confucian beliefs
The Confucian Way 15: Mencius and The Mandate of Heaven
The Zhou aristocracy’s belief in a supreme deity or Tian (“Heaven”) was passed down and adopted by Confucian elites through the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) doctrine. However, the precise meaning and understanding of Heaven in Confucian terms is unclear. For Mencius, who talks openly and extensively about the Mandate, the rule of Heaven seems to refer to both an internal moral guide that can be naturally cultivated by our innate capacity for goodness, and an ideal part of a country’s political culture where a despot can be justly removed by revolution.
The idea that the Mandate of Heaven can reflect a state of societal perfection bears some resemblance to the Platonic theory of forms, where reality is based on a world of perfect ideas above. But whereas the Platonic world of ideas informed the transcendental Christian heaven, Mencius’ description of the Mandate stays clear from referring to a personal god or world above, but still engages with the notion that fate or providence acts as an impersonal force that has the power to distribute good and evil randomly.
The transcendent quality of the Mandate, where the success of overthrowing a ruler ultimately comes down to fate, shows that although Confucianism was a philosophy based on humanism and material reality, it still preserved a kind of metaphysical religious consciousness when philosophers attempted to describe an ideal state of affairs.
A Neo-Confucian Quote of the Week
Although Neo-Confucianism was not monolithic, what separated the new Confucian school from the classical Confucian writers was the belief in ultimate moral metaphysical truths. These were represented by the terms ‘heaven’ (tian), ‘principle’ (li), ‘the great ultimate’ (taiji), the basic element or energy (qi), and the way of things (dao), which explained the unfolding reality-principle of the way the universe functioned.
For Neo-Confucians, the foundation of human reality lies within each human’s psychological makeup. Here, Neo-Confucianism tends to ascribe to Mencian thought, which states that humans are different from other animals because they are born with the capacity to be moral. Morality is thus thought to be biological. As Liu (2017) writes in the book Neo-Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality:
“Humans alone are moral creatures. This is what defines the notion “human” (ren 人)”
What is unique about human beings is their ability to possess a moral sense of right and wrong and to express moral agency and refuse to do wrong things, whereas non-human creatures, such as birds, reptiles and even other primates, do not as they lack the capacity to comprehend what morality is (it should be noted that this view is now commonly contested, see, for example, Rowlands, 2012). It follows that if humans do engage in evil, they have appealed to a lower form of humanity by not cultivating their moral tendencies (referred to as “moral sprouts” by Mencius).
To accept the view that humans are special biologically moral creatures, Neo-Confucians dismissed Xunzi’s view that morality is the product of social conditioning, where rules, rituals, and education can teach and compel humans not to act badly. Xunzi believed that there is no such thing as “innate goodness,” but that institutions can appeal to human reason by showing why behaving morally is better for the individual and society, which can incentivize people to cultivate goodness.
For Neo-Confucians, however, the existence of a moral reality is an undisputable fact that is based on the universality of moral truths grounded in human biological psychology.
Ashoka and the Politics of Moral Governance
When the Emperor Bindusara died in 272 BCE, he was succeeded by his young son, Ashoka the Great (304-232 BCE), who infamously became an ambitious and aggressive monarch that crushed revolts and conquered nearby city-states. On accession to the Mauryan throne, Ashoka inherited both the imperial territory that extended from Assam in the East to Balochistan in the West, and the expansionist policies of his grandfather and founder of the dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya. Ashoka brought the empire to its apogee, conquering the land of the Kalingas in the Southeast (modern-day Orissa), and politically uniting the entire Indian subcontinent for the first time in history (Strong, 1989). Historical evidence consisting of the thirty-four edicts written by Ashoka do not reveal the motivation for the Mauryan empire engaging in warfare against the Kalingas, but the edicts do show that the Maurya victory was overwhelming and brutal:
“One hundred and fifty thousand persons were…carried away captive, one hundred thousand were…slain, and many times that number died…[I]f the hundredth part or the thousandth part were now to suffer the same fate, it would be a matter of regret.”
(Edict XIII, circa 257 BCE.)
