1.3: Confucianism in Ming China

Confucianism

The actual foundation of the early-modern global economy was built on China, not Europe. China’s recorded history began about 2000 BCE. Based on irrigated rice agriculture, the population of China grew to 50 to 60 million people as early as 2,000 years ago. Beginning in 221 BCE, the Chinese created an empire that lasted over two thousand years under a series of more than a dozen ruling families or dynasties. These dynasties were ruled by an emperor who claimed to possess the mandate from heaven, which is the right to rule from the gods. Beginning with the Qin dynasty, Chinese governments built up land-based empire which were focused on agricultural and their armies rather than commerce and naval might.

The early imperial governments began construction of the called Long Walls in the north and dug the Grand Canal to connect the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in the sixth century CE. Historically, China held a monopoly on the creation of silk, which was a closely-held state secret for millennia, and led the world in iron, copper, and porcelain production as well as a variety of technological inventions including the compass, gunpowder, paper-making, mechanical clocks, and moveable type printing.

The social stability that allowed Chinese culture to produce these innovations was based on not only the imperial form of government, but on an elaborate system of professional civil service. The early establishment of a professional administrative class of scholar-officials was a remarkable element of imperial Chinese rule that made it more stable, longer-lasting, and at least potentially less oppressive than empires in other parts of the world. The imperial courts sent thousands of highly-educated administrators throughout the empire and China was ruled not by hereditary nobles or even elected representatives, but by a class of men who had received rigorous training and had passed very stringent examinations to prove themselves qualified to lead.

Civil service training focused on the philosophy of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who had lived from 551 to 479 BCE. Confucian ideas about conduct focus on five basic virtues: seriousness, generosity, sincerity, diligence, and kindness. When a student asked him “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?” Confucius replied, “How about ‘reciprocity’! Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” (Analects XV.24). Confucian social morality is based on this reciprocity and on empathy and understanding others. Although Confucius occasionally talked about heaven and an afterlife, his moral system was not based on the idea of supernatural rewards and punishments. For the most part, Confucian morality is secular rather than religious.

Primary Sources: The Confucian Analects

Over many decades following Confucius’s death, his students and followers collected his words of wisdom in The Analects. The Analects consists of twenty short books, each of which includes a series of short quotations on a particular theme. Confucius’s main concern was to teach people how to become junzi, compassionate and moral beings more concerned with doing what was right than with satisfying their own desires. The junzi understood their duties to others and fulfilled all the ancient ritual obligations. Confucius believed junzi could be created through education, and that society would be harmonious and peaceful if the government was guided by junzi. The following are some excerpts from Book 2.

Discussion Questions

• What does a good government look like?
• What does a good person look like?

CHAP. I. The Master [Confucius] said, “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.”

CHAP. II. The Master said, “In the Book of Poetry are three hundred pieces, but the design of them all may be embraced in one sentence—Having no depraved thoughts.”

CHAP. III. 1. The Master said, “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. 2. “If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.”

CHAP. IV. 1. The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. 2. “At thirty, I stood firm. 3. “At forty, I had no doubts. 4. “At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. 5. “At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. 6. “At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

—Confucius, The Analects, translated by James Legge

Rice University and Open Stax, The Project Gutenberg, in the Public Domain

Centuries after his death, Confucian ideas became the basis of civil service education in imperial China. Scholars would travel to testing centers and sit for exams that often took days to complete. They brought food and a bedroll and remained in their small testing cells until they had completed the exam. There were there increasingly-difficult levels of testing: county, province, and imperial. The highest exam was administered by the emperor himself and passing it qualified a scholar for assignments in the imperial court. However, the exams were also democratic in a way: even a scholar from a poor family could take the exam if he could educate himself; success on the top exam was a ticket to the highest levels of imperial society. For most of its history Chinese society was run by educated men rather than by nobles who had inherited their positions. Figure 1.3.1 shows several male students taking the exam. These students look stressed out and focused on passing.

Confucianism is not a perfect philosophy, because it accepted and even reinforced certain societal injustices. Confucian principles perpetuated and exacerbated the oppression of women, who had no standing in the male-dominated family structure. Girls were considered an expense to their birth families, since they only became valuable when they married and bore sons for their new families. Despite its faults, Confucian civil service insured that for much of its history the Chinese empire, its various districts and regions, and even small communities were run by educated administrators and magistrates rather than by random rulers who achieved power by conquest or inheritance.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Palace Examination at Kaifeng, Ming Dynasty Painting (Artist Unknown), in the Public Domain

The Mongols and the Ming

The Chinese Empire did face conquest several times, but Chinese culture and social organization managed to absorb its conquerors. In 1271, the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, defeated the Chinese army and established the Yuan dynasty, which that lasted until 1368. The Mongols distrusted Confucian officials but did not completely replace them as regional administrators. The Silk Road, the ancient trade route connecting China with Europe, was reestablished and in 1271 the Venetian merchants Niccolo, Maffeo, and Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan at his summer palace in Shangdu (Xanadu).

