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'Tis the season to be jolly, so I figure what better time to ramble on about suicide? Thus I present: The Chinese Political Deathwish Thread (1/n)
There’s an idea that runs through a lot of texts – and they’re usually legalist or legalist-adjacent for… reasons – that getting horribly murdered is not necessarily a Bad Thing. https://twitter.com/StatesWarring/status/1275315341682339840
There are two related sets of justifications for this: 1. That if in order to live your best life you have to take huge risks and no one's lucky every time. 2. That offering good advice in a fallen world is a dangerous business.
The former is a central theme in the Salt and Iron Discourses: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=xwomen/texts/yantie.xml&style=xwomen/xsl/dynaxml.xsl&chunk.id=d2.21&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d2.24&doc.lang=bilingual
You also see a lot of examples in Sima Qian. The most famous is probably Zhufu Yan, who said, “A real man lives eating from bronze cauldrons or dies by being boiled alive in one.” I.e. “get rich or die trying”.
Sima Qian’s own life offered an interesting inversion of the principle: he refrained from committing suicide (the better option, in his case) and accepted castration also driven by an immortal longing: he had to finish his book.
(Btw, the letter to Ren An is a beautiful work of literature, but it was written in response to a desperate message from prison in which Ren An begs any friends he has to get him out. If I’d been him and received this by way of reply, I’d have wanted to punch Sima Qian.)
The conventional Confucian viewpoint was more moderate (also, it has to be said, more self-serving if you were a poor scholar): propounding good doctrines in an evil world will mean that you end up poor and powerless, but hopefully not actually dead. https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=1301
However, Confucius *did actually risk his life* on his travels, and Xunzi gives an anecdote about this that attributes to him a viewpoint that’s much closer to the Sima Qian one: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=12813
It’s kind of long to translate, but there’s a pithy sendoff: “If you have never had to live in hiding, it is because your ideas are not far-reaching. If you have never had to flee for your life, it is because your vision is not wide-ranging.” https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=12813
Weirdly, we find a similar take in the place we might least expect it: in the Han Feizi. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu:8080/exist/cocoon/xwomen/texts/hanfei/d2.42/1/0/bilingual
Though the historical Han Fei almost certainly never said this or anything like it, the fact that someone - presumably on his side - thought it reasonable to attribute it to him shows the level of overlap between the two versions of the concept.
(There are genuine moments of foreshadowing in which he walks over his own grave in the "original" chapters, but they don’t hammer the point home to the same degree. Notably this: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu:8080/exist/cocoon/xwomen/texts/hanfei/d2.11/1/0/bilingual)
Unsurprisingly, it’s the Confucian version of the concept that’s had a greater literary posterity. Bureaucrats feeling like their talents haven’t been recognised by the hierarchy from Jia Yi down to today have always loved this kind of content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jia_Yi#:~:text=Jia%20Yi%20was%20known%20for,himself%20after%20being%20politically%20exiled
“My civil service career’s going badly and I'm not necessarily going to die over it but I *am* going to write some really mopey poetry about how unfair it is” is a whole literary genre.
There are even a few proponents of the more violent version. A while ago I commented that Wu Qi (shot to death at a funeral) doesn’t get the appreciation he deserves, @N13pUzBJObOw3Ex replied with this (modern Chinese so you can just hit translate): https://twitter.com/N13pUzBJObOw3Ex/status/1322109230954917891
And yes, modern Confucians tend to see the fact that many legalists died horribly as a huge own. From this perspective, however, I'd suggest that what they're effectively saying is "No one had enough faith in our ideas to risk annoying any entrenched interests for them."