The edicts, which were chiselled on hundreds of rock surfaces and pillars throughout the Indian subcontinent, were inscribed in India’s first written script, Ashoka Brahmi. Apart from Ashoka’s own edicts, other sources depict the emperor in his early years of rule as harsh and violent. For instance, the Sanskrit Divyāvadāna describes Ashoka as an ugly, grotesque leader that turned the Mauryan kingdom into a place of terror and oppression. It claims that Ashoka beheaded 500 of his ministers by sword and burned 500 court ladies to death. The Chinese Aśokāvadāna reinforces the wickedness of Ashoka’s character, but, as Guruge (1994) notes, there is a tendency among Buddhist writers to make Ashoka’s character out to be all the more malevolent in his early years of rule in order to show the dramatic change in his character after he converted to Buddhism.
The details around Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism are unclear. For the most part, sources tend to skip over the conversion process and emphasise the motivations for Ashoka’s change in character. The story goes that after witnessing the death and destruction that resulted from the Kalinga war, Ashoka was filled with “profound sorrow and regret” (Edict XIII). The lack of elations in the Edicts over the Kalinga defeat is interpreted by Draper (1995) to indicate a silent moral premise that all suffering and destruction of life, whether human or animal, is regrettable and to be avoided. Thus, the deep pain that came from witnessing the killing, dying and deportation of the conquered city caused Ashoka to renounce military conquest and all other forms of violence. This conversion story tends to follow the popular notion of psychological change as being cause by a particular occurrence in a person’s life, for instance, the sight of the sick, the old, the dead, and the ascetic, which caused Siddhartha Buddha to change and renounce his princely life. However, as James M. Macphail, author of the 1928 book Ashoka states:
“It is not easy to understand why Ashoka, the head of a great military empire that had been acquired in no very remote time by conquest, should have been so deeply affected and conscience stricken by his experience of what were in those days familiar horrors of war. There must surely have been some preparation for so great a change. Possibly the teaching of the followers of Gautama had impressed him more than he himself realized, and the experience of actual bloodshed on a large scale, merely to gratify ambition and enrich the State, served to crystallize into convictions impressions that had been slowly forming in his mind.”
In other words, Ashoka was probably exposed to Buddhist teachings before the Kalinga war, and the death and destruction that occurred during the military conquest would have prompted the Emperor to change his foreign policy from dig-vijaya or imperialist expansion to dharmavijaya, conquest through righteousness. In Ashoka’s own description of this transition, he states:
Now that the Kalingas have been conquered, the empire shall be devoted to the intense practice of the Dharma, especially among the people. This is because the Kingdom regrets having conquered the Kalinga territory (paraphrased).
The syntactical form of this description, starting with “now that” or when such a thing has been done, implies that the annexation of Kalinga was a pre-requisite that had to be fulfilled before Ashoka could politically adopt Buddhism and the Dharma (Guruge, 1994). It is unclear whether this was because of Ashoka’s royal duties, the Mauryan tradition to conquer the furthermost lands, or because of national security reasons, but it seems that Ashoka strategically used the death and destruction of Kalinga to upset the status quo just enough to fundamentally redirect Mauryan foreign policy. It can be assumed that this would have been a challenging shift since a lot of power and influence lay in the hands of the Brahman priesthood, who were at the top of the Dharma-sanctioned caste pyramid and who served as Ashoka’s ministers and advisors. One of the first changes that Ashoka enacted was changing the traditional Brahman offerings and ceremonies, which he considered to be ostentatious and unprofitable. In the ninth edict, Ashoka wrote that “Now ceremonies should certainly be performed. But these bear little fruit. That, however, is productive of great fruit which is connected with Dharma.” In his opposition to animal slaughter and the killing and consumption of animals in the royal kitchens, Ashoka again clashed with Brahman ritual as he sought to replace these ceremonies with peaceful “spiritual revival” public events (Albinski, 1958).
Other changes that Ashoka decreed to establish a moral policy included, ordering banyan and mango trees to be planted around the imperial territory; building rest houses and ordering that wells be built every half-mile along the roads so that humans and animals have access to hydration; building medical facilities for humans and animals; and a very Confucian edict was ordering that people obey their parents, are generous towards priests and ascetics and practice frugality in their spending. All up, manpower was doubled to provide the necessary services to the needy, and major internal political reform took place when Ashoka entrusted officials with moral and political functions by commissioning officers to work for the welfare and happiness of the poor and aged.
