Katia N’s Reviews > Chinese Thought > Status Update

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According to Mencius, This also means rulers should uphold a proper division of labour so that each member of society flourishes to the best of his or her talents: ‘Some labour with their minds, others labour with their physical strength. Those who labour with their minds govern others; those who labour with their physical strength are governed by others’ (Mencius 3A.4).

1/2 Society needs market mechanisms, Mencius argues, since it is in the nature of things to be unequal: ‘If fine shoes and poor shoes were priced the same, who would make fine shoes?’

to control the waters, one has to follow the Way (Dao) of water, Mencius reminds us. You need to lead it to the seas rather than into your neighbour’s backyard, where it will do nothing but wreak more havoc and discontent (Mencius 6B.11). It is no coincidence that, in a land ravaged by capricious rivers, water held a prominent place in the conceptual armoury of its philosophers.

Wittfogel wrote Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, in which he argued that agrarian societies that depend on large-scale irrigation require strong governments to control the labour force. The ‘hydraulic societies’ would inevitably require centralized, and oppressive, political regimes. Wittfogel had his critics but the link between water control and political power is in China’s history.

While there is some evidence of embalming corpses in Central Asia, there is no significant tradition of embalming in China, and only a few mummified corpses have been recovered there; the party faithful embalmed Mao Zedong’s body, but not at his own request.

At times, the spirit world itself took on bureaucratic attributes, with gods behaving as officials. This would become a lasting feature of Chinese folk religion. Chinese bureaucracy seeped into the religious imagination. For instance, a Controller of Fate was thought to supervise the registers of the dead and could be beseeched with a request to prolong one’s allotted lifespan.

The ancestral cult, one could argue, relieves people from the need for a god that is sole and supreme. The spirit of Great-Grandad may well be watching you but he does not expect unquestioned loyalty from those not of the same lineage. In the words attributed to Confucius, ‘To offer sacrifices to an ancestral spirit that is not your own is obsequious’ (An. 2.24).

Wang Fu (90–165 CE) complained that the lure of quick profits to be made by selling religious services drew women away from their primary occupation: ‘They embark on the study of shamanic incantations, drumming and dancing to serve the spirits, thereby deceiving the weak and deluding the common people.. even to the point that some are forced to flee from their seasonal labour’

The cult of the dead was the focal point of much of Chinese religious practice, and remains part of the religious fabric in Chinese communities today. To mourn and remember ancestors was an orchestrated proceeding. Both the duration of mourning and the mourning attire were dictated by one’s relationship to the deceased (the ritual canon prescribes five degrees of mourning). Even the wail was based on proximity.

Xunzi takes a more extreme position and turns ritual into a strict rule-book for a functional society: li provides the essential software to transform our hard-wired impulses into behaviours necessary for living harmoniously. Xunzi’s chapter ‘Discourse on Ritual’ (‘Li lun’) starts with the claim that the ancient kings and sages invented rituals to control human desire: