Suchergebnisse

Collecting and hoarding are distinguished by order. An agglomeration of objects is defined by chaos while a collection comes into being through its organization. The largest collection of texts undertaken in Chinese dynastic history, the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu 四庫全書), is the high point of late imperial compilation projects (congshu 叢書). While much scholarship has been devoted to explaining the criteria of inclusion, the question of order remains largely unexplored. In this article, I investigate the link between the collection of knowledge and its organization in the high Qing. Specifically, I explore the poetic understanding of knowledge, the intellectual, non-political purposes behind the collection and its fundamental principle of order. I end this essay offering some remarks on the nature of the Complete Writings, high Qing scholarship, and contemporary attitudes towards classification.

AbstractLucian W. Pye, the renowned American Sinologist, argues that power/authority in Chinese culture follows a paternalistic structure, that the distinction in Chinese society between public and private has historically been in a state of tension, and therefore that Chinese governance has always emphasized central power over local self-governance, suppressed cultural pluralism, and rebuffed multipolar structures of power. Even though the inherent tension identified by Pye certainly exists, the thesis that Chinese culture has a deeply ingrained authoritarian orientation is simply incorrect. In order to resolve the tension between the public and private realms, Chinese thinkers—from the various strands of legalist thought to the Confucian notion of "kingly governance"—have premised the division of power on the priority of preserving centralized power. In other words, diffusion of power has been premised on the idea of an already collectivized authority. Therefore, the power structure that defines Chinese culture has certainly not been the polycentric one that Pye implicitly values, but neither has it been the centralist, authoritarian structure that he abhors. Rather, it has been the Confucian model premised on the values of governance through ritual and moral virtue. Insights from cultural psychology help explain ethical governance—that is, rule by an ethical meritocracy—in Chinese society and culture.