Bao Junya (Zhang Jing)
Gong Zhi Ge is a kind of good book widely circulated in ancient Chinese civil society, which guides people's daily moral practice by enumerating abstract concepts such as good and evil deeds and quantifying merit and wrong. Cynthia Joanne Brokaw's book Meritorious Qualities: The Moral Order of Ming and Qing Society focuses on the widespread social phenomena of meritorious deeds during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and is the first monograph in the non-Chinese world to discuss this issue in detail. Bao Received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and has taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon, and Ohio State University, and is now a professor of history and East Asian studies at Brown University in the United States, mainly engaged in the study of ancient Chinese social and cultural history and book history.
"Meritorious Character: Social Change and Moral Order in the Ming and Qing Dynasties", by Bao Junya, translated by Du Zhengzhen and Zhang Lin, published by Shanghai People's Publishing House in July 2021, 318 pages, 75.00 yuan
The book "Meritorious Qualities: Social Change and Moral Order in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" was developed on the basis of your doctoral dissertation, why did you become interested in the merits and demerits of traditional Chinese society?
Bao Junya: The reasons why I initially wanted to study merit were not the same as the reasons that supported my research later, I was very interested in the field of social history and intellectual history, and I wanted to know what people believed and how the way they thought affected their lives. On the other hand, like many American scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, I was interested in the beliefs and lives of non-elite members of traditional Chinese society, in other words, ordinary people who had little education and did not have a lot of social resources— and I still have a strong interest in them. It has both intellectual and social history significance, so it gives me a good opportunity. There is a concept of a supernatural reward system in the merits, which belongs to the field of intellectual history, and the merits teach people how to accumulate merit in order to seek blessings, which is also a manual to guide the daily life of ordinary people.
But soon I realized I was wrong. I thought that merit was a study of popular thought, but merit was actually created by members of the elite, so it cannot be used directly as a reflection of the commoner's ideas.
On the other hand, at that time I was very interested in Chinese good books, I read mr. Tadao Sakai's works, at first I read the English article "The popular education movement of the late Ming", in which he talked about the merits of this kind of good book, and later I read his famous book "Chinese Good Book Research", I was deeply attracted by merit, because this type of good book advocates that morality can be quantified and can be calculated, which makes me full of interest and full of questions. What exactly does quantitative ethics mean? And how does the quantification of morality affect people's perceptions of good deeds? That's why I became interested in the study of meritocracy.
In the book "Gong Gong Ge", Yuan Huang (1533-1606, 1586 Jinshi) is a unique figure, who devoted himself to the publishing industry after the eunuch journey came to an end, which had a great influence on the popularity of the late Ming Dynasty Gong Pass. Yuan Huang's concept of "establishing a life" has a certain revolutionary enlightenment color, do you think he reflects a common trend at that time, or is he an outlier in the society in which he lives?
Bao Junya: I think Yuan Huang may be both. First of all, Yuan Huang belonged to a more radical branch of the Yangming School (Taizhou School), and in his "Li Feng", Yuan Huang advocated that people could listen to their own inner voice and decide their own destiny. He was a member of a great trend of thought in the late Ming Dynasty. He is also involved in publishing activities outside of his or her credentials, such as the Book of Lifting. Although the book is not designed for the people at the bottom, this kind of book has effectively helped many ordinary people who have not received much education to improve their performance in the imperial examination. However, the concepts he showed in his meritorious qualities may not be able to be recognized by Wang Yangming. His proposition is also contradictory, people should do good deeds without expecting returns, but if they do not seek returns, how can they calculate how much merit they have accumulated? Other members of the Yangming school must have sensed the contradiction as well, and Liu Zongzhou objected to Yuan Huang's interpretation of the concept of merit and transgression (Liu Zongzhou advocated only recording his own faults to avoid conscious accumulation of merits).
On the other hand, Yuan Huang's family background is very unusual, and he can be said to be an outsider of the elite class. His ancestors had been banned from participating in the imperial examination for three generations for opposing Zhu Di's usurpation of the throne. In Yuan Huang's generation, he was the first descendant to be eligible to participate in the imperial examination, and he had considerable pressure on him, which was also an unusual aspect of him.
What do you think is the reason for this change in the concept of meritocracy in your book, which has evolved from a germ of ideas with the color of "establishing one's destiny" and challenging the hierarchy to a moral guide for maintaining social stability? How should this shift be viewed?
