Ancient China: The Mandate of Heaven and the Hundred Schools

This brief guide is designed as an introductory guide for the course. The questions contained in this guide are not necessarily the central questions of the course; they are meant to be basic questions that can be explored in more depth in the course. I present the material as objectively as possible while acknowledging that this guide is not, and can not be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of Contents

Questions ↑

What is the Mandate of Heaven, and how could it justify both rule and rebellion?
How does the Mandate differ from Egypt’s god-king and Europe’s divine right of kings?
Why did the Warring States period produce the Hundred Schools of Thought?
Why did Confucius prefer virtue and ritual to laws and punishments?
How did Legalism help the Qin unify China, and why did the Qin fall so fast?
What is wu wei, and does Daoism argue for minimal government?
How do these ideas still shape China and the West today?

Introduction: Who Deserves to Rule? ↑

“Heaven sees as my people see; Heaven hears as my people hear.”

Book of Documents, quoted by Mencius (4th century BC)

The Central Idea: Legitimacy Through Performance ↑

We can see another early answer to the question of why some people are ruled by others in the early chapters of Chinese history. In the early period of Chinese history, the king was the (1) servant chosen by the gods. In the early period of Egyptian history, the pharaoh was (2) a god himself. The third answer to the question of why some people are ruled by others was found in early Chinese history: the ruler governs because (3) Heaven has granted him a mandate, but that mandate is contingent. It depends on how well he rules. A king who is virtuous, who keeps order, and whose people are fed and at peace has the Mandate of Heaven. A king who is cruel, corrupt, or incompetent, whose reign brings floods, famine, and rebellion, has lost it, and he may be rightfully replaced.

The ancient Chinese viewed Heaven (Tian) as an impersonal force that governed the cosmos. It was neither a paradise nor a personal god. The way Heaven judged rulers of ancient China was based on their actions. Therefore, when a dynasty fell, kingship itself was not overthrown. The legitimacy of a dynasty was based on the performance of its ruler(s) rather than on the rulers’ ancestry. Today, the Communist Party of China (CPC) bases its legitimacy on the same principle as the ancient Chinese rulers: performance. It claims to have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, to have restored order to the country and to have made China powerful again. As an emperor, the CPC fears the signs of a lost mandate, i.e. economic collapse, corruption, disasters and riots. This explains the CPC’s obsession with stability, its anti-corruption campaigns and its acute sensitivity to any negative news. At the same time, the CPC’s claim to legitimacy based on performance means that its failure would justify its replacement, which is why the CPC is so anxious to control people’s perceptions of its performance.

The concept of a moral Heaven, an abstract moral force, developed in the ancient Chinese world around 1046 BC with the Zhou dynasty. The radical idea of this concept is that the legitimacy of a ruler is based on his actions and performance and, in the end, on the welfare of his subjects and their judgment of him. The weakness of this concept is obvious: it acknowledges the legitimacy of a ruler only after the fact.

This idea of an abstract moral heaven, which appeared around 1046 BC with the Zhou dynasty, contains a radical seed. It ties legitimacy not to blood or divine nature but to performance, and, ultimately, to the welfare and judgment of the people. Its great weakness is equally clear: it often recognizes legitimacy only after the fact.

1: Confucianism – Virtue, Ritual, Education, Family, Moral Example of Rulers.

2: Legalism: order through clear laws, harsh punishments, rewards, and the absolute power of the state.

3: Daoism: order through doing less, following the natural way (Dao), and governing with minimal interference.

4: Mohism – Order through Universal Love, Frugality, Merit, and Opposition to Aggressive War.

These four ancient schools of thought are still relevant today, for they contain within them the seeds of political structures that have appeared many times in different eras and places. There is (1) the moral state, governed by (2) good example and education; the (3) coercive state, governed by law and by fear; and the (4) minimal state, governed by doing as little as possible.

Key Terms ↑

Term	Meaning
Heaven	The supreme, impersonal moral force of the cosmos
Mandate of Heaven	Heaven’s conditional authorization to rule
All under Heaven	The civilized world governed by the Son of Heaven
Virtue / moral power	The charismatic moral force of a good ruler
Humaneness	The central Confucian virtue: benevolence, care for others
Ritual propriety	Rites, manners, and roles that structure social life
Filial piety	Respect and obedience toward parents and ancestors
Exemplary person	The morally cultivated person, model for rulers and officials
Law	Standards, models, and penal law; key Legalist concept
The Way	The natural way of things; for Confucians, the right way of governing
Non-action	Acting without forcing; the Daoist ideal of rule

The Central Problems ↑

1: Legitimacy after the fact. If success means that Heaven approves then the winner is right. I wonder whether the Mandate of Heaven is a principle of justice or merely a rationalization of power. Legitimacy depends on this debate.

