In an interview on Confucius

So onto Xunzi, your third choice.

Well Mencius was followed about one hundred years later in the 3rd century B.C.E. by Xunzi, who had an opposite view of human nature, that basically we are born evil. His view of Confucianism was pretty marginalised in theory but in practice it was quite influential throughout imperial Chinese history.

So he’s the Machiavelli of the Confucians?

 Xunzi is certainly viewed as a realpolitik guy. But there’s more to it than that. If you look at the texts, he favours the use of ritual as a way of providing social order. He uses the example of marriage rituals, or burial rituals, even drinking rituals, that would lead to the coming together of people of different classes. So if you have a rich person and a poor person involved in a common drinking ritual, part of the effect is that eventually the rich person develops some sort of bond with the poor person and they are more willing to do things on the poor person’s behalf.

So in a way he is saying that ritual--rather than law and harsh punishment--is key to securing solidarity in society, especially a feeling of commonality between the rich and the poor. It’s a way to make people care about the interests of the disadvantaged as opposed to using the law which, ultimately, is not effective in transforming the motivation, especially of the rich and powerful. It’s always been easy in a big county like China to evade the laws if you have to or you want to. The question is: how do we change the motivation of the rich and powerful? Xunzi’s idea about ritual has a lot to say in that respect.