The importance of Confucius to understanding modern China

First of all, there is the idea of righteous behaviour that, in a sense, should regulate itself from the moral core of the human being. In other words, you shouldn’t have to force people to behave well. In that Confucian worldview, people were inherently inclined to behave well, and you just had to push them in the right direction.

Confucianism is also a system of thinking that believes very strongly in self-development and education. It’s often said as a cliche that the Chinese are more obsessed than anywhere else in the world about education and making sure that their children are well schooled. Of course, there are plenty of other societies that do that, too.

But it’s certainly true that Chinese society has really valued education as a value. That comes in part from the idea of Confucius and one of his identities as “China’s number one teacher”, as a Chinese speaker told me. So those values are there as well. But there are other things that are perhaps less recognisable than those ideas of harmony, of reciprocal good behaviour, of moral good, which in some senses are similar to other moral systems.

The things that are different from what we might see as modern systems of ethics are that, unlike those systems, Confucianism does very explicitly say (at least in its traditional forms) that hierarchy is important and that societies should have good hierarchies to try and stay stable. Confucianism, in its traditional form, has five relationships which are very important, all but one of which are top-down hierarchical. There is ruler to subject, husband to wife – it is obviously gendered in a way that we wouldn’t find acceptable today, master to servant, and so forth. The one that is not hierarchical, but more reciprocal, is friend to friend: meaning, in that case, male friend.

Now these ideas are basically designed to try and create a system of what are sometimes translated as rituals, li in Chinese: in other words, correct ways of behaving. There’s a very strong thread running through Confucian thinking over the centuries that one of the ways to encourage ethical behaviour, which must come from the inside – from the heart and mind, as it’s sometimes put, the xin – is to make sure that you behave in the correct manner on the outside. That includes rituals, habits and essentially behaving in an orthodox sort of a way.

The final phase of this down and then up is that Confucius slowly but surely began to reappear, even in Communist China. From the 1980s, as the Communist Party left the Cultural Revolution era and went into the era of reform and opening to the world, they not only looked at the wider world for new ways of thinking but looked back to their own traditions. There’s a big rediscovery in the 1980s and 1990s of Confucius as a figure who was now regarded once again as a wellspring, as a starting point of traditional thinking, which could actually be useful to the new socialist China. It could be adapted and used as a depository of traditional values.

This new stress on Confucius is visible in all sorts of places in the China of today. Confucius’s birth is celebrated in TV specials at New Year. His birthplace in Qufu, in Shandong province, is now a place of pilgrimage for thousands and thousands of Chinese today. And Confucius’s thoughts repackaged for more popular readers are bestsellers in Chinese bookstores in the present day as well. More than that, you see that officially, today many aspects of Chinese Confucian thinking, such as the idea of daode, the idea of virtue, are being repackaged as values that are relevant to present-day social difficulties in China itself with the endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party.

What that shows is that after a period when Confucius was essentially being cut out of the world of modern China, today he is being readapted, or readopted, by a group of people who in theoretical terms ought to be his exact opposite – the Chinese Communist Party – but, in fact, seem very keen these days to actually embrace the legacy of Confucius for their own aims.

Religion is an important factor in understanding modern China. China is not a society shaped directly by religion in quite the same way as many countries in the Middle East or even, in a different way, the United States of America, which has always had religion as a core of its foundation – not an established religion, of course, but the idea of religious practice as shaping what the United States is. China is not and, over centuries actually, has not been that sort of country. But it’s fair to say that religious practice has been very important in shaping the way that China operates.

This leads to one of the contradictions in present-day China: officially, the Chinese Communist Party is an atheist party, but actually within China itself, religious practice becomes one of the most important factors that the State both wants to control and finds quite nerve-racking. There has been in recent years a huge upsurge in Christianity in many parts of China. That has led to a very difficult relationship between the churches in some parts of China and the State. At the same time, State-authorised religion has been back on the agenda in China really since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Today you will find far more practicing and worshipping Buddhists in China than you would actually find in India, the country of Buddhism’s origin.