Li Yousheng (continued)

VI. The enduring charm and immortal value of the Confucian ideal of a sage-king

Confucianism held a dominant official position for two thousand years, and its recent resurgence is entirely due to the enduring appeal and timeless value of the Confucian ideal of a sage-king. This analysis will examine the three levels of the upper social model from bottom to top to demonstrate the allure and value of the Confucian ideal.

If the population of China in Confucius’ time was estimated at ten million, it grew forty times to four hundred million by the end of the Qing Dynasty. Excluding twenty thousand officials, a staggering 99% of the population lived a rural life similar to the well-field system described by Mencius. The author used the metaphor of a “King of Freedom” to depict the leisurely pace of this life, and also evoked the expansive spirit of Zhuangzi’s “King of the Roc Spreading Its Wings Ninety Thousand Miles,” hence the title “King of Freedom”—though he was merely an emperor within his own household, unknown to the outside world. Ah Q, in his moment of glory, became a self-defined revolutionary, even intimidating the most powerful figure in Weizhuang, Master Zhao, and ultimately died without losing his heroic spirit, without a trace of resentment. Compared to the soldiers who died fighting each other with peasant armies led by Hong Xiuquan and Zeng Guofan, and compared to the unjustly killed by Malthusian theories of war, famine, and population control, Ah Q was far more fortunate. The author says, “This practice of confining the countryside to family communities made rural life relatively stable. Except during times of war, drought, or flood, life was generally as Lao Tzu described: ‘They enjoy their food, their clothes, their dwellings, and their customs,’ living a simple and joyful life. They had a lot of leisure time, especially in winter when they had nothing to do. They also used their leisure time for spiritual life, including religious pursuits such as praying to gods and Buddhas. The number of festivals they had each year, the grandeur of their weddings and funerals, and the frequency and scale of their various recreational activities often led to the entire population working together instead of farming. Such things would make today’s urban office workers envious. Compared with modern life, their life was closer to the primitive social life of prehistoric times. Their weakness was that anarchy was powerless against secondary socio-political forces. Their life could be swept away by chaotic troops overnight, leaving no trace in history.” [16, p. 300]

There is a lack of research on the comfort of peasant life in Chinese history. The image of poverty and ignorance is largely a one-sided view held by intellectuals in secondary society. Furthermore, modern revolutionary theories emphasize the cruelty of landlord exploitation, thus obscuring the true picture of rural life in China. Both spiritually and materially, the lives of peasants in Chinese history were generally better than those of uncivilized tribal peoples today. The following citations of materials from the Kunsan people of South Africa illustrate the credibility of the author’s statement:

“They still live a hunter-gatherer culture, leading a primitive yet prosperous life. The Khun people obtain a variety of foods from their surroundings, resulting in a rich and balanced diet. They have over a hundred kinds of plants available for consumption, but only fourteen are considered staple foods, with the rest reserved. Of their food, seventy percent comes from plants and thirty percent from meat. Women provide fifty-five percent, and men provide forty-five percent, with the men’s contributions including meat. Adult Khun people spend about 20 hours a week gathering food, and needless to say, they roam around, gathering and eating as they go, without the seriousness and tension of modern work. They consume 2,355 calories a day, and medical examinations have confirmed that they are all in good health. Ten percent of their population is over sixty years old, while in the agricultural countries of Brazil and India at the same time, people over sixty years old account for only five percent of the population. The Khun population has remained relatively stable, neither increasing nor decreasing, while India, despite its efforts to implement family planning, has seen its population rise sharply.” [16, p. 50]

