order of the family of the ruler (Chu, 1984: 252–254, 265–266).

16th-century crises

The two long reigns of the 16th century, those of Jiajing (嘉靖, r. 1521–1566) and Wanli (萬曆, r. 1572–1620), were each dominated by controversies over the ordering and succession of the imperial family. Jiajing was originally the cousin of the Zhengde Emperor (正德, r. 1505–1521), who died suddenly and without heir in 1521. Under the direction of Yang Tinghe (楊廷和, 1459–1529), the chief-grand secretary, Jiajing was promoted from prince to emperor, under the arrangement that he would be formally adopted as the dead emperor’s brother and son of the Hongzhi Emperor (弘治, r. 1488–1505) (Fisher, 1990: 92–93). After coming to the throne, however, the emperor chose instead to honor his own parents, granting them posthumous imperial status. The majority of the bureaucracy opposed the emperor’s position as a violation of moral protocol, although a faction emerged in his support, arguing that the ruler should be guided by his own authentic moral sensibilities. A compromise was eventually reached with ceremonial concessions to Jiajing’s natural parents, the resolution coming in 1526 after five years of battle, and a summary compendium of the documents of the dispute, the Great Code to Clarify Relationships (Minglun dadian 明倫大典), was compiled the following year.

In the case of Jiajing’s grandson, Wanli, the young emperor became enamored with one of his concubines and sought to elevate her to the role of imperial consort, supplanting the empress and changing the heir-apparent. Once again, the court and bureaucracy became locked in a contentious and draining conflict that drew in participants from across the realm. The emperor stalled for 11 years in the battle over the heir-apparent, finally reluctantly installing him in 1601.

I will not go into the details of these two cases here, but instead examine some of the common dynamics of the two cases. First, the demographics of the empire had shifted dramatically over the course of the 16th century, with a remarkable expansion in the population and the economic development of the realm. These factors greatly magnified and intensified the dimensions of these disputes. In the era of Hongwu and Yongle, records indicate that the court debates involved only a handful of figures at the top of the bureaucracy. In the case of the crises of the 1450s, larger numbers of actors were involved. In the time of Jiajing and Wanli, however, these crises at court were felt right across the realm (Ditmanson, 2015).

Jiajing’s case saw a dramatic increase in the flow of comment and criticism to the court. His proposal to give posthumous honors to his father drew a response submitted with 64 signatories. His plans to bestow imperial titles on his mother drew 250 signatories in 13 different reports, with responses from all over the empire (Fisher, 1990: 63). Critics of the emperor’s position invoked the authority of the Neo-Confucian tradition and shouted the names of the Ming founder and the Hongzhi emperor, whom Jiajing was intended to adopt (Fisher, 1990: 92–93). The emperor’s retaliations—withdrawing salaries, imprisonment, and banishment—were insufficient to quell the uproar. Once again, as with the officials who stood up to the Jingtai Emperor in the 1450s, the literati claimed to speak not only with Neo-Confucian authority, but also with the authority of the founder himself. It was they, and not the ruler, who represented the interests of the imperial line.

In Wanli’s case, the controversy became equally widespread, if not more. As the controversy over the heir-apparent grew, the presses in the capital produced anonymous pamphlets and fliers protesting and accusing the emperor of being deluded by conspirators to change the proper heir-apparent. As the controversy came to preoccupy the literati both inside and outside the bureaucracy, its significance grew and it came to be referred to as the “controversy over the root of the state” (爭國本) (Dardess, 2002: 9ff).

Ray Huang, who viewed the Ming state as both despotic and dysfunctional, argues that there was in fact no binding legality that prevented Wanli from asserting his will. In fact, from the above examples, we can see that precedents were manipulated in the Jingtai and Jiajing cases to suit the conditions of the day. According to Huang, “Wanli’s desire to depart from custom was not so much illegal in terms of statutory law as it was unethical in the eyes of orthodox bureaucrats” (Huang, 1981: 84). As Huang implies, the emperor was restricted by an intangible wall of bureaucratic opposition, intangible because it was not based upon laws that could be easily changed or challenged. Rather, it was based upon a literati moral authority that had developed over the course of the dynasty. To restate Huang’s argument in other words, while there was no legal framework to rein in the ruler, Wanli likewise had no moral standpoint or authority from which to rein in his officials.

The politics of moral authority had reached a crescendo in the Wanli reign, eventually compelling the emperor to recede from public participation at court for the last two decades of his reign after giving in on the succession debate. The pattern of criticizing the emperor’s moral conduct and family arrangements continued for the rest of his reign. Huang has transcribed the record of an audience between Wanli and his grand-secretary in which the emperor in misery reviewed a memorial describing himself as drunken, lustful, greedy, and ill-tempered, chastising him for the attention he paid to his favorite concubine (Huang, 1981: 224). By this point, however, the politic rhetoric had expanded beyond accusations against the imperium and were aimed at many of those closely associated with the ruler. The grand-secretary Shen Shixing (申時行, 1535–1614) was impeached for colluding with the emperor on the issue of succession. Zhang Juzheng (張居正, 1525–1582), the most powerful of the grand-secretaries, was himself accused not only of corruption, but of lacking moral rectitude in the management of his own family. This was the also age of the Donglin Movement, a factional group of scholars who took a fundamentalist stance on reforming the Ming political order on the grounds of the Great Learning and the essential principles of Neo-Confucian morality. ¹⁶

Conclusions

After the fall of the Ming in 1644, several scholars who lived through the transition reassessed the legacy of Ming political culture. Huang Zongxi (黃宗羲1610–1695), a son of a Donglin partisan, gave a grim diagnosis. At some earlier point in Chinese imperial history, he argued, court politics had taken an unhealthy turn in which:

the prince’s great self-interest took the place of the common good of all-under-Heaven. At first the prince felt some qualms about it, but his conscience eased with time. He looked upon the world as an enormous estate to be handed on down to his descendants, for their perpetual pleasure and well-being.

