Confucius Makes Comeback

May 25, 2007

Source: The Financial Express/The Economist

http://www.financialexpress.com/print.php?content_id=165110

“Study the past”, Confucius said, “if you would define the future.” Now he himself has become the object of that study.

Confucius was revered—indeed worshipped—in China for more than 2,000 years. But neither the Communist Party, nor the 20th century itself, has been kind to the sage. Modern China saw the end of the imperial civil-service examinations he inspired, the end of the imperial regime and the repudiation of the classical Chinese in which he wrote. Harsher still, during the Cultural Revolution Confucius and his followers were derided and humiliated by Mao Zedong in his zeal to build a “new China”.

Now, Professor Kang Xiaoguang, an outspoken scholar at Beijing’s Renmin University, argues that Confucianism should become China’s state religion. Such proposals bring Confucius’s rehabilitation into the open. It is another sign of the struggle within China for an alternative ideological underpinning to Communist Party rule where enthusiasm for communism waned long ago and where, officials and social critics fret, anything goes if money is to be made.

Confucius’s rehabilitation has been slow. Explicit attacks on him ended as long ago as 1976, when Mao died, but it is only now that his popularity has really started rising. On topics ranging from political philosophy to personal ethics, old Confucian ideas are gaining new currency.