Dissent and Cultures of Debate in premodern China and Korea

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Confucian traditions are often described as having imbued East Asian cultures with hierarchical thinking and a concomitant penchant for obedience and submission, thus discouraging the voicing of dissent. According to this line of argument, Confucian ethics encumber the practice of open discussion dedicated to establishing what is true or right through the (joint) scrutiny of the validity of arguments. Confucianism is thus blamed with having impeded scientific and social progress; politically, these views are used to mitigate demands for the granting of the right to free debate in China.This project will provide a more nuanced understanding of practices and notions of dissent and debate among Confucian literati in pre-modern China and Korea (where, different from Japan, Confucianism was politically institutionalized). We assume that voicing dissent and conducting controversies were established practice in the societies concerned, and that Confucianism (a debated but for our concern indispensable notion) held resources for the provenance of a culture of debate and uninhibited argument. While not without contradictions and ambivalences, and partly obfuscated by political and social authoritarianism, this culture of debate constituted an important aspect of Confucian literati’s self-concept and thus merits careful reconstruction.We aim to contribute to this by investigating the ways in which controversial debates were conducted and evaluated by Confucian literati during different historical phases and in different socio-cultural environments. We will a) explore the early history of this “culture of debate” by identifying and analysing the central sources from the Chinese Zhanguo period, given that these sources provided models and precedents to later literati discourse; b) examine exemplary cases of literati debates from Song, Ming and Qing China and from Chosǒn Korea for their social set-up and the attitudes of the discussants towards controversy. Our case studies cover a range of historical situations which are all characterized by a (Neo-)Confucian educational background of (most of) the literati elite but differ markedly in the interpretation and the authoritativeness of the (Neo-)Confucian canon. We will pay special attention to literati meta-discourse about the legitimacy of dissent and controversy; c) collect and analyse the keywords used in this discourse, with an eye to the role of the resources from the Zhanguo period and to whether, and if so to which extent other cultural resources (such as the Buddhist tradition of debate) come into play. The resulting monograph, co-authored by the two applicants and the employed researcher, will contribute to a de-orientalized understanding of Confucian-based cultures of communication. It may also have some methodological value as an attempt to study “Chinese” and “Korean” historical materials in close conjunction without either dichotomizing or conflating the respective socio-cultural entities.