Between humane governance and hegemony: a study on East Asian Confucian discourse on Guan Zhong and related questions
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Between humane governance and hegemony: a study on East Asian Confucian discourse on Guan Zhong and related questions Chun‑chieh Huang1
Received: 20 August 2018 / Revised: 23 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 / Published online: 24 November 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
Abstract The article studies the image of Guan Zhong, a historical figurehead from the Spring and Autumn period China, in East Asian Confucian discourse on humaneness (ren 仁, “benevolence”) and related political questions. It traces the development of Confucian discourse on Guan Zhong from its beginnings in the Analects of Confucius and in the thought of his later disciple Mencius, to later discourses on humaneness in Chinese, Joseon Korean and Tokugawa Japanese Confucian thought. In so doing, it establishes a comparative perspective of how Guan Zhong’s humaneness (or inhumanity) was interpreted in socio-political environments of individual East Asian countries, establishing a correlation between their interpretational tendencies and overall intellectual tendencies of local Confucianisms—as, for instance the philosophy of Practical Learning in Joseon Korea and Tokugawa Japan. Concurrently, the article also illuminates the special characteristics of the notion of humaneness which also gained its expression throughout East Asian Confucian ethical evaluations of Guan Zhong’s political achievements.
The article is an abridged translation of the Chapter 9 of Chun-chieh Huang’s book Dongya Rujia Renxue Shilun 東亞儒家仁學史論 (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2017, pp. 377–414). Chun-chieh Huang 黃俊傑—Huang Chun-chieh [Huang Junjie 黃俊傑] is the Distinguished Chair Professor of National Taiwan University and a member of Academia Europaea. Translated and abridged by Jan Vrhovski—Jan Vrhovski is a research fellow at University of Ljubljana, working on history of formal logic, philosophy and intellectual history of modern China. * Chun‑chieh Huang [email protected] 1
Academia Europaea, London, Great Britain
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C. Huang 412
Keywords Humane governance · Hegemony · East Asia · Confucianism · Guan Zhong
Introduction In my previous research on East Asian Confucianisms I have studied a wide selection of different questions pertaining to Confucian discourse on humaneness (ren 仁, also translated as “benevolence” or “humaneness”).1 In the present study I shall closely examine one of the central questions related to the practice of “humane governance” (renzheng 仁政)2 within the above-mentioned discourse. For centuries, one of the central places in Confucian discourse on humaneness was occupied by the question whether the historical figure Guan Zhong (管仲, 730–645 BCE) had been a humane person. Eventually, the very same question became the pivotal problem related to the notion of practice of humane governance in Confucianism. As an important political personality from the early years of the state of Qi (齊) of the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BCE), Guan Zhong was the subject of fierc
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