(INDIVIDUAL) LITERATI ACTIVISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA

Wu Kedu's corpse admonition was a political performance and strategy aimed at protesting Cixi's exercise of arbitrary power during the late Qing, which has long been viewed as a period of imperial decline.Footnote ²⁷ However, Qing imperial power was surprisingly resilient amid the devastating demographic, economic, political, and social crises that plagued China in the nineteenth century, and it did not dissipate until around Cixi's death in 1908.Footnote ²⁸ One reason why the Qing lasted as long as it did was that Qing rulers from Qianlong to Cixi adopted the “divide-and-rule” strategy by playing one bureaucratic faction against another to maintain their arbitrary and bureaucratic powers.Footnote ²⁹

During much of Cixi's regency (1861–1908), three power holders dominated imperial policy: Cixi (the throne); Li Hongzhang and his aides, who derived their power largely from their administrative functions; and the Qingliu group of scholar-officials and outsiders of the bureaucratic structure, who professed to uphold Confucian morality—the ideological legitimation of imperial power.Footnote ³⁰ Wu Kedu belonged to the Qingliu faction and had close contact with leaders of the group such as Baoting 寳廷 (1840–90; a Manchu), Huang Tifang 黃體芳 (1832–99), Zhang Peilun 張佩綸 (1848–1903), and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), who were identified as the “Four Remonstrators” (si jian 四諫) in Qingshi gao 清史稿 (the Draft Qing History) for their frequent, impassioned petitions to the throne. Compilers of Qingshi gao, many of whom were former Qing bureaucrats highly critical of Cixi, identified Wu Kedu as the forerunner of late Qing remonstrators. Indeed, the attempts of the Four Remonstrators intensified after Wu Kedu's suicide, a trend confirmed by Chen Baochen 陳寳琛 (1848–1935). Chen Baochen, a Qingliu member and Grand Secretariat Academician (Neige xueshi 内閣學士), had submitted numerous petitions to the throne and was sometimes hailed as one of the Four Remonstrators.Footnote ³¹

Wu Kedu's dramatic act of protest encapsulated the spirit of bureaucratic remonstrance and literati activism of late Ming Donglin 東林 members, who fought the political domination of eunuch strongman Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568–1627) by successfully placing themselves via the civil service examinations into the powerful Hanlin Academy.Footnote ³² Political intrigue and infighting doomed the Donglin convergence between Confucian moral philosophy and political activism, but the influence of the Donglin movement remained in the Spring Purification Circle (Zhanchunji 湛春集), a semi-official association of high-ranking bureaucrats and non-degree-holding literati that appeared in the 1820s. The Spring Purification Circle, after more than a century of condemnation of Donglin activism by the imperial state as the cause of collapse of Ming China, openly professed an admiration for the Donglin literati for their moral opposition and political aspirations. Similar to the Xuannan Poetry Club (Xuannan shishe 宣南詩社), the Spring Purification Circle was a “quasi-literary association” that rallied political dissenters in the guise of ceremonial and literary activities.Footnote ³³

That these associations still wore disguise pointed to the looming threat of imperial prohibition of their activities. Nevertheless, many scholars rightly point out that Hong Liangji's 洪亮吉 (1746–1809) famous, well-documented letter of remonstrance to the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) in 1799, one that almost cost him his life, had important influence on the nature of political dissent in nineteenth-century China.Footnote ³⁴ The Jiaqing emperor, as Elman observes, opted for a “minimalist purge” of Heshen's faction by punishing Heshen alone, hoping that bureaucratic loyalty would return to the person of the emperor with Heshen no longer in the picture. Although the Jiaqing emperor had promised to widen the yanlu (largely to elicit rhetorical support for his campaign against Heshen), Hong Liangji, as a minor bureaucrat serving in no advisory capacity, knew that his letter would not be read by the emperor unless he first created some bureaucratic opinion by circulating it among his close associates and sending it to Prince Cheng 成親王 (1752–1823), one of the emperor's brothers.

Having served as one of the compilers (bianxiu 編修) of the veritable records of the Qianlong emperor, Hong Liangji gleaned from court documents that Heshen's damage to the realm was collateral. In his letter, Hong Liangji went against the Jiaqing emperor's proclaimed magnanimity and insisted that all members of Heshen's clique must be punished to deter future literati complicity in bureaucratic malpractice and subversion of Confucian literati standards of honesty and service. At the time, the Jiaqing emperor was already receiving many groundless accusations about bureaucrats from his censors. When he read Hong Liangji's letter, he was incensed at Hong Liangji's audacious abuse of the yanlu, and got him arrested and sent into exile. Within months, however, the Jiaqing emperor exposed his concern for bureaucratic opinion by pardoning Hong Liangji and restoring full honors to him. Hong Liangji returned to his hometown and never served again in any official appointment.Footnote ³⁵

The Jiaqing emperor's punishment of Hong Liangji cowed Qing censors into silence in subsequent years. According to Lin Qian and Ju Hua's analysis, no censor spoke a word about corrupt officials and political scandals throughout the decade from 1800 to 1810, and Hong Liangji himself refrained from all political discussions up to his death.Footnote ³⁶ However, to some of the literati at large, the Jiaqing emperor's mercy signaled that their dissent would be condoned if voiced through appropriate channels or with the purest of intentions, introducing qingyi 清議 (disinterested discussion) protest patterns that became “characteristic of nineteenth-century gentry activism.”Footnote ³⁷

Some individual bureaucrats did take their cue from Hong Liangji's example. Jiang Zhaokui 蔣兆奎 (1729–1802), the Superintendent of the Grain Tribute Administration (Caoyun zongdu 漕運總督), threatened to quit his office if his request for the improvement of the hereditary boatmen's (qiding 旗丁) welfare was not met, and eventually he did quit after his intense debates with the Jiaqing emperor came to naught.Footnote ³⁸ Jiqing 吉慶 (?–1802), a Manchu bannerman and Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi (liang Guang zongdu 兩廣總督), killed himself after the Jiaqing emperor reproached him for submitting confusing and sloppy reports on frontier developments, which he maintained was unintentional.Footnote ³⁹ These sporadic cases hardly counted for bureaucratic activism: bureaucratic protests remained confined to one-to-one interactions between the emperor and his petitioner without implicating the mass of bureaucrats or the legitimacy of imperial power.

Nevertheless, these acts of bureaucratic protest were significantly different in nature from those of previous reigns. From the Yongzheng emperor's handling of Zeng Jing's 曾鯨 “treason” to the Qianlong emperor's treatment of “soulstealers” and imperial mourning practices, bureaucratic reactions, no matter how negative, were discursively acquiescent, sometimes bordering on the unctuous.Footnote ⁴⁰ Beginning with the Jiaqing reign, bureaucrats, in protesting what they viewed as misinformed, unfair, or simply wrong imperial judgment, felt a deep sense of self-righteous indignation against their ruler. The uncoordinated, isomorphic acts of defiance indicated that many bureaucrats of nineteenth-century China had no qualms about incurring the wrath of their ruler through dramatic acts of protest and remonstrance so long as their statements were made. This was in addition to the deterioration of bureaucratic discipline, which in the Jiaqing emperor's view had led to local government malfeasance and examination boycotts that were also an expression of “righteous anger,” but on the part of the literati.Footnote ⁴¹

The case of Wang Ding 王鼎 (1768–1842) was a telling example of the trend, constituting the other corpse admonition in Qing China (to my knowledge, there were only two cases). Wang Ding was known to have taken a hardline on the British off the Canton coast during the Opium War (1839–42) and was one of the most influential Han Chinese bureaucrats in Beijing. He hanged himself after Lin Zexu 林則徐 (1785–1850), the leading opponent of the opium trade, was exiled to Xinjiang. Wang Ding wrote a last testament for the Daoguang emperor (r. 1820–50), proclaiming his suicide to be in protest of Lin Zexu's dismissal and the emperor's decision to reopen negotiations with the British. However, Wang Ding's main rival in the “inner Opium War,” Mujangga 穆彰阿 (1782–1856), had been pushing for a conciliatory approach toward the British and cowed Wang Ding's son into concealing the testament.Footnote ⁴² The Daoguang emperor, although saddened by Wang Ding's death, proceeded to sue for peace with the British. At the same time, he bestowed honors on Wang Ding for the latter's steadfast loyalty.Footnote ⁴³

