Manipulating fate: ming in Chinese political culture

My work mainly focuses on the use of ming in political texts and contexts to see its functioning in political situations where legitimacy was at stake. The foundations for this could be found in the major source on political ming, the Book of Documents . In my reading of the Documents, I single out key characteristics of ming. First of all, the delegation of authority it implied as well as the role accorded to the people. Considering those aspects, ming is shown as a political theory dealing with the innate brokenness of political reality. Two other aspects of ming as a system to manage change are drawn from separate case studies, which show how Chinese political culture referred back to the classics, and in particular the Documents. The first is the need for verification that one was truly the holder of ming. This is shown in what I identify as a \u27parody\u27 of legitimation: Ban Gu\u27s history of the usurpation of Wang Mang. The management of change becomes only clear if this is read as a caricature which magnifies elements that are actually inherent to ming. Ming was the centre not only of a theory of legitimacy, but also of history. The second case study shows ming was conceived as an entity in time. I look at one of the last instances the Mandate of Heaven was publicly claimed, not in China but by Kojong of Korea. This foreign, marginal setting makes it easier to grasp the deliberateness and originality of the use of the political instrument ming. While earlier studies have interpreted this episode as an instance of conservative official nationalism, I show how it was actually part of, or at least consciously harked back to an older tradition of the reinterpretation of Chinese political thought in Choso˘˘n Korea. Neither was it conservative from a world historical perspective, since the court tried to position Korea as an independent state by proclaiming the king as emperor and holder of the mandate. King Kojong\u27s proclamation as Emperor shows most clearly that the political ming did not necessarily have to imply stagnation