Portraying Central Government Institutions: Historiography and Intellectual Accomodation in the High Ch'ing

Vol. 7, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1986 PORTRAYING CENTRAL GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND INTELLECTUAL ACCOMODATION IN THE HIGH CH'ING Quinton G. Priest The High Ch'ing (1736-1795) has been represented, until quite recently, as a graveyard of the promising intellectual trends toward a modern sensibility which had emerged in the Ming-Ch'ing transition period. These trends were crushed by the power and paranoia of an alien dynasty of conquest .1 Foremost among modern scholars to promote this view was Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (1873-1929), who saw a "new tide of thought" (hsin ssu-ch'ao) rising in the early decades of the Ch'ing dynasty, similar in spirit to the European Renaissance.2 The reforming potential of this "renaissance tide" (wen-i fu-hsing ch'ao), with its positivistic, objective philosophy and spirit of scientific inquiry, was squelched in the eighteenth century, according to Liang, by the repressive policies of the Manchu government.3 There followed a period in which scholars timidly avoided subjects of political and institutional reform, preferring instead to conduct "empirical research for the sake of empirical research and [to study the] classics for the sake of the classics."4 Following Liang, scholars have customarily divided the intellectual history of the Ch'ing dynasty into three broad periods: the seventeenth century, a heroic age of intellectual ferment, dominated by empirical research (k'ao-cheng) and statecraft (ching-shih chih-yung); the eighteenth century, prosperous and opulent, dominated by the scholasticism of Han learning (Han-hsueh); and the nineteenth century , marked by the rise of the New Text school (chin-wen hsueh-p'ai) and a return to the reformist programs of statecraft activism. The Ch'ien-lung 1 This article is a revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 22-24, 1985. I would like to thank Beatrice Bartlett, Samuel Chu, Charlotte Fürth, and John Henderson for their comments and criticisms, without however implicating them in errors of fact, interpretation, or presentation. 2 Liang, 1920:47. 3 Liang, 1929:1-31. 4 Liang, 1920:48-49. 27 2^Quinton G. Priest reign (1736-1796) in particular was characterized as an era of resplendent but oppressive monarchical power which controlled a subservient scholar class alternately through patronage and inquisition. The fundamental problem with this older interpretative framework is its tendency to portray statecraft and textual criticism as internally fragmented and discontinuous from Neo-Confucian intellectual traditions as a whole. Recently, scholars have provided new paradigmatic interpretations of late imperial intellectual history. The Japanese scholar Yamanoi Yu sees a slow devolution of late imperial Neo-Confucianism, from Ming "learning of the Mind" to Ch'ing empirical studies, as a process of developing "national consciousness."5 Yamanoi contends that an intervening stage of "learning for ordering practical affairs" was suppressed by the Manchu regime because of its reformist spirit. Ying-shih Yu in several important essays depicts Ch'ing learning as the "third stage" in the development of Neo-Confucian thought from the Sung onward. In his view, the traditional distinction between Sung learning as metaphysics and Han learning as empiricism was a myth invented by later advocates of the Tai Chen (1724-1777) school of Han learning to discredit rival schools.6 Finally, Lynn Struve has added some specificity to these paradigms by drawing a "portrait in transition" of a line of scholarly succession from Huang Tsung-hsi (1610-1695) to Ch'üan Tsu-wang (1705-1755), in the so-called "Eastern Chekiang" (Che-tung) school of historical studies.7 Struve's "portrait" presents convincing evidence that the followers of Huang Tsung-hsi strove to continue the practical orientation of their master , and to provide accurate historical scholarship to aid social and governmental stability.8 Although the original reformist impulse in early Ch'ing statecraft became attenuated in subsequent generations, historical studies remained the key element of their tradition. Institutional historians have yet to make the strides that intellectual historians have made in forging new interpretations of the late imperial political system. If a triumphant and despotic monarchy, ruling over a submissive and powerless scholar-official class, is central to understanding...