2: Law? Can a society run on the example of its leaders or does it need clear rules that apply to everyone with punishment to enforce them? Confucians and Legalists gave answers. I think the debate about Virtue versus law still matters today as people discuss whether character or institutions should guide society.

3: Nature. Are people naturally good as Mencius says or naturally selfish as Xunzi and Han Feizi claim or are they fine until they are spoiled by civilization as Laozi and Zhuangzi suggest? I believe every political ideology depends on an answer to this question and later Western thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau confirmed that idea.

4: Hierarchy and harmony. Confucianism promised harmony. That harmony is built on hierarchy: ruler over subject, father over son, husband over wife elder over younger. I wonder if this hierarchy is a form of justice or simply a form of control. Harmony depends on this structure.

5: Efficiency and cruelty. Legalism united China. Built a powerful state in a few decades but it did so at the cost of terror forced labor and the burning of books. I wonder if a state can be efficient while staying humane. Efficiency and cruelty often go hand in hand.

6: Reading across cultures. These texts were written in Chinese more than two thousand years ago for a world very different, from ours. When we call Laozi a ‘libertarian’ or Han Feizi a ‘Chinese Machiavelli’ we clarify the meaning. We also distort the original context. Reading across cultures requires attention.

Historical Background: From the Zhou to the First Empire ↑

The Zhou kings ruled after the conquest of 1046 BC through relatives and allies on whom they bestowed hereditary fiefs in the territories of the conquered. This system of rule was for about two centuries compared with European feudalism, but the differences between the two systems are substantial. In 771 BC the western capital of the Zhou was sacked by invaders. The Zhou court fled east to Luoyang, and from then on the Zhou king was a ritual figurehead with no actual power.

There are two major periods within this time of change: the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), named after the chronicle of the state of Lu, in which some 100 small states were gradually incorporated into larger ones, all while paying respect to the Zhou king. The Warring States period (475-221 BC) was dominated by seven great states fighting each other in wars of unprecedented scale, with large armies of conscripted peasants, iron weapons, crossbows, and even cavalry. The aristocracy lost its privileges and rulers established bureaucracies and taxed the land to pay for the wars.

These were centuries of (1) horrible destruction and (2) great creativity. In order to govern the many states, the rulers of these states looked for people with education and ability. In order to attract the best, they offered great opportunities to people of modest birth. Most of the major schools of Chinese thought developed in these centuries of crisis and tried to find ways to put an end to the crisis. This era of competition was brought to an end in 221 BC by the most ruthless and most well organized of the states, Qin, which conquered all of the other states.

The Mandate of Heaven: Legitimacy and Rebellion ↑

The Zhou Conquest and the Birth of an Idea ↑

The Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC) ruled over the Yellow River valley by means of military power, bronze technology and the Shang religion. The Shang kings communicated with the royal ancestors and the high god Di by means of divination. They carved questions on turtle shells and ox bones (oracle bones, earliest Chinese writing) and read the cracks which were produced by means of heat. The Shang kings possessed (A) unique access to the ancestral spirits.

By 1046 BC the Zhou, a people of the western frontier, had conquered the last of the Shang kings in the battle of Muye. A former vassal of the Shang, the Zhou were faced with the task of explaining how it was that they could now rule in place of the dynasty which had governed the country for centuries, the ancestors of whose kings were still in heaven. The explanation given by the Duke of Zhou, regent for the young King Cheng, was (B) Mandate of Heaven (Tianming).

The speeches preserved in the Book of Documents (Shujing) assert that Heaven (Tian), the highest moral power above all clans and ancestors, once had granted the right to rule to the Shang. However, the last Shang kings were drunk, cruel and neglected the people. Therefore, Heaven withdrew its favor and gave the Mandate to the Zhou, who were virtuous. The Zhou projected the same idea backwards: the Shang had received the Mandate from the last king of the Xia dynasty, who had also been corrupt, in the same way that the Zhou had received it from the last Shang king. Thus, history became a moral story with a repeating plot.