Despite the fact that China’s Mongol Yuan rulers abandoned many of their own traditions and adopted the ways of the people they had conquered, the ethnic Han Chinese majority continued to resent being ruled by foreigners. Along with exposure to foreign cultures, the Mongols’ reopening of the Silk Road brought foreign diseases to China. Bubonic Plague, the “Black Death” that killed a quarter of the European population in the 14th century, actually hit China first. The plague killed up to 25 million people in China in the 1330s and 1340s, about 15 years before it first arrived in Constantinople. As in Europe, famine and social chaos followed the plague when agriculture failed to produce enough to feed the survivors.

A young man named Zhu Yuanzhang, born during the plague years, watched his entire family die in famines that swept through southern China in the 1340s. After taking refuge in a Buddhist monastery, Zhu joined local rebels when the monastery was destroyed by Yuan forces trying to contain a local insurrection. In 1368, Zhu led his troops north and chased the Yuans out of their capital of Dadu (now Beijing). The Mongols retreated to Mongolia and Zhu claimed the Mandate of Heaven and declared himself the first emperor of the Ming (brilliant) Dynasty. ​ Zhu Yuanzhang returned the empire to its ethnic Chinese roots. Administration of the empire by Confucian scholars was reinstated, along with the elaborate system of civil service examinations. There were roughly two thousand local officials scattered throughout the empire.

Ming China did not need foreign trade to maintain its standard of living, and the government did not take seaborne trade seriously. It had financial independence and a powerful army. For the most part, the massive strength of the Chinese internal economy guaranteed a high level of taxes. The one major product China lacked was precious metals. However, Japan became a major producer of silver and imported silks and other luxuries mostly from China. The social position of Asian merchants was never very high, but elites depended on them for luxuries.

The Ming valued agriculture above all else. Therefore, the government promoted public works and infrastructure projects including new dikes and irrigation systems to serve an agricultural system dominated by paddy rice. It also organized the building or repair of nearly 41,000 reservoirs and planted over a billion trees in his land reclamation program. The Grand Canal was repaired which created a vibrant national market in goods like cotton cloth, lacquerware, porcelain, iron cooking pots, and other goods. The 1,104-mile waterway that linked the Yellow and Yangxi Rivers and enabled the new capital to receive rice shipments from the south. The Ming distributed land to peasants and forced many to move to less populated areas.

Contact with the Outside

In general, the Ming government tried to limit contact with foreigners, but Ming Admiral Zheng He (1371-1433) went on seven expeditions between 1405 and 1430. The chief aim of the overseas expeditions of the 1400s was to show command respect for the empire. The expeditions discovered nothing worth the effort and conquest was never part of the plan. They was never an attempt to cross the Pacific or to travel westward to Europe, because the Ming believed that there was nothing in either direction to make such a voyage worthwhile.

Overall, the Confucian government elite argued that the overseas trade was frivolous and dangerous. Resources that went into ship building were rechanneled for construction and repair of public works. The Ming continued to focus on the Great Wall and turned inward by moving their capital inland, Peking. Therefore, officials withdrew imperial support of the ventures and instead devoted their energies to overland ventures and defense. The Ming was mindful of how the maritime-oriented Song Empire had eventually been overrun by invaders from the north. Additionally, the sixth Ming emperor, was captured and held hostage by Mongol raiders in 1449. The cost of the overseas voyages in addition to the frontier campaigns against the Mongols as well as the building of Peking put stress on royal finances. The burning of the Chinese naval fleet left a power vacuum in the South China Sea and Chinese officials sought to stop all Chinese participation in overseas trade.

Anticommercialism had roots in Confucian thought and was part of an anti-foreign reaction as well which remained dominant into the 1800s. The Ming feared that too much commerce and contact with the outside world would cause instability and undermine its authority. The sea represented problems of order and control rather than an opportunity. Therefore, the government restricted foreign access to China’s sea coast. Overall, the Ming looked to the past for guidance, and there was a mistrust of innovation. The idea persisted that everything one needed to know has been said.

After 1433, the Chinese merchants never went to India, but China still required silver and foreign imports. Chinese merchants sailed to Indonesia and Manila. However, these merchants were never offered any protection from the government. At times, Ming officials tried to restrain the power of merchants by fixing prices, taxing excessive gains, and resorting to outright confiscation. Such policies limited the potential for real industrial growth. There was large scale iron production at one point which diminished by 1500.

Review Questions

• How Confucianism significant to Chinese society?
• Why did the Ming withdraw support for overseas contact and trade?