1
00:00:07,840 --> 00:00:12,640
Still in Zoomland, we are not all on 
the Cornell campus. But we would like  

2
00:00:12,640 --> 00:00:20,880
to acknowledge that Cornell University is located 
on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ'  

3
00:00:20,880 --> 00:00:26,400
(the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' are 
members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,  

4
00:00:26,960 --> 00:00:33,200
an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a 
historic and contemporary presence on this land.  

5
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:40,480
The Confederacy precedes the establishment of 
Cornell University, New York state, and the United  

6
00:00:40,480 --> 00:00:47,120
States of America. We acknowledge the painful 
history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' dispossession, and honor  

7
00:00:47,120 --> 00:00:53,360
the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' people, 
past and present, to these lands and waters.

8
00:00:55,440 --> 00:01:00,720
We would also like to thank the East Asia 
program for its ongoing support for this  

9
00:01:00,720 --> 00:01:06,880
and other events in particular the staff under 
the leadership of its director - Andrea Bachner,  

10
00:01:07,520 --> 00:01:16,240
and program manager - Joshua Young. We have a new 
Cornell East Asia series editor - Alexis Simon.  

11
00:01:17,200 --> 00:01:23,440
And with the help of able Administrative 
Assistant Jennifer Fields. And not least  

12
00:01:23,440 --> 00:01:32,160
Amala Lane who graciously handles event logistics 
and communications. We have been able to organize  

13
00:01:33,200 --> 00:01:43,840
this series, and two more events with Tim Brook 
in the coming week, and a day. Tomorrow we have  

14
00:01:43,840 --> 00:01:51,680
a the Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium 
features Professor Brook who's going to  

15
00:01:52,960 --> 00:01:59,760
do a reading of Qiu Jun's "Daxue Yanyi 
Bu" (大學衍義補). And on Friday of next week,  

16
00:02:00,400 --> 00:02:08,800
he is going to join a round table on Legitimizing 
the State China from 1300 to the Present.

17
00:02:11,520 --> 00:02:17,040
The Hu Shih distinguished lecture series 
was established in honor of one of the  

18
00:02:17,040 --> 00:02:22,240
foremost public intellectuals of 
the 20th century. As our professor  

19
00:02:22,240 --> 00:02:28,400
emeritus Sherman Cochran provocatively 
put it, arguably the greatest Cornelian.  

20
00:02:29,840 --> 00:02:34,720
The lecture series was conceived on the 
centennial of Hu Shih's graduation from  

21
00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:44,320
Cornell - that's in 1914, which was also Cornell 
sesquicentennial year. And the series has been  

22
00:02:45,280 --> 00:02:52,480
convening each year since then. You can find 
past videos at a link which I will paste in chat.  

23
00:02:54,160 --> 00:02:58,160
Besides Hu Shih's more famous 
contributions to the new culture movement,  

24
00:02:58,720 --> 00:03:05,760
to the creation of a modern standard vernacular 
Chinese language, to education, and to diplomacy,  

25
00:03:06,320 --> 00:03:13,120
he also found time to donate around 350 
literary Chinese books to our library - a  

26
00:03:13,120 --> 00:03:20,960
great boost to our Chinese studies programs. 
In recognition of Hu Shih's revolutionary and  

27
00:03:20,960 --> 00:03:26,800
evolutionary transnational visions, and his 
wide-ranging activities, we have invited  

28
00:03:26,800 --> 00:03:33,120
scholars for this lecture series whose work 
transcends received divisions between disciplines,  

29
00:03:33,680 --> 00:03:41,840
nations and, between pre-modern, and modern. Such 
boundary crossing is epitomized by today's speaker  

30
00:03:41,840 --> 00:03:48,720
Tim Brook. I would now like to turn this 
over to Son Suyoung, who comes to us  

31
00:03:48,720 --> 00:03:55,280
by the way in the early hours of Seoul's 
morning to introduce professor Brook. Suyoung.

32
00:03:57,760 --> 00:04:00,800
Welcome to the annual Hu 
Shih distinguished lecture.

33
00:04:00,800 --> 00:04:03,680
Welcome to the annual Hu 
Shih distinguished lecture.  

34
00:04:03,680 --> 00:04:07,520
[I’m Suyoung Son, associate
professor in Asian Studies, specializing  

35
00:04:07,520 --> 00:04:14,000
in literary and cultural history of early modern
China and Korea.] It is my great honor and  

36
00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:17,680
pleasure to introduce today’s speaker,
Timothy Brook. 

37
00:04:19,280 --> 00:04:23,520
Timothy Brook is a professor of Chinese 
history at the University of British 

38
00:04:23,520 --> 00:04:30,400
Columbia. His research mainly focuses 
on China in the Ming period as well as 

39
00:04:30,400 --> 00:04:36,720
China’s engagements with the world, and he 
has published extensively on the topic. In 

40
00:04:36,720 --> 00:04:43,040
addition to one museum catalogue, Brook 
has authored twelve books, edited another 

41
00:04:43,040 --> 00:04:47,920
nine, and authored more than 
35 articles and book chapters.  

42
00:04:49,040 --> 00:04:53,760
He also served as editorin-chief 
of Harvard University Press’s  

43
00:04:53,760 --> 00:05:00,960
six-volume history of imperial China, which
became a bestseller in China. As you can  

44
00:05:00,960 --> 00:05:06,000
see the never-ending list of his books and
articles, which have been translated into  

45
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:13,040
many languages, including Chinese, Czech,
French, Italian, and Korean, it is hard to  

46
00:05:13,040 --> 00:05:18,000
summarize the scope and depth of Prof.
Brook’s scholarship in a short time.  

47
00:05:19,680 --> 00:05:25,440
His far-reaching research encompasses such
diverse subjects as the relationship  

48
00:05:25,440 --> 00:05:30,640
between the local gentry and the state,
commercialization, law and punishment  

49
00:05:30,640 --> 00:05:36,000
in imperial China, collaboration during
Japan’s wartime occupation and war crime  

50
00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:43,440
trials in Asia, global maritime connections,
and historiography, covering a wide span of  

51
00:05:43,440 --> 00:05:51,280
historical period from the 13th to the 20th
century. Today I’d like to briefly mention some  

52
00:05:51,280 --> 00:05:54,960
of his major works that have been
extremely influential.

53
00:05:57,280 --> 00:06:02,800
Prof. Brook’s main area of research is the 
social and cultural history of the Ming 

54
00:06:02,800 --> 00:06:09,840
dynasty from the fourteenth through the 
seventeenth centuries. In an early book of his, 

55
00:06:09,840 --> 00:06:15,840
titled Praying for Power: Buddhism and 
the Formation of Gentry Society in Late 

56
00:06:15,840 --> 00:06:21,040
Ming China, Brook combines the social 
history of Buddhism and the study of social 

57
00:06:21,040 --> 00:06:27,040
elites, and demonstrates the central role 
of gentry families’ patronage of Buddhist 

58
00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:30,320
monasteries in establishing 
their status and local power.  

59
00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:36,160
Another Ming history book of
his, The Confusions of Pleasure:  

60
00:06:36,800 --> 00:06:42,880
Commerce and Culture in Ming China, tracks the
commercialization of the Chinese economy  

61
00:06:42,880 --> 00:06:48,240
over the course of the Ming dynasty.
Focusing on the impact of economic  

62
00:06:48,240 --> 00:06:54,480
growth and change on the lives of the Chinese
literate elites, this book vividly depicts  

63
00:06:54,480 --> 00:07:01,520
the gradual transformation of a statedominated 
agrarian society into a wealthy commercial economy  

64
00:07:01,520 --> 00:07:03,440
centered on the cities
of Jiangnan.

65
00:07:05,440 --> 00:07:10,880
These clearly-defined, well-focused books 
have already shown Brook’s distinctive 

66
00:07:10,880 --> 00:07:17,520
approach toward history. Unlike most 
conventional history books that often bury the 

67
00:07:17,520 --> 00:07:20,240
reader in dry historical facts, however,  

68
00:07:20,960 --> 00:07:28,000
his historiography is encyclopedic in a lively
manner, touching on a variety of issues crucial  

69
00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:32,560
to understanding the ways premodern
Chinese society worked, ranging from  

70
00:07:32,560 --> 00:07:39,840
emperorship and constitutional crises, economy
and ecology, kinship and gender relationships,  

71
00:07:39,840 --> 00:07:44,480
Confucian cosmology and western
ideas, to the material world of  

72
00:07:44,480 --> 00:07:50,320
conspicuous consumption and the new world-economy
that developed through maritime connections. 

73
00:07:51,760 --> 00:07:58,320
Therefore, it is no wonder that Brook’s 
interest in Ming history is expanded into a 

74
00:07:58,320 --> 00:08:03,520
larger interest in the history of the 
world of which Ming China constituted an 

75
00:08:03,520 --> 00:08:10,560
important part. His award-winning book, 
Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century 

76
00:08:10,560 --> 00:08:14,880
and the Dawn of the Global World, starts 
with the examination of the luminous 

77
00:08:14,880 --> 00:08:20,800
paintings of Johannes Vermeer, and traces 
the web of international trade that spread 

78
00:08:20,800 --> 00:08:27,520
across the globe. From the beaver pelts 
Europeans traded with Native Americans to 

79
00:08:27,520 --> 00:08:34,320
the silver mined in Peru, Brook shows how 
the rich global inventory and the urge to 

80
00:08:34,320 --> 00:08:42,160
acquire these goods powerfully connected 
China and the entire world. In another 

81
00:08:42,160 --> 00:08:47,840
fascinating book of his, Mr. Selden’s 
Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a 

82
00:08:47,840 --> 00:08:54,000
Vanished Cartographer, Brook explores 
the conundrum related to an anomalous map 

83
00:08:54,000 --> 00:08:59,360
of the South China Sea, bequeathed to the 
Bodleian Library at Oxford University by 

84
00:08:59,360 --> 00:09:06,080
John Selden in the 17th century, to illuminate 
the mutual interactions among cultures 

85
00:09:06,080 --> 00:09:13,760
in East Asia and Europe. Finding connections 
between the hitherto disparate historical 

86
00:09:13,760 --> 00:09:20,400
sources scattered across China and Europe, 
in these books Brook weaves out the 

87
00:09:20,400 --> 00:09:26,320
entertaining story of the individuals related 
to the painting and the map/ in a colorful 

88
00:09:26,320 --> 00:09:32,880
panorama of historical background. At the 
same time, his entertaining accounts do not 

89
00:09:32,880 --> 00:09:39,120
fail to put forth the important historical 
questions, such as objects as a medium of a 

90
00:09:39,120 --> 00:09:43,440
cross-cultural value system, the 
territorial sovereignty of the sea,  

91
00:09:43,440 --> 00:09:45,600
and the redefinition
of empire. 

92
00:09:48,160 --> 00:09:52,800
Brook’s historical imagination does not 
merely expand the spatial scale in situating 

93
00:09:52,800 --> 00:09:59,200
seventeenth-century China in the larger 
frame of global history. It also situates the 

94
00:09:59,200 --> 00:10:06,160
Ming in a longer temporal span, specifically 
the periods before and after the formation 

95
00:10:06,160 --> 00:10:13,280
of the Ming empire. His book The Troubled 
Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming 

96
00:10:13,280 --> 00:10:18,080
Dynasties makes a conscious choice to break 
with earlier constructs of the Song and 

97
00:10:18,080 --> 00:10:23,520
Yuan followed by the Ming and Qing, and 
instead willfully take the Yuan and the 

98
00:10:23,520 --> 00:10:32,240
Ming as forming a cultural, political, 
social, and environmental continuum.