Another controversial edict ordered by Ashoka was that people should honour men of all faiths. This message was likely perceived as a threat the Brahmanical priests and religious pundits who believed they alone had the authority to dictate what religious rules people should follow. Brahmanical hostility towards Ashoka came in the form of historical silence. As Allen (2012) notes, Emperor Ashoka was “all but erased from India’s history…by promoting Buddhist heresay throughout the land, Ashoka directly challenged the caste-based authority of the Brahman order. Indeed, by the post-Mauryan period Brahmanical intolerance of other religions was so prevalent that in the Mahabhashya of Patanjali, it states that Brahmans and Shramans (which include Jains, Buddhists and others) are ‘eternal enemies’ like the snake and the mongoose (Jha, 2016, p. 5). Despite the setback of Brahmanical opposition, Ashoka kept Maurya’s large and powerful army to maintain public order and expanded friendly relations with states across Asia and Europe through Buddhist missionary campaigns. As well as constructing stupas, Buddhist religious structures, across the empire, Ashoka delegated moral ministers to remote lands to promote his own version of “spiritual imperialism” or modern-day soft power.
According to scholars who traced the decline and fall of the Mauryan Empire, it was not long after Ashoka’s death that the political and religious edifices were weakened and eventually replaced since Ashoka’s rule was popularly interpreted as anti-Brahmanical. Other factors that contributed to the decline of the Maurya range from economic upheaval to the breakdown of expansive bureaucracy created by Ashoka, and decentralization of authority that is said to have brought about corrupt and wicked officials (Guruge, 1994). Ashoka’s moral principles of respecting all living beings and recognising different kinds of vulnerabilities and dependencies is important to note and it can be compared to the Confucian understanding of individuals existing in social relationships of various obligations towards parents, friends, acquaintances, and even towards slaves and servants. Ashoka argued that goodness cannot be done alone or by one without ethical discipline and care must be taken to avoid injustices and maintain control over oneself (Kachru, 2020). Such a communal approach to morality was a strategic way to unite a large and diverse empire, while slowly limiting the overwhelming power and influence of the Brahmanical elite. Although Ashoka’s mandates did not last long after his passing, Ashokan rule represents the pinnacle of ethical governance in India’s political history and should not be forgotten.
The Confucian Way 14: The Mandate of Heaven and Confucius
Similar to the divine right of kings, a metaphysical doctrine of political legitimacy in Christianized Medieval Europe, the Mandate of Heaven (tianming, which is literally translated as “Heaven’s will”) predates Confucius and was set up in the Zhou Dynasty to justify the replacement of the previously overthrown Shang Dynasty. The Mandate provided a convenient creation myth, which gave the Emperor’s rule legitimacy and told the people that the transition from the previous dynasty was a fated blessing from heaven.
Although there is no such thing as a heaven in the Christian sense in the Chinese tradition, heaven is an appropriate word to describe this doctrine because of the association of heaven with height, a metaphor for superiority and high divinity. The idea of a fated Mandate, where the heavenly affects the earthly, does not seem compatible with Confucianism, which pragmatically seeks to look for harmony within nature and the social world, but Confucius and his followers did attempt to discover the deeper meaning of the Mandate and legitimate dynastic rule. In some interpretations, the Mandate takes on a metaphysical quality and is seen as equivalent to the way, which is difficult to understand and unclear. However, the inability to fully know the Mandate would have been a potentially dangerous idea in Confucius’ time, where the Mandate was used to support the political claim that there would always be only one righteous ruler of China.
Quote of the week from the Analects
Since the early thirteenth century, ‘grief’ in the English language has referred to “suffering, pain, or bodily affliction,” coming from grever “afflict, burden, oppress” and the Latin gravare, “make heavy” or gravis, meaning “weighty”. In its modern context, grief is perhaps best understood as mental pain or sorrow for the death of a loved one, which is mostly a reactive expression to the immediate feeling of loss. Crying and feeling shocked and sad at a loss is an example of grief being carried out. Mourning, on the other hand, which comes from the Old English murning, means to long after or remember sorrowfully. It is a state where one mushc formalize the emotion of grief and begin to construct a post-death vocabulary for the loved one and recover from the feeling of disjunction. It is about accepting the reality with the loss and creating some stability in one’s emotive life after suffering from the initial shock and sadness.