But the speeches also contained a warning for the Zhou themselves. The Mandate of Heaven was not easy to keep, and the Zhou would lose it if they were to abandon virtue. Thus, the idea of legitimacy had been transformed into a heavy responsibility, rather than something that could be possessed.

How the Mandate Works ↑

The Mandate of Heaven can be summarized in a few principles:

1: Heaven bestows upon one individual the right to rule as “Son of Heaven” (Tianzi) over “all under Heaven” (Tianxia).

2: The Mandate is granted on condition of the ruler’s virtue and good government; it is withdrawn on account of the ruler’s tyranny, corruption and neglect of his people.

3: The Mandate of Heaven is not based on a single line of descent, as is the case with a hereditary aristocracy. This means that a new family can be granted the Mandate to rule. It can even be granted to a commoner. Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty (202 BC) was a minor village official of peasant origin; Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming (1368) was a poor peasant and beggar monk.

4: Signs: Floods, droughts, famines, earthquakes, comets, and above all, rebellions against the government were seen as signs that Heaven was angry with the king. Good harvests and times of peace indicated that Heaven was pleased with the king.

5: Success proves the Mandate. If a rebel fails to overthrow the current ruler, he is merely a criminal. If he succeeds in overthrowing the current ruler and establishes a stable dynasty, then by definition he has received the Mandate.

In contrast to the Egyptian god-kings and the European theory of the divine right of kings of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Chinese theory of the Mandate of Heaven included the right of the people to replace a ruler who had lost the Mandate. This was why the word for revolution in modern Chinese, geming, literally means “changing the mandate.”

Mencius and the Right to Overthrow a Tyrant ↑

The Chinese philosopher Mencius (Mengzi, 372-289 BCE) developed the concept of the Mandate of Heaven into a theory of popular legitimacy. King Xuan of Qi asked Mencius whether it was appropriate for a subject to kill his ruler, as the founders of the Shang and Zhou dynasties had killed the last kings of the Xia and Shang dynasties. Mencius’ response was that a ruler who destroyed humaneness and righteousness was no longer a ruler, but a “mere fellow.” He had heard of the execution of the fellow Zhou (the last Shang king), but not of the murder of a sovereign.

Mencius stated that in a state (1) the people are more important element of state; (2) the altars of the land and grain come next, and (2) the ruler is the least important of all. Heaven does not speak, and so we must look to the people’s acceptance or rejection of a ruler in order to understand Heaven’s will. This radical view of the Mandate was apparently so offensive to the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, that he had dozens of passages deleted from the official edition of the Mencius used in the civil service examinations.

The people did not elect Mencius, nor did he provide any framework for their choice or overthrow of rulers. Rebellions were always a last resort, to be led by a virtuous leader, but Mencius’s doctrine that government exists for the people, and that the suffering of the people is the ultimate cause for the ruler’s loss of the Mandate to rule, was to have a long and powerful resonance in China and to find expression in Western ideas of right to resist government, such as those of Locke in 1689, and in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776.

The Dynastic Cycle ↑

The Chinese history of the past was organized according to a recurring pattern, known in modern scholarship as the dynastic cycle:

1: A new dynasty founder, who is virtuous and energetic, receives the Mandate from Heaven and sets up a new government. He restores order, reduces the taxes of the people, distributes land to the peasants, and repairs dikes and canals.

2: The peace and prosperity of the subsequent generations of rulers bring about an increase in the population and in trade.

3: Over generations, the ruler becomes more and more isolated in the palace while the officials, eunuchs, and landlords become increasingly corrupt. Taxes are raised while large estates are formed by the wealthy landlords by taking over the land of the peasants. Public works are allowed to fall into disrepair.

4: Natural disasters, such as floods and droughts, often occur and cause famine. Bands of bandits and rebels arise. Peoples on the borders of China invade the weakened state.

A rebellion or conquest overthrows the dynasty, and a new founder claims the Mandate.

The first sentence of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a Ming-era novel, is often quoted to sum up Chinese history for generations of readers: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” Modern historians have found the cycle of unity and disunity too simplistic to account for the enormous changes in Chinese society, technology and economy over the past two thousand years. But the Mandate did shape the way Chinese people understood power: no dynasty was permanent, and every government was, in principle, on probation.

The Hundred Schools of Thought ↑

The word ‘Hundred’ in Chinese refers to many. Between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC, a new class of people, the shi, appeared on the scene in China. They were educated men of minor aristocratic background who had lost their hereditary positions and traveled from court to court of the rival states in order to offer their advice to the rulers. The rulers, in search of advantage in the wars and administration of their states, were only too ready to listen to them. This was one of the most creative periods in political thought of the world, contemporary with the Greek philosophers and Buddha in India, a period which the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age.