Bao Junya: The reason for the change lies in the title of the book, Social Change and Political Change. The Jiangnan region where Yuan Huang is located is a region full of vitality and vitality, there are many non-elite people, good at grasping social opportunities, becoming rich, among the upper class, the society is full of business opportunities and mobility, such a social environment, very suitable for Yuan Huang's concept of "establishing a destiny". But at the same time, there were clear social tensions in the early seventeenth century. Tenant farmers' resistance to rent occurred frequently, and eventually a peasant uprising led by Li Zicheng broke out, which eventually overthrew the Ming Dynasty. So it's also a tumultuous society. This change is a tragic change for the scholar class, and it seems to be a revelation, proving that they have not fulfilled their duties and made society stable and orderly. Therefore, there was a mood of reflection among the scholars and doctors in the early Qing Dynasty, reflecting on what went wrong and why the Han Dynasty was replaced by the Manchus. "Peach Blossom Fan" condenses this reflection, as well as Gu Yanwu. One consequence of the reflection is that it was due to the refusal of the radical Yangming school literati to perform their duties of governing the people. Thus, in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, there was a reaction to this new trend of thought, denying the interpretation of Confucianism by the late Ming and Yang Schools, and returning to a more traditional and conservative Confucian philosophy. Social order and etiquette were reinforced.
In this social environment, mobility is discouraged. Society should get back on track, which requires people to do their duty. Therefore, the merits and demerits have shifted from emphasizing "establishing a destiny", that is, deciding one's own destiny, to persuading security to keep to oneself, maintaining the hierarchical system, and maintaining social stability. Therefore, I think that a series of social and political upheavals at the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties led to changes in the social functions of meritorious characters.
In addition, there is also a change in the merits and faults, Yuan Huang claims that the accumulation of goodness can bring about the rewards of this life, while the reward promised by the merits of the early Qing Dynasty is beyond this life and is reflected in future generations. This notion of afterlife rewards is somewhat reverting to the early twelfth century when the merits were first formed. People accumulate goodness not for the sake of worldly rewards in this life, but for the sake of blessings for their children and grandchildren. This is not to say that Yuan Huang denies that Ji Shan can bless his descendants, he just emphasizes the rewards of this life.
In this sense, can you talk about the transformation of religion by secular authority in traditional societies, when merit and transgression became a moral guide for maintaining social stability in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and whose supernatural conception of merit and transgression had been a religious one?
Bao: The whole system of merit is based on the belief in supernatural retribution. Yuan Huang's expression in the "Li Feng" reflects that he did believe. The early Qing Dynasty's merits and faults, the premise of encouraging social stability is also this concept of supernatural reward. However, many scholars in the Qing Dynasty did not believe it, but just thought it was useful. In the preface to the Qing Dynasty's Meritorious Character, some authors will say that I do not believe it, but I think that the concept of meritorious belief can prompt ordinary people to abide by order and keep to themselves, which is very useful.
The popularity of merit is mainly promoted by the literati class, and the government may support it from time to time, but as far as I know, there is no intention to promote it. Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang promulgated books such as the Great Curse, which, although not meritorious, had a broad effect of persuasion and enlightenment, and promised that if the provisions in the book were followed, there would be some kind of reward, so it may be said that the government also has some role in promoting the popularization of good books. During the Shunzhi period, the emperor ordered the publication of the "Taishang Induction Chapter" to be awarded to the courtiers. A Qing Dynasty version of the Taishang Induction also contained a text telling local officials how to teach the people, so local officials may have used these texts to educate the people.
I have not seen any record of government censorship or destruction of merits. Of course, there are many people who criticize the merits, but the merits are not texts with a rebellious nature. Although Yuan Huang encouraged the use of merit and merit to rise to the upper echelons of society, the essence of merit and merit is to persuade people to be good and pursue worldly returns. The Qing government conducted a different kind of censorship, examining texts that were politically threatening or immoral. The review of the quality of books is mainly aimed at the book of the industry. But while I haven't seen it, it doesn't mean that the government has never examined it properly. It is more modern governments that want to extinguish superstition. I've also seen a 1920s meritocracy that instructs users on how to become a qualified communist, and it can be seen that this form of merit can be exploited at different times.
Meritorious qualities are very popular among the Ming and Qing scholars, what is its actual moral indoctrination effect?
Bao Junya: The evidence about the reading of meritorious qualities is fragmentary and even subjective. After the book was published, I received feedback from all over the world, many of whom remembered that my grandmother in Shanghai or Singapore had a meritorious book. In another example, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese Mantetsu Survey Department found during a survey in North China that there were almost no books in the homes of poor North China peasants, and if anything, it was this kind of cheap merit. I have also seen traces of use in Japanese libraries, and some people have written down some of their own accumulated figures in the merits. The merit of publishing is also regarded as a kind of work, but the number of publications cannot be regarded as the number of books to be read. These are soft evidences that have indeed been widely read and used.
