Three thousand years of philosophy, verse and record, read as the work of the people who wrote it — not as the property of whoever currently governs the place they wrote it in.
Confucius (551–479 BC) left no writings of his own; the Analects, compiled by his students, argue that social order runs on cultivated relationships rather than law. Laozi's Tao Te Ching argues nearly the opposite — that the most effective governance is the least visible. Zhuangzi pushed that skepticism further, toward a wariness of any fixed doctrine at all, including his own. Mencius, writing a century after Confucius, argued that human nature tends toward good and that a ruler who fails his people forfeits the right to rule them — a claim later dynasties found easier to quote than to practice.
Nineteenth-century translations by James Legge remain in the public domain and are the versions most widely reprinted today; this page points toward them rather than claiming to improve on them.
Li Bai and Du Fu, contemporaries in the eighth century, are usually read as opposites: Li Bai's poems move toward wine, wandering and the moon; Du Fu's toward war, famine and the cost of the An Lushan rebellion to ordinary households. Three centuries later, Su Shi — better known by his courtesy name Su Dongpo — wrote through repeated political exile without abandoning either his politics or his humor, and left behind some of the most quoted lines in the language.
Sima Qian compiled the Records of the Grand Historian around 94 BC, a history of China from legendary antiquity to his own time, written after the Han emperor Wu had him castrated for defending a disgraced general. He kept writing. Eighteen centuries later, Cao Xueqin's unfinished novel Dream of the Red Chamber traced the decline of a great household in enough detail that scholars still argue over which real family he meant — under a dynasty, the Qing, that no longer exists to object.
Everything on this page predates the Chinese Communist Party by at minimum eleven centuries, and in most cases by well over two thousand years. It was written by individuals, copied by hand for generations before any printing press touched it, and survived campaigns intended to erase it. See the writing system these works were composed in, and the case this site makes for keeping a civilization and its current government separate, under editorial position.