The Rules And Art Of The Rule - The Ruling Ideology Of The Spring And Autumn Period And Its Applied Research

Speaking in general, governance refers to activities that operate and strengthen power. The goal of these activities is to maintain specific social organization. China is a country that pays great attention to political governing power in her long history. In the past thousand years, the majority of intellectual elites devoted their talents to create theories that how to get, maintain and operate political governing power. In this process, a personalized and nationalistic political cultural tradition formed, in which there were a plenty of concrete and typical cases and propositions. We should have a critical eye on them and try to investigate thoroughly the procedure, rule, method and art of traditional operation of political governing power. Such a study has great historical and realistic significance. With method of historical comparative study, the thesis will research two key elements of traditional political governance. One is the rule of governance, and the other is the art of governing.The rule of governance is regulations and codes of conduct, which are established by governing class to realize their specific political goals. Two thousand years ago, the School of Confucianism, Moism, Taoism and Legalists put forward so many theories on regulation and code of governing conduct, which exerted great influences on following history. The thesis will discuss thoroughly some important concepts of their theories, like the Way of Hegemony, the Way of Benevolent Government, the Rule by force, the Rule by law, and the Rule with do-nothing.The art of governing is arts and skills of operating power, which are performed by rulers under the guide of regulation and code of rule. Compared with the regulation and code of rule, it has a flexible, specific and personal characteristic. The art of governing is incarnated as order-obedience relation between human beings. Thus, the art of governing concerns primarily about "affairs and relations between men". To increase the number of obedient people, the ruler invented many ways of soliciting, like soliciting with fame, profit, etiquette, trick, expostulation and force.To distinguish the degree of obedience in his subjects, the ruler made use of comparing in deeds with same nature, generalizing and inferring with impression, being friendly with people with similar character, checking fame with reality, judging subjects' words, voice, expression, deeds, hobby and friends. To strengthen the obedience of subjects, the ruler took measures like listening different speeches, verifying from different spheres, punishing and awarding, balancing and containing, preventing clique, dispersing responsibility. Some rulers even took tricky ways of controlling their subjects. To help organizations to operate his political power, the ruler established some regulations like defining duty of different posts, judging officials with their morality, granting positions with different abilities, splitting primary minister's power, dividing military power, making supervisory organization loyal. All of these ways, methods and measures of ruling paved way for rulers to achieve their political goals.