In China, this may well owe something to the Confucian ideal that a government official must comment upon the running of the government without openly offending the emperor, not unlike the often noted tradition that Aesop was a slave and was forced into an indirect form of criticism. Other fabulists—including Phaedrus from the first century A.D., a slave freed under Augustus—also found the need to be critical, but indirectly so. The use of fables as metaphors for actual behavior or events conveniently provides both a specific moral stance and a certain degree of safety.

Along similar lines, those clever enough are able to use the form to point out the difficulties of their own positions to those in authority. A particularly fine example of that is found in the Notes of Hsueh Tao, written by Chiang Ying-ke of the fifteenth century.

A general of the army was drinking inside his warm tent on a cold winter’s evening. His tent was lighted by candles and warmed by a stove filled with coal. After he had drunk a few bowls of wine, he began to sweat.

“An amazingly warm winter we’re having this year,” he said. “When it ought to be cold, it’s quite warm.”

"The weather seems normal enough where your servant was standing. sire."

His words were heard by his personal servant, who was standing outside in the cold. Entering the tent, the servant knelt respectfully in front of the general and said: “The weather seems normal enough where your servant was standing, sire.”

All fable traditions deal generally with the faults of mankind. Of all of these, foolishness is perhaps the most common human failing to find expression all over the corpus of Chinese fables.

A man saw a goose flying and fitted an arrow to his bow. “If I can hit it, then we’ll make a grand stew.”

His younger brother, however, said, “No, it would be better if we roasted it.”