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

from the emerging class of the nouveaux riches, who were vulgar merchants, brokers, and dealers as well as hypocritical high-ranking officials of the imperial bureaucracy. The qualitative difference of this “another self” of intellectuals ideally lies on their refined tastes and sophisticated behavior, as well as on their disdain or frustration for a traditional career which, nevertheless, never pushed them as far as to deny the basic structure of the social organization. As long as the individual remained a member of the community, this attitude of theirs contributed to reinforcing the uniqueness of individual characters, tastes, and abilities. Considering the new way of evaluating the private-public and the desires-principles relations, even if it did not occupy the main trend of the cultural and intellectual scene, it remains a solid contribution to the construction of an alternative discourse on “individualization” (gerenhua 個人化) and “privatization” (sirenhua 私人化).¹⁰⁸