Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China by Ying Zhang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China by Ying Zhang Matthew H. Sommer (bio) Ying Zhang. Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xvi, 306 pp. Hardcover $50.00, isbn 978-0-295-99853-4. Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China offers a powerful, highly original analysis of political discourse and factional struggle from the late Ming dynasty through the early Qing. Through an exploration of elite "image politics," Ying Zhang delineates the moral and rhetorical parameters within which power struggles had to be fought out, with the emperor as final arbiter: the "language of political communication," in her phrasing. The last decades of the Ming dynasty witnessed vicious, internecine conflict between bureaucratic factions (often associated with entrenched regional cliques) that paralyzed the imperial center, even as the empire was being torn apart within by rebellion and menaced without by foreign invasion. These struggles continued in the southern capital of Nanjing even after north China had fallen first to rebels, and then to Manchu invaders; they revived and persisted with remarkable tenacity among the many former Ming officials who overcame their Confucian scruples in order to serve their Manchu conquerors, who had founded the new Qing dynasty in 1644. By crossing the Ming/Qing "divide," and emphasizing the deep continuities as well as the more obvious ruptures of the seventeenth century, Professor Zhang helps us make sense of a chaotic and controversial period that ultimately witnessed the consolidation of Qing authority and legitimacy with the help of many Ming defectors (the notorious "twice-serving officials" who saved their skins by switching sides). In a departure from past scholarship, Professor Zhang avoids the temptation to judge which particular factions or figures constituted the truly genuine or sincere Confucians. Instead, she shows what they all had in common: an uncompromising absolutism, in which the ostensibly private performance of Confucian virtue in family life–especially filial piety, [End Page 248] demonstrated in suspension of one's career and withdrawal from public life to care for elderly parents and mourn them when they died–became the prime criterion for evaluating an individual's suitability for office. Officials from all factions went to elaborate lengths to demonstrate their own fitness in this regard, and to attack their enemies as failing to measure up on precisely the same terms. Professor Zhang explores these issues through a series of fine-grained biographical sketches of key political figures (who also played a prominent cultural role), tacking between their official and "private" lives, and between the imperial capital and their own home regions. In this way, she demonstrates how the very public performance of Confucian virtue at home played a key role in establishing political credibility, by creating a fund of symbolic capital that could be drawn on at the capital, where proof of filial piety and the other virtues became, ipso facto, proof of worthiness and reliability in the political realm. By the same token, rivals attacked each other in the political realm mainly by attempting to undermine their reputations for filial piety, sobriety, conjugal fidelity, and so on. In the process, she shows how the strategic publication of ostensibly private letters, prison diaries, poetry, and other writings fueled the accelerating circulation of images, arguments, and counter-arguments among the literati to create a kind of textual proto-public sphere and proto-public opinion that lay outside official life, yet strongly influenced it. It was in this textual realm that power struggles took place, even as they simultaneously followed the parallel official track of memorials to the throne that responded to one another. The two tracks reinforced and informed each other. The absolutism of this discourse required a total commitment to fundamentalist Confucian values that is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, when bitter enemies vied to prove their undying loyalty to Chairman Mao, even as they denounced each other in the blackest terms. The political discourse of the seventeenth century was equally black and white: there was no middle ground, no room for gray. One was either a paragon of filial piety (and hence political loyalty and suitability, regardless of practical...