Allow me to quote
Confucius' Political Philosophy
Confucius' political philosophy is also rooted in his belief that a
ruler should learn self-discipline, should govern his subjects by
his own example, and should treat them with love and concern. If
the people be led by laws, and uniformity among them be sought by
punishments, they will try to escape punishment and have no sense
of shame. If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among
them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a
sense of shame and come to you of their own accord. (Lunyu 2.3;
see also 13.6.) It seems apparent that in his own day, however,
advocates of more legalistic methods were winning a large following
among the ruling elite. Thus Confucius' warning about the ill
consequences of promulgating law codes should not be interpreted as
an attempt to prevent their adoption but instead as his lament that
his ideas about the moral suasion of the ruler were not proving
popular.
Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political
institutions of his day had completely broken down. He attributed
this collapse to the fact that those who wielded power as well as
those who occupied subordinate positions did so by making claim to
titles for which they were not worthy. When asked by a ruler of the
large state of Qi, Lu's neighbor on the Shandong peninsula, about
the principles of good government, Confucius is reported to have
replied: Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the
minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son
being a son. (Lunyu 12.11) If I claim for myself a title and
attempt to participate in the various hierarchical relationships to
which I would be entitled by virtue of that title, then I should
live up to the meaning of the title that I claim for myself.
Confucius' analysis of the lack of connection between actualities
and their names and the need to correct such circumstances is
usually referred to as Confucius' theory of zhengming. Elsewhere in
the Analects, Confucius says to his disciple Zilu that the first
thing he would do in undertaking the administration of a state is
zhengming. (Lunyu 13.3). Xunzi composed an entire essay entitled
Zhengming. But for Xunzi the term referred to the proper use of
language and how one should go about inventing new terms that were
suitable to the age. For Confucius, zhengming does not seem to
refer to the rectification of names (this is the way the term is
most often translated by scholars of the Analects), but instead to
rectifying behavior of people so that it exactly corresponds to the
language with which they identify and describe themselves.
Confucius believed that this sort of rectification had to begin at
the very top of the government, because it was at the top that the
discrepancy between names and actualities had originated. If the
ruler's behavior is rectified then the people beneath him will
follow suit. In a conversation with Ji Kangzi (who had usurped
power in Lu), Confucius advised: If your desire is for good, the
people will be good. The moral character of the ruler is the wind;
the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the
wind blows, the grass bends. (Lunyu 12.19)
For Confucius, what characterized superior rulership was the
possession of de or virtue. Conceived of as a kind of moral power
that allows one to win a following without recourse to physical
force, such virtue also enabled the ruler to maintain good order
in his state without troubling himself and by relying on loyal and
effective deputies. Confucius claimed that, He who governs by
means of his virtue is, to use an analogy, like the pole-star: it
remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it.
(Lunyu 2.1) The way to maintain and cultivate such royal virtue
was through the practice and enactment of li or ritualsthe
ceremonies that defined and punctuated the lives of the ancient
Chinese aristocracy. These ceremonies encompassed: the sacrificial
rites performed at ancestral temples to express humility and
thankfulness; the ceremonies of enfeoffment, toasting, and gift
exchange that bound together the aristocracy into a complex web of
obligation and indebtedness; and the acts of politeness and
decorumsuch things as bowing and yieldingthat identified their
performers as gentlemen. In an influential study, Herbert
Fingarette argues that the performance of these various ceremonies,
when done correctly and sincerely, involves a magical quality
that underlies the efficacy of royal virtue in accomplishing the
aims of the ruler.
