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Chapter 1

The Origins of Chinese Etiquette

Nothing says traditional Chinese ethics and etiquette more clearly or loudly than the name Confucius, the great philosopher-teacher who lived from 551 to 479 BC. In his efforts to provide principles for achieving social and political harmony, Confucius taught that society consisted of a hierarchy of overlapping relationships between people. These relationships were a ruler to his subjects, a father to his son, a husband to his wife, an elder brother to his younger brother, and a friend to a friend. With the exception of friend to friend relationships, all of these relationships involved people of different status.

In the Confucian world, everyone should cultivate yi (ee), which means “virtue”; ren (ren), which means “benevolence”; and li (lee), which means “etiquette”. Li is packed with a multitude of nuance and meaning that is not found in the English word “etiquette”. The Chinese character refers to the making of sacrifices on an altar, in the sense of offering proper respect to another person. From this, we get the idea of “rites” and “rituals”. And indeed, in traditional Confucian thinking etiquette has a very strong ritualistic aspect: The way something is done can be even more important than the final result, and the actions of an individual can be even more important than his inward motivations. So long as the proper respect is offered, then one has done his duty.

The way one shows respect is relative to the status of the individual, the kind of relationship, and the situation. For this reason, Confucius found it absurd that there could be any kind of universal law that determined everyone’s conduct at all times.

In the natural interplay of human relationships, benevolence flows from a person of higher status to someone of lower status, while respect flows the opposite direction. That is, a ruler should show benevolence to his subjects, and his subject should show him the proper respect. It is therefore a grave impropriety in Confucian thinking to ever challenge or question the motivations or actions of someone with a higher status. Confucius taught that if everyone would merely observe the proper etiquette according to his or her station in life, there would be harmony in the world, and that it is not our place to judge or correct those above us.

When it came to government, Confucius taught that government officials could cultivate virtue by studying ancient Chinese classical literature. In his view, government service should be a meritocracy, with rank bestowed based upon how cultivated a person was. In time, Confucian ideas resulted in the development of a system of imperial examinations, which any man could take. While these exams were supposed to test one’s knowledge and understanding of Chinese classical literature, in fact they just tested one’s ability to rote memorize long passages of text. A successful candidate would gain immediate employment as a government bureaucrat, with his rank depending upon his test score.

But what if a supreme ruler did not have virtue and did not show benevolence to his subjects? In Confucius’s view, a ruler received his divine right to rule via a mandate from Heaven, and this mandate could be withdrawn from an unvirtuous ruler. The signs that the mandate were withdrawn would involve some sort of natural disaster or national calamity. As people did not have the right to question authority, the only time they could rebel against a ruler was if they saw signs that the mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn, and that Heaven had chose someone else to rule.

As the generations passed, Confucius’s followers added to, codified, and ritualized the principles he originally prescribed. Because his principles addressed the most fundamental issues in all human relationships and were endorsed and enforced by succeeding imperial courts, they became deeply embedded in Chinese culture.

Over the following millennia the guidelines established by Confucius for proper behavior gradually spread to Korea, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia, becoming the foundation for the ritualistic etiquette that has since distinguished all of these cultures.

However, in China (as well as in adjoining Korea and nearby Japan) the form and ritualistic aspects of the Confucian rules of etiquette became so pronounced they often overshadowed the original essence and purpose of the prescribed behavior. This had positive as well as negative effects.

On the one hand, profound belief in the Confucian principles and the ritualistic behavior this required served as a bulwark of support for the imperial court and government officials, and contributed enormously to the long survival of Chinese civilization.

On the other hand, the restrictive elements in the Confucian code of ethics that supported this ritualistic etiquette prevented the vast majority of Chinese from being able to think and act as individuals, stifled their ambitions, and greatly limited their options and their horizons.

China’s immense size, combined with its civilization that was more advanced than its local neighbors and its early isolation from Western nations, resulted in the Chinese looking upon their country as the center of the known world and their culture as superior to all others. This was to have a profoundly disastrous impact on the future of the country, as it led Chinese leaders to ignore the industrial revolution in Europe and the emergence of Western countries as military powers with aggressive colonial ambitions.