Confucius: Virtue, Ritual, and Hierarchy ↑

Confucius (Kongzi, “Master Kong,” 551-479 BC) was a minor official and teacher from the small state of Lu in China. He died in failure, never having found a ruler who would put into practice his ideas. His teachings were collected by his disciples in the book known as the Analects (Lunyu), which has come to be the most influential book in the history of East Asia, similar to the teachings of Socrates in Greece.

Confucius saw himself as a transmitter of the wisdom of the early Zhou rather than as an innovator. He thought that the breakdown of society in his own time was caused by a breakdown of moral order. His solution can be described by several key ideas:

1: Virtue over punishment. Regulations and punishment can make people avoid doing wrong but they will feel no shame for what they have done. Instead, if people are guided by virtue and kept in line by ritual, they will feel shame for doing wrong and will try to make up for it. Laws create compliance; moral examples create character.

2: Ren (humaneness) – the highest virtue, care for others, expressed in a negative version of the Golden Rule: do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself (Analects 15.24).

3: Li (Ritual Propriety) – Confucius’ rites, ceremonies, manners, and social roles were not empty, but instead were meant to train the emotions and teach how to treat other people with respect.

4: Rectification of names. Social order is based on names being used correctly. A ruler should be a ruler, a minister a minister, a father a father, a son a son. When names are used in correctly, society will fall apart.

5: Hierarchy and family. Confucian society is modeled on the family. The Five Relationships, later codified by Confucianism, are (1) ruler and subject, (2) father and son, (3) husband and wife, (4) elder brother and younger brother, (5) friend and friend. Each relationship has obligations on both sides, but authority is always from the top down, and obedience is always from the bottom up. Filial piety (xiao) toward parents is the root of loyalty to the state.

6: Merit through learning. Confucius taught students regardless of their family origin. The junzi («exemplary person,» originally «son of a lord») was redefined as a person of moral cultivation, not of noble birth. This idea would later justify an elite chosen by education rather than by blood.

The Confucian view of economics is also notable. Confucius claimed that a ruler should worry more about the unequal distribution of wealth than about scarcity. He also claimed that a ruler should worry more about the insecurity of the people than about their poverty. Confucians advocated for light taxation, support of agriculture, and extreme frugality on the part of the government. They viewed merchants with extreme suspicion, as the merchants produced nothing of value and lived off of the profit from trading. The traditional ranking of the “four occupations” listed scholars first, then farmers, then artisans, and finally, merchants. Is there a contradiction here, or is there a social consistency?

The tension in Confucianism is apparent from the outset. On the one hand, the early advice on how to govern, on how to be a good ruler, on how to treat the people, was humane, was based on moral example, on education, on care for the people. On the other hand, the advice on the structure of society, on the relationships between people, on the roles that people should play, was to sanctify a patriarchal hierarchy. Women, children, subjects owed obedience to their superiors. This early advice on the structure of society could easily become the ideology of a contemporary conservative, right-wing elite.

Private property and accumulation ↑

“Under all of Heaven, there is no land that is not the king’s” says the Book of Songs, the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry with 305 poems from the 11th to 7th centuries BC during the Western Zhou and early Spring and Autumn period. It was never quite true but in politics truth is more than mere accuracy, it is more than mere usefulness to those who repeat it.

The way that the early Zhou kings divided up the land was like the Chinese character for a well. Eight families farmed the outer squares and the ninth square in the middle of the well was worked by the families for their lord. This is the well-field system of land division.

While the well-field system of land division may never have been practiced as described in Chinese texts, it is an example of a good myth – a description of the world as those in power wished it to be. The transition to the system of private land ownership in China was caused by the need for taxes and for armies.

Confucius did not despise wealth per se but the manner in which it was acquired. Wealth acquired without righteousness was as a floating cloud to him. Later, his followers would rank the merchant last in a listing of social classes after the scholar, the peasant and the artisan, because the merchant produces nothing and profits from everything.

But the contempt is not comprehensive. Sima Qian, the great historian, admires the great men of commerce. The Han emperors preached frugality but turned salt and iron into state monopolies. The preaching against commerce was done in the sermons and speeches; the practice of commerce was done in the treasury.

