Hu Hong (1105-1161), son of the Neo-Confucian Annals commentator Hu Anguo (1074-1138), became one of the most influential Neo-Confucian thinkers of his generation. The passage below is excerpted from a long memorial that he submitted to the first Southern Song emperor around early 1135. Earlier in the memorial, he sharply criticized Gaozong (r. 1127-1162) and his chief ministers for negotiating peace with the Jurchen Jin invaders who had conquered north China and captured the Song emperors Huizong (r. 1100-1126) and Qinzong (r. 1126-1127). In the passage translated here, Hu presents a modified form of Cheng Yi’s ethnocentric moralist theory of history (see source 3.5) to argue that the Song lost north China to the Jurchens as a consequence of moral barbarization within.

The rest of the memorial (not translated here) explicitly blames Wang Anshi’s reform program for causing the Jurchen invasion by corrupting the government morally, and proposes numerous moral principles and social reforms that Hu Hong considers essential to reviving the Song dynasty’s fortunes.

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I, your subject, have heard that the three bonds (ruler-subject, father-son, and husband-wife) are the innate nature of human beings and that divine transformative power is the innate capacity of Heaven…. If [a ruler’s] moral authority is inadequate to his ethical duties, leading to the collapse of the three bonds, if he is blind to [Heaven’s] divine transformative power and his governance is incapable of maintaining good institutions, such that he must use clever scheming, self-interest, and coercion to vie for power, then he is merely a barbarian, nothing more.¹

All things in the world respond to their own kind. Those who live in the Central Lands but behave like barbarians (Yi-Di) will always suffer disaster at the hands of barbarians. After King Ping of Zhou moved the court east², the traces of the true kings [of antiquity] faded out and the lords invaded one another. Yet the afterglow of the former sages lingered on, so the five hegemons could still understand their supreme moral duty and honor it. Nonetheless, from then on, the Way of kings Wen and Wu declined day by day, and the ways of tyrannical lords grew in strength. Thus, the Qin used a combination of cleverness and brute force to conquer six other states and unify the subcelestial realm. Its father-son and ruler-subject relations did not at all conform to ritual propriety and moral duty, and this was the root of its gradual decline. It ruled for just thirteen years before the entire subcelestial realm rose up and destroyed it.

The Han took the faults of the Qin as a mirror and used the ancients as its model, esteeming classical scholarship and paying attention to the three bonds. Its governance was simple, using clever methods but not depending solely on them, practicing the pursuit of profit and power but not in an unrestrained manner. Though its knowledge of the Kingly Way was limited and deficient, the correct teachings did not decline. That is why there was no disaster of invasion [by barbarians] throughout the Han.

After the Han, the Cao-Wei, Jin, Song, Qi, Liang, Chen, and Sui all gained the throne via usurpation and assassination. They viewed the three bonds merely as a hypocritical façade and were blind to their transformative power. They used clever methods as the mainstays of governance, and profit and power as the source of their authority. Each dynasty followed the example of its predecessor and none could change its ways. Thus, the five divisions [of the Xiongnu] gathered like clouds and rebelled, and [Jin] emperors Min (r. 313-316) and Huai (r. 307-311) died in captivity.³ The imperial court had to retreat south of the Yangzi River and was never able to raise the banner of supreme moral duty, cross the Yellow River, and pacify the Central Plains in the north.

The Tang dynasty responded to the Sui’s injustice by launching a righteous rebellion and putting an end to tyranny and chaos. Taizong, who laid the foundations for the Tang’s rise, had the strategic vision of a great leader and achieved a time of great peace, but he dishonored the three bonds, and his family, plagued by disorder and incest, was close to barbarism (Yi-Di). This went on for generations and only got worse. Hence An Lushan and Shi Siming captured the capital and declared themselves emperors, and the Tibetans and Uyghurs invaded and wreaked violence for years on end.⁴ Thanks to the efforts of loyal ministers, the Tang was just barely able to restore itself. But as soon as the An-Shi rebels declined, the military governors began to pursue autonomous power. The decline continued into the Five Dynasties, with powerful ministers dominating the imperial court. If we trace these events back to their roots, it was all a case of things responding to their own kind. There was nothing coincidental about it.

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1. The received text reads “subject” rather than “barbarian,” but known traces of Qing-era censorship in the next paragraph make it clear that the original text read “barbarian.” ↩︎
2. The transition from Western Zhou to Eastern Zhou in 770 BCE. ↩︎
3. A reference to the Xiongnu rebellion that toppled the Western Jin in the 310s, and a clear parallel to the fall of Northern Song. ↩︎
4. Hu Hong implies that the Turco-Sogdian An Lushan and Shi Siming were similar to the Tibetans and Uyghurs in that they were “barbarians” responding to the moral barbarism of the Tang. This reading of history is simplistic, since An Lushan and Shi Siming were generals in the Tang army who rebelled against the imperial court. ↩︎