I had felt the impact of this immense vitality the moment I first set foot in Amoy. I came upon it by no rational process, no social studies. I met the tide of lusty and abundant life full in the face, with all its primitive urges undiluted. It was a life, at times, frightening in its force.

Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, English resident of Gulangyu, Xiamen, 1920s

Xiamen people’s “immense vitality” was as overwhelming when we arrived in 1988 as it had been for Averil 60 years earlier. In spite of overwhelming challenges, Xiamen people were optimistic about the future because conditions were already better than anyone alive had ever seen. I too had confidence, because Chinese of all people have proven they can handle hardship. But I suspected we were “planting trees for future generations to enjoy the shade”; I never imagined our own generation would witness such a rapid transformation.

We weren’t thrilled with Xiamen’s living conditions but I was captivated by the cheerfulness of people like the bicycle repairman, who with his wife slept in a tiny loft above their 3 m wide shack. Every time I’d ask, “How much?” he’d reply, “Nothing. Wait until you’ve a big repair.” And then he’d offer me tea in a cheap, thimble-sized clay cup but served with such grace and poise you’d have thought we lounged beneath a banyan in a scholar’s courtyard rather than perched on rickety bamboo stools between rusty bike parts and rubber tires. Mr. Li had not finished primary school but he was a Confucian gentleman to the core in values, priorities and behavior.

Optimism Rooted in “Superior Civilization”

I saw the same optimism and decorum in everyone from university leaders to the street sweeper and garden laborer who helped keep China’s most beautiful campus in pristine condition. But such optimism, quiet self-confidence and dedication to the task at hand is nothing new and helps explain Chinese’ successes both at home but abroad. Maclay wrote of Southeast Asia’s Chinese in 1861:

By their intelligence, industry and capacity for business they almost monopolize all the important and highly remunerative departments of labor; commerce passes into their hands, and they become the chief factors, the leading spirits in the native communities in which they live….

Chinese monopolized business across Asia even in the face of colonial powers conducting trade at gunpoint because their “superior civilization” was rooted in what Confucius himself considered “Ancient Ways”.

Ancient Ways of the Yellow River

Some 2,500 years ago, Confucius said, “I transmit rather than innovate. I trust in and love the Ancient Ways” (The Analects, 7:1). These Ancient Ways, Confucius explained, promised peace and prosperity to nations whose people were moral, just and peaceful, but devastation to those who strayed from the primordial and immutable Way of Heaven. Lin Zexu appealed to this Way of Heaven in a futile attempt to dissuade the British from smuggling opium:

The Way of Heaven is fairness to all; it does not suffer us to harm others in order to benefit ourselves. Men are alike in this all the world over: that they cherish life and hate what endangers life. Your country lies 20,000 leagues away; but for all that the Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us, and your instincts are not different from ours; for nowhere are there men so blind as not to distinguish what brings profit and what does harm….

Deities of Self-Sufficiency

These Ancient Ways were promulgated by Chinese Civilization’s legendary founders—great god-kings like the Three Sovereigns, and heroes such as Shennong. Chinese revered these god-kings not for their supernatural traits or intervention in daily affairs but because they taught people pragmatic skills to solve their own problems. Skills such as making fire, building houses, planting and processing the “five grains” and domesticating animals allowed Chinese to migrate from their caves to the 752,000 squ. km Yellow River Basin in which they formed the agrarian villages that evolved into Chinese civilization. But the Mother River of China and source of Chinese civilization has been both a blessing and a bane.

The Yellow River winds from Qinghai in the far west near Tibet up to Inner Mongolia and east to Shandong where it empties what is left after irrigating the dry central plains of China. The Yellow River is an ancient giver of life—but it also brings death. The river has changed course dramatically about every 100 years, and flooded 1,593 times between 602 BC and 1946, with the 1931 flood, the worst natural disaster in history, killing 1 to 4 million.

Yet perhaps this very adversity helps account for ancient Chinese’ innovativeness. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention. After the father of Yu the Great (2123–2025 BC) failed to tame the river with dykes, Yu spent 13 years on his new “not dam but divert” strategy. Today, Yu is revered for creating the irrigation system that tamed the floods and brought prosperity to China’s heartland. But Chinese also admire Yu because he ate and slept with the workers and even shared their physical labor—a spirit admired to this day in leaders such as Xi Jinping, who as a young Party secretary in Fujian not only inspected farmers’ living conditions but even helped them hoe their fields.

Reality Outshines Myth

Chinese have endless legends to account for their unique inventiveness and industriousness but archaeology has revealed that Chinese prospered long before the god-kings showed up.