According to John King Fairbank, there were 20,000 intellectual bureaucrats in the mid-to-late Qing Dynasty, and another 1.25 million people with various official titles. Many of these individuals still led a rural, peasant-like lifestyle to varying degrees and should not be categorized within the Confucian cultural sphere. This group of Confucian intellectuals after the Song Dynasty is estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly tens of thousands during the Han and Tang Dynasties. These individuals studied Confucian classics during the Han and Tang Dynasties, and the Four Books of Confucianism were used as early childhood education texts during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. They were content with poverty and found joy in simplicity, free from worldly and agricultural troubles, leading a moralized and artistic life—a life of leisurely self-satisfaction and self-admiration in the eyes of millions of peasants. The phrase “not seeking profit, not seeking skill” is used here to depict the lifestyle of this bureaucratic intellectual class. Confucius said, “The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.” (The Analects, 14:16) Mencius said to King Hui of Liang, “Why must Your Majesty speak of profit? There is only benevolence and righteousness.” (Mencius: King Hui of Liang, Part 1) This Confucian tradition of emphasizing benevolence and righteousness while ignoring profit was necessary for the stability of the Confucian ideal state. It served as a social guide, stabilizing society and setting an example for people. Profit, as a necessity of life, was provided by this ideal state. The bureaucratic and intellectual class’s tendency towards an artful and moralistic lifestyle led the vast majority of peasants to contentment with a rural life of human relationships, thus suppressing the emergence of a secondary society. However, this influence was insufficient to make peasants embrace Confucianism.

Confucius also said, “A gentleman is not a vessel,” and said that Zigong was a vessel. (Analects, 2:12, 5:4) Whether it is a sacrificial vessel or other objects, they are all tools that humans can manipulate. Confucius’s connection between humans and objects reflects his observation of the tendency in society at that time to attempt to control society. The second level of society aims to establish various social mechanisms that can be manipulated by humans in order to achieve the goal of controlling society: making millions of people into controllable tools. Sima Qian, in his “Records of the Grand Historian: Biographies of the Disciples of Confucius,” lists dozens of disciples, but he devotes a long section to the story of Zigong’s persuasion of General Tian Chang of Qi, the King of Wu, the King of Yue, and the Duke of Jin, concluding that, “Therefore, when Zigong went out, he saved Lu, disrupted Qi, defeated Wu, strengthened Jin, and made Yue a hegemon. When Zigong was sent out, he caused the power to break down, and within ten years, each of the five states underwent changes.” Laozi’s saying, “The world is a divine vessel, which cannot be grasped or manipulated,” applies to primitive society. Although secondary societies establish various human-controlled social mechanisms, such as state institutions and social power networks, Lao Tzu believed that they were essentially uncontrollable. The rulers and generals of the five states, believing they could control millions of farmers through their painstakingly built social power networks, were misled by Zigong’s words, leading to a massive social effect of “mutual destruction,” far exceeding their control. The millions of farmers were indeed tools to be manipulated, and the rulers and generals of the five states also became tools manipulated by Zigong. Zigong himself, burdened with a social mission, was also a tool manipulated for that mission. Among Confucius’ disciples, Yan Hui might have been the opposite, somewhat bookish compared to Zigong, yet Confucius particularly favored Yan Hui. Only when everyone emulates Confucius and Yan Hui—untainted by worldly concerns, upholding inner benevolence and aesthetic principles, and unmoved by mundane affairs—can the Confucian ideal of pure benevolence and aesthetics be realized.

From Wang Mang’s utopian reforms to Emperor Guangxu’s appointment of Kang Youwei to carry out reforms, the ideals of Confucian sage-king politics were permeated. It is said that the princes of the Qing Dynasty were known for their diligence and strictness in their studies. The emperor would get up at four or five o’clock in the morning, and the first thing he would do after getting up was to go to his mother’s room to pay his respects. Compared with the laziness of ordinary people’s children today, it is not difficult to see the appeal of the Confucian sage-king ideal state. According to Zhang Hongjie’s statistics, the emperor was the most unfortunate person. There are 209 emperors in history whose exact birth and death dates can be found. The average lifespan of these 209 people was only 39.2 years, which is nearly 18 years lower than that of ordinary people. In the history of Chinese dynasties, including large dynasties that unified the country and small dynasties that were in a corner of the country, there were a total of 611 emperors. 272 ​​of them died unnaturally, and the unnatural death rate was 44%, which was much higher than that of other social groups. [17, 18] Such a cruel social environment shows that the top level of the social model was far from the Confucian sage-king. The novel *Dream of the Red Chamber* created different bureaucratic images of Jia Zheng and Jia Yucun: Jia Zheng only knew how to talk about philosophy and was not good at worldly affairs; Jia Yucun was good at flattery and playing political tricks. This is the result of the mixture of the moral order of the Confucian ideal state and the material reward and punishment order oriented by the war economy. Different secondary societies should coexist. Until the establishment of modern democratic system, the West lacked the unified world of China. The Christian monastic world and the secular world coexisted. As a result, the author found that the subjectivity represented by the word “I” in poetry has gradually declined in Chinese history, while the opposite is true in Western history. [19] Western traditional poets came from secular society, while Chinese traditional poets belonged to Confucian literati. They did not establish their own Neo-Confucian monasteries. That is, the Chinese traditional bureaucratic intellectual class had a dual identity of monastery and secular society, which led to the occurrence of spiritual trauma. After the emperor of the court became Confucianized and a secular buffer zone was established, such unpleasant things would not happen.

