Celebrating New Sinology

眾女嫉余之蛾眉兮
謠諑謂余以善淫

The Ji Clan at Mar-a-Lago, a chapter in our Contra Trump series, featured a poem by Jianli. Drawing on classical literary forms and allusions found in China’s hallowed language of moral approbation, the poet expressed his disdain for the burlesque by America’s late-imperial political class — in this particular instance, the Gatsby-like revelries organised by US President Donald J. Trump’s minions at his detached palace in Florida at Halloween 2025.

The Ji clan is a reference to a passage about a wilful and reckless ruler in The Analects of Confucius 《論語》that is famously encapsulated in the expression 禍起蕭牆 huò qǐ xiāo qiáng — ‘the real menace lurks within the walls of the palace’.

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Here we feature Cherishing Virtue 懷德, another work by Jianli 漸離 (Chen Li 陳力, aka 陳漸離) in New Poems Inspired by the Book of Songs 新詩經體詩, a cycle of works that recalls The Book of Songs《詩經》, one of the Confucian classics. The language, turns of phrase and metaphorical ambiance of that classic live on in Chinese, and in China, today. A bilingual version of Jianli’s poem is followed by a line-by-line analysis by Ren Jingjing 任晶晶, a cultural critic at China Thought Express.

The editors of Chinese Thought Express tell us that their translations involve the use of AI. As we have previously noted, China Heritage is a cottage industry and, as such, it is underpinned by a more hallowed form of AI — the ‘Artisan’s Intelligence’. With the kind permission of our editor colleagues at Chinese Thought Express we have used our nitpicking hands-on approach to recast their translations both of Jianli’s poem and of Ren Jingjing’s commentary. Caveat lector.

My thanks to Reader #1 for reviewing the draft of this chapter and pointing out a number of typographical errors and infelicities. Obdurate mistakes are my responsibility.

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Since first advocating New Sinology in 2005, I have encouraged students of China — be they in the People’s Republic, Taiwan or overseas — to embrace the three main linguistic and cultural registers of traditional China, the republican era and the post-1949 party-state. Such an ecumenical approach to the Chinese world is grounded in historical reality while it also defys the spatial and temporal limitations demanded of narrow orthodoxy, no matter what that orthodoxy may be.

As we suggested in the editorial introduction to The Ji Clan at Mar-a-Lago, it behooves serious students of China’s increasingly global culture to familiarise themselves with the linguistic landscape and the world of traditional tropes of the kind employed by the poet Jianli. Among other things, you should familiarise yourself with the Spring-and-Autumn writing style 春秋筆法 attributed to Confucius and his literary executors. This style of writing created a readymade lexicon that allowed writers — historians, court officials, poets, writers, story-tellers — to judiciously select words, phrases and expressions that could depict all actions and ideas in moral terms. Today, as much as in the past, students of China should also familiarise themselves with a pantheon of quasi-fictional sages, exemplars and heroes, as well as with the crowded gallery of political ghouls that has been a touchstone of malevolence for millennia. Important, too, are texts like The Book of Songs and The Songs of the South, both of which Jianli draws on in Cherishing Virtue, the poem featured below.

Jianli draws particular inspiration from The Book of Songs, one of the six Confucian classics and what C.H. Wang called ‘the fountainhead of Chinese literature’. An anthology of 305 poems, the collection was supposedly edited by Confucius from a corpus of some three thousand works for the edification of his disciples and it would be required reading for nearly two thousand years, during which time it was regarded as a scripture rather than literature. Its style, diction and language continue to inform and influence modern Chinese in a myriad of ways.

As Stephen Owen observes,

The “Great Preface” [大序] to the Classic of Poetry was the most authoritative statement on the nature and function of poetry in traditional China. Not only was it the beginning of every student’s study of the Classic of Poetry from the Eastern Han through the Song, its concerns and terminology became an essential part of writing about poetry and learning about poetry. This was the one text on the nature of poetry known to everyone from the end of the Han on.

To quote Owen’s translation of the ‘Great Preface’, itself a seminal text in the classical canon:

‘The poem is that to which what is intently on the mind (志) goes. In the mind, it is “being intent” (志); coming out in language, it is a “poem” 詩. The affections are stirred within and take on form in words. If words alone are inadequate, we speak it out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing it. If singing is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance it and our feet tap it.

‘Feelings emerge in sounds; when those sounds have patterning, they are called “tones.” The tones of a well-managed age are at rest and happy: its government is balanced. The tones of an age of turmoil are bitter and full of anger: its government is perverse. The tones of a ruined state are filled with lament and brooding: its people are in difficulty.

