Wang Fuzhi was a scholar from Hunan who participated in the Southern Ming loyalist cause in the 1640s and 1650s. He retired into reclusion in 1675 and spent the rest of his life on classical and historical scholarship and philosophy. His writings, never published, remained in obscurity until rediscovered by members of the Hunan literati elite in the nineteenth century. He is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in seventeenth-century China.

The excerpts below are from three works by Wang Fuzhi, all of which were only published long after his death. They reflect ideas that have led some modern historians to characterize Wang as a racist, but also ideas about cyclical patterns of qi and history and prejudices regarding social class that may complicate such a characterization. Wang’s cosmological thought was quite unconventional and distinctive: He rejected the Neo-Confucian metaphysical dichotomy of cosmic principle (li) and qi, arguing that all principles in the cosmos are determined by the workings of qi rather than preceding or transcending them. Thus, although he insisted that cosmic order demanded a strict separation between Chinese and barbarians due to their fundamental differences in qi, he did not claim that the Chinese enjoyed innate moral superiority due to their qi endowment. Instead, he believed that the cyclical movement of qi meant that the civilization of the Central Lands would eventually decline back into barbarism, just as other civilizations in the world had risen and declined before Chinese civilization began.

As a southerner who believed that the center of Chinese civilization had shifted to south China, Wang Fuzhi also attributed this shift to the movement of qi over time and claimed that he could already see north China descending into moral animality. Wang, writing in the 1680s, may have linked this moral decline with the heavier presence of the conquering Manchus in the north, but if so, he prudently declined to draw such a connection overtly.

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From Huangshu (The Yellow Book), ca. 1657

Human beings, like all other living things, are constituted of yin and yang and must eat and breathe. But human beings cannot be classed together with other living beings. The Hua-Xia people have the same kind of body as the barbarians (Yi-Di) and the same kind of social groupings and divisions. But they cannot be classed together with barbarians. Why is this so? If human beings do not draw boundaries to set themselves apart from other living things, then the order of Heaven is broken. If the Hua-Xia people do not draw boundaries to set themselves apart from barbarians, then the order of Earth is broken. If human beings cannot draw boundaries to separate different [status] groups, then the order of humanity is broken. That is why these three kinds of order govern the three realms (of Heaven, Earth, and humanity)….  

[That is why] whoever can protect his own kind will become their leader, and whoever can defend his community will be one of its great men. Hence the sages first created the ten thousand [Hua-Xia] surnames (clans) and showed them that they alone were superior, then protected the basis of their superiority and prevented them from declining into disorder. They transmitted this wisdom to their descendants, awaiting the rise of future sages. Rulers could gain the throne through abdication, through succession, or through a change of dynasties, but barbarian kinds (lei 類) could never be allowed to infringe upon it.

From Du Tongjian lun (Discourses on the Zizhi tongjian¹), ca. 1687

There are two great boundaries in the subcelestial realm (tianxia 天下): that between the Central Lands and the barbarians, and that between noble men (junzi 君子) and inferior men (xiaoren 小人). It is not the case that there was originally no difference between them and that the former kings arbitrarily set up these boundaries. Barbarians and Hua-Xia people are born in different lands, and since their lands are different, their qi 氣 is also different. Their qi being different, their practices are also different, and so all that they know and do is different. Now, among the barbarians there will naturally also be the high-born and the low-born, but since they are separated from us by geographical boundaries and natural differences in qi, they must not be allowed to intermingle with us. If they intermingle with us, then the human realm will be destroyed; the Hua-Xia people will be devoured (i.e., conquered) by the barbarians and waste away….

Noble men and inferior men are born of different stock (zhong 種). Being born of different stock, they have different temperaments (zhi 質). Having different temperaments, their practices are also different, and so they differ in everything that they know and do. Now, among inferior men there will naturally also be the clever and the stupid, but because they come from a different type (lei 類) and have different predilections, they must not be allowed to associate with noble men. If they do associate with [noble men], then the principle of humanity will be violated; the poor and weak will be devoured (i.e., oppressed) by the inferior men and waste away…. Alas, the danger of inferior men associating with noble men is no different from that of barbarians intermingling with the Hua-Xia. Some may treat it as mere play, not knowing what great harm it can do!

Among inferior men, the clever and stupid divide themselves into different classes. The stupid are content in their stupidity and only bring hardship on themselves, whereas the clever use their cleverness to harm others. The stupid are peasants, bringing hardship on themselves but not harming others…. The merchants are the clever ones among the inferior men, and their corruption of human nature and harming of human lives has become extremely serious. Their qi and temperament are always compatible with those of the barbarians, so whenever the barbarians are strong, the merchants will also rise in prestige….

