Sublime

General Zhang Zhizhong

Chiang loyalist Wu Zhongxin

So long as the scholar-gentry aspired to bureaucratic advancement through the examination system, with its classical syllabus and Confucian ideology, and while China was governed from walled cities with an ultra-loyal Manchu army in reserve, rebellion was unlikely to spread far or last long. The early emperors also insisted upon frugal expenditure

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.

The primary role of a Chinese emperor was to safeguard the frontier against the nomadic irruptions that threatened to wreck (physically and politically) his complex agrarian world.

According to Tu Wei-ming, even Dong Zhongshu, the Han dynasty scholar identified as the architect of official Confucianism, predicated his theory of cosmic correlation with earthly events on the assumption that the emperor harmonized his rule morally and ritually with the cosmic process. Outer kingliness could not be achieved without inner sageline

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability. From that point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the admiral Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.

The China scholar William Callahan, who has launched a critique of Zhao’s conception, suggests that his conception of tianxia as a top-down project of bringing order to a chaotic or potentially chaotic world cannot be derived from the thinkers Zhao uses such as Laozi and Zhuangzi.