From the Ming to the Qing, as the empire underwent significant political, social, and cultural changes, the Confucian moral-political spectrum was widened and enriched. It exhibited contradictory impulses and unexpected collusions, dynamics that spelled a new political culture for the seventeenth century. Although this period lacked the many media forms available today, the political communication processes nonetheless occurred across physical, textual, and embodied spaces.1 The empire had become a world of image building: the literati’s reputation and their efforts to publicize it played a significant role in their obtaining membership in influential social, cultural, and political circles.2 Activities such as publishing, joining literary clubs, collecting objects, sponsoring entertainers and theatrical events, patronizing Buddhist temples, and even writing to advocate “chastity justice” for women,3 all helped the literati bolster their image of superiority in a society with increasingly blurred social boundaries, professional competition, diffused cultural authorities, and emerging new markers of identity.4 Image politics flourished in this fascinating world.
“Image problems” were everywhere, even in the lives of famed moral paragons. This situation means that the seventeenth century cannot simply be classified as a time of moral heroism or a return to conservatism. Some officials strove to fulfill their ethical duties in everyday life, but they appear in the historical record as morally corrupt. Some entered history as moral paragons, even though their political rivals seriously and legitimately contested their claims to exemplariness. But such nuances, discrepancies, and contestations are often lost with the development of historical stereotypes.
Attention to the image of both the “hero” and the “villain” figure can illuminate the production and circulation of officials’ moral reputations as central to political processes during the Ming-Qing transition. Political actors’ image-making efforts show the impact of print culture and related sociocultural dynamics in literati society. They also capture contemporary religious trends and intellectual concerns. Additionally, the seventeenth century was an era of experimentation, and political actors intensively and creatively engaged Confucian ethics as they searched for ways to express themselves, gain political advantage, and juggle competing social and political demands. Even though in many cases we cannot fully reconstruct an individual official’s “actual” performance as a son or husband, by looking at why his personal life attracted public attention, assumed political significance, and generated surprising consequences, in particular at the discrepancies between his polarized images, we gain rich insights into the interactions among contemporary political, cultural, and social dynamics.
Confucian ethics was both a precarious and a highly flexible political tool. The question of how to display one’s masculine virtues properly remained sensitive within the specific political and cultural dynamics of both the late Ming and early Qing. The complex work done by officials’ moral images demonstrates that Confucian ethics did not automatically operate as a stabilizing factor at a time of crisis and transformation. How political actors applied and enriched them in everyday life and in politics was shaped by the changing historical conditions. In life and in politics, the elites extensively tapped into the conceptual connections among the various ethical ideals. In these processes, everyday-life relationships were given moral meaning, and moral assurance became an integral, material aspect of networking. Rather than “thinning out” moral ideals, image politics reproduced the Confucian ethical system.5 Meanwhile, the continuum of Confucian moralism in its two dimensions did not simply discipline or coopt; it enabled—and sometimes guided—people to cultivate empathy and make compromises even when they had before them a seemingly insurmountable political divide or agonizing uncertainties.
BETWEEN PERFECTION AND IMPERFECTION
The immense interest of the state and the literati in exploring the political and social potential of Confucian ethics coexisted with a sense of disenchantment—and even cynicism—in some corners of seventeenth-century China, especially after the change of regime. Early Qing literary representations highlighted the two extremes of Confucian moralism: purely instrumental, hypocritical appropriation of “dualistic” Confucian ritualism for self-interest, on the one side, and “ascetic” ritualism on the other. The latter, which sacrificed all mundane desires, was presented as a noble alternative approach to Confucian moral cultivation, but it nonetheless proved unsatisfactory because it had also already become institutionalized and turned into a means of gaining fame.6 In both these practices of Confucian moralism, the differences between the genuine and the feigned were not only blurred but also widely manipulated. Similarly, parodies of legendary moral exemplars at the time questioned not only the credibility of their official historical portrayals as moral paragons but also the very possibility of sincere noninstrumentalist pursuit of Confucian loyalty, filial piety, and self-discipline.7
However, the lived experiences of literati-officials were much more complex than their sometimes cynical literary representations. The myriad accounts of officials’ personal lives and moral behavior occupied a central place in seventeenth-century politics precisely because, in practice, Confucian moralism as a continuum allowed for and embraced possibilities, options, and creative alternatives. In the moral image-making of these political actors, sincerity and pragmatism were not mutually exclusive but were mutually configured. Literati concerns and disagreements about what constituted the sincere and proper pursuit and display of Confucian virtues were a generative mechanism of image politics during that period. The enhanced availability of print, networking, and publicity through social spectacles offered political actors more opportunities to display their moral accomplishments and also encouraged them to take extraordinary measures in order to “authenticate” their virtues for political purposes. Their authentication efforts inevitably drew on and invigorated discursive connections among the various Confucian masculine virtues.
