The Junzi

It is a deeply rooted habit among the Chinese to divide people into two categories: the junzi (gentlemen, decent people, those with a sense of justice, noble-spirited men) and the xiaoren (petty men, mean-spirited individuals who look only to personal profit and never to the common good). This habit, too, is a legacy of Confucius, who transformed the meaning of these two labels. The term junzi — rendered kunshi in Japanese, kwunca in Korean, and quân tử in Vietnamese — already existed before Confucius, and its original meaning was simply to indicate a person’s social status. As a social designation, junzi meant “son (zi) of a feudal lord (jun)” or of an aristocrat, and thus a member of the noble class that governed under that system. In Confucius’s time, society was divided into two classes: the junzi (the aristocrats) and the xiaoren (the common people, the masses). The original meaning occasionally resurfaces in the Analects, as we will point out in due course. But in most cases, the term is used with a different sense. Confucius transformed it into a moral qualification: from “son of a feudal lord (or an aristocrat)” to “a person who has the ideal qualities of a feudal lord or an aristocrat.” From a social qualification (“noble man by blood”) to an ethical one (“noble man by spirit”). The junzi is, according to Confucius, the ideal human being. Naturally, its opposite, the xiaoren, then does not (in most cases) mean someone of humble social origin, but rather a petty, selfish man, unable to see beyond his own narrow personal interests. As we will see, the junzi of Confucius is not a hereditary condition; it is an ideal of life, a goal to be achieved, which any person may aspire to, not just those of noble birth. The descriptions Confucius gives us of the…