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Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. By WILLIAM T. ROWE. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xii, 601 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
In four years, four blockbuster books have focused on the eighteenth-century Qing state: Evelyn Rawski's Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), Pamela Kyle Crossley's Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (University of California Press, 1999), Mark C. Elliott's Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), and now William T. Rowe's Saving the World. The latter, however, does not complete a foursome, but stands, so to speak, as the apple among three oranges. While the previous three books-and much ancillary scholarship-have pulled us well away from the longstanding attribution of Qing success to Sinicization of the Manchu elite and its rulership, Rowe's book, not explicitly in any passage but by its very content, opens the question again: Was not the Qing state, for all of its Manchuness in certain facets, in its core accomplishments a culmination of the fertile Han Chinese traditions of and Confucian commitment to statecraft? The extraordinary scope of this book, within which only one (highly Sinicized) Manchu appears to any notable degree, assures the perpetuation of this debate, although such is not Rowe's aim. His question, rather, is very simple: "What did the individuals who inhabited the eighteenth-century Qing bureaucracy think they were doing? In particular, how did they conceive the universe and the society that lay before them? What did they presume its potentials and limitations to be? What were the capacities and limits of their own subjective action . . . in the effort to 'save the world'? And what would the world, properly saved, look like?" (p. 446).
Rowe pursues the very complicated, although engrossing, answers to this question through broadly topical chapters on the life and career of Chen...