A Chinese sage once offered a cure for war. Has the world taken it?

This article is part of CGTN's "China in Ink project," which brings the vast world of classic Chinese literature to the fingertips of global audiences.

Is there a cure for war? Long ago, a Chinese sage proposed one, and in doing so, became among the first to grapple with the ethics of warfare. His remedy sounds sweet – some would say naive. Two thousand years on, the world's headlines suggest it remains too bitter to swallow.

The thinker is Mozi, also known as Mo Di, a man of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, hailing from the same soil that nurtured Confucius, yet of a later age – the era known as the Warring States Period (475-221 BC).

True to its name, this was two and a half centuries of military strife born of political turmoil. The feudal Zhou dynasty, which had ruled China since the 11th century BC, was faltering. Its powerful vassal states were vying to cast themselves as the royal house's protector. By the time Mo Di embarked on his intellectual quest, the struggle for supremacy had narrowed to a handful of great powers. The smaller states survived only by regularly shifting their allegiance from one big neighbor to another, depending on where the threat loomed largest. This ascendancy of "might makes right," as his later writings attest, deeply offended Mozi.

Mozi's compassion for the underdog likely sprang from his humble origins. A skilled carpenter by trade, he was said to have built a wooden bird that could "fly for three days without alighting." Yet craftsmanship was far from a high-flying vocation in his age.

Mozi's intellectual beginnings were likely akin to those of Confucius. The arts that Confucius believed upheld the world’s order, such as ritual, etiquette, poetry and music, could not have been foreign to him. Yet unlike Confucius, a nobleman who scarcely hid his disregard for the "lowly trades," the more "working-class" Mozi grew disillusioned with this polished facade of culture. He argued that neither poetry nor music could feed the hungry, clothe the cold, shelter the homeless, and that ritual and refinement did little to curb the strong from oppressing the weak, the many from violating the few, or the cunning from exploiting the innocent.

Turning from Confucius's ideal of a society ordered by ancestral codes, Mozi offered his own diagnosis of the world's ills, including unjust wars: the absence of "universal love," an undifferentiated care of all for all.

Mozi saw self-interest as the root of human strife. Men steal because they cannot feel another's loss; lawmakers vilify one another because they see no good beyond their own. And by the same logic, states expand at each other's expense, turning to war whenever gain gleams on parchment. To Mozi, this apathy stood as the final barrier to human flourishing.

"Let universal love prevail under Heaven, that each may love others as himself," the thinker is quoted as saying in the eponymous work attributed to him.

Preaching "universal love," Mozi naturally condemned war. He argues along a consequentialist line: how could the slaughter of tens of thousands be justified when taking a single life is a capital crime? If stealing a peach or a horse violates another's right, how can plundering an entire land or seizing it outright not be deemed more wrong?

In his treatise "Condemnation of Aggression," Mozi denounces war as inherently unsustainable. Noting that many vassal states, enfeoffed at the dawn of the Zhou dynasty, had perished through their own campaigns of conquest, he argues that while a few victors may appear to have gained from war, far more have been ruined by it. Hence, war can never serve as a prudent policy for the majority, for it is, he writes, "like a drug that cures only five patients out of a thousand, and no filial son in the world would prescribe such a remedy for his father."

Second, war is economically absurd. Aggressors seek land beyond what is needed to feed their people, only to lose men whose absence renders that surplus even more useless. For a ruler who truly wishes his people to flourish, it is wiser to leave them in peace than to summon them to shed blood.

Third, a general may win many battles, but few states triumph forever.

Mozi, however, does not condemn all warfare as aggression. He acknowledges the necessity of defensive war. He even applied his carpenter training to the art of fortification, devising defensive machines of remarkable ingenuity. "The Book of Mozi" recounts that he once staged a simulated war in front of a belligerent duke, demonstrating how his devices outperformed the lord's new siege engines, thus preempting an invasion before it began.

More ambiguous than his rejection of aggression is Mozi's conditional approval of "punitive war." If a state strayed from the "righteous way of benevolent governance," bringing suffering upon its people, Mozi held that a neighboring state might be justified in intervening by force.

Can "universal love" ever be imposed by command? Mozi harbored no doubt. "If a ruler can summon tens of thousands to kill and die at his word, how much easier should it be to bid them love instead?"

It would be fanciful, however, to claim that Mozi's ideals ever stirred much enthusiasm among the ruling elites. To lay down arms for "universal love" might have served everyone's interest amid the wars of the Warring States, yet the zero-sum logic of power that prevailed at the time left no one willing to cast aside their spears, convinced they were surrounded by wolves.

Standing at last in the Warring States Period, the Qin empire that eventually unified China triumphed through conquest, not compassion. With the rise of the Han (206 BC-220 AD), which overthrew the Qin, Mozi's teachings faded further into obscurity as Confucianism ascended to orthodoxy.

Mozi's philosophy did not pass unnoticed among the intellectuals of his age, though it wasn't in everyone's favor. By rejecting ritual, music and hierarchical order, he placed himself in direct opposition to the Confucian school. Mencius – the "Second Sage" after Confucius – denounced Mozi's creed of undifferentiated love as "beast-like": how could one love a stranger as one's father? To the Confucians, such impartiality was the gravest form of unfiliality, for filial devotion ranked among the highest virtues.

Historians generally place Mozi's death around 391 BC. His legacy endures in the eponymous work "Mozi" – a collection of his teachings, almost certainly compiled by later disciples rather than by his own hand.

In our age, humanity – a modern echo of Mozi's ancient "universal love" – has come to stand at the heart of policymaking. Yet war endures, with the concept of "security" stretching beyond armies and borders to embrace culture, identity and even the climate itself. Old justifications for conflict have fallen away, only for new flashpoints to take their place. If the world could ever agree that love is the truest antidote to discord, there may never be a better moment than now to deepen the dose.

The cover photo: Bronze arrowheads, 6th to 5th century BC, from the collection of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum.