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

is Yang, the son is Yin; the husband is Yang, the wife is Yin […] The three cardinal bonds of the kingly way may be sought in heaven (王道之三綱，可求於天).¹²⁷

Moreover, the diffusion of the “Classic of Filial Piety” from the Han Dynasty onwards elevated filial piety as the root of all virtues and broadened its scope to the political sphere by including the duty of serving the ruler.¹²⁸ The contradiction could arise between love for family and other duties, as solidarity for close relatives could beget nepotism, along with discrimination against outsiders and state demands. This means that loyalty became more important than filial piety, and the duty to the monarch was considered to be above the love for one’s parents by “transferring filial piety to loyalty” (yixiao weizhong 移孝為忠).¹²⁹ In the Tang period, in a writing by Wu Zetian, it is warned that “the monarch is the root of the parents. Without the monarch, the parents would not survive. The state is the foundation of the families. Without the state, the families would not exist.”¹³⁰ This trend continued into the Song dynasty and later. ¹³¹ It is not by chance that such principles were promoted by the Ming emperor Yongle 永樂 (1402–1424) in the “Biographical Accounts of Filial Piety” (Xiaoshun shishi 孝順事實) and echoed in early Ming literary works. Nevertheless, the conflict between loyalty to the ruler and filial piety was not resolved by the consolidation of monarchical rule, and individual conscience had to choose between the contradictory roles of son and subject.

Some concrete examples are offered by the biographic genre, although the Chinese genres of biographies and autobiographies tend to draw an “external” profile of their subject: the events in which the subject was involved are presented along with the family environment, the kin group and neighbourhood, the course taken by his studies and examinations, his career and public affairs, and so on. In this respect, there are not many differences between autobiographies and the biographies recorded in dynastic histories or local gazetteers.¹³² Yet in both cases, little attention is devoted to the intimate or “inner” life; even in spiritual diaries of