Two thousand years later the story is much the same. In the Bible both Old and New Testaments contains sermons that decry the accumulation of unlimited wealth but the budgets and laws of empire after empire are made to court the same wealth that is so despised in the sermons. Virtue is far cheaper to preach than to pay for.

Mencius and Xunzi: Is Human Nature Good or Bad? ↑

Two great Confucian successors held quite different views on the most fundamental questions of political philosophy. This debate is reminiscent of discussions among philosophers in ancient Greece as well as early modern Europe.

As we saw in the previous section, Mencius (372-289 BC) maintained that human nature is fundamentally good. All individuals possess the potential for virtues. His famous example: When one sees a child about to fall into a well, one experiences fear and compassion, not because there is some reward or punishment involved; but rather spontaneously. The role of government is to cultivate these virtues, primarily through providing people with sufficient means to survive. Mencius also argued that those who do not have a stable means of support cannot have stable hearts. Therefore, he advocated for land redistribution (idealized «well-field» system) and low taxes. Centuries later, Socrates, Plato, Thomas More, Erasmus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others would argue in favor of the same view of human nature.

In contrast to Mencius, Xunzi (310-235 BC) argued that human nature is inherently evil. People are born with desires for profit and pleasure, and when people pursue these desires, it results in conflict and disorder. Goodness is the result of deliberate efforts such as shaping a warped piece of wood with steam and pressure. Ritual, education, and teachers can help reshape human beings. Although Xunzi was still a Confucian, his pessimism paved the way for two of his students, Han Feizi and Li Si, to develop Legalism into its leading theory and practice. The Sophists, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes would all support the Xunzi side.

Mozi: Impartial Care and the Critique of Waste ↑

Mozi (470-391 BC) was a simple worker and became Confucius’ first major critic. Confucians, Mozi argued, believed that love should be graded; more for family members than for strangers. This is what Mozi believed was the root cause of both war and crime. Instead of graded love, Mozi advocated for impartial care – i.e., treating other people’s families, cities and states the same way we would treat our own.

Mozi evaluated policies based upon whether there were any positive outcomes for the people, the state, and the population. He said offensive wars were the worst crimes because they did not provide benefits to anyone. His followers developed disciplined engineering units that traveled to help cities under siege protect themselves. Mozi also condemned the elaborate funeral services, long periods of mourning, and costly court music that Confucians valued as wasteful use of resources which could have been used to help the poor. He recommended selecting officials based on their merits regardless of whether those individuals were farmers or artisans. He also wanted to develop a single set of moral standards that would flow down from Heaven through the ruler.

Although Mohism was popular for approximately 200 years, it almost completely died out during the Han Dynasty. Modern scholars view Mohism as a precursor to modern utilitarianism.

Daoism or an Ancient Laissez-faire ↑

The Dao (Way) is the nameless, natural process from which everything comes. It acts without striving, like water which is soft and yielding yet wears away stone. Human misery is caused by trying to impose artificial shapes on the world – shapes of ambition, desire, rigid morality, and above all, too much government. The ideal is wu wei, “non-action” or “effortless action” – i.e. acting in harmony with the natural course of things rather than against it.

In the Daodejing we can find some of the most anti-statist passages of the ancient world.

1: The more prohibitions there are, the more people become poor. The more laws there are, the more thieves and bandits there will be.

2: The best ruler is one whose existence the people hardly notice. When the ruler’s work is done, the people will say that they did it themselves.

3: To govern a large state is like cooking a small fish: stir it too much and it will fall to pieces.

4: A small state with few people, where people use no tools or weapons and are content with their simple lives, is ideal.

He was known for mocking Confucian moralists and for turning down positions of power. Once, when offered the position of minister, Zhuangzi responded in the manner of Diogenes of Greece: “I would rather be a live turtle dragging its tail in the mud than a dead turtle with its shell in a temple.”

These texts can be read as a call for minimal government, and modern libertarians such as economist Murray Rothbard have even claimed Laozi as an ancestor. However, the Daodejing can also be read in a quite different way: the lines quoted above could be read as supporting a paternalistic or even manipulative rule of a sage ruler who keeps the people’s minds simple and their bellies full and weakens their ambitions. Thus, Daoism is less a political program than a critique of all political programs. It was, however, Huang-Lao, a school related to Daoism, which guided the early Han emperors in reducing taxes, mitigating the severity of the punishments and letting the economy develop freely after the Qin dynasty had come to an end.