Some censors became famous for remonstrating against Mujangga, albeit to no avail.Footnote ⁴⁴ Wang Ding and the censors who took his side could not reverse the court's decision to scapegoat Lin Zexu and exile him to Xinjiang—a gross injustice, from their perspective, to a loyal bureaucrat who had vehemently opposed the British and the opium trade. As many contemporaries had eulogized, Wang Ding must have understood that his death could create a stir in bureaucratic circles but do little to effect the changes he had wished to see.Footnote ⁴⁵ Qi Junzao 祁雋藻 (1793–1866), a high-ranking minister who had served in the Daoguang, Xianfeng, and Tongzhi courts, broke the silence when he commented, after Mujangga's fall from grace in 1851, that Wang Ding was a “pure minister” (chunchen 純臣) who sacrificed his life in fulfillment of his Confucian ideals.Footnote ⁴⁶ To understand why corpse admonition was a powerful form of bureaucratic protest in nineteenth-century China (and before we examine Wu Kedu's suicide in detail), it may be instructive to discuss briefly the use and narrative of suicide in late imperial Chinese culture and politics.

THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF (MALE) SUICIDE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

The study of suicide in late imperial China has focused almost exclusively on women who killed themselves to maintain chastity after their fiancés or husbands died. Although there are no statistics on suicide in imperial China before 1900, extant writings reveal that female suicides were more common than male suicides in imperial China.Footnote ⁴⁷ While female suicides were largely motivated by the values women ascribed to their roles and responsibilities to family, male suicides were usually responses to a broader community, one that extended beyond family, township, or village to the dynasty (chao 朝) or “nation” (guo 囯).Footnote ⁴⁸

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145 or 135–86 BCE), who suffered the dishonor of castration but lived to complete The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記), created an imposing martyr in Qu Yuan 屈原 (340–278 BCE), who drowned himself after his native Chu kingdom was conquered. Since then, for both male and female writers, Qu Yuan had embodied the values of integrity, loyalty, and purity; he was the progenitor of Ming-Qing Chinese political martyrs.Footnote ⁴⁹ Reform-minded officials of the late Qing Hunan province frequently invoked the words and deeds of Qu Yuan, identifying him as a local ancestor to define their probity, highlight their patriotism, and justify their actions.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Paola Zamperini suggests, male suicide was always tragically heroic, and the choice not to commit suicide was always problematic. Those who chose disgrace over suicide felt compelled to invoke Sima Qian and to assign for themselves the role of the record-keeper who possessed the moral obligation not to die.Footnote ⁵¹

To be sure, Qu Yuan enjoyed a mixed legacy among both premodern and modern Chinese intellectuals, although the image of him as an icon of dissent and loyalty ultimately prevailed. Most writers followed Sima Qian's description of Qu Yuan, whom he had created in his own image, as a representative of scholarly frustration, as someone who was born out of his time and lived unappreciated.Footnote ⁵² However, according to the Han-dynasty historian Ban Gu 班固 (32–92), Qu Yuan flaunted his talents, exalted himself above others, and criticized his king, which made him a traitor. Seen in this light, Qu Yuan's main motivation was self-aggrandizement, and his suicide reflected a thwarted sense of entitlement on his part.Footnote ⁵³ Qu Yuan committed an “egoistical suicide,” not an “altruistic” one, in that he ended his life because he felt predestined by fate and could no longer endure life as it was, not because he was serving some abstract concept or higher purpose.Footnote ⁵⁴

The contention over Qu Yuan's image of whether he was a loyal official true to his words or a self-serving poet who had exaggerated his own abilities and sought both real and posthumous fame was also reflected in the dilemma that the Ming-dynasty scholar-officials faced after their dynasty fell to the Manchus in 1644. Faced with martyrs who had committed suicide during the Ming-Qing transition, surviving subjects (yimin 遺民) justified their choice of living through the ordeal as a more difficult and unbearable one to make.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Han Chinese scholars by the late eighteenth century generally had a more nuanced and sophisticated definition of bureaucratic loyalty, as characterized by their involvement in the state-sponsored scholarly projects of the eighteenth-century Manchu regime.Footnote ⁵⁶

In The Analects, Confucius proposed that for gentlemen (junzi 君子), “while it is inconceivable that they should seek to stay alive at the expense of benevolence, it may happen that they have to accept death in order to have benevolence accomplished” (shashen chengren 殺身成仁).Footnote ⁵⁷ In particular, he praised Shi Yu 史魚, who lived sometime during the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE), for standing firm on his principles: “When the Way prevails in the state he is as straight as an arrow, yet when the Way falls into disuse in the state he is still as straight as an arrow.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Shi Yu was the Minister of Rites in the Wei kingdom. However, the Duke of Wei had not held him in high regard and refused to heed his advice regarding state affairs. On his death bed, Shi Yu ordered his son to place his corpse below the window of the house and not bury it. Through this action, Shi Yu was admonishing his lord for his favoritism toward sinister ministers in the court.Footnote ⁵⁹

It is worth mentioning that Shi Yu did not commit suicide to admonish his ruler. Gradually, however, Shi Yu became the progenitor of practitioners of corpse admonition in imperial China. Gongsun Hong 公孫弘 (200–121 BCE) admonished Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BCE) for traveling incognito and not devoting himself to governing the realm. Allegedly, he told his son, “Though I am no Shi Yu, I hope I might just be able to use my corpse to admonish him,” and then committed suicide.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this story, the assertion of pure morality trumped everything else, as Mencius suggested with his famous metaphor of fish and bear paws: “Life is what I want; dutifulness is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take dutifulness than life.”Footnote ⁶¹ In short, the Confucian-minded remonstrator should point his ruler toward positive change without regard for himself.Footnote ⁶²

That said, corpse admonition, which involved the spectacle of bodily death and conveyed a political message with it, was seldom used as a form of bureaucratic protest in imperial China. Bureaucrats preferred tapping into the wealth of anecdotes and principles in the Confucian classics and relying on their eloquence and rhetorical tactics to sway the emperor to their opinion on state affairs. The high point for corpse admonition came in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when officials committed suicide to dissuade the intransigent Jiajing emperor (r. 1521–67) from posthumously elevating his father, a prince, to the status of emperor after succeeding his childless cousin to the throne. To the practitioners of corpse admonition, all other alternatives were exhausted, from submitting petitions and remonstrating with the emperor in the court to refusing to cooperate with the emperor in matters of government and kneeling outside the palace.Footnote ⁶³ The Jiajing emperor stood firmly by his decision to honor his birth parents and not consider himself the adopted son of the late emperor's father Xiaozong (r. 1487–1505). In this “Great Rites Controversy,” both the emperor and his courtiers searched the rich repertoire of historical precedents and classical quotes to define the parameters of ritual propriety and to resolve the succession crisis in their favor. As Carney T. Fisher notes, the controversy was more a moral conundrum than a political one. Disputants of the emperor's actions protested his deviation from the imperial rituals and succession rules, which were established by the dynasty's founders and influenced by Confucian morality, and the termination of his uncle and cousin's agnatic line, not his legitimacy to succeed the preceding emperor.Footnote ⁶⁴

Despite the slow but growing trend of self-righteous expression of political dissent on the part of bureaucrats in the nineteenth century, and for all the spectacle of violence on one's body, corpse admonition remained an unpopular form of bureaucratic protest during the Qing dynasty, which witnessed only two cases of corpse admonitions. The Qing state was indeed well known for its “prison of letters” (wenzi yu 文字獄) or literary inquisition, but it was relatively receptive to opposing views in policymaking on the condition that they did not criticize the emperor or interfere with the emperor's final decisions.Footnote ⁶⁵ After Wang Ding's death, as James M. Polachek notes, a literati-bureaucratic opposition galvanized and acquired a “highly visible organizational form,” namely the anti-British Gu Yanwu Shrine Association.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the development of this association and its relevance to late Qing politics, a task that Polachek has admirably accomplished. Suffice it to say that collective action, as opposed to individual action (including the sensation of corpse admonition), through approved or condoned channels of protest, was usually preferred by bureaucrats who sought not to subvert imperial power, but to work their way around it. The fact that the association, named after the famous anti-Manchu Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–82), was actually allowed to operate bespoke the high tolerance of the mid- and late Qing state (which retreated from Qianlong's intrusive politics) for strongly-expressed opinions that might not be congruent with its own.Footnote ⁶⁷

Nevertheless, in the context of changing bureaucratic behavior and widening yanlu in nineteenth-century Chinese politics, corpse admonition still signaled the ruler's ultimate failure, for whatever reason, to listen to its practitioner. Given the sensation of corpse admonition, the ruler had to address it and give it a proper hearing. This was the case for Wu Kedu's suicide, which will now be reviewed at length.

