 In his own day, Ouyang Xiu’s radical view fails to win out, but over time the idea that there is one genuine faction becomes widespread within Neo-Confucianism. Zhu Xi encourages his contemporaries to support the formation of such a “faction of superior people”, to join it themselves, and even to see that the emperor himself becomes part of this faction. For Zhu, it is this faction of superior people—those who have grasped the “succession of the Way”—who have the ultimate legitimacy in society, thus even the emperor needs to be properly educated so that he can strive to join this group. Zhu is also explicit that it is crucial to maintain the ethical purity of those in the faction; “if there are those who are wicked and evil, then you ought to expel them completely” (WJ vol. 21, p. 1244). Similar views can be found among the leaders of Neo-Confucianism’s most famous faction, the Donglin. This late-Ming dynasty movement is multi-faceted, including a broad ethical revitalization movement, a national Confucian “moral fellowship”, and a ministerial faction in Beijing; the whole movement takes its name from its institutional base in the privately funded Donglin Academy in southern China (Dardess 2002). The Donglin faction goes to extreme lengths to promote its cause, driven by its members’ conviction that theirs is a battle of the good and public-spirited against the evil and self-centered. Donglin partisans contribute to a toxic political atmosphere in which each side demonizes its opponents. The crucial moment in the struggle comes when a Donglin figure issues a public document explicitly accusing a leading palace figure of gross immorality. In a modern scholar’s words, this document is written in the “language of moral terrorism”: language that is uncompromising, “heated to the highest possible degree of emotional incandescence” (Dardess 2002: 71). Not long after this comes a violent backlash in which key Donglin figures are arrested, tortured, and killed, the academy razed, and the movement crushed.