The Ming–Qing transition as turning point

Many histories of China have attempted to impose outside interpretive methods upon the Chinese past. In this essay, Mizoguchi works from within the Chinese tradition to understand how changing ideas of economics (and in particular the conflict between private land ownership by the ruler and by the common people), literature, philosophy, religion, and politics all combined to make the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the subsequent Qing Dynasty a time of great change in the ways in which Chinese thinkers understood their history and present.