‘Thus to correctly present achievements and failures, to move Heaven and Earth, to stir the gods and spirits, there is nothing more appropriate than poetry. By it the former kings managed the relations between husbands and wives, perfected the respect due to parents and superiors, gave depth to human relations, beautifully taught and transformed the people, and changed local customs.’

詩者，志之所之也。在心為志，發言為詩。情動於中而形於言，言之不足，故嗟嘆之；嗟嘆之不足，故永歌之；永歌之不足，不知手之舞之、足之蹈之也。情發於聲，聲成文謂之音。治世之音安以樂，其政和；亂世之音怨以怒，其政乖；亡國之音哀以思，其民困。故正得失，動天地，感鬼神，莫近於詩。先王以是經夫婦，成孝敬，厚人倫，美教化，移風俗。

‘The tones of a ruined state are filled with lament and brooding: its people are in difficulty’ — 亡國之音哀以思，其民困 — is a line that will resonate with readers of Jianli, a poet who consciously inherits the abundant and vital cultural heritage of The Book of Songs while extending it in unexpected ways. In reading his poems, we are, yet again, ‘intersecting with eternity’, that is, the eternity of the Chinese written word and its vast realm of images, ideas and metaphors. Jianli’s poetry pays due accord to the welter of contemporary events and he subsumes the polyphony of the mytho-poetic-historical past while addressing the possibilities of the future.

So, I recommend that you put aside, if only for a moment, all of that idle speculation about the inner workings of the party-state-army, those heady claims about the golden future and military strife between rising and fading powers. Give yourselves over to a modern poem couched in an ancient diction, one that will divert, entertain and educate, not just today but long into the future.

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This is a chapter both in Celebrating New Sinology, a series that marks the twentieth anniversary of my advocacy of New Sinology, and Contra Trump, a running commentary on the desuetude of the United States and Washington’s unacknowledged convergence with the autocracy of China’s party-state. For related work in Contra Trump, see:

• The Ji Clan at Mar-a-Lago; and,
• Hemail Peril.

Cherishing Virtue is a meditation on contemporary American politics and, by inference, an indictment of prominent Chinese Trump Maggots 川粉, whether they be in America, China, or elsewhere. Despite their furious opposition to the autocracy of Beijing, this clutch of apostates long ago sought succour in the illiberalism of MAGA. In the opening lines of Cherishing Virtue, Jianli indirectly refers to the craven attitudes of such befuddled minds, his oblique criticism drawing on Li sao 《離騷》, a classic attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原, China’s ‘archpoet’. Qu Yuan’s deathless work also provides us with the Chinese rubric for this chapter of Celebration New Sinology:

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
25 November 2025

[* Qu Yuan, Li sao, in David Hawkes, The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets, Penguin Classics, 1985, p.70, lines 87-88.]

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Cherishing Virtue as an Indictment

《懷德》

Jianli 漸離

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A Commentary on Cherishing Virtue by Jianli

Ren Jingjing 任晶晶

Translation revised and annotated by Geremie R. Barmé

 

The fight over whether the files from the Jeffrey Epstein case should be released in full has turned into a political brawl in Washington and throughout the US media. On one side is Congress, pushing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the Department of Justice to disclose almost all Epstein-related investigative records and flight logs within a set time frame, and further forbids the redacting of the names of public officials and prominent figures merely because disclosure might be “embarrassing, reputationally damaging, or politically sensitive.” On the other side are legitimate concerns about privacy, the protection of victims, and the integrity of judicial procedure.

[Note: We would note that the ‘third side’ is, of course, Donald Trump’s craven need to cover his tracks and those of a stratum described by Anand Giridharadas as an ‘anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.’]

Recently, the House Oversight Committee made public some twenty thousand pages of emails and financial documents obtained from Epstein’s estate, which appear to implicate Donald Trump as well as a roster of political and business elites. A new round of political shock followed immediately. On 18 November, the House of Representatives finally passed a bill by a vote of 427 to 1 requiring the government to release the files related to Epstein.

These events form the backdrop to Jianli’s poem Cherishing Virtue 懷德. In twenty-four lines, the poem turns a dispute over right and wrong in the arena of public opinion into an indictment — an inquiry into virtue, public opinion and the lust for power.