Such a complex, broadened understanding of Confucian moralism—as processes of negotiation and adaptation—not only helps us problematize the conventional divide between “gentlemen” and “small men” in the historiography of seventeenth-century politics but also reveals that the Qing rulers’ engagement with Confucianism might not have been any more instrumentalist or hypocritical than the Han elite’s. Rather, one could argue that the many authentication efforts examined here were a form of “consensus-seeking,” a creative approach to the early modern “authenticity crisis.”8
Understanding the continuum of Confucian moralism in this way allows us to see that image politics did not simply stretch the relevance of the Confucian moral-political system across the dynastic divide; it fueled its development. While officials in the late Ming engaged in “image wars,” it could be said that the Manchu deployment of Confucian ethics as a language of political communication in the early Qing paved the way for their “image conquest” of the Han. The Qing way did not just combine the Manchu way and the Confucian way; it transformed them both. Manchu rulers and Han officials engaged Confucian ethical ideals in adapting to the changing political situation and struggle for personal, familial, and collective survival. In the course of constant experimentation, some Confucian practices assumed new political meanings.
Qing rulers proved to be savvy and proactive in employing the language of Confucian ethics to establish Manchu moral superiority while limiting Han officials’ options. In the High Qing, imperial moralizing endeavors led to the formation of a new relationship between the state and its subjects.9 Although the Manchu ruler’s civilizing role was passionately pursued with the assistance of his officials,10 when these officials participated in the bureaucratization of rewarding moral exemplariness and punishing immorality in society, the officials carried less moral authority than bureaucratic responsibility. For instance, when the focus of the imperial civilizing mission shifted from masculine virtue to female chastity, this not only served to establish the court as moral arbiter but also seemed to express the new moralpolitical division of labor between the monarch and literati-officials.11 The Shunzhi disciplining project and turncoats’ transdynastic, transgenerational narratives demonstrate that the reconfiguration of elites’ moral-political division of labor had already begun in the early years of the Qing.
Appreciating the “moralization of politics” with more sympathy, nuance, and precision will benefit historians tremendously.12 When we break away from the binaries that have shaped the Ming-Qing transition historiography—conservatism versus progressivism, autocratic rulers versus liberal gentry, true paragons versus moral hypocrites, and exemplary heroes versus corrupt villains—to consider how political subjects creatively engaged Confucian institutions and changing material conditions in order to adapt, survive, and thrive, we gain more insight into the collective and personal decisions they made and Chinese early modernity itself.
THE POSSIBILITY OF COMPARING EARLY MODERNITIES
In the past two decades, many China scholars have contemplated the question of the “early modern.” Explorations through lenses such as the “public sphere,” “individualism and the self,” and “globalization,” to name a few, have significantly furthered our understanding of the dynamics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. But the superficial resemblance to European counterparts masks substantive differences between the two contexts, especially the “overriding importance of family and communal ties” in the Chinese context.13 As seen from an intellectual history perspective, the Chinese hardly abandoned “tradition” but rather reaffirmed it, a stark contrast to early modern Europe, where “flight from traditional authority” has been detected.14
Still, Confucian moralism in politics did not simply reaffirm tradition; tradition was reinscribed and transformed. While the dynamics of image politics were emerging in other contexts of the seventeenthcentury world as well,15 in China, ruling elites across the dynastic divide continued to engage in moral image-making efforts grounded in Confucian ethics. The rise of literacy rates, growing consumption of print and theater, and denser communication networks created more tools for elites to engage Confucian ethics creatively and deeply so as to meet specific but very diverse personal, familial, collective, and imperial needs in a time of uncertainty and volatility. Seventeenth-century elite’s political experimentation via Confucian ethical ideals insistently tied the individual to the familial and communal; they explored “sincerity” and “interiority” in attempts to think about how the moral subject should pursue self-cultivation and fulfill social and political roles. At the same time, image politics in the Chinese context did not preclude the possibility of change. It opened up the political sphere to more complex interactions between the court and literati society, between politics and culture, and between ideals and practicality. It mirrored and contributed to the reintegration of elite men’s roles and responsibilities as prescribed in the Confucian ethical template.
