Introducing China
Mencius: China's Second Sage
E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
(estimated publication date: 2011)

This wide-audience work separates the Mencius passages from our major study The Emergence of China, and adds material to make a book that is less than a complete translation, but more of an independent account of Mencius and his school than was possible in the longer work.

1. The translated Mencius excerpts from The Emergence of China are retained, and the commentary on those passages is somewhat expanded. Further passages are added to give a fuller account of the two posthumous Mencian schools than was possible in that study. The fortunes of the school are followed beyond 0249 in selections from the probably genuine but inferior writings of the late 03rd century, and in various Han texts which show Mencian affinities, or oppose the continuing Mencian influence.

2. Nobody has ever written a page about Mencius the man that was not full of later school pieties and scribal contrivances. This book restores the correct dates of Mencius, explains how they came to be corrupted, and matches his career with the drastic changes that the state and its army were undergoing during the 04th century. Mencius turns out to have been the great eclectic of his time, with sufficient nerve to take on the great social and political questions of his day. Then there were his shortcomings as a practical advisor, and the fiasco into which he and his advice led the state of Chi in 0315.

3. So much for statecraft. On the philosophical side, Arun Balasubramaniam threw the 1999 Singapore Mencius Conference into a perfect tizzy by asking the one obvious question: Was Mencius right? This book take up that question, asks the obvious counterquestion (Right about What?), and faces the likely answer: Mencius misconstrued real situations from a too hopeful basis in political theory, and his posthumous followers, though castigated for their doctrine of the right of popular revolution, ended by shaping what amounts to an ethic of subordination. It is thus after all not surprising that later interpreters, focusing almost exclusively on those late passages, were able to have Mencius accepted as the quintessential Confucian: the one who cultivates his personal moral perfection, while letting the political world go pretty much where it would have gone without them.

This book replaces the full study of Mencius which its authors do not expect to have time to write. Like the Mwodz volume in this series, it is thus not counterparted by such a study in the New Chinese Classics, and should accordingly have a scholarly as well as a general interest readership.

17 May 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications Page