The Confucian Comeback – a Must-Read

Master Kung Returns: How Social Disintegration in the U.S. Has Fueled a Renascence of Confucianism in Asia

by Dr. Christensen

 

 

Original link here.

 

Ray’s Introduction: As a people, I must say Asians are sorely underestimated. I have, on many times, corrected a Westerner’s misconceptions about his or her own religious tradition (specifically Christianity) when I don’t even specialise in that religious philosophy. Many Westerners think all that Asians enjoy are finance, accounting, maths, and driving poorly, and they reel when they find out a golden-skinned young man understands their own ancient traditions better than they do. They reel when someone with black hair and narrow eyes can talk one-on-one with a Western philosopher about Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard. And then they subsequently attempt to understand truly ancient wisdom like Buddhism with their own Western suppositions and preconceptions and wonder why they subsequently fail in that endeavour too.

 

 

This goes not only for individual Asians, but for Asian society. Western society likens external glamour to true success. In other words, it misunderstands a good bench press to mean an ability to punch like a boxer. As part of Generation Y and a young man myself, I maintain that there is something deeply flawed about this supposition. As a representative of the most venerable tradition of Mahayana Buddhism I also assert that the Confucian resurgence is literally second to none, a reactionist movement that has been a result of the failure of the Western family structure. What is paradoxical is that as the modern Western economical model has proven time and again to be the model economic methodology, observers both internal and external cannot but notice the disintegration of the family in America – both religious and non-religious! Therefore we cannot attribute this to anything but the weakness of the human being and the misconceptions and attitudes that pervade modern families. Although I am from a ‘modern’ family, once again, I am not easily misled, and for a society which claims to have a monopoly on ‘rational philosophy’ and ‘logic’, they sure seem to be sticking their head in the sand about their own problems.

 

 

From the Kumogakure blog on which I found the link: ‘In my conversations with Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean people, both men and women, the subject always comes back to the American people and their great disrespect for family and ancestors. It never ceases to amaze me how important these ideals are to the vast majority of East Asian people. In addition, Asian men especially see how the women of America disrespect both themselves and others. Usually the man ends up telling me that only his “countrywoman” would be acceptable to his parents with respect to marriage.’

 

And there was something Kumo observed which I was myself surprised about, for although I had been able to ‘ignore’ ludicrous ideas per se, I never really thought/realised that it might be possible that ‘…Asian men have the uncanny ability to ignore the ideas of people, especially women, who push for changes that threaten harmony and the established social order. There is a line in the sand, beyond which the Asian man will not cross. I think this ability to ignore the wild delusions of a few mad-women is a trait that we Westerners should learn once again.’

 

 

Now, have a read of Bryce’s essay and make up your own mind on whether or not Asian societies are making the right move after the great rage about the West:

 

For centuries, family life in the Middle Kingdom of China rested securely on a philosophical foundation laid by the great ethical thinker Kung Fu-tzu, popularly known in the West as Confucius. Preserved in the Lun Yu or The Analects, the teachings of this profound Chinese sage strongly reinforced the Chinese family. The Master Kung identified “filial piety”—that is, the duty children owe to their parents—as one of “the roots of humaneness” (1:2),[1] and he taught that those who were “dutiful towards [their] parents” were upholding the civic order as surely as were those who held public office (2:21). Modern commentators thus see in Confucianism an abiding belief that “harmony begins in the family and spreads to the state as a whole.”[2] Schooled in Confucian doctrine, the Chinese long regarded “the family [as]…the natural basis for all moral and political behavior and the most biologically rooted of all human institutions.”[3] But for a thousand years Chinese Confucianists recognized the family as more than a merely natural and biological unit. They saw in the family the embodiment of “eternal moral principles” that uniquely qualified this basic social unit to function as “the foundation of the state.”[4]

