Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State

To win the approval of China’s native elites, Qing China’s new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norman Kutcher’s study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state–unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded–quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.