Search Results

This chapter explores the thought of three famous thinkers who lived through the fall of the Ming dynasty and rise of the Qing. Each of them: Wang Fuzhi, Huang Zongxi, and Gu Yanwu, had personally experienced the horrors of Ming eunuch power, and used their writings, and strategies of evidential research (kaozhengxue), to analyze it. Relying on writings by earlier thinkers, particularly Wang Shizhen and Mao Yigong, Wang, Huang, and Gu articulated a gold standard for eunuch management. Their ideas about the dangers of eunuch literacy, the importance the emperor limiting his numbers of eunuchs, and the need for separation between inner and outer realms of government and the palace would impact the emperors studied in this book

This chapter introduces the first controversy between Miyun Yuanwu and Hanyue Fazang. It details Hanyue's understanding of Tathagata Chan, Patriarch Chan, and the perfect circle. The chapter also tells the story about the author's encounter with Miyun and his reluctant acceptance of Miyun's dharma transmission. This chapter lists all relevant polemical essays related to the controversy.

This chapter proposes another institution—the Academy—that is meant to further restrain the power of parliamentarians. In Western constitutionalism, power is limited by means of rights. In Confucian constitutionalism, power is limited primarily by means of morality. The chapter explicitly invokes the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Huang Zongxi's proposal for an Academy composed of scholar-officials who could question the emperor and appraise and adjudicate the rights and wrongs of his policies. It is careful to note that the Academy supervises, but does not run the state. Subordinate bodies exercise their own authority according to the principle of balance of powers and independence. The Academy does not interfere in these operations and hence its maintenance of religion and morality is different from that of a Taliban-style theocracy.

This chapter examines Waiting for the Dawn (Mingyi daifang lu), the first important work of Huang Zongxi (1610–1695). It suggests that Huang's work is the most eloquent and comprehensive statement of its kind in Chinese political literature. It draws together the ideas that others, in the past or present, had expressed in scattered or unsystematic form. While his discussion of certain problems is sometimes less exhaustive than the treatment of them by others, the balance that Huang achieves between general principles and their historical application adds considerably to the force of his presentation. It is for this reason that Waiting for the Dawn has proved the most enduring and influential Confucian critique of Chinese despotism in the late imperial age as well as the most powerful affirmation of a liberal Confucian political vision in premodern times.

Western sources by and large did not provide an incisive answer as to the question of precisely why government and privately-issued paper money went into decline in China through much of the late imperial era: how and precisely when privately issued notes reemerged and how important a component they were within the late imperial monetary system. Neither did they explain in great detail whether the gradual reemergence of privately issued banknotes in China—which could be traced back to the latter part of the eighteenth century at the earliest—had anything to do with global financial stimuli. This chapter is designed to correct the gap in the academic literature on these issues.