ABSTRACT
What dynasties needed was the poetry of ching-t'ien, its aura of social equity. It beautified their chiin-t'ien efforts to stop recurrence of the truth that had passed as ching-t'ien, the feudal deprivation of the public power. And Confucian landowners, hurt by chiin-t'ien pressures, decried the latter as quasi-Ch'in or Legalist, recalling the infamous liquidators of the ching-t'ien system. Either way, whether as the State's excuse or the gentry's shaming of the State's force, ching-t'ien came down as the highest ideal of polity. The 'Ming History' records a scholar's unequivocal statement that, for ultimate peace in the Empire, ching-t'ien had to be put into practice. Hsien-t'ien, field limitation, would not do; chiin-shui, tax equalization, would not do. 31 And at the end of Ch'ing, when foreign ideals insistently claimed attention, it was for the most part ching-t'ien, with merely its faint classical intimations, not the amply documented chiin-t'ien, which Chinese thinkers identified with Western egalitarianisms. It may have been precisely the elusive historical status of ching-t'ien which made it so adaptable. It was so much better a metaphor-the distillation of 'socialism', for example-when historically, prosaically, it could not be simply itself.
