China today is one of the most governmentalized societies in the world. State penetration into everyday life may not be as thorough as some critics insist, yet the idea that the state should be present in society persuades most Chinese to submit to state oversight in exchange for the security the state claims to provide. China is not alone in elevating the state above the citizen, but it does draw on a long tradition of state policy and political philosophy known as "Confucian statecraft" to support this orientation, for which Qiu Jun’s Supplement provides an almost complete account. This was the China that the Jesuits encountered in the seventeenth century and communicated back to Europeans at a time when the divine right of kings was in question. Qiu Jun’s method of handling monarchy was to caution the emperor on bad policy and warn him of the catastrophic effects that bad decisions could produce, and that the emperor’s main tasks were to detect latent signs of coming disasters and consult his advisors.