{"id":6456,"date":"2015-04-25T18:26:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-25T18:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/frog\/?p=6456"},"modified":"2015-04-25T18:26:46","modified_gmt":"2015-04-25T18:26:46","slug":"confucianism-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2015\/04\/confucianism-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Confucianism Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taisu Zhang has an interesting piece on China File <\/a>analyzing the recent Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu<\/a> paper on ideology in China. Zhang is trying to figure out why Chinese leftists are embracing Confucius. By leftists in a Chinese context he is referring, as Pan and Xu do, to those Chinese who are in favor of<\/p>\n

National unity
\nParty-state
\nSocialist state\/statism
\nNational security
\nMaoism
\nChinese characteristics
\nState sovereignty
\nPatriotism
\nAnti-West
\nWelfare state*
\nMore intervention
\nPublic interest
\nLegitimacy of labor gains<\/p>\n

The cultural set of ideas that go along with this are<\/p>\n

Traditional values
\nCollectivism
\nConfucianism
\nTraditional wisdom
\nThriftiness<\/p>\n

Their opponents, the Liberals, are more likely to favor things like Western Values, Constitutional Democracy, and Free Markets.<\/p>\n

Zhang finds the Leftist interest in Confucianism to be curious. Zhang points out\u00a0that the Late Imperial Confucians who are the most obvious antecedents for the modern \u201cLeftist\u201d traditionalists were in favor of a strongly decentralized economic and political system, which does not seem to go along with their preferences. This is of course true, and he is quite correct in pointing out the weakness of the \u201cold argument that Confucianism is inherently \u201cpro-government\u201d or \u201cpro-authority,\u201d and therefore naturally inclined to lean \u201cleft,\u201d rather than \u201cright,\u201d on the current Chinese political spectrum.\u201d This is true enough in a general sense. \u00a0Late Imperial Confucians favored a decentralized system, but unlike modern internationalist neo-liberals \/ libertarians in China or elsewhere they certainly did not do so because they saw market relations as morally superior to everything else (or anything else.) I could be wrong about that of course, since it is not really my field, but I think the whole idea of trying to link Chinese poll respondents to a historically accurate and unitary idea of \u201cConfucianism\u201d is not the right way to go.<\/p>\n

As an example, I can imagine a Western country with a political grouping that calls itself \u201cChristian\u201d on the grounds that they favor<\/p>\n

-Massive public spending to improve the lot of the poor.
\nor
\n-National disarmament and pacifism.
\nor
\n-Strict regulation of the sexual behavior of citizens.
\nor
\n-Purging those of deviant beliefs from society.<\/p>\n

Needless to say these don’t go together very well, but they can all call themselves \u201cChristian.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what does \u201cConfucianism\u201d mean in China today, if we assume it is not always because of a strong attachment to the actual structures of historic Confucian states? What sort of Confucianism is Ah Q. Public, poll respondent, getting out of historical dramas on TV and that boxed set of the works of Zeng Guofan?\u00a0I have no idea of course, but I do have at least one data point. I have been reviewing Jing Liu’s Understanding China Through Comics<\/a>\u00a0on this site, and having read that and seen every single historical drama ever aired in China (well, one or two of them anyway) I can tell you what type of person a Confucian is. They are the ones who speak truth to power. In Jing Liu’s books the heroes are usually “scholar-officials.” Hai Rui. Wang Anshi. Zeng Guofan. When China is controlled by the corrupt and the self-serving (which seems to be pretty often) they are the ones who stand up for the common people. Jing Liu is not a scholar, of course, but he is trying to write a series of books that explain the lessons of Chinese history to his kids and everyone else. \u00a0That type of history is best done through heroes and villains (or praise and blame) and I suspect that if you were to do a thorough and open survey of every person in China about what “Confucianism” meant to them you would get more stories about heroic rebels, virtuous remonstrators and brave patriots than you would detailed analysis of Late Qing ideas about decentralized power. In other words, Confucianism may be more of a cultural term than a political one.<\/p>\n

Sadly, we can’t do any follow up questions and find out what Chinese \u00a0might mean by agreeing that “The Eight Diagrams in the Book of Changes<\/em> explain many things well” since the Political Compass site that generated the data was blocked by the Great Firewall in March of 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taisu Zhang has an interesting piece on China File analyzing the recent Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu paper on ideology in China. Zhang is trying to figure out why Chinese leftists are embracing Confucius. By leftists in a Chinese context he is referring, as Pan and Xu do, to those Chinese who are in favor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[109,193,200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communism","category-political","category-web-sites"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1G8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6456"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6460,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6456\/revisions\/6460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}