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The name Gu Yanwu (1613-82) is well known to scholars of late impe- rial China, and historians cite his encyclopedic masterpiece, Record of Daily Learning (Rizhi hi), in research works on a wide variety oftopics.1 Yet, despite the fact that Gu was first and foremost a political thinker, his political ideas remain somewhat neglected. A reassessment of his statecraft (jingshi) reform thought, developed in Record of Daily Learning during the first decades of the Qing period, can shed new light on core issues in the intellectual history of late imperial China.
The essential feature of Gu's political thinking was his attempt to mix two rival systems for ordering the empire: the ancient fengjian model and the only- slightly-less-ancient junxian model. Where,fengjian was hierarchical, familial, aristocratic, and localist in nature, junxian was bureaucratic, meritocratic, and centralist. Gu devised a mixed model "constitution" for early Qing China in order to solve the problem he identified as that of two despotisms, local and central. Historians of political thought stand to benefit from a fresh look at Gu's hybrid system, both as part of the evolution of Chinese political thought, and in contrast to the western tradition of mixed constitutionalism. And for historians of China, it is important to understand why Gu thought a mixed model was so urgently needed, where he found intellectual inspiration, and whom he tried to convince of his approach.
Gu did not develop his ideas in a vacuum based on pure scholarly medita- tion on the hidden meanings of the Classics. Of course, like any good literatus, and Gu was a particularly learned one, he was steeped in the textual tradi- tion-and this article will highlight some of the unconventional textual sources of his political ideas. But Gu was also a man engaged in the present, traveling and corresponding incessantly. He energetically participated in the empirewide, early Qing debate over fundamental questions about the future of political and economic reform. Dozens of letters back and forth link Gu to the leading think- ers and officials of the 1660s, "70s and "80s. He read and was being read by most political thinkers of note in the early Qing-Huang Zongxi, Lu Shiyi, Lü Liuliang, Li Yong, and Sun Qifeng among them. Their influence can be...