Editorial & Introduction

Culture and Dialogue 8 (2020) 183-195 brill.com/cad Editorial & Introduction Confucianism: Comparisons and Controversies Eirik Lang Harris Philosophy Department, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, US [email protected] Henrique Schneider Professor of economics, Nordakademie, University of Applied Sciences, Elmshorn and Hamburg, Germany [email protected] On October 2019, the China Daily ran an article, “Is Confucius still Relevant?,” which began as follows: “The ideas of the ancient Chinese sage may need a little tweaking, but …[they] now point the way to world peace.”1 This is remark- able for a variety of reasons, not least because the China Daily is published by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, which has since the late 1960s spilled an inordinate amount of ink attacking the Confucian tradition. As the China Daily’s Chinese language sister publication Renmin Ribao wrote in January 1967, “to struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate … reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”2 This was followed in 1973- 1976 by Mao Zedong’s “Anti-Lin Biao, Anti-Confucius Campaign,” which again held up Confucius as the punching bag and source of many of China’s ills. Despite this, Confucius and his ideas have been experiencing a revival. In 2019, more than two thousand people celebrated the 2,570th anniversary of his birth in Qufu, Shandong province. The highest-ranking member of the Communist Party’s local chapter attended the ceremony as a guest of honor. More generally, recent decades have seen a revival of Confucius, fostered in part by the Chinese government. As the China Daily puts it, “He [Confucius] 1 China Daily, “Is Confucius still relevant?” (30/10/2019). https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/ 201910/30/WS5db89296a310cf3e355744f3.html (accessed August 31st, 2020). 2 Cited in A. James Gregor and Maria Hsia Chang, “Anti-Confucianism: Mao’s Last Campaign,” Asian Survey 19, no. 11 (1979): 1075-1076. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24683949-12340083Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:34:42AM via free access 184 Harris and Schneider has emerged again as a central figure in defining what it means to be Chinese, and the message is spreading through hundreds of teaching institutions worldwide – the Confucius Institutes.”3 This might sound bombastic, but it reflects an increasingly popular opin- ion. Even if stereotypically, Confucius and the ideas based on his teachings, Confucianism, are heavily associated with China and East Asia, and contemporary China’s foreign policy capitalizes on this stereotype.4 Increasingly, the academic5 and popular6 discourses in China are turning to Confucianism as a source of inspiration and in order to generate new resources. This is not simply a manifestation of zeitgeist. And, it should be noted, this ever-shifting relationship with Confucius is not new. Twentieth century China has long had an uneasy and rapidly shifting relationship with Confucius. From the Boxer Rebellion through the May 4th Movement and into the early years of the People’s Republic, Confucius has alternated between savior and scourge. He has been seen as the reason for China’s decline and lack of competitiveness with the West in the early twentieth century by some and simultaneously as a fount of resources for repelling the West by others. Indeed, even those within the Communist Party itself have regularly changed positions on this issue. In 1939, the second Chairman of the PRC Liu Shaoqi wrote On the Ethical 3 China Daily, “Confucius.” 4 Ying Zhou and Sabrina Luk, “Establishing Confucius Institutes: a tool for promoting China’s soft power?,” Journal of Contemporary China 25, no. 100 (2016): 628-642. 5 Examples are Sophie Pezzutto, “Confucianism and Capitalist Development: From Max Weber and Orientalism to Lee Kuan Yew and New Confucianism,” Asian Studies Review 43, no. 2 (2019): 224-238; Andrew Smith and Miriam Kaminishi, “Confucian Entrepreneurship: Towards a Genealogy of a Conceptual Tool,” Journal of Management Studies 57, no. 1 (2020): 25-56; Alex Payette, “‘Countryside Confucianism’: Organizing the Confucian Revival, Saving the Villages, and Cultural Authority” East Asia 33 no. 2 (2016): 73-90; Huey-Li Li, “Rethinking Confucian Values in a Global Age.” In Confucianism Reconsidered: Insights for American and Chinese Education in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Xiufeng Liu and Wen Ma (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018): 221-36; Qin Pang, “The Confucian Revival Among Intellectuals and the State Responses,” in State-Society Relations and Confucian Revivalism in Contemporary China (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 125-160. 