Under Confucian Eyes

Under Confucian Eyes
Author: Susan Mann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520222748

"This important volume adds a significant number of new and unique materials for teachers at all levels of higher education to use in classroom and seminar discussion about the issues of gender, society, and religion in imperial China."--Benjamin Elman, author of A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China "The eighteen primary documents in this anthology, all of them translated for the first time, provide a rich array of sources on the lives of women in China's past. The anthology is important not only for the selection of documents but for the ways it suggests we can think about, and find sources about, women in China. It is must reading for scholars and students alike."--Ann Waltner, author of The World of a Late Ming Visionary: T'an-Yang-Tzu and Her Followers

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes
Author: Martina Deuchler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1684175534

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did not level the social hierarchy but instead tended to sustain the status system. In the late Chosŏn, it also provided ritual models for the lineage-building with which local elites sustained their preeminence vis-à-vis an intrusive state. Though Neo-Confucianism has often been blamed for the rigidity of late Chosŏn society, it was actually the enduring native kinship ideology that preserved the strict social-status system. By utilizing historical and social anthropological methodology and analyzing a wealth of diverse materials, Deuchler highlights Korea’s distinctive elevation of the social over the political.

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism
Author: Taisu Zhang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107141117

Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.

Heaven Has Eyes

Heaven Has Eyes
Author: Xiaoqun Xu
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020
Genre: China
ISBN: 0190060042

"A history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era, the book addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices in China's long history, and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to their modern counterparts in the twentieth century and beyond. From the ancient times to the twenty-first century, there has been an enduring expectation or hope among the Chinese people that justice should and will be done in society, which is expressed in a popular Chinese saying, "Heaven has eyes." To the Chinese mind in the imperial era, justice was, and was to be achieved as, an alignment of Heavenly reason, state law, and human relations. Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century when Western-derived notions--natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process--came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong, which was a fundamental shift in philosophical and moral principles that informed law and justice. The legal-judicial reform agendas since the beginning of the twentieth century (still ongoing today) stemmed from this change in the Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize the said principles in everyday practices is a very different order of things that is much more difficult to accomplish, hence all the legal dramas including tragedies in the past one century or so. The book will lay out how and why that is the case"--

Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire

Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire
Author: Liang Cai
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 143844849X

Contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence under China’s Emperor Wu. When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141–87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian’s The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91–87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.

Wealth and Power

Wealth and Power
Author: Orville Schell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2013
Genre: China
ISBN: 0679643478

Two leading experts on China evaluate its rise throughout the past one hundred fifty years, sharing portraits of key intellectual and political leaders to explain how China transformed from a country under foreign assault to a world giant.

Confucian Image Politics

Confucian Image Politics
Author: Ying Zhang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295806729

During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative images of their rivals. The rise of print culture, the dynastic change, and the proliferating approaches to Confucian moral cultivation together gave shape to this new political culture. Confucian Image Politics considers the moral images of officials—as fathers, sons, husbands, and friends—circulated in a variety of media inside and outside the court. It shows how power negotiations took place through participants’ invocations of Confucian ethical ideals in political attacks, self-expression, self-defense, discussion of politically sensitive issues, and literati community rebuilding after the dynastic change. This first book-length study of early modern Chinese politics from the perspective of critical men’s history shows how images—the Donglin official, the Fushe scholar, the turncoat figure—were created, circulated, and contested to serve political purposes.

Confucianism for the Modern World

Confucianism for the Modern World
Author: Daniel A. Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2003-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521821002

While Confucian ideals continue to inspire thinkers and political actors, discussions of concrete Confucian practices and institutions appropriate for the modern era have been conspicuously absent from the literature thus far. This volume represents the most cutting edge effort to spell out in meticulous detail the relevance of Confucianism for the contemporary world. The contributors to this book--internationally renowned philosophers, lawyers, historians, and social scientists--argue for feasible and desirable Confucian policies and institutions as they attempt to draw out the political, economic, and legal implications of Confucianism for the modern world.

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan
Author: Dorothy Ko
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2003-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520927826

Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan. What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman’s life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century.