Although they are all human beings, the barbarians and the Xia are separated by territorial borders, and inferior men and noble men are separated by their types (lei). We must be strict in maintaining these boundaries. The barbarians have long intermingled with the Hua; those who court their friendship and invite them in, blithely seeing them as a source of profit, are inferior men addicted to material gain, and the merchants are the worst.² The barbarians profit from aiding the merchants, the merchants become arrogant by relying on the barbarians’ [strength], and the Way of humanity is thereby nearly extinguished forever.

From Siwen lu (A Record of My Thinking and Questioning), 1680s

What I do know is that the subcelestial realm (tianxia) of the Central Lands must still have been a world of barbarians before the time of Xuanyuan (Huangdi), and it must still have been a world of animals before the time of Taihao (Fuxi). Animals cannot attain a state of complete innocence and simplicity (zhi 質), while barbarians fall short of full civility (wen 文). When civility is lacking, then humans descend gradually to the state of being devoid of civility. They know nothing of the past and pass no knowledge on to the next generation. They have no consistent standard of right and wrong and no sound basis for making choices. They call out when hungry and discard their leftovers as soon as they’ve eaten their fill, behaving like mere animals who can stand erect.

After the Wei-Jin period, at the beginning of the depredations of Liu Yuan and Shi Le³, the civility of the Central Lands was like a flickering flame on the verge of going out. One day in the future, that civility will surely be defiled to the point of extinction.  Human beings will revert to the state they were in before Xuanyuan, and everyone will be a barbarian. Having lost their civility, human beings won’t be able to hold on to innocence and simplicity either. They will eat and wear what they shouldn’t, and as their diet changes, so will their blood and qi; as their attire changes, so will their physical forms. They will then revert to the state they were in before Taihao, and everyone will be an animal. By that point, there will no longer be writing and thus no way to verify the truth of what is heard, even with a billion years’ worth of eyewitness testimony. It will be an age of primordial chaos.  

The qi of heaven and earth declines and flourishes in a cyclical pattern. Before the time of Taihao, the people of the Central Lands gathered in bands like deer and birds. But this need not have been the case in every place illumined by the sun and moon. There must have been a place in the world that was like the Central Lands in the days of [the sage-kings] Tang (Yao) and Yu (Shun) and the three dynasties (Xia, Shang, and Zhou). But we could not get to it by human strength, and when it was prospering, we were declining, so we had no way to verify its existence; by the time we were prospering, they had declined and were unable to record their past and communicate it to others. So, we now have no way to know about it. 

But if we extrapolate from smaller regions nearby, then the regions of Wu, Chu, Min, and Yue⁴ were barbaric before the Han dynasty but are now a center for the teaching of civility. Qi, Jin, Yan, and Zhao⁵ were the Central Lands of the Xia before the Sui and Tang dynasties, but they are now a land of stupid, perverse, and vicious people, nine out of ten of whom have the hearts of animals. The Song dynasty was only five hundred years ago, but Shao Yong said at the time that the state would begin to suffer disorder once southerners became chief ministers.⁶ In that case, southerners were still of lower quality than northerners at that time. Since the reigns of [Ming emperors] Hongwu (1368-1398) and Yongle (1402-1424), the middle Yangzi and lower Yangzi regions  have produced good scholarship, acts of integrity and moral duty, achievements in statecraft, and literary brilliance, whereas northerners have been especially given to greed, callousness, immorality, regicide, treason, conniving with imperial consorts and eunuchs, and serving enemies of the state. Therefore, Shao Yong’s words were prescient in the Song but are no longer applicable today.

In our day, Guangxi and Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guizhou are gradually moving toward illumination by civility (wenming 文明), while customs and people’s hearts north of Anhui and Henan only become more and more unspeakable. The southward shift of terrestrial qi is such even for small regions nearby. Extrapolating from that to places far away, what’s so strange about one place being in primordial chaos while another is illumined by civility?

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1. On the Zizhi tongjian, see source 2.11. ↩︎
2. This is probably a reference to the maritime merchants of the south China coast who traded with the Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese. ↩︎
3. Liu Yuan and Shi Le were “barbarian” rebels who toppled the Western Jin dynasty and established their own states in north China. ↩︎
4. Corresponding to Jiangsu, Hunan, Fujian, and Zhejiang. ↩︎
5. Corresponding to Shandong, Shanxi, and Hebei. ↩︎
6. Shao Yong (1011-1077) was a Song philosopher and cosmologist who lived in Luoyang. Due to his theories about qi and acquaintance with the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi later elevated him as one of the founding figures of Neo-Confucianism. According to an anecdote recorded by his son Shao Bowen (1057-1134), Shao Yong once saw a cuckoo (a bird typically seen only in lands to the south) in Luoyang in 1064-1067 and interpreted it as a sign that the emperor would appoint a reformist southerner as chief minister within two years, leading to much trouble in the realm. Evidently, this story was a reference to the rise of the reformist southerner Wang Anshi as chief minister in 1068. ↩︎