China: Contesting Confucius

An article by Henry Zhao in New Left Review about the ancient and contemporary contest of Confucianism in China.

It is indeed a very significant trend in China. Hundreds of confucian colleges have been built around China in the past decade. We can have a glimpse of its political implication from the quote below:

During the 1980s and 1990s there was a powerful movement for the ‘revival of Confucianism’, mainly fanned by Chinese scholars teaching in the United States, who proposed that a Confucianist work ethic, comparable to that of Weberian Puritanism, lay behind the spectacular success of capitalism in Far Eastern countries. Du Weiming at Harvard is the leading star of this movement. ‘First of all’, he argues, ‘in Far Eastern countries there is a cooperation between a powerful economy and the State; and secondly, there is a coordination between democracy, elitism and moral education; and, lastly, there is a strong sense of team spirit, although an individual is also allowed to claim personal achievements’. Du frequently states that most of the companies in those countries are run on a family basis, and therefore more ‘efficiently’—Jullien would be proud—than their Western competitors.

The 1990s ‘revival’ was, somehow, muffled by the Asian financial crisis that suddenly exploded in 1997 and spread rapidly along the so-called ‘Dragon Path’ (or Confucianist sphere of influence) from Singapore to South Korea and Japan, exposing the fragility of the economies and, in some cases, the political structures of those countries. In recent years, however, another movement, the guoxue re or ‘native philosophy fever’, has been sweeping mainland China like a prairie fire. Popularizers of philosophy have been turned into stars by state-run television, reminiscent of the evangelists in the United States in the 1980s. School students are made to learn Confucius by rote, without any requirement to understand or interpret him. In 2006 there were a series of efforts aimed at reviving popular interest in Confucianism. In May, several internet giants sponsored the selection of ‘national philosophy masters’; in July, publicity around a traditional ‘Confucianist Primary School’ in Shanghai caused great controversy; in September, a ‘standard’ Confucius statue and portrait were released internationally, and a large number of scholars signed a proposal to establish Confucius’s birthday as an official ‘Teachers’ Day’. Many encourage students to burn incense and kowtow to the statue of Confucius before taking exams, rather than to Buddha, because the latter is not scholarly. A sound and wise suggestion. But these attempts to do more and more for Confucius are unending, and we shall definitely see many more of them prevail. Jullien may not have realized that his idealization of early Chinese philosophy could help to provide this ‘fever’ with an innocently apolitical veil.