From 1625 to 1627 scholar-officials belonging to a militant
Confucianist group known as the "Donglin Faction" suffered one of
the most gruesome political repressions in China's history. Many
were purged from key positions in the central government for their
relentless push for a national moral rearmament under the Tianqi
emperor. While their martyrs' deaths won them a lasting reputation
for heroism and steadfastness, their opponents are remembered for
fatally degrading the quality of Ming political life with their
arrests and tortures of Donglin partisans. John Dardess employs a
wide range of little-used primary sources (letters, diaries,
eyewitness accounts, memorials, imperial edicts) to provide a
remarkably detailed narrative of the inner workings of Ming
government and of this dramatic period as a whole. Comparing the
repression with the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, he argues
that Tiananmen offers compelling clues to a rereading of the events
of the 1620s. Leaders of both movements were less interested in
practical reform than in communicating sincere moral feelings to
rulers and the public. In the end the protesters succeeded in
commemorating their dead and imprisoned and in disgracing those
responsible for the violence.
A work of unprecedented depth skillfully told, Blood and History
in China will be appreciated by specialists in intellectual history
and Ming and early Qing studies.
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