99
00:10:32,240 --> 00:10:37,200
This book not only raises the importance 
of ecological, environmental, and climatic 

100
00:10:37,200 --> 00:10:43,840
effects on all aspects of Chinese history 
from the 13th to the 17th century, but also 

101
00:10:43,840 --> 00:10:50,480
reconstructs the Ming as one of a number 
of great Asian empires such as the Ottoman, 

102
00:10:50,480 --> 00:10:57,600
Mughal, and Safavid, which are part of 
a greater post-Chingssid formation. This 

103
00:10:57,600 --> 00:11:03,200
reconstruction of the Ming empire 
successfully challenges the modern tendency to 

104
00:11:03,200 --> 00:11:09,680
view the international system solely as the 
interaction of independent states. Instead, it 

105
00:11:09,680 --> 00:11:17,680
detects the effects of the complicated 
history at play between and within regions. In 

106
00:11:17,680 --> 00:11:23,200
his edited volume Sacred Mandates: Asian 
International Relations since Chinggis 

107
00:11:23,200 --> 00:11:29,680
Khan, Brook and his collaborators suggest 
the operation of much more diverse ethnic, 

108
00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:36,240
cultural, political, linguistic, and 
spiritual form of statecraft in Asia/ than the 

109
00:11:36,240 --> 00:11:42,720
monolithic nation-state model, and identify 
three worlds—Chingssid Mongol, Tibetan 

110
00:11:42,720 --> 00:11:48,000
Buddhist, and Confucian Sinic—each 
of which represent different forms of 

111
00:11:48,000 --> 00:11:55,760
civilization, authority, and legal order. 
Furthermore, in one of his most recent books, 

112
00:11:55,760 --> 00:12:01,840
Great State: China and the World, Brook 
investigates the history of China’s complex 

113
00:12:01,840 --> 00:12:07,600
relationships with the world beyond its 
shifting borders/ and argues that the shape of 

114
00:12:07,600 --> 00:12:12,960
the Chinese state and contemporary China’s 
approach to the world was determined 

115
00:12:12,960 --> 00:12:19,280
less by its Han Chinese rulers than by the 
legacy of the two great empires that ruled 

116
00:12:19,280 --> 00:12:24,960
China for several centuries, that is, 
the Mongols and the Manchu, who have been 

117
00:12:24,960 --> 00:12:33,040
considered outsiders or aliens /to the 
civilization essentialized as Han. His books have 

118
00:12:33,040 --> 00:12:38,800
sparked debates on the concept of “Asian 
sovereignty” and provided new ways to 

119
00:12:38,800 --> 00:12:43,760
examine contemporary China’s global 
engagement, particularly with regard to 

120
00:12:43,760 --> 00:12:49,120
understanding how historical elements in 
state legitimation are appropriated in 

121
00:12:49,120 --> 00:12:55,120
modern China.
Even from this very cursory summation  

122
00:12:55,120 --> 00:13:01,360
of his scholarship, we can clearly see that in
the trajectory of Brook’s historical inquiry  

123
00:13:01,360 --> 00:13:06,560
he has not hesitated to challenge the
conventional norms and confront the  

124
00:13:06,560 --> 00:13:14,640
controversial issues. With his characteristic
incisiveness, he lays bare the misconceptions  

125
00:13:14,640 --> 00:13:21,040
reproduced by the Orientalist and
modern Chinese politics. In his Death  

126
00:13:21,040 --> 00:13:27,200
by a Thousand Cuts, which traces the laws of
punishment in imperial China, Brook and his  

127
00:13:27,200 --> 00:13:32,160
collaborators successfully deconstruct
the Western misconceptions of Chinese  

128
00:13:32,160 --> 00:13:39,520
judicial cruelty. In Collaboration: Japanese
Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China,  

129
00:13:40,160 --> 00:13:46,240
Brook reconsiders the discursive politics
of resistance versus collaboration, which  

130
00:13:46,240 --> 00:13:53,600
has been championed by Chinese politics of
heroic patriotism. His inquisitive,  

131
00:13:53,600 --> 00:14:01,280
creative mind reminds us to scrutinize our own
ideological positions and opens new areas for  

132
00:14:01,280 --> 00:14:07,920
serious research. His extensive use of
historical sources cuts freely across  

133
00:14:07,920 --> 00:14:15,280
linguistic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries.
As a scholar of literature, I am particularly  

134
00:14:15,280 --> 00:14:22,560
amazed by his superb storytelling—his
writing is lucid, insightful, and sharp,  

135
00:14:22,560 --> 00:14:29,120
often tinged with humor and irony, vividly
unfolding the timbre of the historical figures,  

136
00:14:29,120 --> 00:14:35,680
events, and objects in their own context,
which makes otherwise esoteric historical topics  

137
00:14:35,680 --> 00:14:41,600
easily accessible not only to scholars
and students but also to general audiences.

138
00:14:43,520 --> 00:14:50,080
It is our great pleasure to have him, one of 
the most original and inspiring historians 

139
00:14:50,080 --> 00:14:57,760
of our time, here at Cornell to give this 
year’s Hu Shih distinguished lecture. Please 

140
00:14:57,760 --> 00:14:59,280
welcome Timothy Brook.

141
00:15:03,280 --> 00:15:09,920
Thank you very much. It's a great honor to have 
been asked to give the Hu Shih lecture, in part,  

142
00:15:09,920 --> 00:15:16,560
because it has sent me back to Hu Shih, and I can 
read, re-read, and think about his contributions.  

143
00:15:16,560 --> 00:15:22,080
I want to thank Suyoung Son and T.J. Hinrichs for 
making this possible. I also want to thank them  

144
00:15:22,720 --> 00:15:27,920
for giving me this opportunity because I'm going 
to use it to pull together some recent research.  

145
00:15:28,720 --> 00:15:34,000
It's going to be a very wide ranging lecture. I'm 
sorry but I'm going to take my full 60 minutes  

146
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:39,840
here. I have a lot to talk about and I promise 
you to be very controversial. So let me begin.

147
00:15:42,240 --> 00:15:48,080
China is one of the most governmentalized 
countries in the world: a country in which  

148
00:15:48,080 --> 00:15:53,520
the state has the capacity to order almost 
all aspects of life, and in which society  

149
00:15:53,520 --> 00:16:00,480
has effectively no mechanisms to challenge, 
reprove, or alter the state. The penetration of  

150
00:16:00,480 --> 00:16:05,920
state administration into everyday life is not as 
thorough as some unsympathetic observers suggest,  

151
00:16:06,800 --> 00:16:12,320
yet the view that the government is authorized to 
monitor any aspect of individual or social life  

152
00:16:12,960 --> 00:16:18,720
is widely understood and accepted by most Chinese 
as a feature of what they imagine to be the proper  

153
00:16:18,720 --> 00:16:23,680
function of the state; in vivid contrast 
to what most North Americans imagine to be  

154
00:16:24,960 --> 00:16:32,080
legitimate state function. China is not unique as 
a culture where people acquiesce in raison d’état,  

155
00:16:32,080 --> 00:16:36,800
the belief that the protection of state interests 
is the first condition of state viability,  

156
00:16:37,760 --> 00:16:42,400
or the state recognizes no real constitutional 
limits on its exercise of sovereignty.  

157
00:16:43,760 --> 00:16:47,040
But China is somewhat in its own 
category as a political culture  

158
00:16:47,600 --> 00:16:52,800
in which the absence of constitutional 
limits and the accessibility of society  

159
00:16:52,800 --> 00:16:59,120
to state direction are explicitly practiced, even 
celebrated, as model features of good government,  

160
00:16:59,840 --> 00:17:05,120
not just provisionally during a tutelary 
period, but confidently as permanent features  

161
00:17:06,240 --> 00:17:11,040
as evidence, in effect, that the People’s Republic 
has brought China to the end of its history. 

162
00:17:12,960 --> 00:17:17,360
Reaching the end of history was of course the 
Hegelian claim that some American commentators  

163
00:17:17,360 --> 00:17:22,960
made after the collapse of the Soviet Union: 
that a liberal democratic order had finally  

164
00:17:22,960 --> 00:17:27,040
shown itself to be the natural end 
point of a transformation begun in

165
00:17:27,040 --> 00:17:32,160
the Renaissance and in the wake of the decline 
of monarchy: a destination finally reached.  

166
00:17:33,680 --> 00:17:37,120
American politics of the past 
decade if I may mention this,  

167
00:17:37,120 --> 00:17:42,080
have proven this to be a fragile claim. The degree 
to which the United States veered toward state 

168
00:17:42,080 --> 00:17:47,440
lawlessness would, I think, have stunned 
those in the 18th and 19th centuries  

169
00:17:47,440 --> 00:17:54,720
who ran the original experiment in constitutional 
democracy. Do Chinese politics of the past decade  

170
00:17:54,720 --> 00:18:00,960
tell the opposite story? That is to say, has that 
experiment in state organization, by contrast,  

171
00:18:01,680 --> 00:18:07,360
reached a stage at which it has so thoroughly 
resolved its internal contradictions that the  

172
00:18:07,360 --> 00:18:14,960
system has been perfected and alternative paths 
into the future closed off and history thus ended?

173
00:18:17,440 --> 00:18:22,320
Much in the past decade, indeed in just the 
past few years, could be offered as evidence  

174
00:18:22,320 --> 00:18:26,640
that the Chinese Communist Party’s experiment 
has brought China to a degree of perfection  

175
00:18:27,680 --> 00:18:33,120
such that it allows the PRC state a free hand 
to seize Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor as  

176
00:18:33,120 --> 00:18:39,040
hostages and place them in solitary detention for 
almost two years in defiance of international law.  

177
00:18:40,400 --> 00:18:45,920
That authorizes the state to arrest and shame 
its critics, such as former Qinghua University  

178
00:18:45,920 --> 00:18:51,680
law professor Xu Zhangrun. That gives the 
PRC state a free hand to imprison Uyghur  

179
00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:57,360
intellectuals such as literary scholar Gheyratjan 
Osman, currently serving a ten-year incarceration  

180
00:18:58,080 --> 00:19:05,120
and medical research scientist Tursunjan 
Nurmamat who was disappeared last Apri. Does  

181
00:19:05,120 --> 00:19:10,960
it permit the state to incarcerate over a million 
Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims in what  

182
00:19:10,960 --> 00:19:16,960
the Chinese ambassador Huang Ping euphemistically 
calls  “vocational training centres” purely  

183
00:19:16,960 --> 00:19:23,840
because of their ethnic identity? And this is 
just to name just a few recent unfortunate events.  

184
00:19:24,640 --> 00:19:28,400
And all this without much negative 
comment from the Chinese people.

185
00:19:30,960 --> 00:19:37,120
These developments have led me to ask by what 
standards is state action is lawful when that  

186
00:19:37,120 --> 00:19:44,160
state is the People’s Republic of China? I should 
by now have some of your squirming in your seats  

187
00:19:44,160 --> 00:19:50,880
at what sounds like the commission of Teemu 
Ruskola’s charge of legal Orientalism.  

188
00:19:51,600 --> 00:19:56,240
I have long admired Ruskola’s sustained 
critique of the narrative in the study  

189
00:19:56,240 --> 00:20:00,720
of comparative law that polarizes
a lawful West and an unlawful East.

190
00:20:03,120 --> 00:20:07,440
But recent events means that I find myself 
having to reflect upon acts of the PRC state,  

191
00:20:08,320 --> 00:20:14,960
and they offend my sense of lawfulness. Ruskola 
is fond of citing Clifford Geertz’s observation  

192
00:20:14,960 --> 00:20:20,720
that law quote “is part of a distinctive manner 
of imagining the real,” or in his own terms,  

193
00:20:20,720 --> 00:20:26,000
as quote “a resource of signification,” “a 
structure of the political imagination.”  

194
00:20:27,120 --> 00:20:32,800
I recognize that law is not natural but 
constructed, particularly law in its liberal form:  

195
00:20:32,800 --> 00:20:37,920
in Ruskola’s terms, as “a fundamental element",
and I'm quoting here, "in the modern worldview  

196
00:20:37,920 --> 00:20:42,400
that conceives of the individual as the 
paradigmatic existential, political, and legal  

197
00:20:42,400 --> 00:20:48,800
subject and the state as the privileged medium 
for the instantiation of its universal values.”

198
00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:55,280
As a historian, however, I cannot but 
help notice that law’s construction  

199
00:20:56,080 --> 00:21:03,360
is, I think in every culture, derived from 
a long, difficult, and intentional history  

200
00:21:04,160 --> 00:21:09,520
through which some people have striven to 
produce a system of order in which the reasons  

201
00:21:09,520 --> 00:21:16,080
for which an individual acts are not in every case 
outweighed by the reasons for which a state acts.  

202
00:21:17,440 --> 00:21:23,440
If the observation that “law is a structure of 
the political imagination” alarms me slightly,  

203
00:21:23,440 --> 00:21:28,080
it is because it leaves people vulnerable to acts 
by political agents with different imaginations,  

204
00:21:28,720 --> 00:21:32,960
whether they occupy the pinnacle of state 
leadership or run errands for the local  

205
00:21:32,960 --> 00:21:37,600
police that might include knocking on your 
door at 5 in the morning, waving a "legal"  

206
00:21:37,600 --> 00:21:44,480
document in your face, and causing you to 
disappear. To aver that law has no fixed  

207
00:21:44,480 --> 00:21:50,880
content may well be intellectually rigorous, 
but in all legal systems, law has content,  

208
00:21:51,600 --> 00:21:58,080
and what that content includes can affect 
profoundly what people are allowed, or expected,  

209
00:21:58,080 --> 00:22:03,840
or required to do as the legal subjects of 
the particular system of law they live under  

210
00:22:04,960 --> 00:22:12,000
that have constructed them in this way. Law is 
a construction, but it in turn constructs us,  

211
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:16,400
and in ways that, given its service to 
the state, renders resistance difficult.  

212
00:22:17,680 --> 00:22:23,200
Law in any political system may be law regardless 
of its content, but not all political systems  

213
00:22:23,200 --> 00:22:28,400
provide the same benefits or opportunities, 
nor do their laws enable or restrict the same  

214
00:22:28,400 --> 00:22:34,240
rights and obligations. The story that law 
tells may not be the story we want told—but  

215
00:22:35,920 --> 00:22:39,840
and need not reduce us to being 
polite cultural relativists.

216
00:22:41,040 --> 00:22:45,680
To allege, as I have already done, that the 
PRC state in recent years has been conspicuous  

217
00:22:46,480 --> 00:22:51,280
in failing to meet of what I happen to regard 
as appropriate standards of state lawfulness  

218
00:22:52,080 --> 00:22:59,920
could be a regrettable lapse into legal 
Orientalism, but I don’t think so. If legal system  

219
00:22:59,920 --> 00:23:05,760
differ, their differences can be subjected 
to analysis that is not purely prejudicial.  

220
00:23:06,720 --> 00:23:12,000
As Donald Clarke has recently and reasonably 
argued, quote “In the case of China, at least,  

221
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:16,160
there is prima facie evidence suggesting 
that we should at least be open to the idea  

222
00:23:17,200 --> 00:23:22,960
that the Chinese order system is fundamentally 
different from what we think of as a legal system,  

223
00:23:23,840 --> 00:23:29,600
and it should not be methodologically impossible, 
let alone politically incorrect, to say so.” 