DYING TO MEMORIALIZE (EVENT)

Wu Kedu was born into a family of letters in Gaolan 臯蘭, Gansu province, in 1812. Although his ancestors enjoyed no significant success in the civil service examinations, he received a holistic education in the Confucian classics at home, and was particularly fond of copying the memorials and literary works of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70), Lu Zhi 陸贄 (754_805), and Lu You 陸游 (1125_1210), whose writings displayed their loyalty to the emperor and strong political convictions. Wu Kedu admired and identified with Lin Zexu; he copied the latter's petition to the Daoguang emperor to ban the opium trade.Footnote ⁶⁸ After a few unsuccessful tries, Wu Kedu finally passed the metropolitan examinations and attained the jinshi 進士 title in 1850. He became a secretary (zhushi 主事) at the Board of Punishments (Xingbu 刑部), where he was known to be uncompromising in recommending punishments for corrupt, incompetent, and negligent officials.Footnote ⁶⁹

During his stint in Beijing, Wu Kedu befriended Li Hongzao 李鴻藻 (1820–79) and Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 (1830–1904), who were Hanlin Academicians, alleged leaders of the Qingliu faction, and chief tutors of the Tongzhi emperor. Wu Kedu remained on good terms with them throughout his career.Footnote ⁷⁰ Known for their outspokenness (an unintended substitute for censorial opinion), Li Hongzao and Weng Tonghe had supported the empress dowagers against Sushun 肅順 (1816–61) in the Xinyou 辛酉 Coup (1861) and were instrumental to the dowagers’ rise to power.Footnote ⁷¹ As a lowly ranked bureaucrat but a prolific poet, Wu Kedu mingled with poet-ministers and Qingliu members such as Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Peilun, and Chen Baochen.Footnote ⁷²

The Qingliu faction was a loose, Beijing-based coalition of Hanlin Academicians and concerned scholar-officials who generally rejected Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang's adoption of western firearms and institutions as the principal means to strengthen China. In place of western learning, Qingliu members proposed revisiting the classics and history, which formed the bedrock of the informal “Qing constitution,” for inspiration to resolve the various crises that were plaguing the empire. Qingliu members were similar to the Spring Purification Circle in aspiration and organization in that they emphasized statecraft learning and wider political participation by non-degree-holding but morally upright Confucian literati.Footnote ⁷³

To their detractors, however, Qingliu members were ideologues who knew little about the conduct of practical matters but were determined to eradicate their political opponents, namely those who advocated reforms to the Confucian order.Footnote ⁷⁴ The overseas Chinese reformist Gu Hongming 辜鴻銘 (1857–1928), for instance, observed that Qingliu members regarded Zeng Guofan, an otherwise loyal Confucian scholar and new-style intellectual-official who staffed his “private bureaucracy” (mufu 幕府) with technical specialists from his native province rather than appointees from the civil service examinations, as a “great minister” (dachen 大臣) and not a “Confucian minister” (ruchen 儒臣). In Gu Hongming's impression, Qingliu members’ idea of great ministers was those who served the administration with honor but disregarded Confucian learning; that of Confucian ministers was those who equated Confucian morality with practical ability and used it to guide their every action and policy. Seemingly oblivious to the fiscal difficulties of the court to provide for local administrative needs, Qingliu members deplored the Self-Strengtheners as the “Impure Stream” (zhuoliu 濁流) and questioned their moral character.Footnote ⁷⁵ As a Qingliu member, Wu Kedu did not engage in the debate over the right mixture of Chinese and western influences in policymaking and statecraft, even though he remained a traditional scholar-official who swore ultimate allegiance to his emperor and Confucian ancestors.

To put Wu Kedu in perspective, it may be instructive to compare him with Zhang Zhidong, a Qingliu member and famous remonstrator who was nevertheless identified as a Self-Strengthening intellectual-official. Although Zhang Zhidong also believed that it was in China's best interests to selectively adopt western institutions and knowledge to strengthen itself, he repeatedly censured Li Hongzhang and his protégés for their allegedly uncritical, wholesale import of all things that were western.Footnote ⁷⁶ To be sure, Zhang Zhidong might also have attacked his political opponents to improve his political standing and secure scarce resources for his own “reformist” initiatives.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whatever the case may be, we should note that Qingliu and Yangwu were not fixed binaries and certainly did not encapsulate all the complex ideas and values of late Qing scholars. We may thus infer from Hao Chang's example of “reformist” versus “revolutionary” that it is facile and misleading to pigeonhole any late Qing intellectual as either Qingliu or Yangwu. In the context of a gradual dissolution of legitimacy of Confucian cosmological emperorship during the late Qing, when the idea of the Son of Heaven became incompatible with increasing knowledge of natural laws and western sciences, almost all self-professed Chinese intellectuals responded by reconfiguring their worldview based on both prior knowledge and new concepts of the cosmos and social world.

For example, Zhang Zhidong, by his own interpretation, justified the “traditional” Qing dynastic order against radical reformism by appealing to “secular” images of a conscientious ruler rather than invoking the mystique of the cosmological emperorship.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, the dichotomy between Qingliu and Yangwu obscures some of the personal, sometimes intimate relationships between Qingliu and Yangwu members; Li Hongzao, Zhang Peilun, and Li Hongzhang had written letters inquiring after one another's health and about matters of government. In 1882, Li Hongzao even convinced Cixi and Prince Gong 恭親王 (1833–98), in confidence, to relieve Li Hongzhang of his mourning obligations for his mother (duoqing 奪情) so that he could remain in service and not have to temporarily retreat to his hometown.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, “Qingliu” was more a phenomenon of heightened political expression among some late Qing bureaucrats who were united more by connections than by convictions.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although Qingliu members aimed to maintain the status quo by preserving the ruler-centered Confucian order, they were not a clearly defined faction of ideologues who were bent on wrecking the Self-Strengthening Movement.Footnote ⁸¹

We can only wonder what could have happened if Qingliu members had transformed into new-style, professional intellectual-officials such as Zeng Guofan and Zhang Zhidong, who created private bureaucracies by recruiting other intellectual-officials who might not have passed the civil service examinations, but were recommended for official appointment and promotion for their expertise in administration, diplomacy, transportation, or weaponry; such expertise was increasingly valued after the devastating Taiping Rebellion (1851–64). Nevertheless, the career prospects of Qingliu bureaucrats remained promising in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As a result of his connections and professionalism, Wu Kedu was later promoted to the position of Assistant Department Secretary (wailang 外郎) of the Board of Punishments. However, Wu Kedu had to return to his hometown to observe mourning when his mother passed away. Back in Gansu, he became a lecturer at the Lanshan Academy 蘭山書院 and was charged with organizing a local militia, which was a development contemporaneous with other provinces and counties at the time.Footnote ⁸² When Wu Kedu returned to Beijing from mourning, he received the position of Department Director (langzhong 郎中) at the Board of Personnel (Libu 吏部).

