Confucian cosmology once bound rulers to an order they could not command, linking virtue, ritual, and the rhythms of Heaven. This second essay in the Simulated Sagehood series explores how that moral architecture has been emptied and re-coded in China. In place of resonance, Xi’s regime installs synchronization; in place of harmony across difference, it imposes order through uniformity.
What remains is not metaphysics, but choreography, an aesthetics of control masquerading as ethical order.
Under Xi Jinping, the metaphysical heart of Confucianism – once pulsing with the idea of cosmic responsiveness (ganying, 感应) – remains in name but is empty in spirit. The words of the tradition still echo in speeches and textbooks, but their deeper logic – where human action was supposed to resonate with a morally ordered universe – has been stripped of its ethical charge and repurposed for political submission.
In classical Chinese thought, cosmology wasn’t abstract speculation. It was a moral architecture, a way of binding rulers to a higher standard. Tian (Heaven) wasn’t a deity, but a moral horizon – a principle rulers had to align with. Ganying wasn’t just intuition; it was a ritual circuit, a choreography of offerings, timing, and space that linked governance to cosmic rhythms. Power was judged not by loyalty or efficiency, but by how well it harmonized with this larger moral field. He (和), often translated as “harmony,” didn’t mean peace or consensus. It meant ethical balance – a live calibration between Heaven, ruler, minister, and people. In the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), zhong (中) refers to centrality or equilibrium – not as a fixed state, but as a form of ethical responsiveness. Virtue created legitimacy, but only if it answered to something outside itself.
This notion of “differentiated harmony” – captured by the phrase he er bu tong (和而不同), or “harmony without uniformity” – stood in quiet opposition to the Legalist idea of yi (一), or enforced sameness. Where Confucians aimed for resonance across difference, Legalists imposed order by crushing it. That contrast would come roaring back under the Chinese Communist Party’s modern appropriation of Confucian ideas.
Imperial China took this moral cosmology seriously. Omens, droughts, and celestial events were read as signs of moral imbalance, demanding ritual correction. In 637, Emperor Taizong issued a limited ban on animal slaughter during the three annual changzhai (long fasts) – not a sweeping reform, but a gesture toward ethical recalibration, where Confucian ren (benevolence) met Buddhist compassion in an act of cosmic repair. A few centuries later, Song Dynasty Emperor Zhenzong responded to strange heavenly phenomena by unveiling a “Heavenly Text” (tianshu) – a supposed divine revelation that was in fact fabricated by the Daoist priest Zhao Yu. What followed wasn’t retreat, but theatrical escalation: grand new rites, altar constructions, and sacrifices, especially at Mount Tai. These weren’t acts of superstition, but were scripted performances designed to restore Heaven–ruler resonance.
Even the Western Zhou Dynasty, nearly 3,000 years ago, eclipses could trigger pauses in labor conscription or suspensions of punishment. The message was clear: power must remain morally permeable to the world beyond itself.
There were moments – rare but real – when Confucian cosmology exerted genuine moral traction on political authority. The Western Han Emperors Wen and Jing, ruling in the aftermath of the Qin collapse, pursued a politics of restraint. Collective punishment was scaled back (though retained in treason cases), fiscal discipline enforced, and rituals simplified. Wen, in particular, refused to build new palaces and avoided lavish rites, not merely out of thrift but as a gesture of symbolic restraint that later Confucian historians would interpret as alignment with Heaven. While the dominant ideology of the court remained Huang-Lao – a syncretic blend of Daoist non-action and Legalist statecraft – advisers like Lu Jia began articulating a political ethic grounded in virtue and moral suasion rather than coercion. His Xinyu rejected Qin authoritarianism and emphasized humane governance, ritual propriety, and the ruler’s ethical conduct as the foundation of lasting order. Although not yet grounded in the metaphysics of resonance, this early Han rhetoric laid conceptual foundations for later cosmological models of rulership, where austerity could function as a ritualized performance of moral clarity.
Centuries later, under the Northern Song, Emperor Renzong presided over one of the clearest efforts to embed Confucian ethics into the structures of governance. Reformers like Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu interpreted institutional decay as a symptom of moral misalignment. In 1043, Fan’s Ten-Point Memorial proposed civil, military, and educational reforms not simply as policy corrections, but as acts of cosmological repair. Renzong responded to droughts and disasters with a pattern of ritualized self-accountability – issuing scores of self-reproach edicts, palace diet reductions, and public requests for remonstrance. While the precise number is debated, it far exceeded that of any earlier Song monarch. These gestures were not mere formalities: they often accompanied dismissals, budget reallocations, and real administrative shifts. They did not transform the system. But they did mark moments when sovereignty acknowledged its limits and sought legitimacy by answering to a moral order beyond itself.
Yet those flashes of traction were neither continuous nor permanent. Over time, ritual began to detach from moral substance and serve the consolidation of power. Confucian forms were retained, but their ethical force dulled. Ming Emperor Yongle built the sprawling Temple of Heaven between 1406 and 1420 – not just as a sacred site, but as a theatrical assertion of harmony. The architecture multiplied altars and axis lines in a performance of cosmic alignment, even as Yongle centralized power and suppressed dissent. Qing emperors performed elaborate rituals at the empire’s frontiers even while expanding through conquest and destruction – most infamously during the Dzungar genocide and the incorporation of Tibet and Xinjiang. Harmony remained on the stage, but it no longer bound sovereignty to an ethical horizon. Ritual could now operate as a mirror or a mask.