224
00:23:31,440 --> 00:23:37,520
I am not a philosopher of law, however, I'm 
a historian, and so today I will use what  

225
00:23:37,520 --> 00:23:43,360
is in my toolkit and apply that to the history of 
Chinese state formation and political philosophy,  

226
00:23:44,240 --> 00:23:50,400
and see how that might help us better understand 
the current crisis - and it is a crisis -

227
00:23:50,400 --> 00:23:59,280
in which China and the world are facing off. 
Now a historical approach requires suspending  

228
00:23:59,280 --> 00:24:06,160
any notion that the PRC state is the necessary, 
or characteristic, or let alone end-of-history,  

229
00:24:06,160 --> 00:24:12,640
outcome of the Chinese tradition. A historical 
approach accepts that governance practices today,  

230
00:24:13,200 --> 00:24:18,640
and the ways of speaking that justify them as 
lawful, have emerged from a complex range of  

231
00:24:18,640 --> 00:24:24,880
factors that cannot exclude policies, protocols, 
and practices, from a great range of sources,  

232
00:24:25,760 --> 00:24:31,840
especially prior to the 20th century—and that 
are subject to debate among Chinese themselves.  

233
00:24:33,360 --> 00:24:37,680
To explore this possibility, I will devote the 
body of this lecture to a discussion of the  

234
00:24:37,680 --> 00:24:43,680
school of statecraft philosophy anchored 
by the 15th-century scholar, educator,  

235
00:24:43,680 --> 00:24:51,440
and at the end of his year, Chief Grand Secretary,
Qiu Jun (born in 1421, died 1495).  

236
00:24:53,200 --> 00:24:57,680
To get to Qiu Jun’s vision of the lawful 
state, however, we cannot simply leap  

237
00:24:58,320 --> 00:25:04,480
from the era of China’s Great States forward to 
the era of Communist Party rule. I want instead  

238
00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:10,240
to start from the transition era and consider 
how Republican intellectuals addressed the  

239
00:25:10,240 --> 00:25:16,160
problem of the state that they hoped to bring 
into existence after the Qing had collapsed,  

240
00:25:16,720 --> 00:25:22,560
beginning with Sun Yatsen, and then turning 
to Hu Shih, whose memory this lecture honours.

241
00:25:25,120 --> 00:25:27,840
Part two: Republican Dilemmas:

242
00:25:29,840 --> 00:25:34,800
Although no one would claim him as a political 
philosopher, Sun Yatsen did think at length about  

243
00:25:34,800 --> 00:25:40,960
the political constitution of the republic he 
imagined as China’s future. His ideas were those  

244
00:25:40,960 --> 00:25:46,560
of someone formed between an imperial tradition 
that he knew more by popular lore than by study,  

245
00:25:47,520 --> 00:25:51,600
and the tradition of Western constitutional 
government that he absorbed through reading  

246
00:25:51,600 --> 00:25:59,120
and living abroad. Though he was powerfully 
persuaded by foreign political ideas, the concepts  

247
00:25:59,120 --> 00:26:04,240
that he adopted into his political discourse drew 
more on the language of Chinese political life,  

248
00:26:05,440 --> 00:26:12,800
as they had to in order for him to reach a broad 
domestic audience. Sun was a political actor,  

249
00:26:12,800 --> 00:26:17,600
not a political philosopher. And his most 
famous formulation, as a political actors,  

250
00:26:18,240 --> 00:26:23,600
were the principles of Chinese republicanism 
knowns as the Three Principles of the People -

251
00:26:23,600 --> 00:26:28,160
min zu (民族), min quan (民權), and min sheng (民生).

252
00:26:28,160 --> 00:26:32,880
Sun talked a lot about these three principles 
without tying himself to precise definitions.  

253
00:26:33,840 --> 00:26:39,040
The conventional translations of 
these terms - nationalism, democracy,  

254
00:26:39,040 --> 00:26:44,640
and socialism - are later construals 
and rather mask what he imagined  

255
00:26:44,640 --> 00:26:50,320
when he coined them. What he seemed to mean when 
he first published this trio of concepts in 1905  

256
00:26:50,880 --> 00:26:57,120
was that the Chinese people should recognize 
themselves as (1) a people sharing a common ethnic  

257
00:26:57,120 --> 00:27:04,320
identity (as distinct from the Manchus), that 
the people should be recognized as right-holders,  

258
00:27:05,360 --> 00:27:09,520
and (3) that they should be guaranteed 
the means of securing their livelihood.  

259
00:27:10,960 --> 00:27:14,320
These are aspirations. They do not 
amount to a political constitution;  

260
00:27:14,880 --> 00:27:17,360
at best, they were a 
placeholders for a constitution.  

261
00:27:18,560 --> 00:27:22,960
That said, the future state that Sun 
imagined: the revolution bringing into being  

262
00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:28,560
would be lawful to the extent that it 
recognized and acted on these three principles. 

263
00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:36,320
Now all three terms have a “traditional” tone, 
which leads me to ask whether we can find them  

264
00:27:36,320 --> 00:27:43,440
in the political lexicon of the Ming and Qing 
writers. The short answer is, not really. Min  

265
00:27:43,440 --> 00:27:48,800
zu (民族) and min quan (民權) are utterly absent. 
Both were neologisms adopted from Japanese  

266
00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:54,880
political philosophy which took Chinese terms and 
reconfigure them as to translate foreign concepts.  

267
00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:02,640
The idea of the people the min (民) being a zu (族) 
would resonate most strongly with the phrase in  

268
00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:07,920
the "Spring and Autumn Annals" describing those 
who were not native to the North China Plain,  

269
00:28:07,920 --> 00:28:14,720
and therefore barbarians to the Zhou state: the 
expression is fei wo zu lei (非我族類), people not  

270
00:28:14,720 --> 00:28:20,880
of our type. The implication of ethnic difference 
would have been obvious to all, of course, given  

271
00:28:20,880 --> 00:28:25,920
that the Manchus were one of the revolutionaries’ 
targets, and were "not of our type".  

272
00:28:27,680 --> 00:28:34,320
A second term min quan (民權) would 
have even less resonance with the  

273
00:28:34,320 --> 00:28:39,920
idea of Sun Yatsen. Quan (權) connoted power, 
and did not connote the idea of “rights”,  

274
00:28:40,640 --> 00:28:46,080
although it was moving in that 
direction. Of any of these three terms,  

275
00:28:46,080 --> 00:28:50,880
the one that probably resonated most with the 
language of Confucian political philosophy,  

276
00:28:50,880 --> 00:28:58,480
was the last one min sheng (民生), and I shall 
shortly argue this from the writings of Qiu Jun. 

277
00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:04,240
Now if I, from my perspective as a historian 
working in a different cultural framework,  

278
00:29:04,880 --> 00:29:09,440
were to imagine a term that Sun might have 
used to give voice to a new political vision,  

279
00:29:10,080 --> 00:29:18,000
but didn’t, the one I would identify is the idea 
of the people bearing an entitlement to rule,  

280
00:29:18,560 --> 00:29:23,520
using the word zhi (治) as in zheng zhi, 
"politics"; so, following his formula,  

281
00:29:23,520 --> 00:29:30,720
min zhi (民治), “the people as rulers.” The term 
was utterly inadmissible in Confucian rhetoric.  

282
00:29:30,720 --> 00:29:36,640
And it is missing from Sun’s writings, at least as 
far as my limited reading of Sun Yatsen tells me.  

283
00:29:37,840 --> 00:29:44,960
By the 1920s, however, this term min zhi (民治) is 
in wide circulation among the generation after Sun  

284
00:29:44,960 --> 00:29:54,240
Yatsen, including Hu Shih. And I now turn to Hu.
He regarded min zhi (民治) as the core feature  

285
00:29:54,240 --> 00:29:59,600
of republican government, and associated it 
unapologetically with democracy as practised in  

286
00:29:59,600 --> 00:30:05,680
the West. Through the 1920s, he grew increasingly 
disappointed by the failure of the political  

287
00:30:05,680 --> 00:30:10,640
leadership of the Guomindang (the Nationalist 
Party) to advance the ideals of republicanism.  

288
00:30:11,280 --> 00:30:19,280
At a tense moment in his agitation for democratic 
culture and responsible government in 1929, he  

289
00:30:19,280 --> 00:30:25,120
denounced the regime for hijacking and distorting 
Sun Yatsen’s Three Principles of People.  

290
00:30:26,160 --> 00:30:31,120
Hu took particular offense at a regulation 
the Guomindang brought down reducing min  

291
00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:36,960
quan (民權) to a prohibition against violating 
someone’s “person, liberty, or property.”  

292
00:30:38,000 --> 00:30:43,840
What offended him was the absence of
any reference to such violation by the state  

293
00:30:43,840 --> 00:30:52,080
itself. As he observed in a piece of journalism, 
quote “this order only forbids violation of those  

294
00:30:52,080 --> 00:30:57,760
rights by a private individual or a corporation 
but fails to restrict governmental organs.  

295
00:30:58,560 --> 00:31:03,280
It is true that a private person or a corporation 
must be prohibited from attempting acts of  

296
00:31:03,280 --> 00:31:10,000
encroachment upon another man's person, liberty or 
property, but the country is suffering very much  

297
00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:15,920
more through and from illegal acts of 
governmental organs, or acts done in the  

298
00:31:15,920 --> 00:31:20,320
name of the government and the party... The 
order in question seems to have accorded no  

299
00:31:20,320 --> 00:31:26,800
protection or guarantee to the people against 
the acts of the government itself” end quote.

300
00:31:28,080 --> 00:31:34,640
The people may be said to have rights, but the 
right to rule, for Sun Yatsen, was not specified  

301
00:31:34,640 --> 00:31:41,600
as one of them. Now Hu trod gently here, but he 
laid responsibility in part with Sun himself,  

302
00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:47,280
whose unreflective conservatism excluded 
something like min zhi (民治) from consideration.  

303
00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:53,200
To reduce the political program of republicanism 
to min quan (民權), the rights of the people, and  

304
00:31:53,200 --> 00:31:59,040
call it “democracy,” as the term is translated, 
papers over the absence of the most fundamental  

305
00:31:59,040 --> 00:32:05,360
principle of lawful democratic rule missing from 
Sun Yatsen’s model and from Guomindang practice:  

306
00:32:05,360 --> 00:32:08,880
the right of the people to 
participate in ruling their country. 

307
00:32:10,560 --> 00:32:14,240
Hu Shih’s frustration in the 
late 1920s century was enormous.  

308
00:32:15,520 --> 00:32:21,120
I re-read his biography by Chou Min-chih, prior 
to writing this lecture, and the word that leaps  

309
00:32:21,120 --> 00:32:29,360
off the pages in Chou's biography is the word 
“dilemma.” No word better captures Hu Shih’s  

310
00:32:29,360 --> 00:32:35,440
predicament during the mid-Republican period. He 
raised hope after hope for how China might evolve,  

311
00:32:35,440 --> 00:32:41,120
and how that evolution might be guided, but almost 
every time, he was opposed, and often silenced,  

312
00:32:41,120 --> 00:32:47,200
by the leaders and enablers of the Guomindang. 
That he remained an optimist is to me remarkable.  

313
00:32:48,800 --> 00:32:52,160
Now, one dilemma that Chou Min-chih 
doesn’t raise, but that I will,  

314
00:32:52,960 --> 00:32:57,520
is Hu Shih’s relationship with the 
Chinese past. Unlike Sun Yatsen,  

315
00:32:57,520 --> 00:33:00,800
Hu had extensive and profound knowledge 
of China’s history and literature.  

316
00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:08,080
By and large, however, when advocating measures 
to move China toward a genuine republicanism,  

317
00:33:08,080 --> 00:33:14,720
his models were Western, largely American. Hu 
did not reach into his native tradition, either  

318
00:33:14,720 --> 00:33:21,520
substantively or even rhetorically, to chart a 
way forward. As his writings on Chinese philosophy  

319
00:33:21,520 --> 00:33:26,560
attest, his inclination was to reach back into 
the writings of Warring States philosophers,  

320
00:33:26,560 --> 00:33:32,480
who argued philosophical ideas from the 
ground up, rather than turn to the political  

321
00:33:32,480 --> 00:33:37,840
philosophers linked to the statecraft 
tradition from the Song dynasty forward. 

322
00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:44,400
The only later thinker who caught Hu’s attention 
and earned his approval is the 17th-century  

323
00:33:44,400 --> 00:33:51,840
critic, Huang Zongxi. Huang’s Minru Xuean (明儒學案), 
Case Studies of Ming Scholars, became the standard  

324
00:33:51,840 --> 00:33:58,000
handbook for post-Ming readers of what Ming 
philosophy had achieved—which, in the view  

325
00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:04,320
of many, was limited and uneven. Huang Zongxi’s 
text is almost entirely blind to the concept of  

326
00:34:04,320 --> 00:34:09,600
statecraft. Political thought carried a lesser 
reputation in the tradition of li xue (理學), the  

327
00:34:09,600 --> 00:34:16,080
school of principles or Neo-Confucianism. The 
Neo-Confucians combined ethical absolutism  

328
00:34:16,080 --> 00:34:20,240
with metaphysical robustness in their 
investigations of principles, and this was a  

329
00:34:20,240 --> 00:34:25,920
powerful combination that outclassed thinkers 
on lower metaphysical levels, which is where  

330
00:34:25,920 --> 00:34:33,840
high philosophy tended to relegate statecraft. 
Qiu Jun whose idea I will speak about shortly,  

331
00:34:34,480 --> 00:34:41,920
is granted two brief cameos in Huang Zongxi’s 
Case Studies, so far as I've noticed, once as  

332
00:34:41,920 --> 00:34:47,840
compiler of the court diary of the Chenghua 
reign, which repeats an unflattering story  

333
00:34:49,680 --> 00:34:55,680
about the Neo-Confucian philosopher Chen Baisha 
who curried favour with eunuchs. Now this is an  

334
00:34:55,680 --> 00:35:02,960
entirely unfair attack, as Qiu was a distant 
editor-in-chief who would probably have read  

335
00:35:02,960 --> 00:35:10,240
right past the story. The other quick walk - on is 
the political opponent of another Neo-Confucian,  

336
00:35:11,040 --> 00:35:17,360
Wang Shu, who treated Qiu in a condescending 
manner, as though Qiu was his intellectual  

337
00:35:17,360 --> 00:35:26,320
inferior. This is the only way in which the reader 
of Huang Zongxi would even have heard of Qiu Jun.  