Family-centered Confucianism, however, did not reach the 20th century intact and healthy. Indeed, by the late 20th century, many observers viewed it as a moribund philosophy doomed to extinction. Strangely, however, just as social anthropologists were putting the finishing touches on its obituary, Confucianism reasserted itself with astonishing vigor. Writing in 2004, one well-informed observer characterized “the contemporary resurgence of Confucianism…as the ‘Confucian comeback.’”[5] What has brought this venerable family-centered philosophy back from the brink of oblivion? Of course, the Confucian renascence would seem to suggest that the Chinese have recovered a new appreciation for their own heritage. A closer look at the renascence of Confucianism in China—and throughout Eastern Asia—also reveals that many of those now turning toward the family-minded Master Kung are doing so because they are deliberately and decisively turning away from family-subverting American thinkers. In the new world of global trade, many Asians are rediscovering the Lun Yu as part of a determined attempt to keep American-style family disintegration from becoming a destructive import to their lands.

To appreciate fully, however, the recent resurrection of Confucius, it is perhaps necessary to turn the clock back a few decades to a time when political ideologues and economic rationalists were busy sealing his tomb. “To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate…reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Proletarian Revolution.” So declared the Mao Zedong Red Guards of Beijing University in January of 1967.[6] In some ways it is surprising that Chinese communists turned against Confucianism during the Cultural Revolution of the late Sixties. After all, the great Sun Yat-sen—hailed by Mao Zedung and other Communist leaders as an important “precursor” to their movement—explicitly and repeatedly said that he had been inspired by “the ancient doctrines of Confucius.”[7] But by the time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong had decided that the teachings of Confucius—like those of later Confucian interpreters Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming—were essentially feudal in character and therefore incompatible with the doctrines of Engels, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.[8] Because the teachings of Confucius fostered “harmony, collaboration, compromise, and accommodation,” they were dramatically at odds with “the Marxist philosophy of struggle” and class warfare.[9] Chinese Communists consequently turned against Confucius in a savage, comprehensive, and unrelenting way.

To be sure, even before the Chinese communists launched their campaign against all things Confucian, the Master Kung faced a dubious future in the modern world. Decades before Mao Zedong concluded that Confucianism could not be harmonized with communist dogma, Max Weber had argued that Confucianism was “an obstacle to progress” within the capitalist paradigm. Weberian analysis therefore meant “the abandoning [of] Confucianism if China were ever to develop capitalism or…to modernize.”[10] Thus, Harvard sinologist Tu Wei-ming identifies pre-communist “Westernized intellectuals” as the leaders of “a frontal attack” on Confucianism in the early 20th century, an attack judged necessary because “Confucianism was perceived to have nurtured a ‘national character’…. detrimental to China’s modernization.”[11]

After the fall of the Chinese monarchy in 1912, Confucianism no longer, in fact, controlled any prominent political institution, leaving it highly vulnerable during the following decades to attacks from capitalist entrepreneurs and from liberal and Marxist intellectuals, who regarded it as the “‘source of ten thousand evils’ in its suppression of women and its extinction of independence and creativity on the part of youth.”[12] The Cultural Revolutionaries were thus far from being the first Chinese leaders to consign “Confucianism to the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’ as an ideology rendered defunct by Chinese progress toward modernity.”[13]

Still, the scope and intensity of the communist assault on Confucianism was fiercer than any previous attack on the ancient philosophy. While pre-communist liberals and capitalists had attacked Confucian belief, it was not until the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties that the numerous shrines erected to the memory of Confucius were “systematically trashed” by Red Guards, who also made it their mission to suppress—for the first time—all study of the Confucian classics.[14] With the onset of the Cultural Revolution, “everything in Confucianism was [viewed as] reactionary,” while Confucius himself was condemned as “a parasite, a fraud, a purveyor of poison, the wielder of an ‘invisible knife that killed without leaving a trace of blood.’”[15] The reactionary rulers of the past, communist officials claimed, had “‘clung tightly [to] the cadaver of Confucius’ because his ideas [had been] so useful in deluding the people.”[16]

