The sparse words and long reach of Han Yu

Han Yu 韓愈

Han Yu is a literary giant of China’s Tang Dynasty with whom I have dealt only briefly, and actually should have dealt with far more prior to now. I’ve read some of his essays in translation. Not for nothing is he considered the greatest of the Eight Masters, an equivalent (if my gentle Chinese readers and friends will pardon the ‘barbarism’) to our Chaucer or Shakespeare! Even in translation, the elegance, the brilliance and the moral power of his work comes through clearly. Unlike prior writers of prose and official essays, Han Yu’s writings are concise and written in a down-to-earth language, but his words carry a great deal of weight.

The prosaïst’s best-known work in English, the ‘Memorial on the Bone of Buddha’ 諫迎佛骨, doesn’t quite catch him at his best, but is still quite powerful. It is an anti-Buddhist polemic which takes the form of a memorial to the Emperor, warning him to be afraid of the un-Chinese superstitions, theatrics and excesses of the followers of the ‘barbarian’ faith. Specifically, he warns that the Buddhist creed will lead young men to neglect their parents, in violation of their filial obligations. Buddhist monasticism will lead them to a selfish celibacy (and Han Yu had a similar critique of Daoist eremitism). It will lead them to turn their backs on the world, to forgo the use of meat in ritual sacrifices, and – worst of all – to cut their hair and mutilate themselves (‘burning heads and searing fingers’), thus dishonouring the bodies that Heaven and their parents gave them. Han Yu accuses the Buddha (not entirely unfairly, in light of Gautama’s personal life), that ‘he did not recognise the relationship between prince and subject, nor the sentiments of father and son’.

And in the veneration of the relic of Buddha’s finger-bone in particular, he saw something of a sacrilege. Like Orthodox Christians, it must be said, the Chinese classical culture frowned on cremation or on any way of disposing the body that would lead it to decay. It was commendable, from a classical Confucian perspective, to inter the body of a loved one quickly. There were strong prohibitions against disinterment. Preparing thick coffins and dressing the dead body with jade so as to preserve it from decay were common practices. The ‘dry and rotten’ (kuxiu 枯朽) member of the body, even of a holy man, exposed to the air and to direct view, was ‘loathsome’ (xionghui 兇穢) to Han Yu’s sensibilities.

It’s understandable, but somewhat unfortunate, that one of his more eristic essays (and he was indeed capable of delivering some real jeremiads when his hackles were up) has earned this greatest of prose masters the greatest fame. Other of his essays, like the ‘Farewell to Poverty’ 送窮文, and the ‘Ultimatum to the Crocodiles of Chaozhou’ 祭鱷魚文 show a highly imaginative mind and a ready and active – if quite dry – wit. And he cared deeply, as a true Confucian gentleman ought to do, for the students under his tutelage. But it was the ‘Memorial on the Bone of Buddha’, along with ‘On the Origin of the Way’ 原道 which sparked something of a revolution in later, particularly Song and Ming Dynasty, Confucian thinking. His engagements with, and his moral indictments of, the Buddhist and Daoist traditions shaped and influenced practically the entirety of the Song-Ming ‘mind Confucian’ or lixue 理學 movement that would follow him. Equally importantly, he placed his stamp on Confucian philosophy by showing a marked preference for the writings of Mencius to those of Xunzi or Yang Xiong. Comparing the three Confucian philosophers, Han Yu said: ‘When Mengzi died, [the Way] did not succeed in being transmitted. Xunzi and Yang Xiong grasped parts of it but not its essence; they spoke of it but not in detail.’ This was a preference on his part, not a prejudice – he was versed in all three authors, had a high opinion of them, and believed they all carried deep insights. But Han Yu’s preference for Mencius over Xunzi would come to influence those of later neo-Confucians of the Song and Ming Dynasties – particularly Zhu Xi, who codified the post-mediæval Confucian canon and gave Mencius a place of honour among the Books.

Han Yu’s wit and breadth of learning, and the depth of his concise prose, are all worth appreciating in their own right. He could be pugilistic in defence of what he considered the Chinese cultural legacy, but he was never partizan-minded. But to me, his long reach in the development of Confucian philosophy, particularly neo-Confucianism is also of great interest.