Under Xi, the entire cosmological structure hasn’t been debated or disproved – it’s simply been overwritten. In 2013, the directive On Cultivating and Practicing the Core Socialist Values recast he (harmony) as “unity and cohesion under Party leadership.” That may sound cosmetic, but it marks a profound ontological shift. Where he once meant ethical balance between distinct entities – ruler and Heaven, humans and nature – it now means the elimination of difference. In this, Xi’s reinterpretation hews closer to the Legalist ideal of yi – sameness as control – than to Confucian harmony.
The 2021 Xi Jinping Thought Student Readers illustrate this clearly. Children learn about “social harmony” through standardized dress, synchronized flag-raisings, and orderly public behavior. He is illustrated by clean streets, neat queues, and families watching the evening news in unison. What once expressed resonance across moral and cosmic domains is now reduced to aesthetic compliance. It’s not a misreading of Confucianism – it’s an inversion. The classical system nurtured harmony by balancing difference; Xi’s model engineers harmony by erasing it.
This logic extends beyond human society. In Mencius 1A7, a ruler’s refusal to watch an ox suffer was more than kindness – it was an ethical sensitivity that reached beyond class, species, and utility. That single passage fueled debates on humane governance for centuries. Han thinker Dong Zhongshu warned that Heaven sent disasters when animals were slaughtered without ritual care. His Chunqiu Fanlu linked environmental order, moral virtue, and the ethics of sacrificial violence into a single system. The Book of Rites urged nobles to abstain from meat while mourning – not just for human grief, but in recognition of broader sentient suffering.
That whole ethical universe is now dormant. Modern CCP documents and textbooks no longer mention tian-ren ganying – the resonance between Heaven and humanity. Environmental policy is framed not as stewardship but as technocratic optimization. The flagship initiative of “ecological civilization,” introduced under Hu Jintao and expanded by Xi, turns environmental ethics into spreadsheets: carbon credits, eco-city blueprints, green GDP. The moral grammar remains, but it’s been converted into metrics.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Xiong’an, the showcase “smart eco-city.” Citizens are encouraged to embrace “green lifestyles,” rewarded with housing and benefits for actions like tree-planting or sorting trash. AI-based behavioral scoring is still uneven, but the logic is already in place: ethical performance as data. Even phrases like tian-ren he-yi (Heaven and humanity in unity) survive – but only as marketing for Chinese diplomacy or tech-savvy modernization. The cosmos is still cited. But it’s no longer inhabited.
This transformation didn’t begin with Xi. Mao Zedong denounced Heaven as superstition and collapsed moral order into class struggle. Deng Xiaoping shifted legitimacy from cosmic alignment to GDP growth. Hu Jintao tried to soften that edge, introducing slogans like “harmonious society” and “ecological civilization.” Xi finishes the arc – not by discarding the old language, but by embalming it. Harmony becomes discipline. Virtue becomes loyalty. Heaven becomes a decorative backdrop.
To many outside China, this might look like rational progress. After all, in a world run by data and governance metrics, who needs omens or rites? But Confucian cosmology was never about superstition. Its real power lay in de-centering authority – binding it to something it couldn’t control. Floods and eclipses mattered not because they caused political change, but because they interpreted power. That external frame – where sovereignty had to respond to something beyond itself – acted as a brake on autocracy.
Consider the late Ming. When the Wanli emperor stopped performing the Temple of Heaven rites for nearly 30 years, Confucian officials protested not out of rote ritualism, but because his silence symbolized a breakdown in the moral order. His absence from ritual space became a proxy for dynastic decay, long before the Manchu threat arrived.
Other civilizations have had cosmological checks – mizan (moral balance) in Islamic thought, logos in Stoicism, ordo in medieval Christianity – but none formalized them quite like China. The Chinese model triangulated Heaven, ruler, and people through codified rites, bureaucratized resonance, and symbolic accountability. That precision makes its unraveling today even more striking.
In Xi’s China, that triangle is broken. Tian no longer functions as a moral constraint. The people cannot remonstrate in meaningful ways. Legitimacy no longer flows from above or below – it loops inward. The 20th Party Congress made this official: the CCP’s centralized leadership is now the sole source of political truth. Omens are out. Metrics are in. And in 2022, a revised Party Constitution placed Xi Jinping Thought above even Deng Xiaoping Theory. Authority no longer seeks external justification. It declares itself valid.
Recovering the spirit of Confucian cosmology doesn’t mean reviving superstition. It means recovering the principle of external constraint. Replace eclipses with transparency. Replace sacrificial rites with civic audits. Replace Heaven–Earth resonance with climate interdependence rooted in responsibility. What matters isn’t mysticism; it’s the refusal to let power justify itself on its own terms.
What remains today is a highly curated imitation. Harmony is measured in spatial order. Virtue becomes a checkbox. Heaven becomes a logo on a brochure. The symbolism persists, but the force is gone. Ritual no longer binds power to morality – it seals it within performance. The CCP reenacts legitimacy on a stage drained of resonance. The architecture still stands, but the breath is gone.