The World According to Lao Tzu

Although Lao Tzu (also known as the Old Master) is not as well known in the outside world as Confucius, he was one of the primary creators of China’s traditional culture—and according to some legends was a mentor to Confucius.

According to some scholars, Lao Tzu was born in 604 BC and died in 531 BC. He is credited with having written the Tao Te Ching (often translated as “The Way”), one of the most significant treatises in Chinese philosophy. This influential work discussed individual spirituality, interpersonal dynamics, political strategy, and numerous other topics. It expounded on the nature of human beings and the ideal relationships they should have with one another, their government, and with the cosmos at large.

One of his most influential teachings was that one should avoid explicit intentions and proactive initiatives—a prohibition that was to become so embedded in Chinese culture that it is still discernible.

Charles Lee, an authority on traditional and modern Chinese culture and author of the insightful book Cowboys and Dragons, writes that the teachings of Lao Tzu were and still are more relevant than those of Confucius. According to Lee, Confucian philosophy was followed by the ruling class while the philosophy taught by Lao Tzu and his successors became the ideology of the common people, among whom they lived.

While Lao Tzu was the founder of philosophical Taoism, there is another form of Taoism that centers on the worship of various gods from ancient Chinese folk religions. The highest of these is the Jade Emperor, who rules in Heaven over a myriad of lesser deities. In religious Taoism, these gods control most aspects of human life, including whom one will marry. As these deities can be at times fickle or capricious, people wanting success or good luck will offer them sacrifices.

Folk Tales And Proverbs

Along with Confucianism and Taoism, many Chinese people have found inspiration and moral instruction from old folk tales and sayings. Some of the folk tales are legends involving various Taoist deities, while some are mythical or even true stories about people from Chinese history. Examples would include the story of Hou Yi, the archer who shot down the nine suns, and his wife Chang’e, who flew to the moon; how Cao Chong weighed an elephant; how Zhuge Liang gathered 100,000 arrows; and how Yugong moved a mountain.

These old stories have often proven to be inspiration for Chinese proverbs, called chengyu (chung-yoo). Chengyu are written in classical Chinese and follow a strict four-character form. In many cases, they give such a pithy summation of a story’s moral that they are relatively meaningless unless one knows the story behind them. It is estimated that there are as many as 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, and many of these are commonly used in daily life.

As we shall see in the next section, since the 1949 Communist take-over, many of the traditional teachings within China have been de-emphasized or at times even ruthlessly suppressed. However, this has not been the case, by and large, of old folk tales or proverbs. Instead, the government has incorporated these into the education system and has used them as part of the youth’s moral education, at times reinterpreting them to suit their political agenda. Indeed, in a famous and often quoted speech, Chairman Mao retold the story of how Yugong moved a mountain to stress the need for perseverance, reinterpreting the story as an allegory of how China would overcome imperialism and feudalism.

Along with these old folk tales, a new folk hero emerged in the 1960s, and has been used to inculcate morality among the youth—Lei Feng. Lei Feng (1940-1962) was an army soldier who died in a traffic accident. Shortly after his death, he became the focus of an intense propaganda campaign within China, as an example of selfless sacrifice for the Chinese people. Photos of Lei Feng surfaced showing him helping others and doing good deeds. A diary also emerged, extolling Chairman Mao, expressing zeal for his country, and revealing his desire to fan the flames of revolution among his brethren. This all belies the real question of whether or not Lei Feng even existed— something even some Chinese scholars doubt.

Nevertheless, Lei Feng is held up as a moral example even now, and Lei Feng Day is celebrated by schoolchildren each year on March 5 with visits to old folk’s homes or to the local park to pick up litter.

The Wonder That Was China!

In the centuries following the lives of Confucius and Lao Tzu, China experienced remarkable periods of innovation and invention that would make it the most technologically advanced country in the world.

Randy Smith of Monterey Peninsula College has noted in his writings that one of the greatest secrets of history is the immense contribution ancient China made to world civilization. The list of inventions and discoveries of the early Chinese is astounding, and equally remarkable is that many of their breakthroughs in knowledge and technology did not reach the Western world—or occur there independently—until hundreds or even thousands of years later. For example, Smith notes that “modern” paper was invented in China in AD 105. In contrast, papermaking was not introduced in the West until the eighth century, and the first paper mill in Europe was not built until 1009.

