Politics and Morality during the Ming-Qing Dynastic Transition (1570-1670).

Abstract

This study explores the significance of moral issues in shaping literati-officials’ political struggles and behaviors during the Ming-Qing dynastic transition (roughly from 1570 to 1670). Focusing on four literati-officials (Li Zhi, Zheng Man, Huang Daozhou, and Gong Dingzi) and women in their lives, it highlights how the Confucian ideal of the literati official was strained during a time of intense factionalism and loyalism, and the ways in which moral discourse about personal behavior was deployed for political purposes. The roles and responsibilities laid out by the Five Cardinal Relations (wulun) were utilized by literati-officials during this dynastic transition to define the political virtue of loyalty (zhong) in moral attacks as well for self-protection. This work argues that political struggles, by activating intangible connections among literati’s multiple moral virtues, made these virtues—in particular gender norms and sexual morality—relevant to politics and officials’ career. Through an investigation of the lived reality of particular literati-officials, this study not only demonstrates how moral issues affected political developments but also exposes and challenges the legacy of what it identifies as “the grand narrative of the Ming-Qing transition”—a moral, political, and historical interpretative framework based on the presumed association between loyalty and morality. This framework shaped the moralistic nature of seventeenth-century literati’s historical documentation as well as modern historians’ readings of the archive. The methodologies of literary studies, art history, and gender studies are brought to bear in an intertextual examination of a variety of primary sources, including official and non-official histories, court memorials, literati scholarly works, biographies and autobiographies, letters, collections of poetry, artworks, and popular literature. With this range of sources, it is possible to tease out how sensational elements in literary and political rhetoric affected negotiations in court, the symbolism in political language, and the intertwining of the political and emotional dimensions of literati-officials’ experience during this time of crisis and transformation.