PRECIS AND CRITIQUE

Precis and Critique

Precis and Critique of Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China by William T. Rowe.

For this paper, I have selected, the work, ““Politics.” in Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China”.

Precis

Saving the World is much more than a political biography of the man WilliamT. Rowe calls the “eighteenth-century Qing empire's most influential Chinese official” (p. 2). Rowe sketches upon the unusually wealthy life and writings of Chen Hongmou (1696-1771) to meld thoughtful and social annals and illuminate the convoluted matters that overridden elite thought and practice in the high Qing period. In so doing, the publication matters a bold dispute to those who would claim that only Europe held claimion to the label “early up to date” throughout the eighteenth century.

Instead of guiding readers through a chronology of Chen Hongmou's achievements as a leading official who served the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors in over a dozen provinces, Rowe organizes his work topically. The book's three parts, “Being a Man,” “Creating Prosperity,” and “Ordering the World,” feature chapters about Chen's views and policies in areas as diverse as famine administration, trade, granary management, and the education of minorities and women. Rowe depicts Chen as the embodiment of three tensions that were particularly salient during the mid-Qing period: the tension between Confucian moralism and administrative pragmatism, between the imperial state and “local societal self management,” and between individual and group (Rowe, 2001).

Rowe utilizes a broad array of court documents, secondary materials in Chinese, Japanese, and English, and Chen's own prolific writings to assert that agents of the Qing state exercised a remarkable degree of flexibility and creativity in the face of pressing population problems. Richly detailed discussions of Chen Hongmou's crucial role in local cases like a Guangxi land reclamation scam and food crises in Jiangxi and Shaanxi represent one of the book's main strengths.

Because other Western scholars have drawn upon parts of Chen's writings as primary sources to discuss late imperial law, culture, economics, and women's history, Rowe's reading of Chen's corpus allows him to engage in a number of debates. His fresh takes on issues ranging from the mutable nature of Qing statecraft (jingshi) to Chen's activism in promoting profit seeking and self-interest as solutions to economic problems are bound to spark controversy. Rowe's portrayal of Chen Hongmou as a pro-market “protoindividualist” who held nuanced views on gender distinctions flies in the face of previous scholarship by Susan Mann and others who have labeled Chen as a conservative reactionary (Rowe, 2001).

While for the most part Rowe is up to the considerable challenge of using Chen's huge body of writings to reassess the tireless official, Chen was so prolific that he inevitably contradicted himself. Although Rowe cautiously navigates Chen's inconsistencies to depict how the complicated man reflected a complex era, the author's conclusions sometimes seem strained, particularly in the area of gender relations. For demonstration, in section nine Rowe argues that Chen eschewed rigid hierarchies and “believed in the ...