Organizer: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
Chair: Paul J. Smith, Haverford College
David A. Graff, Southern Methodist University
For ten months in the year 757, a T'ang local official named Chang Hsün defended the city of Sui yang, strategically situated on the Pien Canal in Ho nan, against the An Lu shan rebels; his efforts are traditionally supposed to have saved the dynasty by preventing the rebels from breaking through to the Huai River and the Yangtze. Chang perished when the city fell only three days before the arrival of a relieving army. The question of whether or not to bestow posthumous honors on the defender of Sui yang sparked a heated debate at court, since Chang and his followers had resorted to cannibalism-systematically and on a very large scale-in order to prolong their heroic resistance. Chang's supporters won their argument, and he came to be regarded by later generations as an exemplary figure representing uncompromising loyalty. Since most of the surviving information about the siege of Sui yang is based upon the hagiographic literature produced by the pro Chang party, and especially Li Han's Chang chung ch'eng chuan, it is not possible to produce a narrative reconstruction of the event from the standpoint of military history, nor would it be wise to make any claims with regard to Chang's attitudes, motivation, and choices. Regardless of what actually happened at Sui yang, a good case can be made that the military importance of Chang's epic defense has been greatly exaggerated in the traditional accounts of the An Lu shan rebellion.
The real significance of the episode lies elsewhere, in Chang Hsün's posthumous career as a paragon of loyalty and in the willingness of court officials and scholars to come to his defense. Personal connections and old friendships played a part in rallying support for Chang initially, but the driving force behind his apotheosis was the "loyalty crisis" created by the An Lu shan rebellion, when loyalty to the T'ang dynastic state could no longer be taken for granted and many officials and commoners found that they could ensure their safety only by collaboration with the rebels. Faced with this situation, the court and its supporters felt a need to emphasize loyalty as the highest virtue and the highest good. And the meritorious cannibal Chang Hsün served this agenda especially well in that his transgressions in the name of loyalty provided a particularly clear cut object lesson in the proper prioritization of values.
Marie Guarino, Connecticut State University
In his eight fascicle text, the Learning of the Emperors (Ti-hsüeh), Fan Tsu yü (1041-1098) teaches that an emperor's appreciation of learning in himself and in others is fundamental to the pursuit of good government. Through a seemingly familiar survey of the sage-kings and exemplary emperors of past dynasties, Fan arrives at a startling conclusion: since not all rulers are born sages, the ruler-like any other man holding a government position-needs to embrace learning. The learning that Fan promotes is not a calling to moral rectitude or personal virtue, but a kind of political authority. Fan alludes to two kinds of political authority-learned authority and heritable imperial authority-and measures the legitimacy of one in terms of the other.
Fan took the Great Learning (Ta-hsüeh) as a model for both the organization and thematic structure of the Learning of the Emperors. He writes that rulers are men born to the throne and ministers are men who attain their positions through study for the civil examinations. He then concludes that emperors who do not come into the world with the wisdom of sages (and there have been precious few who have, he notes) must be taught sage like wisdom in much the same way that common men are taught what they need to know to pass the civil examinations. Though the sage-kings were extra-ordinarily learned and talented, they were human nonetheless. Sagely virtue was found in the capacity of the ruler-like any individual-to seek to become learned.
The Learning of the Emperors was presented to the Northern Sung Che tsung emperor (r. 1086-1100) at the Classics Mat (ching yen). The Classics Mat was a lecture or colloquium attended by the emperor and conducted by a scholar commonly recognized as a learned authority in the lessons of history and the classics as they pertain to the pursuit of good government. Fan points out that the inherited and seemingly absolute Imperial authority of the ruler stands in contrast to an authority grounded in learning. Through his lectures from the Classics Mat, Fan sought to reach the emperor as an individual and to make him aware of the potential for human error-and human strength-that he held in common with all humanity while preserving and even enhancing the supremacy of imperial authority. Public recognition of the political authority of the learned individual-whether he be ruler or minister-could plausibly temper the potential for wanton exercise of power without diminishing the political authority of the monarchy. Thus, the Classics Mat and the Throne sat delicately balanced by the authority of learning.
David Robinson, Princeton University
Officials of late imperial China alternated among a number of strategies in dealing with armed and violent elements of society. While ignoring potential sources of trouble was often the preferred option, officials who took action could attempt to either suppress or co-opt their more volatile subjects. Descriptions of these men changed accordingly. They could be either praised as men of virtue and loyalty or damned as vicious outlaws and rebels.
In 1510 just south of Beijing, a group of skilled horsemen with a reputation for fighting prowess and bravery declared their intention of establishing a new dynasty. These rebel forces sacked scores of administrative cities in six provinces before the considerable financial and military resources of the Ming government wore them down two years later. The leaders of this rebellion, the Liu Brothers and Tiger Yang, could boast of having previously been imperial soldiers, bandits, military retainers of provincial officials, and bandit catchers for county officials. It was however rebellion to which they turned last, and almost all historical documents refer to them as "rebels," regardless of what hat they were wearing at any particular time.
This paper explores the connections between these men of force and the Ming government, noting how they were characterized in both imperially sponsored and privately compiled histories. I will show that Ming officials of varying ranks made relatively frequent use of the more volatile elements of society. Later descriptions of these men of force as "rebels" or "bandits" tend to obscure the ongoing links between this segment of the population and Ming authorities.
Zhihong Liang Oberst, Columbia University
This paper will be a summary of the findings of my Ph.D. dissertation, which is a study of the ideas related to economic life in the Sung Period (960-1279). The role of the state in economic development and the relationship between the state and the private sector were salient topics in Sung discourse on economic statecraft, and are still of great importance in present day China. My dissertation studies a few major concepts/terms selected from Sung writings, explains their meanings in the context of the contemporary intellectual life, and their particularities as cultural perceptions that cannot be simply/directly translated using the vocabulary of modern economics.
For example, the concept of "engrossers" (jian bing) was central to Chinese thinking concerning land tenure and private property. It raised the question of whether private accumulation of wealth was morally justifiable, or posed a sufficient threat to the state as to necessitate state intervention in the name of protecting the poor and dispossessed. On occasions where this concept was applied to commercial wealth, it represented the classical Confucian antipathy to usury and market manipulation by a few merchants or local wealthy families. The concept of "urging sharing" (quan fen) addresses another important aspect of the interaction between the state and the private sector. It began with the assumption that the rich had a moral responsibility to help the poor during times of famine. Meanwhile, the rich were portrayed as opportunists who made big profits by manipulating grain markets. It was thus justifiable that the state should "urge" and "enlighten" (and use threats and coercion if necessary) the rich to the effect that they would open their granaries and sell at very low prices.
Other topics discussed in my dissertation include the origin of the classical idea that agriculture was the root (ben) and commerce the branch (mo) and its modifications in the Sung period, and views regarding the relationship between state activism and centralization (associated with the concept of "fiscal administration", li cai) and greater freedom of private economic activities (represented by the concept of "storing wealth with the people", cang fu yu min).
Finally, I turn to discussions on ideas regarding monetary policies, mainly the concept of "light and heavy" (qing zhong), which explained the relationship between money (metal coins) and goods in terms of their relative amounts in circulation, and the concept of cheng ti ("to balance the values of the currencies"). The latter was invented in the Sung and was initially interpreted as a method of market intervention by economic means, with the goal to keep a steady ratio between the value of paper money and that of metal coins. As state fiscal deficits continued to rise and more paper money was issued, the government came into conflict with the private sector when it used various coercive practices intended to raise the value of paper money.
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