Later, Wu Kedu was appointed as a censor and was known to be plainspoken in his new posting. By then, however, censorial opinion was barely audible and politically weak. As a reminder, censors had failed to impeach Mujangga. Their opinions were practically ignored by the Tongzhi emperor when he insisted on restoring the Old Summer Palace (Yuanming Yuan 圓明園) despite bureaucratic corruption and fiscal difficulties. It took the combined pressure of the empress dowagers and (to a lesser extent) Prince Gong, who were the powerbrokers of 1860s and 1870s Qing politics, to make the Tongzhi emperor relent on his stance.Footnote ⁸³ Censorial opinion was important and relevant only from the ruler's perspective. Shortly after the death of Xianfeng emperor, censor Dong Yuanchun 董元醇 (?–?) petitioned the throne to honor the empress dowagers Ci'an (1837–81) and Cixi as gatekeepers of Qing imperial power, and keep Sushun, the initial regent for the Tongzhi emperor, at bay. Dong Yuanchun's memorial became the justification needed by Prince Gong and the empress dowagers to remove Sushun from power and execute him. However, for his presumptuous action against an existing regent, Dong Yuanchun was never fully relied on and trusted by Cixi, who assumed Sushun's position as the regent. Dong Yuanchun had transgressed unspoken, never explicitly stated out-of-bounds markers of political behavior, and faded into oblivion soon after his purpose had been served.Footnote ⁸⁴

Wu Kedu soon experienced how irrelevant censorial opinion had become by the late Qing period. He once complained about Chenglu 成祿 (?–?), the military commander (tidu 提督) of Urumqi and a close associate of Prince Chun 醇親王 (1840–91) and the Aisin Gioro imperial clan. Wu Kedu denounced Chenglu for massacring an entire village of innocent men, women, and children, heavily taxing the local population, and being afraid to confront and suppress rebel forces. Wu Kedu's lengthy and strongly worded memorial on why Chenglu should be brought to task and executed and contending that the emperor should order either the death of Chenglu or his own death if his statements were false, offended Prince Chun and the Tongzhi emperor, who demoted Wu Kedu by three ranks and ordered him to lecture at the Lanshan Academy.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although Wu Kedu seemed content and relaxed in his hometown after his demotion, he sometimes in his poems betrayed his true feelings about the lack of reciprocity for his loyalty to the court.Footnote ⁸⁶

In 1875, the Tongzhi emperor died without a son and designated successor. The empress dowagers, who had already taken over the reins of government during Tongzhi's illness in the name of tutelage (xunyu 訓諭), designated Zaitian 載湉 (the future Guangxu emperor), Prince Chun's son and a first cousin of Tongzhi through both his father and mother, as the “heir to the throne” (si huangdi 嗣皇帝) and adopted son of the Xianfeng emperor. It is worth mentioning that on the eve of the death of the Tongzhi emperor, Prince Gong, the only person who could have competed with the empress dowagers for imperial power at the time, took over the vetting of Manchu memorials (Li Hongzao vetted the Chinese ones) on behalf of the emperor, and approved Li Hongzhang's and Zuo Zongtang's requests for more military funding at his own discretion. This turn of events alarmed Cixi and revealed the tenuous position of the dowager-regents in the existing political structure.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ci'an and especially Cixi decided to tune the circumstances to their favor. Without conferring with Prince Chun and Prince Gong, they quickly proclaimed Guangxu as the new emperor by pointing out that Xianfeng had no second son and that it was unacceptable to continue his line with someone older than Tongzhi. Their move violated the Manchu law of succession, which held that a new emperor should be from a younger generation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Confucian rites also demanded that Tongzhi's successor belonged to a younger generation than his own so that he could perform the ancestral ceremonies for Tongzhi.

Behind the scenes, Cixi instructed Pan Zuyin 潘祖蔭 (1830–90) and Weng Tonghe (Weng was the chief imperial tutor of Guangxu) to discuss and recommend her decision publicly so that she could formally “approve” their proposal. By Cixi's design, Guangxu assumed the throne by filial adoption (jisi 繼嗣) and not by agnatic adoption (jitong 繼統). After Tongzhi's death, the adopted Guangxu became Tongzhi's brother and Xianfeng's only living son and could legitimately succeed Xianfeng. However, the question of Tongzhi's heir remained because jisi was prioritized to justify the position of the empress dowagers in the new reign. Whose agnatic line should Guangxu's heir inherit, Guangxu or Tongzhi's? The edict proclaiming Guangxu as the emperor mentioned that Guangxu's son would claim the tong (namely, the throne), but fell short of prescribing whose tong it would be. Cixi had her agenda in nominating Guangxu as the adopted son of Xianfeng. If Guangxu had become the adopted son of Tongzhi, then Tongzhi's empress (whom we know Cixi hated) would be elevated to the status of empress dowager, and Cixi would have to retire from active politics and could no longer on any grounds “rule behind the curtains” (chuilian tingzheng 垂簾聽政).Footnote ⁸⁹

Cixi's arrangement was unacceptable by Confucian standards, which as we know from the Great Rites Controversy of the Ming, defined the rules of imperial succession as a moral issue and accorded great importance to the continuation of the agnatic lines of former emperors. Self-styled Confucian scholar-officials, both Han Chinese and non–Han Chinese, were worried that Tongzhi's agnatic line would be terminated with Guangxu being designated as Xianfeng's son. As a consolation to the concerned bureaucrats, Guangxu never made an attempt to elevate Prince Chun to the status of emperor, as the Jiajing emperor did for his deceased father—to the dismay of Ming-dynasty literati—which would have further complicated the matter.

In something like an act of no confidence, Guang'an 廣安 (?–?), a Mongol bannerman and Grand Secretariat Academician Reader-in-waiting (shidu xueshi 侍讀學士), memorialized the throne requesting that the decree designating the future son of Guangxu as Tongzhi's heir be engraved on a tablet so that the decision would not be overturned in the future.Footnote ⁹⁰ He cited the example of Emperor Taizong of Song (r. 976–97), who had designated his own son as successor instead of his nephew, the son of Emperor Taizu (r. 960–76), contrary to the wishes of Taizong's mother, who had persuaded Taizu to pass the throne to his brother Taizong. According to Guang'an, regents should not change or undermine the order of succession to the throne at their whim. Although he accepted that the choice of a successor was the sole prerogative of the throne, he was concerned about the lack of clearly defined rules governing imperial succession and the provision of heirs for the deceased Tongzhi.

As Bastid argues, Guang'an's memorial reached the throne with the help of officials anxious about the future of succession rules, and the empress dowagers’ leniency in not punishing him—they simply dismissed his petition as “ignorant and obsolete” (maomei duchen 冒昧瀆陳)—indicated that they and their advisers preferred to tread cautiously in the face of literati-bureaucratic opinion.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1876, censor Pan Dunyan 潘敦嚴 (?–?) made a similar appeal to standardize the rules of imperial succession. However, by insinuating that Tongzhi's wife, who could have become the empress dowager under an emperor of a generation younger than that of Tongzhi, had died of unnatural causes (rumors were rife that Cixi killed her), Pan Dunyan was dismissed from office for his “baseless words” (wu ju zhi ci 無据之詞).Footnote ⁹²

Wu Kedu was disappointed that after the dismissal of Pan Dunyan, debate on the matter had not been sustained. Given the centrality of the ruler in his worldview, his feelings were intelligible. He wanted to support Guang'an's petition by submitting one of his own, but he was advised by a friend that it would be futile to do so as a recently demoted official. After his demotion and return to the Lanshan Academy, Wu Kedu became acquainted with Zuo Zongtang 左宗棠 (1812–85), who was the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu and had also petitioned to the throne to have Chenglu removed from his appointment. Zuo Zongtang liked Wu Kedu for his candor, and they shared an appreciation for men of probity. When he was a censor, Wu Kedu had recommended that ancestral temples and posthumous honors be conferred on officials who had died in their course of duty, and these were officials whom Zuo Zongtang had appreciated as his colleagues.Footnote ⁹³ Wu Kedu wrote many poems in praise of Zuo Zongtang's character and administration of Gansu and Shaanxi,Footnote ⁹⁴ and Zuo Zongtang placed Wu Kedu in charge of many matters related to education and examinations.Footnote ⁹⁵ Throughout his stint in Gansu, Wu Kedu was not pleased with what he viewed as complicity on the part of bureaucrats and even his close associates, who had been paying lip service to the need for formal guidelines to dictate imperial succession with “pious platitudes and vague bromides.” From his perspective, bureaucrats had failed in their duty and right to curb the excesses of imperial power.Footnote ⁹⁶

