The Objectionable Li Zhi is an edited volume that grew out of a 2013 workshop titled “Writing, Virtues, and Social Change in Sixteenth-Century China.” Its eleven chapters are arranged thematically in five sections, treating Li Zhi from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, and situating him in late-Ming social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. As Ann Waltner aptly observes, “The scope of the work is in fact broader than this one man—we learn a lot about the Ming world” (back cover). In fact, while in some chapters the life and work of Li Zhi is front and center, in others they serve as a pretext for discussing broader facets of the Ming dynasty. Prior to considering the content of them, however, it may be of use to review in brief past English-language scholarship on Li Zhi.Footnote ¹

In the English literature on the Ming dynasty, few individuals have exercised the imagination as much as Li Zhi (style name Zhuowo) has. However, the reason for this is to be found in the determined efforts of a small circle of scholars who have produced a rich, growing body of literature on this “iconoclast, eccentric, hero, individualist” (3) in the twenty-first century. Of course, Li Zhi was the topic of an earlier scholarship, but as Pauline Lee noted in her 2002 dissertation, as of that time one could only find a handful of articles about him.Footnote ² In fact, literature reviews, such as those written by Hok-lam Chan, Wolfgang Franke, and Pei-kai Cheng, had been published in the early 1980s and dominated by a vast Chinese- and Japanese-language literature, with few listings for English publications.Footnote ³ Yet, in his “Preface,” Chan observed that “There were indeed few intellectuals in imperial China who can match Li Chih (1527–1602), iconoclastic scholar-philosopher of the late Ming, in the scope and intensity of controversy over the interpretation of his thought and evaluation of his historical status amid the ideological and political fluctuations of the modern century.”

Prior to the 1980s, substantial English scholarship specifically speaking to the many facets of Li Zhi appear to have been limited to K.C. Hsiao's article, “Li Chih: An Iconoclast of the Sixteenth Century” and Eng-Chew Cheang's dissertation, “Li Chih as a Critic: A Chapter in Ming Intellectual History.”Footnote ⁴ The latter was completed with feedback from some of the most prominent scholars who were then bringing or would bring Ming history and Li Zhi to the attention of an English-reading audience, including K.C. Hsiao, Frederick Mote, and Hok-lam Chan. Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, Li Zhi was also indirectly introduced through the many “Columbia-style” studies of “Ming thought,” including most famously William Theodore de Bary's “Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late-Ming Thought.” Heavily influenced by Shimada Kenji's Chugoku ni okeru kindai shii no zasetsu 中國における近代思惟の挫折 (The frustration of modern thought in China), which cast the Wang Yangming School of Mind as in some sense modern, de Bary explored the meaning of individualism for Wang Yangming, Wang Gen, and Li Zhi, famously concluding that with the latter, “the tide of individualistic thought in the late Ming reached its height.”Footnote ⁵ However, unlike many Ming Confucians, Li never became the principal subject of a monograph, no doubt because he did not neatly lend himself to the category of “Ming thought.”

In the 1980s and 1990s too, even though Li Zhi's life and writings featured in survey histories, sourcebooks, or monographs on the Ming (most notably, as a man with “A Divided Conscience” in Ray Huang's 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline), at least by my count, he featured only once as the main subject of a publication. That was Pei-kai Cheng's 1980 dissertation, a comparative study of the life and intellectual trajectory of Li Zhi and Tang Xianzu.Footnote ⁶ This seems surprising, given that Li might easily have found a home in a research project belonging to a history, philosophy, religious studies, or East Asian languages and cultures department. As Cheang had demonstrated, Li Zhi could be treated as “A Social Critic,” “A Literary Critic,” or “A Philosophic Critic.” Furthermore, Ming studies was diversifying, with less emphasis on “Ming thought” and more in the way of social and cultural history, as well as literary and art studies, as Martin Heijdra has explained.Footnote ⁷ Finally, in the wake of Reform and Opening, scholarship on Li Zhi in the PRC rapidly accumulated during these decades.

It was not until the new millennium that a major translation and two monographs were published, in a sense finally bringing to fruition what had been in cultivation during the last century. In fact, the editors of the Objectionable Li Zhi were the principal driving force behind this rich harvest (which also includes many articles not discussed here). Most importantly, in 2016, with the assistance of nine scholars, Handler-Spitz, Lee, and Saussy published the first book-length translation of a selected writings from Li Zhi's collected works.Footnote ⁸ They also provided a useful introduction to his life and times. As for the monographs, with dissertations and articles as the foundation, Lee published Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire in 2012, while Handler-Spitz's Symptom of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity appeared in 2017.

