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1 Introduction . I N S E V E N T E E N T H-century China, the name “Donglin” meant three different but partly overlapping things. It stood for an ethical revitalization movement; it referred to a national Confucian moral fellowship; and it also labeled a Beijing political faction, whose activities are the main focus of this book. The name comes from the Donglin (“East Forest”) academy of Wuxi county, located about fifty miles west of Shanghai, in what is now Jiangsu province. The heyday of the Donglin in all of its dimensions were the early decades of the seventeenth century. The Donglin academy, from its refounding in 1604, disseminated through its widely attended lecture sessions, open to officials and students from all over China, an ethically intense and militant Confucianism, according to which, in the words of Heinrich Busch, everyone was “urged to form convictions on the basis of truth and adhere to them uncompromisingly without regard to the consequences.”1 Important for our story is the fact that the Donglin leaders also labored to place their adherents and sympathizers in key offices of the central government and, through them, to achieve nothing less than the remaking of a troubled Ming China starved, they believed, of morally right-guided leadership. In 1620 and 1621, after the death of the Wanli emperor, who had long been hostile to the Donglin, it appeared that the movement had triumphed at last. But over the next several years its pretensions were challenged and its power curtailed, and from 1625 to 1627 the young Tianqi emperor and his favorite eunuch, Wei Zhongxian, purged and destroyed the Donglin movement in one of the most spectacularly gruesome political repressions perpetrated in the history of China to that point. It all makes for gripping drama. Normally the story finds its place as an episode in the longer history of late Ming partisan struggle and dynastic decline and collapse.2 Long ago, Charles O. Hucker published an excellent chapter-length study of the Donglin movement, the conclusions of which still strike me as valid. But when I first read that paper in the 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N early 1960s, I was left puzzled and bewildered by the affair, and I found it inexplicable why so many should have sacrificed even their lives for what seemed to be no important or useful or even definable purpose.3 Until 1989, that is. The Tiananmen demonstrations of spring 1989 offered several compelling clues to a satisfactory rereading of the events of the 1620s, which also had their epicenter in Beijing. Whatever it was that kept so many of us who were not in China in 1989 glued to our television sets while the demonstrations were under way, it had something to do with loving good and hating evil; with vilifying the corrupt and cheering for the selfless and the brave; with the play of hope against despair; and, in the end, with the smashing of beautiful, fragile ideals on the ugly rocks of entrenched power. And all those things were searing and memorable because they were visceral, and it all ended, appropriately enough, awash in blood and martyrdom. From what happened in 1989 it became evident that, in China, a political-moral confrontation was not necessarily aimed at achieving practical reforms or concrete results. The point was not to achieve victory in the usual sense. Rather, the intention was to communicate sincere moral feelings to the rulers and to the public at large. The agenda was imprecise, symbolic, unrealistic. The protesters did not venture beyond spontaneous or ad hoc organization as a matter of principle rather than oversight. Their mood became so vehement as to be intolerant of negotiation and compromise. In the end, the protesters (both the Donglin and the students in 1989) did achieve something through their elitist storm of absolute self-righteousness: glorious commemoration for the dead and imprisoned participants, and eternal infamy for those who unleashed the dogs of repression upon them. Repression and memory; blood and history. Hence the title of this book. With perhaps very few exceptions, the protesters of 1989 were not knowledgeable about China’s past or aware of what had taken place in the 1620s on the same ground now occupied by Tiananmen Square.4 Even so, scholarly commentary has called attention to the place of China’s national self-obsession and persistent traditionalism in the story of Tiananmen in 1989. It...

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