Beauty Wang and Poet Wang

Wang Zhaojun 王昭君

Wang Anshi, the great Song dynasty reformer who had a deep influence on Henry Wallace and the New Deal reforms here in the US, was far more renowned for being a prosaïst than a poet, and indeed was ranked among the Eight Masters of his age, alongside many of the early neo-Confucians (including the pioneer of neo-Confucianism, Han Yu, on whom I will write a later blog post). But early in his career, he wrote two poems in praise and sympathy of Wang Zhaojun, the Western Han-era beauty who brought peace between the Han Dynasty and the Xiongnu Federation through her heqin with Huhanye Chanyu. These two poems, intended to be read together, were titled the Mingfei Qu 明妃曲; here they are in the original:

明妃初出漢宮時，淚濕春風鬢腳垂。
低徊顧影無顏色，尚得君王不自持。
歸來卻怪丹青手，入眼平生幾曾有；
意態由來畫不成，當時枉殺毛延壽。
一去心知更不歸，可憐著盡漢宮衣；
寄聲欲問塞南事，只有年年鴻雁飛。
家人萬里傳消息，好在氈城莫相憶；
君不見咫尺長門閉阿嬌，人生失意無南北。

~~~

明妃初嫁與胡兒，氈車百輛皆胡姬。
含情慾語獨無處，傳與琵琶心自知。
黃金桿撥春風手，彈看飛鴻勸胡酒。
漢宮侍女暗垂淚，沙上行人卻回首。
漢恩自淺胡恩深，人生樂在相知心。
可憐青塚已蕪沒，尚有哀弦留至今。

The English translations, by Notre Dame’s China classics expert Dr. Yang Xiaoshan (with a very minor cosmetic alteration in brackets by myself), are as follows:

As Brilliant Lady just came out of the Han palace,
Her tears moistened [the] spring breeze, her temple locks drooping.
Pacing up and down, gazing at her own shadow, so pallid.
She still caused her lord-king to lose control.
Turning back, he blamed no one but the painter:
When have I ever seen anything like this in my life?
Her mien and manner could not be captured in paint,
At once causing Mao Yanshou to be wrongly killed.
Once she departed, she knew in her heart she would not return;
Sadly, she wore out her dresses from the Han palace.
She wished to send a messenger to ask about things south of the border,
But year after year there were only wild geese flying by.
Word came from home ten thousand miles away:
Take care in the city of felt tents—don’t think on us.
Haven’t you seen how Ajiao was confined in the nearby Changmen Palace?
In life’s disappointment, there is no south or north.

~~~

When Brilliant Lady was just about to be married to the barbarian fellow,
There were a hundred felt-canopied coaches, all with barbarian maids.
Wishing to talk about feelings, but with absolutely no one to turn to,
She conveyed through the pipa what only she knew in her heart.
As she plucked the golden plectrum with her hand of spring breeze,
She watched the flying geese while playing,
　　and called for more barbarian wine.
As maids from the Han palace shed tears furtively,
Passers-by on the desert couldn’t help turning around:
Han’s favour is shallow and the barbarian’s deep;
The joy of life is to be with your heart-to-heart intimate.
Sadly, Green Mound has disappeared beneath the weeds;
Still, the sound of the sorrowful strings lingers on to this day.

Yang remarks that some of the lines in these poems were considered ‘morally problematic’, though he also makes clear that the ‘moral’ critique of these poems seems to have arisen later in Wang Anshi’s career, as the more ‘mainstream’ neo-Confucians of the day began criticising his New Policies on ideological grounds – these poems were considered proof of Wang’s ‘treachery’. But it’s interesting that the passages that Yang discusses as being ‘scandalising’ – namely: ‘In life’s disappointment, there is no south or north’ in the first poem, and ‘Han’s favour is shallow and the barbarian’s deep; The joy of life is to be with your heart-to-heart intimate’ in the second – are considered so because they contradict the contemporary principle of Hua-Yi zhi bian 華夷之辨, the ‘separation of Chinese and barbarian’. To the sensible mainstream poets of the day, the heqin of a Chinese beauty to a barbarian prince was an unmitigated tragœdy. Wang Anshi takes a slightly different view. He does emphasise Wang Zhaojun’s sorrow as she makes her way out past the frontier, but he also drops hints that her life among the ‘barbarians’ wasn’t wholly a bad one, and that they appreciated her in ways that the Han nobility did not.

