Enlightenment Under Autocracy: The Origins of Liberalism in China

This paper studies how ideas emphasizing individual moral agency shape political behavior under autocracy by tracing the rise of Wang Yangming’s School of Mind in late imperial China. Using a new dataset of over 24,000 historical texts from 1000 to 1900, we measure regional exposure with two indicators: the frequency of core concepts and the count of associated authors. We also introduce a semantic similarity measure that compares local texts to Wang Yangming’s writings. A difference-in-differences design exploiting the staggered introduction of public lectures shows that exposure rises after a prefecture’s first lecture, with effects that persist in subsequent cohorts. Prefectures with higher exposure were more likely to produce reformist leaders in the Donglin Movement (1604–1627). Under the Qing (1644–1911), public lecturing was curtailed and the intellectual agenda shifted, so the lecture channel that helped seed Yangming learning in the Ming largely disappears from the record. Using contemporary survey data from 2010, we nevertheless find that detectable traces remain: residents in historically exposed prefectures express stronger support for the right to discuss public affairs and for limiting government involvement in private affairs. Together, the results link Yangming learning to reformist mobilization among elites and to long-run variation in attitudes toward political voice and the appropriate scope of government.