Ying Zhang begins Confucian Image Politics with the history of a joke, namely the witty response of Cheng Hao, the Song dynasty neo-Confucian sage, to his brother's shock upon encountering courtesans at a banquet. Cheng Hao's brother Cheng Yi, also a neo-Confucian sage, felt morally endangered; Cheng Hao did not. Zhang takes the tale from a book of jokes by the literatus Feng Menglong (1574–1646), the noted collector and author of Ming vernacular fiction, and then she traces the story as it was told and retold during the late Ming: first in a collection of xiaopin (brief essays), where it was used to advocate “tolerance and transcendence”; then in a severely didactic text that listed “mingling with courtesans” as one of the “miscellaneous transgressions” that interfered with “watchfulness over the solitary self”; later in a collection focused on the dangers of political factionalism, which claimed that the story was invented by Cheng Yi's enemies; and finally in a personal attack on the author of that claim (Zhang, pp. 4–5). Zhang's opening salvo, witty in itself, situates Confucian Image Politics firmly in the world of male literati passions and concerns, the world of all three books reviewed here.

Reading the three books together lets us follow important intellectual currents in the Ming and early Qing literati worlds. Discussing Li Mengyang (1473–1530), Chang Woei Ong shows us roads not taken, philosophical options alive early in the dynasty but then closed off by the ascendance of Li's contemporary and friend Wang Yangming (1472–1529), and by the new direction Wang gave to neo-Confucian thought. Rivi Handler-Spitz, centering her study of early modernity on the provocative writer Li Zhi (1527–1602), shows us the perils of the individualistic road that was taken, as Li's outrageously performative iconoclasm ended with his suicide in prison. And by focusing on the way male adherents of the seventeenth-century Donglin and Fushe movements understood their gender-inflected roles, Zhang “reimagines” the Ming-Qing transition by analyzing the invention of the “ideal Donglin man”—an individual devoted to both “political integrity and romantic love” (Zhang, p. 219). She explores the influence of this representation not only in the late Ming but also in the early Qing, whose rulers had to contend with the enthusiasms of their newly conquered empire.

But this is not a simple chronology, since the three books have very different concerns. Zhang mentions Li Zhi only in passing, and makes some brief final remarks on early modernity (Zhang, pp. 217–19), while Li Mengyang and his struggles with the Song-Ming neo-Confucian heritage are never even mentioned by Zhang or Handler-Spitz. Nevertheless, the three books illuminate each other. The concern with clear and authentic writing that was so important to Li Mengyang helps to historicize Li Zhi's longing for a stable and transparent language; the printing wars in which Zhang's protagonists attacked each other enrich Handler-Spitz's account of China's early-modern printing boom; and the over-representation of Zhejiang and Jiangsu men in the Donglin movement supports Ong's contention that Southerners felt more allegiance to their unofficial literati networks than to the “state apparatus” in “realizing the ideal order” (Ong, p. 64).

Ong lists the “three pillars” of Li Mengyang's thought as follows: “his theory about how the cosmos works and how it affects the human world, his views on how literati learning should be tailored to serve the state, and his insistence that the art of literary writing [should be] an independent pursuit for expressing selfhood” (Ong, p. 272). Ong sets himself the task of explaining why the first and second pillars were never embraced by the mainstream, or, in other words, why Li Mengyang is only remembered as a literary figure, though he also wrote on “cosmology, ethics, and statecraft” (Ong, pp. 7, 272). Ong's arguments are complex and detailed, drawing on a daunting list of Li Mengyang's contemporaries, and they hinge on Li's heritage as a man of the North, where the imprint of the state was consistently accepted as an element of intellectual life. Ong explored this acceptance of the state in his earlier book Men of Letters within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese History, 907–1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), but in his new book he notes that the northern outlook never gained traction in the culturally dominant South, though Li Mengyang did gain followers for his literary views.

We tend to think of the Ming in what Ong would call Southern terms: individualistic in its response to Wang Yangming and the Taizhou School, as well as romantic and expressive, as individuals sought the cosmos-organizing li or “principle” within their own hearts and minds. Wang Yangming focused on the self, rather than on the way the self fits into the state. But this was not at all the approach of Li Mengyang, who felt that literati learning should be tailored to serve the state, that human nature was not inherently good, and that Heaven chose rulers according to inscrutable reasons of its own.