Take, for example, the representation and mediation of political struggles in a variety of literary genres, across generations and dynasties. Competing political forces took advantage of the booming print culture and efficient networking techniques when they publicized attacks and counterattacks in the form of Confucian family tales. These tales and their mediating and mediatizing functions differed significantly from the family model of politics analyzed by Lynn Hunt in her study of the French Revolution. While French family romances saw the murder of the tyrannical father figure preceding the actual regicide,16 in seventeenth-century China, regicide was morally condemned and confessions of filial piety allowed political actors to articulate and negotiate their political positions, regardless of how they defined loyalty. Further, in both political and literary narratives, Confucian family tales implicate transgenerational dynamics and concerns far beyond the parameters of the nuclear family paradigm.17 They helped families and communities deal with serious political ruptures such as a change of dynasty.
Thus, this cultural-historical approach to factionalism and dynastic change draws attention to “generation” as an important category of political historical analysis, helping illuminate the particularities of seventeenth-century Chinese image politics and its early modern conditions. Officials’ moral reputations were at bottom family matters; two or three generations of officials from the same family underwent political upheavals together and had joint stakes in publicizing their role performance as men. Disciples and male descendants of officials of rival factions, including those who did not hold official positions, participated in producing images that they and their allies could use to attack political enemies. The family romances and biographies concocted to expose someone’s lack of filial devotion or selfdiscipline often wove together sensational domestic stories of a whole family. These image-making enterprises could not only enhance the effectiveness of factional attacks but could also hold the interest of a reading public that increasingly craved the strange and sensational. Finally, when the badly fractured elite society strove to revive itself in the early Qing, recovery was accomplished to a large degree via transgenerational, transdynastic Confucian family tales in a variety of literary, artistic, and ritual forms. Family tales of turncoats further show how Manchu moral superiority was made persuasive by virtue of the loyal turncoat’s moral continuity from the Ming to the Qing.
REIMAGINING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The conventional, narrow notion of “Confucian moralism” captures some realities but hides complicated historical processes that involved contingent cultural, social, and political activities of the state, communities, and individuals.18 A biographical approach to the interplay of politics, culture, and Confucian ethics, by considering how the two dimensions of the continuum of Confucian moralism shaped historical subjects’ emotions and actions, opens new opportunities to challenge the dominant historical images in seventeenth-century political historiography. These gendered dominant images have perpetuated certain moral assumptions about political men even as they have been transformed by modern Western historical vision and a Han nationalist framework in later periods. The conflation of these influences in the multilayered historical memories of the seventeenth century is best exemplified by the invention of the image of the ideal Donglin man.
In an inscription for Miscellaneous Records of the Plank Bridge (Banqiao zaji) by Yu Huai, the late Qing literatus Qin Jitang (1837–1908) writes: “Every one of [the courtesans] married a Donglin man.”19 Summarizing the poet’s historical imagining of late-Ming politics and literati sexual adventures, this line has become one of the most frequently invoked references in the historiography of the Ming-Qing transition. Two images emerge from this picture: first, in the late Ming, “the righteous men”—namely, Donglin officials—devoted themselves to both political integrity and romantic love; second, late-Ming courtesans gained a high political profile from their association with these men. Two kinds of historical imagining intersect in the political identity of the Donglin official and his moral character: the morally exemplary Donglin man is partially constructed through the figure of the late-Ming courtesan, whose relationship with the Fushe scholar had symbolized passionate love and a devotion that paralleled loyalism.20 On one level, this configuration obscures the fact that the meaning of the “Donglin man” was in fact unstable; his claim to exemplariness was constructed around zhongxiao and was constantly being contested. On another level, through this configuration, Qing literati and modern intellectuals who tended to romanticize late-Ming elites projected the romantic sentiments of some Fushe scholars onto the Donglin officials in order to increase the appeal of both of them.21 The Donglin-Fushe man became the premodern predecessor of the ideal modern Chinese man.
In reality, Donglin-Fushe officials created less “romantic” images for themselves as Confucian fathers, sons, husbands, and friends and struggled to defend their zhongxiao claims. As these men’s lives were subjected to more scrutiny and exposure in various media, they had to present carefully their domestic lives as ones that followed prescribed gender norms so as to advance their careers, promote their individual, familial, and organizational interests, and adapt to the changing political conditions. Their women, often talented in poetry and art, not only played an active role in officials’ networking in “apolitical” spaces but also helped their husbands achieve images of moral exemplariness. Thus, understanding the operation of the continuum of Confucian moralism as gendered processes centered on zhongxiao is crucial to rescuing the seventeenth century from narratives produced by the Qing state in the eighteenth century and by modern intellectuals in the early twentieth century.