That Confucian ideas persist in the minds of Chinese politicians should not surprise us. Confucianism began as a means of bringing social order out of [political] chaos…. It has been a philosophy of status and consequently a ready tool for autocracy and bureaucracy whenever they have flourished.” John King Fairbank, the noted China scholar, wrote these words in 1948. Half a century later, many hope that he is still right. After all, China’s current leaders may need to tap whatever Confucian instincts remain in the population to contain the social upheaval that is coming with the country’s rapid modernization. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, 58,000 major incidents of social unrest took place in China in 2003—an average of roughly 160 a day and 15 percent more than the year before. The same article reported that “as police battled to suppress deadly ethnic clashes in Central China, tens of thousands of rice farmers fighting a dam project staged a huge protest in the western part of the country. The same day, authorities crushed a strike involving 7,000 textile workers… The Communist Party has indicated it is worried that these outbursts of discontent might coalesce into large-scale, organized opposition to its rule.”

Widespread political chaos, often sparked by economic failure, is all too common in Chinese history. For example, the brutal politics of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution were driven in part by his desire to neutralize critics of the Great Leap Forward, his botched attempt to impose massive agrarian reforms and accelerate industrial growth that led to a famine that may have killed 30 million Chinese. Like China’s leaders today, Mao wanted to unleash his nation’s enormous ...