Excursus

Chinese thought has always linked human morality with cosmic events. Most famously, Chinese political theory has tended to blame moral failings of the royal family for floods, fires, plagues, famines, and earthquakes as well as (more credibly) civil disorder. Such analysis was used to explain the fall of previous dynasties, but of course it could not be safely applied to any régime while it was in power.

(Some western commentators see a descendant of this line of logic in the instinct of the Communist Party to conceal or minimize news of unfortunate events, but it is an instinct shared with authoritarian governments in general and is not peculiar to China.)

Morality is not just an imperial responsibility, of course. The moral failings of ordinary people can also bring about illness, bad luck, and natural disasters, usually only upon themselves or their families (what some commentators unsympathetically call “blaming the victim” or less bluntly “patient responsibility for illness”). But sometimes society in general may be thought potentially responsible for bad things happening.

The ancient writer Xúnzǐ 荀子 (298?-238 BC) attributes the following short plaint to a very frustrated King Tāng 汤 (reign 3a-1), the legendary founder of the Shāng 商 dynasty (roughly the 1600s-1100s BC). King Tāng’s brief cri de cœur clearly reflects the notion, prevalent throughout Chinese history, that untoward natural phenomena can occur as a result of human bad behavior. If King Tāng had really said this —which we must doubt given the centuries between his life and Xúnzǐ’s— his would be one of the earliest articulate statements we have of this proposition.

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