Moral authority and rulership in Ming literati thought
| Author | Peter Ditmanson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117706181 |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
EJPT
Article
Moral authority and
rulership in Ming
literati thought
Peter Ditmanson
National Central Library, Taiwan
Abstract
This article explores the crises and debates surrounding the management of imperial
family matters,especially succession, underthe Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) as anapproach
to understanding the limits of imperial power and the nature of literati discourse on the
imperium. Ming officials and members of the literati community became passionately
engaged in the debates on imperial family decisions, regarding the moral order of the
imperial familyas a key feature of their prerogatives over imperial power. This prerogative
was based upon claims to Neo-Confucian moral authority. Over the course of the dyn-
asty, these claims grew increasingly widespread and increasingly vociferous.
Keywords
Chinese political thought, imperial family, Ming Dynasty, Neo-Confucianism,
remonstrance
These are my family’s affairs and that’s all.
(Purported comment by the new Yongle emperor after usurping the throne in 1402;
Bu, 1986: 3.66a–b; Elman 1993: 25)
Over the course of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Chinese literati both inside and
outside the bureaucracy were deeply engaged in issues pertaining to the imperial
family and imperial succession. At several points, the virulence of this engagement
brought the dynasty into severe political crisis. This article examines the evolution
of these issues in the Ming period as a means of exploring the place of the imperium
in the scholarly discourse of the day. In short, this article argues that Ming
European Journal of Political Theory
2017, Vol. 16(4) 430–449
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117706181
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Corresponding author:
Peter Ditmanson, National Central Library, 10001 Zhongshan S. Rd, Taipei, 100001, Taiwan.
Email: peterd@ncl.edu.tw
literati—the scholarly class that was shaped by the extensive civil service examin-
ation system—made significant claims upon the moral status of the imperial throne
and consistently asserted their prerogative as the guardians of its integrity.
Ming political culture has long been characterized as autocratic, and scholarly
discussions of that autocracy have tended to reflect, and be reflected by, the circum-
stances of modern China. Scholars have argued that the political order of the
Ming and other periods bequeathed a tradition of autocratic rule that has
hampered or limited the range of possibilities in political discourse in the present.
1
This view is problematic for several reasons. One is the danger of interpreting the
political and social dimensions of the modern nation-state back onto the very
different dynamics of late imperial China. Ming political institutions and social
structures were drastically different from those of modern China. More import-
antly, however, the sweeping label of ‘‘autocracy’’ obscures the historical realities
of Ming (and by extension much of Chinese) political discourse. The contested
visions of moral authority and state legitimacy that lay at the heart of disputes
about the imperial house actually offer a much more complex picture of how Neo-
Confucian moral commitments could be marshalled politically, and the wide range
of normative argumentation they could and did support. As Pierre-E
´tienne Will
(2012) has argued, despite the absence of a constitutional framework, a broad
range of institutional elements constrained the Ming court in important ways. In
this article, I argue further that Ming literati vigorously insisted on these con-
straints, particularly in matters of the personal morality of the ruler, his family,
and his succession. The emperor, they argued, was the central moral icon of the
realm, a position that bore significant responsibility. The structure and order of the
emperor’s family was the ultimate precondition of the structure and order of the
realm itself. And these literati scholars of the classical tradition, knowledgeable of
the precedents and institutions of the dynasty, insisted that it was they—not the
ruler—who arbitrated and defined that responsibility.
Scholars such as John Dardess (1983) and Benjamin Elman (1993) have argued
that Neo-Confucian doctrines became useful tools in the consolidation of Ming
imperial authority and autocratic power, laying the groundwork for a type of
moral absolutism that Ming emperors could use to their advantage. It is certainly
true that Ming emperors, particularly the powerful founder Hongwu ( ,r.
1368–1398) and his son Yongle ( , r. 1402–1424), gained significant advantage
from their active negotiation of the discourse and moral authority of Neo-
Confucianism. And it is also true that these doctrines did not prevent them from
carrying out sweeping acts of dramatic and arbitrary brutality. On the other hand,
as I will argue, the authority of Neo-Confucianism could be deployed in the other
direction as well, particularly by the bureaucratic ranks whose training in these
doctrines ran deep. The Hongwu and Yongle emperors, and those who followed
them, frequently did acknowledge the constraints of Neo-Confucian doctrines and
were often compelled to yield to those who promoted them.
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Neo-Confucian discourse on
the ordering of the imperial family marked a bright red line, demarcating one of the
Ditmanson 431
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