Dong Zhongshu, a "Confucian" Heritage and the Chunqiu Fanlu

16 introduction
such as Zhufu Yan 
主父偃, which eludes me, as does a certainty in 
relating particular events or reports of the histories to a fully under-
stood political situation. In company with other writers she accepts, or 
assumes, that full power lay in the hands of emperors such as Jingdi 
(r. 157–141 BCE) or the young Wudi (reigned 141–87) immediately 
after his accession, or perhaps with the Empress Dowager, and later 
Grand Empress Dowager, Dou 
竇. Such may well be the way in which 
Sima Tan, Sima Qian 
司馬遷 and Ban Gu 班固 represented an ideal 
of imperial sovereignty and intended their tale to be understood, but 
the situation would seem to be far more complex. Certainly there is 
reason to show that Jingdi was capable of ruthless actions. If so, and if 
he enjoyed full power, one can hardly see how the Empress Dowager’s 
predilection for Huang-Lao exercised an influence on the highly active 
or even forceful policies of his reign. There is little to show that the 
decrees of 141 to 87 BCE derived from the mind of the young Wudi 
or that he played a leading role in the activities that marked his reign. 
The part that he played in the crisis that beset the dynasty in 91–90 
can hardly argue that he was a man of forceful personality or decisive 
character.
One further matter of importance concerns the writings ascribed to 
Dong Zhongshu. More cautiously than others may deem to be neces-
sary, the present writer is in no way convinced that the Chunqiu fanlu, 
whatever its date, necessarily represents Dong Zhongshu’s teaching.
50
The biography records that there were in total 123 pian of his expressed 
interpretations of the jing 
經 and the memorials that he had submit-
ted, and the bibliographical list of Han shu chapter 30 duly enters 
an item as Dong Zhongshu bai er shi san pian 
董仲舒百二十三篇 in 
precisely the same form as for other persons such as Gongsun Hong 
公孫弘 and Zhuang Zhu 莊助.
51
Such mentions would seem to refer 
to no more than a collection of miscellaneous writings, rather than 
to an ordered series of chapters on identified and cohesive themes. 
Hsü Fu-kuan writes that no such work had been made in Dong’s life-
time, but in her repeated references to ‘the Tung Chung-shu’, Profes-
sor Queen leaves the impression of a duly authored and completed 
‘book’.
52
A publication of 2005, which is designed as a ‘reader on 
50
See Anne Cheng, ibid., p. 27.
51
HS 56, p. 2525, 30, p. 1727, HSBZ 30.31b.
52
Hsü Fu-kuan, ibid. p. 307; Queen, ibid., pp. 39–41.

 introduction 
17
traditional Chinese culture’ repeats the generally accepted view with-
out a caveat, including the statement that Wudi ‘under the influence 
of Dong Zhongshu, adopted Confucianism as the state ideology’.
53
Two contributors to a recent corporate work on Chinese religion are 
ready to accept Dong’s authorship of the Chunqiu fanlu as against the 
highly cautious and critical view of another.
54
For his part, Mark Csik-
szentmihalyi carefully avoids applying the term ‘Confucian’ to Dong 
Zhongshu.
55
We may now turn to the attention paid to Dong Zhongshu recently, 
as and when his name appears in connection with the recent promo-
tion of the idea that a ‘New Confucianism’ plays a prominent role in 
the intellectual authority of post Maoist China. In a series of studies 
of the way the idea has been fostered in the late twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, Dr Sylvia Chan writes (2003):
56
Li [Zehou] contends that the development of Confucianism made by 
Confucians in the Han dynasty, particularly by Dong Zhongshu, was the 
second period. The daotong theory, however, does not recognise them 
as authentic transmitters of Confucianism at all. This view is, of course, 
hard to justify on historical grounds, for Han Confucians were responsi-
ble for elevating Confucianism to state orthodoxy in the reign of the Han 
Emperor Wu Di (
漢武帝 r. 141–87 BC), in which position Confucian-
ism remained for the next two thousand years. Dong Zhongshu’s eclec-
ticism, however, had drawn criticism from Confucians even before the 
daotong theory had become established. His cosmology borrows heavily 
from the pseudo-scientific theory of yin-yang and the five elements, and 
even includes superstitious beliefs such as portents, while his social and 
political theory is extremely authoritarian. One may well wonder what 
53
Jan L. Hagman, in Victor H. Mair, Nancy S. Steinhardt and Paul R. Goldin (eds.), 

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