1.1 Perception of equality in ancient China

The Chinese people is a great people with a long history.As other old civilizations, the perception of equality in China dates back to very ancient times.Especially, symbolizing the mainstream values in ancient China, Confucianism delivers the most typical and systematic interpretation of equality.

Firstly, the interpretation is based on human nature theory. Confucius（551BC—479BC）said, “By nature, men are nearly alike.”“Do to no one what you yourself dislike.”While men are alike by nature, every individual has independent internal values and nobody can impose his/her belief on others.There is no difference between man's ability to understand and acquire morality.“Every person can be a sage.”In other words, it is possible that everyone could become a sage as long as he disciplines himself in his daily life.

Secondly, political equality.The Book of Rites in the Western Han Dynasty（206BC—25AD）, in very succinct words, chanted a world for all, where means of production and all the other social wealth are owned by the whole community.In this world, everyone shall work and there is no room for the privileged.Everyone can participate in political affairs if he/she is honest and intellectual.Everyone has the equal access to social benefits and social security, regardless of men or women, the young or the elderly, the healthy or the disabled, and the rich or the poor.In a word, equality and solidarity is the basic principle when Confucianism drew the blueprint for a world for all.

Thirdly, economic equality.As Confucius proposed, the state shall“make people rich”and“inequality, rather than want, is the cause of trouble.”That is to say, economic equality not only plays a major role in safeguarding survival right and personality right, but also is indispensable for the ruling class to maintain their reign. People's subsistence needs should be satisfied first to secure their natural life, and after that people would be willing to enhance their morality and dignity.And finally, a good social order would be established.Therefore, tax reduction is needed to provide subsistence for all and the philosophy“making people rich”should be stuck to in order to avoid the wealth gap.That is the tenet of Confucianism for good governing.

Additionally, equality is reflected in Confucian theory of education and making friends.However, the contribution of Confucianism to equality does not mean the philosophy has little to do with the concept of inequality.According to conventional wisdom, everything has its rules, but sometimes accommodates changes.While we should obey the general rules, we need to be flexible in line with circumstances.General rules are important, but knowing the reality is more important.In this sense, the equality accepted by Confucianism is based on the empirical reality.While saying“every person can be a sage”, Mencius（regarded as the second sage in the Confucian school）also said, “Filial piety is the only path to become a sage.”Confucianism acknowledges that it is possible for everyone to become a sage, but this identity in morality does not mean the equality in social practices.Therefore, the ancient China with Confucianism as the mainstream values is in reality feudal and hierarchical.

During thousands of years from the Zhou Dynasty（1046BC—256BC）to the Qing Dynasty, hierarchy had been existing in feudal families with blood lineage.It is patriarchy.Grandfather was the head and also authoritarian economically, religiously and politically.His power was unshakable.All the other family members were subject to him, including his wife and concubines, his male offspring and their wives and concubines, his unmarried female offspring, cohabiting relatives and servants.Besides this polarization, there were other affiliating relations such as husband and wife, brothers, masters and servants. The young should obey the senior and the humble should obey the noble.Moreover, the senior benefited more, while the young worked more.The division of rights and duties was also decided by this family hierarchy.Again in social life, the elderly were entitled with more political and legal rights.

Hierarchy existed in the social system where family was the basic unit.Through maintaining the internal hierarchy, every family made its contribution to the hierarchy of the whole society.Similar to the family unit, the social division of labor also drew a line between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the underprivileged.Mencius said, “Those who work with their minds rule others; those who with their strength are ruled by others.Those who are ruled by others support them; those who rule others are supported by them.”Peasants, workers and vendors were physical workers and lived on tech niques.They should serve the mental workers—the literati and officialdom, who were intellectual enough to govern the country.This polarized division of labor resulted in two antagonist social groups. That said, the literati and officialdom itself was hierarchical.It was composed of the emperor, feudal princes, officials and scholars. The book Guanzi emphasized the rank of nobility. It elaborates rigorous feudal bureaucracy that the clothing, food, housing and transport should conform to a man's social rank.

This hierarchical feudal society, through political, legal and economic systems and Confucianism as its values, imposed specific regulations, such as production and life styles and division of rights and duties, on specific social classes.The literati and officialdom were the privileged and could escape from legal punishment.Feudal laws were only applied to the ordinary people and were thus the ruling tools of the bureaucracy.Furthermore, thanks to their superior political and legal positions, the officialdom suppressed and exploited the ordinary people to safeguard their interests and reduced the ordinary people to be the underprivileged subject to the suppression.

