Why Didn't the Chinese Place Gods at the Top of Power Like Europeans and Arabs Did?
The year the Zhou people captured Chaoge (the Shang capital), King Zhou of Shang burned himself to death on the Deer Terrace. Though victorious, Duke of Zhou, Duke of Shao, and others couldn't celebrate. A heavy weight remained in their hearts.
The Shang dynasty had practiced rituals for four hundred years. They sacrificed cattle after cattle, burned oracle bones upon oracle bones, and carefully mapped out the relationships between the Supreme Deity and ancestral spirits. Yet what happened? They collapsed overnight. Could the Mandate of Heaven really be trusted? If it couldn't be trusted, how could the Zhou claim they received this mandate? But if it could be trusted, what had those four centuries of Shang rule meant?
The Zhou people pondered this question for a long time.
Their final answer, recorded in the Book of Documents, repeats the same few phrases: "The Mandate of Heaven is not fixed," "It assists only those with virtue," and "Heaven sees through the eyes of the people; Heaven hears through the ears of the people." In modern terms, this means: Heaven's favor isn't a guaranteed position—it goes to whoever possesses virtue. And what is virtue? It's not measured by how many cattle you sacrifice, but by how well you care for ordinary people.
Today this sounds like common sense, but back then it was revolutionary—breaking through the ceiling of conventional thinking.
The Shang people had lived by a different logic: when gods are pleased, humans remain safe. So all political resources went to rituals and divination. The Zhou completely reversed this logic: when people live well, the gods are pleased. You want to know if Heaven still favors you? No need to burn turtle shells—just step outside your palace gates and look at the faces of the common people.
I often feel that the Zhou's philosophy wasn't so much an intellectual breakthrough as it was born from fear.
Having just overthrown a dynasty that claimed the Mandate of Heaven for centuries, they understood too well how such mandates could be lost. In the Kang Gao chapter, Duke of Zhou repeatedly urges King Kang to "secure and protect the people" and "properly care for the former Shang subjects." This wasn't universal love—it was fear. Fear that their descendants might become another King Zhou, fear that their newly established rule might someday be taken from them in the name of "Heaven's Mandate."
There's a line in the Jiu Gao that always hits me hard: "People should not look into water to see themselves; they should look to the people." Water only reflects your face; the people reflect the rise and fall of a nation. The character "jian" (to observe) literally means "mirror"—a warning system. Duke of Zhou was telling the young King Cheng: when you hold court each morning, your first question shouldn't be about today's astrological signs from the Royal Historian, but about harvest yields from the Minister of People, roads built by the Minister of Works, and cases judged by the Minister of Justice.
This was a manual of governance written in the blood of a fallen state.
Of course, the Zhou didn't dare to directly say "Heaven doesn't exist." In that era, nobody would dare make such a claim. Instead, they did something more radical: they completely redefined Heaven's nature. Heaven was still Heaven—its position remained, its title remained, and ritual ceremonies remained. But Heaven's will no longer existed independently; it became firmly tied to the will of the people. Heaven no longer had its own eyes or ears—what the Supreme Being saw and heard came entirely through the senses of ordinary people.
This "old bottle with new wine" approach prevented theocratic politics from taking root in China. Not through violent overthrow, but through quiet displacement, replacement, and hollowing out.
Interestingly, this ideology emerged not just from fear, but because the Zhou's own political system forced them forward.
Wang Guowei noted that the greatest change between Shang and Zhou was the clan-based feudal system. This system distributed power according to blood relationships—trusting those of your own family. But it had an unavoidable flaw: why should nobles treat commoners not related by blood with kindness? Brotherhood couldn't explain this.
The Zhou filled this gap with "virtue." And "virtue" wasn't empty rhetoric—it was clearly defined as "protecting the people," "ensuring people's wellbeing," and "enriching the people." If you accomplished these, you had virtue, and Heaven's Mandate belonged to you. If you failed, you lacked virtue, and Heaven's Mandate would pass to another. This wasn't religion—it was performance evaluation. Fail the evaluation, and you're replaced.
The system of blind historian-musicians was another fascinating arrangement. These blind musicians collected folk songs from the people, turned them into melodies, and performed them before the king in court. Whether commoners lived well or harbored grievances—all was hidden in these "airs." Since blind musicians were believed to communicate with Heaven, the voices they sang represented Heaven's own will.