It is hardly surprising that by the late Sixties, many informed Western observers had concluded that the Chinese communists had “completed the surgery begun decades earlier, by removing the last viscera of Confucian China,” and had “embalmed the remains.”[17] Confucianism had officially become “merely historically significant, an object of historical study, safely lodged in the museum,” so joining other “products of the past” that had “forfeited any ‘claim to affect the future.’”[18] In truth, however, Confucianism was hardly “safely lodged in the museum” at that point. As cultural anthropologist Arlif Dirlik has remarked, “Confucius was chronically pulled out from the museum and beaten to a pulp” (emphasis added).[19]

Thus, the spasm of anti-Confucianism that erupted in the late 1960s was followed by another anti-Confucian crusade in the early 1970s, a crusade in which Mao Zedong himself was personally involved.[20] One of Mao’s top lieutenants, Zhou Enlai justified the way this anti-Confucian campaign was being given “critical political space” by explaining in 1974 that Confucius was one of “the reactionaries who attempt to turn back the wheels of history.” He had therefore to be crushed by those seeking “the consolidation and development of the great achievements of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”[21]

For a time, Confucius and his philosophy did appear to have been crushed, pulverized by the communist juggernaut. But by the 1980s, informed observers began to acknowledge “a Confucian revival” within China. That revival has now continued for more than 20 years and shows no signs of abating. Writing in 1995, Columbia scholar William Theodore de Bary marveled at “the stunning reversal of [Communist] party policy,” a reversal evident in the way the Beijing regime was actually “claim[ing] for itself the right to speak for China’s Confucian heritage.”[22] Because of this reversal in official policy, public schools in China have now been teaching Confucianism for over a decade—with the Communist government’s full blessing and support.[23]

Western China-watchers report that “an enormous effort is now underway to make Communist Party officials ponder Confucian classics in party schools.”[24] And these officials do seem to be learning their lessons: the official communist press is now full of articles “quoting tirelessly from the Confucian classics.”[25] President Jiang Zemin himself quotes liberally from The Analects, The Book of Odes, and other Confucian classics in his speeches.[26] The same Communist Party which once ordered its cadres to destroy Confucian shrines has spent millions in recent years to restore those shrines, while spending additional millions to make and distribute municipal banners carrying edifying quotations from the Master Kung.[27]

Nor have the Chinese Communists been content to keep their rediscovered sage to themselves. The Party has given its imprimatur to international conferences on Confucius and has supported a Confucius Institute with branches overseas.[28] Partly because of such efforts, interest in Confucianism has grown in other Pacific Rim countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.[29] Interest in Confucius has even grown stronger on this side of the Pacific. Writing in 1995, one prominent American scholar acknowledged that “for more than a decade…the airwaves over the Pacific from Singapore to…Washington, D.C., have been filled with talk of Confucius.”[30]

This resurgence of interest in the Master Kung has naturally stimulated inquiries as to its causes. It is all very well for a Western journalist to quip, “It’s hard to keep a good sage down.”[31] But scholars want real understanding of this astounding cultural development.

Any plausible analysis of the resurgence of Confucian thought in recent decades must acknowledge that, despite their determined efforts to do so, the Chinese Communists never fully extirpated Confucian beliefs and practices. Indeed, one perceptive observer in the late Sixties shrewdly concluded that the communists found themselves compelled to attack Confucius again and again and again because of “the continued appeal within [Chinese] society, for better or for worse, of certain attitudes valued by Confucius and his followers.”[32] In the same vein, another observer writing at the same time interpreted the communists’ repeated assaults on Confucianism as “evidence that the Communists’ ability to promote social change is not infinite and that Confucian ideas which the Communists fear continue to appear.”[33] The persistence of Confucianism even during the decades when Communist leaders were trying to destroy it does, in fact, help to explain why observers see it growing in an “organic way” at the “grassroots level” now that the government officials have reversed themselves.[34]

Still, it would be a serious analytical error to see nothing in the turn toward Confucianism except the communists’ acknowledgement of the failure of their previous attacks on the Master Kung. Some observers, in fact, see not an acknowledgement of failure in the Chinese Communists’ belated embrace of Confucius but rather the emergence of a bold new formula for success both political and economic. In a geopolitical world remade by the collapse of communism in the former Soviet empire, some analysts see the Chinese Communists turning to Confucius as a way of filling a dangerous ideological void in their claims to political legitimacy.

