Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (review)

Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. By William T. Rowe (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001) 601 pp. $59.95

At the outset of this weighty study, Rowe proclaims that he has pursued not the Annales route of anonymous social and economic forces but the personal approach of biography (2). He then asserts that as a result of the gap between intellectual and social history, he has sought a middle ground to tie Chen Hongmou's intellectual beliefs—chiefly ideas on cosmology and social relations—to his practical administrative actions (11, 86). Accordingly, the book is an exploration of how intellectual and administrative concerns were combined in the person of one Qing eighteenth-century field official—as well as his fellow field administrators—in other words, a study of the connections between a Qing local official's philosophy or worldview and his working life.

In focusing on Chen Hongmou, Rowe emphasizes the Chinese administrative style generally known as "Statecraft" (jingshi), which he believes is better translated "social management," or even by the philosophical term, "ordering the world" (jiushi) (2). Because the Qing revival of earlier Statecraft administrative ideas reached its height in the early nineteenth century, Rowe sees its rise in Chen and his group.

Basing his study on about forty of Chen Hongmou's published works, plus his own erudition and wide reading in contemporary published and archival sources, Rowe finds Chen not to be an original thinker but typical of the many Confucians who have expounded the unity of thought and action across the ages (86). In fact, Rowe admits that the eighteenth-century thinkers' guiding principles for action often turn out to be the traditional moral principles of Confucian China (89). For Chen Hongmou, the ultimate principle (Tianli) assured the existence of a rational world with dependable, natural laws (89), but also allowed for and embodied dynamic process and change (91). In practice, this outlook translated into avoiding government interventions to stabilize local situations (as with market forces, for instance), although intervention was permissible when undertaken not to correct but only to assist natural forces (163-164, 215).

Rowe pursues this methodology of tying the eighteenth-century philosophical outlook to several areas of economic and political endeavor (land reclamation, food supply, the silk industry, governance, and so forth), but the precise connections are not always made explicit or clear.