Yang attributes this largely to Wang’s personal penchants for originality, contrariety and competitiveness, and his liking for the contemporary ‘volte’ (fan’an 翻案) fashion in Song poetry: what Yang calls his ‘poetics of disagreement’. And Yang is certainly correct: Wang was as markedly an ‘eccentric’ in his literary life, and this was genuinely held against him later. But I have to wonder if there isn’t something else going on. It is easy to overstate the differences among literary men of the same age, of course. Like most of the neo-Confucians of his generation, Wang Anshi dearly loved the Mencius 孟子 and preferred the thought of Mengzi to that of any other classicist following Confucius. But when it came to writing and defending his New Policies (which he had begun working on as early as 1058 with his Ten Thousand Word Memorial 萬言書 but which didn’t begin to be implemented until 1067), Wang Anshi borrowed from a broader array of sources, and turned to a synthesis of Old Text (Zhou li 周禮) and New Text (Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳) sources, in contradistinction to his contemporaries’ growing preference for the Zhongyong 中庸 and the Daxue 大學. (The reason for this general turn of preference away from the Han-era classical scholars and toward Mencius, traceable to that superlatively sublime prosaïst and moralist of the Tang Dynasty, Han Yu, is something I will approach in a later blog post.) This also might be explained by Wang’s contrarian personality, if not for the fact that Wang genuinely believed that his approach was more in line with the thought of the ancients.

So I have to wonder if his approach to the legend of Wang Zhaojun doesn’t also partake, even if indirectly, of a certain New Text School sensibility which blurs the distinctions between Chinese and ‘barbarian’ when it came to his treatment of Wang Zhaojun’s emotional state among the Xiongnu tribes. The influence of Han-era classicism on Wang Anshi’s early worldview is something I definitely want to look into further.

EDIT: I plan on keeping this blog post for a later series, but my recent studies seem to indicate my view of Wang Anshi’s philological interests, stated here, to be extremely naïve. He was emphatically not a New Text scholar in any way, shape or form. Wang considered the entirety of the Spring and Autumn Annals, in fact, to be a ‘broken, musty old court scribbling’ (duanlan chaobao 斷爛朝報), and strongly preferred the Rites of Zhou which, in concert with his emphasis on the Mencius, would seem to indicate a favourable attitude toward Old Text philology. If this entire framework is even useful for understanding Song policy and poetics, which in fact it may not be: the philological controversies died down very quickly after the fall of the Han dynasty and would not surface again until the late Ming.

Linking three systems 通三統: a Confucian cosmopolitanism

The Qing army during the Taiping Rebellion, flying the wuseqi 五色旗

子張問：「十世可知也？」子曰：「殷因於夏禮，所損益，可知也；周因於殷禮，所損益，可知也；其或繼周者，雖百世可知也。」

Zi Zhang asked whether the affairs of ten ages after could be known. Confucius said, “The Yin dynasty followed the regulations of the Xia; wherein it took from or added to them may be known. The Zhou dynasty has followed the regulations of Yin; wherein it took from or added to them may be known. Some other may follow the Zhou, but though it should be at the distance of a hundred ages, its affairs may be known.” (Analects 2.23)

In Wang Hui’s masterful China from Empire to Nation-State, the excellent Chinese neoleftist historian explores the question of why China did not become an ethno-state after the fall of the Qing Dynasty – which, after all, had held together a collection of different ethnicities (Manchu, Mongol, Han, Tibetan and Uyghur), all of which spoke different languages and practised different faiths, largely through the force of military discipline and personal loyalty to the Emperor. In terms of linguistic affinity, why did the Han Chinese not join forces with the Vietnamese, the Koreans and the Japanese – all of whom could be considered part of the linguistic Sinosphere as all of them used Chinese characters? Why instead did they choose a policy of racial integration: to keep all the old Qing-era ties with their non-Han subject peoples? Wang Hui argues persuasively that the post-Enlightenment European understandings of ‘nation’ and the assumed principles of modernisation which are supported by those understandings, are insufficient to explain China’s choice. He argues instead that there was a Confucian-influenced moral impetus behind the wuzu gonghe 五族共和 policy; the same as the Qing themselves had used to legitimate their rule over a vast multiethnic empire.