But this also raises an interesting question, how is merit and function used? I have seen some of them arranged according to the month, each day corresponds to the "work" column and the "pass" column, and there is a total at the end of the month. This is a relatively simple typography, and the user only needs to fill in the basic values. I've also seen some of the grid-like typography. There are also some merits that do not have tables, only text, and the user must record it themselves. But people write down numbers, not what they do.
This raises another interesting question, which is that it is easy for people to use merit to do gaming, to do a lot of small good deeds, and to get a high score by the standard of merit and fault to offset their own great evil. There is a character in George Orwell's novel The Burmese Years, who believes in supernatural rewards and therefore constantly donates money to the temple, believing that if he donates enough money, he can eliminate the evil things he has done.
Therefore, it is difficult to measure the impact of merit on people's moral realm, which is a difficult question to answer. Although Benjamin Franklin of america (1706-1790) did not invent anything like this, he did say that at the end of the day one should reflect on what one has done and record it as a book that binds oneself. Although there are many problems with merit and transgression itself, we can see that the vitality of this moral self-restraint is not limited to traditional China.
How did some of the dominant paradigms and classical debates in Chinese studies in the 1970s influence you?
Bao Junya: I did not deliberately respond to these questions in the book, but these issues are unavoidable, and they filled the academic atmosphere at that time. My classmates in graduate school were interested in thinking about how to overturn the "stagnation theory," so my research theme also wanted to reflect change rather than stagnation. It is also true that there have been major changes in such good books as meritocracy, and they may seem similar, but in almost a century, the concept has changed significantly.
The debate about whether there was a "bud of capitalism" in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties was also very influential at the time. This is not because the final discussion came to a yes or no conclusion. The precondition for this debate is highly questionable, namely that China must go through a stage of capitalism to enter socialism, and that the economic thrust of late Ming society is not necessarily capitalism. However, a series of excellent studies around this issue have made people aware of the various economic activities and economic forms of Chinese society at that time, which had not been well studied before, so this series of debates has greatly promoted the field of economic history, although I am not an economic historian, but it is very meaningful to discuss the changes that have taken place in society from an economic point of view.
I was also influenced by my undergraduate teacher, Ke Wen. He stressed that the study of China's history should start from China itself, rather than viewing China from a Western perspective and standard. Professor Schwartz was my mentor at Harvard, he was a brilliant historian of ideas, and I really enjoyed his classes. At that time, there was a popular practice in American historiography to compare Chinese thinkers with Western thinkers to see which Western thinker was most similar to a Certain Chinese thinker. Therefore, there are articles comparing Wang Yangming to Heidegger, or to Habermas. Professor Schwartz did not do this, he is the kind of scholar who studies the history of Chinese thought from the historical context of China itself.
The research of Japanese scholars also had a great influence on me. My PhD thesis was basically done in Japan. At the University of Tokyo, I studied with Mr. Tadao Sakai. The University of Tokyo has a deep tradition in socio-economic history, and I learned a lot there, including the traditional Chinese land leasehold relationship, the late Ming Dynasty tenant peasant anti-rent movement, and so on. Although the connection between merit and tenant relationship is not so direct, you can better understand it when you know more about the social context in which the text is produced, such as what probably happened when you wrote the book. Frequent slavery has worried many elite literati about the collapse of the social order, which has also affected how they perceive and use meritocracy.
Mr. Tadao Sakai also helped me tremendously in finding materials. In those days (the 1970s and 1980s), it was almost impossible for Americans to go to China to do research on China, especially the study of good books around the belief in supernatural merit, which involved "feudal superstitions", which was even more inappropriate. Fortunately, there are many Ming and Qing dynasty meritorious collections in Japan, so I have access to many precious historical materials in Japan. It is regrettable that some of Japan's collection of books were collected from China during the Japanese colonial process. After the publication of this book ("Meritorious Qualities"), a great deal of research on meritorious qualities has emerged, which proves without a doubt that there are still a large number of meritorious qualities in libraries in China and around the world, and the number must be much more than I have studied in the book. However, the perspective of Japanese scholars asking questions is different from that of Chinese scholars, and the questions they are interested in are sometimes not necessarily of Chinese scholars, so to some extent, the Japanese collection is a supplement to the collection of Chinese libraries.
So, when I was studying, I was surrounded by dynamic new ideas about how to study China, and I thought I was very, very fortunate to learn how to do rigorous and meticulous research at the University of Tokyo.
The new cultural history and the history of European books in the 1980s can be seen from the conclusions of this book and the shift in your research interests since then, and you have paid more attention to issues related to book history and print culture since then.