Turning now to the book under review, in “The Paradox of Genuineness: Problematic Self-Revelation in Li Zhi's Autobiographical Writings,” Wai-yi Lee takes on a conundrum familiar to students of Neo-Confucianism—that is, how does one reconcile discourse on the highest reaches of Neo-Confucian attainment with what Neo-Confucians actually did. Wang Yangming, for instance, presented his handling of military campaigns as the outcome of the natural operation of liangzhi (“good knowing”). As for Li Zhi, he is known for his rhetoric of genuineness, authenticity, and spontaneity, as well as for his philosophy of the child-like mind. Yet, Lee asks, especially given Li's notoriety, “to what extent can ‘genuineness’ accommodate [his] inconstancy, inconsistency, or contradictions?” (20) Lee's exploration clearly shows that the seeming paradoxes reach their extreme with Li Zhi, but concludes that, “Ultimately, the quest for genuineness in Li Zhi becomes more compelling because it is steeped in contradictions even as it beckons as an ideal” (34).

In “Li Zhi's Strategic Self-Fashioning: Sketch of a Filial Self,” Maram Epstein achieves two important objectives. First, she demonstrates that for Li Zhi, filial piety was “a deeply held and sincere expression of a person's core ethical and affective values” (50). In fact, it was for him “as genuine an expression of himself as his desire for the autonomous freedom to pursue the Dao” (50). Second, Epstein shows how Li's filial piety calls into question modern interpretations of Li dating to the late Qing, May Fourth, and Maoist scholarship, according to which Li is an iconoclast and critic of Confucian ritualism. Since ritualized filial piety was considered emblematic of the oppressive nature of traditional society, should not Li Zhi have in some way criticized or rejected it? Epstein shows that he did not. On the contrary, he was quite conventional in his views. This should not be surprising, however, because the repression and liberation of the authentic individual are very differently understood and interpreted in a Confucian (or Neo-Confucian), May Fourth, and Marxist (or Maoist) context. For a Neo-Confucian, attaining an authentic or natural expression of emotion in intersubjective contexts is precisely how one accords with the Dao.

In “The Perils of Friendship: Li Zhi's Predicament,” Martin W. Huang provides a moving account of Li Zhi's exploration of the meaning of friendship both in life and his writings. “As far as friendship is concerned,” Huang declares, “he was a giant of both theory and practice” (55). For Li, the truest friend was “someone worth dying for or somebody in whose company one would be happy to die” (67). As such, he imbued friendship with a transcendental quality and sacredness that elevated it over other among the “five relationships (wulun).” Huang rightly notes that the pursuit of friendship understood as comradeship and finding “intellectual soulmates” (57) featured strongly in the Ming School of Mind but does not here unpack broader factors contributing to this cultural trend.Footnote ⁹

In “A Public of Letters: The Correspondence of Li Zhi and Geng Dingxiang,” Timothy Brook returns to the epistolary correspondence of these two famed late-Ming literati. Indeed, such correspondence, which constituted a kind of “public of letters,” is among the most valued sources for studying Ming intellectual history (exchanges among Wang Yangming's disciples, such as Wang Ji and Nie Bao, come to mind). Brook not only details the course of their arguments over whether sagehood was a prerequisite for government service, he also explains the material conditions and cultural horizon that made it possible.

In “Affiliation and Differentiation: Li Zhi as Teacher and Student,” Rivi Handler-Spitz examines Li Zhi's relations with his teachers and students. Although he claimed never to have declared himself a disciple or to have taken one, Li certainly demonstrated a profound reverence for those who influenced him and had many students. Like his mentors Wang Ji and Luo Rufang, his teaching method was flexible, antihierarchical, designed to elicit independent insight and, at times, Chanist in flavor. This chapter very sensitively and intimately explains the theory and practice of Li Zhi's pedagogy.

In “Image Trouble, Gender Trouble: Was Li Zhi an Enlightened Man?,” Ying Zhang analyzes contemporary images of Li Zhi from the perspective of gender and in the context of a burgeoning late-Ming print culture that was refashioning discourse about it. On the one hand, in “intensely mediatized and mediated platforms,” Li Zhi used gendered language to project a certain image of himself, including explaining his conduct and philosophical ideas. On the other, his friends and enemies did the same thing, circulating criticism and interpretations of him that were beyond his control, hence bringing him “image trouble.” This is the conflicted world of Li Zhi as it is known from late-Ming print culture, and Ying Zhang explores it specifically for the purpose of showing how “gender ideals were contested or negotiated in society” (111).

In “Native Seeds of Change: Women, Writing, and Rereading Tradition,” Pauline C. Lee explains how Li Zhi contributed to a late-Ming “native” feminism. Building on some two decades of scholarship on this subject, she shows how he worked from within the Confucian tradition to “propose a new vision of women's roles in society” (132). This was a vision “where it is assumed that women travel freely, read widely, write and publish poetry and history, govern, marry (and remarry if they wish) partners of their own choosing, whose inner emotional lives matter, and whose death are recognized as irreplaceable losses” (132). She recognizes, however, that Li offers this vision by creatively reinterpreting gender norms and roles in the classical tradition, as opposed to actively advocating for the kinds of institutional and legal change that would bring about that world.

