Monarchy has been a universal form of government in earlier centuries, though it involves the structural problem of all decision-making stemming from one individual. Qiu Jun did not challenge the legitimacy of monarchy, but he constructed advice that would encourage his monarch to be alert to change, cautious about his decisons, and attentive to the advice of his best ministers. This chapter also considers the critique of monarchy in Europe at this time, where the Jesuits presented Ming China as an ideal monarchy, and the growing challenge to the divine right of kings, which would eventually lead to the delegitimization of this form of government.

Adherent to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, Qiu Jun’s magnum opus demonstrates the nature of Neo-Confucian learning, which is a knowledge practice rooted in the Confucian Classics, corroborated by orthodox histories, and oriented to statecraft – a mixture of humanist antiquarianism (or Confucian Classicism) and pragmatism. Preoccupied with the Confucian qualities and the piety towards Confucian institutions and traditions, Neo-Confucian scholars were concerned with China’s secular constitutional structure beyond moral self-cultivation. In their socio-politically oriented programs, the Classics were presumed to be instrumental, and histories useful, for maintaining the Confucian institutions and traditions that are reciprocal to Chinese identity and qualities.

The section titled “Institutions of Penal Prudence” (“Shenxing xian”) has established Qiu Jun’s reputation as a legal thinker in China, Korea, and Japan. After a brief review of this section, the chapter focuses on three issues on which Qiu showed fairly innovative thinking. First, he gave the most erudite and systematic exposition of moderation in the application of legal punishments. The Ming Code provided an array of inflexible sentences for an ever-growing amount of crimes, which caused discomfort among sensitive magistrates. Confucian Classics were mobilized in order to legitimize a more sparing use of the punitive arsenal, for which Qiu Jun provided the model argumentation. Second, he was instrumental in the insertion of judicial precedents in the Code to complement the statutes, which daringly braved the Ming founding emperor’s interdiction of changing the Code. Lastly, he pleaded for a better regulation of the death sentences review by the Assizes.

Qiu Jun was convinced that geography offered recourse for ordering the Ming world. This chapter looks into how geography fit into Qiu’s statecraft model, particularly as it related to his visions for managing non-Chinese populations within and without dynastic borders. I begin by reconstructing Qiu Jun’s doctrinal views, showing that he wished to keep Chinese and “barbarians” separate by respecting the natural boundaries that divided their territories. I then discuss how he leveraged the precedents of China’s past to support his delimiting program and further situate Qiu in the geo-demographic realities of fifteenth-century China. Moreover, a qualification is at this point made: his commitment to an absolute model of demarcation for the Ming was not ironclad. This chapter indeed stresses the need to distinguish between doctrinal absolutism and practical compromise in Qiu Jun’s geographic statecraft, for Qiu could turn from idealist to realist when he really needed to.

This chapter tacks the origin of Qiu Jun’s categories for diagnosing disorder and examining how it arose. His categories can be grouped into six ideological modules: ethicism, especially patriarchal ethics, which Confucians know as propriety and duty; Confucian Legalism, which embraces law, regulation, and punishment; moralism, which is enshrined in the category of personal virtue; rationalism, which entails both primordial principles, general trends, and fluctuating circumstances; ethnocentrism, which highlights the socio-political superiority of Chinese to non-Chinese; and finally institutionalism, which includes rites, political institutions, and social customs, a category which could be said to characterize his entire work. All these six modules were already in the statecraft toolkit by the fourteenth century for Qiu to construct a program to respond to disorder and as well to constitute discourses for that response. In this sense, Neo-Confucian learning is more than a moral philosophy focused on self-cultivation.