It is thus Confucianism that provides the “traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” which Chinese Communists must harness to carry out their announced program for “moral construction,” a program essential to the creation of what Deng Xiaoping called the “spiritual civilization” of a socialist society.[35] What outsiders consequently see is the communist appropriation of Confucianism as a nationalist “crutch now that the pillars of Marxist ideology and class struggle have crumbled.”[36] Some Western outsiders even regard this strategy with deep concern, as they see communist officials emphasizing “the most authoritarian aspects of Confucianism, such as hierarchy, ideological unity, and rule by an elite,” while ignoring “Confucian principles that [require]…leaders not [to] abuse their power, [to] be honest, and [to] listen to the voice of the people.”[37]

But Chinese Communists are seeking more than a consolidation of their political power through opportunistic and perhaps even cynical appropriation of Confucianism. In a development that would have stunned Max Weber, Chinese Communists have come to rely on the Master Kung as an essential support to their newly market-oriented economic system. As party officials have explained, they are drawing on Confucius for economic reasons. “To establish and improve our socialist market economic structure,” these officials remark, “it is essential to have a compatible ideological and moral system.”[38] The role that Confucianism is supposed to play in creating that compatible ideological and moral system is clarified by a 1995 report from the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, a report highlighting “the deciding influence of Confucianism in the economic take-off of East and Southeastern Asia,” areas that have prospered economically because of “the strengthening of traditional culture.”[39]

In some of its manifestations, the new Chinese regard for Confucianism as a source of economic prosperity has been superficial and even silly. The marketing now being used to attract tourists to visit Confucius’s hometown in Shandong Province, there to take guided tours of the local shrines and buy putatively Confucian souvenirs and memorabilia, has grown so shameless that street peddlers now sell credulous tourists old coins guaranteed to have once been Confucius’s own personal property.[40] Seeing this kind of hucksterism, some critics have understandably complained that the Chinese have “moved [Confucius] from the museum to the theme park.”[41] Perhaps worst of all is the marketing of San Kung Beer, named for famous places where Confucius is supposed to have taught students, and of a Confucius Family Liquor, a cheap vodka-like beverage.[42]

But beyond this mercenary reduction of Confucianism to a mere “brand name” are the very claims made by commentators and scholars, many of whom are not communists, convinced that the moral and social values inspired by Confucianism—including “a sustained lifestyle of discipline and self-cultivation, respect for authority, frugality, and overriding concern for stable family life”— actually do (pace Weber) foster economic growth.[43] In the judgment of nationally syndicated writer Joan Connell, “Traditional values of diligence, thrift, respect for authority, and national pride drawn from the 2600-year-old teachings of Confucius have played a crucial role in the rocketing economies of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwain.”[44]

Spelling out the relationship between Confucianism and economic prosperity more fully, one Hong Kong-based journalist has argued that Confucianism serves as “the root of [the region’s] search for wealth.” Within Confucianism, this journalist has argued, economic and professional achievement is “admired because it reflects well on a person’s family,” so converting “money, reputation,…and prolonging the family line” into the “ultimate concerns” in the life of a practical Confucian.[45] Some economists have accordingly begun to speak of “the functionality of Confucianism to [capitalist] moneymaking.”[46] Journalists have even started to write—rather crassly—of “the cash value of Confucian values.”[47] With good reason, Tu Wei-ming marvels at how a philosophy that had “hitherto been viewed as an obstinate obstacle to Chinese modernity [has been] transformed into a dynamic force of modernity for others to emulate.”[48]

Predictably, some observers have refused to join the capitalists heaping praise upon Confucianism as a stimulant to economic prosperity. Some leftist critics have expressed understandable fears that “Confucianism [has become] an instrument of ‘social engineering’ to guarantee more cooperative (and docile) citizens for corporations” to exploit.[49] But closer analysis suggests that, with regard to the economic effects of Confucianism, both capitalists’ praise and leftists’ criticism may be misplaced. It should be recalled that when the Singaporean government first announced its decision to promote Confucianism in public schools, prominent Singaporean business executives were “concerned” that the teaching of this social philosophy might “undermine the [economic] development of that city-state” (emphasis added).[50] Doubts about Confucianism as a catalyst for capitalist prosperity are reinforced by the comment of a Korean scholar who has remarked, “Very few Koreans genuinely believe that Confucianism has been a significant contributory factor in the effort to accomplish rapid economic growth.”[51]

