Abstract: Having lived through the reigns of six Ming emperors, Zhao Nanxing witnessed firsthand the shifting currents of social mores and scholarly trends. As a scholar-official steeped in Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism who had entered officialdom through the imperial examination system, he nonetheless harbored no pronounced sectarian bias, instead approaching the diverse intellectual currents of his age with an open mind. As an astute scholar and an upright official, he perceptively observed how competing academic trends reshaped social mores, which in turn prompted his sustained reflection on society, politics, scholarship, and literary style. He advocated upholding the primacy of Cheng-Zhu learning while selectively absorbing elements of Wang Yangming’s teaching on the mind, and he was keenly aware of the flaws that had accumulated among later followers of the Wang school. Accordingly, he sought a path of scholarly integration to redress these biases and remedy their shortcomings, thereby reinforcing the authority of orthodox Confucianism. At the same time, he strove to rectify the Yan-Zhao region’s literary penchant for eccentricity and affectation, endeavoring to restore it to its original plain and unadorned character. Although Zhao Nanxing’s scholarly attainments do not rival those of his friend Gu Xiancheng or his disciple Gao Panlong, his thought nonetheless possesses distinctive value: it exemplifies how northern Yan-Zhao scholars, confronting the intellectual dilemmas and crises of Ming scholarship, responded through a path of “subsuming Wang’s teaching under Zhu Xi’s framework” and integrative synthesis to address the developmental challenges facing Confucianism-thereby revealing the underlying disposition toward “veneration of Zhu Xi” that characterizes the scholarly tradition of the Yan-Zhao region.