As Ong describes Li Mengyang's cosmos, Heaven's will is essentially unknowable; rulers are chosen according to criteria opaque to humans; and yin, here cast as the evil component of our nature, is constantly at war with yang, our better self. Only a strong government working to keep this conflict in check can guarantee that human society will continue to function, just as inscrutable Heaven keeps the conflict between yin and yang from destroying the cosmos. With the rest of the Mencian-influenced mainstream, Li did see qing or emotional attachment as crucial to successful government: to be successful, a ruler's feelings had to be in accord with those of his subjects. But those subjects were dependent on their ultimately unknowable ruler for their continued existence. This goes even beyond the typical Northern view that state and scholars needed each other to prosper, and Ong gives persuasive reasons why Li Mengyang never gained widespread acceptance for his views on the cosmos or the state. Li Mengyang found a place in mainstream histories primarily for his teachings on literary style and his insistence that prose not be reduced to mere explication of doctrine. Rather, said Li, prose should become, through clarity and expressiveness, an “authentic representation” of what was being described (Ong, p. 222). Li took the great Han dynasty historians as his models.Footnote ¹ This same spirit animated Li Mengyang's “archaist” vision of true poetry (Ong, pp. 243–70). When Li Mengyang advocated a “return to the ancient” (fugu), this was not a flight from the complicated present. Rather, it was a vision of the true potential of poetry, which had been realized in ancient times: its ability to synthesize emotion with vital energy and with melody (true poetry must be chanted, said Li, as it had been in days of old). And since true melodies arose from nature, the correct production and appreciation of poetry aligned the self with the cosmos (Ong, pp. 249–50). Finally, Li Mengyang articulated a vision for poetry that would be influential among intellectuals for the rest of the dynasty. By studying and replicating the popular poetic form yuefu, said Li, literati could find their own true voice by learning from the authentic way folk songs articulated emotions (Ong, pp. 263–70).

As Ong summarizes, “It was therefore Li Mengyang's belief that replicating the songs of the common folk did not require a poet to surrender his own self-representation. On the contrary, it was the necessary first step in a process of self-discovery and self-representation” (Ong, p. 270). Unlike his description of a dangerous and unknowable cosmos, Li Mengyang's ideas about literature and authentic self-cultivation fit well into the sixteenth-century literati mainstream.

In Symptoms of an Unruly Age, Handler-Spitz examines the writer Li Zhi (1527–1602) in the context of sixteenth-century transnational early modernity. Here she builds on a very substantial earlier article where she examined Li Zhi's Fenshu (A Book to Be Burned) and Montaigne's Essays to explore cultural expectations surrounding the act of reading.Footnote ² She demonstrated that in sixteenth-century China and France, “cultures of reading developed that placed unprecedented emphasis on personal judgment.” In Symptoms of an Unruly Age, she widens her focus to compare a broader range of cultural phenomena.

Handler-Spitz sets herself two discrete tasks: to describe societies that were undergoing critical, parallel changes; and to justify the comparative approach itself. She characterizes transnational comparison as a “risky proposition.” Rather than restricting herself to those rare cases where direct influence can be shown, however, she “challenges entrenched habits of mind that comprehend cultural phenomena as exclusively significant—or at least primarily significant—within the confines of the nations in which they took form” (Handler-Spitz, p. 7). We will no doubt be exploring the causes of parallel cultural developments forever, but as Handler-Spitz makes clear, simply recognizing the parallels can safeguard us from inappropriately narrow, single-culture-specific notions of causality.

By choosing Li Zhi as her protagonist, Handler-Spitz is able to zero in on some key cultural issues of the sixteenth century. Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his readers, as Handler-Spitz describes them, experienced none of the certainties that sustained Li Mengyang. Rather, they were operating in an “epidemic of semiotic instability” (Handler-Spitz, p. 152), in which everything from the value of coins to the reliability of book editions was in flux. In sixteenth-century China and Western Europe alike, clothing was no longer a reliable indicator of status; books were provisional rather than final products (publishers could and did make changes at will, as could authors themselves); and as commerce exploded in both places, money took on a new symbolic valence even as the values of coins themselves were unnervingly uncertain. On page 99, Handler-Spitz passes along Richard Von Glahn's observation that the Jiajing emperor, overwhelmed by counterfeiting, had to establish official exchange rates between counterfeit coins!

In this environment, Li Zhi chose to meet paradox with paradox, enlightening his readers through the techniques of “bluff.” “Bluff,” a term Handler-Spitz borrows from the French Renaissance historian Barbara Bowen, denotes a set of rhetorical techniques intended to baffle and unsettle readers, startling them out of their accustomed habits of thought. Li Zhi's brilliant writing and unorthodox behavior—abandoning his official career and taking up residence in a Buddhist monastery, “unfilially” shaving his head but growing a beard, and more—delighted many but enraged others, as witness the mob who stormed and burned his monastery, precipitating his death.

