Y ing Z hang . Confucian Image Politics

The second half of the Ming dynasty, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries, was a time of tremendous change and turmoil in China. A rapidly developing commercial economy interacted with a long-established social and political order in ways that often yielded new forms of cultural expression as well as conflicts and convergences between different groups within the empire. Ideas and practices drawn from within the complex traditions of Confucianism were redeployed and contested by scholars and political actors in new and sometimes radical ways. The growth of commercial publishing and an attendant expansion in literacy and participation in print culture extended the reach of debates and arguments to broader audiences, sometimes generating feedback in new and disruptive ways. By the end of the sixteenth century the ideas of Wang Yangming and his followers in the Taizhou School, and the reaction of others against those views, had fostered a moralization of political discourse and contributed to an environment within which political differences were portrayed as moral conflicts between figures of good and evil rather than disagreements among like-minded gentlemen seeking to serve the needs of the empire and its subjects. The congruence of political and moral categories was a familiar trope with a long history across dynasties, but the explosion of printing and the widespread circulation of texts, both for elite political debate and for more popular literary consumption, gave a new intensity to the creation of images of moral heroes and villains, and set up new modes of conflict and competition among contenders for power and influence within the imperial state.

Aesthetics · Art · China · Elite · Empire · Literature · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Trope (literature) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies