Chinese Social Structure

China's dissimilarity to a nation in the usual sense and its lack of class distinction represent what it does not have, but its ethics-oriented system of professional distinction, that is, its consideration of society as the nation, without distinguishing between these two, represents what it does have. The absences in Chinese political culture have already been discussed. What is present in this culture – ethics and professional distinction – has also been hinted at above but needs to be discussed in more detail. This chapter elaborates on these aspects.

As has been previously mentioned, both family life and group-centered life inhered in the people in the earliest times. But with the passage of time, family life prevailed in China and collective life prevailed in the West. As a result, family life in China gives rise to ethics-oriented culture, which develops into professional distinctions in society, while group-centered life in the West alternated for a long time between individual-orientedness and society-orientedness, and then evolved into class divides. Class divides result from the differentiation between groups, but this does not occur in an ethics-oriented society. An ethicsoriented society naturally lends itself to professional distinction. Ethics and profession are so intimately associated with each other that they form a wonderfully intriguing match.

How, then, do class divisions result from the existence of different groups? Classes arise in two ways: either through foreign conquest and rule or internal divisions within. The former is the combination of two groups into one and the latter is the division of one group into several. In short, classes are formed according to the power to be gained from within the group. That is a perfectly sound fundamental principle. If the group-centered society is said to be three-dimensional, then the ethics-oriented society can be considered to be two-dimensional. By ethics, I refer to the friendly (clearly non-power-based) relationship between one person and another (clearly not group-centered). As the ethics-oriented society takes shape and when people's friendly relationships between one another emerge, the group tends to become divided and the power gradually declines. Such being the case, class divides do not arise.