[The Ideology Called Confucian]
551 b. c. is most commonly given as the year of Confucius' birth. Confucius (K'ung Ch'iu; also Master K'ung—K'ung Fu-tzŭ, from which Confucius is derived) was a wandering scholar and would-be official whose life was spent in the advocacy of political and social reform. He was important because of his part in establishing the profession of teaching and for his doctrines upholding good government. Discontented with the present, he turned to the past—becoming conservative and aristocratic in outlook. His position in the history of political thought he owes to the bent which he gave aristocratic conservatism. He sought the leadership of the chün-tzŭ (the upright, superior, or aristocratic man) rather than the domination of laws. He developed an ethical system secular and practical in its orientation and humane in its tenets. He emphasized the necessity of the individual's appropriate self-consciousness in the society, and the need for following li (propriety), the established values. He stressed family loyalty above all others, and insisted on respect for tradition. After his death in 479 b. c. his ideas were elaborated, clarified, and revised into what is known as the Confucian system.[5]
This system underwent many changes. The Confucian influences came to prevail in the Han dynasty, in the second and first centuries b. c., but lost its official preeminence with the fall of the Han in the third century. It nevertheless retained a great share of intellectual leadership. In the Sung period (960-1279) the philosopher Chu Hsi developed Confucianism into its most recent accepted form. Others joined him in sharpening and refining Confucianism.
The Sung philosophers evolved a Confucianism which showed the influence of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. They reinterpreted the classics by emphasizing works other than those hitherto regarded as preeminent. With reference to the concept li, they developed the notion of a truly complete order running through both spirit and matter. Metaphysics, alien to the mind of Confucius himself, became an operative part of Confucian thought. Through their ethical and psychological studies the Sung Confucians translated the Confucian rationale into an effective ideological technique for domination. It is not inconsistent to find them opposing any action definitely governmental. Furthermore, they showed themselves to be conservatives in politics, and through their commentaries on the classics—which were studied in succeeding centuries along with the texts themselves—imprinted their conservatism upon the Chinese mind.
The ideology called Confucian is not identical with Confucianism as the philosophic system proper. In the first place, it is not known how much of the social doctrines taught by Confucius and his successors was original and how much mere transmission of preexisting beliefs. Confucius himself regarded his work as that of a transmitter and not a creator. Secondly, the whole Chinese culture contributed elements of strength to the ideology to which the name of Confucius became attached by Westerners. Thirdly, the system developed in practice to an extent which Confucius could not have anticipated. The Confucian ideology and society bear the relation to Confucius which Christendom bears to Jesus Christ; both founders would scarcely recognize the derivations to which their teachings have led.
The Confucian ideology came to prevail in China just before the day of Christ. At the time of Christ, Wang Mang, a usurper and a zealous Confucian, shook the Han Empire with his experiments. A period of reaction against Confucianism set in. Taoism and Buddhism provided rival cults. After the twelfth century, Confucianism rose slowly to power over men's minds again—although it had never been wholly superseded by other doctrines, it had long lacked its all-compelling primacy. Not until the Ming dynasty (1368-1643) did it become the state philosophy of China, the ideology whereby China lived politically and whereby she was governed.
Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely. Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was interpreted by Aquinas, so was Confucianism by the Sung philosophers. Aristotelian politics are far removed from the specific problems of representative or modern authoritarian government; nevertheless they possess great value and exercise an indeterminable influence upon the entire West. The analogy holds for China if left in its loosest terms. Confucianism is far from oblivion. The China which met the Western impact—"old China" in the eyes of the twentieth century—was in fact more Confucian than was the West Aristotelian. She was permeated by an ideology in which Confucius' teachings were the key pattern, though not one which he had made up in its entirety.
[Government in the Confucian Ideology]
In Confucian China, government was reduced to a minimum. There existed a set of institutions which in many respects afforded a remarkable although misleading parallel to the governments of the West. In fact, the earliest Western visitors to China found no difficulty in applying their own political language to China. The supreme Chinese leader they called the emperor, despite the inevitable Caesarian connotations of the term and the fact that it erased the peculiar significance of the Chinese title. Subordinate areas were called provinces. All the way through, the use of European concepts compelled whole series of unwarranted parallels. The term mandarin forced its way into Western tongues, however, since there was no existing term to describe the members of the curious hierarchy of scholar-bureaucrats occupying a position of hegemony among the institutions of Chinese society. Unfortunately for Chinese as well as Westerners, both were so poorly informed in the beginnings of intercourse that the Chinese could not secure an adequate picture of Europe, while the Europeans assumed that the Chinese were more, rather than less, like themselves. The Chinese society, with a single supreme ritual leader, was termed an empire, and the predominant hierarchy of that society a government.
Actually, modern political scientists would have to hesitate before applying the term government to the hierarchy of old China. In many respects that hierarchy was more like Europe's medieval universities and our fraternal societies than the governments of the West. The prestige accruing to positions in the system was not derived so much from political power as from the status which the system offered to its members. An official, although he might value his power, was regarded in the society at large almost as much for what he was as for the dignity with which the office invested him. This arose from his peculiar role, in which his function was to provide a model of propriety in his private and public life rather than to interfere in the lives of others. Interference, to be sure, occurred—sharply, Draconically, directed more against the social group of the offender than against the offender himself, on the theory that it was the function of the group to keep its members in line with the common-sense traditions. In such rare cases the officialdom became a government—government as the institution of men who seek to control society in the name of all society. Normally the officialdom was not a government in this sense, as it claimed leadership rather than control, preached rather than punished, shamed rather than intimidated the people.