Wu Kedu waited four years before he could strike the right opportunity to make his appeal. In 1879, the entombment of Tongzhi was scheduled to take place, and Wu Kedu requested to be among the retinue to participate in the ceremonies. His request was approved. After completing the ceremonies, he left the entourage alone and swallowed poison at a temple in Jizhou 薊州, a temple as close to Tongzhi's mausoleum as a bureaucrat of his rank could go to, leaving a sealed, secret memorial at the site.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to Qing regulations, an official's memorial would be vetted by his departmental superior for offensive language before it could be submitted to the emperor. However, Baoyun 寶鋆 (1807–91), the Manchu Minister of Personnel (Libu shangshu 吏部尚書), and the local bureaucrats who handled Wu Kedu's case understood that corpse admonition in the Confucian world, which was the most honorable display of loyalty by a civil official, was a potentially sensitive and serious matter. They treated it as a confidential matter and left Wu Kedu's memorial sealed for presentation to the throne.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the memorial system of the Qing palace, secret palace memorials were contained in securely sealed envelopes to be opened only by the emperor; damaged or opened envelopes would subject the messenger or whoever handled them to capital punishment.Footnote ⁹⁹

Seeking to emulate Shi Yu, Wu Kedu had been making arrangements for his staged suicide, from finding the perfect site to commit suicide to preparing his coffin and funeral garments.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He decided that only his suicide could revive bureaucratic attention to the succession issue and problematize controversial decisions of the empress dowagers. Understanding that his bold censure of the empress dowagers might invite punishment of his family, he entrusted his son to Zuo Zongtang in a posthumous letter.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In writing his suicide letter to his son, Wu Kedu did not forget to lament that he could no longer discuss current affairs and poetry with Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Peilun, and Zhang Renjun 張人駿 (1846–1923); Zhang Renjun was Zhang Peilun's nephew and had served as a compiler in the Hanlin Academy.Footnote ¹⁰²

In his final testament, Wu Kedu called himself a “guilty subject” (zuichen 罪臣) for his corpse admonition, stating that it was erroneous to arrange for Guangxu to succeed Xianfeng and not Tongzhi, to whom he was personally grateful for sparing his life when he made the presumptuous proposal to remove Chenglu many years earlier. Wu Kedu pointed to the absence of a decree that formally guaranteed that Guangxu's future son, who was mentioned in passing in the edicts to be the adopted son of Tongzhi, would assume the throne. For everything that the empress dowagers had pledged to do, the future was uncertain, and Tongzhi might not have descendants to offer ancestral worship to his spirit because only an emperor could perform such an honor for a deceased monarch. Wu Kedu informed the empress dowagers that the practice of transferring imperial power from father to son, which had continued unabated for two centuries since the founding of the Qing dynasty, must remain valid. He therefore requested that a new edict be issued proclaiming the first-born son of Guangxu as both the adopted son of Tongzhi and the successor to the throne.Footnote ¹⁰³ This, although Wu Kedu had not explicitly said so, meant returning to the imperial primogeniture of pre-Qing Han Chinese dynasties. Thus, as Bastid argues, Wu Kedu's memorial was concerned with the role of paternal inheritance in the transfer of imperial power.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Wu Kedu hoped that his suicide could restrain the empress dowagers’ exercise of arbitrary power with regard to the choice of an heir to the throne and prevent the use of adoption to suit the regents’ whimsical purposes. In Wu Kedu's view, unless it was somewhat codified in writing that Guangxu's heir would offer sacrifice to Tongzhi as his son, neither the empress dowagers nor Guangxu himself could guarantee that the successor would act according to their vague, oral instructions. The Chinese respect for the written word and for the authority of public statements issued by the highest order, which were viewed as more effective in inducing submission than coercion and terror, cannot be overstated.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Key opponents of the Qingliu group (i.e., “provincial patriots” such as Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 [1811–72], Li Hongzhang, and their protégés) were silent over the succession issue, perhaps for the fear of risking Cixi's endorsement of their Self-Strengthening Movement. Perhaps the issue, so crucial to the staunchest of self-fashioned Confucian scholar-officials, did not matter that much to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Manchu princes and bannermen, as Weng Tonghe observed, had been displeased with Cixi's arbitrary selection of Guangxu as the emperor and disruption of succession rules but, for unknown reasons, were cautious in reacting to Wu Kedu's suicide.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While emphasizing that he had acted alone to absolve other individuals or parties of responsibility, Wu Kedu intended his suicide to be a public act.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ True enough, Wu Kedu's suicide was sensational. Because the suicide involved the contentious issue of imperial succession and was committed during the entombment of Tongzhi, it aroused keen emotion and polemics in the court. Wang Wenshao 王文韶 (1830–1908), Weng Tonghe, and Zuo Zongtang, who were some of the most prominent bureaucrats of the late Qing era, recorded Wu Kedu's death in their diaries or writings.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In something like an inquiry, the empress dowagers asked the Princes, High Ministers, Grand Secretaries, Presidents of Boards, Nine Chief Ministries of State, College of Literature, Imperial Supervisorate of Instruction, Office of Scrutiny, and Censorate, which were virtually all the most important institutions of the Qing court, to jointly and duly deliberate over Wu Kedu's memorial and to present their opinions to them.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Six different memorials on Wu Kedu's suicide, all by purported Qingliu members, were submitted to the Grand Council. Weng Tonghe recorded in his diary that he convened with Hanlin Academicians Pan Zuyin and Xu Tong 徐桐 (1819–1900), both allies of the empress dowagers, to contemplate how they should respond to Wu Kedu's testament.Footnote ¹¹¹ They submitted a joint memorial, explaining that the Qing's dynastic law forbade the formal designation of an heir apparent and that Wu Kedu had misread the situation.Footnote ¹¹²

Prince Li 禮親王 (1843–1914) presented his memorial on behalf of the Manchu princes, stating that the choice of successor had already been clearly made in the edict proclaiming Guangxu to succeed Tongzhi and that Wu Kedu's request was pointless.Footnote ¹¹³ Baoting, a Hanlin Academician of the Aisin Gioro clan, claimed that the distinction between filial adoption and agnatic adoption was artificial.Footnote ¹¹⁴ His colleague Huang Tifang argued that the imperial clan was subject to neither the procedures that governed the transmission of hereditary titles nor the rules of inheritance among ordinary families, adding that Guangxu's successor should offer ancestral worship to both Tongzhi and Guangxu.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Li Duanfen 李端棻 (1833–1907), a censor, reasoned that considering the young age of Guangxu, the choice of successor would not be made any time soon, recommending that the empress dowagers elucidate their views on the matter, making this the closest option to what Wu Kedu had requested.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In the end, Zhang Zhidong offered the lengthiest and most elaborate response to Wu Kedu's suicide.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He first stated that bureaucrats should not interfere in the rules of imperial succession. He then agreed with Baoting that no difference existed between filial and agnatic adoptions and this was an understanding that, according to him, was also shared by the empress dowagers and Guangxu. Zhang Zhidong recalled that ordinary princes were not permitted to offer ancestral worship to a deceased emperor and that only the living emperor could perform the honor. He explained that if the empress dowagers were to grant Wu Kedu's request to nominate Guangxu's first-born son as Tongzhi's successor, they would be violating the dynastic rule that forbade the designation of an heir apparent. Additionally, as Zhang Zhidong explained, doing so risked preventing the most capable son from succeeding if Guangxu had many sons. Thus, Zhang Zhidong proposed that the regents issue a new edict stating that the next successor to the throne would be the adopted son of Tongzhi, regardless of which of Guangxu's sons might become the successor. Guangxu would confirm the edict when he assumed his personal rule.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Fearing that their widening of yanlu over Wu Kedu's suicide might later backfire and foster a Han-Manchu alliance against their controversial decisions, the empress dowagers issued an edict declaring an end to the debate after consolidating the views expressed in the memorials. The same edict stipulated that the heir to the throne would become the adopted son of Tongzhi once Guangxu had decided on his choice of successor. It also stated that copies of Wu Kedu's memorial and the written responses to it, alongside the edict that elicited the responses and this edict itself, were to be deposited in the emperor's study room and used in Guangxu's education. The empress dowagers ended the edict by conferring posthumous honors on Wu Kedu for his candid opinion and loyal devotion. The Board of Personnel provided some money for his funeral expenses and enrolled his name among the list of those in the temple of worthies to whom libations were offered.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Zhang Zhidong's memorial provided the rhetorical support Cixi needed to justify her own position in the existing power structure. Her final solution to the succession crisis, which had continued for years despite Guangxu's accession to the throne, was to resolve jisi and jitong all at once by adopting the mainstream bureaucratic opinion of combining them. This was most elaborately enunciated by Zhang Zhidong, that the heir to the throne would become the adopted son of Tongzhi once Guangxu had decided on his choice of successor, and that he would offer ancestral worship to both Guangxu and Tongzhi as the emperor. In effect, Guangxu's son would be the agnatic descendent of Tongzhi and would have two fathers, something which opposing ritualists tried to deny the Jiajing emperor in the Great Rites Controversy. The proposals made by Zhang Zhidong and others sought to remove the theoretical obstacles to Cixi's choice of jisi over jitong, and can be regarded as attempts to standardize the ancestral rituals of the Qing imperial lineage according to Confucian precepts and historical precedents.

