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Reviews of Books
explaining how some cultures have confronted their
excesses (air pollution, for example) and made some
important adjustments to curb or even reduce some
destructive trends. Does McNeill have the right to be
optimistic or to hope that humans will adjust their
habits and practices in a new millennium? It ultimately
comes down to whether sharks can transform themselves into rats.
MARTIN V. MELOSI
University of Houston
ASIA
To Rebuild the Empire: Lu
Chih's Confucian Pragmatist Approach to the Mid-T'ang
Predicament. (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and
JOSEPHINE CHIU-DUKE.
Culture.) Albany: State University of New York Press.
2000. Pp. xiii, 311.
Josephine Chiu-Duke's study begins with a biography
of Lu Chih (754-805) and pays special attention to
how such families as his had service traditions as
bureaucratized aristocratie lineages. She traces Lu's
political career from 780 to 795, culminating in his
service as a "prime minister" to the T'ang emperor
Te-tsung (r. 779-805). The T'ang dynasty had almost
been extinguished during the An Lu-shan rebellion
(755-763), and rebellions by military governors in the
provinces during Te-tsung's reign further devastated
the dynasty. Beleaguered by rebellious armies and
pressed by declining resources, the emperor used some
of Lu Chih's drafted proclamations both to stir loyalists and to win back many of those who had risen in
opposition to the emperor's policies. Lu was usually
cautious, but he clashed with the head of public
revenue, P'ei Yen-ling, whom the emperor trusted to
enhance much needed revenues. Lu urged the emperor to investigate P'ei's behavior, especially his
harsh dealings with envoys from provincial military
governors. The emperor thereupon demoted the troublesome chief minister and almost had Lu executed
when it appeared that he rnight be leading a faction
and intriguing with the army. About ten years later, a
reformist group briefly gained ascendancy; they had
the new emperor summon Lu back to the capital, but
Lu died before he received this call to serve. Thus, the
challenge to P'ei ended Lu's career. Just before that
challenge, Lu had eloquently replied to those urging
caution: "I have not betrayed the Son of Heaven on
high and I have not betrayed what I have learned in
this world; nothing else troubles me" (p. 61). Skillfully
utilizing this quotation, Chiu-Duke turns to Lu's
thought.
Because of Lu's limited extant writings, Chiu-Duke
focuses on his memorials and writings for the emperor.
Her goal is to establish Lu as a "Confucian pragmatist"
approaching sociopolitical problems with a practical
flexibility and directed toward the greater good of the
people. A hallmark of this approach is how situational
flexibility or expediency (ch'iian) complements the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
principle of righteousness. Through characterizations
of implicit motives, she strives to distinguish Lu's
principled expediency from the emperor's "appeasement" policies and focus on the survival of the dynasty.
She further sharply contrasts Lu with his contemporary
institutional specialist, Tu Yu, who is presented as far
more concerned about the state's wealth and power
than with the people's welfare. She thus distinguishes
her favored "pragmatist" from what she labels as Tu's
"utilitarianism," a rubric she acknowledges borrowing
from my Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi (1982). However, Ch'en's view of
expediency and rightness was essentially the same as
Lu's, for Ch'en also argued that proper expediency and
the Tao of what is right were one. Chiu-Duke claims
this principled position for Lu alone and thus suggests
that Chu Hsi would have no grounds for condemning
Lu's ethic. But she apparently accepts at face value
Chu's caricature of Ch'en ethics as advocating that the
end justifies the means and as being the unprincipled
pursuit of the state's wealth and power.
Whereas a few endnotes very briefly discuss modern
studies of Lu (especially p. 246, n. 106) and China's
utilitarians (p. 247, n. 107 and 262, n. 51), parallels
between Lu and Max Weber's ideal of the truc statesman are prominent in the text. Besides serving as an
internationalized standard, Weber's "ethic of responsibility" is further used to contrast Lu's ethic from the
"ethic of social orientation" among Chinese utilitarians. But Chiu-Duke does not look more closely at the
sense of ethica] responsibility among utilitarians in
premodern China.
Since Lu was enshrined in the Confucian Temple in
1826, he has become better known among some China
scholars by his canonical name, Lu Hsilan-kung. Even
though she briefly mentions Lu's elevation to the
Confucian Temple, Chiu-Duke does not relate her
own theme of conflicts within Confucianism to Huang
Chin-shing's Chinese books and articles on the Confucian Temple, which set forth comparable conflicts
between rulers and officials over ideology and cultural
symbols. Such publications could have strengthened
her case.
The above oversights are problematic because ChiuDuke's larger goal is to construct a tradition of Confucian pragmatists that will counter the ideal of "new
authoritarianism" prevailing since 1988 in China (p.
193). She links this new authoritarianism to Tu Yu's
utilitarian tradition, which similarly strove to save the
state by elevating the ruler and subordinating the
people's interest. Nonetheless, one must admire her
convictions and applaud this thought-provoking book,
which is the first on Lu as a statesman and thinker.
HOYT CLEVELAND TILLMAN
Arizona State University
VICTORIA CASS. Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies,
and Geishas of the Ming. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield. 1999. Pp. xix, 156.
