@Emmanuel Florac — 2026-02-14 12:15:33
Arnaud Bertrand (@arnaudbertrand): This is probably the single feature that makes China most unique as a civilization in human history: it is pretty much the only one where religion never had a say in political affairs.
We often wrongly believe that China's secularism came with Communism but this couldn't be more wrong. The roots are far, far more ancient than this.Think about any other civilization - India, Persia, ancient Egypt, European civilization, the Incas: they all had a priestly class that held considerable political power. China? Never.
Never, ever? Actually China, in its very early history, had a brush with theocracy during the Shang dynasty in the 2nd millennium BC. And it is precisely this episode - or rather what came afterwards - that decisively de-linked religion from government affairs.
How so? Because around 1046 BC, the Zhou overthrew the Shang and immediately faced a big problem of legitimacy. The Shang had claimed to rule because Heaven had chosen them. If that were true, then the Zhou had just committed the ultimate act of sacrilege. How do you justify going against God’s will?
The answer the Duke of Zhou (who can thus be credited as the - perhaps unwitting - inventor of secularism) came up with was essentially to say that Heaven's mandate is not a birthright but a contract - conditional on the virtue of the ruler and good governance.
It might not sound like much but this idea completely changed the whole equation: suddenly the legitimacy of power didn’t rest on God’s will but on man’s moral judgement, on whether the ruler had virtue (德, Dé) and governed well. Which meant that, ultimately, the people - as opposed to a God - became the arbiter of whether a ruler is legitimate.
If there is one single decision that most shaped China's destiny as a civilization, it's probably this one. And, as I explain in my latest article, it ultimately shaped all of us in profound ways: through a chain of events involving Jesuit missionaries, Voltaire, and what French Enlightenment thinkers called "l'argument chinois" ("the Chinese argument"), it is this very idea that ended up secularizing Europe too and drove the Enlightenment movement.
That's the topic of my latest article: the origins of China's secularism, how it shaped three thousand years of Chinese civilization, and why - far from being a belief in nothing or an absence of belief as it's all too often depicted - it's on the contrary a faith in humanity itself.
Read it all here 👇
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♲ @harryhaller@diaspora.psyco.fr:
@clacke didn't mandate of heaven in practice just mean that if you could take and hold leadership then you had more legitimacy than someone by noble birth alone. but leaders can and did use religious interpretation to claim mandate of heaven like "all these natural events preceding my leadership are omens that reaffirm my standing to lead" I don't think it ever affirmed individual rights or the direct voice of common people in governance so I don't know how it is related to the development of the enlightenment but I didn't read his article either because it behind a paywall 
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1@sun I can't claim to have studied it, but the vibe I have received is that the Mandate of Heaven has pretty much always been invoked in retrospect. If you need to invoke it to try to undermine a would-be usurper, you've pretty much already lost.
The tie to secularism may be overplayed, but I find it interesting. Either way, Chinese history seems to be one of actual meritocracy, more than any other nation-state I'm aware of.