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At the center of reality is the family. Until recently, worshiping one's ancestors was the highest spiritual duty; to be loyal to one's kinsmen is still for most the highest social duty. Legend abounds with stories of filial devotion, including the boy Meng who lured the mosquitoes to bite him so that they would leave his mother and father alone. Chinese tradition tells of a son who reported his father for stealing a sheep; the judge decided that the son should be put to death because he had shown greater loyalty toward the authorities than toward his own father. This extreme devotion to family explains why the traditional Chinese has no social conscience in the Western sense, for the community outside family or clan is an abstraction. One looks after one's own, not others: this is at the root of much Chinese corruption.
The Western notion of individualism, which insists on its own rights but respects the rights of others, is hard for the Chinese to understand. Author Lin Yu-tang describes a passenger in a crowded bus triumphantly settling into the only empty seat—the driver's—and refusing to give it up, even though it obviously means that the bus will go nowhere.
In China, anything resembling nationhood was understood only in terms of a kind of superfamily, with the Emperor as the patriarch. Ultimately, in the Confucian view, all government was based on virtue. So long as the head of the great Chinese family was virtuous, all was well with the land; but if the country fared ill, it must be because the Emperor had fallen into evil ways and the "mandate of heaven" had been withdrawn. That was the traditional rationale for the periodic rebellions that brought down every Chinese dynasty. Mencius, a revered follower of Confucius, proclaimed the people's "right to rebellion"—but only as a last resort.
The distaste for force in the Confucian order is profound, one indication being the low social status of the soldier. Men who know how to employ ruse, the traditional weapon of the weak against the strong, are particularly admired. A famous Chinese story describes how a poet wrote a novel considered dangerous by the Emperor and was summoned to court to be punished; he bribed the boatman to travel as slowly as possible, and by the time he arrived, he had written a new novel so fantastic that the Emperor decided he must be insane and spared his life. To many Chinese, that poet is more of a hero than is a conquering general.
Strenuous or dangerous sports were taboo in traditional China. The notion of legal litigation is distasteful, a fact reflected in proverbs like: "Win your law suit and lose your money." Life is regulated more by custom than by law. The ideal demands that disputes be settled by mediation and compromise. "The Chinese people love compromise," said Lu Hsün, a satirist who died in 1936. "If you say to them," This room is too dark, we must have a window made,' they will oppose you. But if you say, 'Let's take off the roof,' they will compromise with you and say, 'Let's have a window.' "
Reality of Appearance