Purify the World: A Discourse on Confucian Texts in Ch’ing-liu Movement

Huai-chen Kan
National Taiwan University

Ch’ing-liu, literally clean-stream, used to be the self-image of Chinese literati. This concept can be traced back to the so-called Ch’ing-liu Movement in the last years of the Late Han Dynasty. Literati who were treated as a regional group during the Ch’un-ch’iu and Warring States periods became a national class after the Movement. Since then, literati from different regions of the country built their identity, which was based on Confucian learning. Historically, a group’s collectivity is formed mainly by political movements. Such movements aim to articulate a frame to classify people. In this way, collective identity is created. The literati who promoted the Ch’ing-liu Movement used Confucian texts as cultural resources to build a new political order. Through this discourse, literati became the ruling class de jure and justified their political engineering such as “purifying the world.” This article will analyze how the Ch’ing-liu Movement interpreted the classification of the people in Confucian texts in order to find out how Chinese hermeneutics was created and practiced by members of political movements such as the Ch’ing-liu.