Katia N’s Reviews > Chinese Thought > Status Update

Few cultures put more emphasis on the central role of food preparation and consumption than the Chinese in both a secular and religious context.The thinkers reference to butchers, cook:Dao that runs through the stomach.eating is one of the most ritualized activities:we observe table etiquette&eat in company. Mencius said:,’A person’s surroundings transform his qi just as the food he eats changes his body’.

Ideologically, the market in ancient China does not appear in a favourable light, but as a tightly supervised space where the prospect for profit and gain was constantly overshadowed by the potential for disorder and where the lure of greater returns constantly tested principled human behaviour. In many ways, it is an image that still endures. Confucius’s reticence to speak publicly about profit-making (not dao).

Unlike Mozi’s insistence on thrift, The Master Guan recommends a good balance between consumption and frugality. He puts forward the idea of increasing public spending in order to stimulate the economy: encouraging consumer desire for luxury goods, lavish temples and costly festivals and funerals can be a good way to provide employment. (@circa 2nd century bce).

As the commentary to The Great Learning remarks, ‘accumulating wealth is the way to scatter people (away from the ruler); scattering wealth among them is a way to gather the people (around him)’.

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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.