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

and realizing harmony among humans and with nature.⁸ But harmony does not entail uniformity and submission; it presupposes diversity and complementarity among individuals, social groups, and cultures. For this reason, the Confucian tradition is an important philosophy to be developed and shared with other civilizations, especially in light of the contemporary encounter and contamination of cultures.⁹

This chapter will highlight that the tension toward individual autonomy, as reflected in the pluralism of doctrines and religious beliefs, needs to be given more attention when rethinking on Chinese history. Over the centuries, China has been able to reconfigure itself as a multiethnic and multicultural society, notwithstanding the state’s ideological control. Except for some periods of enhanced state repression—most notably when Qin Shihuang carried out the banning/burning (fen 焚 / jin 禁) of books and burying of scholars—since its very beginning, Chinese civilization has been characterized by the coexistence of a variety of schools of thought and religions. Any discourse on the search for autonomy among scholars must take at least two social phenomena into account: 1) the containment of violence through the practice of means for solving conflicts and 2) the political tolerance for different opinions, which finally give a concrete sense to the aforementioned ideal of harmony. It is evident that tolerance toward divergent and heterodox ideas does not only depend on the more or less despotic authorities but also on the way conflicts are conciliated. Recurrent licit and illicit, private and public violence in Chinese history has been studied by eminent scholars; historians have discussed the factors that facilitated explosions of violence in China, but it would be difficult to evaluate the degree of acceptance of violence as a normal part of life—that is, the sensibility toward it.¹⁰ In any case, with the risk of oversimplification, we can say that tolerance and mutual respect facilitate widespread individual autonomy and sense of dignity, while a high level of violence discourages it and depresses the value of human life and personal integrity.