In Confucianism, grief and mourning are considered natural and necessary parts of living out a humane life. Grief demonstrates a commitment to the loved one that passed away and to carry out grief appropriately serves three functions. The first is to honor the person that passed away. For example, Confucius suggested a three-year mourning period following the death of one’s parents. If one truly honored and cared about the loss, then the usual joys of life would no longer bring joy and ease but instead only increase anxiety and feelings of loss. The second function of grief and mourning is to remember one’s ancestors. There is a duty to reflect on one’s past and the death of a family member should cause one to both grieve and commit to carrying out their ancestors memories by continuing traditions and rituals. Finally, grieving properly allows one to move into the stage of mourning and adjust one’s sense of reality to no longer having the loved one around.
The Confucian Way 13: Doing Nothing and the Nature of Water
Humans and nature can resemble and learn from each other. In Confucianism, the fluid and reflective nature of water provides a model for the various ways of being. The way that water nourishes everything which is in it, fearlessly seeks out the lowest spots to fill them, and has the capacity to level itself no matter where it is found, are all lessons for humans in their ability to imitate water. The appropriate phrase to describe this relationship is “as if”. Humans are not water, but they are akin to it, which is why meditating on it draws us closer to balance and harmony. To be “as if” water is to embody the principle of wu-wei or doing nothing, in an effort to participate in a kind of creative emptiness. This interpretation of wu-wei differs in the later forms of Daoism, where non-action was hardened into a strategic doctrine for effective rule. In this way, the agenda of wu-wei was no longer about finding stillness and peace and to “be like”, but about calculatingly managing others as a way of indirectly exerting one’s power and influence.
Quote of the week from the Zhuangzi
There are a few points to consider here: Zhuang Zhou is not a butterfly, dreaming is not awakening, and knowledge is not ignorance. Yet, these distinct situations interdepend and interchange to the point of where Zhuang Zhou is uncertain of where he is. The two contrasting moments correspond to the Confucian concept of li, ‘ritual’ and yue, ‘music’. The essense of li is control, and that of yue is ‘harmony’. Control holds back, while harmony blends. They correspond to Zhuang Zhou’s two moments in the dream of distinction then interchange, which also pervades our everyday life.
Authenticity and the Jennifer Dilemma
The word authentic comes from the Medieval Latin authenticus and Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal”, from authentes or “acting on one’s own authority”. It derives from the term autos or “self, of oneself (independently)” and hentes meaning “being”, and the modern use of authentic implies that to be authentic, the contents in question should correspond to facts. In other words, authenticity refers to trustworthiness, reliability and consistency. An authentic document, for example, is understood to be genuine and original, or not a fake or copy, while authentic words are understood to come from the heart. Feelings and words should be aligned if they are to be considered authentic. Thus, a thing is authentic if it is what it professes to be. However, the question of authenticity becomes more complicated when authenticity becomes a characteristic attributed to human beings. After all, what does it mean to be truly autos-hentes or one’s own being? And is it even possible to truly represent oneself genuinely?
According to Varga (2020), although being oneself is somewhat inescapable, since whenever you make a choice or act, it is you who is making that choice or act, many of our thoughts, decisions and actions are not really are own and so they cannot genuinely express who we are. The issue here is whether we can ever be authentic in our day-to-day life in spite of influences that come from our families, friends, government, education, ideological affiliations, and even the language that we speak, which can affect the way that we think. If we are simply made up of these amalgam of influences, it would mean that our sense of self could not have existed without society. This argument goes so far as to make the metaphysical claim that our expressive self is only real because we as a society have made it real. So once we imagine it and give it a name and role, we cause it to be real. Consider the following dilemma: as far as we know, ‘Jennifer’ is a daughter, student, and friend. She is a Christian, an Australian, and only speaks English. We know of Jennifer as a kind girl. She was taught to express herself politely and has never in our presence made a condescending mark towards anyone. Do all these things point to an authentic Jennifer (where an authentic Jennifer would be one who acts in a way that reinforces her status as a kind, Christian friend and daughter), or is an authentic Jennifer the Jennifer beyond the labels and concepts, that is, the human that people happen to refer to by ‘Jennifer’? We will return to the Jennifer dilemma later.