The very notion that Confucianism can serve as an economic stimulant will seem very strange to those familiar with the teachings of the Master Kung. For far from encouraging commercial enterprise, Confucius expresses something close to scorn for the profit-minded merchant. “The Gentleman,” says Confucius in Book 4 of The Analects, “is familiar with what is right, just as the small man is familiar with profit” (4.16). An aversion to financial motivations shows up again in Book 8 of The Analects, where Confucius complains about how hard it is “to find anyone who studies for three years but is not intent on a salary” (8.12). And capitalists who strive incessantly to win competitive advantage for themselves and their companies could only puzzle over Confucius’s declaration in Book 3 of The Analects that “There is nothing which gentlemen compete over” (3.7, emphasis added).

It is no wonder that the Taiwanese commentator Chen Li-fu stresses the distance between Confucianism and capitalism, seeing in Confucianism an “emphasis on the people and virtue, an emphasis quite alien to capitalism,” which “lays emphasis on wealth or money and belittles morality.”[52] In the same vein, sinologist Jonathan Chaves of George Washington University has challenged the belief that Confucianism is the reason for “the economic success of the ‘Asian Tigers’” by reminding his readers of how “Mencius [the greatest of ancient Confucian scholars] famously berated King Hui of Liang for asking ‘What will profit my kingdom’ on the grounds that a concern for profit is unseemly.”[53] With good reason, De Bary has suggested that, far from reinforcing capitalism, Confucian values actually serve as a check on “the forces of a runaway economic and technological modernization.”[54]

De Bary is on far shakier ground, however, when he asserts that the revival of Confucianism is politically congenial to Western liberals because it can safeguard “human rights in the perspective of Confucian concepts of social justice.”[55] Just as dubious is De Bary’s suggestion that Confucianism can teach Asians how to “stand up to those who abuse power” as it “enrich[es] liberal concepts such as liberty, rationality, human rights, and due process.”[56] This view of Confucianism as a support for Western-style human rights—a view shared to a significant degree by Tu Wei-ming—has come in for a sharp critique from Anthony C. Yu, who believes that such a view simply ignores the hierarchical and conservative elements central to Confucianism.[57] Chaves likewise parts company with De Bary, Tu, and others when they try “to articulate a Neo-Neo-Confucianism, modeled on Western Enlightenment thought and acceptable to modern [Western] intellectuals.”[58] The efforts to convert Confucius into a Western-style champion of human rights are finally no more plausible than the attempts to transform him into a profit-seeking capitalist.

What many Western observers seem reluctant to admit is that Asians are rediscovering Confucius not because they want what they see in Western economies and political regimes, but rather because they do not want what they see in the Western society and cultures. To a very significant degree, the Asian turn toward Confucius reflects a turn away from the West and a Western culture perceived as morally corrupt and degenerate. Thus, it is not attraction for what the West has to offer, but rather fear of what the West might be spreading that is most evident in Communist China’s new embrace of Confucianism. In explaining that embrace in 1995, Xinhua expressed deep concerns about “the disappearance of social norms, the death of morals, and the disintegration of traditional values,” serious problems that Xinhua regarded as epidemic in the West and as a looming threat to China unless the Chinese accepted the “good medicine” offered by Confucianism.[59]

The tone is very much the same when Japanese scholar Katsuta Kichitaro declares that “by following the insights of Confucianism, [he and his fellow Asians] can avoid the social catastrophe befalling the West, the result of centuries of individualism and egotism.”[60] Western observer Alfred M. Boll consequently interprets the resurgence of Confucianism as an attempt “to protect [Asian] tradition against perceived detrimental Western influence.”[61] Thus, when Singapore made its turn toward Confucius in the late 1970s, government officials explained that they were doing so “as a means of countering the Western ‘cultural onslaught’ on the young.”[62]