Wang Hui puts it this way, looking at the Qing-era sources:

For example, during the mid Qing period, New Text scholars reexamined the principles laid out in the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu fanlu) that honour ritual and stress trustworthiness, value trustworthiness over place of origin, and hold the importance of ritual over that of oneself to emphasize that any standard of deciding whether or not something was “Chinese” that was based on geography or “person” (ethnic identity) was out of line with the principles of ritual.

There’s our good old friend Dong Zhongshu again. Dong’s hermeneutics were back in favour during the Qing Dynasty, in part because those Han Chinese scholars sympathetic to the new dynasty and particularly the dynamic new emperor (who was emphatically not an ethnic Han, but who had adopted many Chinese practices and customs and who had cultivated friendships among the Chinese during his time on the throne) required a theory which allowed them to acknowledge his Chineseness. They turned to the Analects, particularly to passages like this one (a favourite of mine which I’ve quoted on occasion):

子欲居九夷。或曰：「陋，如之何！」子曰：「君子居之，何陋之有？」

The Master was wishing to go and live among the nine wild tribes of the east. Some one said, “They are rude. How can you do such a thing?” The Master said, “If a superior man dwelt among them, what rudeness would there be?” (Analects 9.14)

They also quoted the Analects passage at the top of the page, and placed it in light of Dong Zhongshu’s theory of ‘linking the three systems’ (tong santong 通三統). The scholars who followed Dong Zhongshu and his read of the Spring and Autumn Annals were particularly concerned with maintaining a certain cultural and political continuity that could hold between dynasties and minimise the threat of instability which naturally accompanied the transfer of the Mandate of Heaven (as it did between the Xia, the Yin and the Zhou), even if a ‘barbarian’ dynasty happened to possess it. The idea of racial or ethno-national continuity, something like which had come to the fore particularly during the Ming Dynasty (and later among its loyalists) was downplayed in favour of the idea of civic continuity (to deploy another slight Western anachronism) as expressed through ritual, music and institutional life. Wang Hui again:

References in their works to important themes from classical texts appear frequently in their work: “When Chinese become barbaric, they must be treated as barbarians” (Zhongguo [ru] yidi, ze yidi zhi 中国入夷狄，则夷狄之); “When barbarians enter China, they become Chinese” (yidi ru Zhongguo, ze Zhongguo zhi 夷狄入中国，则中国之); and “China is now completely barbaric” (Zhongguo yi yi xin yidi ye). All of these statements emphasize that ritual and culture (rather than geography or ethnicity) define the importance of “China” and offer a pointed critique of the view of China promoted by Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism that called for “separation between Chinese and foreigners 華夷之辨.”

Also, from the longer-form work by Wang Hui (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought), for which China from Empire to Nation-State serves as an introduction:

The statecraft theory of the New Text school took rituals as a basis and placed the political practice of the empire at the centre. When they revived the themes of the Confucians of the early Qing, they did not clearly differentiate between Chinese and barbarian, nor did they have the tendency to rebel, which lay concealed beneath early Qing orthodoxy. Rather, the New Text school scholars developed their theory based on the presupposition of the legitimacy of the empire and the transformation of history. This change in the emphasis of scholarship undoubtedly reflects the political reality of the Qing minority being rulers of a multi-ethnic empire.

Of course, this internal logic of breaking down ethnic barriers and emphasising the civic role of ritual was shaken grievously, as Wang Hui notes, by the sudden and jarring arrival of the Westphalian nation-state paradigm in which the Qing Empire quickly found itself forced to participate. It also led Kang Youwei, the leading New Text scholar in the mad new world of the Chinese nineteenth century, to undertake some bold leaps of philosophical thought which placed him on the far left fringe of contemporary politics. But his civic vision of a multi-ethnic China was somehow compelling enough to be embraced even by Sun Yat-sen’s Han-centric revolutionaries, even if the rooted grounding in Confucian ritualism Kang favoured had sadly fallen into disuse after the May Fourth movement.