Initially, the poet repeatedly asks, “Why this thicket of prosecution? Look only to your own heart” [胡為乎株林/ 從汝心], before going on to declare that “Mist-haze cloaks the Purple Springs,/ the Imperial City reduced to ruination” [紫泉煙霞/ 蕪城帝家]. The poet ultimately passes judgement: “Precarious as stacked eggs, fragile is your rule, / despite all of that domineering clamour” [危若累卵/ 聲色王霸].

It takes aim at the ruling class that treats sensual pleasure and spectacle as the kingly Way, and drags them into the dock. To read Cherishing Virtue at a moment like this, it is obvious that the poem is not some affected artefact of revivalist classicism, one that is far removed from reality, but an example of the poet’s unique creation — a poem in a New Book of Songs 新詩經 that locates the “judgment of virtue” and the “sensual spectacle of power” within a framework of commentary on current affairs.

A Line-by-Line Analysis of the Poem

Cherishing Virtue is composed of three movements, each eight lines long. Four-character sentences carry the action forward and on two occasions three- and five-character lines act as an accusation and, in one instance, a four-character line is followed by a three-character staccato. Despite (although perhaps because of) these dramatic caesura, the overall rhythm of the piece remains taut throughout:

This first section is an interrogation followed by a defence. The opening four lines build up the case with the words “jealous” 嫉, “slanders” 謠諑, “resentful” 嫉, “accusation” 怨謗 and reveal the emotional core of the poem: it suggests that at the heart of “moral indignation” lies an envy of “moth brows” 蛾眉 and “wealth” 富貴.

“Why then this ensnaring thicket?/ Look only to your envious heart” [胡為乎株林 / 從汝心] is the first decisive turn in the piece. Why, exactly, must someone be driven into this “grove of stumps and trunks” 株林, a proverbial site where people are exposed and judged? Is it really done in the name of justice, or is it “following your own heart” [從汝心] — an impulse that comes from within and from the onlookers’ own hidden desires? The closing judgement — “This knotty entanglement — your heart has set the pace” [匪適株林 / 從汝心] — is the poet’s first adjudication: the place is less a real wood than a projection of the observer’s prurience.

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[Note:

See James Legge’s translation of “Zhu Lin” 株林 in the Book of Songs, a poem traditionally thought to be about an intrigue involving Duke Ling and a lady of Zhu Lin.

《株林》

— The Odes of Chen, The Book of Poetry, trans James Legge.]

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The second paired stanzas of Cherishing Virtue repeat the same call-and-response structure of the first:

“The startled pheasant lifts wing to fly, the echoes of his call, low and high” [雄雉于飛 / 上下其音] is all but a direct quotation “Male Pheasant” 雄雉 in The Book of Songs in which the cock is an embodiment of gaudy display and allure. Traditionally, however, it is an image linked to the junzi 君子, the “gentleman” or superior individual. Here, however, the poet follows with the line “The noble man once stood so tall, yet now he betrays sincere hearts” [展矣君子 / 辜負衷情] and in an instant the ancient image cracks wide open: the superior man who ought to stand upright is actually the person who fails those who have trusted him.

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[Note: The original of “Male Pheasant” 雄雉 from The Odes of Bei in The Book of Songs《詩經·邶風·雄雉》, with a translation by James Legge, reads as follows:

Legge remarks that in this poem “a wife deplores the absence of her husband, and celebrates his virtue”.]

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Once again the poem poses the question: “Why then this thicket here? / Look only to your lustfulness” [胡為乎株林 / 從汝欲]. Compared with the earlier “your heart”, this is more direct and the subject’s “lustfulness” [欲, wishes or desires] is named directly. The final two lines turn the scenario on its head: it turns out that those who whip up desire, dressing it up as righteous indignation, are in fact the ones who truly know what is “not virtuous behaviour” [不知德行] while the virtue of the accused is evident: as the poem insists, “all see, none blind to the evidence” [眾目昭彰].

The final section of the poem — two four-line stanzas — turns our focus to the heart of power:

In the couplet “Mist-haze cloaks the Purple Springs, / the Imperial City reduced to ruination” [紫泉煙霞 / 蕪城帝家] both “Purple Springs” 紫泉 and “Imperial City”, literally the “emperor’s home” 帝家 , are referring to the Great Within and the locus of political power. The expression “weed-grown city” 蕪城 — given as “ruination” in the translation — brings to mind “Rhapsody on the Two Capitals” 兩都賦 by Ban Gu 班固 of the Han dynasty, a poem that has been a source of images and expressions that depict imperial excess and political desuetude for nearly two millennia.