Bastid rightly suggests that by accepting that the successor and son of Guangxu would become Tongzhi's successor, Qing bureaucrats were also ratifying the accession of Guangxu.Footnote ¹²⁰ As it turned out, Guangxu had no son when he died. Cixi selected Puyi 溥儀, Guangxu's nephew, to succeed him as the Xuantong emperor (r. 1908–12). Previous edicts and memorials had made no provisions for the case of an heirless Guangxu. Cixi had to exercise her arbitrary power enabled by her precedent-setting selection of Guangxu as the emperor, and choose a successor again. However, this time, she did not live long enough to rule behind the curtains and mobilize bureaucratic opinion to support her position.Footnote ¹²¹

Prince Gong and Prince Chun remained silent throughout the event. Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and their protégés made no mention of Wu Kedu's suicide in their interactions with the throne. Although Wu Kedu's purpose was fulfilled, he was admonished for his supposed ignorance and insolence by supporters of the current political configuration, many of whom were his close associates. To be fair, the Qingliu patrons of Wu Kedu also requested that the emperor and empress dowagers bestow honors on Wu Kedu for his steadfast loyalty to the throne. For their balanced treatment of the event, Baoting, Huang Tifang, and Zhang Zhidong gained prominence and became active remonstrators in the late Qing. Wu Kedu's suicide, which was a political barometer, had the unintended consequence of consolidating formal, bureaucratic support for the empress dowagers’ regency and reaffirming for them the loyalty of their allies in the court. This ultimate act of personal sacrifice sorted out and put to rest the positions of the emperor, empress dowagers, and Tongzhi's agnatic line (now combined with Guangxu's), which had been ambiguous since Guangxu ascended the throne in 1875.

More importantly, Wu Kedu's corpse admonition revived bureaucratic interest in the workings of government and heightened scholar-officials’ sense of involvement in policymaking within the post-Taiping Qing court. After decades of resurging yet dormant censorial opinion, late Qing bureaucrats generally felt emboldened by Wu Kedu's act and empowered to sway imperial decisions with their memorials and petitions, which were, at least prior to the 1870s, supplementary and seldom decisive in the emperors’ decision-making process. Officials who saw themselves as bearers of the Confucian tradition justified Cixi's merger of jisi and jitong by drawing anecdotes from the classics and history, which governed their and the empress dowagers’ actions and speech in an implicit Qing constitution. As a result of Wu Kedu's suicide, that constitution now carried provisions for the rules of imperial succession in writing (i.e., in the edicts deposited in the emperor's study room). This was politically significant, given that such rules had been a source of contention for Ming-Qing bureaucrats and literati because of their lack of codification and vulnerability to change by the arbitrary power of an authoritarian ruler.

JANUS-FACED BUREAUCRATS (EXPERIENCE)

Wu Kedu left his son in the care of Zuo Zongtang, who wrote shortly after his suicide that he could understand why Wu Kedu, given his character, would kill himself to make his point, but he disapproved of his action. Wu Kedu claimed that he was repaying Tongzhi with his suicide (gan'en tubao zhi si 感恩圖報之死), which Zuo Zongtang felt was restricted to emotions and not to the purportedly higher purpose of serving and safeguarding the dynasty. To Zuo Zongtang, for all Wu Kedu's righteousness (zhengyi 正義), his suicide was “a bit extreme” (wei pian 微偏).Footnote ¹²² Zuo Zongtang held that the Qing practice of not nominating an heir apparent when the emperor was alive had profound meaning. Although he still extolled Wu Kedu for his altruism, he, like Zhang Zhidong, felt that Wu Kedu had breached propriety by disputing imperial prerogatives. Suggesting that bureaucrats could claim no say in the rules of imperial succession, Zuo Zongtang wrote that such rules were decided by heaven and not by man.Footnote ¹²³ Lamenting Wu Kedu's suicide, Zuo Zongtang helped defray some of Wu Kedu's funeral expenses and occasionally aided his family financially.Footnote ¹²⁴

At the urging of the local gentry in Jizhou, the site of Wu Kedu's suicide, Li Hongzhang requested the throne to erect a temple to Wu Kedu in which his loyal spirit might find rest.Footnote ¹²⁵ As a mark of respect to Wu Kedu and respondents to Wu Kedu's testament, the empress dowagers did incorporate Wu Kedu's final testament in the Guangxu emperor's education. It is worth recalling that respondents to Wu Kedu's testament were Qingliu members known to appreciate the purity and value in Confucian rituals and morally upright officials who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their principles. Weng Tonghe confessed in his diary that when he was lecturing on the testament, he was moved to tears by its poignant content.Footnote ¹²⁶ When Weng Tonghe walked past Wu Kedu's ancestral hall, whose construction was sponsored by Zuo Zongtang and erected in 1885, he was overwhelmed with grief.Footnote ¹²⁷

Professedly speaking for himself and other Confucian scholar-officials, Baoting wrote in admiration of Wu Kedu: “An admonition is easy, but to die for it is difficult.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Zhang Zhidong, the most vocal supporter of Cixi in the succession crisis, regarded Wu Kedu as his first “bosom friend” (zhiji 知己) in life. Huang Tifang wrote a eulogy about Wu Kedu, “who was once demoted for petitioning the throne and in the end died for his admonition.”Footnote ¹²⁹ In 1898, after the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform, Wu Baochu 吳保初 (1869–1913), a protégé of Baoting's who was recommended for office by Li Hongzhang (another proof that the Qingliu-Yangwu divide is artificial), lamented the death of Tan Sitong, an “old Donglin member” (Donglin jiu dangren 東林舊黨人), and identified Wu Kedu as a pioneer of late Qing political reforms. To Wu Baochu, both Tan Sitong and Wu Kedu laid down their lives to make their political statements and hence deserved his utmost respect.Footnote ¹³⁰

As explained by Antonio Gramsci's metaphor of the Centaur, a Greek mythical creature that was half-beast and half-man, the late Qing state used both political coercion (half-beast) and political consent (half-man) in conducting its rule. Late Qing bureaucrats were also Centaurs in that they had a “professional” face (although it might have been due to a consideration of personal political interests rather than coercion) to display when asked by the empress dowagers to present their opinions, and a “sentimental” (or “real”) face that revealed itself in their private writings.Footnote ¹³¹ Speaking as Confucian specialists, Qingliu members were most representative of these Centaurs. They justified the empress dowagers’ rise to power when the Tongzhi emperor assumed the throne. They maintained that the empress dowagers’ decision to make Guangxu the adopted son of Xianfeng was ritually acceptable by blurring the distinction between jisi and jitong. Yet, they continued to hold Wu Kedu in high regard, and their private outpouring of emotions for his corpse admonition signaled the internal conflict between ideology and practice they had to grapple with as part of their psychological makeup.