This design remains brilliant even today. Public opinion didn't need to kneel outside palace gates petitioning for justice, nor gather in protests. Instead, it was set to music and lyrics, entering the highest decision-making halls with the sacred aura of ritual and music. Of course, in practice, whether kings wanted to listen or believed what they heard was another matter. But at least the system provided a legitimate channel for public sentiment to reach the top.
I don't mean to paint the Western Zhou dynasty as an ideal state. King Zhao's disastrous southern campaign, King Li being driven out by the citizens, King You dying at the foot of Mount Li—these events are clearly recorded in the Discourses of the States and Records of the Grand Historian. There's no need to hide the Zhou's flaws. But one thing is interesting: even the most notorious tyrants never dared to publicly declare that "the people don't matter." Such words would mean admitting they didn't care about Heaven's Mandate. Once this verbal cage was built, rulers themselves became its prisoners.
This cage was later inherited by Confucianism, reinforced, refined, and locked tight.
Confucius dreamed of Duke of Zhou his whole life—not of his power, but of his logic. Politics should win people through virtue, transform them through ritual, make nourishing the people its duty, and educating them its achievement. Duke of Zhou's thinking was systematized and universalized by Confucius. Confucius rarely spoke of spirits not because he firmly believed they didn't exist, but because he took Duke of Zhou's approach of "respecting yet keeping distance" to its extreme: whether Heaven exists can remain an open question, but what matters in governance is absolutely clear—sufficient food, sufficient military strength, and the people's trust.
As Zhang Xuecheng said, "Duke of Zhou perfected the tradition of governance, while Confucius established the ultimate teaching tradition." This hits the core truth. Duke of Zhou embedded people-centered governance into institutions; Confucius carved it into the soul.
During the Warring States period, Mencius expressed it even more bluntly: "The people are the most important element; next comes the state; the ruler is of least importance." This wasn't Duke of Zhou's original wording, but the logical conclusion of his thinking. If you accept that Heaven's Mandate shifts according to popular will, then the people's wishes become the highest standard of judgment—higher than state symbols, higher than the ruler's throne. Xunzi used the boat-and-water metaphor—the water can carry the boat, but it can also capsize it. Emperor Taizong of Tang later repeated this metaphor until it became political common sense among rulers and ministers alike.
Yet what we now consider common sense was once forbidden territory.
Looking back at the Shang-Zhou transition, I increasingly believe that the core of this intellectual revolution wasn't some "Axial Age breakthrough" or "philosophical awakening." It was simply a group of politicians terrified by history, desperately trying to secure a future for their descendants. They didn't know their anxieties would be written into classics, didn't know how many scholars would later make their living interpreting these words "people-centered governance." They only knew that the ashes of the Shang dynasty were still warm, and the next to fall in blood might be themselves.
This fear was more sincere than any philosophy.
That's why I'm reluctant to describe the Western Zhou's shift from heaven-focused to people-focused governance as a perfect, closed, watertight theoretical system. It was never that perfect. The Zhou didn't dare completely deny Heaven, so they bound Heaven and the people together; they didn't dare fully empower the people, so they used "Heaven" to constrain rulers, and "rulers" to control the people. This wasn't democracy—not even its seedling. It was simply an extremely practical, deeply indigenous, remarkably effective system of power balance—though often crooked and frequently failing.
But it lasted more than two thousand years.
After the Qin and Han dynasties, religious officials like the Grand Historian and Grand Diviner were pushed to the margins. "Matters of state" were no longer about rituals, but about grain transportation, border defense, taxation, and administration. Max Weber was right that China established rational bureaucracy early, but he didn't ask where this bureaucracy's philosophical foundation came from. That foundation originated three thousand years ago, from Zhou dynasty statesmen too anxious to sleep at night, from sentences written in the Book of Documents that later generations would recite countless times.
I write this article not to prove how great the Western Zhou was. It wasn't that great—Zhou kings committed plenty of terrible acts. I simply want to say that the practical, skeptical, non-superstitious character of Chinese political culture—its reluctance to surrender destiny to supernatural forces—was painted stroke by stroke beginning here. This heritage sometimes weighs heavily on us, sometimes we forget it completely, but it has never been entirely broken.
So why does Heaven "change its mind"?
The answer is actually simple. The Zhou people spent four hundred years in anxiety and witnessed a fallen dynasty before arriving at this answer: Heaven has never had a mind of its own. The heartbeat of Heaven is the combined pulse of millions of ordinary people. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes drowned out by the roar of the machinery of power, sometimes so faint it's barely audible. But as long as you still press your ear to the ground, as long as you can still hear human voices, that heartbeat continues to sound.