Once again, though – the moral, cultural and intellectual resources for Chinese intelligentsia and people to resist Han chauvinism don’t have to be imported either from Maoist thought, or from liberal pluralism. The ritual, ‘institutional’ classicism of Dong Zhongshu itself contains a certain cosmopolitan outlook and character. Its detractors (and perhaps some of its supporters, as I suspect Wang Hui may be) might call it ‘progressive’, but I get the feeling Dong himself would prefer ‘humane’.

The New Text School’s theological critique of power

a modern artist’s depiction of Fan Ying 樊英

Just because I’m not done yet beating up on Yu Yingshi and his simplistic, crude and downright untrue caricature of institutional Confucianism (制度性的儒家), I am reposting this 1966 passage from Jack Dull’s history of the post-classical scholastic controversies which gave rise to institutional Confucianism. Read here his treatment of Fan Ying, a reclusive geomancer, chenwei scholar and institutional Confucian (I so call him because of his association with Dong Zhongshu and the New Text School) of the Han Dynasty. And then, judge for yourself if he is a ‘Confucianist who oppressed others’ or who ‘forbade criticism of [his] superiors’:

The fullest expression of this New Text esteem of Heaven as opposed to the emperor comes from the biography of Fan Ying. Fan was a widely recognized expert in the apocryphal texts and one of the few men credited with teaching them. Because of his fame, Emperor An summoned him to become an Erudite, the highest academic honor that could be bestowed upon anyone, but Fan Ying declined the position and refused to go to the capital. In A.D. 217, Emperor Shun, who was much more concerned with the scholarly world than was his predecessor, prepared an elaborate ritual by which to invite Fan to the court and again Fan refused. After the Emperor rebuked the local officials for not conveying Fan to the capital, Fan had no alternative. However, upon arriving in Lo-yang, he pleaded illness and declined to appear in court. Finally when he was bodily carried into the court, he refused to bow according to ritual to the Emperor.

Emperor Shun’s wrath was aroused at seeing his authority flounted by Fan Ying and he warned the obstinate scholar of the nature of imperial power:

I can allow you to live or I can kill you. I can make you noble or I can make you base. I can make you wealthy or I can make you poor. How is it that you treat with contempt my commands?

Fan’s answer was a blunt rebuttal of every point made by the Emperor:

Your servant received his alloted span from Heaven. If one lives and completes his alloted span, it is Heaven [that decides this]. If one dies and does not receives a full span it is Heaven’s [doing]. How can your majesty allow me to live? How can you kill me?

Your servant views a cruel ruler like he views an enemy. If I resolve not to stand in his court, can he make me noble? Even if I were among the ranks of the commoners and lived in poverty, I would be fully content with my lot. I shall not exchange my place for that of a ruler of a great state. Then can Your Majesty still make me base? Can your Majesty make your servant noble? Can you make your servant base?

If it were an improper remuneration then even though it were 10,000 bushels, your servant would not accept it. If something furthered my principles, then even though it was but a single-dish meal, I would not spurn it. How can Your Majesty enrich your servant? How can you impoverish your servant?

The Emperor was unable to make Fan Ying submit and ended by giving him special treatment. Although not a contemporary, the historian [Ban Gu] favored the Old Text School and gives what might well have been a contemporary Old Text characterization of Fan Ying in saying that Fan’s “fame was the most exalted and his slander the most extreme.”

Institutional Confucianism was, in fact, not a system of thought which supported the supremacy of the Emperor. That designation better (but still somewhat unfairly) describes the New Text School’s contemporary opponents, the Old Text School followers of Liu Xin (among whom are the historian Ban Gu and his sister Ban Zhao), because they saw the Emperor as the highest rational expression of humane authority. The New Text Scholars were theological personalists who stressed both the primacy and the benevolence of Heaven. However, modern-day commentators like Yu Yingshi mistake the New Text Scholars, the first Han-era institutional Confucians, for oppressors (or knowingly libel them as such) precisely because their critique of power is theological and not secular. It is rooted in Confucianism as a comprehensive doctrine, rather than in a modernist language of pluralism and instrumental rationality. But this very same theological critique allowed later New Text Scholars (like Gong Zizhen, Kang Youwei and Chen Huanzhang) to use the Confucian classics in remarkably radical ways: ways that stressed œconomic equity and reciprocality.