Legalism: Law, Punishment, and the Power of the State ↑

Legalism (or School of Law) was a label created later by Han historians for a group of thinkers and statesmen that had a very cold, practical view of politics. This group of people, who could be seen as secular Pharisees, rejected the moral idealism of the Confucians, believing that the ancient sages and virtuous examples of the past were irrelevant in the brutal competition among states. They believed that people were motivated by two things: reward and punishment. These were the “two handles” of power, as Han Feizi would later call them.

Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), chief minister of the western state of Qin from the 350s BCE, put these ideas into practice in one of the most radical reform programs in ancient history:

1: Abolishing hereditary privilege. Rank and land were granted for military achievement (measured by enemy heads taken) and agricultural production, not for birth.

2: Agriculture and war. The two activities that strengthen the state were rewarded; commerce, scholarship, and other «unproductive» activities were discouraged and taxed.

3: Collective responsibility. Groups of five and ten households were held responsible for each other’s crimes and had to report on the misdeeds of fellow citizens.

4: Clear, public laws applied to all, with harsh punishments even for small offenses, on the theory that severe penalties would deter crime and eventually make punishment unnecessary.

5: The creation of a centralized administration with counties governed by appointed officials instead of by hereditary nobles. In addition, the weights and measures of the state were standardized.

The reforms made Qin the strongest state in China. Shang Yang made many enemies among the aristocrats he had deprived of privileges; after his patron died, he was accused on grounds of rebellion and executed by being torn apart by chariots.

Han Feizi (280-233 BC) was a prince of the state of Han and a student of Xunzi. He was the most important theorist of Legalism. Han Feizi wrote that effective rule required three elements: (1) clear laws and standards; (2) methods of controlling officials and assessing whether they had fulfilled their promises; and (3) the positional power and authority of the ruler. The ruler should be mysterious and impartial, trusting no one, including his wife and children. He should let the system work. In his essay “The Five Vermin,” Han Feizi listed the groups of people that he considered to be parasites on the state: Confucian scholars, wandering political talkers, private swordsmen, those who used connections to avoid military service, and merchants and artisans who hoarded wealth. Han Feizi was imprisoned in Qin and forced to take poison, reportedly through the intrigues of his former fellow student Li Si.

While comparisons with Machiavelli (1513) and Hobbes (1651) are frequently made and are very apt as both thinkers also started from a very pessimistic view of human nature and were primarily concerned with the establishment and maintenance of order and state power, there is one very important difference. Legalist “law” was a tool of the ruler to use as he saw fit, not a constraint upon him. Thus, Legalist “law” was not the same as modern “law” which is meant to apply equally to the ruler and to the citizens of a country and to grant them certain rights.

The Qin: Legalism, Power But No Virtue ↑

In 221 BCE King Ying Zheng of Qin defeated the last of the Warring States and became China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (First Emperor of Qin). He created a new title that has remained in use ever since. Along with his chancellor Li Si, Ying Zheng used legalism to create a unified system of laws and governance throughout China.

Ying Zheng reorganized China. He abolished the previous feudal states and established 36 commanderies, each controlled by salaried officials appointed and removed by the central government. All aspects of life in China were standardized. There was one written language, one currency, one set of weights and measures, and even the width of cart axles were standardized. This is because an empire functions like a machine; every part must work together.

Hundreds of thousands of people worked to build roads, canals, and walls. They also built a tomb for the First Emperor guarded by an army of clay soldiers. Even after death, power wants to be obeyed. On Li Si’s advice in 213 BCE, the Qin state ordered the burning of historical texts, poetry, and the writings of the «Hundred Schools.» Only those books dealing with medicine, divination, and agriculture were allowed to remain. According to Sima Qian, over 460 scholars were executed the next year. It is still debated among historians today what occurred during this time period. This is understandable given that the stories were recorded by the dynasty that succeeded the Qin. Every regime destroys some books and every succeeding regime records the ones that survive.

The Qin Empire did not last very long after its founder died. The First Emperor died in 210 BCE while searching for an elixir of immortality. Two years later, in 209 BCE, according to Sima Qian, two conscripted leaders, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, were delayed by heavy rain and faced execution if they arrived late. They decided they had nothing to lose and rebelled. They asked whether kings, nobles, generals, and ministers were born to their positions. Rebellions quickly spread throughout China and the Qin Dynasty fell in 206 BCE after only fifteen years. Since then, for two thousand years, Chinese scholars have cited the Qin as the classic example of a powerful state that lacked virtue and consequently lost the Mandate of Heaven almost immediately upon seizing it.

