Governing Nature through Morality
by hachidori
Yu, also known as King Yu (禹王), the legendary founder of Xia(夏) dynasty, is traditionally depicted as ascending to the throne as a result of his successful flood-control efforts. In classical Confucian discourse, he is praised as a ruler who acted not for personal gain or the pursuit of power, but to relieve his people from the suffering caused by floods, and is subsequently canonized as the archetype of a sage-king by later scholars, including Confucius and Mencius. However, such evaluations rest upon an anthropocentric assumption that human moral objectives take precedence over nature. This essay applies the concept of Wild Nature, as formulated by Roderick Nash, and the ethics of ecocentrism to critically reevaluate the natural and political philosophy embedded in the myth of King Yu.
Ecocentrism does not consider nature as a means to human ends but recognizes intrinsic value in nature. In particular, Wild Nature refers to the state of nature prior to human management, modification, or rationalization, and is considered inviolable even for the purposes of human survival, morality, or the maintenance of civilization. From this perspective, ethical concern centers not on the justification of intervention, but on the self-restraint of human action. Natural phenomena, therefore, are not to be evaluated solely on their utility to humans, and threats to human life do not inherently authorize human interference.
The myth of King Yu frames floods as disorderly, abnormal, and threatening events that must be overcome. From an ecocentric perspective, however, floods are not errors or failures of nature, but part of ecological processes including inundation, erosion, sedimentation, and geomorphological change. Floods constitute a natural unfolding of wild processes, and are not intrinsically subjects for “correction.” In this light, Yu can be interpreted not as a figure who revered nature, but as the first individual to problematize the functioning of nature because it posed a threat to human society. His flood-control efforts represented a decision to subordinate nature to human order rather than an act of ecological respect.
The principal justification for Yu’s interventions is that they were necessary to preserve human life and social order. Ecocentric ethics, however, hold that the mere fact of human survival does not confer the right to infringe upon nature. Humans are not the owners of nature, and nature cannot be reduced to a backdrop for human social maintenance. Consequently, if floods conflicted with human settlement and agricultural practices, the ethically appropriate response may have been to adjust or abandon human patterns of life—settlement, cultivation, or land ownership—rather than manipulating nature. Yu rejected such alternatives, choosing instead to restructure natural processes to fit human societal aims.
The myth frequently emphasizes that Yu “let the waters flow without obstruction,” conveying an image of compliance with nature. Yet from an ecocentric standpoint, guiding water or containing it both constitute rearrangements of nature according to human purposes, and thus are morally equivalent. Moreover, the expression “he followed the heavenly principle (天理)” disguises human decision as the will of nature, effectively justifying human intervention as natural inevitability. This constitutes an appropriation of nature for human ends.
Yu’s flood control was not an episodic or individual act, but a large-scale, organized, and sustained state intervention. It marked the institutionalization of interference with nature as a normative responsibility of political authority. Subsequently, nature became an object of management and control rather than reverence, incorporated as a resource for state governance. From an ecocentric perspective, this represents a structural infringement upon Wild Nature.
In conclusion, while Confucian tradition sanctifies Yu as a sage-king, application of ecocentric ethics renders such evaluation wholly untenable. Yu’s flood control was not an act of reverence or respect for nature, but a political assault that radically denied nature’s intrinsic value and autonomy, subordinating it to human social order and objectives. Moral rhetoric such as “relieving the people,” “heavenly principle,” and “harmony” served only to legitimize this aggression, institutionalizing the structural violation of Wild Nature as a state responsibility. Yu neither revered nor respected nature; he refused to yield before it. He was the first figure to destroy Wild Nature for human ambition.
This myth is not merely historical. As of 2026, the political discourse in China, South Korea, and Japan continues to invoke the Yu narrative as a symbolic resource to justify land development, large-scale civil engineering projects, and even geoengineering, framing environmental destruction as a moral duty and historical inevitability. The myth of King Yu is therefore not only an early case of environmental exploitation rationalized by human welfare but also a foundational narrative in East Asian political culture that perpetuates the justification of ecological harm. From an ecocentric perspective, Yu cannot be regarded as a sage-king; he must be understood as the originator of anthropocentric political ethics, systematically infringing the intrinsic value of Wild Nature and rejecting the ethic of human self-restraint.
