Was political expediency and concerns of statecraft limited to the dominant elite groups alone?
Colonial statecraft and its perception of the social order were shaped by its characterization of the problems of managing, controlling and governing labour.
Confucian ethics made it the duty of the literati to apply all their learning to statecraft (jingshi, literally "ordering the world"); this was the political side of the agenda.
Inganno's initial approach, sanctioned in the contemporary literature on statecraft, was to emphasize prudential argument, not simple right and wrong.
However, these rhetorical oppositions between young men and elders, violent hotheads and measured experience, educated and illiterate, conservatives and radicals, violence and statecraft, are blurred in practice.
Second, following an old colonial tradition of statecraft, government situated itself at a level removed from society and, in official discourse, assumed its own autonomy.
Considerations of statecraft discouraged the state administration from disrupting locally embedded bodies, for that would offend popular sensibilities, and invite their protest.
Under realism, threats are the currency of international politics, and the rational deployment of threats is at the core of effective statecraft.