338
00:35:26,320 --> 00:35:29,120
Whether Qiu had any had any 
contributions to make to Ming thought  

339
00:35:29,760 --> 00:35:37,600
is something Huang Zongxi entirely ignores: he 
was simply not one of “us," in a very elite sense. 

340
00:35:39,200 --> 00:35:44,400
Now Huang’s version of Ming thought dominated the 
perspective of intellectuals, and even reformists,  

341
00:35:44,400 --> 00:35:48,720
at the end of the Qing. Not to put too fine 
a point on this, Huang’s perspective—which  

342
00:35:49,680 --> 00:35:53,840
arose from his dismay at the dynasty, 
the Ming, falling to barbarians—blocked  

343
00:35:55,200 --> 00:35:58,960
Chinese thinkers in the early Republican 
period from any sort of critical up-take of  

344
00:35:58,960 --> 00:36:04,160
Chinese ideas about governance, which absorbed 
the attention of statecraft writers throughout  

345
00:36:04,160 --> 00:36:11,200
the Ming and Qing periods. This inattention left 
political philosophers such as Qiu Jun—and I would  

346
00:36:11,200 --> 00:36:17,440
be willing to defend his writing as philosophy, 
not just as policy-wonking—beyond consideration.  

347
00:36:18,800 --> 00:36:22,800
Sun Yatsen was entirely unaware of 
this tradition, as far as I can tell.  

348
00:36:23,760 --> 00:36:29,200
And while Hu Shih strove to illuminate the 
contributions of Chinese classical thought,  

349
00:36:29,840 --> 00:36:34,000
he too relied on the Case Studies of 
Ming Scholars for his account of the Ming  

350
00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:41,280
as a short parade of such luminaries as Wang 
Yangming who he characterizes as "destructive". 

351
00:36:43,600 --> 00:36:50,080
Had the statecraft thought been available to 
them as a living body of intellectual production,  

352
00:36:50,880 --> 00:36:57,200
what might Hu or Sun have found there? That
they didn’t, at least to a degree explicitly,  

353
00:36:58,400 --> 00:37:02,800
means that their question can be answered 
only speculatively. If we want a place to  

354
00:37:02,800 --> 00:37:09,040
begin the exercise, however, there is no better 
text than Qiu Jun’s "Daxue yanyi bu" 大學衍義補.  

355
00:37:09,040 --> 00:37:14,560
Although neither Hu or Sun appear to have 
known this text or read it, we might still ask  

356
00:37:14,560 --> 00:37:21,280
whether the statecraft tradition might have been 
whispering in their ears, most especially about  

357
00:37:21,280 --> 00:37:26,400
“the people,” which will be the concept on 
which I will focus for the rest of this lecture.

358
00:37:28,160 --> 00:37:31,920
So, Part three: Qiu Jun’s 
Model of Good Government. 

359
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:37,120
Qiu Jun was a brilliant young man, born in 1421,  

360
00:37:37,920 --> 00:37:43,520
whose learning catapulted him from Hainan 
Island to Beijing, and who was serving  

361
00:37:43,520 --> 00:37:49,840
as chancellor of the National Academy when 
Emperor Hongzhi came to the throne in 1487.  

362
00:37:51,040 --> 00:37:55,680
To mark the occasion, Qiu presented the 
seventeen-year-old with his homework: the  

363
00:37:55,680 --> 00:38:03,840
Daxue yanyi bu 大學衍義補, Supplement to Elaborations 
on “The Great Learning” in all its 160 chapters.  

364
00:38:05,120 --> 00:38:09,920
The inelegant title was intentional, for it 
acknowledges an earlier work by the 13th-century  

365
00:38:09,920 --> 00:38:15,520
Neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhen Dexiu, who 
compiled a program of moral education under  

366
00:38:15,520 --> 00:38:22,000
the title of "Elaborations on “The Great 
Learning"". Both authors refer back to the  

367
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:26,880
short classical text, "The Great Learning," 
which opens by announcing what it calls  

368
00:38:26,880 --> 00:38:32,640
“the way of Great Learning,” consisting of quote
“illuminating bright virtue, renewing the people,  

369
00:38:33,280 --> 00:38:38,000
and resting in the highest goodness” 
(大學之道，在明明德，在親民，在止於至善). As platitudinous  

370
00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:44,240
as these sound, they are not platitudes for 
Qiu or Zhen, but constitute what Qiu called  

371
00:38:44,240 --> 00:38:52,400
a gang ling (綱領), a program, that could be 
followed in order to achieve perfect government.  

372
00:38:55,200 --> 00:39:01,520
"The Great Learning" lays out eight steps 
familiar to all students of Confucianism:  

373
00:39:01,520 --> 00:39:08,240
investigate things, extend your knowledge, 
make your thoughts sincere, rectify your mind,  

374
00:39:09,200 --> 00:39:16,000
cultivate your person, regulate your family, 
govern the state, and bring peace to the realm,  

375
00:39:16,560 --> 00:39:23,200
or empire, or world, depending on how 
you want to translate tianxia (天下): Zhen  

376
00:39:24,160 --> 00:39:33,120
Dexiu’s elaboration touch on the first six steps 
and does it in 43 chapters. Qiu however felt that  

377
00:39:33,120 --> 00:39:38,640
Zhen failed to finish the task by stopping at 
the end of the sixth step. Two steps remained,  

378
00:39:39,360 --> 00:39:44,080
which only the emperor could practice: governing 
the country, and bringing peace to the realm.  

379
00:39:45,120 --> 00:39:50,400
As these steps were not so straightforward, 
the emperor needed guidance, and Qiu was there  

380
00:39:50,400 --> 00:39:59,280
ready to supply that guidance in 160 chapters.
The Supplement, as I shall name this book is  

381
00:39:59,280 --> 00:40:03,440
China’s most systematic and comprehensive 
handbook of state administration.  

382
00:40:04,240 --> 00:40:09,360
Qiu compiled it during his tenure as chancellor 
of the Academy, probably relying on the students  

383
00:40:09,360 --> 00:40:14,560
there as his research assistants, although he 
no doubt had the mass of texts that he cites  

384
00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:21,680
at his fingertips. To call it a “compendium” 
makes it sound too much like a grab-bag rather  

385
00:40:21,680 --> 00:40:25,280
than the programmatic vision of state 
administration which is what it is.  

386
00:40:26,720 --> 00:40:30,480
For the Supplement is not an even-handed 
consideration of policy alternatives;  

387
00:40:31,520 --> 00:40:37,920
it is a carefully constructed, unified vision 
of how a Confucian bureaucracy under the aegis  

388
00:40:37,920 --> 00:40:45,760
of a informed, moral, but minimally interfering 
emperor should manage the affairs of the realm.  

389
00:40:48,160 --> 00:40:54,000
It was very much a project of its time. Qiu and 
his generation of officials lived in the shadow of  

390
00:40:54,000 --> 00:41:01,120
the 1449 Tumu Incident, when Emperor Zhengtong led 
a massive army on a pointless excursion across the  

391
00:41:01,120 --> 00:41:07,600
Great Wall, against the Mongol Great State, only 
to be taken hostage halfway back to Beijing as  

392
00:41:07,600 --> 00:41:13,760
he beat a hasty retreat. The loss of the emperor 
was a constitutional crisis of epic proportions,  

393
00:41:14,400 --> 00:41:18,400
which steady hands at the time resolved by 
placing the emperor’s younger half-brother  

394
00:41:18,400 --> 00:41:24,160
on the throne—an improvised solution that 
might have held had China not been plunged at  

395
00:41:24,160 --> 00:41:30,160
exactly that moment into a seven-year climate 
downturn worse than any in several centuries. 

396
00:41:31,840 --> 00:41:37,680
The crisis of the 1450s haunted the rest of 
the 15th century. Intellectually ambitious  

397
00:41:37,680 --> 00:41:44,080
officials such as Qiu Jun vowed never to allow 
an emperor to repeat the errors of that decade.  

398
00:41:45,120 --> 00:41:49,520
Looking back on the claims and debacles of 
Great State ambition that had dominated the  

399
00:41:49,520 --> 00:41:54,160
first century of Ming rule (without daring, 
of course, to call down any Ming emperor for  

400
00:41:54,160 --> 00:41:59,840
anything he might have done or failed to do), 
Qiu put together a complete program of state  

401
00:41:59,840 --> 00:42:05,680
administration and policy options designed to 
bring China back into line with its classical  

402
00:42:05,680 --> 00:42:12,000
ideals, largely filtered through the wisdom of 
philosophers of the Song School of Principle,  

403
00:42:12,560 --> 00:42:17,120
Zhu Xi holding pride of place among 
the authorities that he liked to cites.  

404
00:42:18,640 --> 00:42:25,280
Given Qiu’’s neglect at the hands of philosophers, 
I was amused to discover that the archway leading  

405
00:42:25,280 --> 00:42:31,440
to his tomb on Hainan Island is graced 
with the inscription lixue mingchen (理學名臣),  

406
00:42:31,440 --> 00:42:38,560
renowned official of the School of Principle. So 
that title should put us on notice that the school  

407
00:42:38,560 --> 00:42:45,120
of lixue (理學), the school of Neo-Confucianism 
was not regarded by its own practitioner at the  

408
00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:50,960
time as purely a gymnasium for metaphysics, 
but it was at least as much a playing field  

409
00:42:50,960 --> 00:42:57,840
for the design and implementation of policies 
consonant with the ideals of Confucian philosophy.  

410
00:42:58,720 --> 00:43:02,800
To be fair, jing shi (經世), statecraft, 
was not so much a philosophical school,  

411
00:43:03,440 --> 00:43:08,160
at least in terms of its own aspirations, as it 
was a mode of communication through which ideas,  

412
00:43:08,160 --> 00:43:16,080
people, and texts were linked, and I thank my 
college Yin Shoufu for this insights. Nonetheless,  

413
00:43:16,080 --> 00:43:20,320
its guiding assumptions were firmly 
rooted in Neo-Confucian philosophy. 

414
00:43:22,400 --> 00:43:26,240
The conviction guiding Qiu through
the Supplement is that all problems  

415
00:43:26,240 --> 00:43:30,400
in the public realm—political and 
infrastructural, social and economic,  

416
00:43:30,400 --> 00:43:36,320
environmental and moral—can be resolved 
by careful analysis and correct procedure.  

417
00:43:37,520 --> 00:43:41,600
Qiu sets up his program within the classical 
construction of the emperor as the son of Heaven,  

418
00:43:42,320 --> 00:43:48,320
which meant starting with the court that surrounds 
the emperor, in the first section of the book,  

419
00:43:48,960 --> 00:43:52,000
moving to the officials who serve 
the court in the second section,  

420
00:43:52,720 --> 00:43:56,880
reaching out to the people whom the officials 
oversee in the third section, and so forth, 

421
00:43:56,880 --> 00:44:01,840
branching out further and further to other 
tasks and responsibilities, then ultimately  

422
00:44:01,840 --> 00:44:05,920
dealing with the military, and 
finally dealing with the barbarians.  

423
00:44:07,440 --> 00:44:13,520
Given that the system hinged on an absolute ruler, 
the temptation of autocracy hovers at the edge of  

424
00:44:13,520 --> 00:44:20,720
statecraft thought. Yet it was an impulse that the 
Supplement resisted to some extent. The emperor  

425
00:44:20,720 --> 00:44:27,360
whom the text constructs could not simply do 
as he liked. He was merely born to his job,  

426
00:44:28,160 --> 00:44:34,320
he had to be educated to it properly, he had to 
take the best advice on policy that was available,  

427
00:44:34,320 --> 00:44:40,560
he had to listen to qualified technocrats whose 
knowledge and moral education exceeded that of  

428
00:44:40,560 --> 00:44:52,080
his own, in other words, Qiu and his cohort.
What is somewhat unusual about the Supplement  

429
00:44:52,080 --> 00:44:59,120
within the genre of statecraft writing is its 
voice. The text directly addresses one reader,  

430
00:44:59,120 --> 00:45:06,000
the emperor. Qiu opens his preface with the 
phrase chen wei (臣惟), “your minster avers.”  

431
00:45:07,280 --> 00:45:11,360
Each chapter then is structured as a sequence 
of quotations first from the Classics,  

432
00:45:11,920 --> 00:45:17,200
followed by commentaries from pre-Ming thinkers, 
followed by his own commentary. and once Qiu gets  

433
00:45:17,200 --> 00:45:24,000
to his own commentary, he prefixes this with a 
comment chenan (臣案) “your official comments,”  

434
00:45:24,560 --> 00:45:32,080
with chen (臣) printed as a half-sized character 
to display his deference to his implied reader.  

