Confucius returns

How is Confucius being reinstated?

As part of a drive to restore Confucian teachings to the heart of China’s cultural life, the state is funding a £16m film about the sage, who will be played by Chow Yun-Fat, the tough-guy star of Hong Kong gangster movies. Confucian texts are being pushed to the fore in uni-versities and schools. Confucius Institutes (modelled on the British Council) have been set up in more than 50 countries to promote Chinese culture. Even prisoners are now taught Confucian principles to keep them on the straight and narrow. The Beijing Institute of Genomics has even compiled a database of descendants of the great man, to clarify who among 1.3 billion people can claim a blood link.

And just who was Confucius?

Born in 551BC in the small state of Lu in northeast China, into a poor but noble family, he worked as a cowherd, clerk and book-keeper before rising, at the age of 53, to become Lu’s Justice Minister. According to the 2nd century BC historian Sima Qian, the rival state of Qi, worried that Lu was becoming too powerful, sought to undermine its Duke by sending him a gift of 80 dancing girls. For three days the Duke indulged himself, neglecting his official duties. So Confucius left Lu to seek a more worthy master.

And did he succeed in his quest?

No. Though he acquired many disciples in the course of his 12-year journey round China, he couldn’t find his Philosopher King; he died in 479BC with no hope for the future of civili-sation. Scholars now believe he never actually wrote anything down; his teachings (see box), passed down by his disciples who had no trouble “recalling” extra ones after his death, have survived as a collection of small aphoristic fragments, The Analects. Unlike Christ, Confucius was not a religious teacher: his counsels and maxims are concerned with the orderly conduct of life in this world, rather than with hopes and fears for the next.

So he was something of a conservative?

And then some. He stressed the ideals of harmony and obedience, based on his concept of “virtue” – ie honouring one’s family, obeying one’s social superiors, and being honest. He deplored innovation, scorned the idea of progress, and hoped for a society where learning, study and ceremony would be put before pleasure, profit and power. His ideal system of govern-ment was one run by an honest bureaucracy under a bene-volent prince committed to public duty. Governments should rule through a well understood system of li (rites) based on immemorial custom rather than bribery, coercion or even laws, which he saw as making people act out of shameless self-interest. He believed in making people virtuous by example, not punishment.

How did his ideas take hold?

The Han emperors (206BC-220AD) and their successors valued his emphasis on a hierarchy of obedience (sons obey fathers, wives husbands, commoners officials and officials their rulers). The Han adopted what became Confucius’s most influential teaching – that official positions should be filled by scholars rather than nobles who’d done nothing to deserve them.

How did that affect China?

It gave rise to the Mandarins: a cadre of civil servants selected by gruelling exams – sometimes lasting 72 hours – in such subjects as arithmetic, knowledge of ritual and ceremonies, military strategies, civil law, and the Confucian Classics. Pass rates were so low (2% during the Tang dynasty of 618-907AD) that some candidates would sit exams annually into their old age. Others committed suicide, unable to bear the disgrace of continual failure. Confucius is often said to be the reason Chinese schoolchildren learn by rote and memorise vast reams of facts for exams; and the reason Chinese parents have always been so strict; and the Chinese in general excessively deferential to authority.

Why didn’t the Communists like him?

Mao condemned Confucius as a feudal thinker (his emphasis on filial loyalty, reverence for the past and rigid social hierarchies were “anti-Marxist”), and until the 1980s children were taught to see him as an apologist for historical injustices. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Red Guards destroyed Confucian temples and monuments including his family home, grave-plot and temple. Yet Confucius and hard-line Maoists would have had at least one thing in common: they’d have been disgusted by the capitalist free-for-all that now passes for Chinese Communism.

Why is he being reinstated now?

Unlike Falun Gong and other religious movements, Confucianism is palatable to China’s nominally Marxist leaders, as it requires no belief in God and offers a validation for the burgeoning disparities in status and personal wealth resulting from China’s dash for growth. It’s even trumpeted as a key aspect of “the Asian Way” – an alternative to the Western liberal model of government. China’s President Hu Jintao seems to believe that China’s rampant consumerism has left an ethical vacuum, and that a return to the Confucian values of honour and decency could fill it. In a recent lecture titled The Socialist Concept of Honour and Disgrace, he extolled Confucius’s “eight virtues” (including plain living and public service) and warned of his “eight disgraces” (including pursuit of profit). He is doubtless less keen on Confucius’s support for free speech and his belief that intellectuals have a duty to speak out against injustice.

Could his ideas flourish here?

Schools minister Jim Knight thinks so. In February, following a visit to China, he expressed a desire to bring the ancient philosophy into English classrooms and give pupils the chance to learn Mandarin, perhaps hoping they might emulate the discipline and hard work of Chinese schools. Who knows? They might even renounce their love of the pop music Confucius so hated (“music of Zheng”, he called it) and cease to behave, in the sage’s words, like “dishevelled savages who fold their clothes on the wrong side”. ·