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CHAPTER 1 Ritual Figureheads In the vastness of four seas, among multitudes of people, [all] are ruled by a single person. Even among those whose power suffices to sever the norms and whose knowledge exceeds that of their age, none will not hurry to serve—is not it due to the basic norms of ritual? . . . Insofar as [a ruler] is not as evil as Jie and Zhou[xin], and [a minister] is not as benevolent as Tang and Wu, one to whom the people flock and who is decreed by Heaven—one should preserve the separation between the ruler and the minister even at the expense of prostrating [oneself and accepting] death! —Sima Guang The lines cited in the epigraph come from the opening paragraphs of Sima Guang’s (司馬光, 1019–1086 CE) masterpiece, The Comprehensive Mirror to Aid the Government (Zizhi tongjian 資治通鋻), arguably the most influential political -historical text of the second imperial millennium.1 In a few sentences,Sima Guang succinctly summarizes what he considers the quintessence of Chinese political culture: first, the existence of the universal and omnipotent monarch; second, the intrinsic link between the monarch’s power, the functioning of the ritual pyramid, and the preservation of the sociopolitical order in general; third, that the monarch should normally command the complete obedience of his subjects; and, finally, in certain extraordinary cases an evil ruler can— and should—be replaced.This replacement,however,as Sima Guang’s narrative convincingly shows, should alter only the name of the dynasty but not the monarchical foundations of the political order. A millennium later, and writing from an entirely different perspective, the leading reformist, Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873–1929), may have had a similar understanding in mind when he summarized Chinese history as having a single field of “progress,” that toward an ever more effective dictatorship.2 Many modern scholars share Sima Guang’s and Liang Qichao’s view of the ruler’s omnipotence as a quintessential feature of Chinese political culture. 13 Thus when Liu Zehua,the leading current scholar of Chinese political thought, sought to summarize his twenty-odd years of studies of China’s political culture , he used a term wangquanzhuyi 王權主義 (“monarchism”) as the title of his magnum opus.3 This term may serve as a useful departure point for my discussion. Can we indeed identify “monarchism” as a guiding principle of Chinese political culture? And if so, when and how did it emerge? Or, perhaps, was it essential to Chinese culture, just as ancestral cult and ritually based social gradations are supposed to be?4 What are its practical implications? Was it universally endorsed by Zhanguo thinkers, and if not, what were the dissidents’ alternatives? To what extent was monarchic rule religiously or philosophically stipulated, or was it primarily conceived as an administrative necessity? Were there any proposals of institutionalized limitations to the ruler’s authority,and if not, how did thinkers seek to limit the abuse of power by the sovereign?These questions will be addressed in the following four chapters. First, I outline the religious, ritual, and political background of Zhanguo views of rulership, particularly, the problematic of the Western Zhou (西周, c. 1046–1771) and Chunqiu legacy of ritually all-powerful, but politically weak, sovereigns. In Chapter 2 I trace various arguments in Zhanguo texts in favor of the ruler’s exaltedness, focusing specifically on the evolution of the ideal of a True Monarch, whose power was supposed to be absolute.Yet as Zhanguo thinkers realized,most if not all of the current rulers fell well short of the idealized True Monarch, and so they had to address the situation of absolute power being concentrated in the hands of a potentially inept sovereign.Some thinkers, whose views are discussed in Chapter 3, pondered about the ways to ensure that a truly competent monarch would occupy the throne.Their failure,in turn, gave way to more sober and yet more sophisticated attempts to prevent the abuse of power by mediocre rulers.In Chapter 4,by focusing on two major late Zhanguo thinkers, Xunzi (荀子, c. 310–218) and Han Feizi (韓非子, d. 233), I show that supporters of the ruler’s absolute authority simultaneously discouraged the rulers from active involvement in policy-making.The resultant contradiction between the ruler’s ostensible omnipotence and the minimization of his political involvement became a source of constant tension that plagued the Chinese empire ever afterward, as I shall demonstrate in the epilogue to Chapter 4. Religious Foundations of the Ruler’s Power In...

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