The Chinese Formula for Success: The “Loyalty and Trust” Stratagem

What can the currently declared turn to the East offer Russian sociopolitical thought? The best answer to this question is a reference to the phenomenon of the unprecedented resilience of Chinese civilization, which requires serious theoretical understanding and testifies to the extraordinary effectiveness of Chinese civilizational strategy. This circumstance gives rise to the suspicion that the Chinese possess some kind of "unsolved Military Secret" underlying this strategy—a certain algorithm for the surprisingly successful implementation of their sometimes astonishingly long-term strategic projects. I would like to derive a "formula" for this "algorithm of effectiveness". To do this, the author of this article believes it is necessary to inquire into the original Chinese—orthodox Confucian—explanations for the secret of such success—at least initially, in such a key area of human activity as strategic interaction. In search of an answer to the aforementioned question about the formula for Chinese success, we examine and analyze the fairytale story of the miraculous crossing, presented by Chinese tradition as an almost canonical example of the supposedly absolute effectiveness of such rudimentary, yet equally banal, spiritual and moral maxims as the ethical postulates of "loyalty and trust". However, in the eyes of a traditionally minded Chinese (and almost any current resident of the PRC can be such), "loyalty" (zhong忠), as not only the primary but also the defining determinative in the duet "loyalty and trust," is, on the contrary, one of the names of utmost seriousness. According to Confucian orthodoxy, the strategy of "loyalty and trust" is a miracle recipe for almost any occasion. The reason why the rather banal moralistic rhetoric of the Chinese sometimes conceals stratagem-like cunning, and why the well-known moral imperatives of "loyalty and trust" suddenly acquire (at least in the eyes of the greatest Confucian thinkers of the past) the status of a strategic panacea, is their categorematic foundation in the hexagrams of the I Ching. Thus, the magical words "loyalty and trust" directly refer us to hexagram No. 61, "Inner Sincerity" Zhong Fu (中孚䷼). The cunning stratagem of "Inner Sincerity", aimed at generating the effect of trust, turns it into an indispensable tool of strategic interaction, where a player's success depends on the actions of other players, and not just on their own decisions.