Studies of contemporary Western culture are informed by conceptions of human agency, which emphasize individuality as the principal theme of personhood. Although the prevailing myth of individualism is that in eighteenth-century Europe, a few courageous men of reason fought against religious repression to set the individual free to find and express his authentic self, the development of individualism was gradual and much more complex than this myth suggests. The Enlightenment movement’s demand for liberty re-defined human beings as individual entities rather than as role-bearers in the system of social relations. People slowly gained an increasing awareness of what Charles Taylor (1989) refers to as “inwardness” or “internal space”, where the authentic self can be separated from public performance and perception. Furthermore, the growth of commerce created an expanding middle class of merchants, well-off farmers and urban craftsmen who advocated for private property and individual wealth accumulation (Foley, 2017). Underlying these developments was Christianity’s revolutionary idea: “we are all equal because we are all brothers” (Puyol, 2019). Although this concept of fraternity promised that every individual human being (whether child, woman, foreigner, poor, disabled, non-Christian, etc.) was equal in the eyes of God, fraternity did not translate into political equality because Christian equality was about the equal worth of souls and not the equal rights of men on earth. By the nineteenth century, these commercial, intellectual and religious movements and ideas promoted individualism and led to the development of capitalist entrepreneurism and Romantic individualism, where in the latter, the quest to find an authentic self translated into rejecting materialism and society and living solitarily in nature. A similar albeit mass version of Romantic individualism occurred in the 1960s, which Taylor (1998) called “an individuating revolution”. 1960s global youth culture produced expressive individualism, which rejected conformity and authority in order to discover or find your ‘true self’. The revolution promoted self-expression, equality and sensuality, but rather than simply being an excuse for self-indulgent hippyism (which 1960s youth culture is usually accused of), it was a way of shifting from the systems and times that suppressed individuality and creativity, resulting in the emergence of the Age of Authenticity.
Critics argue that the pursuit of authenticity and individualism has resulted in cultural decline as the preoccupation on one’s own feelings and attitudes is anti-social and destroys altruism and compassion towards others and community. Christopher Lasch (1979) has claimed that there are similarities between authenticity and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which are both characterized by self-indulgence and a lack of empathy. For Bloom (1987), the preoccupation with authenticity has made the minds of the youth “narrower and flatter” (p. 61), while Bell (1976) argues that the traditional economic processes, “based on a moral system of reward rooted in Protestant sanctification of work” (p. 38), have lost their legitimacy and are replaced by hedonism and the search for extreme experience or “kicks” and “highs”. The obsession with authenticity has also led to a time where we are losing our sense of truth and reality. Criticism of public institutions has gone so far as to legitimize alternative ways of knowing, where conspiracy theories and alternative medicine, schooling and journalism are all part of the larger conversation that characterizes the era of post-truth that we currently live in. On the other hand, as Watts (2019) states, there is a kind of nobility in the pursuit of authenticity. It is now common to tell children to follow their dreams and pursue their passions rather than stick to a dreary job all their lives that we believe would at odds with their true selves. There is also a kind of desperation to have authenticity around us, from our expectations of honesty and transparency in our closest relationships to how our leaders present themselves, for there is “nothing more despicable than a person who isn’t genuine…who betrays their feelings in order to save face.” There is also a tendency in Western society to avoid the monotonous nature of ritual, “which keeps us chained to the past.” (Watts, 2019). Meanwhile, the romanticisation of romantic love has stayed with us because it feels spontaneous and unmediated, which shows how authenticity has turned into the new cultural currency.
