The Spirit of Loyalty: East and West
In the East, loyalty is duty-based and relationship-oriented, largely due to Confucius' influence. He emphasizes filial piety (Xiào or Hsiao) as the greatest virtue; it includes obedience to parental authority and serving parents with propriety and affection. Social order and world peace hinge on the practice of filial piety.
Loyalty is the equivalent of filial piety in governing the relationship between ruler and ministers. The Chinese character loyalty ( Zhong or Chung) contains two symbols: The top symbol stands for "center" or "middle", while the lower symbol stands for "heart" or "mind." Thus, loyalty means a heart unswerving from the center. However, Confucius did not advocate blind obedience and slavish allegiance, because the ruler must possess humaneness (Rén or Jen) and moral rectitude in order to demonstrate that he had received the "mandate of heaven".
Often filial piety conflicts with loyalty to the state. Sometimes, one is confronted with the moral choice between taking one's own life or taking other people's lives for what one believes. These conflicts are dramatized in the recent movie Hero. Rightly or wrongly, the protagonist Nameless (Jet Lee) resolves the dilemma of divided loyalties by giving up his plan to revenge for his parents and sacrificing his own life for the greater good - the prospect of creating a united and peaceful country.
The Confucian principle of loyalty has been extended to relationships between employer and employee and between friends. It governs all sorts of relationships outside the family. In China, the word loyalty is often used as part of a compound term including honesty or righteousness. Thus, loyalty is considered the mark of good character and honor, while disloyalty is linked to shame and moral failure.
This is an excerpt from Paul Wong's article on loyalty.