I noticed you recently commented on acephalous about social darwinism in Asia. I’ve been looking at materials on the issue in China, but I’ve grown curious about Japan’s reception of Spencer, Huxley et al. especially since so much material reached China via Japan. If you could email me a few recommendations, I greatly appreciate it – especially anything that compares and contrasts Meiji era interpretations with those of the Chinese Qing reformers, such as Yan Fu.

Sam: The best dynasties, by all accounts, were the ones which took care of both the “materialist historical” issues as well as the ritual/rhetorical ones. I’ve always been struck, when I do read histories like Huang’s 1597, how much time and energy some Emperors spend convincing their “followers” in the bureaucracy of their legitimacy and lobbying for policy.

On dynastic fall and reconstitution, I imagine that underlying questions of power and policy – defeating the forces of the old and constituting a new, effective coercive apparatus; and addressing whatever social dislocations that might have caused the previous dynasty to fall – were of greater importance to newly established power holders than name rectification. But, then again, I am a sucker for more materialist historical explantions…

Witness the legendary Ming emperor who dealt with a dangerous river of a sort of semantical flood control project. Instad of building dikes and dams, he changed its name from “The Wild One” to “The Peaceful One.” So common have such “rectifications of names” been in that country, from Confucius to Chou En-lai, that this form of error might be called the Chinese fallacy.

Fisher cites Hans Konigsburger Love and Hate in China Clearly neither of them has any idea what they are talking about. The idea that Chinese are people who sit in pavilions discussing meaningless philosophy while the floodwaters rise seems to have a deep hold in the west. Also, which of the Ming emperors is legendary?

In Fisher’s defense he does have a great quote on the confused relationship between names and reality, courtesy of the White Knight

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

“It’s long,” said the Knight, “but it’s very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it–either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else–”

“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddock’s Eyes’.”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man’.”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called?’” Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

The short answer is no, I am not aware of any such ritual. Some of the people on H-Asia probably know more about imperial ritual than I do. That forms and names xing ming and rectification of names zheng ming are big ideas in Confucian thought is of course not news. Xunzi 22 is all about Rectification, and Lewis talks about it in Writing and Authority. It does seem to be something that Western writers pick up on and misunderstand, however.