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.

This chapter explores the impact of military grain provisioning on civilians through a study of yiyun, the Nationalists’ relay transport system. Having lost key sections of major railways and without adequate supplies of trucks or fuel, the Nationalists resorted to the large-scale use of civilian labor and equipment to transport military grain. There was no equivalent in scale in any other theater of World War II to the Nationalists’ reliance on mass local mobilization as a key mode of both military and commercial transport. Proponents of this nationwide scheme drew inspiration from the courier service of imperial times, but also applied the more recent concept of “scientific management.” As with granary networks, yiyun tied civilians directly to the prolonged conflict, extending state powers into the remotest communities through historic units of local administration, the baojia. Because both yiyun and granary networks hinged on civilian contributions of labor, property, and foodstuffs, they reveal the basis of the Nationalist war effort as the systematic imposition of sacrifice upon the citizenry.

China today is one of the most governmentalized societies in the world. State penetration into everyday life may not be as thorough as some critics insist, yet the idea that the state should be present in society persuades most Chinese to submit to state oversight in exchange for the security the state claims to provide. China is not alone in elevating the state above the citizen, but it does draw on a long tradition of state policy and political philosophy known as "Confucian statecraft" to support this orientation, for which Qiu Jun’s Supplement provides an almost complete account. This was the China that the Jesuits encountered in the seventeenth century and communicated back to Europeans at a time when the divine right of kings was in question. Qiu Jun’s method of handling monarchy was to caution the emperor on bad policy and warn him of the catastrophic effects that bad decisions could produce, and that the emperor’s main tasks were to detect latent signs of coming disasters and consult his advisors.

This chapter examines Qiu Jun’s eclectic vision of employing military violence in the rule of the imperial realm. As a well-established Classicist, Qiu deeply immersed himself in the ancient doctrines of guiding the monarch to practice the kingly way that equipped him with benevolence and righteousness, which would translate moral power into invincible military might. Moral value thus outweighed the martial one. The reality, however, taught Qiu the necessity of military preparation and using coercive means when dealing with external and internal security issues. Qiu therefore sought a way to reconcile both moral and military values. Moral principles, according to Qiu, would also legitimatize the use of military violence. Furthermore, to strengthen the military capability of the Ming Empire, Qiu also looked for intellectual resources from historical precedents to model the institutional reforms that he advocated, regardlessof the fact that the ancient practices might not fit the current circumstances.