The Yellow River basin agrarian settlements at Hebei’s Nanzhuangtou Neolithic Site (8,700–7,500 BC) cultivated millet and processed grains with stone slabs and rollers up to 6,000 years before the Yellow Emperor’s day. The villages of the Peiligang Neolithic Site (7,000–5,000 BC) in Henan grew millet and raised pigs, poultry and cattle, and fished with nets of hemp. Relics include stone sickles and rollers for harvesting and grinding millet and pottery for cooking and storing grains. The Jiahu villages to the south planted rice.

The ancient Yellow River basin’s architecture was so innovative that other nations are adopting it to this day. With its “bamboo bones” in walls of earth and glutinous rice, rammed earth dwellings are earthquake-proof and self-healing, with some buildings standing for 700 years. These homes are comfortable year round thanks to superb acoustic and thermal insulation, and are so eco-friendly that the techniques have been adapted for everything from hospitals, churches and schools to a meditation center at Stanford University and Napa Valley’s newest luxury hotel, the Bardessono eco-resort.

Ancient Yellow River agricultural practices were so ingenious that they were centuries and even millennia ahead of those in the West. In the 1600s, Dutch sailors borrowed Chinese agricultural techniques and tools, which led to the Agricultural Revolution that in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution.

Even into the twentieth century, foreign experts were amazed at Chinese farmers’ ingenuity in squeezing crops from the smallest plots of land for centuries with no deterioration in soil quality. Johnston described in 1898 how “indomitable” Chinese coaxed crops on vertical slopes as “inaccessible as the nest of the eagle”:

At first the hills rise abruptly from the water’s edge on either side, those to the south rising to a height of two thousand feet rugged and bare, except where the indomitable energy and industry of the Chinese have planted their little crop of rice on terraced slopes, or in nooks and crannies which seemed from our point of view as inaccessible as the nest of the eagle.

“There are no more clever farmers in the world,” concluded Philip Wilson Pitcher in 1893—but Chinese cleverness went far beyond farming.

Master of All Trades

In English we talk of a “jack of all trades and master of none”, but Chinese seemed to have mastered all trades they put their hand to—and thousands of years before the West. Shore was astonished at the size and productivity of Xiamen Chinese oyster-beds and wrote in 1881, “While we in Europe are still writing essays and pamphlets on the theory of the subject, this practical people have been obtaining good results for the last 1,800 years.”

Westerners also marveled at how Chinese craftsman effortlessly conjured up quality products with the simplest tools, techniques, and material—be it fine wood or a strip of common bamboo. George CoffinFootnote 1 wrote of Chinese carpenters in 1908:

The carpenter’s tools at first sight seem rude and clumsy to a Yankee, but to see them handle them one must confess that they do not work so hard and can accomplish more than our carpenters.… They paint better than we do….

Chinese’ attention to detail delighted foreigners, with ElizabethFootnote 2 Lewis exclaiming in 1938 how this integrity in workmanship reflected Chinese ideals of beauty and the “individual industrialism” at the heart of Chinese’ entrepreneurial success at home and abroad:

If any one Chinese virtue occurs more widely and to more marked degree than others, it is probably integrity in workmanship…. Whether a potter struggling to perfect a glaze; an ivory carver laboring for years on a screen worth a king’s ransom; or a humble housewife stitching shoe soles for her family, the same patient and painstaking attention is given to detail, the same effort poured into producing what will not only serve the immediate pursuit, but will have beauty and durability as well. Satisfaction in work well done seems to be its own reward in China; certainly no other is apparent in this land where labor, even when it becomes creative art – and only the thinnest line exists between Chinese artist and artisans – is the cheapest of all commodities.

This racial characteristic of thoroughness may be due to the Middle Kingdom’s having been throughout the centuries a civilization composed of individual industrialists. The largest establishments rarely consisted of more than the proprietor and six or seven helpers; great factories and mills appeared only with the introduction of foreign methods. Any man trained in a craft could set up business for himself in his own home; doing all the work in person or being assisted by the members of his household until that day when he could afford to feed and shelter an apprentice.

Cultivating a Philosophical Character

What is truly remarkable is the excellence pursued by all Chinese, Confucian scholar or illiterate farmer alike. John MacGowan wrote in 1907 that a Chinese is a blend of Spartan and Buddha with virtually unlimited persistence:

…. It is this same absence of nerves that enables the Chinese to bear suffering of any kind with a patience and fortitude that is perfectly Spartan. He will live from one year’s end to another on food that seems utterly inadequate for human use; he will slave at the severest toil, with no Sunday to break its wearisome monotony, and no change to give the mind rest; and he will go on with the duties of life with a sturdy tread and with a meditative mystic look on his face, that reminds one of those images of Buddha that one sees so frequently in the Chinese monasteries or temples.… The staying power of the Chinese seems unlimited. The strong, square frames with which nature has endowed them are models of strength.

