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

his family retainers who led the mob against Li in 1591. Li’s arrest in 1602, instead, marks the extension of the state’s repression from local to central spheres of power due to the limitations imposed on individual freedom from the authorities at all levels.

Li Zhi’s impatient, supercilious disposition and his unyielding personality played a decisive part in the conflict with the local gentry, but his intellectual dispute with Geng Dingxiang was most importantly a private grievance involving disciples, friends, and followers of the powerful Geng faction. Even though the conflict started within a school, for personal incompatibilities or due to local antagonism, it was Li’s nonconformism and publication that brought about his persecution, first by the gentry who regarded him as an outsider causing a social disturbance, and then by the central authorities. As a matter of fact, Li Zhi’s challenging of the moral dominance of Confucian elites, either of the Zhu Xi’s orthodox tradition or the School of Mind, was repressed both at the central and local levels. Li’s provocative actions (his behavior and publications), his attacks against an influential personage, notwithstanding Geng’s moderate reaction and final reconciliation (1596), provoked a violent response by Geng’s followers who eventually silenced him.

Li Zhi was successfully persecuted by his enemies because of his character, his political relative isolation,³³ and his provocative style, which antagonized many and weakened his position. As noted by Theodore de Bary, “Li’s individualism did then enable him to achieve a large measure of intellectual independence, to rise considerably above the traditional limits of his culture (above most of the cultural determinants of Buddhism as well as Confucianism) and to envisage a new world—one might almost say a modern world—transcending most of the parochial limits of the traditional culture. Nevertheless, having stripped himself of all social or cultural support, he stands there naked and alone, without the means to create any new order or to protect himself from the old, and without as much freedom of mind as he supposes.”³⁴