Seminars

This paper begins with the question of why “the people” (i.e. the demos) in late archaic Greece (in some cases, at least) were able to institutionalize certain forms of political power, and why “the people” (i.e. the 國人) in Spring-and-Autumn China were not. It argues against the view that democratization was an elite-driven process (in the Greek example), in which elites mobilized the dēmos with the goal of creating more egalitarian poleis. It further contends that even if the emergence of democracy in late archaic Greece may have required the development of certain egalitarian practices, these practices have parallels in our evidence from Spring-and-Autumn China. The paper focuses on two examples of these parallels: assemblies and the emergence of written laws. Establishing these parallels, it suggests, may help us to challenge some of our assumptions regarding the development of political institutions in each context.

Although Chinese culture has been regarded as a “shame culture” by many scholars for a long time, the idea of chi (shame) itself, as an ethical and political concept in the Chinese philosophical tradition, has not yet been systematically examined. In this paper, I place the idea of chi in the ethical and political structure of early China and explore its unique meaning in the Chinese context. I argue that the idea of chi is not only a moral/ethical concept, but also a political concept that is closely linked to some of the most important elements of zheng (politics). It is a key point connecting morality and politics, virtue and action, and the individual and the state. (Keywords: chi, shame culture, zheng, virtue, action)

Prof. Zhang will present a chapter from a book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Legality in China. This chapter finds that law and legality provide the Party-state with significant amounts of perceived sociopolitical legitimacy even when they serve to strengthen governmental control and dominance. Specifically, the Chinese public is more likely to ideologically accept controversial constraints upon their freedom when those constraints are issued in a legalized fashion. This chapter makes four specific observations to suggest that across the long arc of modern Chinese history, political and intellectual elites seemed to collectively accept normatively thin understandings of law and legality to a far greater extent than what classical Confucianism could tolerate. In fact, much of this acceptance emerged as an explicit rejection of Confucian political morality.

Despite its importance in Chinese culture, the Book of Changes (Yijing 易經, Zhouyi 周易), one of Five Classics of Confucianism, often eludes our understanding, either in Chinese or in translation. Fortunately, newly excavated texts and advances in historical linguistics have facilitated reconstruction of the early Western Zhou (ca. 1046-771 BCE) meanings. By explaining seemingly ancient cultural aspects such as omens, and also explicating archaic linguistic properties such as polysemy, parataxis, and isolating syntax, the presentation will show how the texts can be understood as based on the experiences of everyday life in early China.

Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-1777) believes the set of contested desires called “human desires” (renyu 人欲), which are deemed ethically problematic by the lights of the moral orthodoxy of his time, are in fact important constituents of virtuous character. Dai proposes that there is a better moral epistemology and metaethics (his own and Mengzi’s) which doesn’t trivialize them. The paper is an attempt to offer the first close reading and careful assessment of his argument that orthodox (Zhu Xi-style) Neo-Confucianism trivializes human desires to negative effect.