美国历史教科书中的明朝和清朝(原文下半部分)

    Let us turn to a famous example of a morally courageous official of the Ming dynasty. Hai Rui (1515-1587) began his career as an instructor at a government school. He worked his way up the ladder of officialdom, eventually becoming Secretary of the Ministry of Revenue. Blunt and fearless, in 1565 he wrote a scathing memorial to the reigning emperor, Shizong. The memorial charged the emperor with neglect of government, excessive interest in unusual religious ceremonies, and misuse of state funds to build extravagant palaces and mansions for himself. Hai Rui even compared the emperor unfavorably with certain infamous rulers of past dynasties.
　　
　　Enraged upon seeing the memorial, the emperor ordered guards to make sure *Hai Rui* did not escape. The guards answered that there was no need to worry. Hai Rui was calmly waiting outside and had even brought his own coffin along. The emperor realized that having Hai Rui killed immediately would make him a martyr, and all of his accusations against the emperor would ring true to other officials, who might then cause trouble. So the emperor had Hai Rui thrown in prison while the court manufactured evidence against the courageous official. Hai Rui was tortured and sentenced to death, but Emperor Shizong died unexpectedly, before the sentence could be carried out. The next emperor realized that he could use Hai Rui to enhance the imperial image by appearing to heed criticism and favor honest officials. Hai Rui resumed his official career, but his sharp criticism was not reserved for the emperor alone. He also managed to offend many other officials, which caused his *dismissal from office,* though only temporarily. Hai Rui was eventually "promoted" to the prestigious but "harmless" post of Censor-in-Chief of Nanjing. This post was a great honor but lacked actual power. After his death, Hai Rui became idealized as a perfect official and paragon of courageous remonstrance. Courageous remonstrance was one of the highest values in Chinese political culture, but those who actually practiced it were few.
　　
　　(In Ming times, and also today, a common technique for criticizing others in China was to compare them with certain historical figures. In 1962 Wu Han, Deputy Mayor of Beijing, wrote a play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Hai Rui ba guan). The play featured Hai Rui as an honest minister who stood up for the common people but whom an autocratic emperor dismissed from office. Such a play might seem devoid of controversy at first glance, but at the time, many considered it a thinly veiled critique of China's autocratic leader Mao Zedong, who in 1959 dismissed his defense minister under circumstances similar to those Wu Han depicted in the play. Many historians regard a 1965 article denouncing Wu Han's play as the start of the Cultural Revolution.)
　　
　　The Ming dynasty was a dangerous, frustrating time for those involved in politics. Many would-be officials therefore stayed out of government and turned their attention to cultural pursuits. Many of China's greatest novels were written during the Ming dynasty. Although the novel was not a fully respected form of literature at the time, today many Ming novels are considered classics of world literature. The most famous Ming novels are The Golden Lotus (also known as Jin Ping Mei), The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin (also known as All Men Are Brothers), and Journey to the West. *Novels* were quite popular in Ming times among the well-to-do (remember, the majority of Chinese at this time were illiterate), who found them much more interesting than dry, moralistic Confucian literature. The Golden Lotus, for example is as racy as any modern novel, if not more so. Some Confucian moralists condemned this and other novels as pornography but still managed, it seems, to read them in private. The Ming dynasty was perhaps the high water mark for Chinese erotic culture (or low water mark, some moralists would say). The Qing emperors proved to be much more puritanical (for want of a better term) than their Ming counterparts and promoted policies to suppress many forms of sexual expression. (#more about novels#)
　　
　　The Ming dynasty was also a time of great activity in drama. Many plays written at this time took the form of dreams, which allowed for greater freedom of dramatic effect. In the eighteenth century, many classic dramas from the Ming dynasty were adapted to popular audiences. This process gave birth to #Beijing Opera,# featuring elaborate acrobatics and singing, which is still popular today.
　　
　　By the 1620s, the Manchus began to encroach on Chinese territory. The region known as Manchuria is today the extreme northeast portion of China, across the border from North Korea. In the early 1600s it was not part of the Chinese empire. The Manchus were cultural cousins of the Mongols, who lived farther to the west and pursued a similar lifestyle of nomadic herding. By the 1620s, the Ming dynasty was potentially still quite strong. It lacked political unity, however, and also faced serious financial problems. A domestic rebel, Li Zicheng, captured Beijing in 1644. When the capital fell, the last Ming emperor hung himself and many others took their own lives as well:
　　
　　Minister of Revenue Ni Yuanlu hanged himself, and twelve members of his household followed him. Others who committed suicide included the minister of works, the censor in chief, a vice minister of justice, and the chief justice of the Grand Court of Revision. Officials of middle grades and junior ranks who chose to die rather than survive the dynasty were countless. Some 200 women drowned themselves in the creek that flowed through the palace compound.8
　　
　　Although the Ming dynasty was not able to save itself, it retained the loyal support of many officials and other subjects. Throughout the next dynasty, there would remain a lingering feeling of loyalty to the memory of the fallen Ming.
　　
　　Combined Chinese and Manchu forces drove the rebel Li out of Beijing, though not before Li's soldiers went on a rampage of terror and looting. The Manchus set themselves up in the fallen Ming capital, thereby establishing China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing.
