Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

摘要

This beautifully written history illuminates the fate of Sinicized people from their conquest by the Mongols in the 13th century through their conquest by Manchus in the 17th century. Sinicized people were not hegemonic in Asia, and they tried to comprehend the sources of their defeats. According to neo-Confucian thinkers, Ming despots were criticized for abandoning the Confucian "constitutional restraints of emperorship" (p. 81). As historian Frederick Mote put it, "Mongol brutalization" destroyed "much of the restraint built into the imperial constitution, thereby opening the way for Ming despotism" (p. 86). Drawing on the tyrannical practices of the Mongols, as many believe Lenin also did, Ming rule was turned "into a Legalist gulag" (p. 8). For example, power was concentrated in the paramount leader, the court and civil service exam were weakened, the "Confucian moral tradition" was "hollowed out" (p. 88), and the "only aristocracy were the members of the (imperial) Zhu family" (p. 153). Additionally, purges were carried out, the Prime Minister position was cancelled, and the Central Secretariat and Censorate were dismantled. Brook details the constitutional crises of the Ming in which Wang Yangming's philosophy "was intimately tied to constitutional politics" (p. 100). Ming Confucians suffered ultimate punishments when they found China's "constitutional principles higher than the obligation to serve the emperor" (p. 103).