The emphasis on authenticity and transparency in Western culture sits well with the philosophical school of Existentialism. Existentialism arose with the collapse of the idea that philosophy itself can provide substantive norms and rules for existing by specifying particular ways of living, while authenticity was advocated as the approach where I can engage in my life as my own (Crowell, 2020). The need to live an authentic life to live meaningfully adds another important layer in moral evaluations. For instance, by keeping my promise, I act in accordance to a duty to others, and if I keep acting so because it is my duty, than according to Kant, I am acting morally because I act for the sake of duty. But, from the existentialist perspective, by simply keeping my promise out of duty’s sake makes the moral act of promise keeping inauthentic because I am only keeping the promise because I believe it is required and expected of moral people to do so. To keep my promise authentically, I need to take ownership of this choice and commit myself to the act of keeping my promise because it is my own decision and action, and not because it is socially or morally required of me. Only then can I succeed in being myself authentically. By choosing to do things on my own account, I recover myself from being alienated and absorbed into the anonymous self that uncritically engages in the world. Thus, there is a kind of integrity in acting authentically: I can either occupy a role and time that was given to me by others and drift in and out of these roles while feeling separated from myself, or I can autonomously commit myself and become whatever I choose.
In classical China, there was a similar prevailing interest in how to live an authentic life. The Daoist school, for example, actively rejected the Confucian idea that the good life comes from embodying traditional social norms and rites and instead focused on taking care of one’s own interest. Harisson (2013) refers to this as the ethical egoist argument, where the right thing to do is to pursue one’s own interests and maximize one’s own good. Because, it is argued, we are naturally inclined to prioritize our own interests, it follows that following societal ethical recommendations about doing the right thing distorts our selfish nature and therefore compromises our authentic selves. But, whereas the Confucian scholar Xunzi, who also recognized human selfish nature, argued that it is up to moral education and rigorous practice of rites to correct human behavior, the Daoist Yang Zhu claimed that to live an ethical life, we must maintain what is genuine in our lives by avoiding artificial moral and social obligations. So, rather than finding the good life in appropriate social relationships and roles, we should actively retreat from our social life and get rid of material goods and power. Thus, the best life can be can be lived away from society and in harmony with the natural flow of Dao (the Way). An authentic life can be found in the natural world, beside rivers and mountains, which is more conducive to living authentically, that is, as our true selves stripped from others’ expectations and from our artificial social roles.
So, there are various ways of answering the Jennifer dilemma. For the Confucians, Jennifer’s authentic self comes from how others see her and the roles she is expected to play in her social relationships. Jennifer is only Jennifer because she is a daughter to her mother, an Australian national, and a Christian follower. She becomes more herself the more she honorably practices these roles and carries out the appropriate rites and rituals associated with her identity. Existentialists would argue that she is only truly Jennifer if she autonomously adopts her role as daughter, Christian, etc. as her own. If she is simply following these roles mindlessly because others expect her to, then she is harming her authentic self and will never find the satisfaction of taking control over her own existence. Finally, the ethical egoist Daoists would claim that an authentic Jennifer can only be found if she rejects her social roles and obligations as daughter, Australian citizen, Christian. Only once she retreats from the socially constructed ‘Jennifer’ can the real, authentic Jennifer live in harmony and simplicity.
The Mandate of Heaven and Revolution in Modern China
The story goes that in early January, 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang, the future emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), had eliminated his contending rivals, but when his followers urged him to take the throne, he hesitated. He said that he would not make such a decision on his own and that he would consult the high heavens for guidance. So he set up an alter to worship the supreme cosmic deity and prayed that if the heavens approved the new ruling house, January 23rd would be a bright day and he would mark it as the day of enthronement. On the scheduled day, the sky miraculously cleared up after several consecutive days of snow and interpreting this as an auspicious sign, Zhu claimed he attained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) and announced the founding of the Ming Dynasty. In an effort to rebuild the Chinese empire, Zhu initiated a series of social programs and legal documents that came to be known as the ‘Ming Constitution’, which covered all aspects of empire, including governmental institutions, cultural policies, and social customs. ‘The Great Ming Code’ set forth a value system and legal culture that not only had a profound impact on the subsequent Manchu-Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), but also affected the ruling establishments of neighboring countries, such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam (Jiang, 2011).