Rotten grass, tiny fireflies, drooping willows, evening crows — all of these images denoting decline and decay, they offer a light touch for the depiction of a heavy subject. In this case, the flickering glow of fireflies seen as they rise from the decay is no real light at all and the crows that perch in the willows at dusk are harbingers of doom.

“Moss and berry none can count, better to have clothes stained than not” 莓苔莫數 / 霑衣勝無 reads like a moral aside. The moss stains on the figurative robe recall Su Dongpo 蘇東坡, the Song-dynasty scholar-official, who wrote about his delight in “green moss reaching the hem [of his robe],” although here the poet turns the ancient reference on its head: the stained robe suggest that one is being forced to confront the sodden reality. How better to have been touched by that earth than to ignore the truth while keeping one’s garment spotless.

The final judgement — “Precarious as stacked eggs, fragile is your rule / despite all of that lascivious domineering clamour” [危若累卵 / 聲色王霸] — lands heavily. On the surface, a power structure that relies on sensory pleasure and diversions 聲色 — revelries, banquets, libidinous delights — to sustain itself may appear to be grand, but its foundations are “as precarious as eggs piled one on top of another” 危若累卵. This is an ancient image drawn from Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty.

The poem thus moves in three clear steps: first, it exposes the jealousies lurking behind the political rumour mill; secondly, it questions the “gentleman” about his appetites and supposed virtue; and, finally, it passes judgement on the imperial order and its system of “sensual kingship.” By the end, “cherishing virtue” is no longer about cherishing the virtue of some maligned “you”, it is a dirge for a socio-political order mired in sensual diversion and vacuous spectacle.

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From The Book of Songs to a Contemporary Ethical Theater

In form and diction, Cherishing Virtue is a powerful example of what Jianli is attempting in his New Book of Songs poems. Expressions like “the pheasant flies”, “how the gentleman stretches”, “precarious as stacked eggs” and “sound and colour as kingship” are all clear references to hallowed classical usages in The Book of Songs, among other classical Confucian texts. “The pheasant flies”, for instance, comes from the poem “Male Pheasant” (《詩經·國風·邶風》), while “precarious as stacked eggs” [危若累卵] has been used since it first appeared in the ancient Zuo Commentary《左傳》to describe political instability (as we noted earlier, this formulation was taken up by Sima Qian, the Han-dynasty historian). And, from the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BCE), the expression “sound and colour” 聲色 (musical entertainments and sexual indulgence, translated as “lascivious clamour” here) has encapsulated a moral disdain for debauched rulers brought low by bacchanalia.

Jianli does not flaunt these classical references, inserting them instead in his contemporary moral schema. The “male pheasant” of The Book of Songs becomes a “gentleman” who fails those who love him; the idiom “precarious as stacked eggs” is set against “a regime of lascivious clamour”, reading thereby like a verdict on misrule. The “city in ruination” 蕪城, literally, “the weed-overgrown city” and “Purple Springs” transpose old visions of an imperial cityscape onto the ruins of a modern political order.

More importantly, the poem reconfigures a fundamental aspect of The Book of Songs by expressing an ethical view of public affairs in the language of private feeling. Many of the “Airs of the States” 國風 in The Book of Songs appear to be love songs or the laments of women, but, according both to tradition and modern interpretation, they are also metaphors that critique social relationships, political oppression and the breakdown of ritual norms. Cherishing Virtue pursues a similar strategy: superficially its tone is intimate — “jealous of your moth brows”, “when you think of me” — but words like “virtue,” “noble man,” “kingship” and “domination” keep breaking through.

For poets experimenting with forms of “new classicism”, Jianli offers a practical lesson. There is no need to write up real-world issues as editorials in verse; rather, it is possible to embody them into the winsome guise of “love talk”, and let the reader unpack the layers of meaning at their leisure. There is no need to line up obscure allusions; Cherishing Virtue uses a small set of familiar classical images and juxtaposes them with easily recognised contemporary events. For the poet there is no avoidance of political metaphor, either; he folds them  into such images as “moth brows”, the interrogation of the “thicket”, the tag line about the “sound-and-colour domination” and in so doing, he is both tactful and accusatory.

From “Moth Brows” to “Fireflies”: Two Battlefields

The imagery of Cherishing Virtue revolves around a bifurcated perspective. The first is more intimate, focussed around the “you” who is being watched and judged. The second uses as a broader lens, and it focuses on the “noble man”, the “imperial house” and “kingship”.

