Political Thought Of Late Ming Dynasty In Altruism-selfish Horizons

The Ming dynasty strengthened the monarchy system, but it still couldn’t get away from the history destiny of decadence and replacing by a new dynasty. In the end of Ming, some thinkers such as Huang Tsung-his, Wang Fu-chih, Ku Yen-wu, who had a bitter experience rethought profoundly of the absolute monarchy and drew a lesson from the failure, and put forward some ideas of political structure reform.Distinction between altruism and selfish was the clue of their political criticism and reform conception. The confliction between the selfish of the monarch and the public interest provided a broad space for the expansion of the late Ming’s ideology. The late Ming thinkers criticized the monarch, and firmly believed that the selfish of the monarch was the chief root of all kinds of political problems. The significance of this criticism was firstly negating the rationality of the autocratic monarchy. The legitimacy of the autocratic monarchy based on the monarch’s moral superiority or the function of delivering public services, however, the selfish nature of the monarch was not only contrary to the theory hypothesis of monarchy, but also was the cause of social disorder, chaos and collapse.Considering the monarch selfish, the Ming court thinker put forward to adjust the ethics relations between the monarch and the minister. The relationship original father-son type was denied, and replaced by a teacher-friend relationship, which meant equality and independence. The monarch and minister would contact through the moral and establish a relationship featuring equality and cooperation. So they suggested that the monarch and minister should share the political power and take shared-governance, and establish a political system in which the scholar-bureaucrats were dominant.They criticized the despot implement the law only to maintain their own property without regard to the public interest. Bound by the rule of law, the scholar-bureaucrat were powerless and insecurity, so they didn’t have power and energy to exercise the public function, thus causing many problems which eventually led to collapse. So, to limit the harm of the monarch selfish, the law of the monarch must be abolished and replaced by the public law.The public law replacing the monarch law means a system reform, namely to adjust and regulate the interest of each social class, stratum and group, and relationships between them. For the public interest, the late Ming thinkers made a clamor for strengthening the bureaucratic system, enhancing the independence in education and employment, and limiting the monarch power through decentralism. Furthermore, they argued to eliminate the adverse influence of the eunuch and clerk groups in the political system, and ease the contradiction between the government and the farmers and merchants who were the service objects of the bureaucracy.The late Ming thinkers also accepted the existence and rationality of private interest and desire, but they thought they should be regulated and constrained by Li(理). They criticized the radicalism what advocated desire and personal liberation and breaking down all authority, and wanted to determine the legality of Confucian orthodoxy.In summary, through the altruism-selfish horizons, we will discover that the political system of the late Ming political thinkers wanted to establish was dominated by the scholar-bureaucrat and their ideology. And that was the essence and main purposes of the late Ming political thought.