An editorial in the English-language North China Herald (Chinese newspapers, including the influential Shenbao, were surprisingly silent about the episode) wrote that Wu Kedu's suicide was due to his belief that his opinions on the imperial succession “would not be taken into consideration unless they were emphasized by his death.” The editorial was “compelled” to urge its readers to “remark on the want of principle and the rapacity of Chinese officials,” from whom Wu Kedu was different: “[This was] a man who knew how to sacrifice his interests to his convictions—not the convictions of Western religion, where something may be sacrificed in the belief that much will be obtained.”Footnote ¹³² The North China Herald also claimed that an undercurrent of sadness tinged Wu Kedu's dying appeal and rendered him “worthy of a place in the ranks of the many patriots that Chinese history has to show.” Nevertheless, Wu Kedu's suicide failed to bring to justice a “cruel and remorseless tyrant” and led him to “brood over a wrong that he thought his late Sovereign had suffered at the hands of the dual Regency, and a… morbid desire seems to have taken possession of him to emulate the example of earlier patriots whose history plays such an important part in the formation of the character of an educated Chinese.” One of the editors of The North China Herald astutely pointed out that the publication of Wu Kedu's final testament by the Qing court in the Peking Gazette was to “allay the suspicion and distrust that the mystery surrounding his death has caused.”Footnote ¹³³

The North China Herald also noted that Wu Kedu was determined to assist in performing the obsequies of his benefactor (the Tongzhi emperor) and, upon their completion, had offered his life as a sacrifice. An editorial lauded Wu Kedu as the epitome of self-devotion, but it also criticized the “impractical nature of his policy,” claiming that Wu Kedu displayed an impracticability that was the “weak point of the Confucian philosophy.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Another editorial, written almost a year later, wrote that Wu Kedu's suicide (a “voluntary death”) was unexpected; only one of the “obsequious crowd” that helped in Tongzhi's funeral felt called on to die for what appeared to the foreign spectator a “not very important principle.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The foreigners in China generally viewed Wu Kedu, who had surprised them by being a somewhat atypical Chinese official, in a positive light while denouncing, in their opinion, the authoritarian empress dowagers and their docile bureaucrats. In his 1910 book on Cixi, J.O.P. Bland (1863–1945) lauded Wu Kedu as “an upright and fearless scholar of the best type” whose name, with his “swan-song” (his final testament), would go down in Chinese history.Footnote ¹³⁶ As the American missionary Arthur Smith (1845–1932) summarized decades after the event, Wu Kedu was “filled with a natural indignation and sense of outrage [and] waited four years before committing suicide near the grave of [Tongzhi]” because Cixi (Smith did not include Ci'an in his condemnation) was acting “above the law.”Footnote ¹³⁷

That some of most outspoken members of the “conservative” clique, known for their “undeviating attachment to orthodoxy,” defended the empress dowagers after Wu Kedu's suicide was significant yet puzzling.Footnote ¹³⁸ At the very least, the case of Wu Kedu shows that these high-ranking officials were not the ideologues that they made themselves out to be. Seen in this light, Wu Kedu was perhaps a greater Confucian ideologue, if we must apply the term. As a censor, he made an honorable display of loyalty with his corpse admonition, requesting the empress dowagers to standardize the rules of imperial succession according to propriety and ritual. Wu Kedu was, if you may, a progressive Confucian ideologue in that unlike Zhang Zhidong and Zuo Zongtang, he believed that well-intentioned bureaucrats like himself could point out irregularities in imperial succession for correction. Most late Qing literati-bureaucrats failed to reconcile professionalism with sentimentality; Wu Kedu had to commit suicide to merge the two and to serve his cause of checking the arbitrary power of the empress dowagers.

As for western observers, they had long perceived and depicted the late Qing as a period of imperial decadence, decline, and depredation. Their interpretations of Wu Kedu's suicide betrayed their low regard for China and its politics. From their perspective, the exceptionally altruistic and loyal Wu Kedu had no place in the Chinese political structure, a sign that he had failed to become one of the new-style intellectual-officials who were beginning to form the majority of the late Qing bureaucracy.

THE AFTERLIFE OF A CORPSE (MYTH)

At the turn of the twentieth century, political martyrdom in the cause of nationalism and republicanism was in vogue in China. Leaders of the Tongmenghui and later the Kuomintang purposefully merged nationalism and republicanism in their call to overthrow the Qing regime, which toward the end of the nineteenth century had increasingly failed to defend Chinese interests against foreign encroachment. They commemorated, publicized, and glorified the “heroic” deaths of followers who died in resisting the Qing authorities.Footnote ¹³⁹

Insignificant lives became significant when linked to the “revolutionary enterprise” (geming shiye 革命事業) against the Qing regime in their termination.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets frequently carried sensationalized reports of assassination-cum-suicide attempts on the lives of Qing high-ranking officials and Republican-era warlords, generating public opinion on what constituted a moral death or murder.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The “new youths” (xin qingnian 新青年) of the May Fourth generation, at least discursively, viewed the fear of death for a political cause as an effrontery to their standing as the new Chinese intellectuals who dared to challenge and subvert traditional thinking and old modes of government. Some killed themselves to force their demand for popular political participation on the various Chinese states emerging after the Qing collapse, which according to these young intellectuals were staffed by self-serving bureaucrats.Footnote ¹⁴²

As for the former bureaucrats of the Qing, extremely few of them felt compelled by the Chinese precept of loyalty to commit suicide for their fallen dynasty, which was a far cry from the sensational martyrdoms of the Ming. Many former Qing bureaucrats chose to assume Sima Qian's role of the record-keeper, writing newspaper articles and popular novels that explained and rationalized for themselves why the Qing dynasty fell. Even Liang Ji's 梁濟 (1859–1918) suicide, which the practitioner himself claimed was for the Qing dynasty, was perhaps more “a kind of Confucian conscience at work [to exert moral influence on society] in the midst of deep cultural crisis” than a political statement made in the name of ideology.Footnote ¹⁴³

Liang Ji, like Wu Kedu, left a final testament when he killed himself. Liang Ji and Wu Kedu's final testaments were a form of autobiographical mythologization in that the authors reworked their prior lives to make them, in Paul A. Cohen's words, “coherent and congruent with the changes in self-conception,” which in their cases, were linked to but not wholly explicable by their allegiance to the Qing throne.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Still a more powerful form of mythologization, as Cohen observes, in etching images of the past in people's minds was found in literary works dealing with historical subject matter.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Since its occurrence, Wu Kedu's corpse admonition had been most often consumed as a historical event in the satirical “fiction in chapters” (zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小説).Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In the years surrounding the Qing demise, satirical works emerged to offer historically interpretive accounts of how China remained economically and militarily weak in the face of foreign imperialism. Many of these works, a mix of facts and fantasy, were written by former Qing bureaucrats or their descendants who claimed to possess the insider information to correct misrepresentations of the Qing regime in print media. Coincidentally, Cixi was the main antagonist in them.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Because their seemingly misogynistic authors were highly critical of the Qing regime and claimed to expose its ugly secrets, these works were known as “novels of exposure” (qianze xiaoshuo 譴責小説). The disintegration of the late Qing bureaucracy was held responsible for the Qing collapse, as Li Boyuan's 李伯元 (1867–1906) Guanchang xianxing ji 官場現形記 (The Bureaucrats) had sought to convey.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

