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Limits to
Autocracy
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LIMITS TO
AUTOCRACY
From Sung Neo-Confucianism
to a Doctrine of Political Rights
ALAN T. WOOD
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS, HONOLULU
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© 1995 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
95 96 97 98 99 00 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Alan Thomas.
Limits to autocracy : from Sung Neo-Confucianism to
a doctrine of political rights / Alan T. Wood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8248–1703–6
1. Political science—China—History. 2. China—Politics and
government. 3. Neo-Confucianism. I. Title.
JA84.C6W66 1995
320’.0951—dc20 95–9836
320’.0951—dc20 95–CIP6
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on
acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Council on
Library Resources
Designed by Kenneth Miyamoto
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To my parents,
Herb and Katherine Wood,
my wife, Wei-ping, and
Brian and Irene
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1. Introduction 1
Part One
The Historical Dimension
2. The Background of Neo-Confucianism 25
3. Background of the Ch’un-ch’iu Commentaries 55
Part Two
The Ideological Dimension
4. Sun Fu’s Views on Obedience to Authority:
The Literal/Moral Levels 81
5. The Views of Ch’eng I and Hu An-kuo:
The Moral/Metaphysical Levels 111
6. Statecraft and Natural Law in the West and China 132
7. Implications for Modern China and Japan 148
Abbreviations 179
Notes 181
Selected Bibliography 233
Index 255
vii
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Preface
The main thesis of this study is that the leading neo-
Confucian political thinkers of the Sung dynasty, who pro-
moted a policy of “revering the emperor and expelling the
barbarians” (tsun-wang jang-i), intended not to increase the
power of the emperor, as they are often accused of doing, but
instead to limit it. They believed that China’s vulnerability to
rebellion from within or invasion from without was due to a
moral failure of China’s society and could therefore be recti-
fied only by a revival of fundamental Confucian values. Central
to this revival was thought to be the institution of the emperor,
who represented the indispensable link between the timeless
values of cosmic harmony and the temporal reality of govern-
ment policy. The priority that Sung thinkers placed on the cru-
cial role of the emperor has caused many modern scholars to
conclude that they advocated a form of blind obedience to the
ruler and in so doing laid the ideological foundations for the
growth of autocratic institutions in China.
During most of the twentieth century, the leading intellec-
tuals in China have tended to blame Confucianism—especially
neo-Confucianism—for China’s failure to develop a modern
democracy. In attempting to throw off the chains of Confucian
authoritarianism, some of them embraced a Western ideology
of Marxism-Leninism that condemned the Chinese past whole-
sale and promoted socialism as the agent of national salvation.
Others rejected Marxism-Leninism, but were disillusioned by
ix
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x Limits to Autocracy
the wartime corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang,
and chose to settle in the United States. There, as scholars
of Chinese history in American universities, they continued to
search for the underlying source of China’s weakness and often
found it in Confucianism. If this is true—if Confucianism did
advocate absolute loyalty to the emperor—then the Chinese
intellectual tradition would indeed be hostile to modern
notions of democracy and human rights. Those doctrines
could then legitimately be regarded as little more than foreign
imports from the West, exotic indoor plants unable to survive
on their own in the Chinese climate. The current leaders in
Beijing would be correct when they claim that the concept of
human rights is of Western origin with no roots in Chinese soil.
This study takes a different view, arguing that in fact the neo-
Confucian political thinkers of the Northern Sung—who
defined the terms of orthodox Confucian political thought for
the last thousand years—sought to reduce the power of the
emperor, not enhance it. To be sure, the leading Sung political
thinkers, who embedded their most important ideas in com-
mentaries on the Confucian Spring and Autumn Annals, did
advocate enhancing the authority of the emperor. Authority,
however, is not power. Although many Sung literati may have
advocated centralizing the authority of the emperor, at the
same time they also hoped that he would delegate his actual
power to them. In other words, the neo-Confucians hoped to
appropriate for themselves the emperor’s power through their
dominance of the government bureaucracy. They believed that
they deserved that dominance, of course, because they consid-
ered themselves to be the only group educated enough to
understand fully the moral laws governing the natural and the
human worlds. What they appeared to be granting him with
their left hand, in effect, they were planning on taking away
with their right. Since my case rests on making a plausible dis-
tinction between power and authority, I focus the first chapter on
explaining how modern political theorists define those terms.
How could Sung scholar-officials ever hope to pull off such a
political sleight of hand since they were only servants of the
emperor and had no institutional base in an aristocracy? Part of
the explanation lies in naïveté about the reality of court poli-
tics, but part of it also lies in their enormous self-confidence. To