Legacy: From the Han Synthesis to Our Time ↑

Outwardly Confucian, Inwardly Legalist ↑

The Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) took lessons from the fall of the Qin Dynasty, but retained some of the Qin Dynasty’s apparatus. The Han Dynasty maintained the central bureaucracy; maintained the Commandery system; and adopted many of the Qin Dynasty’s laws. However, the Han Dynasty removed the most severe punishments associated with the Qin Dynasty, and changed the official language of legitimacy. During the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE), Confucianism became the state orthodoxy. Emperor Wu established the Five Classics as the curriculum of an Imperial Academy, and began recruiting officials based upon their knowledge of Confucianism. Dong Zhongshu, a scholar, combined Confucian ethics with cosmology to teach that natural disasters and unusual events were signs from Heaven that the Emperor was making mistakes. This provided officials with a respectful method to express criticism of the Throne.

Chinese thinkers later summarized this result in a famous quote, «The Empire was outwardly Confucian, inwardly Legalist.» (1) Virtue from Confucianism provided the public ideology, rituals, and education for officials. (2) Law from Legalism provided the hard structure for the state.

Daoism continued to be a philosophy for private life, art, and religion, and as a recurring voice of protest against an overbearing government. This combination is likely the most significant ideological combination in world history. For nearly two thousand years, this combination ruled over the largest population on Earth.

The Han Dynasty also hosted one of the earliest documented debates concerning economic policy. In 81 BC, during the Debate on Salt and Iron, Confucian scholars debated government ministers who had created state monopolies on salt, iron, and liquor to fund Emperor Wu’s wars. Led by Sang Hongyang, the ministers argued that the state should control strategic industries, set prices, and collect profits that would otherwise have been collected by private magnates. The Confucians responded that a government that competes with its citizens for profit corrupts both itself and its citizens. Additionally, the Confucians stated that the state should govern through virtue, frugality, and low taxes. Compiled by Huan Kuan, the debate record reads very similarly to modern debates regarding state-owned enterprises, industrial policy, and free market economics.

The Examination State and the Scholar-Official ↑

China selected its officials through competitive civil service examinations based on the Confucian classics starting with the Sui (605 CE) and Tang dynasties, and more importantly under the Song (960-1279). From the 14th century until 1905 the exams were based on the commentaries of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200). In theory any man, women were excluded, could rise from poverty to the highest positions in government through hard study. However, the wealthy families had many advantages in preparing their sons for the exams. Thus the exams created a national elite of scholar-officials whose loyalties were to the state and its Confucian ideology rather than to their region or clan.

In the Enlightenment, European thinkers were also impressed by the examination system. Voltaire and Leibniz for instance praised the Chinese system of government, run by philosophers rather than priests or hereditary nobles. François Quesnay, the French physiocrat, was even called «the Confucius of Europe» by his followers. In his Le despotisme de la Chine (1767) he praised the Chinese government in the highest terms. It is generally agreed that the British reform of the civil service through competitive examinations, as proposed in the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854, was influenced by the Chinese model. It is even suggested that the Daoist concept of wu wei was one of the sources for the physiocrats’ idea of laissez-faire, although this is the subject of much debate.

Rebellion and the Mandate in Later Centuries ↑

The grammar of Chinese politics remained the Mandate of Heaven. Rebellions by Chinese peasants claimed that the ruling dynasty had lost the Mandate. First the Yellow Turbans (184 CE) against the Han, then the Red Turbans, whose leader Zhu Yuanzhang became the first Ming emperor in 1368, and finally the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) against the Qing, which combined a radical form of Christianity with land reform on a huge scale and cost the lives of millions. Even foreign conquerors such as the Mongols (Yuan dynasty, 1271-1368) and the Manchus (Qing dynasty, 1644-1912) claimed the Mandate of Heaven, using the Chinese system of Confucian rituals and civil service examinations to govern a majority Chinese population.

The Mandate of Heaven traveled to Korea and Vietnam, which adopted Confucian statecraft and various forms of the Mandate. Japan, on the other hand, adopted Confucian ethics but not the conditional Mandate, as Japanese emperors claimed to have an unbroken divine lineage, making rebellion against the throne unthinkable.

