The Penguin History of the World

The mid-first millennium BC saw in China fundamental increases in agricultural productivity which soon could sustain a much larger population. The main breakthroughs were in irrigation and in better tilling of the land, which made for greater yields. Communications increased and so did trade – attempts by each state to control trade were more than made up for by the needs of each territory and the protection individual states were willing to give to its traders. The invention of minted coins also helped create one economy – there were many currencies, but each of them was trusted throughout the central Chinese area since diluting the metal worth would not be in anyone’s interest. For a time the post-Zhou balance of power seemed to serve many purposes at once. But by the fifth century BC, as the peripheral powers increased their influence and their rivalry with each other, it became obvious that the centre could hold no longer, and that the Zhou legacy was not enough to keep a form of stability in place.

At the end of the Spring and Autumn period there was in China a profound and prolonged sense of social and political crisis. As a result, there was a burst of speculation about the foundations of government and ethics. The era was to remain famous as the time of the ‘Hundred Schools’, when wandering scholars moved about from patron to patron, expounding their teachings. One sign of this new development was the appearance of a school of writers known as the ‘Legalists’. They are said to have urged that law-making power should replace ritual observances as the principle of organization of the state; there should be one law for all, ordained and vigorously applied by one ruler. The aim of this was the creation of a wealthy and powerful state. This seemed to many of their opponents to be little more than a cynical doctrine of power, but the Legalists were to have important successes in the next few centuries because kings, at least, liked their ideas. The debate went on for a long time. In this debate the main opponents of the Legalists were the followers of the teacher who is the most famous of all Chinese thinkers – Confucius. It is convenient to call him by that name though it is only a Latinized version of the Chinese term Kong Fuzi, or ‘Master Kong’. Confucius was to be more profoundly respected in China than any other philosopher. What he said – or was said to have said – shaped his countrymen’s thinking for 2,000 years and was to be paid the compliment of bitter attack by the first post-Confucian Chinese states in the twentieth century.

Confucius’s birth-name was Kong Qiu, and he was born in the minor state of Lu (present-day Shandong) in 551 BC. Since his father died when he was very young, he was brought up by his mother, and probably trained as a book-keeper. His family consisted of many important scholars and officials, and Confucius himself was to spend some time as a minister of state and an overseer of granaries but probably never rose above a minor official rank. When he could not find a ruler to put into practice his recommendations for just government he turned to meditation and teaching; his aim was to present a purified and more abstract version of the doctrine he believed to lie at the heart of the traditional practices and thus to revive personal integrity and disinterested service in the governing class. He was a reforming conservative, seeking to teach his pupils the essential truths of ancient ways (Dao) materialized and obscured by routine. Somewhere in the past, he thought, lay a mythical age when each man knew his place and did his duty; to return to that was Confucius’s ethical goal. He advocated the principle of order – the attribution to everything of its correct place in the great gamut of experience. The practical expression of this was the strong Confucian predisposition to support the institutions likely to ensure order – the family, hierarchy, seniority – and due reverence for the many nicely graded obligations between men.

This was teaching likely to produce men who would respect the traditional culture, emphasize the value of good form and regular behaviour, and seek to realize their moral obligations in the scrupulous discharge of duties. It was immediately successful in that many of Confucius’s pupils won fame and worldly success (though his teaching deplored the conscious pursuit of such goals, urging, rather, a gentlemanly self-effacement). But it was also successful in a much more fundamental sense, since generations of Chinese civil servants were later to be drilled in the precepts of behaviour and government which he laid down. ‘Documents, conduct, loyalty and faithfulness’, four precepts attributed to him as his guidance on government, helped to form reliable, sometimes disinterested and even humane civil servants for hundreds of years.