In a sense, Li Zhi was just continuing a search initiated by Wang Yangming and his immediate predecessors. Li Mengyang had also valued individuality and originality, which a true understanding of the ancient sages and contemporary folksong would rescue from the rigid examination system. Wang Yangming had taught his followers to look within themselves for the organizing principles (li) of the cosmos. Nevertheless, “an appreciation for individuality,” writes Ong, “did not necessarily lead to idiosyncrasy.… Wang Yangming's entire intellectual project was precisely to establish a shared norm for embracing individuality” (Ong, p. 23, italics added). But even during Wang's lifetime his teachings gave rise to the passionate missionary activities of the Taizhou School, whose early representative Wang Gen (1483–1540) was soon behaving almost as idiosyncratically as Li Zhi would do, wandering about in unconventional garments (Handler-Spitz, p. 75) as he encouraged the masses to find sagehood within.

Li Zhi, however, approached the issue of individuality as a literatus, with the intellectual background characteristic of a mid-Ming examination-taker. Thus, he impacted the literate governing class in ways that Wang Gen presumably did not. Handler-Spitz shows Li Zhi sharing ideas with the “radical” literatus He Xinyin (Handler-Spitz, p. 142), demonstrating that Li Zhi operated within a community of highly literate friends, who “struggle[d] with questions of authenticity and falsification,” and were fascinated with “the mutability and malleability of truth and the growing sense that individuals must judge and appraise emerging situations for themselves” (Handler-Spitz, p. 7).

In her final chapter, Handler-Spitz draws on these insights to detail what is probably Li's most important cultural contribution. Li's statements to and about readers were often contradictory, but Handler-Spitz demonstrates that whether or not he “consciously intended to spark readers to develop their powers of critical judgment,” that is what he did. His texts “participated in an early modern trend toward weaning readers from their habitual dependence on ancient sources of authority, fostering readers’ confidence in their ability to judge shifting situations for themselves” (Handler-Spitz, p. 18). This empowerment of the reader seems to me a convincing marker of modernity, perhaps more useful to China scholars than the well-known but Eurocentric model of On-cho Ng, whose article on the “epochal concept of early modernity” Handler-Spitz cites (Handler-Spitz, p. 154n14).Footnote ³ In Ng's model, “modernity” requires “supplanting the authority of eternal being with history (the logic of becoming),” rather than what he sees as China's linking of past and present via static tradition.Footnote ⁴ Handler-Spitz's model, by contrast, is praxis-oriented and based on what agentic individuals can be shown to have actually been doing.

But two questions struck me as I read. Why does Handler-Spitz reference the “Epitaph for Myself” of Zhang Dai (1597–1679) as evidence that Zhang and Montaigne (1533–92) saw the “same period” as “unruly?” Handler-Spitz reads the “Epitaph for Myself” as recalling a “chaotic,” “topsy-turvy,” and “jumbled” time “in the years preceding the collapse of the Ming dynasty” (Handler-Spitz, p. 3). But the “Epitaph” actually describes a paradise of wealth and pleasure preceding the Ming collapse, with Zhang Dai plunged “into a daze” only after 1644. To make her case, Handler-Spitz would have had to provide readers with more detail, including the Chinese terms that she is translating. And I wonder also at Handler-Spitz's consistent use of terms like “lowbrow” and “vulgar” for Ming vernacular fiction and drama. Major contemporary scholars have demonstrated the deep involvement of Ming literati with these genres, and in fact the most-published Ming dynasty chuanqi dramas were written by jinshi and juren degree-holders.Footnote ⁵ I think this is just an unfortunate choice of terminology, since Handler-Spitz herself cites the clever use that the vernacular novel Jin Ping Mei (Plum in the Golden Vase) makes of the Analects (Handler-Spitz, pp. 140–41)—the kind of clever allusion only possible with literati education.

