Civil Society in Early Ming China

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The Transformations of Messianic Revolt and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty

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Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620-1627

From 1625 to 1627 scholar-officials belonging to a militant Confucianist group known as the "Donglin Faction" suffered one of the most gruesome political repressions in China's history. Many were purged from key positions in the central government for their relentless push for a national moral rearmament under the Tianqi emperor. While their martyrs' deaths won them a lasting reputation for heroism and steadfastness, their opponents are remembered for fatally degrading the quality of Ming political life with their arrests and tortures of Donglin partisans. John Dardess employs a wide range of little-used primary sources (letters, diaries, eyewitness accounts, memorials, imperial edicts) to provide a remarkably detailed narrative of the inner workings of Ming government and of this dramatic period as a whole. Comparing the repression with the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, he argues that Tiananmen offers compelling clues to a rereading of the events of the 1620s. Leaders of both movements were less interested in practical reform than in communicating sincere moral feelings to rulers and the public. In the end the protesters succeeded in commemorating their dead and imprisoned and in disgracing those responsible for the violence. A work of unprecedented depth skillfully told, Blood and History in China will be appreciated by specialists in intellectual history and Ming and early Qing studies

Did the Mongols Matter? Territory, Power, and the Intelligentsia in China from the Northern Song to the Early Ming

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Shun-ti and the end of Yüan rule in China

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The Cheng Communal Family: Social Organization and Neo-Confucianism in Yuan and Early Ming China.

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The Late Ming Rebellions: Peasants and Problems of Interpretation

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Childhood in Premodern China

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Ideas, Determination, Power: How Zhang Juzheng Dominated China, 1572–82

This posthumous work was a “handwritten pencil manuscript on scrap paper, left unfinished" when John W. Dardess passed away on March 31, 2020. Bruce M. Tindall transcribed the manuscript, and was lightly edited by Sarah Schneewind and Bruce M. Tindall (1956-2021).Zhang Juzheng (1525-1582) was psychologically the most complex of Ming China’s chief grand secretaries. His rise owed something to an appealing combination of brilliance with diffidence and humility. He was learned, and mastered the literary arts of memorization, comprehension, and interpretation, and the articulation of these things in a clear and creative way in writing. But learning, for Zhang, was never enough. One’s learning, if thoroughly and conscientiously come by, must somehow find its appropriate impact and end in the rectified governance of a realm that after functioning in a faltering way for two centuries had developed some very serious problems. Anything less was just vapid talk. To prepare himself, Zhang joined learning with psychological self-strengthening to meet the political resistance that could be expected in the future. Zhang was not outgoing, but did share feats and frustrations with friendly colleagues in the field. Was Zhang Juzheng corrupt? Martyr complex. (Sarah Schneewind)© The Estate of John W. Dardess, 202