Both the Ming Constitution and the Ming Code worked to establish emperor Zhu as the ‘Son of Heaven’, where he was believed to act as a mediator between the spiritual-heaven realm and the earthly human realm with the purpose of establishing a harmonious cosmic-social order that would bring peace and prosperity to his subjects (Goldstein, 2017). Importantly, if the rulers would violate the cosmic order by abusing their power and acting immorally, heaven would send down a warning by bringing disaster on society and revoking the Mandate to rule. Thus, it was normal for dynasties to rise and fall according to a regular pattern of popular protest, rebellion and a new mandate to rule, which was often given by various divine omens. The system allowed political challengers, whether peasants or foreign invaders, to make bids for the kingship by rebellion and created checks and balances so if the imperial family grew increasingly corrupt, the dynasty would lose its Mandate. Although the Mandate was on some level an important tool used by the ruling elite to justify state power, it was not only used as a means of behavioral control. The Mandate attempted to embody an ideal cosmic order based on the Heavenly principle (tianli, the ultimate origin of the universe) and human sentiment (renqing, human compassion based on the Heavenly principle).
In key Confucian texts, it is written that the ruler in the Mandate of Heaven “is a boat and the people are water. Water can carry the boat and overturn it, too” (Xunzi, “Wangba” chapter), and “The people are the most crucial and important, the next is the state, and the least is the king” (Mencius, “Jinxinxia” chapter). These exerts highlight that there is some humility to the emperor’s authority. The emperor does not have a ‘right’ to rule, but a duty to fulfill according to heavenly destiny. In that case, the heavenly appointed role holds the ruler accountable to the people for if his duties are not performed well, then he risks losing the Mandate to rule (Zhao, 2009). To be a well-performing emperor, a Chinese ruler needs to receive many years of intensive education in Confucian classics, history, calligraphy, and statecraft from Confucian officials at an early age. This required training is meant to ensure that China’s politico-legal cosmology was modelled on a higher moral order that could create structure and peace in times of high instability brought about by, for example, foreign ‘barbarians’, greedy imperialists, natural disasters, epidemics or internal corruption. In fact, according to the Mandate, the emperor was to assume responsibility for any natural disasters and the common people viewed disasters and famines as a sign of unfit rule and possible dynastic change. The emperor’s performance legitimacy and duty to rule for his people inspired thousands of peasant (and sometimes foreign-led) rebellions throughout China’s history, and the country’s rebels and revolutionaries were often romanticized and glorified in literature.
The Mandate’s mythology was still an influential force in the 20th century. For instance, the father of the Chinese Revolution, Sun Yat-sen, who was a convert in Christianity and trained in Western medicine, visited the Ming tombs and proclaimed the downfall of the Manchus upon the founding of the 1912 Republic. The people-led revolution also inspired Mao Zedong’s doctrine of “People’s War”, which played an important role in the Communist victory in 1949. As Perry (2001) states, “Like Mencius’s Mandate of Heaven, Mao’s Mass Line insisted on the reciprocal linkage between leader and led in staking a claim to higher political morality” (p. x). Thus, whereas Stalin’s communist revolution looked to the secret police to enforce a top-down order, Mao made it clear that the masses were to engage in government-sponsored class struggle campaigns so that revolution could be achieved from below. While mass campaigns were thought to be over in the Deng Xiaoping era, popular protests have continued in the post-Mao era. From the Democracy Wall Movement (1978-79), the 1985 anti-Japanese demonstrations, the 1989 student uprisings to the 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong, protestors have remained active and unafraid of violent reprisal. With market-oriented reform widening the gap between rich and poor, and with the Chinese Communist Party increasingly centralizing state power, dissent has also spread on the Chinese internet. In 2016, a letter calling for President Xi Jinping’s resignation was signed by loyal members of the Communist Party and leaked on various websites before being pulled down by authorities (Rauhala & Xu, 2016). 20 people were detained over the incident (Sudworth, 2016). The anti-Xi Jinping movement also created the online nickname for the President, Da si bi (大撒币), which literally means to “giving big money”, but the sound of the three Chinese words can also sound like saying “stupid”. The nickname refers to how President Xi gives big money in exchange for global influence, but he is stupid for doing so because he is only representing the interests of the party and not the people (Zhou, 2019).
