Chapter 7 China 245always also the state’s coercive fist. This is wu, which means force or military
order. Confucius may have preferred a state based on the wisdom and virtue of a
fatherly ruler and the moral cultivation of filial subjects, but because virtue often
fails, social order may also be imposed and defended by force. The legalists and
militarists sometimes rivaled the Confucian philosophers and brought a darker
view of humanity in which peace could be won only through violence and the
punishment of what they saw as the inherent wickedness of man.
Events of the present do not contradict these fundamental patterns of Chi-
nese society. Even with the contradictions in China today regarding the rela-
tionship between socialism and capitalism, there is a surprising degree of
consensus regarding the validity of a strong central authority that provides
moral leadership for the people. Mao Zedong had tremendous moral authority
that has been criticized for its cultic qualities and its excesses during the Cul-
tural Revolution. But many thoughtful Chinese now worry about the moral
vacuum of capitalism and look back with a certain nostalgia on the social
morality of Mao’s teachings contained in these words:
We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness.... A man’s ability may
be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and
pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of
value to the people. (Mao Zedong 1965:337)
As Mao articulated a Communist morality that had strong resonance with
themes of Confucian morality while also governing a coercive state, destroying
enemies of the state, and suppressing dissident views, he and the Chinese Com-
munist Party were following a very old pattern. We turn now to the establish-
ment of these patterns in ancient times.The Beginnings: Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin
The Chinese have always been interested in their past—worship of ances-
tors is worship of origins—and have put extraordinary effort into recording his-
tory in dynastic chronicles, gazetteers, travel accounts, and official records. The
twentieth century provided a phenomenal growth of knowledge about the ori-
gins of Chinese civilization from a new source, as archaeology opened to view
palaces and tombs of the earliest dynasties. But the names of these ancient
kings are not new to us; archaeology confirms the existence of rulers already
chronicled in the first century B.C.E. by China’s “Grand Historian,” Sima Qian
(145–89 B.C.E.). It was Sima Qian who rescued the name of Confucius from
oblivion after the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang (259–210 B.C.E.), attempted to
obliterate Confucian teachings and texts. Sima Qian gathered all the older doc-
uments that were available to him as court historian and archivist to his Han
dynasty emperor to write the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), an enor-
mous work that would require two to three thousand pages for a complete Eng-
lish translation (Wills 1994).