Similarly, an early compass was invented in approximately AD 200 when a Chinese metal smith discovered that magnetized pieces of iron always aligned themselves in a north-south orientation when placed on pieces of wood floating in a bowl of water. This primitive compass was refined over the centuries and the first true compass is said to date from around AD 900. It was not until the fifteenth century that Europeans became aware of magnetism.

Other Chinese discoveries and inventions that better-educated Westerners are generally familiar with include silk, gunpowder, and rockets.

For well over three thousand years China also led the world in the treatment of various diseases and in preventive measures designed to ensure optimum health—some of which, particularly acupuncture and tai chi, are only now finding acceptance in the West.

Smith credits the development of agricultural technology for the extraordinary growth of civilization in China, listing such innovations as row cultivation, intensive hoeing, and the use of the seed drill as major factors. Here China also outpaced the West: the first seed drills did not appear in Europe until the sixteenth century AD, although in China they came into use in about 1500 BC.

The Eclipse of the Great Chinese Civilization

During most of the last millennium of Chinese civilization’s heyday, the cultures of European nations were in the throes of what came to be called the Dark Ages—a stagnant period when the fall of Rome and domination by the Christian church resulted in religious faith replacing reason and logic in the affairs of the state and people.

While there was no dark age in China, by the beginning of the fifteenth century the imperial government stopped promoting and rewarding innovation, in effect making it taboo. Emphasis was shifted from looking ahead to looking backward, and from invention and creativity to revering the past and maintaining the status quo. Creativity in China dried up, and its great civilization began a slow, steady decline. For the most part China’s creativity was not to flower again until modern times.

From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries a series of invasions and incursions by newly industrialized Western nations caused upheaval in China, and then in the early 1930s a massive invasion by Japan combined with a communist-led civil war to further devastate the country. Shortly after the end of World War II in 1949 the communist revolutionaries became the masters of China.

The Communist Regime of Mao Zedung

By the time Mao Zedung and his communist forces took over the country in 1949 the ancient wonder that had been China for more than three thousand years had virtually disappeared. The lights that had shone so brightly in the Middle Kingdom had gone out.

During the first decade of his rule Mao actually made many social and economic improvements in China. He gave women the right to vote and reformed the ancient tenant farming system. He established a system of universal education and decreed that Mandarin was to be taught as the national language.

But his attempts to rebuild the industrial infrastructure of the country in “Great Leaps” forward ended in disaster, bringing death and untold suffering to millions. In a final desperate attempt to remake China in his image of a communist utopia in 1966, Mao initiated the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” which was intended to eliminate all vestiges of China’s traditional culture—specifically the heritages of Confucianism and Taoism. Mao’s goal was to totally eradicate these traditions because he understood their weaknesses and did not want communism to mutate into a mixture of the two.

Mao’s armies in his new revolution were made up of millions of young people—mostly students—whose lives had been disrupted beyond reason by the results of centuries of war and turmoil. These were the infamous Red Guards who embarked on a ten-year frenzy of burning libraries and destroying temples; intimidating, torturing, and killing members of the educated class; splitting up families; and sending millions of city dwellers into the countryside to force them to live like peasants.

During the chaotic Cultural Revolution, Mao’s government condemned refinement in behavior as a ruling-class plot to inhibit people and keep them down. His Red Guard minions went to extremes to destroy China’s ancient cultural heritage of etiquette.

Present-day Chinese sociologists blame Mao for the virtual disappearance of good manners during his reign. Historians note that Mao himself was coarse and vulgar and delighted in flouting convention. During the Cultural Revolution being called a dalacu (dah-lah-tsu), a “big, rude guy,” was a compliment that was pursued in earnest by top leaders.

The Cultural Revolution was motivated by a desire to do away with traditional values and mores, pitting young people against their parents and teachers in a way that would horrify Confucius. However, the Cultural Revolution did not result in an eradication of traditional values within China—they still hold a potent power of many Chinese people, and later government initiates have at times stressed the need for traditional morality.

