This book explains the contributions of Li Fu to the Lu-Wang school of Confucianism.

Angle's book is both an exposition of Neo-Confucian philosophy and a sustained dialogue with many leading Western thinkers, especially with those philosophers leading the current renewal of interest in virtue ethics. He argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy.

Scholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of “state activism” when the state sought to strengthen its control on various social and cultural sectors. The Taiping Rebellion and the postbellum restoration efforts of the mid-nineteenth century have frequently been associated with the origins of elite activism. However, drawing upon a wide array of sources, including previously untapped Qing government documents, After the Prosperous Age argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century, and that the Taiping Rebellion served as a second catalyst for the expansion of elite public roles rather than initiating such an expansion. The first four decades of the nineteenth century in China remain almost uncharted territory. By analyzing the social and cultural interplay between state power and local elites of Suzhou, a city renowned for its economic prosperity and strong sense of local pride, from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Seunghyun Han illuminates the significance of this period in terms of the reformulation of state–elite relations marked by the unfolding of elite public activism and the dissolution of a centralized cultural order.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, local leaders around the Qing empire attempted to rebuild in the aftermath of domestic rebellion and imperialist aggression. At the same time, the enthronement of a series of children brought the question of reconstruction into the heart of the capital. Chinese scholars, Manchu and Mongolian officials, and writers in the press all competed to have their ideas included in the education of young rulers. Each group hoped to use the power of the emperor—both his functional role within the bureaucracy and his symbolic role as an exemplar for the people—to promote reform. Daniel Barish explores debates surrounding the education of the final three Qing emperors, showing how imperial curricula became proxy battles for divergent visions of how to restabilize the country. He sheds light on the efforts of rival figures, who drew on China’s dynastic history, Manchu traditions, and the statecraft tools of imperial powers as they sought to remake the state. Barish traces how court education reflected arguments over the introduction of Western learning, the fate of the Manchu Way, the place of women in society, notions of constitutionalism, and emergent conceptions of national identity. He emphasizes how changing ideas of education intersected with a push for a renewed imperial center and national unity, helping create a model of rulership for postimperial regimes. Through the lens of the education of young emperors, Learning to Rule develops a new understanding of the late Qing era and the relationship between the monarchy and the nation in modern China.

In the Soul Martial Continent, the soul beasts were revered. The strength of a soul beast often determined a person's future, a person's life and death. The weak were mediocre people who were bullied. When the strong were angered, blood would flow like rivers. [Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] [Next Chapter] Close]

"Where does Neo-Confucianism—a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to it—fit into our story of China’s history? This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in China’s history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible."

Continuing the argument developed in the author's previous book, this exhaustively researched study describes the humiliation of the Chinese gentry at the hands of the statist Oboi regents in the 1660s and the Kangxi emperor's self-declared Confucian sagehood in the 1670s, which effectively trumped the gentry's claim to sovereignty.

Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.

Volume 9, Part 2 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes which together explore the political, social and economic developments of the Ch'ing Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prior to the arrival of Western military power. Across fifteen chapters, a team of leading historians explore how the eighteenth century's greatest contiguous empire in terms of geographical size, population, wealth, cultural production, political order and military domination peaked and then began to unravel. The book sheds new light on the changing systems deployed under the Ch'ing dynasty to govern its large, multi-ethnic Empire and surveys the dynasty's complex relations with neighbouring states and Europe. In this compelling and authoritative account of a significant era of early modern Chinese history, the volume illustrates the ever-changing nature of the Ch'ing Empire, and provides context for the unforeseeable challenges that the nineteenth century would bring.