ICS Lecture: Meow Hui Goh, “The Instrumentality of Jian 諫 for Imperial Remembrance: Admonishing Wei Emperor Ming against Extravagance"

The Ohio State University presents a talk by Professor Meow Hui Goh.

“The Instrumentality of Jian 諫 for Imperial Remembrance: Admonishing Wei Emperor Ming against Extravagance”

Professor Meow Hui Goh
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University

Abstract:
Jian 諫 (“admonishing”)—an official offering advice to a ruler with the intention of eliciting a change in his behavior—was an important practice in Chinese court culture. By the Wei Dynasty (220-265), it already had a long recorded history. As a remembered practice, its enactment was necessarily a reenactment; in fact, it was by highlighting it as a reenactment—through recalling past acts of jian and the jian chen 諫臣 (“admonishing officials”) in history—that the full significance of an act of jian could be made explicit.

While considering how an official remembered himself along with the jian of the past when offering his own admonition, I will also examine other kinds of memory—to use Jan Assmann’s terms, these include cultural memory as well as communicative memory—that were called upon in such an act. Focusing on the admonition presented to Wei Emperor Ming (204-239) by a group of officials in light of his extensive building activities, I will discuss what and how they drew from a shared pool of references to construct persuasive strategies that were similar in some aspects but yet very different in others. Even though they were all making the same argument—“curb your extravagance!”—they exhibited individual styles of language, different selections of specific references, and high self-referentiality. Some of their admonition also hinted at opposing opinions from other competing officials.

Furthermore, the context of their admonition showed that while they intended to correct the emperor’s conduct with their advice, the emperor had also attempted to solicit their comments to “legitimize” his own behavior. Considered as such, jian was a dynamic process through which an emperor and his officials negotiated these issues: what were the right lessons to learn from the past? Which were the correct precedent? Who were the role models? The circuitous persuasion and endless quotes and citation in an act of jian, which seemed to involve as much obsessive energy as constructing pleasure palaces and awe-inspiring statues, were part of the process of building the moral and cultural fabric of the dynasty. It was fundamentally concerned with shaping imperial remembrance for the purpose of governance and legacy formation.