The reaction against the Western “cultural onslaught” and toward Confucianism has often been most pronounced among Asians repulsed by what they see in American culture. Certainly, it is American culture which makes the need for Confucianism particularly clear to Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani. Writing in 1995, Mahbubani painted a very dark picture of American society:

In most Asian eyes [Mahbubani wrote] evidence of real social decay in the United States is clear and palpable. Since 1960, the U.S. population has grown by 41 percent. In the same period, there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crimes, a 419 percent increase in illegitimate births, a 400 percent increase in divorce rates, a 300 percent increase in children living in single-parent homes, a more than 200 percent increase in teenage suicide rates, and a drop of almost 80 points in Scholastic Aptitude scores.[63]

Nor have American cultural trends since 1995 been such as would soften Mahbubani’s judgment. No, for many Asians in and outside of China, Confucianism looks like a much-needed protection against the cultural ills plaguing a modern America where families fall apart—or never form in the first place—and where rootless adolescents spend their nights committing street crimes rather than studying. Hence, many Asians view Confucianism not as a help in developing a capitalist society of the sort they see in the United States, but rather as “a cure for capitalism” (emphasis added) as they see it operating in a socially and culturally ailing America.[64]

Western-style feminists may fret that 21st-century advocates of “Asian values” are bringing back “Confucian patriarchy by idealizing traditional patriarchal family structure and values that rigidly and hierarchically distinguish between women’s and men’s places and their respective roles.”[65] But such feminist worries count for little with Asians like Mahbubani as they recoil in dismay from American social trends that have dramatically multiplied the number of American single-mother households while pushing millions of American fathers into roles of irrelevance for all but the state bureaucrats who must collect child support payments from them. For such Asians, the typical fatherless American family—impoverished, demoralized, and vulnerable—serves as a potent reminder of the great value of “the Confucian family rest[ing]… on a structured hierarchy, with ancestors as the counterpart of Heaven and the father as the earthly ruler of the family.”[66]

America’s feminists, sexual liberationists, and radical individualists may continue to regard the family as an oppressive institution. But contemplating the social evil wrought by these anti-family groups only gives Asian observers fresh reasons to appreciate a Confucianism within which “the family is enshrined as a sacred community.”[67] Similarly, when Americans shatter family ties to assert their do-their-own-thing personal liberty, they only remind Asians of why wise Confucianists consistently stressed personal virtue (identified as the Heaven-sent de in The Analects[68]) as the essential safeguard of “the solidity of the family [and] its honor and integrity.”[69]

Not content with merely using Confucianism to prevent the contagion of Western sickness from infecting their own cultures, a significant number of Asians now wish “to export Asian values to the United States and Europe.”[70] “Asians,” one Western journalist explains, “want to do for us—or, perhaps, to us—what, as Christian missionaries, we did to the nations of Asia through four centuries of evangelization.”[71] Senior Japanese diplomat Ogura Kazuo has thus called on his fellow Asians to “reexamine [Asia’s] traditional spirit and transmit our worthy Asian values to the rest of the world,” and it is quite clear that Ogura has Confucian values in view when he specifies that Asians must particularly teach Westerners about “the maintenance of family relationships and the relationship between the group and the individual.”[72]

Confucian scholar Kim Dae Jung—Nobel laureate and former president of South Korea—also wants to promote Confucian values in the United States, so helping a failing American society to change along Asian and Confucian lines.[73] “Instead of making Western culture the scapegoat,” Kim has written, “it is more appropriate to look at how the traditional strengths of Asian society can provide for a better democracy” (emphasis added).[74] One way that those traditional Asian values might come to the West is through a “reverse Peace Corps,” discussed in recent years in Malaysia as a way of sending Confucian-minded volunteers to American cities, there to instill in lawless youth the humanizing ren that will guide their energies into activities other than crime and mayhem.[75]

