Timothy Garton Ash: Confucius can speak to us still - and not just about China
[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]
When I was a young child, China was, for me, a vaguely comical Chinaman with a wispy moustache, dressed in an embroidered silk robe and conical hat, exclaiming in a funny accent: "Confucius, he say ..." Later, it was black-and-white photos of a Mao-period sculpture of a pre-revolutionary rent-collection courtyard, shown me by an enthusiastic English schoolmaster. Then it was the naively misinterpreted madness of the cultural revolution and the Red Guards. (I still have my student copy of the Little Red Book.) And now it is an American-educated Chinese academic, in a dark suit, telling me in excellent English, "so what Confucius says is ..."
In China, Confucianism is back. A popularisation of Confucius by a media-friendly Chinese academic, Yu Dan, has sold more than 10m copies, about 6m of them apparently in pirate editions. Her book has been called Chinese Chicken Soup for the Soul. On the campus of Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University there used to be a statue of Chairman Mao. Now there's Confucius. A Confucius film is to be made with funding from a state film company. Chow Yun-Fat, better known as a tough guy in Hong Kong gangster movies, will play the master. And there are explicitly Confucian private schools.
This revival is both a private and a public, a social and a party-state affair. "Confucius said, 'Harmony is something to be cherished'," observed President Hu Jintao in February 2005, promoting the Communist party's proclaimed goals of a harmonious society and world. "From Confucius to Sun Yat-sen," averred premier Wen Jiabao a couple of years later, "the traditional culture of the Chinese nation has numerous precious elements", among which he mentioned "community, harmony among different viewpoints, and sharing the world in common". In a book called China's New Confucianism, the political theorist Daniel Bell quips that the Chinese Communist party might one day be renamed the Chinese Confucian party.
At an exhibition in the largest Confucian temple in Beijing, pinpoint electric lights on a wall map plot the spread across the globe of the country's Confucius institutes, China's counterparts of Germany's Goethe institutes and our British Council offices. While these Confucius institutes are at present mainly devoted to teaching the Chinese language, the exhibition clearly implies that the world could benefit from a better understanding of Confucian thought.
There's a simplistic way to read this renaissance of Confucianism, and a more interesting one. The simplistic way is to seek in Confucianism the key to understanding contemporary Chinese society, politics and even foreign policy. This is an instance of what I call Vulgar Huntingtonism, a dumbed-down version of the cultural determinism that you find in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations: "Chinese are Confucians, so they'll behave like this ..."...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
When I was a young child, China was, for me, a vaguely comical Chinaman with a wispy moustache, dressed in an embroidered silk robe and conical hat, exclaiming in a funny accent: "Confucius, he say ..." Later, it was black-and-white photos of a Mao-period sculpture of a pre-revolutionary rent-collection courtyard, shown me by an enthusiastic English schoolmaster. Then it was the naively misinterpreted madness of the cultural revolution and the Red Guards. (I still have my student copy of the Little Red Book.) And now it is an American-educated Chinese academic, in a dark suit, telling me in excellent English, "so what Confucius says is ..."
In China, Confucianism is back. A popularisation of Confucius by a media-friendly Chinese academic, Yu Dan, has sold more than 10m copies, about 6m of them apparently in pirate editions. Her book has been called Chinese Chicken Soup for the Soul. On the campus of Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University there used to be a statue of Chairman Mao. Now there's Confucius. A Confucius film is to be made with funding from a state film company. Chow Yun-Fat, better known as a tough guy in Hong Kong gangster movies, will play the master. And there are explicitly Confucian private schools.
This revival is both a private and a public, a social and a party-state affair. "Confucius said, 'Harmony is something to be cherished'," observed President Hu Jintao in February 2005, promoting the Communist party's proclaimed goals of a harmonious society and world. "From Confucius to Sun Yat-sen," averred premier Wen Jiabao a couple of years later, "the traditional culture of the Chinese nation has numerous precious elements", among which he mentioned "community, harmony among different viewpoints, and sharing the world in common". In a book called China's New Confucianism, the political theorist Daniel Bell quips that the Chinese Communist party might one day be renamed the Chinese Confucian party.
At an exhibition in the largest Confucian temple in Beijing, pinpoint electric lights on a wall map plot the spread across the globe of the country's Confucius institutes, China's counterparts of Germany's Goethe institutes and our British Council offices. While these Confucius institutes are at present mainly devoted to teaching the Chinese language, the exhibition clearly implies that the world could benefit from a better understanding of Confucian thought.
There's a simplistic way to read this renaissance of Confucianism, and a more interesting one. The simplistic way is to seek in Confucianism the key to understanding contemporary Chinese society, politics and even foreign policy. This is an instance of what I call Vulgar Huntingtonism, a dumbed-down version of the cultural determinism that you find in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations: "Chinese are Confucians, so they'll behave like this ..."...