Is China headed for a clash of cultures as Xi Jinping fuses Confucius and Marx?
- Xi Jinping’s vision is producing an unlikely and contradictory brew of Confucian communism, yoked to the service of a unifying state ideology
Paul F. Scotchmer
Published: 4:10pm, 27 Jul, 2019
A performance of a rite of passage for young women during Confucius’ time, at a village in Zoucheng, Shandong province. The renaissance of Confucianism has led to such performances becoming popular tourist attractions. Under Mao’s leadership, The Analects was banned, artefacts were destroyed, and temples were turned into libraries and museums. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
Soon after becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping revealed his vision for a more distinctly Chinese direction for his country and has strongly encouraged a
renaissance of Confucianism
in China. Yet Marxism – a European import – remains the ideological framework of the government. It would seem, then, that China is headed for an internal clash of cultures.
Xi's cultural tack is diametrically opposed to that of
Mao Zedong
, who dismissed Confucianism as a retrograde social philosophy that could only dampen the revolutionary fire. Under Mao's leadership,
The Analectswas banned, artefacts were destroyed, and temples were turned into libraries and museums.
Mao’s contempt for Confucianism was consistent with the materialist conception of history, which lies at the core of Marxist thought. By this view, social standards and religious beliefs are simply reflections of a given mode of production. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in
The Communist Manifesto: “Law, morality, religion” are nothing more than “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests”. With his attacks on Confucianism, Mao was simply helping history along, as it were.
By this logic, Xi is now reversing the course of history. In a 2014 address to the International Confucian Association on the 2,565th anniversary of Confucius’ birth, Xi praised Confucianism as “the cultural soil that nourishes the Chinese people”. He also used terms alien to the materialist political philosophy which underpins the Communist Party. “Confucianism,” he said, is the key to “understanding the national characteristics of the Chinese as well as the historical roots of the spiritual world of the present-day Chinese”.
In addition to acknowledging Confucius’ historic influence in China, Xi underscored his relevance for the future. “Some people of insight,” he observed, “believe that the traditional culture of China, Confucianism included, contains important inspirations for solving the troubles facing us today.” Xi then spelt out several traditional ideas that could benefit Chinese society, mostly by helping to reduce
corruption in government.
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