This survey of some of the interactions and clashes between the court and officials over the course of the Ming has demonstrated the limits of autocracy as a description of “traditional Chinese” political culture. The point is certainly not to argue that the Ming political order was democratic or parliamentarian in any sense of either word. Nor is it intended as an apology for any of the egregiously arbitrary assertions of the imperial will: the beatings at court, or the unjust execution, punishment, and displacement of officials. Rather, the point is that much of the political disruption in the Ming political order came about as a result of battles over the moral authority over the imperial clan and the determination of its succession.

For all the dysfunction of the Ming political order, we can clearly say that over the course of the dynasty, the literati frequently did rein in their emperor in terms of the rhetoric of Neo-Confucianism. On this, an empire-wide consensus prevailed and the emperor was, for the most part, compelled to concede. As we have seen, emperors at times won these battles, either by force or by manipulation of court factionalism. But these victories were largely pyrrhic; as in the case of the commemoration of Jianwen, the larger war was lost as emperors eventually conceded the moral authority of their literati subjects. Indeed, in late 1644, under encroaching pressure from Manchu forces, the collapsing Ming court in exile took the time to grant additional honors to a list of 75 Jianwen martyrs in hopes that such acts might win back Heaven’s mandate. ¹⁷

Ming literati asserted repeatedly that the ruler, his moral behavior and his legitimate succession, was the ultimate and unquestionable authority in the realm. As Fang Xiaoru argued at the beginning of the dynasty, the moral stature of the imperium was the basis for the legitimacy of the dynasty itself. This is why, in 1449, the throne could not stay empty. On the other hand, the literati asserted, vocally, vehemently, and repeatedly, that it was they, and not the ruler himself, who understood the nature of that authority and who were charged with safeguarding it. The martyrs of Jianwen were the clearest emblem of this. For in the end it was they, rather than Jianwen himself, who became the righteous icons of 1402 historiography. The biographies that were written in the 16th century of these martyrs reassert their righteous loyalty as indestructible in the face of imperial will.

In this light, we might reconsider the views of the early Qing scholar Huang Zongxi and others. It is clear that this condemnation of autocracy in the Chinese tradition did not emerge ex-nihilo in new insights drawn from witnessing the fall of the Ming. Rather, we might see these views as a continuation of a contentious discourse that extended in a continuous and jagged line across the dynasty, from Fang Xiaoru’s day to his own. Indeed, Fang held pride of place in Huang’s survey of scholarship in the Ming dynasty, appearing at the very beginning of the work. (Huang, 1983–1986: intro. 3b–5a).

The rulers of the succeeding Qing Dynasty seemed to perceive some of the features of this strong dynamic within the Ming polity and sought to mitigate them, especially after the uneasy succession of the Yongzheng Emperor (1722–1735). The Qing ruler and the imperial clan, Manchus (not Han Chinese), who proclaimed themselves universal rulers over “a multitude of lords,” were further distanced from the sphere of literati engagement and couched within the larger ethnic framework of Manchu separateness (Hevia, 1995: 124). That separateness was not only institutionalized into the Qing polity through the particular prerogatives of Manchu bannermen, the elite core of clansmen who descended from the original coalition that established the Manchu state. It was further built into the nexus between the ruler and the bureaucracy in the institution of the Grand Council (Junji chu 軍機處), established as a buffering medium between the ruling family and the scholar officials (Bartlett, 1991).

Nevertheless, this proprietary concern with the person and family of the ruler could clearly be seen in the vocal and contentious negotiation of the imperial success after the death of the Xianfeng Emperor (咸豐, r. 1851–1861) in 1861, when debates emerged about how to assist the young Tongzhi Emperor (同治, r. 1862–1874). Marianne Bastid has described the way in which discussions on the appropriate regency or advisory bodies extended beyond the Grand Council and the Manchu princes, with prominent Han figures from the bureaucracy weighing in. In Bastid’s view, these debates on succession and the family matters of the imperial family inevitably evolved to encompass the role of the ruler within the larger moral framework of the state, debates that foreshadowed the more intensive discussions on imperial authority in the 1898 reforms and beyond. Bastid argues that debates on the imperium at the end of the Qing were organically linked to broader debates on “the social and political morality of Neo-Confucianism as a whole” (Bastid, 1987: 148). Peter Zarrow has also reiterated this point, noting that the problem of the monarchy “was intimately connected with the deepest layers of cultural and national identity and even existential orientation” (Zarrow, 2002: 23–24). Therefore, as the late 19th-century reformer Kang Youwei (康有爲, 1858–1927) considered the role of the ruler in a modern Chinese state, he focused upon this same sense of a moral centre as a key element in his conception of the ruler:

The distinction between the hegemon and the true king lies solely in the mind-and-heart. When the mind is sincerely devoted to the people, and one leads them to wealth and power, this is the kingly way. When the mind is obsessively devoted to oneself, and one leads the self to wealth and power, this is the method of the hegemon. (Zarrow, 2012:34)