　　
　　Founding of the Qing Dynasty
　　
　　In general, the Qing emperors left the Ming system of government in place, but they made a few significant changes. The first major change was establishing the Manchu banner system in north China. A "Banner" was an administrative unit that consisted of several military colonies. These colonies were responsible for supplying designated numbers of soldiers to the government in times of military need. There were several banners, each with its own lands. The members of the military colonies engaged in agriculture and enjoyed tax and other benefits in return for their military service obligations. Most of the Banners were Manchu, but the dynasty did establish some Banners that consisted of Chinese or other ethnic groups such as Mongolians. The effectiveness of the banner system declined in the later part of the dynasty, but in early Qing times, it functioned well as a cost-effective way to maintain a powerful military organization.
　　
　　Although Manchu soldiers had taken the capital and established their banner system in the vicinity, it would be almost half a century before they completely conquered the Chinese empire. Resistance to the Manchus in the south of China was widespread and lasted into the 1680s. The last stronghold of the Ming loyalists was the island of Taiwan, which fell in 1683. It was at this point that all of China came under Manchu rule, but an undercurrent of Chinese resentment of the Manchus lingered throughout the life of the dynasty.
　　
　　The Manchu emperors embraced Chinese institutions and culture but simultaneously took steps to preserve Manchu culture. With a few exceptions, they went out of their way to avoid exacerbating cultural and ethnic tensions. The Manchu rulers undertook the study of Chinese language and culture, and the great Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) was a master of the Confucian classics and other forms of Chinese literature. Ray Huang points out that "The Qing emperors, on the whole, lived much closer to the expectation of the Chinese tradition than did numerous indigenous rulers of preceding dynasties."9 Early Qing emperors became sinicized, ruled firmly but well, and came closer to the ideal of sage rulers than any emperor of the previous Ming dynasty. The population recovered from the problems of the late Ming years and prospered. This situation engendered a dilemma for those educated Chinese who had lived during the time of the Ming dynasty, and, to a lesser extent, educated Chinese any time in the Qing era:
　　
　　Traditional statecraft, growing out of the teachings of Mencius, taught them [educated Chinese] to value the satisfaction of the population at large regardless of the origin of the ruler . . . . On that count, they had no cause to raise their standard against the Qing. Yet, bound by the practice of those days, to acquiesce [to Manchu rule] was to collaborate, which would always be a source of inner conflict.10
　　
　　Should one serve an alien dynasty of "barbarians" that nevertheless ruled well, or, should one refuse to serve the state out of loyalty to the previous Ming dynasty or out of an ethnocentric sense that "Chinese" do not serve "barbarians?" It is safe to say that this issue crossed the mind of nearly every educated Chinese at one time or another during the Qing dynasty. Even the great modern scholar Qian Mu had to deal with these sorts of questions. At age eight, in 1904, he was shocked to hear from a teacher that the emperor of China was not Chinese:
　　
　　My teacher Bogui also told me, 'You know that our emperor is not Chinese, don't you?' I was shocked and said I didn't know. When I got home I asked my father about it. He said, 'Your teacher is right. Our emperor is a Manchu, and we are Han [Chinese] people. That's why there are sometimes things in the shops with both Han and Man[chu] writing.'11
　　
　　Throughout most of the Qing dynasty we do not find nationalism in the modern sense of the word.12 For one thing, only a small portion of the total population--persons with a high level of education--probably had a strong consciousness of themselves as distinctly "Chinese." It is easy to overstate the degree of ethnic tension at the time by reading our modern conceptions of "nation" into the premodern past. Still, some degree of Chinese-Manchu ethnic tension always existed at or below the surface of Qing China.
　　
　　Qing emperors were ever on the lookout for Chinese writings critical of Manchus or northern "barbarians" in general. Qing authorities burned such writings, and those associated with them would face severe punishment. Lu Liuliang was a bitterly anti-Manchu scholar, physician and monk who died in 1683. His anti-Manchu writings circulated underground in central China and inspired a young schoolteacher, Zeng Jing, to explore the possibility of overthrowing the Qing state. His plot was found out and he was arrested. Upon investigating the matter, the Yongzheng emperor became enraged that Lu's writings were in circulation. He responded by having Lu's corpse exhumed and dismembered. Then he had all of Lu's surviving relatives enslaved or exiled to remote locations. As for Zeng Jing, the emperor used him for positive publicity: "He made a dramatic gesture of pardoning Zeng with no more than a reprimand on the grounds that he had been gullible."13 But Zeng was not so fortunate in the long run. When the Yongzheng emperor died, his son, the new emperor, "Claiming filial loyalty to his insulted father . . . reversed Yongzheng's edict of clemency and ordered the unfortunate Zeng Jing . . . sliced to pieces in the market of [Beijing]."14 Though generally more benevolent than their Ming predecessors, there were some things China's Manchu rulers would not tolerate.
　　
　　Although China's new rulers quickly learned Chinese culture and presented themselves as Confucian sages, they did impose one aspect of Manchu culture onto the entire Chinese male population. As a sign of submission to Manchu rule, the dynasty required all males to wear their hair in Manchu style. This style differed markedly from Chinese style and required shaving some hair at the top of the forehead and allowing the rest to grow into a long braided ponytail. In English, this hair style is commonly called the *queue.* It is easy to identify pictures and photographs from the Qing period because men will inevitably have queues during this dynasty but not before or after. Because wearing the queue was a political act, cutting it was one way to make an anti-Manchu political statement--a statement punishable by death during Qing times.