talya and i could sense the confucian ideal in the peaceful orderliness of his well-proportioned home -- the need for a ruler to be balanced , upright , harmonious and virtuous -- but driving down through the fields during harvest time the previous day our guide had mentioned that four out of five of chinas one billion people live and work on the land and we wondered how anyone , benevolent dictator or pragmatic central committee , could control or even keep track of so massive and disparate a people in the twentieth century without the use ( or threat of the use ) of some form of force .