Indeed, in 1971, the PLA stepped in to gain control over the young members of the Red Guard, sending many of them to work in the fields as peasants, all of the while stressing the Taoist theme that the students should mind their own business, and just tend to their own fields without worrying about what others were doing. As Lao Tzu said,

There should be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.

This kind of thinking informs the behavior of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution even to this day.

An enduring legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was the disappearance of virtually all of the more stylized forms of etiquette that had distinguished the Chinese for millennia. This was compounded by the new market-orientated society, where survival and achievement became more important than ritualized etiquette. It was to be several decades before the importance of good manners was to become a matter of national concern.

Opting for the Capitalist Road!

The Red Guard reign of terror and destruction in China did not end until Mao died in 1976. Mao was followed in power by Deng Xiaoping, an old revolutionary cohort who had been removed from his position in the government and exiled to the countryside after making known his disillusionment with Mao’s ideas and methods.

Recalled to Beijing by other members of the politburo who had also become disillusioned, Deng was soon to become famous by declaring, “To get rich is glorious!” It is said that an independent-minded daughter of a high-level general made this comment first; Deng apparently just adopted it.

Deng’s epochal new capitalistic ideal was also the result of outside inspiration. He adopted it after a visit to the coastal city of Shenzhen (Shen-jen), where Deng saw that entrepreneurs from nearby Hong Kong had transformed the area into a dynamic manufacturing and shopping center far beyond anything else in China. Beginning in 1978 Deng initiated reforms that were to set the country on the road to capitalistic wealth and power.

The initial benefactors of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were agricultural workers, because the farmers could now bring their crops directly to the market and keep the money they had earned. Another group which benefitted greatly from the reforms were party cadres. With the decentralization of government control over the economy, they had plenty of opportunities to become wealthy by lining their own pockets through corruption and graft. However, reforms occurred much more slowly in the commercial and industrial sectors, to the detriment of city-dwellers and people with university degrees. At the same time, even though society was becoming more open and people had many more opportunities and choices than ever before, the government itself was not keeping pace with social and economic reforms.

This all reached a breaking point, resulting in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. While the student protestors wanted to end government corruption and to speed up government reforms, one key factor underlying their discontent was a lack of economic opportunities for themselves.

After the protests were put down in June, 1989, the Chinese government gradually shifted its policies from agricultural reform to privatization, with many government factories and businesses being spun off into private companies which were completely responsible for their own bottom line, even though they were partly or wholly government owned. These state owned enterprises (SOEs) were not bound by the old rules, and could hire or fire whomever they wanted.

With the growth of SOEs, many Chinese people began to groan that “the iron rice bowl was now broken”—that the promise of full employment and a government salary until the day they died was no longer going to be kept. This was only partly true, as the government made great efforts to insure that these SOEs stayed afloat through easy bank loans and favorable treatment. However, with privatization and the loosening of economic restrictions, the private sector experienced rapid growth. This growth intensified after China was admitted into the WTO in 2001.

With this economic growth, people flooded into the big cities looking for high-paying jobs, something the national government has encouraged. In the year 2000, only 36% of the people of China lived in cities, but by 2014 this figure was 53.7%, and the Chinese government plans on raising it to 60% by 2020. Thus, within less than a generation, China has turned from being a largely rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrialized nation, with white-collar wages approaching those found in developed countries. Indeed, in 2011, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy.

Not everyone has shared in this prosperity, however. Rural areas have become an economic backwater as farming income has declined, and in many cities—especially Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing—new arrivals have often found themselves relegated to low-paying jobs, and barred from receiving public benefits because they cannot get a residence certificate, a hukou (hoo-koh).

With economic reforms there has come in increased interest in the rule of law and greater fairness and openness in how the law was applied. This has been especially true in cities such as Shanghai, which effectively have become laboratories to test out policy initiatives before they are rolled out nationwide. While there are sometimes unexpected anomalies in the way the law and various government rules and regulations are understood and enforced in a city like Shanghai, in daily life the legal system there is in many ways just as transparent and above board as in many developed countries. This is certainly not true throughout China, however, and there is still a great disparity between how the law is administered in the big metropolises, and how it is administered in rural villages and small cities.

