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China TRADITIONAL SOCIETY AND CULTURE
The leaders who directed the efforts to change Chinese society
after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949
were raised in the old society and had been marked with its values.
Although they were conscious revolutionaries, they could not wholly
escape the culture into which they had been born. Nationalists as
well as revolutionaries, they had no intention of transforming
China into a replica of any foreign country. They had an ambivalent
attitude toward their country's past and its traditional society,
condemning some aspects and praising others. Furthermore, as
practical administrators, China's post-1949 leaders devoted energy
and attention to changing some aspects of traditional society, such
as rural land tenure and the content of education, while leaving
other aspects, such as family structure, largely untouched. Change
in Chinese society, therefore, has been less than total and less
consistent than has often been claimed by official spokesmen. To
understand contemporary society, it is necessary to be familiar
with past legacies, particularly in the realm of values and in
areas of social life, such as family organization, where
transformation has not been a high-priority political goal.
China's traditional values were contained in the orthodox
version of Confucianism, which was taught in the academies and
tested in the imperial civil service examinations. These values are
distinctive for their this-worldly emphasis on society and public
administration and for their wide diffusion throughout Chinese
society. Confucianism, never a religion in any accepted sense, is
primarily concerned with social order. Social harmony is to be
achieved within the state, whose administrators consciously select
the proper policies and act to educate both the rulers and the
subject masses. Confucianism originated and developed as the
ideology of professional administrators and continued to bear the
impress of its origins
(see The Ancient Dynasties;
The Imperial Era
, ch. 1).
Imperial-era Confucianists concentrated on this world and had
an agnostic attitude toward the supernatural. They approved of
ritual and ceremony, but primarily for their supposed educational
and psychological effects on those participating. Confucianists
tended to regard religious specialists (who historically were often
rivals for authority or imperial favor) as either misguided or
intent on squeezing money from the credulous masses. The major
metaphysical element in Confucian thought was the belief in an
impersonal ultimate natural order that included the social order.
Confucianists asserted that they understood the inherent pattern
for social and political organization and therefore had the
authority to run society and the state.
The Confucianists claimed authority based on their knowledge,
which came from direct mastery of a set of books. These books, the
Confucian Classics, were thought to contain the distilled wisdom of
the past and to apply to all human beings everywhere at all times
(see Culture and the Arts
, ch. 4). The mastery of the Classics was
the highest form of education and the best possible qualification
for holding public office. The way to achieve the ideal society was
to teach the entire people as much of the content of the Classics
as possible. It was assumed that everyone was educable and that
everyone needed educating. The social order may have been natural,
but it was not assumed to be instinctive. Confucianism put great
stress on learning, study, and all aspects of socialization.
Confucianists preferred internalized moral guidance to the external
force of law, which they regarded as a punitive force applied to
those unable to learn morality. Confucianists saw the ideal society
as a hierarchy, in which everyone knew his or her proper place and
duties. The existence of a ruler and of a state were taken for
granted, but Confucianists held that rulers had to demonstrate
their fitness to rule by their "merit." The essential point was
that heredity was an insufficient qualification for legitimate
authority. As practical administrators, Confucianists came to terms
with hereditary kings and emperors but insisted on their right to
educate rulers in the principles of Confucian thought. Traditional
Chinese thought thus combined an ideally rigid and hierarchical
social order with an appreciation for education, individual
achievement, and mobility within the rigid structure.
Data as of July 1987
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