Confucius: China's Comeback Kid
by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Posted August 30, 2008
If the Beijing Olympics were, as the International Olympic Committee’s Jacques Rogge claimed in his closing remarks, an opportunity for the world to “learn more about China,” then a great teachable moment was lost when the transformation of Confucius from has-been to hero between Mao’s day and the present was glossed over in television commentaries. These routinely trotted out the cliché of China having “5,000 years” of continuous history—but just as routinely ignored the discontinuity that has marked how the story of that past gets told in different periods.
Curiously, the fact that Confucius was quoted at the start of the Opening Ceremony and that this extravaganza featured 3,000 men dressed up as his disciples was portrayed as an unremarkable, indeed natural thing, even though the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was once a virulently anti-Confucian organization. Indeed, in a world that loves “comeback kids,” Confucius is easily the biggest comeback kid in China’s history. How much of a comeback kid is Confucius? Well, leaving aside the ups and downs of his lifetime (551-479 BCE) and the next couple of thousand years, he’s seemed washed up twice in just the last century.
This happened first during the New Culture Movement (1915-1923), when both radical and liberal thinkers blamed Confucius for China’s weakness. They mocked him for venerating stultifying traditions and defending unjust hierarchies rooted in age, class and gender. To move forward, they said, China must leave him behind.
Our comeback kid fared even worse in Maoist times (1949-1976). Mass campaigns targeted him, temples honoring him were defaced, and quoting him in anything but a derogatory way became dangerous.
Yet, Confucius refused to go down for the count.
His first big comeback was in the 1930s, when authoritarian Nationalist Party leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement. The philosopher’s birthday became a national holiday, as the generalissimo insisted that to progress China should combine key parts of Confucianism, such as its valuing of harmony and stress on proper deportment, with promising bits and pieces of imported creeds.
The sage’s second big comeback began in the 1990s when, once again, an authoritarian ruling party, this time the CCP, was becoming, depending on one’s point of view, either increasingly eclectic ideologically or increasingly prone to grab at anything that might help it stay in power. Soon, Confucius was once again being recast as a great thinker.
In 2004, the Party even started setting up “Confucius Institutes” abroad to bring the fruits of Chinese culture to the world. This and related developments, such as the rebuilding of Confucian temples and the rising status of the Confucian classics on campuses, inspired an April 20, 2007, Chronicle of Higher Education article by Paul Mooney. Called “Confucius Comes Back” in print, it’s listed as “Confucius, the Comeback Kid” on the periodical’s Web site. Now, thanks to the Opening Ceremonies and a rash of books celebrating his ideas, often in an admittedly watered-down form, he’s enjoying a status that he hasn’t since the New Life Movement era. And perhaps that’s no accident, as then, too, calls for social harmony filled the air, campaigns to improve manners were launched, and little attention was paid to inequalities linked to gender.
Some commentators, inside and outside of China, offered up sophisticated analyses of the Opening Ceremony. They pointed out that many interesting choices were made about what to include and what to leave out, and that the handling of Confucius was telling. It was easy, however, for foreign television viewers to assume that the only revealing decision, in terms of history, was skipping Mao.
This is too bad, especially if audiences are as hungry for inspiring stories of resilience as the media thinks. A few decades back, if you’d bet that Confucius would someday have a place on China’s Olympic team, you’d have gotten very long odds indeed. But on 08/08/08, there he was.
His appearance could’ve been used to remind viewers that China has become a place where all bets are off, and that all simple claims that both the regime and its critics make about continuities and ruptures with the past need to be examined closely. It was easier, though, for the coverage to focus on other things, like the most obvious aspects of China that have either changed dramatically (how cities look) or stayed the same (“house churches” remaining illegal). Meanwhile, Confucius has made his latest and in many ways most surprising comeback.
Mr. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at U.C. Irvine, a co-founder of “The China Beat” (www.thechinabeat.blogspot.com), and the author, most recently, of “China’s Brave New World” (2007) and “Global Shanghai, 1850-2010” (due out later this year).