OCTOBER
2001
Asia
Victoria Cass has written a short, lively, and engaging
study of female archetypes that were deeply imbedded
in the structuren of Chinese culture and daily life
during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Cass focuses on
women as outsiders, as revealed in the private and
informal language of memoirs, miscellanies, short stories, and novels. Her goal is to place these women/
outsiders in their own historical context of "the universals of myth and religion, and the verities of the
cultural landscape," "so that they will speak coherently
to the modern" (p. xii). In this, she succeeds admirably.
Cass opens with a chapter on "The Great Ming,"
emphasizing the prosperity of the Ming dynasty and
the prevalence of male anxiety and warnings about
dangerous women. She emphasizes three aspects of
Ming culture as directly relevant to her study of female
archetypes: the importante of piety and the cult of the
family; the growth of urban prosperity with its attendant entertainment districts, cosmopolitanism, anonymity, and relative freedom; and solitude or reclusion
as an abiding cultural ideal. Each of these, and sometimes two or all three at once, helped condition the
roles of women as dangerous outsiders.
Cass notes that the geisha in China was, on the one
hand, captive and enslaved but, on the other, highly
refined and in some cases even celebrated for her
beauty and artistic talent. Although I find it difficult to
picture a Chinese courtesan as a geisha, Cass justifies
the use of the Japanese term because it literally means
"artist," which is what the Chinese ji or courtesan was.
In the late Ming, some geishas reached the pinnacle of
fame as the romantic partners and aesthetic and moral
advisors of the most prominent male literati in the
empire.
Grannies (po) may or may not have been actual
grandmothers, but they were relatively independent
(and usually) older women who included among their
ranks healers, midwives, wetnurses, shamans, merchants, gossips, and matchmakers. Palace-grannies
could be extremely powerful by virtue of their affective
ties to the foremost people in the empire. Grannies
were seen as necessary to the fertility and fecundity of
the all-important family lineage but also as potentially
very dangerous by virtue of their independence and
their extensive knowledge of the dark world of yin and
its "earthy physicality" (p. 63).
Cass sees women warriors and religious mystics as
latter-day descendants of ancient female shamans, and
as such, they were also potentially extremely powerful.
As practitioners of esoterie religious and martial practices, they sometimes claimed magical gifts such as the
ability to fly or to transform paper soldiers into real
fighting men. Their claims were not taken lightly, and
several women warriors achieved fame as military
leaders of great skill and accomplishment.
Much more negative was the image of the female
predator, like Pan Jinlian of the famous erotic Ming
novel of manners, Jin Ping Mei, who preyed on the
weaknesses and lusts of men to manipulate, enslave, or
destroy them. Almost animal-like in her lust for sex
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1333
and for power, the female predator operated on the
national level as a state-toppler and on the local level
as a family-wrecker. Such women, Cass admonishes,
were seen as real, not just as literary archetypesalthough, interestingly enough, most of her examples
come from fiction where the predator was often portrayed as a shape shifter who was actually a fox spirit or
a ghost.
In her final chapter, "Recluses and Malcontents,"
Cass notes that female recluses in China "were not
anomalous; they had a cultural legitimacy inscribed
into the folklore of the feminine" (p. 106). Because
reclusion was an accepted cultural ideal, the female
recluse could be highly respected even if she existed
outside the constricting confines of the family and
community. In this category Cass includes religious
teachers and disciples and other less positive types
such as the intensely driven woman consumed by
jealousy.
Intended for a general audience, this short and
well-illustrated volume is as engaging and entertaining
as it is instructive. Cass sprinkles her text with insights
not only on Ming China but also on Western parallels
and contrasts. Ranging from the mundane details of
daily life to the esoterie practices of sorcery, magie,
religion, and the martial arts, she paints a vividly
gendered portrait of Ming culture in all its complexities and contradictions. The book should be extremely
useful in women's studies courses, courses on Chinese
history, and courses on Chinese women and gender
relations.
PAUL S. ROPP
Clark University
WEN-HSIN YEn. Betoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. (Studies on China, number 23.)
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press. 2000. Pp. x, 435. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.00.
Academie research on late Qing and Republican
China has in recent years produced diverse and exciting challenges to conventional narratives of "Chinese
modernity." Wen-hsin Yeh has brought together some
of these in a scholarly collection of essays that makes
for rewarding reading. Stimulated by unprecedented
access to rich archival sources and a refreshing (though
none-too-timely) engagement with contemporary debates in cultural studies and the social sciences, much
of this research has also been inspired by the demise of
the revolutionary paradigm dominating intellectual
approaches to Chinese modernity until 1989. The
result is a conceptualization of Chinese modernity not
as an already assumed entity defined according to a
basically linear historical trajectory but as a changing
configuration, the meanings of which are culturally
produced through multiple spaces and subjects.
A rethinking of the approaches to modernity associated with the intellectual and political orientations of
dominant May Fourth narratives emerges in Leo Oufan Lee's analysis of the role of Shanghai's publishing
OCTOBER 2001