Chinese history is not one of my areas of interest, so I have not read deeply in any specific area. Lorenzo Warby, on the other hand, has a much better grasp of the sweep of historical events in China and some of the philosophical and cultural elements that persist through the centuries:
All political and social philosophies rest, implicitly or explicitly, on some claims or claims about the nature of humans.
Consider the thought of Kong Qiu (c.551 BC – c. 479 BC), known as Kǒngfūzǐ (孔夫子) (Great Master or Wise Teacher Kong), hence Confucius. He held that human nature is naturally good and that it is therefore a reasonable aspiration to create a society of harmony, a society without conflict, if everyone just behaves with the propriety appropriate to their place in society — in particular, according to their placement in the web of social connections. His constant concern for the rites (li 禮) is for people to show the correct forms of, and orientation towards, those socially embedded interactions.
This leads very naturally to a very authoritarian, hierarchical view of politics as enforcing social harmony, particularly as people vary in their willingness and capacity to cultivate such virtuous propriety. The notion that politics is legitimately an arena for bargaining between competing interests — the Western idea of “normal politics” — becomes not a natural way to do politics, but a failure to achieve proper harmony.
Master Kong developed his ideas — that were further developed by disciples and commentators — in a civilisation with no tradition of warrior assemblies, self-governing cities, or deliberative assemblies of any kind. A ruler’s court is a place where officials report, and may even debate, but the ruler decides. You can see this narrow view of politics in comments by Master Kong in the Analects such as:
8.14 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.”
14.26 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.” Master Zeng [Zengzi] commented, “The gentleman does not allow his thoughts to go beyond what his position calls for.”
In such a political culture, judicious quotes based on mastery of a shared literature become a way of communicating to superiors while giving minimum offence. Conversely, political rhetoric has little or no value, because there are not the deliberative assemblies to be swayed by argument. Master Kong deprecated glib persuasiveness, on the grounds that it tended to hide one’s real character (or lack thereof).
Where command-and-control hierarchy is the dominant method of political action, hoping for propriety to pervade the hierarchy has obvious resonance. Putting such propriety as a mechanism for social harmony is a way to, ironically enough, be persuasive — which requires a positive view of human nature. But it also hugely elevates the moral claims of governorship. Hence comments such as:
2.1 The Master said, “To rule by virtue is like the way the North Star rules, standing in its place with all the other stars revolving around it and paying court to it.”
12.17 Ji Kangzi asked about the way of governing [zheng]. Confucius replied, “To govern [zheng] is to correct [zheng]. When you set an example by correcting your mistakes, who will dare not to correct his mistakes?”
This concern for harmonious propriety is not a world away from ibn Khaldun‘s concern for asabiyya. Nor is it so far from recognising the importance of a coherent civic culture in order to maintain robust institutions, which rest on norms and rules. This is a factor that much of mainstream Economics fails to seriously grapple with, leading to incompetent analysis of immigration.
The problem is that this cultural and institutional framework turns the thought of Master Kong, his disciples and commentators, into what is, in effect, one-trick moral propriety politics, however sophisticated other aspects of this tradition may be. The choices of governance are narrowed down to punishment and example:
2.3 The Master said, “If you guide the people with ordinances and statutes and keep them in line with [threats of] punishment, they will try to stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. If you guide them with exemplary virtue [de] and keep them in line with the practice of the rites [li], they will have a sense of shame and will know to reform themselves.”
They are reduced to trying to make autocratic command-and-control politics work as a successful long-term project: as the repeated dynastic collapses in Chinese history show, they did not succeed. Indeed, the recurring pattern of Chinese political reformers and reform programs ending badly reflects that such fail to break out of that autocratic command-and-control pattern, so end up being swallowed by its incentive structures — including the long-term pathologies of bureaucracy and the inherent fears of autocrats.
The most thorough attempt to implement ideas based on rú (儒) classicism (“Confucianism”) in Chinese history was the disastrous reign of Wang Meng (r.9-23), who provides an object lesson in overweening Theory leading to disastrous policies. Ironically, Master Kong himself was against such grand theorising:
9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.
The episode is a particularly disastrous example of Etienne Gilson‘s principle that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple, thereby all too readily reducing struggles with complexity to a simplifying dogmatism: a trap that scholarly commentary on The Analects often tried to avoid.
The thought of Master Kong also wanders very close to someone is morally better, not only because learned, but because smart and learned. For instance:
5.9 The Master said to Zigong, “Who is the better man, you or Hui [Yan Hui]?” Zigong replied, “How dare I compare myself with Hui? Having learned one thing, he gives play to ten, while I go only as far as two.” The Master said, “You are not as good as he is. Neither of us is as good as he is.”
This arrogance of the appropriately credentialed periodically led to mass outbreaks of infuriated peasants removing educated heads from elite bodies. The most recent manifestations of this were the Cultural Revolution in China and the megacidal Cambodian horrors under Pol Pot but you can see versions of this reaching back into Chinese history — for example, the massacres by Huang Chao’s rebellion (874-884) towards the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the earlier peasant revolts that brought down Wang Meng.
We can also see the same self-righteous exploitive arrogance of those credentialed with “morally proper knowledge” afflicting contemporary Western societies along with bureaucratic pathologies that have also been a feature of Chinese history — remembering that we Westerners copied the Chinese pattern of bureaucratic selection through examination without considering the long-term patterns of Chinese history. Fortunately, national populism generates a less violent outlet for popular frustrations than Chinese peasant revolts.