literature

[1] Liu Hedong (2008): The Five Stages of Confucianism Development and Its Modern Value. September 2008. Paper presented at the First World Confucianism Conference in Qufu, Shandong.

[2] Li Yousheng (2006): A New Interpretation of Chinese Taoism. London, Canada: Taoist Rehabilitation Centre.

[3] Yousheng (2012): The Differences Between Eastern and Western War Cultures: A Case Study of Duke Xiang of Song’s Defeated Defeat by Chu Due to His Adherence to the Rules of War. *Xue Deng*, Issue 24. (http://www.confucius2000.com/writer/yousheng.htm)

[4] Ping-Ti Ho (1962): The ladder of success in imperial China: aspects of social mobility, 1368–1911. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962. (He Bingdi: On Social History of the Ming and Qing Dynasties)

[5] John King Fairbank (1995): John King Fairbank on China. Translated by Xue Xuan. Taipei: Zhengzhong Book Company.

[6] Joseph R. Levenson (1969): Confucian China and its Modern Fate. University of California Press, 1969.

[7] Li Yinghua (2004): Sage Kings and Philosopher Kings: A Comparative Study of the Ideal Ruler in Pre-Qin Ancient Greece. From “A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Political Thought”, Hainan Publishing House, 2004.

[8] Buck and Ernest (2003): Greek Political Theory. Translated by Lu Huaping. Changchun: Jilin People’s Publishing House. (pp. 491-492)

[9] Zhou Ruizhi (2012): The Dictatorship of Philosophy—Notes on “Greek Political Theory”. Source: (http://www.scuphilosophy.org/ Philosophy section: 2012/10/21).

[10] Qi Liang (2001): A History of Chinese Civilization, Volume 2. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House. pp. 13-21.

[11] James TC Liu(1989): China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century. Harvard University Press, 1989.

[12] Victoria Tin-Bor Hui (2005): War and State Formation in Ancient China

and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[13] You-Sheng Li (June 2012): The Ancient Chinese Super State of Genetically Coded Primary Societies and its Implications for Modern Democracy. Submitted to and accepted by the Ninth ISUD World Congress. ISUD=International Society for Universal Dialogue.

[14] Wang Xuetai (1999, 2007): Vagrant Culture and Chinese Society. Tongxin Press, 2007.

[15] You-Sheng Li (2010): The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary Societies: Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century. Bloomington, USA: Author House. p208-35.

[16] Li Yousheng (2009): Looking at life and the world from a different perspective: Chinese Taoism in the 21st century. Beijing: Thread-bound Book Bureau, 2009.

[17] Zhang Hongjie (2007): Five Fates of Chinese Emperors. Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Publishing House, 2007.

[18] Zhang Hongjie (2012): It’s tiring to rule the world: Nine flavors of Chinese-style power. Changchun: Jilin Publishing Group, 2012.

[19] Yousheng (2011): On the anarchist tendencies of Confucius and Mencius. *Xue Deng*, Issue 17. (http://www.confucius2000.com/writer/yousheng.htm)

author By Dr. You-Sheng Li

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