And at least a few prominent Americans have in recent years indicated a willingness to accept Asia’s Confucian emissaries as their tutors. American historian Mary Evelyn Tucker, for instance, concedes that “things have gotten out of hand in our society,” because “we have a tremendous sense of rights, but not of responsibility.” Tucker accordingly believes that “there is much to be learned from Confucianism” about “responsibility, reciprocal relationships, and the common good—in the family, in society, and in the natural world.”[76] Also willing to take lessons from Confucian instructors, Washington Post writer T.R. Reid believes that through their adherence to Confucianism, East Asians have developed effective ways “of bringing their basic moral values to bear on the events of daily life” and so have built “a safe, civil, and harmonious society.”[77] Reid asserts that it is time for Americans to start emulating many of Asia’s Confucian practices, particularly in devoting more energy to “civic ceremonies, reminding people of the values underlying our society.”[78] And though De Bary has been criticized for an overly Western, overly progressive interpretation of Confucianism, he seems to have the more traditional and conservative elements of Confucianism in view when he asserts that our American world of “rapid and almost compulsive change” might benefit from “a more Confucian view of our primary responsibilities” and “parochial loyalties.”[79]

Will Americans—and other Westerners—begin adopting Confucian beliefs in the decades ahead, so joining Asians who have rediscovered the Master Kung in the decades just past? Most of those currently forecasting America’s cultural future do not see much place for Confucianism. But then anyone audacious enough to predict the future in any form may well live to see his folly. And given how dramatically Confucius has confounded those who not even fifty years ago were dismissing him as a “feudal mummy” and a museum relic in China and other Asian lands, maybe it is premature to write off the Master Kung as an influence in the 21st-century cultural life of any country. And given what has happened to the American family during the last forty years, only the purblind will persist in arguing that the United States has nothing to learn from the greatest of Chinese philosophers. Indeed, at a time when America’s costly family failures have reminded the Chinese of the value of their own heritage, Americans ought themselves to recognize that the Middle Kingdom can give them something far more valuable than cheap shoes and garden tools.

 

Endnotes:

1 Confucius: The Analects, trans. Raymond Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Parenthetical reference gives Book and Chapter numbers. All quotations from The Analects come from this translation.

2 Fred D’Agostino, “The Doctrine of Filial Piety: A Philosophical Analysis of the Concealment Case,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31 (2004): 451-467.

3 Kang, Nam-Soon. “Confucian Familism and Its Social/Religious Embodiment in Christianity: Reconsidering the Family Discourse from a Feminist Perspective,” Asia Journal of Theology 18(2004): 173.

4 Cf. D’Agostino, op. cit., 462, 464.

5 Kang, op. cit., 169.

6 Qtd. in James A. Gregor and Maria Hsia Chang, “Anti-Confucianism: Mao’s Last Campaign,” Asian Survey 19 (1979): 1074-1075.

7 Qtd. in Gregor and Chang, ibid., 1080-1081.

8 Cf. Wing-Tsit Chan, “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China,” Philosophy East and West 11 (1961): 115, 118.

9 Cf. Gregor and Chang, op. cit., 1087.

10 Arif Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” Boundary 2 22(1995): 234.

11 Wei-ming Tu, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27.

12 Dirlik, op. cit., 232.

13 Ibid., 229.

14 Cfr. T.R.Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 115.

15 Gregor and Chang, op. cit., 1077-1078.

16 Peter R. Moody, Jr., “The New Anti-Confucian Campaign in China: The First Round,” Asian Survey 14 (1974): 320.

17 Michael Gasster, “The Death and Transfiguration of Confucianism,” Rev. of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. III: The Problem of Historical Significance, by Joseph R. Levenson, Philosophy East and West 18 (1968): 206-207.

18 Ibid.

19 Dirlik, op. cit., 236.

20 Moody, op. cit., 311-319.

21 Qtd. in Gregor and Chang, op. cit., 1075.

22 William Theodore De Bary, “The New Confucianism in Beijing,” Crosscurrents Winter 1995: 481-486.

23 “Chinese Schools Revive Confucianism,” Telegraph-Herald 23 June 2002: A12.