The opening lines read:

belong to the first focal point. The scene is familiar: envy of beauty, envy of status, gossip framing itself as righteous anger. The phrase “moth brows” is an old, almost tender way of describing a woman’s beauty; “wanton” and “curses” are the old labels used to cut down that beauty.

The poem’s tone here is extremely cool. It does not rush to prove whether “she” is chaste or not. Instead it asks what lies behind the slanders: a jealousy of her appearance, a resentment of her wealth. This is uncomfortably close to the way modern scandals play out. In every public storm over sexual misconduct, especially where women are involved, a familiar set of questions surfaces: Was she a willing participant? Was she motivated by greed? Was she aspiring to “climb up” to power? While the self-righteous talk about morality and justice, in reality, those who take it upon themselves to judge, often focus first on the victim’s “moth brows” and social standing. Cherishing Virtue starts by casting this hypocrisy in relief.

The images of the second focal point cluster around an axis expressed by “the noble man—imperial house—kingship”. The cock-pheasant in flight, with its “voice rising and falling,” is as noted earlier taken from The Book of Songs, where the image carries the weight of elegance and desire. “The noble man once stood so tall” [展矣君子] at first sounds like a straightforward compliment. Yet the following line — “yet failed a true heart’s sigh” [辜負衷情] — turns admiration into an indictment. Here the “noble man” can be read as a specific person, but also as a type: the official, the opinion leader, or the public figure who enjoys a reputation for righteousness.

The third section—“purple springs in mist and smoke; the imperial house a ruined town; rotten grass, fireflies; drooping willows, evening crows”—pulls the view still wider. “Purple springs” evokes the palace park; “imperial house” fixes that association; “ruined city” names decline. Rotten grass that breeds fireflies and dusk crows perched on willows form a textbook “end of dynasty” tableau. The closing “precarious as stacked eggs; sound-and-color kingship” then draws a line under the whole picture: what collapses is not just one person’s virtue, but an entire structure of rule built on pleasure and manipulation.

Read this way, the poem is not only defending a maligned “you” whose virtue is “plain to every eye,” it is tracing how an entire world of “kingship through sound and sex” produces both the temptations and the slanders.

Who Gets Suspected, Who Still “Cherishes Virtue”?

The title Cherishing Virtue《懷德》itself has a hallowed history. There is a line in The Analects of Confucius that reads: “The gentleman cherishes virtue; the petty man cherishes one’s native land” 君子懷德，小人懷土 《論語·里仁篇第四》. To “cherish virtue” is to keep one’s mind on moral character rather than on gain, territory, or comfort.

In the poem, the concept of “cherishing virtue” works on two levels. On the surface, it is about embracing the virtue of a person victimised by rumours and accusations. At a deeper level, however, it asks whether, when someone is being dragged into the “thicket” of public judgment, anyone can really think about virtue at all.

A question is repeated in the first and fourth stanzas — “Why this thicket, why here, why now?” — this is answered first as “Look only to your own heart’s desires” and then as “Look only to your lustfulness”. The questions are directed as much at the accused as at the crowd. When people demand that someone be hauled into that grove to be exposed and shamed, are they driven by a sincere concern for virtue, or by hidden resentments and idle curiosity? Are they asking for what is just, or merely satisfying their own prurience?

The poet then turns his attention to the institutions of power. In a world of “purple springs in mist and smoke” and an “overgrown imperial house”, where “sound-and-colour domination” has been normalised, the entire structure of rule functions as a factory for temptation and concealment. In this context, to focus obsessively on personal vice — or on whether an individual “deserves it” — without addressing the socio-political arrangements that makes it all possible, is itself another collapse into the tangle of slander and grievance.

Thus, the core of this poem is to redraw our ethical coordinates: those who should be subjected to the strictest scrutiny are the ones who hold power and command resources, the world of “kings lost in revelry and domination”. What truly deserves to be “cherished” is the virtue that can still stand out “before the eyes of all” amidst rumour and oppression, rather than longing for the seductive halo attached to power. What really calls for self-examination are the sins driven by the “hearts” and “desires” of the meat-eaters [肉食者], or power-holders — for if you do not want others to know of your dastardly behaviour, then simply don’t engage in it — rather than the endless cover-ups. Once you are cast into the “thicket of prosecution”, fearful missteps and all of your flailing serve no purpose. In Cherishing Virtue the poet evokes a classical metaphorical landscape that  resonates with the Epstein farrago.

