Li Zhi

Li Zhi the Chinese philosopher, historian and writer of the late Ming dynasty (1527-1602) whose radical individualism and sharp criticism of conventional morality made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his age. He attacked the hypocrisy of the Confucian establishment, defended the legitimacy of private desire and self-interest, and championed a form of sincere self-expression that unsettled both the orthodox and the powerful.

Early Life and Career

Li Zhi was born in 1527 in Jinjiang, near the port city of Quanzhou in Fujian province, into a family of Muslim descent that had long since adopted Chinese ways. He received a classical education and entered the imperial bureaucracy through the examination system, passing the provincial examination and taking up a series of minor and middling offices over some two and a half decades of service.

His official career was respectable but never brilliant, and he chafed against the constraints and compromises of administrative life. He held posts in several provinces, including appointments concerned with education, and he acquired a reputation for honesty and independence of mind. The death of his son and other family losses deepened a melancholy that coloured his later writings and strengthened his inclination to withdraw from the world.

In 1580, at the age of fifty-three, he abandoned his official career altogether. He left his family in the care of relatives and retired to a life of study and writing, at first settling in Hubei and later moving among friends and patrons. This renunciation of office, unusual and disturbing to his contemporaries, was the decisive act of his life and freed him for the work that made him notorious.

Philosophy and the Attack on Hypocrisy

Li Zhi's central target was what he saw as the falsity of the moral order around him. He argued that people professed the virtues of loyalty, filial piety and disinterestedness while in fact pursuing their own advantage, and that this gap between profession and practice corrupted both individuals and the state. He preferred an honest pursuit of self-interest to a dishonest pretence of virtue, holding that sincerity, even when it served the self, was morally preferable to hypocrisy.

He developed a doctrine of the childlike heart, a native and spontaneous goodness that he believed was present in all people from birth but was smothered by the teachings, customs and ambitions imposed in later life. The task of the genuine person was to recover this original simplicity and to act from it directly, rather than to conform to the expectations of the crowd or the demands of a rigid orthodoxy.

These ideas led him to question the authority of the Confucian classics and of the sages themselves. He argued that the value of a teaching lay in its truth rather than in the fame of its author, and he refused to accept that the judgments of antiquity must bind the present. Such positions placed him at odds with the dominant school of his time and made his books both eagerly read and officially condemned.

Historical and Literary Works

Li Zhi was a prolific writer across several genres. His Book to Burn and Book to Hide collected essays, letters and polemics in which he pursued his criticisms and reflected upon his own life and reading. The titles themselves express his sense that some of his views were too dangerous to publish openly and would have to be concealed until a fitter age, though in the event both circulated widely and provoked fierce controversy.

He compiled and edited historical works of a distinctly personal cast, most notably a collection of evaluations of historical figures in which he judged the great men and women of the past by his own standards of sincerity and usefulness rather than by conventional praise. He admired able men of action, criticised those he thought merely respectable, and drew provocative parallels between ancient figures and his own concerns.

He was also an influential literary critic who championed the plain and the natural in writing and opposed the imitation of ancient models that dominated the literary fashion of the day. He praised the novel and the drama as serious forms and helped to win respect for vernacular literature, a stance that anticipated later developments in Chinese criticism and greatly widened the range of writing thought worthy of attention.

Controversy and Persecution

Li Zhi's willingness to question received authority brought him powerful enemies. Orthodox officials accused him of heresy and of corrupting public morals, and his teachings were denounced as a danger to the social order. He was also criticised for his unconventional personal conduct, including his friendships with women and his rejection of the ordinary obligations of family life, which scandalised conventional opinion.

In his old age he found protection and hospitality among sympathetic officials and friends, but the opposition eventually prevailed. He was arrested in 1602 on the orders of a censor and taken to prison in Beijing, where he was charged with spreading false doctrine and with offences against public morality. He was by then an elderly and ailing man, and the prospect of a humiliating trial weighed heavily upon him.

While in custody he took his own life by cutting his throat, dying a few days later in 1602. His death made him a martyr in the eyes of admirers and confirmed his reputation among opponents as a subversive influence. The controversy over his ideas continued long after his death and shaped the intellectual climate of the closing decades of the Ming.

Influence and Legacy

Li Zhi's insistence upon sincerity, his suspicion of professed virtue and his defence of the individual against the pressures of orthodoxy gave voice to tensions that ran deep in late Ming society. His work was widely read and reprinted despite repeated official attempts to suppress it, and it influenced a generation of writers and thinkers who shared his dissatisfaction with conventional morality.

Later Chinese thinkers of reformist and individualist sympathies looked back to him as a forerunner, and modern scholars have seen in his celebration of the childlike heart and of unforced authenticity affinities with currents in Western thought. His critique of the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of official virtue remains recognisable to readers in any age.

He is remembered as one of the most original and fearless minds of the Ming, a man who sacrificed comfort and ultimately his life for the freedom to say what he believed. His books, once regarded as dangerous enough to burn, are now studied as major monuments of Chinese intellectual history and as a source of enduring questions about sincerity, authority and the self.

See also

• Neo-Confucianism
• Ming dynasty
• Chinese philosophy
• Vernacular literature