Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial

Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial China (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)

Since the second century BC the Confucian Classics, endorsed by the successive ruling houses of imperial China, had stood in tension with the statist ideals of â€œbig government.â€ In Northern Song China (960â€“1127), a group of reform-minded statesmen and thinkers sought to remove the tension between the two by revisiting the highly controversial classic, the Rituals of Zhou: the administrative blueprint of an archaic bureaucratic state with the six ministries of some 370 offices staffed by close to 94,000 men. With their revisionist approaches, they reinvented it as the constitution of state activism. Most importantly, the reform-councilor Wang Anshiâ€™s (1021â€“1086) new commentary on the Rituals of Zhou rose to preeminence during the New Policies period (ca. 1068â€“1125), only to be swept into the dustbin of history afterward. By reconstructing his revisionist exegesis from its partial remains, this book illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage between classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.

Country	USA
Author	Jaeyoon Song
Binding	Hardcover
EAN	9780674088368
ISBN	0674088360
Label	Harvard University Asia Center
Manufacturer	Harvard University Asia Center
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	450
PublicationDate	2015-10-26
Publisher	Harvard University Asia Center
Studio	Harvard University Asia Center
ReleaseDate	0000-00-00

Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial China (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)