Session Name: Family, Clans, Friends, and Co-Religionists: Chinese Community Networks from the 16th -20th centuries
3 - Deploying the Past to Change the Future: Fan Zhongyan (989-1052) in the Philanthropic Innovations of Yu Zhi (1809-74)
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract In southeastern China large scale corporate management of assets was rare until the late Ming dynasty and did not become common until the mid-Qing. Those who implemented these novel practices, however, rarely failed to invoke the precedent of the celebrated Northern Song statesman and Suzhou native Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052). It was Fan who first articulated the rationale for collective welfare within common surname groups and saw that the construction and maintenance of physical infrastructure could serve as a focus for collective identity. Summoning Fan’s memory simultaneously concealed the social implications of organizational innovation and provided a stamp of orthodoxy for group self-interest outside the confines of the state. This paper examines a key moment in the transformation of late imperial philanthropy—the period immediately preceding, during, and following the Taiping Civil War (1851–64)—through the treatment of Fan in the work of the influential moralist Yu Zhi 余治.(1809–74). Fan was effectively the patron saint of Yu’s most influential work, Record of Attaining [Goodness] (Deyi lu 得一錄, 1869). With Fan providing sanction for the entire work, Yu then employed paragons of major local patrilines that were powerful in his own day for the subcategories of philanthropic activity on which each individual chapter focused. In this way, Yu’s validated local elite’s desire to see themselves as the Fan Zhongyans of their own day. In doing so, Yu also made these elites more amenable to funding his own distinctive philanthropic vision.
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