Challenging the Mandate was never easy. The necessity for political protest and revolution as a feature of China’s politico-legal cosmology and history was well suited to its 20th century communist takeover. Although stripped of its religious-cosmological aspects, Marxism put forward the necessity of revolution to abolish the bourgeois state. As Engels notes, “[force] is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms” (cited in Lenin, 1918). In other words, it is revolution and human struggle that moves societies from one historical stage to the next and without properly serving the people by allowing for social inequality and economic hardship to become widespread, it is a given that rulers risk losing their ‘mandate’. In the Analects, Confucius also puts forward a theory on how good ruler conduct makes revolution unnecessary. He states that it is important to “Advance the upright and set aside the crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit” (2:14). Although revolution is seemingly necessary for just political change, Confucian texts do not outline what makes revolts successful. For Karl Marx, the one class capable of leading countries to political freedom was the proletariat since it is more realistic to expect a radical revolution to get rid of oppressive economic and political structures like capitalism than to expect the bourgeoisie to lead the way through political democracy (Fiddick, 1978). According to Tiruneh (2014), by examining the literature, two types of revolutions can be identified: spontaneous and planned. Without any significant organized effort, spontaneous revolutions occur when many factions of a society suddenly and without prior planning take part in protests and quickly seek to overthrow the current political-economic system. The purpose of spontaneous revolutionary action is that officials are unable to predict the onset of a popular uprising spreading rapidly across a country like that of the 1911 Chinese Revolution and 1917 Russian Revolution. Planned revolutions, on the other hand, are more guerilla-led or deliberately organized by revolutionaries. Revolutionary efforts can be anticipated and the fight for political-economic freedom will take a longer and harder road. What makes either revolution successful is strong leadership, where far-sighted individuals are able to unite normally opposed groups of people into large-scale political movements. As well as revolutionary ideology, popular support, access to resources and organizational strength, success in revolutionary efforts usually comes down to whether the military is either acquiescent or supportive of or otherwise defeated by popular uprisings and revolutionary fighters (Perry, 2001; Tiruneh, 2014).
In China’s current political situation, the government has tried to avoid any popular uprising or revolutionary efforts by replacing the radical, revolutionary communism as the ideological foundation of the political system to traditional, conservative Confucianism. For instance, in the 4th Plenary Session of the 16th Congress of the CCP Central Committee held in September 2004, former President Hu Jintao called for the creation of a “harmonious society” and new development policies were directed towards the underprivileged Chinese population (Jin & Nahm, 2019). To avoid a peasant rebellion, the government abolished all agricultural taxes, increased the provision of subsidies for farming, and removed the one-child policy, while also strengthening the Letters and Petitions Bureaus in the State Council and People’s Congress to avoid riots and protests. The government also launched its Western China development project that aimed to manage the widening regional inequalities. However, the Chinese state cannot sustain its role based only on performance legitimacy alone because it runs the risk of promising to deliver too much welfare to too many people. Without ideological and legal-electoral legitimacy, the Chinese government has had to resort to acting paternalistically and coercively, which has resulted in the high cost of surveillance technologies and locally spread and difficult to track resistance. Because there is limited opportunities for compromise between citizens and the state who are diametrically opposed in their understanding of state legitimacy, revolution or at least local (or even digital) rebellion seems inevitable.
The Confucian Way 10: Water, Stillness and the Mirror of the Sage
This episode opens with a passage from the Zhuangzi that talks about water that is so still that it forms a mirror-image that can be used to reflect on human behaviour and relationships. The stillness and reflection of the mirror can be compared to the still and silent mind of the Sage, whose complete clarity of the world can accurately reflect on the nature of reality. By looking into the mind of the Sage, you can see yourself and your relationships as they really are, despite what might be thought or said by others. This idea of the mirror image is similarly explored in Western philosophy through the Greek and Roman myth of Narcissus, in Plato’s writings, as well as by St. Paul and Lacan, where the mirror can both reinforce hubris and act as a means of self-recognition and self-understanding.
The Confucian Weekly Bulletin 