435
00:45:32,080 --> 00:45:37,920
Qiu started compiling the Supplement under the 
Chenghua emperor, who took no interest in what the  

436
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:44,720
chancellor of the National Academy was up to. 
Cheng hua's death in 1487, by which time the  

437
00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:50,320
supplement was, must have been completed was 
a stroke of remarkable good fortune for Qiu.  

438
00:45:52,080 --> 00:45:58,000
For Chenghua's heir, the seventeen-year-old 
Hongzhi emperor, was willing to receive a  

439
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:06,320
copy of the book. He praised Qiu for the book, he 
ordered it published, and Qiu’s star rose quickly,  

440
00:46:06,320 --> 00:46:14,240
catapulting him into the post of the Senior 
Grand Secretary at the remarkable age of 70. 

441
00:46:14,240 --> 00:46:19,840
The Confucian cosmology of the Supplement rests on 
the theological premise shared by all monarchies  

442
00:46:19,840 --> 00:46:24,640
that invoke the divine right of kings, that 
Heaven appoints the emperor to rule the people  

443
00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:30,080
in accordance with whatever principles Heaven 
represents. In the Confucian version of divine  

444
00:46:30,080 --> 00:46:35,760
right, as Qiu puts it succinctly near the start 
of the fourth chapter of the third section on  

445
00:46:35,760 --> 00:46:40,160
“Consolidating the Foundation of the State,” 
that is, dealing with the people, he says,  

446
00:46:40,160 --> 00:46:46,480
“Heaven sets up the ruler to govern the people”
Tian li jun yi zhimin (天立君以治民).  

447
00:46:46,480 --> 00:46:51,040
This formulation constructs two 
political, even moral, subjects,  

448
00:46:51,040 --> 00:46:59,280
the ruler and the people, the one as authorized 
to govern, the other as authorized to be governed.  

449
00:47:00,640 --> 00:47:08,640
But Qiu does not remain passive in the face of 
this relationship between governing and being  

450
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:15,040
governed. He follows this statement with a 
second: quote “The ruler must get people,  

451
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:23,440
Jun bi demin (君必得民), he has to bring them 
in, he has to get them under his authority,"  

452
00:47:23,440 --> 00:47:29,200
"for only then will he be able to be a 
ruler," ranhou deyi wei jun (然後得以為君),  

453
00:47:29,200 --> 00:47:36,400
only there after can he claimed to 
be a ruler. This way of putting it  

454
00:47:37,120 --> 00:47:41,760
might seems a little opaque, but what he is 
saying is there is no such thing as a ruler  

455
00:47:41,760 --> 00:47:46,480
without the people over whom he rules and 
in their absence, the ruler does not exists.  

456
00:47:47,520 --> 00:47:54,080
As he puts it in blunter terms: quote “a ruler 
cannot be without the people for even one day.”  

457
00:47:56,720 --> 00:47:59,200
What he's done is set up 
a reciprocal relationship,  

458
00:47:59,840 --> 00:48:09,040
in which neither party can be absent.
As he says in the opening section,  

459
00:48:09,760 --> 00:48:11,920
in the opening passage section 
of this section of the book,  

460
00:48:12,560 --> 00:48:16,720
he repeats kind of standard 
platitude of Confucian political

461
00:48:16,720 --> 00:48:22,640
philosophy: minzhe, guo zhi ben (民者, 國之本), 
“the people are the root or the foundation  

462
00:48:22,640 --> 00:48:28,640
of the state.” It's a standard piety, though 
Qiu urges the emperor to have this statement  

463
00:48:29,200 --> 00:48:35,600
quote “inscribed on the corner of the throne 
so that it is carved into your mind and etched  

464
00:48:35,600 --> 00:48:41,680
into your bones”. This is the lesson that 
he wants the Emperor Hongzhi to pick up on.  

465
00:48:43,280 --> 00:48:49,920
Unlike other pietists, Qiu has views on why this 
is so: quote “what makes the state a state is the  

466
00:48:49,920 --> 00:48:57,280
people and nothing else. Without the people there 
is nothing by which a state can be a state.” Hence  

467
00:48:57,280 --> 00:49:05,360
the importance of administering their affairs 
well. He phrases this at times as a “reliance.”  

468
00:49:05,360 --> 00:49:11,760
“The ruler is positioned above the people but yet 
relies on the people. Why is this so? That which  

469
00:49:11,760 --> 00:49:17,520
makes the ruler a ruler is his having the people. 
What can a ruler do who does not have the people  

470
00:49:17,520 --> 00:49:27,200
to rely on to be a ruler?” So the key to having 
the people is to cherish them” aimin (愛民). And you  

471
00:49:27,200 --> 00:49:34,960
aimin (愛民) by following policies that have been 
carefully worked out by Qiu Jun and his cohort.

472
00:49:36,240 --> 00:49:43,840
So, the means by which the enlightened ruler can 
rule as an enlightened ruler are simple, for Qiu.  

473
00:49:45,040 --> 00:49:50,000
And they are standard in the Confucian political
lexicon: be sparing in the use of punishments,  

474
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:55,040
keep taxes light, be lenient when corvéeing 
labor”. It's all the standard stuff.  

475
00:49:56,880 --> 00:50:04,160
But it sits in a kind of larger vision of 
the way in which the lawful state functions,  

476
00:50:04,160 --> 00:50:09,520
and the legitimate ruler functions. 
And the alternative, and Qiu is  

477
00:50:10,320 --> 00:50:15,920
unsparing in stating it, the alternative is 
the ruler who "treats the people like dirt or  

478
00:50:15,920 --> 00:50:19,280
weeds”. This is the phrase that I 
will return to later in the lecture. 

479
00:50:23,120 --> 00:50:27,840
Now Qiu does not believe the ruler can simply 
command the people to submit. He must invite  

480
00:50:27,840 --> 00:50:34,160
them to gather under his rule. This he does, Qiu 
writes, by supplying them with secure places to  

481
00:50:34,160 --> 00:50:40,800
live and with the food and necessities they 
require on a daily basis. The key condition  

482
00:50:40,800 --> 00:50:44,800
for keeping this covenant between the ruler 
and the people - I won’t call it a contract,  

483
00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:52,400
I don't think Chinese legal reasoning would 
tally with 17th century European reasoning  

484
00:50:53,360 --> 00:50:59,600
quite the same way here, since both parties do not 
enjoy an equal status - but he says the condition  

485
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:07,360
for keeping this covenant is cai (財), resources or 
material wealth. And he offers an analogy: quote  

486
00:51:07,360 --> 00:51:12,960
“The state having people is like a granary having 
grain or government treasuries having resources.”  

487
00:51:13,920 --> 00:51:18,480
What draws him to the analogy I think is 
the implied causal relationship: that is  

488
00:51:18,480 --> 00:51:22,160
if there is no grain in the granaries,; 
if there's no resources in the treasury,  

489
00:51:22,160 --> 00:51:27,280
the people will not be there to constitute 
themselves as the ruler's people.  

490
00:51:30,240 --> 00:51:35,440
So governing the people, according to this vision 
of Ming statecraft does not merely keeping them in  

491
00:51:35,440 --> 00:51:41,520
line or keeping them in awe, though discipline 
and charisma are part of Qiu’s project.  

492
00:51:42,560 --> 00:51:47,760
It is that the state must provide the conditions 
that will enable families to reproduce themselves  

493
00:51:48,400 --> 00:51:56,000
securely generation after generation. To quote Qiu 
again, “He who truly knows that what makes him a  

494
00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:02,000
ruler and secures his position realizes that it 
comes from his having the people. How can he not  

495
00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:09,680
think about supporting their livelihood, thereby 
achieving his own security? When the people have  

496
00:52:09,680 --> 00:52:16,000
livelihood and security, the ruler attains what 
he relies on and his own position is then secure.”  

497
00:52:18,160 --> 00:52:24,560
And he actually does go on to say that it 
isn't basic survival that secures his position.  

498
00:52:24,560 --> 00:52:30,400
It's actually prosperity. The goal of the ruler 
is not to simply provide the means of livelihood,  

499
00:52:30,400 --> 00:52:37,360
it is to enable the people to prosper, 
and that to fail to people to prosper,  

500
00:52:37,360 --> 00:52:46,640
is to condemn himself to being wu min (無民) 
"without people." All right, I've run you through  

501
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:53,040
some of Qiu Jun's thinking, let us now go back 
to the concept of min sheng (民生), the people's  

502
00:52:53,040 --> 00:52:58,400
livelihood, or socialism as it ended up 
getting translated in the late 1920s.

503
00:52:58,960 --> 00:53:04,000
Where does min sheng (民生) arise? Well, 
"The Great Learning," the ur-text on which  

504
00:53:04,720 --> 00:53:11,920
Qiu elaborates, does not use the term. It's 
term is xin min (新民), renewing the people.  

505
00:53:13,120 --> 00:53:16,960
Qiu acknowledges that term but he doesn’t 
use it, he doesn’t seem to to like it,  

506
00:53:17,520 --> 00:53:21,920
he doesn't even gloss it, which for Qiu 
is unusual. He usually busily glossing  

507
00:53:22,880 --> 00:53:28,720
every technical term that comes up in his book, 
partly because he's talking to a 17-year-old.  

508
00:53:31,440 --> 00:53:37,440
The term he prefers is min sheng (民生), which 
he may have understood as less abstract that  

509
00:53:37,440 --> 00:53:41,840
xin min (新民), not renewing the people but 
giving the people the means of their livelihood.  

510
00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:45,520
And it's possible that he did so 
because he wanted to have more a more  

511
00:53:46,080 --> 00:53:52,320
reciprocal relationship. Xin min (新民) suggests 
that there's a ruler who is renewing the people,  

512
00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:59,760
whereas min sheng (民生) suggests that the ruler is
providing the condition for people to flourish  

513
00:53:59,760 --> 00:54:03,280
and that flourishing in turn then
benefits the ruler and the state.

514
00:54:05,520 --> 00:54:14,640
Now he does say that “the people’s livelihood 
depends on their ruler making rules for them.  

515
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:21,440
By [the ruler’s] relying on teaching and 
leadership to assist them in this way,  

516
00:54:21,440 --> 00:54:25,280
[the people] are therefore able to gain 
their livelihood and nourishment.””

517
00:54:26,320 --> 00:54:29,840
The term he uses for rules 
is -how have I translated  

518
00:54:29,840 --> 00:54:34,160
it - making rules of them is fa zhi (法治)

519
00:54:35,760 --> 00:54:41,200
setting up a system of laws. But I wouldn't 
go so far as to want to suggest we are talking  

520
00:54:41,200 --> 00:54:47,440
about a code of laws here. It's more of a set 
of procedures by which things need to get done. 

521
00:54:49,520 --> 00:54:54,800
When the term min sheng (民生), arrived in Sun 
Yatsen cultural in-box, it did not perhaps  

522
00:54:54,800 --> 00:55:00,320
do quite the same service. Sun’s idea of 
min sheng (民生) is difficult to pin down.  

523
00:55:00,960 --> 00:55:07,600
In the 1900s, land redistribution was uppermost 
in his mind. In the 1910s, he was imagining a  

524
00:55:07,600 --> 00:55:11,440
republican government supporting industrial 
production which meant to enlarging the  

525
00:55:11,440 --> 00:55:16,960
economy and benefiting the people in that way. And 
later, he shifts to political ground. So in 1919  

526
00:55:17,680 --> 00:55:26,080
he attributed the poverty of the Chinese to 
autocracy, so autocracy needs to be overthrown, in  

527
00:55:26,080 --> 00:55:30,800
order for the people to secure their livelihood, 
and this is what he believe a revolution will  

528
00:55:30,800 --> 00:55:35,440
deliver. And then early in the 1920s, he 
moves the term in the direction of socialism,  

529
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:39,760
giving the state the power to control 
the economy and distribute its benefits. 

530
00:55:41,680 --> 00:55:48,560
Sun and Qiu perhaps shared certain expectations 
that the state, whether in the person of the ruler  

531
00:55:48,560 --> 00:55:54,000
or as the abstraction of a republican government, 
had an obligation to provide the means by which  

532
00:55:54,000 --> 00:55:59,440
people could live. Failure in that regard 
produced consequences, both recognized this.  

533
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:05,120
Sun believed that quote “our nationalist and 
democratic revolutions have coincided with a  

534
00:56:05,120 --> 00:56:10,640
universal revolutionary tide carrying the world 
toward the people's right to livelihood.” That is,  

535
00:56:11,760 --> 00:56:18,160
people's poverty was driving this revolutionary 
change. Not dissimilarly, though very much from  

536
00:56:18,160 --> 00:56:24,320
above rather than below, Qiu warned his emperor: 
quote "Those below dare not speak against those  

537
00:56:24,320 --> 00:56:30,240
above, yet they dare to be angry. The complaints 
that the people have in their hearts are  

538
00:56:30,240 --> 00:56:35,120
far more severe than what they give voice to, and 
the complaints that the people voice to Heaven  

539
00:56:35,120 --> 00:56:41,600
are far more severe than those they file 
with the officials.” Allow the conditions  

540
00:56:41,600 --> 00:56:47,200
generating complaints to build, and the ruler 
will find himself wu min (無民), without people. 

541
00:56:48,560 --> 00:56:52,720
Where Sun and Qiu differed was over 
the question of who should rule.  

542
00:56:52,720 --> 00:57:01,120
In Qiu’s conceptual world, the ruler governs, 
jun zhi (君治), the people produce/reproduce.  

