The centrality of traditional Chinese thinking

Photo by Guilherme Mesquita

Less than half a century ago, maybe as recently as the 1970s or 1980s, it seemed that there was almost no place in Chairman Mao’s China for what had been thousands of years of Chinese traditional thinking, whether it was the philosopher Confucius or the other people who lived in that very ancient time 2,500 years ago, who had shaped so much of Chinese culture. One of the great shifts over the past 30 to 40 years is that traditional Chinese thinking, and the thinking of Confucius in particular, is back in a big way in the China of today.

It’s useful to briefly consider the rather strange trajectory of traditional Chinese thinking over the last 100 years or so and then come back to the present day. Many people will have heard the name Confucius. Many people might have heard of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the Bing-fa, as it’s known in Chinese. But the context of this kind of traditional Chinese philosophy is not always very clear.

The centrality of traditional Chinese thinking on ethics, politics and society was essentially an underpinning web that has existed for 2,500 years or more in the context of all of the societies that have emerged in China since ancient times. Confucius is probably the single most famous thinker in that repertoire. He lived, in a broad sense, at about the same time as great figures like Plato or Aristotle in Greece, in the Western world. Confucius was someone who lived at a time of turmoil and tried to come up with an ethical system, a way of living, that would in some way both speak to the circumstances of his time and the universal.

Main ideas of Confucianism

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.

Top-down hierarchies

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.

Why Confucianism was rejected

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If we fast-forward to the early 20th century, the story changes. By that stage, China was suffering both internally and externally. It was falling apart in terms of its government not working well at all by that stage. A lot of foreign countries or empires were invading and occupying parts of China. Many of China’s best and brightest young men and women looked at what was happening and laid the blame for China’s slow collapse on a variety of factors, one of which was Confucianism and the traditional thinking of the many thousands of years of Chinese philosophy. They argued that this way of thinking had let China down, and people like the young Mao Zedong, who would go on to lead China as the chairman, or the great modernist writer Lu Xun wrote about how Confucianism was actively destroying China.

Much of the early 20th century is an intellectual clash between thinkers arguing that Confucianism should be preserved but adapted to the modern world and that group of people, including many in the Chinese Communist Party, who said, nope, we absolutely have to reject that background. We have to reject Confucius as being totally inappropriate for the modern world. In many ways, the mid-20th century, all the way up to the Cultural Revolution in China of the 1960s and 1970s, was a time when Confucius and traditional thinking more broadly were pretty much rejected, certainly during the period of Chairman Mao’s rule. They regarded Confucius as a feudal relic of the old culture who had to be wiped out.

Rediscovering Confucianism

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.

The influence of religion

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.

State, religion, and culture

Photo by arun sambhu mishra

In the early medieval era of China, about 400 CE, the monk Kumarajiva, who lived in what we now think of as Central Asia but on the borderlands of areas of Chinese influence, was kidnapped on a couple of occasions by invading armies. He was brought to the Chinese capital and spent his time translating the great Buddhist classics from Pali and Sanskrit into Chinese. This is one of the biggest acts of translation that has ever taken place in Chinese history, around two million Chinese characters’ worth of writing. And this translation by Kumarajiva is still used today by Buddhist worshippers in China who are reading and chanting scriptures, which they may not know the exact meaning of, but which draw on those translations from more than 1,500 years ago.

This story tells us three things that are really interesting about the relationship between religion, culture and the State in China. Number one is that China, when it wants to be, can be highly adaptive in terms of what it takes from outsiders. As I’ve said, this was a Central Asian monk being brought in to translate texts in Indian languages, which have no grammatical connection with classical Chinese. Secondly, that that adaptation became absolutely, impeccably something that was central to Chinese culture: Buddhism spread over the centuries and became a very central part of Chinese worship. And third, it lasts to the present day. This is not just a historical legacy. It’s something that really shapes present-day religious practice in China.

Understanding that adaptability – the willingness to take something from outside, the ability then to indigenise and make it part of Chinese tradition and then to use it again and again over the centuries – that says something very profound both about Chinese religion but also about Chinese culture more broadly.

Discover more about

The legacy of traditions in Modern China

Mitter, R. (2013). Communism, Confucianism, and charisma: The political in modern China. In M. Freeden, & A. Vincent (Eds.), Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (pp. 60–69). Routledge.

Mitter, R. (2016). Modern China: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

The importance of Confucius to understanding modern China