Abstract
This chapter examines and deconstructs a well-known institution in China: Confucianism. China is often presumed to be different from Europe: While the Western world was simultaneously cursed by a Hobbesian state of war and blessed by a deeply ingrained tradition of constitutionalism, the East was supposed to be endowed with peace but burdened with autocracy. Confucianism, a political philosophy that emphasizes benevolence, is often taken to prescribe pacifism in China’s external relations and paternalism in China’s state-society relations. Yet, Confucianism is not unlike other world philosophical thoughts in that it contains both elements that support peace and those that justify war and components that champion freedom and those that defend autocracy. This chapter traces Confucianism’s evolution from its birth in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BCE) to its construction in the Imperial era (221 BCE to 1911 CE). It shows that China’s history had roughly equal parts of pacifism and aggression, and limited government and imperial despotism. Confucianism has continued to be reconstructed to this day to support the official line of “peaceful rise” in international relations and a one-party dictatorship in state-society relations. Nevertheless, this deep historical analysis suggests that both the past and the present have suppressed alternatives truer to the Confucian legacy.
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Notes
- 1.
Following the Chinese convention, Chinese names begin with surnames unless the scholars in question go by the English convention.
- 2.
One li is about 0.415 km or 0.258 mile.
- 3.
Many steppe populations were in fact settled agriculturalists with advanced civilizations. The Mongol empire employed Central Asians rather than Chinese to fill its bureaucracy.
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Hui, V.Tb. (2020). Evolution of Confucianism: Construction of Confucian Pacifism and Confucian Autocracy in Chinese History. In: Bondarenko, D.M., Kowalewski, S.A., Small, D.B. (eds) The Evolution of Social Institutions. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51437-2_9
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