543
00:57:03,040 --> 00:57:09,040
They need food in order to do so, the ruler needs 
the people in order to for him to rule so there is  

544
00:57:09,040 --> 00:57:17,360
a two-way relationship implied there, but that 
meant that there was a way judging the success  

545
00:57:17,360 --> 00:57:22,480
of a Neo-Confucian State. Did the 
ruler provide what the people need,  

546
00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:26,960
and did the people in terms provide the 
ruler, with the people that he needed?

547
00:57:28,080 --> 00:57:32,240
Qiu phrases this almost as a “natural 
law” argument at the end of his book.  

548
00:57:34,320 --> 00:57:40,000
He says that: if the ruler cultivates himself and 
governs the people competently, the people will  

549
00:57:40,000 --> 00:57:45,760
follow their natural inclination to be good and 
will act as they know they should. There's kind of  

550
00:57:46,480 --> 00:57:52,000
perfect moral harmony that will emerge in 
the well-regulated, responsibly -regulated  

551
00:57:52,960 --> 00:57:59,520
state. Now, had Sun chosen to stay within 
Confucian statecraft technology to imagine  

552
00:57:59,520 --> 00:58:04,160
his political order, he might have switched out 
jun zhi (君治) for min zhi (民治), but he didn’t.  

553
00:58:06,320 --> 00:58:08,880
People would be ethnic
masters, they would be  

554
00:58:08,880 --> 00:58:13,040
rights-holders, but they would not
be rulers. Top down, not bottom up.

555
00:58:15,280 --> 00:58:21,840
Part four: Reasons of State

556
00:58:23,360 --> 00:58:28,320
It is easy for all of us to agree that the state 
has a duty to promote the welfare of the people,  

557
00:58:29,040 --> 00:58:35,440
and that the performance of this duty is a test 
of the lawfulness of the state. Where people and  

558
00:58:35,440 --> 00:58:40,960
cultures differ, however, is over the political 
constitution and economic program we think  

559
00:58:40,960 --> 00:58:47,600
likeliest to promote popular welfare. There was 
a period in the history of European political  

560
00:58:47,600 --> 00:58:52,560
thought when the appeal to the livelihood of 
the people started to set off alarm bells.  

561
00:58:53,360 --> 00:58:59,600
In Latin the term was salus populi, the people’s 
health, which meant the protection not just of the  

562
00:58:59,600 --> 00:59:07,440
lives of the people, but also their property and 
prosperity. What caused the unease was when the  

563
00:59:07,440 --> 00:59:12,960
provision of public welfare became a justification 
for political regimes that introduce policies  

564
00:59:12,960 --> 00:59:19,760
favourable to their own perpetuation, without 
public consultation or even disclosure. The  

565
00:59:19,760 --> 00:59:23,520
figure usually associated with 
this is Niccolò Machiavelli.

566
00:59:25,040 --> 00:59:29,920
This political logic, associated with 
arguments for the supremacy of state authority,  

567
00:59:31,600 --> 00:59:37,840
went by the term, raison d’état, “reason 
of state.” Raison d’état crystallized  

568
00:59:37,840 --> 00:59:42,560
as a political concept in the latter 
half of the 16th century as Europeans  

569
00:59:42,560 --> 00:59:48,640
traveled down the long passage from Catholic 
monarchy to secular republic, coincident with and,  

570
00:59:48,640 --> 00:59:53,360
I would argue, unleashed by their expanding 
engagement with a world beyond Europe.  

571
00:59:55,360 --> 00:59:58,800
Much of Europe was ruled through a small 
network of royals linked to each other  

572
00:59:58,800 --> 01:00:05,200
by kinship and marriage, but confidence in that 
exclusionary practice was slipping, and political  

573
01:00:05,200 --> 01:00:11,280
philosophers of the Renaissance found themselves 
having to explicate the existence and legitimacy  

574
01:00:11,280 --> 01:00:18,400
of states without being able to take recourse 
in any divine rights of kings, divine or even  

575
01:00:18,400 --> 01:00:24,080
kinship-based rights of king. Those rights were 
slipping away, and new logic had to be found. 

576
01:00:25,280 --> 01:00:29,200
The de-personalization of the 
state then generated a massive  

577
01:00:29,200 --> 01:00:35,040
host of questions about how the operation of 
government in the absence of the intervening  

578
01:00:35,840 --> 01:00:40,400
divinely-guided character of the monarch 
could be squared with the Christian morality  

579
01:00:40,400 --> 01:00:47,520
that the rulers were expected to exemplify.
Machiavelli is famously credited with initiating  

580
01:00:47,520 --> 01:00:53,920
the conceptual problem by advising the ruler to 
act in ways that benefited only his interests,  

581
01:00:53,920 --> 01:00:58,080
without concern for acting in ways 
that embodied Christian virtue.  

582
01:00:59,440 --> 01:01:03,840
One of the critics of Machiavelli who constituted 
the second generation of theorists of raison  

583
01:01:03,840 --> 01:01:09,840
d’état was Giovanni Botero, a failed Jesuit 
but a successful advisor to several cardinals.  

584
01:01:10,640 --> 01:01:19,120
In his Della ragion di stato of 1589, Botero 
opposed illegal or immoral acts by state leaders,  

585
01:01:19,920 --> 01:01:25,520
but he did allow that a leader must attend to the 
survival of his state, and that attention is what  

586
01:01:25,520 --> 01:01:32,880
he called reason of state; in his words, reason 
of state was quote “knowledge to found, conserve,  

587
01:01:32,880 --> 01:01:38,960
and expand state dominion” in the hands of a ruler 
who upheld justice and attended to the needs of  

588
01:01:38,960 --> 01:01:45,280
those unable to provide for themselves. 
It sounds a little bit like Qiu's model.  

589
01:01:45,840 --> 01:01:50,960
I have selected Botero from among many other 
Renaissance candidates because he happened to  

590
01:01:50,960 --> 01:01:53,920
be keenly interested in China,
as many of intellectuals of  

591
01:01:54,960 --> 01:02:02,240
late-sixteenth centuries were. In his 
Relationi universali of 1596, a kind of  

592
01:02:03,760 --> 01:02:09,120
catalog of world cultures, 
Botero praises China as quote

593
01:02:09,120 --> 01:02:14,560
“a very earthly paradise, where nature 
and art strive to content the inhabitants,  

594
01:02:15,120 --> 01:02:19,840
where no good thing is wanting, 
but much superfluous and to spare.”  

595
01:02:20,960 --> 01:02:28,480
So, Botero was tremendously impressed with 
China. He knows, in every place, no matter  

596
01:02:28,480 --> 01:02:34,800
how unpropitious, quote “whatsoever is needful 
for clothing, for food or nourishment, delight  

597
01:02:34,800 --> 01:02:41,280
or cause of a civil life, is to be found.” 
Now, it would be excessive to suggest that  

598
01:02:41,280 --> 01:02:45,920
Botero’s idea of the well-governed 
state relied on the example of China.  

599
01:02:46,880 --> 01:02:52,320
What is intriguing for present purposes, though, 
is the extent of overlap between what he approved  

600
01:02:52,320 --> 01:02:59,120
of and what Qiu regarded as essential for the good 
of the state and the prosperity to the people.  

601
01:02:59,920 --> 01:03:05,280
For example, Botero applauds the mid-Ming decision 
to turn away from Great State adventurism.  

602
01:03:05,920 --> 01:03:12,560
Observing that “content breeds stability,” he uses 
the middle Ming to exemplify a favourite argument  

603
01:03:12,560 --> 01:03:19,600
he liked to make against military expansionism; 
as he says “conquest brings care to see to the  

604
01:03:19,600 --> 01:03:26,880
conquered”—which is exactly the view that Qiu Jun 
took. Botero also observes that China’s borders  

605
01:03:26,880 --> 01:03:33,440
were closed to foreigners “lest their customs and 
conversation should breed alteration in manners,  

606
01:03:33,440 --> 01:03:38,960
or innovations in the state”— which is 
again exactly a point that Qiu Jun makes. 

607
01:03:40,880 --> 01:03:44,080
“To conclude,” Botero writes of China,  

608
01:03:44,080 --> 01:03:48,800
“every man’s endeavours tend wholly to 
the good and quiet of the commonwealth.  

609
01:03:48,800 --> 01:03:54,960
By which proceedings," and here he is speaking 
again in China, "Justice the mother of quietness,  

610
01:03:55,680 --> 01:04:02,720
policy the mistress of good laws, and industry the 
daughter of peace, do flourish in this kingdom.  

611
01:04:04,080 --> 01:04:11,840
There is no country modern or ancient governed 
by a better form of policy than this Empire."  

612
01:04:12,400 --> 01:04:18,960
Now Botero has no idea that he is praising 
Qiu Jun's vision of Neo-Confucian statecraft.

613
01:04:18,960 --> 01:04:20,480
But effectively, that's what he was doing.

614
01:04:21,520 --> 01:04:28,560
And to quote Botero again: “Since the country is 
not only large, mighty, and spacious, but united,  

615
01:04:28,560 --> 01:04:34,160
populous, plentiful and rich, at least let it be 
believed and accounted for one of the greatest  

616
01:04:34,160 --> 01:04:40,400
empires that ever was.” Botero is getting 
this from his Jesuit colleagues, whose works  

617
01:04:40,400 --> 01:04:46,640
he's reading avidly, and from whom he's extracting 
this idea of China as the perfectly ordered realm.

618
01:04:47,200 --> 01:04:53,840
However, on one count Botero was uneasy, and 
that was the China's domestic political order.  

619
01:04:54,880 --> 01:05:00,320
He doesn't mince his word when he says, “The 
government is tyrannical, for throughout the  

620
01:05:00,320 --> 01:05:06,080
kingdom there is no other lord but the king. They 
know not what an earl, a marquis or a duke means.  

621
01:05:06,800 --> 01:05:12,960
No fealty, no tribute or toll is 
paid to any man but the king.” This  

622
01:05:13,600 --> 01:05:20,160
culture of severely hierarchical authority, which 
transfers downward to local judges and officials,  

623
01:05:20,160 --> 01:05:27,280
dismayed Botero. Quote, "No man may speak unto 
them but upon their knees. Herein the people show  

624
01:05:27,280 --> 01:05:33,040
their base minds, making themselves the slaves 
(not the subjects) of the prince.” Now the whole  

625
01:05:33,040 --> 01:05:38,240
business of Chinese subjects being required 
to go on their knees and kow tow and so forth,

626
01:05:38,240 --> 01:05:48,640
is an ongoing Orientalist trope in European 
writings. But what concerned Botero is that  

627
01:05:48,640 --> 01:05:54,080
there is a distinction that he would make in 
his political philosophy between a subject  

628
01:05:54,720 --> 01:06:00,480
and a slave, and that distinction was not properly 
maintained in the Chinese political order.

629
01:06:03,520 --> 01:06:08,822
Now like Qiu, and like Machiavelli, Botero 
believed that a well-governed state is one that is  

630
01:06:08,822 --> 01:06:13,040
able to deliver the contentment and prosperity 
that a poorly governed state cannot deliver;  

631
01:06:13,760 --> 01:06:19,280
but unlike both Machiavelli and Qiu, he regarded 
the exclusion of the people from deliberations  

632
01:06:19,280 --> 01:06:26,160
in state affairs as a sign of unlawfulness: 
a state seeking to enlarge its powers at it's  

633
01:06:26,160 --> 01:06:30,160
people’s expense: a government in which 
the people are subjects, not slaves. 

634
01:06:31,760 --> 01:06:37,040
In the tradition in which Botero writes, the state 
that reserves its reasons to itself, that declines  

635
01:06:37,040 --> 01:06:43,600
to reveal or revise them when subject to critique, 
is unlawful. Such a state may deliver ample  

636
01:06:43,600 --> 01:06:50,160
benefits to the people, but when it is only to 
perpetuate itself, which is to say, to perpetuate  

637
01:06:50,160 --> 01:06:56,160
the leader or oligarchy controlling the levers 
of power, then it forfeits its legitimacy.  

638
01:06:57,120 --> 01:07:04,000
Such a state becomes “tyrannical.” But Qiu Jun 
also had language for this, and I cited it earlier  

639
01:07:05,440 --> 01:07:11,440
“the vicious and violent ruler” is one expression 
he uses, and the other one is ruler who “treats  

640
01:07:11,440 --> 01:07:18,640
the people like dirt or weeds.” The opposite Qiu 
Jun has in his mind is the renzhi zhi jun (仁智之君),  

641
01:07:18,640 --> 01:07:24,400
“the benevolent and wise ruler,” who is “fearful 
of Heaven’s rebuke and the people’s anger”.  

642
01:07:26,160 --> 01:07:31,360
For Qiu, there was not a problem 
in the system of imperial ruler,  

643
01:07:32,000 --> 01:07:38,720
because so long as the ruler was being advised 
by wise officials, they would guide him,  

644
01:07:38,720 --> 01:07:48,800
toward a state that did not conduct a tyranny. 
And yet for Botero, the lack of any kind of  

645
01:07:49,360 --> 01:07:56,240
structural impediments to state 
tyranny was cause for concern.