離人垂頸嘆

離人垂頸嘆
雛鴨戲水玩
鏡下錦龜游
躬葦擺其頭
樺柏伸晚霞
月虧爬其家
珍寶再易得
難比此瞬刻

- 郭明正，2017年6月3日

Wang, Wallace and proto-chartalism

Wang Anshi 王安石 at the Song court

Honest-to-God American Bull Moose and FDR veep Henry Agard Wallace is a name which deserves wider currency than it currently does, given that he was responsible for many of the more successful programmes of the New Deal. What is even less well-known than Wallace’s name, is that he was well-read in Chinese philosophy, and that he drank deep from the wells of New Text Confucianism in particular, by way of the Cantonese Confucian Chen Huanzhang, who in turn was a studious disciple of Kang Youwei. Wallace was particularly intrigued by the populist Green Shoots policy of Song Dynasty statesman Wang Anshi (who was himself connected in interesting ways with the New Text School). As Li Chaomin notes, not altogether uncritically:

The essence of the ideas of the American Ever-Normal Granary was from China. As Bean mentioned, however, it was supplemented with the policy of the non-recourse loan. The American Ever-Normal Granary in the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) had as its goal not only the stabilisation of commodity prices, as deriving from ancient Chinese practice, but also a farm income goal overseen by the Commodity Credit Corp (CCC) and a mechanism in the form of the non-recourse loan. This amounted to a modernised version of the Ever-Normal Granary and the Green Sprout Money scheme proposed by Wang Anshi.

The mechanisms of the American Ever-Normal Granary were similar to Wang Anshi’s scheme although the goals were different. The non-recourse loan is made by collateral in terms of crops, initially applied in the American farm belt and later made available to all US farmers. Such loans to farmers were made in accordance with the AAA to stabilise food prices and farm income. The CCC loses its right to recourse the loan once it is made. In order to obtain loans, farmers contract with the CCC on area planning, using crops as collateral. Either the loans are repaid with interest or the crops are taken by the CCC if the market price is lower than the target price. For the CCC, food price stability is the primary goal, and it decreases the loan amount whenever the interest rate is low and vice versa. Therefore, the interest rate is capped and the loan risk is borne by the CCC.

Wallace paid his own glowing tribute to Wang Anshi. He said that Wang had been confronted by problems that were almost identical to those faced by Roosevelt in 1933 and that the methods Wang employed were strikingly similar. Wang Anshi’s reforms ended up being frustrated in their implementation; nevertheless, Wallace thought that Wang Anshi had left an enduring impression in the Chinese tradition of statecraft and that what was beyond the reach of paternalistic statesmanship nine centuries ago was within the reach of democratic statesmanship today.

The green sprouts policy, which was part of Wang Anshi’s reform package called the New Policies (or the One-Whip Policies by his detractors) is described here by China historian Valerie Hansen:

Although much of the debate with the historicists was phrased in terms of the Dao, or way, and how to recover it, the underlying disagreement between the two groups concerned money. Suspicious of money, the historicists wanted to limit the government’s œconomic activities. They held that the money œconomy could not grow, and they thought that the traditional relationships among the wealthy and the poor needed no alteration. Wang Anshi and his followers took a diametrically-opposed stance: the government should intervene to hasten œconomic development, create prosperity, and draw in the higher tax receipts the government so desperately needed. Wang also believed that the traditional relationships between rich and poor required massive alteration [in favour of the poor].

Wang Anshi and his followers were infatuated with the potential of [fiat] money in a way that only the first generation to encounter it could be. They loved its many advantages. Unlike cloth and grain, it could not spoil and could be stored forever. It was liquid. Best of all, it could be produced—either by minting metal coins or even more expeditiously, by printing paper money…

Many of the reforms Wang instituted, the New Policies, were linked to money. He wanted to put all government employees, even those in the lowest positions, on cash salaries to replace the pay in kind they had previously been receiving… The most representative of the New Policies was called the Green Sprouts reforms, intended to relieve the chronic debt of the poor peasants. They always had to borrow money to buy seed to plant; when the harvest came in, they had to sell their crops at low prices, earning barely enough money to pay back the moneylenders. If they could break out of this cycle of debt, Wang argued, they would extricate themselves from the clutches of the local moneylenders, or engrossers, as he referred to them. As they became more prosperous, they could serve the empire better by paying taxes and performing military service. In the Green Sprouts reforms, Wang instituted what were called ever-level granaries; the granaries loaned grain to cultivators when they were short, to be repaid after the harvest. These loans were supplemented by the Green Sprouts loans made to peasants at planting time and to be paid back, with no interest, after the harvest. Wang hoped that these loans would enable cultivators to pay their taxes.

