Natural disasters in China divine retribution: "tianzai" (天災), literally 'heavenly disaster'. In ancient beliefs, natural disasters were seen as Heaven’s response to immoral human behaviour, whereby the conduct of different individuals carried different weights. While the behaviour of common people ranked last, the actions of bureaucrats had a greater effect. Given that in Imperial China the emperor's behaviour was believed to be the most important, popular belief was that the emperor should attempt to prevent disasters by ensuring his conduct was in following with moral codes – and if a disaster should occur, he was responsible for addressing the consequences. According to the Overseas
What Is to Be Done? belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia. Lars T. Lih, a McGill University course lecturer, has suggested that Lenin's pamphlet has been widely misinterpreted partly by mistranslations of key terms used by Lenin. Lih says that those historians and textbooks that misinterpret the pamphlet follow "three mutually reinforcing strands": Lih argues that "even if we examine the controversial passages in "What is to be Done?" we misunderstand them if we are not alive to the meanings of the words used. Some of these have been translated in such a way as to confuse or even to draw readers to the opposite of