646
01:07:56,240 --> 01:08:01,040
Now, where have we heard China 
being accused of being of a tyranny

647
01:08:01,040 --> 01:08:07,440
recently? Well, from none other than Xu 
Zhangrun, the Qinghua University law professor  

648
01:08:07,440 --> 01:08:14,960
I mentioned in my opening remarks. In February 
2020 Xu castigated President Xi Jinping for his  

649
01:08:14,960 --> 01:08:22,480
mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak. He had 
been critical of Communist Party leadership for  

650
01:08:22,480 --> 01:08:27,200
some time and this was the last straw for the 
Party dictatorship, and it led to Xu’s arrest,  

651
01:08:27,760 --> 01:08:33,120
termination of employment, deprivation of 
pension, suspension of citizens’ rights,  

652
01:08:33,120 --> 01:08:42,000
and public humiliation in the summer of 2020. Now 
Xu was later released from prison from want of  

653
01:08:42,000 --> 01:08:47,440
anything to charge him with—even PRC law couldn’t 
come up with a plausible pretext—but he has since  

654
01:08:47,440 --> 01:08:53,360
been made to bear constant police surveillance 
and he's been placed in social isolation. 

655
01:08:56,400 --> 01:09:01,680
The Communist Party went after the right person, 
in a sense. Xu was a profoundly learned scholar  

656
01:09:01,680 --> 01:09:06,880
of constitutional law who for years had been 
researching the processes by which Chinese  

657
01:09:06,880 --> 01:09:12,080
jurists and theorists over the past century and 
a half have endeavoured to develop a legal system  

658
01:09:12,720 --> 01:09:18,480
takes took full account of China’s historical, 
legal legacies. While interweaving those  

659
01:09:18,480 --> 01:09:26,160
legacies with judicial standards evolved in 
global legal tradition. Language echoing "The  

660
01:09:26,160 --> 01:09:34,400
Great Learning" rolls off his keyboard just as 
easily as “the rule of law and democracy,” which  

661
01:09:34,400 --> 01:09:38,880
as he writes, quote “ought to be the intrinsic 
elements for constructing ‘modern China’.”  

662
01:09:40,320 --> 01:09:45,120
For Xu Zhangrun, no state should hide behind 
“reason of state,” and people should be free  

663
01:09:45,120 --> 01:09:51,040
quote “not to discriminate between east and west, 
nor to distinguish between Chinese and foreign,  

664
01:09:51,040 --> 01:09:56,000
but simply to observe what comes before and 
after, and to notice what rises and falls.”  

665
01:09:57,200 --> 01:10:01,200
Direct these anodyne comments toward 
the Party dictatorship under Xi Jinping,  

666
01:10:01,760 --> 01:10:06,960
and the implication is a frank challenge to 
the legitimacy of the PRC’s legal system.  

667
01:10:08,480 --> 01:10:13,360
Xu does not get there by fetishizing Western 
judicial liberalism. He understands the cultural  

668
01:10:13,360 --> 01:10:19,600
embeddedness of law— he can quote Clifford 
Geertz at the best of them. But he does  

669
01:10:19,600 --> 01:10:26,240
not accept that Chinese law should be a tool of
Party hegemony. It should be developed organically  

670
01:10:26,240 --> 01:10:32,400
by engaging with the best of Chinese and European 
legal norms so as to nurture a positive and  

671
01:10:32,400 --> 01:10:39,440
progressive culture in China and, if I may quote 
Botero, establish quote “concord among peoples.”  

672
01:10:40,160 --> 01:10:45,120
No wonder the Communist Party mobilized 
its legal machinery to persecute this man. 

673
01:10:46,880 --> 01:10:54,400
Do Xu Changrun’s views make him a legal 
Orientalist singling China out as a failed  

674
01:10:54,400 --> 01:10:59,440
legal tradition? Only in the eyes of those who 
decline to accord him the intellectual respect  

675
01:10:59,440 --> 01:11:05,520
that would allow him to embrace whatever elements 
of legal thought he understands as conducive  

676
01:11:05,520 --> 01:11:10,960
to the creation of good government and the 
dispensation of equal justice. Xu was trained  

677
01:11:10,960 --> 01:11:15,200
in Western legal theory, and that training 
has encouraged his understanding that law  

678
01:11:15,200 --> 01:11:21,440
reflects its cultural context; as 
well, that law shapes social realities.  

679
01:11:24,160 --> 01:11:27,840
In fact, he quotes Geertz to this 
effects, saying quote "legal thought  

680
01:11:27,840 --> 01:11:32,000
is constructed of social realities 
rather than merely reflective of them."  

681
01:11:32,640 --> 01:11:37,040
So what Xu Zhangrun seeks to do is 
to construct a different reality  

682
01:11:37,040 --> 01:11:41,760
than what prevail under the current
Party dictatorship, and to do so by developing  

683
01:11:41,760 --> 01:11:48,640
quote “a scheme of interpretation for legality 
in contemporary China.” I wish him well. It  

684
01:11:48,640 --> 01:11:54,240
would be excellent to know that the law should no 
longer simply disappear behind reasons of state. 

685
01:11:56,880 --> 01:12:03,920
Well in this lecture, I have taken you a long way 
up, and all the way back down, a long river of  

686
01:12:04,480 --> 01:12:11,760
the statecraft tradition from the Ming to the 
present. On the academic issues I have raised,  

687
01:12:11,760 --> 01:12:17,360
I might conclude by observing simply that there 
are aspects of the Chinese statecraft tradition  

688
01:12:17,360 --> 01:12:22,240
that countenance autocracy, as there are in 
the European tradition of the rule of law;  

689
01:12:23,520 --> 01:12:28,160
but also that the statecraft tradition, like 
one school of the Renaissance discourse on  

690
01:12:28,160 --> 01:12:34,080
reason of state, does not hand the autocrat 
carte blanche, though he may think it does,  

691
01:12:35,040 --> 01:12:42,720
but expects the ruler to serve the people. But 
that was the Renaissance, this is now. And if  

692
01:12:42,720 --> 01:12:48,480
you’ve heard that expression before, "serve the 
people", you should pause: there is certainly an 

693
01:12:48,480 --> 01:12:51,760
autocrat in the room. Let 
the people serve themselves.

694
01:12:54,240 --> 01:12:54,640
Thank you.

695
01:12:57,440 --> 01:13:04,400
Thank you, Tim, so much for this stimulating talk, 
and for bringing Ming history into conversation  

696
01:13:04,400 --> 01:13:10,000
with the 20th century, and with recent events 
that have been of concern to all of us.  

697
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:20,720
We will turn now to Q&A. And I'm going to ask 
you to raise, use the raise hand function.  

698
01:13:20,720 --> 01:13:26,640
And if you're new to zoom you can find that by 
moving your cursor to the bottom of your screen,  

699
01:13:27,280 --> 01:13:34,000
and you will see a reactions icon, and if you 
click there you can find the raised hand function.  

700
01:13:35,520 --> 01:13:38,880
And then lower your hand when you are called on,  

701
01:13:38,880 --> 01:14:00,000
and unmute, and remember to re-mute when you 
are done talking. So do we have any questions?

702
01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:08,480
Eric. Hi thank you Professor Brook for this 
wonderful talk. I actually um first knew of the

703
01:14:08,480 --> 01:14:13,840
Qiu Jun from your work The "Confusions 
of Pleasure" when I read it 10 years ago.

704
01:14:14,640 --> 01:14:20,960
And it's interesting that um as I recall in 
that chapter when you talk about Qiu Jun,  

705
01:14:20,960 --> 01:14:26,160
you mainly talk about him in terms of the 
economic relations and market right? Um  

706
01:14:27,280 --> 01:14:34,520
so it's interesting that what also drew me to that 
book to this day still and from time to time I do  

707
01:14:35,520 --> 01:14:40,880
go back to read the introduction you wrote. Is 
there's a snippet where you describe that you went  

708
01:14:40,880 --> 01:14:47,280
to China in the 1970s, and then so by the time 
you wrote the book, it seems kind of huge change,  

709
01:14:47,920 --> 01:14:55,120
somewhat parallel to what was going on back then. 
So my question is that, based on your sort of  

710
01:14:55,120 --> 01:15:00,960
this re-entering of Qiu Jun, if you were to write 
The "Confusions of Pleasure" nowadays, how would  

711
01:15:00,960 --> 01:15:08,080
you actually talk about the seasonality. I mean 
it seems that when you were in China, it was a  

712
01:15:08,080 --> 01:15:14,000
kind of like a spring, and then my generation 
had a sort of end of the summer, and now it's  

713
01:15:14,000 --> 01:15:19,280
in the winter. And but I mean you open your book 
with the season winter, and end it with the fall.  

714
01:15:19,280 --> 01:15:24,480
So I wonder if you know how to reach sort of 
reconstruct the seasonality and then cycle, how  

715
01:15:24,480 --> 01:15:31,760
would you do it? Thank you. Well, Eric, thank you 
for linking my earlier work to my current work. 

716
01:15:33,200 --> 01:15:38,160
I did what most people - most people who 
quote Qiu Jun do so because they dive into  

717
01:15:38,160 --> 01:15:43,760
some little narrow topic that he comments about 
and we we sort of raid him for whatever we can  

718
01:15:43,760 --> 01:15:49,600
find and use it for our own purposes. And when I 
wrote "Confusions of Pleasure", I had only read

719
01:15:51,680 --> 01:15:56,880
less than a chapter of Qiu Jun and there are 160 
chapters. So since then, I've gone on to sort of  

720
01:15:57,520 --> 01:16:04,880
to read. In fact I have a there's a there's about 
a dozen of scholars who are with me translating  

721
01:16:04,880 --> 01:16:10,000
parts of Qiu Jun's work for publication into 
English, so I've come to have a broader vision  

722
01:16:10,000 --> 01:16:17,280
of what he was up to. I think the question of 
how I might have written "Confucian of Pleasure"  

723
01:16:17,280 --> 01:16:21,600
if I were to write it now, is a question I can't 
answer, because I probably wouldn't write it now.  

724
01:16:23,600 --> 01:16:30,480
As a historian, my eyes are directed towards 
the evidence and documents of the past but my  

725
01:16:30,480 --> 01:16:36,880
imagination is shaped by the world in which I 
live. And the world in which I live is one in  

726
01:16:36,880 --> 01:16:47,200
which, well there are two overwhelming concerns 
facing the world today. One is the deterioration  

727
01:16:47,200 --> 01:16:51,600
of the environment, and the other is the 
deterioration of public and international  

728
01:16:51,600 --> 01:16:57,440
political culture. That these things are happening 
simultaneously is probably not coincidental.  

729
01:16:58,160 --> 01:17:05,440
And well I and I continue to to I continue to do 
some research on the environment. I don't really  

730
01:17:05,440 --> 01:17:10,160
research much much on the economy, although that 
said I'm hoping to publish a books next year on  

731
01:17:10,960 --> 01:17:17,520
on Ming commodity prices, so I'm still keeping up 
some side of that that particular interest. But I  

732
01:17:17,520 --> 01:17:23,040
guess I no longer, I don't have the confidence 
of the vision that that led me to write The  

733
01:17:23,040 --> 01:17:29,840
"Confusions of Pleasure" of going from a highly 
restricted to a more open and creative society.  

734
01:17:30,560 --> 01:17:36,560
That was a process I saw in China over the 
1970s and 80s. I warmed to it. and it seemed  

735
01:17:36,560 --> 01:17:44,480
to resonate very well with a certain phase 
of Ming history. The society I see today is

736
01:17:47,600 --> 01:17:51,600
the high level of of excessive consumerism,  

737
01:17:51,600 --> 01:17:57,360
the over-exploitation of natural resources, the 
failure to renew natural resources - all of these  

738
01:17:57,360 --> 01:18:02,080
issues, I think would just make it impossible 
for me to write that book. I would end up  

739
01:18:02,640 --> 01:18:10,000
writing a very different book, and probably a a 
a less optimistic portrait than the one that I  

740
01:18:10,560 --> 01:18:17,040
produced, whenever that was 20-odd years 
ago. But thank you for the question.

741
01:18:19,520 --> 01:18:20,080
Yuan Yuan.

742
01:18:22,240 --> 01:18:28,560
Hi, Professor Brook, thank you for the fascinating 
talk. Actually I'm very interested in the  

743
01:18:28,560 --> 01:18:35,680
terms you applied to the Ming dynasty because 
the title of your talk today on "Troubling  

744
01:18:35,680 --> 01:18:41,920
Legacies of the Confucian Statecraft Tradition" 
just reminds me of your previous works.  

745
01:18:41,920 --> 01:18:48,880
One is The "Chinese state in Ming Society", and 
the other one is The "Troubled Empire - China  

746
01:18:48,880 --> 01:18:55,680
in the Yuan and Ming Dynasty". And in the 
Chinese state in Ming society that book,  

747
01:18:55,680 --> 01:19:02,880
you sort of, you discuss the whether 
we can take Ming dynasty as a state,  

748
01:19:02,880 --> 01:19:10,720
and you compare it with the European late 
late medieval late medieval states. And  

749
01:19:10,720 --> 01:19:18,240
also their crafts for the state building. 
But in in the other book I noticed you used  

750
01:19:18,240 --> 01:19:28,000
"empire" to describe Ming, so I'm wondering like 
in which sense we can call Ming as an empire? Yes.