This emphasis on rule of law has not extended to the decision-making apparatuses of the central and local governments. If anything, the government is less open, less transparent, and more restrictive of press and individual freedom now than at any time since 1989.

The pressing problem for the Communist Party has been how to maintain control over the country in the face of economic reform and openness. The answer was to take steps to strengthen its control over the government and over the Chinese culture and media, and to increase party membership. In 1989, the party had 47 million members. However, by 2015, the party membership had risen to 87.8 million members—an 86% increase, even though the population had only grown by 21%. Now, instead of complaining about corruption, many of the educated elite could take part in it and share the wealth.

Things came to a head in 2012, with the Bo Xilai incident. Bo Xilai was the party secretary for Chongqing in southwestern China, but he had aspirations to become leader of the country. As noted by Carl Minzner of Fordham Law School,

Breaking with long-accepted political norms that emphasized low-key public personas for up-and-coming cadres, [Bo Xilai] aggressively cultivated a charismatic populist image during his tenure from 2007 to 2012. His signature tactics included mass rallies, a revival of Maoist “red” culture, and an intense campaign against “organized crime” that swept up criminal suspects, legitimate businessfolk, and their lawyers alike.

However, the world came apart for Bo when his chief of police fled to the US consulate in Chengdu to escape retribution for investigating Bo’s wife regarding the murder of a British businessman. The chief of police carried with him an extensive dossier on Bo’s activities, and both the chief of police and the dossier fell into the hands of the central government in Beijing. While things become murky at this point, if the stories are to be believed, Bo conspired with the head of state security, Zhou Yongkang, to wiretap the top leaders in the central government in view of gaining leverage to become elevated to the top spot in the government, and possibly even mounting a coup d’état.

Now with Bo’s wife, the chief of police, Bo Xilai, and Zhou Yongkang safely in prison, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has effectively adopted many of the same tactics that Bo Xilai used in Chongqing, but on a national scale. Xi Jinping has amassed more personal power within the Chinese government than any man since Deng Xiaoping, and he is now building a personality cult around himself. Further, the government is promoting Maoism on a scale that has not been seen in a generation, as Xi Jinping seeks to center all of Chinese society around the Communist Party. In this regard, there is a government push to insist that all private companies within China should have Communist Party cells operating within them (as this is not yet a law, it appears that foreign companies may be exempt).

Oddly, Confucianism is now being emphasized by the government, as it seeks to gain greater control over society. In particular, the Confucian concept of filial piety is being promoted. Filial piety is the respect someone should show towards his father or ancestors. In this case, however, the Communist Party has reinterpreted filial piety to mean respect for the government and its leaders.

Finally, Xi Jinping has initiated a seemingly never-ending anti-corruption crusade. Thus far, more than 70,000 high-level party officials have been disciplined for corruption. The government claims that this is all in the name of strengthening the rule of law in China. However, there is a real question as to whether this anti-corruption drive represents “rule of law” or “rule by law”. In a nutshell, does the law apply equally to everyone in the country, or is Xi Jinping just using the law to weed out possible opposition to his rule?

Now that the Chinese economy has started to show signs of slowing, given all of the fissures within Chinese society—between the urban poor and the urban rich, between cities and rural areas, between those working in private companies and those still working directly for the state or in SOEs, between the communist old guard and those who joined the party for personal advancement, etc.—there is a real question as to where the country is heading in the future.

As Minzner sums up,

Uncertainty hangs in the air. Chinese with the most to lose are diversifying against risk—placing their money in Vancouver real estate and their children in U.S. colleges, and maybe even seeking passports from one or another of the small Caribbean nations that is known to put citizenship up for sale.

The events of 1989 did not resolve the core question of China’s political future. Nor did they put it on hold indefinitely. Rather, they launched a cascading set of effects that have swept through China’s politics, economy, and society in the years since. The resulting reverberations have now begun to dislodge core elements of the institutional consensus that has governed China for decades. A new future is slouching toward Beijing to be born.