Abstract

An economy based on agriculture required access to both tillage and tillers. Power was shared by two groups in the ruling class. The warriors’ priority was to mobilize the tillers for war and the acquisition of more lands by conquest at the cost of peace and agriculture. The priority of their rivals in power, known colloquially as ‘Mandarins’ in European languages, was to liberate the tillers from warfare and to promote peace and agriculture. The technocratic Mandarins could not use martial prowess to defeat the warriors’ ‘hard power’. Confucian thought emerged from this continuous struggle as a ‘soft power’ strategy. Today, Chinese thinkers and strategists are reinterpreting Confucian ideals to promote a ‘harmonious society’ and a ‘harmonious world’ based on a classical Confucian concept of the entire world as one common space to be shared harmoniously, perhaps responding to a collective ‘Western’ vision of self-interested Realpolitik with a Confucian dream of peace.