Speeches in the Shangshu (Call of Shao and others)

The speeches attributed to the Duke of Shao in the Book of Documents — the people as the root of the state, lessons from the fall of the Shang

Tradition: Zhou dynasty / early Chinese political thought

"The people are the root" — the speeches that grounded political legitimacy in popular welfare and the lessons of dynastic failure

The speeches attributed to the Duke of Shao in the Shangshu (Book of Documents) are among the earliest Chinese political texts. The most important is the "Call of Shao" (Shao Gao), an address to the people of the newly conquered Shang territories explaining the Zhou conquest as the transfer of Heaven's mandate from a corrupt dynasty to a virtuous one. The Duke of Shao articulates the principle that Heaven's mandate is conditional: the Shang lost it through misgovernance, and the Zhou must rule virtuously or face the same fate. The speech emphasises learning from historical precedent, attending to the welfare of the common people, and maintaining institutional competence. The famous dictum "the people are the root of the state" (min wei bang ben) — whether directly attributable to the Duke of Shao or to the broader early Zhou tradition he represents — established the minben (people-as-root) school of political thought that profoundly influenced Mencius and all subsequent Confucian governance. The textual history is complex: the "Old Text" Shangshu chapters were demonstrated to be later fabrications, while the "New Text" chapters are older but still not verbatim records of 11th-century speeches. Nevertheless, the political philosophy — conditional mandate, historical learning, popular welfare — is authentically early Zhou.