In “An Avatar of the Extraordinary: Li Zhi as a Shishang Writer and Thinker in the Late-Ming Publishing World,” Kai-wing Chow explains why this literary master and best-selling author “should be understood in the context of burgeoning commercial publishing and the transforming social and intellectual contours of the late Ming” (145). What made his writing so appealing was the fact that he so effectively articulated the ethos of a growing social class, the shishang (“mercantile literati”). His valorization of the quotidian life, mercantile pursuits, an ethics centered on the self's material well-being, the desire for wealth and advancement, and syncretic religious practices articulated and legitimated what the shishang were doing and experiencing in their own lives. This ethos could be contrasted with a Confucian orthodoxy of moral perfectionism and ideals of service governing the worldview of the scholar-official class. Without a doubt, Chow here provides a compelling distillation of many of the insights he has articulated over the years in his publications on Ming-Qing history.

In “Performing Authenticity: Li Zhi, Buddhism, and the Rise of Textual Spirituality in Early Modern China,” Jiang Wu states that the “influence of Buddhism on Li Zhi cannot be underestimated” (164). Evidence for this lies not only in the Buddhist dress he wore and the years he spent in a monastery, but also in the commentaries he wrote for Buddhist scriptures, his reprinting of Chan texts, and the Buddhistic features of his interactions with others (at least, as the written records conveys those). Furthermore, this “textual spirituality,” as Wu labels it, can only be fully understood in the context of a substantial community of Dao learners of which he was a member. These were “spiritual seekers” with diverse social identities who shared a common, non-sectarian enthusiasm for pursuing the Dao through ethical and spiritual self-cultivation. Jiang Wu's chapter provides a window on this late-Ming social and intellectual world, although the theoretical significance of “textual spirituality” (as opposed, say, to other kinds) merits further definition.

In “Performing Li Zhi: Li Zhuowu and the Fiction Commentaries of a Fictional Commentator,” Robert E. Hegel examines commentaries on the most popular long fiction of the Ming dynasty—Outlaws of the Marsh, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West—attributed to the fictional commentator Li Zhuowu. He asserts that these commentaries held a certain amount of literary authority and exerted an important influence on the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. After briefly introducing what is attributable to the historical Li Zhi as commentary on the Outlaws, Hegel explains in some detail the identities of the authors of the fictional Li Zhuowu commentaries, as well as the style and content of them. He also identifies the characteristics of the Li Zhuowu persona and suggests that values reflected in the commentaries—the affirmation of individuality, celebration of subjectivity, and passionate expression of emotion—reflect values associated with the historical Li Zhi. The chapter is a learned inquiry, but indeed primarily one about one of the “Afterlives” of Li Zhi (as the section in which it was placed categorizes it). A reader might be left wanting to know more about the historical Li Zhi as a literary critic.

In “The Question of Life and Death: Li Zhi and Ming-Qing Intellectual History,” Miaw-fen Lu offers a potpourri of preliminary inquiries into how facets of Li Zhi's life and thought fit into “ideological discussions and conflicts taking place among Confucians of his time” (209). First, she shows that, like other Ming-Qing Confucians, Li asked questions about the meaning of death and what happens after it that were unconventional. Second, she explains Li's views on practices best suited to seeking the Dao, situating them in late-Ming debates on self-cultivation. Li emphasized practices conducive to realizing certain states of the heart-mind over their expression in ritual and according to conventional norms. Last, Lu explores changing elite attitudes towards Li from the late-Ming through the late-Qing (in general, from controversial to rejection to celebration). This chapter reflects the author's wide-ranging knowledge of late-imperial China's intellectual history, but each subject merits further unpacking, perhaps a chapter of its own.

The Objectionable Li Zhi is a mature contribution both to Li Zhi and late-Ming scholarship. Features of his life and writings are examined by knowledgeable Ming scholars who are able skillfully to shed light on him from the perspective of a body of scholarship for which each is known. Perhaps one problem, however, is that of readership, as the collection assumes a certain level of familiarity with Li Zhi and his world. The “Introduction” awkwardly offers a brief, three-page biography and concludes with a few sentences explaining how he has been interpreted over time, but this may be insufficient to prepare the non-expert for the level at which this scholarship is written, as it retains the aura of the academic workshop out of which it grew. Readers unfamiliar with Li Zhi will have their appetite wetted for further reading but may also benefit from reading other biographical material and translations of his writings in advance, such as those discussed above.