Within Mohism, universal love (jian’ai 兼愛) is articulated as an uncompromising call to care for all people impartially, without privileging family, clan, or state. Rather than endorsing a hierarchy of affection, it urges equal concern for every person’s welfare, regardless of kinship, social status, or political allegiance. Mohist thinkers identify partial love—favoring one’s own group at the expense of others—as a root cause of conflict, war, and social disorder. By contrast, universal love seeks to extend the same basic regard for others’ lives, families, and communities that one naturally extends to one’s own.

This love is not framed as a purely emotional sentiment but as a moral and political discipline that must be enacted in concrete behavior. It involves actively helping others, preventing harm, and opposing injury to others’ persons, property, families, or states just as one would oppose such harm to oneself. At the personal level, it calls for treating others’ interests as one would wish one’s own to be treated, thereby promoting mutual benefit and overall welfare “under heaven.” At the political level, it demands that rulers govern for the benefit of all, rather than favoring particular clans, factions, or hereditary elites.

Mohist universal love also carries a broader social vision: if individuals and rulers truly extended equal concern to all, the motives for aggression and exploitation would wither, and large-scale violence and social chaos would be greatly reduced. In this sense, universal love is not an abstract ideal but a practical strategy for securing harmony and material well-being for all people. It challenges entrenched patterns of favoritism and self-interest, asking that care be distributed according to the simple measure of shared humanity rather than bloodline or rank.