Revolution, Mao, and the Attack on Confucius ↑

In 1911-1912 the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty to end more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China. The leaders of the revolution, many of whom were intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement (1919), referred to the revolution as geming, meaning a ‘change of mandate’ in modern Chinese. For these young revolutionaries, Confucianism was the main impediment to China’s modernization. Confucianism was a system of thought that demanded obedience to elders, women to men, and individuals to the family and state. One of the slogans of the May Fourth Movement was to ‘overthrow the shop of Confucius.’

Mao Zedong shared this hostility towards Confucianism. During the Cultural Revolution, the Confucian temple and family cemetery in Qufu were vandalized by Red Guards in 1966. Later on, during the “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” campaign (1973-1976), Confucius was criticized as a supporter of the slave-owning aristocrats. The Legalists, on the other hand, were praised, including the First Emperor of Qin, Qin Shi Huang, who was said to have unified China and crushed the reactionary scholars. Mao Zedong even compared himself to Qin Shi Huang on occasion. The ancient debate between Confucians and Legalists was used as a weapon in the power struggles of the 20th century.

Confucius Returns: Legitimacy in Contemporary China ↑

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping began to introduce market reforms in China in 1978. In the years that followed, the Chinese Communist Party gradually rehabilitated the famous philosopher Confucius. Today, hundreds of Confucius Institutes are being funded by the Chinese government around the world in order to promote Chinese language and culture. Many of these have been closed in recent years by various countries around the world due to concerns about the Chinese government’s political influence. Official slogans such as “stable society” (promoted in the mid-2000s) also make use of Confucian terms. President Xi Jinping, who took office as general secretary of the party in 2012, has on numerous occasions quoted from the classics of Chinese literature, as well as described China’s system of governance as based on five thousand years of civilization.

Performance legitimacy is the modern version of the Mandate of Heaven. The Chinese state does not derive its legitimacy from competitive elections, as do most liberal democracies, but from its performance in delivering results such as economic growth, stability, power and anti-corruption campaigns. The China Model of political meritocracy is a form of governance that is said to be based on the principle of merit. This form of government, however, lacks the basic institutions of a modern democratic system, such as free and fair elections, an independent press and an independent judiciary, which are necessary to enable citizens to evaluate the performance of the government and to peacefully withdraw its mandate. The suppression of the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and the subsequent treatment of dissent are cases in point. There is also the danger that, like the ancient Mandate of Heaven, performance legitimacy could be lost if the government fails to deliver on its promises of growth and other results, particularly in times of crisis.

Echoes within the West and in Economics ↑

The ancient Chinese debates are still relevant today:

1: Virtue versus institutions. Confucius placed his bets on the character of the ruler while the Legalists and later the authors of the U.S. Constitution designed a system that would work even with bad people in charge. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 51 (1788) “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The debate over whether a good society needs good leaders or good rules is still open today.

2: The debate about meritocracy within the Chinese examination state is also very relevant to current debates about the selection of elites by education and testing and the question of whether a meritocracy can be fair or whether it will create a new hereditary class of the educated. In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” as a satire on this very danger.

3: Minimal government – Laozi’s famous warning that the more laws there are, the more thieves there will be has been used by many modern libertarians and free-market economists. Mencius argued that people first need a secure livelihood before they can be virtuous, which is the basic idea of the welfare state.

4: Culture and capitalism. Sociologist Max Weber argued that Confucianism, with its emphasis on harmony and tradition, discouraged the development of rational capitalism that took place in Protestant Europe. Decades later, however, many observers concluded that the rapid growth of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and, more recently, mainland China was based on Confucian values of education, discipline and family saving. As Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, put it, there are “Asian values” that can be contrasted with Western liberalism. Economists tend to favor an explanation based on policy, on investment, on global context but in the end it is also a debate about culture and how ancient ideologies are being reinterpreted in the light of modern realities.

All four schools of thought developed in response to the crisis of the collapse of order during the Warring States period. However, they had different views of human nature, of the role of the state, and of the source of social order. The table above summarizes these traditions in simplified form; however, they were internally diverse and frequently borrowed from each other.

As the four schools of thought each developed in response to the collapse of order during the Warring States period, they arrived at very different conclusions regarding human nature, the role of the state, and the source of social order. However, as the table above suggests, these four schools of thought together have mapped out many of the basic options for political ideology that China has explored over the last two thousand years: the moral state, the coercive state, the minimal state, and the state of universal welfare. All of these options are, of course, subject to the question of whether or not a government still deserves to rule.