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

against the mistakes of the emperor and defending the dynasty, according to the mentioned saying: “a scholar dies protesting and a soldier dies fighting.” But at the same time, China is also the country where somebody like Jia Baoyu challenges this ideal of sacrifice and considers heroic, honorable death (大丈夫死名死節) unworthy in normal times. These kinds of martyrdom are motivated by “the hope of winning one’s self an imperishable reputation for honesty” (只顧他邀忠烈之名) rather than by pure heroism. Baoyu regards them as unnecessary and springing from excessive ambition, for “emperors hold their power from Heaven, and it’s unthinkable that Heaven should lay the huge responsibility of empire on any but the worthiest shoulders.” Everybody must die eventually, and he chooses an uncommitted and aesthetic death. He prefers an elegant end and declares he would rather float away in a river made of women’s tears:

My idea of a glorious death would be to die now, while you are all around me; then your tears could combine to make a great river that my corpse could float away on, far, far away to some remote place that no bird has ever flown to, and gently decompose there until the wind had picked my bones clean, and after that never, never to be reborn again as a human being—that would be a really good death.¹⁰²

Baoyu does not discredit the fact that criticizing authorities is the right of any intellectual and not a crime punishable by death—a stance which was similarly debated in Europe as well. But his arguments refuse any political engagement and move toward an aesthetic dimension.

Yuan Mei’s so-called “records of the strange and extraordinary” (zhiguai 志怪) have also carried on some of the new ideas and sensibilities of the late Ming. In touching upon desires, love, and freedom, Yuan states that desire is not the dangerous enemy that orthodox Neo-Confucians want us to believe, but quite the opposite—it is the very foundation of human actions and life:

Love for goods and love for sexual pleasures are the desires of human beings […]. Without feelings and desires, the human race