More specifically, these satirical writings alluded to the Tongzhi reign and Cixi's regency as the beginning of the end of the Qing, assuming a gender slant as they cautioned readers about having a woman in political control of the Chinese nation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Cai Dongfan 蔡東藩 (1877–1945), a former Qing official who was appalled by the corruption and nepotism in bureaucratic circles and quit office to concentrate on literary writing, wrote Cixi taihou yanyi 慈禧太后演義 (The Romance of Empress Dowager Cixi), an unflattering account of Cixi that attributed the downfall of the Qing to her megalomania and usurpation of imperial power, which demoralized honest Qing bureaucrats and hindered their work. Although Cai Dongfan gave credit to Cixi for the suppression of the Nian (1851–68) and Miao (1854–73) rebellions and for identifying and recruiting capable ministers, he depicted her as being later misled by sinister sycophants who protested the Hundred Days’ Reform of the Guangxu emperor and contributed to the collapse of the Qing. Comparing Cixi with Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang 孝莊皇太后 (1613–88), who retired from politics after securing the Qing regime for her grandson Kangxi, Cai Dongfan explained that Cixi had accrued too much power for herself, unrestrained by any person or institution (furen ke xiaozhi, bu ke dashou 婦人可小知, 不可大受). According to Cai Dongfan, his objective in writing Cixi taihou yanyi was thus to prevent the (re)emergence of female authority (fangfan nüquan 防範女權) in China.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In the 120-chapter Qingshi tongsu yanyi 清史通俗演義 (The Popular Romance of the Qing), in which each chapter ended with his own commentary, Cai Dongfan elaborated on that theme in the second half of the work by emphasizing Cixi's rise to power despite bureaucratic and popular resistance to her rule in the context of imperial decline. In Chapter 53, Cai Dongfan first described Wang Ding's corpse admonition as a futile attempt to curb the excesses of Mujangga's power and reverse the Qing's war fortunes against the British, calling it a display of “foolish loyalty” (yuzhong 愚忠).Footnote ¹⁵¹ In contrast, in Chapter 80, which focused on Wu Kedu's corpse admonition and Zuo Zongtang's military expeditions to Xinjiang, Cai Dongfan viewed Wu Kedu's suicide in a more favorable light. While regarding Wu Kedu's memorial as pedantic, Cai Dongfan respected his candor in a court staffed by docile, obsequious bureaucrats who looked after only their own interests. Cai Dongfan concluded that the Qing declined as a result of the “deaths of straight-talking [like Wu Kedu] and experienced [like Zuo Zongtang] officials” (zhichen wang, laocheng xie 直臣亡, 老臣謝). In the case of Wu Kedu, his corpse admonition was a futile gesture, because officials did not dare to band together and challenge the authority of the empress dowagers with their lives.Footnote ¹⁵²

Without referring to Cai Dongfan's works, Liang Qichao's protégé Huang Jun 黃濬 (1891–1937), who seemed oblivious to the suicides that were happening around him at the time, suggested that Wu Kedu's corpse admonition encapsulated a spirit of martyrdom that the Japanese had acquired but the Chinese had abandoned. Speaking for the Republican period, he uncannily shared Cai Dongfan's opinion that China's chronic weakness as a nation stemmed from a consistent lack of people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their ideals and fellow countrymen like the sacrifice made by Wu Kedu.Footnote ¹⁵³

At around the same time, or even before Qingshi tongsu yanyi was published, Lu Shi'e 陸士諤 (1878–1944), whose grandfather and father had served as minor Qing bureaucrats, wrote the 140-chapter Qingshi yanyi 清史演義 (The Romance of the Qing), which faithfully documented both Wang Ding and Wu Kedu's corpse admonitions without author commentaries and major changes to the historical plot. Published in 1913, Qingshi yanyi was, like the later Qingshi tongsu yanyi, a colloquial rendition of Qing history intended for mass readership. In the preface, Lu Shi'e rejected any cosmological explanation for the Qing collapse, arguing that it was more than just a loss of the Mandate of Heaven (xingwang qi jin guan tianming hu 興亡豈盡関天命乎). Mentioning in passing Sima Qian and Qu Yuan, who strove to remonstrate with their rulers through their works, Lu Shi'e hoped that his book could enlighten modern bureaucrats on how to govern by avoiding the pitfalls of Qing rule. He believed that the rise and fall of regimes were not preordained and could be altered in their trajectories, for better or for worse, by human action.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Another Republican Chinese writer, the less well-known Li Botong 李伯通 (?–?), wrote Xi taihou yanshi yanyi 西太后艷史演義 (The Scandalous Romance of Empress Dowager Cixi), a largely fictitious account of how Cixi satisfied her carnal desires by sleeping with young men.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In his less popular account of Qing history Qingchao quanshi yanyi 清朝全史演義 (The Complete Romance of the Qing Dynasty), Li Botong distinguished his description of Wu Kedu's suicide from that of Cai Dongfan's and Lu Shi'e's works by highlighting the Qingliu faction. He mocked Qingliu members for not expressing support for Wu Kedu while erroneously suggesting that Qingliu members did not even whimper (lian ge pi dou bu ceng fang 連個屁都不曾放) in the succession crisis and the event of Wu Kedu's suicide. He was disappointed with the supposedly righteous Qingliu members for their timidity under imperial pressure. He concluded his chapter on Wu Kedu's corpse admonition by saying that while it irked Cixi, it did little to challenge her power and had even justified her decision to indirectly and posthumously depose the Guangxu emperor and install Puyi as the Xuantong emperor.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

As former Qing bureaucrat and Republican-era journalist Xu Binbin 徐彬彬 (1888–1961) pointed out, the agnatic line of the Daoguang emperor had long been broken with Xianfeng's death: “Guangxu” literally means “continuation of the [Dao] ‘Guang’ line” and “Xuantong” literally means “agnatic adoption of ‘Xuan’ [zong]” (Xuanzong was the Daoguang emperor's temple name). Guangxu and Xuantong, as Prince Chun's son and grandson respectively, were not direct descendants of the Xianfeng emperor. By her violation of the law of filial succession and choice of successors after the Tongzhi reign, Cixi had severed the agnatic line of the Daoguang emperor in practice while maintaining it in name.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Considering how easily Cixi had appeased the bureaucrats in the succession crisis, Xu Binbin argued that Wu Kedu had “made too much of a minor issue” (xiaoti dazuo 小題大做).Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The Republican-era satirical works on Qing history offered, with the benefit of hindsight, convenient, simplistic explanations of why Qing China could not survive in the age of western imperialism by scapegoating and vilifying Cixi, who was only part of the problem (that is, if she was any problem). Nevertheless, these popular portrayals of Cixi's rapaciousness and Wu Kedu's heroism revealed that corpse admonition, hijacked by the idea and aspirations of the modern nation, had become part of the cultural and historical repertoire of Chinese suicides in the Republican period. Unlike Wu Kedu's contemporaries, the authors of novels of exposure perceived little meaning in his corpse admonition other than serving as a sensational instance of how Cixi ignored, manipulated, and suppressed bureaucratic opinion to the peril of the Qing regime. That said, they still respected Wu Kedu for what they perceived as martyrdom for the Chinese nation: Wu Kedu's final testament was reproduced in full in all these satirical works on Qing history. In something like a literary campaign against (female) authoritarianism (I have no evidence that they were alluding to the Nationalist regime at the time), they believed that the fall of the Qing stemmed from bureaucratic disintegration, which resulted from Cixi's political domination; the bureaucrats themselves, save for Cixi's nodding sycophants, were absolved of most responsibility for dynastic collapse.

Widely perceived at the time to be a sympathizer of the Qing, Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) drowned himself in Kunming Lake in 1927. Wang Guowei's suicide fascinated his contemporaries and later scholars: was it an act of anguish because Wang Guowei was disillusioned with the cultural and historical crises in China, or was it for more trivial reasons or personal difficulties? David Der-wei Wang interprets Wang Guowei's suicide as a result of “radical incompatibilities between the public and private projects of modernity” that Wang Guowei had progressively foreseen, arguing that Wang Guowei exercised his modern freedom negatively in a willful act of self-annihilation.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The “macabre tradition” of suicidal literati and their self-destruction continued to wield significant power over Republican Chinese writers and thinkers, to whom suicide served as a “powerful means of critiquing or probing the troubled Chinese soul trying to survive in a modern world.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Observers linked Wu Kedu's and Wang Guowei's suicides and called the latter a “corpse admonition,” which Wang Guowei used to renounce the non-monarchical Chinese world in an act of Qing loyalism.Footnote ¹⁶¹ However, a small caveat is in order. As Wu Kedu did, Wang Guowei perceived an irreconcilable mismatch between his aspirations and the circumstances at the time. Unlike Wu Kedu, however, Wang Guowei was no bureaucrat at the time of death, and Republican Chinese writers wishing to offer a historically interpretive account of his suicide glossed over the precise meaning of “admonition” (jian), which should be used only to refer to an official's contribution of his opinion on a matter to the emperor for the latter's reference and consideration. As Cohen elucidates, mythologizers of the past were generally uninterested in the historical accuracy of events. These observers were no exception, having established nebulous links between Wang Guowei and Wu Kedu, simplified their suicides as an act of martyrdom for the falling/fallen Qing, and glossed over the complexity of their respective circumstances, motivations, and objectives.Footnote ¹⁶²