Liang Cai

It is often said that “Confucius composed the Chunqiu 春秋 (The Spring and Autumn Annals) to convey the way of the king.” Scholars have long noticed that before the founding of and during the Han Dynasty the phrase that served as the title of the allegedly Confucian work, “Chunqiu,” was also often used to designate history in general. In what

“How Strong is Your Love for Your Parents? Childlike Mindset and Confucian Filial Piety,” , the Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology, 7(2020), 225-254.

In the West, it is debatable whether children, adult or dependent, have filial obligations to their parents. By contrast, filial piety serves as one of the essential virtues in the Confucian tradition, which had not only dominated premodern East Asian societies but is recently promoted by 21st century Chinese government. Loving one’s parents, in turn, is said to be the most fundamental and strongest human emotion praised by Confucians. This paper is not to provide justifications for treating filial piety as a virtue. But using a temporal framework, it offers a more complicated reading of the affection for parents presented in the Analects and the Mencius. While young children have strong emotional attachment to parents, adults’ love to their parents is sporadic and inconsistent. To address the deficit of emotions in adults’ interaction with their parents, Confucians use young children’s mindset—strong affection to parents—to both justify and motivate filial actions. This paper criticizes the view that simply equalizes consanguineous affection to xiao (filial piety). It contends that xiao, as a virtue, cannot be automatically generated by original family affection. Instead, filial-oriented rituals, as Confucians advocate, is supposed to foster an affectionate relation between parent and child.

“Zhengzhi quanli bangjia xia de tianren ganying zaiyi shuo (gongyuan qian 206 nian – gongyuan 8nian) “政治權力綁架下的天人感應災異說 (公元前206 年–公元8 年) [Moral Cosmology that was Kidnapped by Political Power (206 BCE to 8 CE), Zhongguo shi yanjiu 中 國 史 研 究 [Journal of Chinese Historical Studies], 2017.2, 63-80.

While historians are interested in demographic and social network information of historical actors in the early Chinese empires, very few studies have been done on entity retrieval from classical Chinese historiography. The key challenge lies in the low resource of the language: deep learning requires large amounts of annotated data and becomes impracticable when such data is not available. In this study, we employ domain experts (history professors) to curate a set of person entities and their profile attributes (e.g., courtesy name, place of birth, title) and relations (e.g., father-son, master-disciple) from two books, Records of the Grand Historian and Book of Han. We develop a pattern-based bootstrapping approach to extract the information with a very small number (i.e.,1 or 2) of seed patterns. Experimental results show the effectiveness as well as the limitations of the iterative method. We would appreciate research of digital humanities to address the challenges in entity retrieval from low-resource languages.

In this study I take men from Donghai, a region of northeast China, as a case study for examining models of success in the Western Han (206 b.c.e.-9 c.e.). Employing digital tools to mine data from The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) and The History of the Western Han (Han shu), I explore the social networks and career patterns of men from a region that enjoyed a reputation for producing a remarkable number of high officials and celebrated Ru. I focus on three questions. First, what was the social mechanism that enabled people to distinguish themselves at both the local and the imperial levels? Second, did these celebrated men from Donghai serve as bridges connecting the local to the capital, directing resources back to their hometown and helping their local fellows achieve success? Third, did their positions in the central government remove them from local society by transforming them into capital-dwelling elites primarily concerned about the success of their families in the central court? In addressing these questions, I probe the dynamics between bureaucratic hierarchy, social networks, and the flow of talent and resources. I investigate various understandings of prestige and the strategies for climbing the ladder of success. Furthermore, I ask which forms of social prestige-for example, academic reputation, wealth, social networks-could bypass the hierarchical system imposed by the imperial bureaucracy, providing direct access to lofty positions. Did the patterns of success seen in the Donghai group reflect a bias built into the sources, constitute a regional variation, or provide a universal model for success in early imperial China? In early imperial China, fortunate Ru who secured the sponsorship of powerful men rose high in the bureaucracy, but no institutionalized avenue had yet been established that regularly and predictably selected Ru for office. 1 To win political power, most Ru had to accumulate 1. Western scholars have debated the terms "Confucian" and "Ru," with some holding that the Ru constituted an intellectually heterogeneous group in the Han dynasty. Although not all Ru were necessarily followers of Confucius, the term was

Confucius did not create Confucianism. Actually, no one ever thought so. But Confucius has been regarded as the founder of ru tradition since immediately after his death. No matter whether one wants to translate ru into Confucianism or not, it is a fascinating puzzle how a man who was a failure in the political realm became the founder of a tradition that both existed before him and was once shared by all the elite. This chapter starts with an investigation of this historical myth. It proceeds to demonstrate that how the versatile tradition of ru allows scholars throughout the history to create Confucianism into a school of thought, a political agenda, a philosophical tradition, and a religion.

Sou, Daniel. 2015. "Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire. By Liang Cai. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 276. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $27.95". Religious Studies Review. 41 (4): 210-211.

Arthur, Shawn. 2015. "Liang Cai, Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 288 pp., $85.00 (hardback) $27.95 (paperback)". Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. 16 (2): 258-262.

Students of Chinese intellectual history are familiar with moral cosmology developed in Han era, a theory that promises ru to use omens to admonish the emperor, and thereby to constrain and compete with his absolute political power. This thesis, in theory, is convincing; in actuality it is not. This paper questions the autonomous power of omen discourse. Focusing on the social－political conditions in which this discourse functioned, I will demonstrate that, in real politics, the enactment of omen interpretation had nothing to do with restraining the power of the throne, but evolved with bloody factional struggles. Replacing the secret knowledge of diviners and astrologers with the common cultural heritage—the classics—and transforming the mysterious otherworldly spirits into a moral agent, ru successfully defeated the technical specialists and became the primary operators of the omen interpretation enterprise. The theoretical innovation that contributed to Ru success, however, undermined their chance of building a social closure to both close off the competitions and secure their interpretative authority. As the numerous historical cases show, neither the ru classics nor the moral competence of the speaker can add to the social efficacy of omen explanation. Without monopolized knowledge, standardized hermeneutic rules, or institutionalized positions, omen discourse, rather than contesting political power, became its servant.

This book is a new reading of the emergence of Confucian Empire. Contradicting the standard paradigm that Emperor Wu (141-87BCE) promoted Confucians to power, Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire  demonstrates that, Sima Qian, the founding father of Chinese historiography as well as a witness of Emperor Wu’s reign, in fact indicated that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm. Endeavoring to negotiate and rectify this reality, Sima Qian invented a homogeneous and competitive Confucian community on paper long before the actual one came into being, a vision that provoked a new understanding of Confucians’ political role and thereby contributed to their solidarity.  It argues that a witchcraft scandal (91-87 BCE) which has long been ignored by modern scholarship, fundamentally reshuffled the power structure of bureaucracy in Western Han dynasty and provided Confucians a decisive opportunity to seize power, evolve into the new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse in China for centuries to come.