Wang Yangming and Huang Zongxi, both natives of Yuyao in eastern Zhejiang, were not contemporaries. Wang (1472-1529) lived in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and is widely considered an exemplary scholar even today. Huang Zongxi (1610-1695) was a scholar of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Wang and Huang are representatives of the scholars of eastern Zhejiang. They were not scholars who knew everything about theories but almost nothing about the real world. Wang Yangming was a successful governor and general who cracked down on armed rebellions fast and solved economic and financial problems almost miraculously and brought law and order to regions under his watch. Huang Zongxi studied economics deeply and came up with wise observations on land, finance, state governance, and interwoven relations of the three. Modern scholars consider Huang’s studies valuable because he saw how a dynasty could fall apart due to failures.

Wang’s career as governor and general is exemplary indeed. In 1510, he served as a county magistrate in Jiangxi Province. New taxation introduced by the provincial governor smashed the county’s economy after a severe drought and a pandemic. As death tolls spiked, refugees organized themselves into gangster groups and plundered villages for survival. Wang investigated the crisis and abolished the taxation policy and brought the county back to law and order.

From 1516 to 1519, Wang was appointed to work as a governor in the south of Jiangxi Province where armed bandits had been a disaster for decades. It took Wang only one and half a year to smash organized crime. Most people may marvel at Wang’s military talent, but the military supplies and logistics Wang put together was a decisive factor of the victory. Wang set up a neighborhood administrative system in the region. The rigorous system effectively cut off the resources of the local bandits, without spending a penny from the government treasury. Li Zhi (1527-1602), a famed scholar of the Ming, pointed out that Wang Yangming’s approach was an ingenious design when the government in financial difficulty was not able to fund a large-scale military campaign and that the system might be considered a bad move that would bring harm to people, but some critics were not aware that it worked effectively and efficiently under special circumstances. A look into all the reports and proposals Wang as a government official submitted to the court reveals that all the texts were about people and their welfares.

Huang Zongxi didn’t have a chance to work as a government official. In his prime years, he fought the Qing (1644-1911) with the last Ming resisters in southern China and after the defeat retired to a life of scholarly pursuit. He is best known as a historian and the founder of the Eastern Zhejiang School. What made him famous was, the greatest book he wrote in 1663. The book, which critiques despotism and argues for a form of limited government that is built upon laws, political protection of academic freedom, good institutional designs, and separation of governmental powers, was highly recognized in the 1990s in China when scholars reexamined the text and discovered something academically and practically important which is labeled as the Law of Huang Zongxi. The law describes the accumulated damage to a dynasty’s dynamics when more and more taxes were levied. Huang’s study of the taxation history of past dynasties before his time shows that though a newly founded dynasty might reduce taxes by simplifying the tax code, many other taxes would soon emerge and multiply, which would eventually topple a dynasty. Whether Huang is right or wrong, his study is highly recognized as scholars of today look into the effects of a taxation system on the welfares of a nation. Some scholars have examined the taxes of the Ming Dynasty and discovered that taxes in the Ming were inadequately levied so that the public works were not fully supported. But it doesn’t matter whether Huang is incorrect or not. No other books in the history of China were like the one he authored. That is, no other Confucian scholars in the country back then were like him, a scholar who scrutinized the taxation systems of past dynasties and came up with eye-opening observations and discussions.