At the same time, the final lines — “Precarious as stacked eggs, fragile is your rule, / despite all of that domineering clamour.” — reflect the fragility of the skein of power interwoven with pleasure. In the Epstein case, the disturbing thing is not just the passenger manifest of the Lolita Express, it is the fact that a system built on sexual exploitation by those with power and money operated with impunity for many years among billionaires, politicians, academics and royalty, while prosecutors, regulators and institutions looked the other way. From that perspective, “cherishing virtue” is not a plea for leniency towards all public figures, and it certainly does not suggest a defence of any of the abusers. It is a demand for discrimination: to distinguish those whose character is “plain to every eye” but who are targeted by jealousy and rumour, in contrast to those who are the architects and beneficiaries of “that lascivious domineering clamour”.

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[Note: Here Jianli’s poem, and Ren Jingjing’s explication, rhyme with another observation made by Anand Giridharadas:

‘At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.’]

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The Responsibility of Literature in an Age of Leaks

Cherishing Virtue reminds readers living that, when talking about the cavalcade of people and events, it is easy to stop with the question “Did he do something wrong?”. and to go no further. More challenging by far is the more fundamental issue: “Does he/she have any virtue?” It is easy to be borne along in the heady currents of popular opinion, far harder yet to discern what “all eyes have long seen clearly.” The “virtue” in Cherishing Virtue is neither a flimsy public persona nor a purely abstract ideal. It is about the sort of moral character that, despite the rumour mill and various pressures, remains legible to ordinary observers.

In a case as politicised as that of Jeffrey Epstein, such judgments are even harder. Distrust of the powerful is justified; partisan warfare ensures that every revelation and every defence is quickly tagged as being “for” one side or “against” the other. The line “all eyes see, none blind to the evidence” [眾目昭彰] points towards a minimum standard: whatever one’s political sympathies, there has to be a willingness to acknowledge complexity, to resist reducing a person to “a name on a list”, and to refuse to assume that superficial opulence and personal wealth is necessarily reflective of innocence or of guilt.

Here it is worth returning to that last line — “despite the dominant entertainment” [聲色王霸], literally “sound-and-colour kingship.” Epstein’s network fascinates people in part because it makes the hidden backstage goings on of “sound and colour”—parties, mansions, private islands, sexual exploits — visible. It brings into view the machinery that is usually obscured by carefully curated diversions. The question for literature is whether the kind of poetry that Jianli is pursuing can offer ways of seeing and insights that delves into something deeper than the superficial.

[Note: The line 聲色王霸 “sound-and-colour kingship”, translated in the poem as “despite the dominant entertainment” is made up of 聲色, an expression for sensual diversions and indulgences, while 王霸 indicates the domineering mindset of an autocratic ruler.]

This is what Cherishing Virtue attempts. Between “sound and colour” 聲色 and “autocracy” 王霸, it suggests there lies a narrow path of “virtue” 德. The poem does not tiptoe around questions related to “a proclivity for wantonness” 善淫 “moth brows” 蛾眉, or the diversion of “sound and colour” 聲色, nor does it hesitate to talk about the imperial in terms of “overgrown cities” 蕪城 and “palace springs” 紫泉, but the focal point remains on “virtue” 德, an ancient term that also means “power born of innate values” [a term which is somewhat similar to the Latin term virtus]. The poet is asking:

• Do the rumour-mongers have any virtue?
• Does the person under attack have any virtue?
• When the gentleman betrays sincere feeling, where does his virtue go?
• When rulers drown in pleasure, do they not drag their kingdoms to the brink of disaster?

For writers, this stance demands judgements that are not simply focussed on condemnation or titillation. Literature can, of course, describe the suffering of victims, the depravity of rulers and the indifference of institutions. But if it stops at the level of “sound and color,” it risks becoming one more part of that grove—a more elegant version of the thicket of spectacle.

In a classically laconic style, Jianli’s Cherishing Virtue builds a three-tier moral theatre in which we see the crowd, the noble person and the ruler. Each is interrogated; each is measured against “virtue.” That is why, in the welter of today’s endless news cycle, the poem calls for a moment of stillness and reflection. In a culture shaped by leaks and breaking stories, Jianli’s New Book of Songs-style poem insists that the work of writing is not just about throwing one more stone into the thicket, but one that aspires to leave readers with a clearer sense of what virtue looks like when the noise dies down.

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Source:

• Jianli and Ren Jingjing, A Trial of Virtue in an Age of Sensual Power, Chinese Thought Express, 20 November 2025

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