Sarah Schneewind's superb book Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos uses the seemingly arcane phenomenon of premortem enshrinement to shed vivid light on Ming political culture. It is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive study.
After describing premortem shrines physically and noting the laws that governed their creation, Schneewind raises her main argument: the shrines were an important means by which the subjects of Ming China “reversed the bureaucratic metaphor,” compelling resident administrators to be responsive to the subjects’ interests rather than to the discipline of the central state. While bureaucratic practice required that resident administrators be transferred elsewhere after brief postings, local people often petitioned to retain those who were well liked. With the petitions usually failing, premortem shrines honoring the popular ones became the next best thing to keeping them on hand. Furthermore, by lauding the policies that earned resident administrators their affection (in the steles that usually accompanied the shrines), the local people effectively endorsed them. In this way, the people “voted” for the policies they favored, not only after the fact, when the man who enacted them left town, but prior to the fact, when the new administrator arrived and saw, in the shrine to his predecessor, what he needed to do to keep his constituents happy (pp. 114, 122–25).
As for the policies the people liked, they tended more toward good government (zheng), or whatever benefited the people directly, than toward teaching (jiao) or moral transformation, which only served the pretentions of the governing class. In many cases, good government, popularly conceived, meant shielding the people from the excessive taxation of the state (pp. 73–85). By advocating for the people of his jurisdiction in this fashion, the protective magistrate, sub-prefect, or prefect earned a reputation as a “parent” (fu mu) and worship while still alive. Unlike a child's real parents, the people's metaphorical parents were worshipped on the condition of their “going along with what [the people] want and not doing what they dislike” (p. 75). Of course, the parental metaphor is compatible with even the most autocratic of regimes, and two exhortations recorded here—“Accord with popular feeling in everything” and “Follow the wishes of the people”—were originally pronounced by Ming emperors (pp. 64, 74); but throughout her book, Schneewind demonstrates that the “parentalism” of premortem shrine discourse was in fact “demanded and shaped by the locality below rather than imposed by the court and central bureaucracy above” (p. 86).
Schneewind shows that it was almost always the common people who demanded premortem shrines for exemplary resident officials. To be sure, popular appeals for shrines could be counterfeited by gentry in cahoots with the enshrinees themselves; but Ming law discouraged such shenanigans (pp. 47–53), and close reading of related sources—“the commoners built a shrine to sacrifice to him” and “the commoners set up a shrine to sacrifice to him”—attests convincingly to commoner agency (p. 227). Schneewind uses the example of a certain county to challenge the theory that premortem shrines served mostly the professional interests of the elite (pp. 209–20), and she also employs statistics to illustrate that commoners could put up much of a shrine's financing (pp. 38–41). Later, she devotes an entire chapter to the question of commoner involvement in shrine creation (pp. 176–204), which revisits the funding question and highlights several cases of commoners articulating their interests in their own words. She concludes that commoners could “sometimes take the lead as sponsors of honors and criticisms of the bureaucrats delegated by the Son of Heaven” and that their contribution to political discourse was more “rational and thoughtful” than the folk songs, slogans, posters, and riots heretofore assumed to have circumscribed public expression (p. 203).
One of the strengths of Schneewind's approach is that she sidesteps the issue of her sources’ veracity in order to understand them culturally. “Even outright lies reveal genre convention,” she writes, “and the political theory that lay behind it” (p. 22). On the subject of shrine sponsorship, the prevalence of formulaic chronicling by elite writers does not matter:
For each report of shrines sponsored by commoners, historians may choose to believe it, in which case commoners participated in politics. Or they may choose not to believe it, with the even more interesting result that elite stele writers were explicitly, publicly, in stone, claiming that commoners had the right to political participation. (p. 177)
Focusing on what Ming eulogists said rather than on whether it was true, furthermore, saves Schneewind the trouble of separating saints from scoundrels and keeps her out of the swamp of late Ming politics. Her interest in the strife between the Donglin and Wei Zhongxian factions is limited to how each side claimed legitimacy through the institution of premortem shrines and the popular support they represented (pp. 9, 166–67, 172, 290, 291).
Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos adds great depth to our understanding of public opinion and popular political involvement in the Chinese context, although it is emphatically a Ming history book, as Schneewind takes pains to differentiate the Ming from other periods, especially the Qing. Building on the work of earlier scholars, Schneewind contends that the emergence of “populism” in the mid-Ming was a special occurrence. She takes note of its origins, with references to social mobility and to the philosopher Wang Yangming (pp. 13–18, 148, 233), but otherwise allows her study of premortem shrines to stand alone as the best vehicle for appreciating the phenomenon. If she is suggesting something along the lines of the “sprouts of democracy,” she does not use the phrase (nor does she ever use the word “democracy”), and she generally leaves the broader meaning to the reader.
What she has done is more than enough. Schneewind's book is extremely appealing because of the masterful way she develops her argument, in its structure and its logic. Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos belongs in the “guided tour” genre of history writing, in which the writer conducts the reader from point to point, raising and answering questions, examining every facet of the subject. It is as enjoyable to read as it is informative. This is essential reading for specialists and will captivate and inspire graduate students and precocious undergrads.