A large group of peasants rebelled against the feudal officialdom and landlords from time to time in order to free themselves from suppression and exploitation and to achieve egalitarianism.As early as the end of the Qin Dynasty, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang led the peasants to fight with the unequal feudal system.They proposed the question“do those gentry certainly have blue blood? ”During the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhong Xiang and Yang Yao raised the political proposition of“no respecter of persons”.At the end of the Ming Dynasty（1368—1644）, the rebellion leader Li Zicheng（1606—1645）raised the slogan of“dividing land equally and abolishing the grain taxes payment system”so that the political ideal of abolishing the wealth gap was put into practice.In the 1850s, the Taiping Rebellion delivered the most systematic perception of equality for peasants, which represented the culmination of peasants'movement in China as well as the world.

Firstly, Hong Xiuquan（1814—1864）, the founder of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, created comprehensive principles of equality. He proposed“God is the symbol of truth.Everyone is the subject to loyal to God without any discrimination.”He said that God was the only“divinity”in the world.He tried to replace Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion with a form of Christianity so as to break up all the spiritual control on the ordinary people by feudal bureaucracy.Hong said that all the people were God's subjects without differentiation of the noble and the humble.The landowning upper class were the“monsters”, who crafted hierarchy and privileges to torture the ordinary people.While those“monsters”lived an extravagant life through exploitation, the working people were in great poverty.Therefore, the feudal autocracy must be abolished so that all the people could obtain equality in a society of“common peace”.

Secondly, the Taiping regime pursued egalitarianism economically.The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom advocated shared farmland, shared food, shared clothing, and shared money to achieve universal egalitarianism and subsistence, which reflected the peasants'calling for equality by abolishing private property and building up common ownership.Based on that, the regime made specific policies to distribute land and income equally.On the one hand, the division of land must be according to the number of individuals, without sex discrimination, so that each person shall receive land with equal coverage and fertility; on the other hand, the“treasury system”avoided private property so that the social wealth was shared and managed by the whole army of peasants.

Finally, local officials were managed in a system of recommendation, promotion and demotion.Because the Kingdom was in constant battles, its local authority was not purely administrative.Instead, it was a military unit responsible for administrative affairs, so the local officials must be competent in both administration and military affairs.It was recorded in the Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom that the daily work of the officials was to manage agricultural production.In war time, they had to lead the soldiers to combat enemies.The Kingdom implemented public recommendation.If an official was obedient and practiced farming, he was recommended by the higher-rank official and reported to that official.The performance of officials at different levels was assessed every three years, the excellent promoted and the poor demoted.If a lower-rank official got promoted, so would the higher-rank official who made recommendation.In turn, if the lower-rank official was demoted, the higher-rank official would get the same punishment.This tenure system was a counter force to feudalism and reflected to some extend the simple democratic awareness of peasants.

Numerous peasants were inspired by Taiping regime's campaign for equality and took part in the rebellion against feudalism.Within 14 years, The Movement expanded to half the area of China and established authority in 18 provinces.Its political and economic policies satisfied peasants'demand for equality, so it was an unprecedented peasant movement for equality in Chinese history and even in the world history.However, the Movement failed due to the intrinsic smallholder consciousness of the peasantry and the difficulties at home and abroad at the end of the 19th century.What can be learned from the failure of the Taiping Rebellion is that the perception of equality of ancient Chinese peasants is featured by spontaneity, blindness and fantasticality.

The demand for equality of the ancient peasantry was the spontaneous resistance to the unequal feudal society.Engels wrote, “The spontaneous reaction against the crying social inequalities, against the contrast between rich and poor, the feudal lords and their serfs, the surfeiters and the starving; as such it is simply an expression of the revolutionary instinct.” Feudalism is a system of political suppression and economic exploitation, combining autocracy, hierarchy and privileges.The privileged bureaucratic landlords enslaved and exploited as much as possible the ordinary people, most of whom were peasants.The living conditions of the ordinary people deteriorated, even in desperation.Seeing the upper classes occupy higher social ranks and wealth, the peasants thought it unjustified for them to live at the bottom of the society.They waged violent uprisings to fight with the upper classes.However, the peasants had their limitations.They were suppressed and exploited, but at the same time they themselves owned private property.Compared with landlords, the peasantry composed of poor smallholders easily went bankrupt, so what they only cared was the equal distribution of wealth.Those limitations prevented the peasants from identifying the driving forces and the orientation of social development.So when the social wealth was not sufficient, they resorted to religion to express their discontent with social inequality and their surrealistic expectation of an equal world.This religious egalitarianism would inevitably be blind and fantastic, and to some extent backward and reactionary.According to Karl Marx, this is“crude Communism”, and“turns against richer private property as envy, and the desire to level.”

To sum up, the peasantry pursuit of equality represents the fundamental interest of most people and combats the unequal feudal society.In this regard, it is more advanced than Confucianism.But due to some limitations, this pursuit of equality is too superficial and idealistic to become reality.So there is a long way ahead for more advanced and more revolutionary classes to explore and to practice equality.