6 Refer to the discussions in Jun Deng and Craig A. Smith, “The rise of New Confucianism and the return of spirituality to politics in mainland China.” China information 32, no. 2 (2018): 294-314; Gerda Wielander and Derek Hird, eds., Chinese Discourses on Happiness (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018); Xi Wang and Ting Wang, “Discourse on national- ism in China’s traditional cultural education: Teachers’ perspectives,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 50, no. 12 (2018): 1089-1100; Wonho Jang, “Identification, Confucianism, and Intersubjectivity: Issues Related with Social Empathy in East Asia.” Journal of Asian Sociology 48, no. 1 (2019): 43-52. Culture and DialogueDownloaded from 8 (2020) Brill.com09/28/2021 183-195 12:34:42AM via free access Editorial & Introduction 185 Cultivation of Communist Party Members – a treatise that draws deeply on Confucian ideas of moral cultivation.7 The ideas prompted by Confucius and his followers have been discussed for almost two thousand five hundred years. They have been adapted, modi- fied, and enriched by staying in constant dialogue with others, such as Daoism, Mohism, Buddhism, Christianity, Pragmatism, Historicism, Communism, and many more. At various points in time, Confucianism was the official doctrine of Chinese (and other East Asian) Dynasties, which again enriched its thinking by making it operative in political, legal, commercial, and other ways. Confu- cianism, which is unique for its longevity among others, became engrained in East Asia (although and obviously not everything East Asian is Confucian). In any case, Confucius and Confucianism are part of East Asia’s history and present. In virtue of this and because of its wealth of intellectual resources, its contemporary strengthening is more than just a fad. This is also the reason for this co-edited issue of Culture and Dialogue, a journal devoted to cross-cultural philosophy and the humanities. In its own terms, the journal seeks to encourage and promote research in the type of philosophy and theory that sees dialogue as a fundamental ingredient of cultural formations and whereby culture is understood as a manifestation of human achievement in the arts, languages, forms of expression (whether secular or religious), and customs of all kinds including political ones. Dialogue, in this context, means a mode of relationship that lets cultural formations unfold by bringing together human beings and, for example, their natural environment, their historical past, traditions, external cultural influences, contemporary trends, other communities, or simply other persons in conversation. 1 Aims of This Issue In this spirit, a dialogue with Confucianism is conversation not only with its historical development but also with its contemporary shapes. Moreover, a dialogue with Confucianism is equally a dialogue with those engaging with the tradition. The aim of this issue is indeed to engage in such a dialogue from 7 See Bryan W. Van Norden, trans., “On the Ethical Cultivation of Communist Party Members,” in Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy: Han Dynasty to the 20th Century, Justin Tiwald and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014): 370-373. For more on intellectual efforts to integrate Confucianism and Communism, see David S. Nivison, “Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (November, 1956): 51-74 and Joseph R. Levenson, “The Place of Confucius in Communist China,” The China Quarterly no. 12 (1962): 1-18. Culture and Dialogue 8 (2020) 183-195 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:34:42AM via free access 186 Harris and Schneider multiple perspectives to show that Confucianism is a multi-facetted, cross- sectional and interdisciplinary endeavor. Similarly, diverse are the ways of engaging with it. The authors of the papers assembled here cover a wide range of contemporary and historical issues, from inner-Confucian to wider Chinese and comparative perspectives. This Issue of Culture and Dialogue discusses contemporary Confucian ideas as such – what is often labelled “New Confucianism,” by examining the contemporary development of a dialogue Chinese scholars have long had among themselves. The selection of essays also brings Confucian ideas into conversation within a broader contemporary discourse, for example Confucianism and democracy or gender. The Issue explores not only inter-Confucian controversies but also intra-Confucian ones, addressing, for example, the “updating” of the Confucian program, its relationship to increasingly open and diverse societies, and its relevance in a world in which commerce is important. Finally, more traditional Chinese critiques of Confucianism – from a “Legalist” and a “Daoist” perspective – are equally included here. The essays target a broad public in philosophy and the humanities and re- frain from delving into specialized investigations that may be of interest to only a few. As a matter of style, Chinese characters have generally not been used in the essays. Instead, Romanized transliterations refer to the Chinese terms in italics. The exceptions to this rule are this Introduction and the first essay. In the Introduction, the key names are written in Chinese characters as well as their tonal transliterations. The first essay, which provides a philosophi- cal and historical overview of the development of New Confucianism, main- tains Chinese characters in order to allow interested readers to cross-reference terms and the political lingo.

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