Returning now to Zhang's Confucian Image Politics, here we are shown “signs of the fundamental transformations and challenges that seventeenth-century Chinese elites were experiencing, a kind of ‘authenticity crisis’ that affected all spheres of life” (Zhang, p. 5). The “image politics” of her title, Zhang says in her introduction, are “not about moral images per se, but about conditions that generated and perpetuated them” (Zhang, p. x). The male images with which she is concerned are those of officials, fathers, sons, husbands, and friends—“Confucian family tales,” as Zhang calls them (Zhang, pp. 22–23 and chap. 5). Her gendered focus, namely “looking at men as men,” complements the “insights of women's historians” in explaining the resilience of the traditional gender system, but beyond that, “elite men faced a distinct set of issues in times of change and crisis” (Zhang, p. 21). In the highly commercialized late Ming, men had new choices of goods and lifestyles (and women), requiring new patterns of ideological display. The new choices demanded that men “[walk] a fine line when publicizing their masculine qualities and virtues,” while avoiding charges of inauthenticity, or merely “perfunctory” moral endeavors (Zhang, pp. 21, 22).

These male images were deployed in one of Ming China's most consequential conflicts, the well-studied Donglin affair, and they shaped the cultural reception of the Fushe (Restoration Society), which was composed in part of sons of the Donglin heroes. “Factionalism,” with all its historical connotations of disloyalty and danger, was the “forum” in which the battles played out (Zhang, p. 17), and Zhang offers a penetrating analysis of the way opposing sides applied the “faction” label to each other, in a new world where print offered new weapons.

Zhang's opening account of the Cheng brothers’ story demonstrates how print could be weaponized during the late Ming. Her account of “printing politics” in chapter 1 expands the theme, showing us a battle between two officials named Wu Yuancui (jinshi 1577) and He Canran (jinshi 1595): when Wu Yuancui published observations on contemporary politics in Random Notes Taken in Retirement in 1609, He Canran responded with a Critical Commentary on Random Notes in 1622, which Wu answered with a Counter-Commentary on Critical Commentary on Random Notes, spurring He's Counter-Counter Commentary on Critical Commentary on Random Notes (Zhang, pp. 29–30)! Print could make your partisanship public, and serve to amplify your voice.

Manipulating the aura of authenticity that was associated with vernacular fiction, the Tianqi-era eunuch clique then launched print wars of their own, drawing up blacklists like the List of Notorious Donglin Fighters, claiming one-to-one correspondences between specific Donglin suspects and members of the 108 “rebel leaders” of the Shui-hu Zhuan outlaw band (Zhang, pp. 39–40). From this, they graduated to producing vernacular novels themselves, in which they portrayed foes like Zheng Zhenxian, his son Zheng Man, and their female relatives as unfilial and immoral. The tales themselves eventually verged on the pornographic (Zhang, pp. 52–58). All of this enriches the Donglin martyrdom story enormously, changing a straightforward pity-and-terror narrative into one where we also see the inventive strategies of the martyrs’ enemies.

The next generation did not face a unifying enemy like Wei Zhongxian, but they were sophisticates who knew how to deploy images so as to enhance their own organizing power and increase the appeal of the Fushe. They “successfully molded the Donglin-Fushe image into one community of moral paragons” (Zhang, p. 91). When the rising star Gong Dingzi was abruptly jailed for insubordination by the Chongzhen emperor, he and his Fushe supporters publicized the image of his talented and beautiful concubine, the former courtesan Gu Mei, crafting an image of the traditional faithful wife even as they continued to bask in Gu Mei's romantic aura. And as with the Donglin martyrs, the enemies of the Fushe turned once again to the vernacular genres, producing the drama Green Lotus, a romantic comedy, to mock their pretensions.

Zhongxiao (loyalty plus filial piety) was coin of the realm, and Fushe sons and brothers wrote out the Classic of Filial Piety in blood when their fathers or brothers were imprisoned. (The Chongzhen emperor finally had to command them to stop.) A celebrity culture developed, exemplified by Huang Daozhou, famous for alternating stints in the capital, where he attended to government matters, with devotions at his parents’ graves. Even an icon like Huang Daozhou could run afoul of the emperor, however, and so Huang was jailed in 1640 and severely beaten. His response was to copy out the Classic of Filial Piety in his famous calligraphy, in batches of pamphlets that the prison staff sold for good prices (Zhang, p. 123).

Zhang's great strength is in finding new angles from which to tell the story of the late Ming, along with a striking number of new sources, as well as strategic uses of the vernacular never before explored in a systematic way. This gives her the language to explain what happened when the Ming finally fell: the Shunzhi and Kangxi emperors showed themselves to be masters of image politics, welcoming the “loyal turncoats” from the Ming in their own ru language of mandate change, so that the turncoats (Zhang's phrase) could salve their consciences as they transferred their political loyalty.