Confucianism seeks to bring about harmony by having people know their roles in the hierarchy and
know how to play them well starting from within the family (between the husband and the wife, the father
and the son, the older sibling and the younger sibling, etc.) and extending up to the ruler and their subjects,
with them bound together by benevolence and obedience. Each person respects and obeys those above them,
who are both benevolent and impose standards of behavior on them. All people are expected to be kind,
honest, and fair. Confucianism values harmony, broad-based education, and meritocracy.
Legalism favors conquest and unification of “all under heaven” as soon as possible by an autocratic
leader. It believes that the world is a “kill or be killed” jungle in which the strength of the emperor’s central
government and strict obedience to it must exist without much benevolence given to the people by the
emperor/government. The Western equivalent is fascism.
Taoism teaches that the laws of nature and living in harmony with them are of paramount importance.
Taoists believe that all of nature is composed of opposites and that harmony comes from balancing them well
—yin and yang. This plays an important role in how the Chinese seek the balance of opposites.
Of these, Confucianism and neo-Confucianism have been the most influential through time, usually with some
Legalism thrown in, up until the early 20th century when Marxism gained favor with Mao and then with his
successors. I will briefly explain Marxism when we get into the 20th century. Naturally all of these have been very
fleshed out and have evolved over time, along with the ways that the emperor and government operate.
All of these Chinese systems from the beginning of recorded history were hierarchical and non-egalitarian. I
was told by one of the most senior Chinese leaders, who is also a highly informed historian and an extremely
practical top policy maker, that the core difference between Americans and the Chinese is that Americans put the
individual above all else and the Chinese put the family and the collective above all else. He explained that
Chinese leaders seek to run the country the way they think parents should run the family—from the top down,
maintaining high standards of behavior, putting the collective interest ahead of any individual interest, with each
person knowing their place and having filial respect for those in the hierarchy so that the system works in an
orderly way. He explained that the word “country” consists of two characters, “state” and “family,” which
represents how the leaders view their roles in looking after their state/family—like strict parents. So one might say
that the Chinese government is run from the top down (like a family) and optimizes for the collective while
the American approach is run from the bottom up (e.g., democracy) and optimizes for the individual. (These
differences of approach can lead to policies that those on the opposite side find objectionable, which I will explore
in more detail in the next chapter.)
As far as how the governance structure works (i.e., who reports to whom in the hierarchy within the central
government and how that extends down to interactions with regional and local governments), that has evolved over
thousands of years and many dynasties into well-developed approaches that I won’t get into because the digression
would be too great. However what is clear is that there are well-established structures in which the emperor has
ministers who are responsible for different domains that extend down to interacting with the provinces and
municipalities via a large bureaucracy, and, at the same time, there have always been lots of fights to keep and get
control of power by the emperors and the people who report to them. I was told by Zhiwu Chen, who is one of the
most highly respected contemporary Chinese scholars, that 37% of emperors died unnaturally and that more often
than not they were killed by the people around them or others in political struggles.7 Politics in China has
traditionally been brutal.
Geographically China is basically one giant plain surrounded by big natural borders (mountains and seas)
with a giant population in that plain. For that reason most of China’s world was within those borders and
most wars were for control of it and were fought within those natural borders, mostly between the Chinese
themselves, though sometimes between foreign invaders and the Chinese.
As far as wars and the philosophies about them are concerned, the goals have traditionally been to ideally
win wars not by fighting but by quietly developing one’s power so that it is greater than the opponent’s so
that one can then show it and have the opponent capitulate without fighting. There is also the extensive use of
psychology to influence the opponents’ behaviors to produce the desired results.8 Still there have been numerous
violent wars inside of China over the dynasties, though there haven’t been many outside of China. Those
that were outside China were for the purpose of establishing China’s relative power, security, and trade, not
for occupation. Scholars believe that China’s lack of significant expansion of its empire outside of China is