No Confucius? No China?
Reading online Chinese newspapers and commentaries everyday in my boring lonely retirement home, I came across a very enlightening article entitled,“Are We Able to Recover the Culture We Have Lost?”discussing how to recover the Chinese culture thrown away by Mao during his Cultural Revolution and use it to rebuild China. It was written by Professor Zhang Yiwu for the online“M4.cn.” The remarks quoted below from his paper somehow inspired me to make a comparison of the Chinese Empire as represented by the Han Dynasty（206 BCE - 220 CE）with the Roman Empire（27 BCE - 476 CE）:

“哪些传统是可以适应现代社会的，是对我们有用的，哪些又是无用的？这需要拣选，找到可用的，适应我们现代生活的价值和习俗，中断的可以找回来，仍旧延续的可以发扬光大."

It may be noted that while the Chinese Empire was kept alive and active by succeeding dynasties for more than 2,000 years until the overthrow in 1911 of the Qing Dynasty（1644-1911）, the Roman Empire disappeared forever after living for only 503 year!
How come? In my naïve opinion, because of their cultural differences. With almost no human culture（人文 ）of their own to speak of, all the Roman emperors ruled their subjects and the conquered by force, and whatever laws they made were used only to rule and punish them - most likely very similar to the Qin Dynasty’s（221 - 206 BCE）Legalist（法家）form of government. So, how could the conquered ones choose to become Romans?
In China, when the Han Dynasty came to power, it followed the Qin’s Legalist practice for quite a while - more or less like the Roman Empire.
However, lucky for the Han emperors, before they came to power, China had become a unified country under the Qin Dynasty’s central govenment without feudal states anymore, and the Chinese language in its written form was made the same in nearly all the lands owned and conquered by its Founding Emperor, By the way, the land size under his rule was about the size of today’s China Proper which is about a fifth of Europe in size.
size.
As a result, this made it easier for Han emperors to spread Confucius‘s
（557? - 479 BCE）teachings. Long before this time, running a feudal state, the first emperor of the Zhou Dynasty（ 1122-256 BCE）came up with his so-called “Mandate of Heaven”（天命）, based on a verse in the nearly 4,000-years-old “Song of Five Sons”
（五子之歌）which reads, “People are the foundation of a state. When the foundation becomes firm and solid, the state will be in peace and harmony,” but neither he nor any one in his court knew how to build such a foundation. Fortunately, 500 some years later came Confucius and his idea of a Datong Society（大同, Great Harmony）for the people, as attached here below, which could create a“firm and solid foundation” for a state.
Surprisingly, it may be noted that the kind of welfare benefits mentioned here read almost like the human rights found in today’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights; however, in a Confucian world, they are to be provided by the ruler as his duty.
So, around 140 BCE, the ruling emperor decided to replace the Legalist form with the Confucianist kind of government where human-heartedness and justice（仁义）ruled from the top to the bottom with the emperor as its role model or family head. In the meantime, a palace test system（ 殿试 ）based on Confucius’s teachings was introduced for hiring the common people to fill government jobs. As a result, less and less royal family members and aristocrats were used for government service, and they were replaced by men with virtue and talent who had successfully passed the palace tests. This kind of governing system lasted until about 600 CE when the Sui Dynasty（589 - 618）came to power. By then, just about all the Han people or Chinese, had learned to write the Chinese characters in their standard forms. So, it replaced the old palace tests with the rigorous Imperial Examination System（科举制度）- the modern days’civil service examinations. And, this system lived with only occasional interruptions until the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
Thus, Confucius has been almost nonstop in keeping China alive and active for more than 2,000 years! As a result, no millionaires have ever become top government officials since, by the Chinese tradition since time immemorial, the people are divided into four classes：the scholars, the farmers. the artisans and the merchants or businessmen. Had the Italians had some human culture or a political philosopher like China’s Confucius or even perhaps Greece’s Socrates（469 - 399 BCE）, a large number of Europeans could now be called Romans besides the ones living in Italy today. And the Latin or Italian could be the language for at least a quarter of the Europeans.
The Communists took power and established the People’s Republic in 1949. Not knowing exactly what a Marxist or Communist society ought to look like and how its people live, so following Mao’s death and the breakup of his horrible Cultural Revolution, they began a few years later to peddle and spread Confucianism by funding and supporting more than 500 Confucius centers, institutes and academies throughout the world. There are nearly 50 of them in the US alone!
In this way, the People’s Republic appears to be announcing to the world that she will now live by Confucius’s teachings or standards. And like the earlier dynasties, she now accepts the Mandate of Heaven and will try to build his Datong Society for the Chinese people!