What is Confucianism? How did it influence the Chinese state and society?

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Confucius (Kongzi) was a scholar who lived from 551 to 479 BCE, during a time of civil war. He and his followers looked back to a mythical "Golden Age" when China was imagined to have been unified and free of conflict. Confucius advocated a way to return to such a situation of stability. His teachings advocated maintenance of a society in which people were not equal; rather, each individual was part of a status network set according to family, profession, or other attributes. An individual's relationships to superiors and subordinates were governed by a complex set of obligations and responsibilities. Superiors could expect subordinates to fulfill obligations—but they also had to discharge their own clearly mandated responsibilities to their subordinates.
Confucianism held that social stability would be maintained by upholding particular codes of conduct towards one's superiors, one's subordinates, and to the community at large. For example, a particularly effective institution was the baojia system, in which family members were collectively held responsible for all members' behavior. If one family member was accused of violating the law or behavioral norms, the punishment—even execution—could be meted out to a specified number of generations of the individual's family, including several degrees of cousins. In the absence of extensive central government involvement in local affairs, this and other Confucian measures effectively overcame the potential for political chaos in Imperial China—even though it clearly came at the cost of suppressing individual freedom.
The Confucian system went far beyond the family: the very same sets of obligations and responsibilities extended to the relationship between the emperor and his subjects, as well as between the Middle Kingdom and its vassal states. As long as the emperor and his dynasty remained strong and cohesive, the idea of social hierarchy that was central to Confucian cultural identity generated tremendous political cohesion throughout the empire. As a result, China exhibited far less social and political unrest than was the case in Europe—even though the Chinese state was not "strong," according to our modern definition of state strength. This form of cultural identity directly shaped Chinese politics for almost 3,000 years, from the mid?seventh century BCE until 1911.