the central concept of benevolence, as it relates to human nature,
human relationships, and human governance. This philosophy was
expounded in part through employing homonyms and the ideographic
features of the Chinese language. In Chinese, the pronunciation of
human and benevolence (or humaneness) is the same, namelyren, and
the word for benevolence is composed of two morphemes meaning
two people. Literarily and philosophically, Confucius and Mencius
believed that being human is being benevolent and that to be benevolent
is to ‘‘be human’’ (ren zhe ren ye) and is to love humans (ren zhe ai ren).
The original-goodness nature of human beings
The humane leadership philosophy is based on the assumption of the
original goodness of human nature. Mencius said:
All humans have a mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others...
When I say that all humans have a mind which cannot bear to see the
sufferings of others, my meaning may be illustrated thus – even nowadays,
if people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without
exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress... The feeling of
commiseration is the principle of benevolence. Such a commiserating mind
of the ancient emperors guaranteed a commiserating government (Legge,
1970 : 202).
Notice here, the goodness of human nature is defined in a human’s
natural feelings of empathy, compassion, and love for other human
beings. Such benevolent feelings define and distinguish human beings
from other beings. This human goodness lays the foundation for
people to act altruistically as opposed to selfishly, according to social
obligations and duties as opposed to individual instincts, morally as
opposed to instrumentally to seek material benefits. Such inborn
humane tendencies also lay the foundation for self-cultivation to
become a superior person or even a sage. Lastly, and most importantly
from a leadership perspective, such human goodness lays the founda-
tion of benevolent leadership in terms of cultivating virtuous leader-
ship characteristics, leading the followers, and forming a benevolent
system of governance. Of course such a natural tendency does not
automatically cause altruistic, responsible, and moral actions, which is
why self-cultivation, moral education, and leadership are needed to
sustain, extend, and institutionalize humaneness.
34 Xin-hui Yang, Yan-qin Peng, and Yueh-ting Lee