Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

basically remains in an authoritarian system of political and social governance.¹⁸

Despite being less ingrained in family structures and no more in empire politics, the individual is then still a means of improving the wealth of the Chinese nation. The fact that the individual is in any case subordinated to a bigger and collective entity reminds one of Tang Zhen’s 唐甄 (1630–1704) organicistic concept of the state; although his anti-authoritarian verve and indignation for violence and blood for which state power is deemed solely accountable, Tang’s theorizations over the nature of state power apply well to this argument.¹⁹ Mao’s idea of self was different than that of the May Fourth intellectuals; for Mao, the individual was to be completely overwhelmed and sacrificed for ideological aims, under the formula wei renmin fuwu 為人民服務 (serving people), becoming a “mass,” tool (qi 器) of superior political design. The ideology of sacrificing the self to the state reached its acme toward the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). As it was mentioned in a letter sent by Wang Yuanhua 王元化 (1920–2008) to his friend Li Rui 李銳 (1917–2019) in April 1993, the dawo had been conceived of as the expression of the authoritarian and idealistic purity of Communism and Maoist moralism, which evolved out of the Confucian concept of self, identified with morality or “selfishness” (dagong wusi 大公無私). Significative is Wang’s analysis of the way Chinese scholarship has interpreted Rousseau’s “general will”—that is, by charging it with traditional values that allow a direct equivalence of politics and morality, thereby giving the state the power to exceed its authority and interfere in the lives of any members of society by any means.²⁰

Such a long-term perspective leads us to the question of whether China has moved from a more “collectivistic” society toward a more “individualistic” one, or to put it another way, from a self-representing collectivistic society to a more individualistic one. As far as the economy was concerned, during the late imperial period—with the exception of traditional monopolies, the more or less efficient ban of maritime