Bao Junya: There are two things that have pushed me from studying the merits to studying the social history of books. One of the thrusts is what I think is where the book doesn't do well. At the end of the book, I talked about a little bit of ductious publishing, circulation, and reading, and I found myself with only a few sporadic materials, and it was not very systematic. I realized that this was a big problem, and in order to measure the effects of merit, we had to grasp the production of books, where they were published, where they were sold, what editions they had, how they were circulated, and I found that this part of history was not completed at the time.
The second thrust was what you call the history of books (histoire du livre), and I was also reading a lot of European book studies at the time, including Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier and many other scholars. I think that books are so important in traditional societies, why don't scholars study Chinese books as much as they study the impact of European books on European society? In fact, there were a lot of relevant studies at that time, but I didn't notice it. For example, Mr. Yasushi Ohki of the University of Tokyo. Chinese scholars study books from the perspective of bibliographic literature and versionology, which has been a long tradition in China for centuries, but this approach is a completely different issue from the history of Books or the history of book society in Europe. I love books, so I wanted to pioneer this very interesting area of study. Of course, the historical conditions of China and Europe are different, so it is impossible to ask exactly the same questions, but there are indeed some problems that are common.
The keywords Book Culture and Print Culture are frequent in your research topics, so what are the similarities and differences in the emphasis between the two?
Bao Junya: Book culture and the history of printing culture are closely related but different. Scholars, myself, sometimes use them less rigorously, so it is really necessary to distinguish what they are. Printing culture should include all printed materials, of course, including printed books, but also newspapers, single printed materials such as New Year paintings, religious images, business cards, advertisements, etc., most printed materials should belong to the category of print culture. Book culture, of course, also includes printed books made by all printing methods (woodcuts, movable type, lithographs, lead printing), but also includes manuscripts. There is certainly some overlap between the two concepts. In addition, printing culture includes many printing technologies that were once popular in East Asia, from wood engraving, metal and wood, and ceramic movable type before the nineteenth century, to mechanized movable type printing, lithography, lead printing, and now digital printing technology that entered East Asia after the nineteenth century.
Thirty years have passed since the English edition of your book was published in English and reprinted in Chinese translation, so if you had the opportunity to write a preface to the Chinese translation, what would you write?
Bao Junya: I think I will write about the issues that we just discussed, about the concepts and practices of meritocracy, and how people continue to use it in the contemporary era. There is still something in contemporary China and the United States that embodies this concept of quantifying morality and reward for merit. China has a credit reporting system and a social credit scoring system, while in the United States there is a credit reporting system, which is also a system that quantifies moral standards in numbers. When a person needs to buy a house or a car, the bank will check this number to assess whether the person is economically responsible and trustworthy, and these practices of quantifying moral qualities do not only exist in traditional Chinese society. The credit system does not have any supernatural beliefs, and the credit rating in the United States does not have religious overtones, these are completely secular systems, but there are some common ideas that the number can represent a person's qualities, which is still very interesting.
You have recently been conducting research on the book culture and Shu studies of the southwest region of the Qing Dynasty, can you brief the readers of the Shanghai Review of Books about your research progress and findings?
Bao Junya: I am currently working on two major research projects, but because of the epidemic, I can't go to China and have to brake urgently. One such study is about the Zunjing Academy in Chengdu at the end of the nineteenth century. Zunjing Academy was founded in 1874 by Zhang Zhidong and some local gentry, at first to teach Sinology to Sichuan students, the academy also published classics books, and later turned to zhigongyang studies, in 1898 Zunjing Academy participated in the restoration and reform movement, began to publish the academy's periodical "Shu Journal", the content of the Shu Journal covers a wide range, there are about the reform of the law, there are edicts, there are also articles on Confucian morality and ethics, Western legal politics, etc., is an interesting publication. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Zun Jing College was integrated into the school system of modern higher education.
I am interested in studying the publishing history of the Dzun Ching College, which reflects what the Dzun Ching College has taught its students, and I am also interested in the people who study at the Dzun Shing College. Zun Jing Shu was very effective in training students to pass the imperial examinations, and some of the students later became quite important officials in the late Qing Dynasty. When they left Sichuan to become officials in Beijing and were exposed to broader national policies, they were committed to forming a regional academic school identity called "Shu Studies." Members of them also competed to define what "Shu Xue" was. In short, this project studies both publishing and people and is an interesting project.
My other plan is to continue my research on commercial publishing in Huwan, Jiangxi, and I will continue to study the engraving and mass publishing. My last visit to China was in 2017, and I was scheduled to visit China again in 2020, but then the global outbreak of the epidemic has forced my research project to be suspended, which is very frustrating. Hopefully everything will be okay as soon as possible.
(Thanks to Mr. Zhang Yekai, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Brown University, and Mr. Huang Xiaofeng, editor of The Paper, for their assistance.) ）