14 China in World History
positions learn how to behave from those above them. Thus, the most
important quality for a king to have was virtue so that his subjects
would naturally be inspired to serve him loyally and virtuously. Like
Jesus fi ve hundred years later, Confucius believed that virtue was pow-
erful and contagious, but in the war-torn era of his time, he had dif-
fi culty persuading any ruler to implement his teachings. He never rose
very high in any government and died in 479 bce, feeling himself a
failure.
More than a century after Confucius, Mengzi, known to the West
as Mencius,^8 expanded on the optimistic idealism of Confucius by pro-
claiming unequivocally that human nature was good and that morality
and ritual were more effective than any amount of brute force in moti-
vating people to behave properly. Mencius was more of a storyteller
than Confucius, and his collected sayings helped to popularize the val-
ues of Confucius through clever dialogues, colorful anecdotes, and short
parables. To demonstrate the goodness of human nature, he argued that
any person, upon seeing a child about to fall into a well, would auto-
matically respond by trying to save the child, not through any ulterior
motive but simply because humans naturally hate to see a child suffer.
Mencius was more infl uential in his own time than Confucius had been,
and he served as an advisor to two major states. He justifi ed the steep
social hierarchies of the day by saying it was right and just that those
who work with their heads rule over those who work with their hands.
Yet he also admonished kings and princes that the common people were
more important than their leaders.
He interpreted the Mandate of Heaven as the natural working out of
politics in which rulers who care for the people consequently win their
support, whereas those who offend the people or exploit them will lose
their support and fail. The Mandate of Heaven gives a king the right to
rule, but, he reminded kings, quoting an earlier text, “Heaven sees with
the eyes of its people. Heaven hears with the ears of its people.”^9 The
king’s fi rst duty is to attend to the welfare of the people. Mencius’s unfet-
tered idealism helped keep the Confucian tradition alive even as it contin-
ued to lose ground to the Legalist trends of the Warring States period.
In contrast to the idealistic Mencius, Xunzi, a slightly later fol-
lower of Confucius, actually served as a government administrator. He
accepted many of the changes of the Warring States period and tried to
make the ideals of Confucius relevant to the times. In contrast to the
short declarations of Confucius and the dialogues and parables of Men-
cius, Xunzi wrote full-blown essays on self-improvement, government
regulations, military affairs, rites and rituals, music, human nature, and