Wang Anshi’s plans, owing to poor implementation and climactic events beyond his control, did not materialise in his own time; and his career ended ignominiously. But his ideas about financing small-volume loans at zero-to-nominal interest rates to poor farmers was indeed ages ahead of its time and motivated by a populist anger at the treatment of smallholding farmers by wealthy mercantile interests. But even more so was his idea of widening the availability of credit by expanding the money supply by government fiat. Even though his medium of choice was copper (a state-controlled commodity) rather than the paper jiaozi 交子 which had been pioneered regionally by the Song government some decades earlier, his instincts with regard to the way money was supposed to work were in fact proto-chartalist. Not only were the problems the poor peasantry of the 11^th century Northern Song faced similar in ways that mirrored the problems of the impoverished inland farmers in 19^th century America, but Wang’s approach to them directly foreshadowed the goals, the methods and even the œconomic reasoning of the greenback movement and the subtreasury plan of the Farmers’ Alliance. That a Midwestern agrarian-populist statesman like Henry Wallace would find much to admire in an idiosyncratic institutional Confucian reformer from nine hundred years before may seem a bit far-fetched, but the confluence of ideas makes it quite understandable.

Hit the Books, for real

Private Confucian education appears to be a topic which is gaining some traction and attention from abroad (albeit attention loaded down with the usual tired nickel anti-PRC invective from FP and general hack-journalistic bloviation over the gaokao). The trend of Confucian private academies is one I did notice in English-language media some time back. It’s also one about which I expressed some scepticism on the basis that Confucian education cannot (if it is to be meaningful) merely consist in the modern rote pædagogies and memorisation-heavy learning methods which have been en vogue since the Republican era. Study of the Classics is beginning to take root in state schools as well, though there, of course, that latter caveat applies double.

The question that should be haunting the former, though, is this: what are the true aims of these private Confucian academies, particularly the exclusive ones that charge exorbitant tuitions and aim their pædagogies at the children of wealthy urban professionals? The Master himself was not in the business of training a new élite from the bones of the old – indeed, he had harsh words for the sons of privilege in his own age. And he would be insulted by the suggestions, both that he would seek to profit and that he would aim his education at a specific class. He demanded no tuition from his students – literally anyone who showed up at his threshold with a bundle of jerky and a true eagerness to learn found a welcome.

子曰：「自行束脩以上，吾未嘗無誨焉。」

The Master said, ‘From the man bringing his bundle of dried flesh for my teaching upwards, I have never refused instruction to anyone.’ (Analects 7.7)

子曰：「與其進也，不與其退也，唯何甚！人潔己以進，與其潔也，不保其往也。」

The Master said, ‘I admit people’s approach to me without committing myself as to what they may do when they have retired. Why must one be so severe? If a man purify himself to wait upon me, I receive him so purified, without guaranteeing his past conduct.’ (Analects 7.29)

子曰：「有教無類。」

The Master said, ‘In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.’ (Analects 15.39)

And Confucius was particularly hard on students who merely memorised the Odes but did not understand and could not apply them, and had not learned more than how to recite them:

子曰：「誦詩三百，授之以政，不達；使於四方，不能專對；雖多，亦奚以為？」

The Master said, ‘Though a man may be able to recite the three hundred odes, yet if, when entrusted with a governmental charge, he knows not how to act, or if, when sent to any quarter on a mission, he cannot give his replies unassisted, notwithstanding the extent of his learning, of what practical use is it?’ (Analects 13.5)

There is nothing at all wrong, of course, with training children in manners, having them respect elders and help the young, and teaching them to criticise the selfish materialism and rampant, atomistic individualism of the liberalising society around them, which is indeed what many of these private academies purport to do. And the question of funding for many of these academies is undoubtedly a thorny one. But aren’t those lessons wasted, if they do not follow the methods of the Master himself, who taught by example and not by rote? What can be learned by their students, if the administrations of these schools behave as selfishly and as individualistically as the society that they criticise?