The De part opens with the sentence that gives it its subject and its difficulty: the highest power is not powerful, and therefore has power. De is usually rendered as virtue, which imports a moral sense the Chinese word does not carry on its own; it is closer to the efficacy or force that accrues to a thing by being what it is, the potency of something in accord with the way it goes.
The chapter that opens the part sets out a decline. When the way is lost there is power; when power is lost there is benevolence; when benevolence is lost there is rightness; when rightness is lost there is ritual, and ritual is described as the thinning out of loyalty and trust and the beginning of disorder. The named virtues of the surrounding culture, the Confucian vocabulary in particular, are treated not as goods but as the symptoms by which a loss can be dated.
From there the part turns more often to the conduct of a state than the first does. There is taxation, and the observation that the people are hungry because those above eat too much of it. There is war, treated as an instrument of ill fortune, with victory to be observed by funeral rites. There is capital punishment, and a warning to whoever takes the executioner's place. There is the picture of a small state whose people find their food sweet and never travel, which has been read as an idyll and as a reactionary fantasy and as satire, and which the text does not gloss.