MacGowan 1907

Rose Talman, one of MacGowan’s contemporaries in Xiamen, wrote of the “great difference in the psychology of Eastern and Western Society”:

To their conditions they have developed responses – frugality (nothing wasted in China), patience, industriousness, sense of humour – a philosophical approach to the realities of life. These are the qualities that make the Chinese tough and persevering and give them the will to love and fight against poverty. The Chinese enjoy few luxuries in material things. They are not an acquisitive society. The people yearn more for peace and stability – a climate for work rather than affluence or wealth for the sake of pleasure. There is a great difference in the psychology of Eastern and Western society.

Rose Talman, Amoy Missionary, 1916–1930, unpublished memoirs

Chinese at all levels of society, whether scholar, farmer or fisherman, were Confucian in philosophy and practice because the Confucian values of humaneness, justice, norms, knowledge and integrity, and their concomitant behaviors, were taught not just in classes but in everyday life by leaders’ consistent examples.

This Confucian ethos was so pervasive and effective that even the northern nomadic invaders who overran China were forced to admit their newly conquered subjects’ superiority and became more Chinese than the people themselves. Maclay wrote in 1861 of how China has remained virtually unchanged over the millennia:

The permanence of Chinese institutions is worthy of notice in this connection. It is a significant and singular fact that, from the earliest period of their authentic history to the present time, the Chinese have preserved intact and inviolate every important feature and principle of their government and civilization. The successive irruptions of northern barbarians have neither abrogated nor essentially modified Chinese institutions. The conquering races who have overrun those fertile plains have stood abashed … and after subduing the empire, they have invariably adopted its government, laws, civilization, and language.

Maclay would not be surprised to learn that even in the twenty-first century, socialist China is also grounded upon the ancient ways because, as Confucius taught, they are the only sustainable path to peace, prosperity and stability.

Peace Rooted in Patriotism and Probity

Of all Chinese traits, I most admire their love of peace, which is rooted in patriotism and probity. Chinese have never sought to colonize distant lands (see Chap. 25) in part because it is immoral but also because they love their own homeland so deeply that they simply have no need to seize someone else’s.

This Chinese patriotism is, admittedly, hard for foreigners to understand or believe. Western media paints Chinese as poor, oppressed and chafing for change, but in driving over 200,000 km around China during 32 years, I’ve been astonished at how consistently Han Chinese and minorities alike love their country and are grateful for its changes. That’s not to say they don’t have complaints. Every nation on earth has issues and the planet’s most populous nation is no exception. But whether 100% satisfied or not, Chinese view China as their home—even when far from home! In 1881, Shore wrote that many Chinese sought their fortune abroad but their dream was to return home to China, preferably in life but, if not, at least in death:

…. Very many settle down in their adopted countries, but great numbers return home after amassing a competency; some, indeed, after death to be buried near their ancestors, for the Chinese have a deep regard for the mother country, and make a point of having their bodies embalmed, if, that is to say, they can afford it, and being sent back to their native place for burial.

Shore, 1881

I’ve seen the same pull of home during my three decades in China. Several of my brightest graduate students emigrated abroad but after a decade or two returned to a lower-paying job in China. One told me, “Life in America was comfortable and I had a bright career – but it wasn’t home – and I wasn’t doing anything as meaningful as I am here in China.”

Confucian Work Ethic vs. Protestant Work Ethic

Chinese also value peace simply because it is in accord with the Ancient Ways—the Way of Heaven that Lin Zexu tried to explain to Western opium smugglers. Sadly, Lin’s appeal to morality fell flat, even though Western capitalism was, in theory, grounded in what Weber called the “Protestant Work Ethic”.

I read The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in grad school, and then wrote “Beyond the Protestant Work Ethic” as my PhD dissertation because Christianity is not the historical explanation for capitalism’s success. I see nothing of Christ’s compassion, concern for the poor or demand for justice in the practices so vividly depicted by Dickens and Marx, and undertaken for centuries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. But to this day I do see the underlying influence of China’s Ancient Ways—an ethos ancient even in Confucius’ day that promised peace and prosperity if a nation followed the Way of Heaven’s “fairness to all”.

There are only two paths to profit. We can either steal it (colonialism, opium and slave trafficking, today’s proxy wars to secure trade advantages), or we can earn it as Chinese have through the ages with industriousness, innovativeness and integrity.

I hope that other nations will learn from China’s example, because only in the “Ancient Ways” of fairness to all, the foundation of China’s 70-year battle against poverty, does our little planet have any hope of escaping the unjust practices of the past five centuries?