751
01:19:30,800 --> 01:19:39,760
I no longer like to use the word "empire". To me 
empire is too tied to a set of historical dynamics  

752
01:19:39,760 --> 01:19:47,120
that I think of as based in Europe, and that's 
why I've just I've for that kind of expansive  

753
01:19:47,760 --> 01:19:53,280
super-regional polity, I've gone back to the 
Mongolian term "great state," and that's the term  

754
01:19:53,280 --> 01:19:59,280
that I now prefer to use. The interesting thing 
about the Ming is that it inherits Great State  

755
01:20:00,880 --> 01:20:06,960
orientation, so that Hongwu particularly, 
and Yongle, these are, if I may put the put  

756
01:20:06,960 --> 01:20:12,960
it this way, these are Mongol emperors, they are 
they are ambitious to rule the world. And it's  

757
01:20:12,960 --> 01:20:23,520
it's Tumu in 1449 where the car crashes into the 
wall at that point and the whole idea of a kind of  

758
01:20:23,520 --> 01:20:31,760
expansive imperialist state is nothing 
that any Chinese adviser wants to take on,  

759
01:20:31,760 --> 01:20:40,720
and so the Ming sort of pulls itself back. So 
I think I use that term, "Troubled Empire",  

760
01:20:40,720 --> 01:20:45,200
because I couldn't find a good title for 
that book. I wanted to try and understand  

761
01:20:45,200 --> 01:20:51,600
what was happening through the Yuan and Ming. At 
the time that was part of the Harvard series and  

762
01:20:52,800 --> 01:20:59,840
the the team of writers who wrote that series, we 
got I remember vividly having a lunch at an AAS,  

763
01:20:59,840 --> 01:21:05,760
and saying to them all, I really don't like 
the term "empire", I'd like to not use empire.  

764
01:21:06,400 --> 01:21:10,240
And we hummed and hawed, and went around, and 
couldn't sort it, we couldn't come up with any  

765
01:21:10,240 --> 01:21:16,800
other solution. And so I just left empire there in 
the title of my book. Now if I were to write The  

766
01:21:16,800 --> 01:21:21,360
"Troubled Empire" again, I would definitely change 
that title. I would not use "empire". But I'm glad  

767
01:21:21,360 --> 01:21:29,120
you brought in the question of state, because for 
my generation of scholars coming up through the  

768
01:21:29,760 --> 01:21:38,960
scholarship of the 1980s, we were very much under 
the influence of Theda Skocpol's book, "Bringing  

769
01:21:38,960 --> 01:21:44,800
the State Back In". We wanted to take the concept 
- a highly Europeanized concept of the state,  

770
01:21:44,800 --> 01:21:51,760
and think how can we use this term more broadly. 
And so The Chinese State in Ming Society was my  

771
01:21:51,760 --> 01:21:59,680
was my sort of thinking through whether it was an 
appropriate term for for the the government of the  

772
01:21:59,680 --> 01:22:05,760
Ming period. And I decided it was and so it's a 
term well as you see from my talk today, I use it  

773
01:22:05,760 --> 01:22:15,200
consistently. But then this then though becomes 
a bit of the peril of translation, because when  

774
01:22:15,200 --> 01:22:21,600
guo appears in Qiu Jun sometimes I translate it 
as state, sometimes I translate it as "country,"  

775
01:22:24,320 --> 01:22:30,400
and there is no perfect alignment between these 
concepts. But I prefer to expand the concept of  

776
01:22:30,400 --> 01:22:37,760
state such that it can include what Chinese 
administrators like Qiu Jun were serving,  

777
01:22:37,760 --> 01:22:43,120
because effectively there was a highly 
articulated administration with a clear  

778
01:22:44,240 --> 01:22:50,320
a clear hierarchy of leadership that was engaged 
in solving problems to the benefit of the country,  

779
01:22:50,320 --> 01:22:55,280
and to me the word state is is 
entirely adequate to describe that.

780
01:22:58,560 --> 01:23:07,520
We have a a hand up by from someone who, we 
have a lot of people here who are in under  

781
01:23:08,720 --> 01:23:15,040
the Christian Shaffmaster account, so you 
know who you are, who has your hand up,  

782
01:23:15,840 --> 01:23:23,680
please pop on, and ask your question.
Okay now I know how it works,  

783
01:23:23,680 --> 01:23:32,400
thank you. Hi everyone my name is April Tan, and 
we all know that Cornell is a leader in technology  

784
01:23:32,400 --> 01:23:43,120
as well. In addition, my recollection 
informed me that a form of rice farming.  

785
01:23:44,000 --> 01:23:50,720
Well let me let me get this disclosed first that 
I was an Asian study major at Cornell with a focus  

786
01:23:50,720 --> 01:24:01,040
in southeast Asia. And I remember from classes 
that a form of technology in rice farming that  

787
01:24:01,040 --> 01:24:09,280
was found at Cornell actually caused a major 
revolt which led to the passage being written

788
01:24:11,360 --> 01:24:21,680
in history. I remember that because they speak 
Chaozhou hua, the son who came to Cornell to study  

789
01:24:21,680 --> 01:24:29,680
the technology to bring it home to southeast Asia 
for farming. Bring it back to today, I shouldn't  

790
01:24:29,680 --> 01:24:38,160
say bring it back, bring it forward to today, 
Secretary Blinken just announced that the State

791
01:24:40,560 --> 01:24:53,360
Department is enhancing and growing in the 
technology aspect, I think a new department or new  

792
01:24:53,360 --> 01:25:01,360
et cetera. It might have been funded by a Congress 
already, I'm not sure. I just heard a little blurb  

793
01:25:01,360 --> 01:25:10,880
on NPR I think just yesterday. So I would love to 
hear Professor Brook with your scholarly in-depth  

794
01:25:10,880 --> 01:25:22,560
knowledge of Chinese history particularly you know 
according to the news the technology focus of the  

795
01:25:22,560 --> 01:25:34,880
new department on technology is clearly related 
to China, so share with us your most intimate  

796
01:25:34,880 --> 01:25:43,200
and most scholarly enriched thoughts, please.
Forgive me for being so vibrant.

797
01:25:45,360 --> 01:25:54,240
Thank thank you, April, you you are you 
are sending me into a zone that is is just  

798
01:25:54,240 --> 01:26:04,000
beyond my competence. We, in 2021, we one we live 
in this intensely technical technologized world  

799
01:26:04,000 --> 01:26:10,240
in which you and I can have this conversation 
while I sit looking out at the Pacific Ocean,  

800
01:26:10,800 --> 01:26:16,240
and you sit wherever you're sitting, as though in 
fact we were sharing the same room together. So  

801
01:26:16,240 --> 01:26:20,320
technology is is constantly 
rapidly transforming the world,  

802
01:26:20,320 --> 01:26:26,480
it's also the transforming the way in which states 
function, because states engage in technological  

803
01:26:27,520 --> 01:26:34,960
development and in order to enhance their 
capacity to, if I can go back to Botero, to found  

804
01:26:35,840 --> 01:26:41,120
what was it what is this phrase he used? – 
“found, establish, and expand the state.”  

805
01:26:42,880 --> 01:26:47,040
Now for people like me who don't 
really understand technology very well,  

806
01:26:47,840 --> 01:26:53,520
that that is a source of anxiety, and this becomes 
another one of these reasons of state: that this  

807
01:26:53,520 --> 01:27:02,640
that the state, not the State Department, but the 
state globally is seeking to enhance its capacity  

808
01:27:02,640 --> 01:27:09,040
to protect itself, and to expand its powers 
using technology, much of it digital technology,  

809
01:27:09,040 --> 01:27:15,440
much of it online. And states use this kind 
of capacity in order to weaken each other.  

810
01:27:16,800 --> 01:27:23,600
This is why I find, I connect this to what what 
I referred to earlier as one of the two great  

811
01:27:23,600 --> 01:27:31,280
problems we are facing at the moment, which is an 
illiberal international politics, and technologies  

812
01:27:31,280 --> 01:27:38,480
being manipulated in order to continue to make 
that politics more aggressive, and more illiberal,  

813
01:27:38,480 --> 01:27:45,680
and and not for the not for the good health of the 
populations that the governments should represent.  

814
01:27:45,680 --> 01:27:53,680
So, but to me, it's a bit of a black box, 
it's really not a field, it's not an area of  

815
01:27:54,480 --> 01:28:02,160
inquiry that I feel that able to offer much. 
But I do, but it does make me nervous when,  

816
01:28:04,240 --> 01:28:12,560
as has happened here at UBC, the People's 
Liberation Army has entered the hard drives  

817
01:28:14,240 --> 01:28:19,280
of a colleague's computer, and taken material, 
and inserted material into his hard drive.  

818
01:28:19,280 --> 01:28:26,400
This disturbs me deeply. And China is not 
the only country that is playing this kind of  

819
01:28:27,360 --> 01:28:33,600
what I can only call digital cold warfare. And 
I find it unfortunate and it would be great if  

820
01:28:33,600 --> 01:28:39,840
we had a forum in which these issues could be 
addressed, but the United it seems to not be  

821
01:28:39,840 --> 01:28:45,680
something the United Nations is able to take on 
at this point. Sorry for that negative response. 

822
01:28:46,400 --> 01:28:55,680
We're officially to the end but I think we, 
I think I missed one question in the chat  

823
01:28:55,680 --> 01:29:05,680
from Ankit. I hope I got that right. They say, 
any comments on current situation between China  

824
01:29:06,320 --> 01:29:12,880
and its neighbors. And that of course also 
came up in the for Qiu Jun and in the Ming.

825
01:29:14,000 --> 01:29:14,320
Yes.

826
01:29:18,800 --> 01:29:26,960
Well, that requires a a long answer which I can't 
give. What, one of the reasons why I think I  

827
01:29:28,640 --> 01:29:39,360
was driven to think more about the Mongol origins 
of late imperial China is that the Great State  

828
01:29:39,360 --> 01:29:46,320
model is an expansionist one. It it understands 
it that the Mongol model of the Great State  

829
01:29:46,320 --> 01:29:53,440
respects the integrity of other states until such 
time as the boundary between those two barriers  

830
01:29:53,440 --> 01:29:58,560
thins out, and there would be reasons for 
the Great State to move into that territory. 

831
01:29:58,560 --> 01:30:07,040
I'm not go the People's Republic of China has has 
made a mantra of saying that it will not cross  

832
01:30:07,040 --> 01:30:14,240
its borders into into other territories, and yet 
its influence on its neighbors is enormous, and  

833
01:30:15,920 --> 01:30:24,000
is one of the, is a destabilizing factor I think, 
in at least in the Asian international situation,  

834
01:30:24,000 --> 01:30:28,560
and is perhaps destabilizing globally. 
We it's almost as though we need a new,  

835
01:30:30,320 --> 01:30:37,280
we need a new international agreement among all 
states about the nature of their relations with  

836
01:30:37,280 --> 01:30:42,960
other states. And I think that's also, 
in today's talk, why I was drawn to the  

837
01:30:42,960 --> 01:30:51,120
concept of reason of state, that reason of state 
becomes a screen behind which a lot goes on that  

838
01:30:52,160 --> 01:30:59,760
the worldly would be better if it didn't go 
on. So I think if if China's neighboring states  

839
01:31:01,520 --> 01:31:07,280
have cause for concern, they also have cause to 
to build and maintain positive relations with the  

840
01:31:07,280 --> 01:31:14,880
People's Republic of China to the extent that is 
possible, and to engage in the non-intervention in  

841
01:31:14,880 --> 01:31:20,640
each other's sovereignty. B, but that may be 
a kind of almost a curious holdover from the  

842
01:31:20,640 --> 01:31:26,000
original United Nations model of how the world 
should go forward, and it's not a model that  

843
01:31:27,440 --> 01:31:34,240
most states are following anymore. So we are in a 
period in which in which the future of inter-state  

844
01:31:34,240 --> 01:31:41,440
relations needs to be readdressed, and not in the 
old realist way of who can get what from whom,  

845
01:31:42,160 --> 01:31:48,560
but in a more constructivist way of how do we go 
on sharing the planet with each other. I'm sorry,  

846
01:31:48,560 --> 01:31:53,120
I've moved into a rather abstract response 
to your question, but it's a very good one,  

847
01:31:53,120 --> 01:31:59,680
and it was an issue that that Qiu Jun cared very 
much about. China should not cross its boundaries,  

848
01:31:59,680 --> 01:32:04,320
China should have nothing to do with foreign 
countries, and if foreigners came, China should  

849
01:32:04,320 --> 01:32:10,640
be very careful about either integrating them 
into China or leaving them outside China. And  

850
01:32:11,680 --> 01:32:18,560
the fact that the Republic of China chose not 
to do that in 1912, and failed to acknowledge  

851
01:32:18,560 --> 01:32:25,840
the claims of independence of Mongolia, Tibet, 
and Xinjiang has left it, now a century later,  

852
01:32:26,880 --> 01:32:32,480
the People's Republic, with problems that it is 
apparently unable –well, not apparently - the  

853
01:32:32,480 --> 01:32:40,080
problem is it will never solve, and that will 
continue to destabilize the People's Republic.

854
01:32:40,080 --> 01:32:53,040
Well on on that cheery note, I think we should 
let you get a break, and and we will, everyone,  

855
01:32:53,920 --> 01:33:02,560
thank you for coming. There will be more 
opportunities to engage with Professor Brook  

856
01:33:03,680 --> 01:33:10,720
tomorrow at the Cornell Classical Chinese 
Colloquium, and next week at another event,  

857
01:33:10,720 --> 01:33:22,320
and you can find those links online, and at at 
some point the video for this talk will appear  

858
01:33:22,320 --> 01:33:27,600
on you will be able to find it along 
with those other videos that are  

859
01:33:29,040 --> 01:33:34,720
linked from previous Hu Shih lectures. You 
will be able to find this one together with  

860
01:33:34,720 --> 01:33:42,880
those through the east Asia program website. So 
I would like to thank Professor Brook again for  

861
01:33:45,520 --> 01:33:57,920
an outstanding Hu Shih lecture, and thank everyone 
for coming and bringing some life to the Zoomland.

862
01:34:01,280 --> 01:34:03,840
Thank you.