Gu Xiancheng And The Donglin Movement In Later Ming Dynasty: A Research On The Traditional Scholar-Bureaucrat Polity

In this thesis, we focus on Gu Xiancheng and the Donglin Movement in later Ming Dynasty. Our purpose is to reveal the relationship between the intellectual and the politics in traditional society by analyzing the diversity of Scholar-Bureaucrats' life style.The Scholar-Bureaucrats played multiple roles in traditional society:firstly, as the traditional intellectuals, they were the interpreters and the inheritors of the culture; secondly, they were the bureaucracies of the political system; thirdly, as the local elites, they were the teachers educating the local people and guiding the local customs, and played the role as the intermediate power between the state and the local society.Accordingly, the Donglin Movement also contains three interrelated dimensions. In the academic dimension, it existed as the Donlin School which criticized the thoughts of "not being good and not being evil"; in the political dimension, it existed as the Donlin Faction which criticized the unreasonable political phenomenons by the carefree talk and the faction-fighting; in the social dimension, the Donglin Confucians educated the people and refreshed the customs by lecturing in the academy.Eventually, the Donglin Movement succeeded in the academic and the social dimensions, and failed in the political dimension. The failure in the political dimension is the destiny of the Scholar-Bureaucrat in traditional society. As the official bureaucracies, it weakened the independence and autonomy of the intellectuals. So their criticism was weak and incomplete. And this led the tragedy destiny of the traditional Scholar-Bureaucrat. Our final conclusion is that the real value of the Confucianism is in the social dimension, and the relationship between the Scholar-Bureaucrat and the traditional politics was irrational, intellectuals should keep some distance from the politics.