24 Tony, Lau, “Jiang’s Appeal to Virtue Harks Back to Confucius,” South China Morning Post 20 Feb. 2001: 8.

25 Ibid.

26 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 116.

27 Cf. De Bary, op. cit., 482-488, and Reid, op. cit., 116.

28 Cf. Dirlik, op. cit., 240 and “Confucianism Finds New Disciples,” China Daily 4 Jan. 2007: 18.

29 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 62-65, 117.

30 Dirlik, op. cit., 229.

31 Reid, op. cit., 115.

32 Moody, op. cit., 324.

33 Gasster, op. cit., 212.

34 “Confucianism Finds New Disciples,” op. cit.

35 “Chinese Party Paper Stresses Importance of Programme to Raise Moral Standards,” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific—Political 27 Oct. 2001: 1; “Chinese Party Journal on Coordinated Development of ‘Three Civilizations,’” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific—Political 19 Dec. 2002: 1.

36 Steven Mufson, “Maoism, Confucianism, Blur Into Nationalism Series: Asia’s Dragon: What Is Chinese Nationalism?” Washington Post 19 May 1996: A1.

37 Ibid.

38 “Chinese Party Paper,” op. cit.

39 Xinhua qtd. in Willy Wo-Lap, “Crisis of Morality,” South China Morning Post 9 May 1995: 1.

40 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 116.

41 Dirlik, op. cit., 273.

42 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 117.

43 Cf. Dirlik, op. cit., 246.

44 Joan Connell, “Revival of Confucianism Fuels East Asia’s Economic Miracle,” Houston Chronicle 15 Mar 1992: 16.

45 “Confucianism—the Root of Hong Kong’s Search for Wealth,” South China Morning Post 30 May 2003: 13.

46 Dirlik, op. cit., 273.

47 Ibid.

48 Qtd in Dirlik, op.cit., 236.

49 Dirlik, op. cit., 272.

50 Ibid.

51 Qtd. in Dirlik, op. cit., 249.

52 Qtd. in Dirlik, op. cit., 247-248.

53 Jonathan Chaves, “Confucianism: The Conservatism of the East,” The Intercollegiate Review Spring/Summer 2003: 44-50.

54 Qtd. in Anthony C. Yu, “Which Values? Whose Perspective?” Rev. of Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective by William Theodore de Bary, The Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 299.

55 De Bary, op. cit., 485-491.

56 De Bary qtd. in Todd Douglas, “East Meets West,” Vancouver Sun 22 Jan. 2005: C5.

57 Cf. Yu, op. cit., 301-304.

58 Chaves, op. cit., 50.

59 Xinhua qtd. in Wo-Lap, op. cit., 1.

60 Qtd. in Reid, op. cit., 62.

61 Alfred M. Boll, “The Asian Values Debate and Its Relevance to International Humanitarian Law,” International Review of the Red Cross March 2001: 45-47.

62 Dirlik, op. cit., 238.

63 Qtd. in Reid, op. cit., 219.

64 Dirlik, op. cit., 249.

65 Kang, op. cit., 171.

66 D’Agostino, op. cit., 456.

67 Kang, op. cit., 172.

68 Cf. Ramond Dawson, “Note on the Translation of Key Terms,” Confucius: The Analects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxi.

69 Kang, op. cit., 158.

70 Reid, op. cit., 62.

71 Ibid., 63.

72 Qtd. in Reid, op. cit., 63.

73 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 222-223.

74 Qtd. in Reid, op. cit., 222-223.

75 Cf. Reid, op. cit., 63.

76 Qtd. in Connell, op. cit.,16.

77 Reid, op. cit., 246, 27.

78 Ibid., 246.

79 Qtd. in Frank Gibney, “The Confucian Ethic of Asian Capitalism,” Rev. of East Asian Civilizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages by William Theodore de Bary, Los Angeles Times 17 Apr 1988: 6.

 

*Final note: there are aspects of the Western lifestyle I enjoy fully. Just don’t ask me to stick in a long-term relationship for long. ;-)

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