I am thinking about the relationship between Confucian ideals and Chinese nationalism.  In fact, I am giving a talk on the subject tomorrow and I want to use this space to kick around a few ideas.

    The Communist Party has quite consciously been encouraging the revival of Confucianism, though it is not yet clear what the precise purpose or extent of the revival might be.  As a recent Newsweek article states:

…the debate within the government is not whether to resurrect Master Kong, as
Confucius was known, but on which pedestal to enshrine his teachings—as part of
the education system, as a political ideology or as a national religion.

    I imagine "national religion" is pretty much out of the picture: there are limits to how far the Party will let go of its secular scientism.  "Part of education" is very much in the mix these days, with the opening of Confucian schools, the creation of Confucius Institutes around the world to spread Chinese language and culture, and, oddly enough, the establishment of a Confucius Business Institute in London (odd if we remember Confucius’s disdain for business).  The only real question, then, is how far the Confucian revival will push into political ideology.  And here, I believe, there will be some interesting problems.

    As one example we have this story in today’s NYT: For Visitors, Graveyard Holds Memories of a Bloody Era.  April 5th was Qingming, a traditional day to commemorate deceased family members in China.  It dates at least to the Tang Dynasty (618 AD – 907 AD) as an officially recognized holiday, and has deeper historical roots.  The practice resonates with the general Confucian virtue of respect for parents and elders.  Although Confucius himself was silent on the after-life, he believed firmly in proper burial and mourning rituals for parents and, by extension, other ancestors.  In short, taking a day out to remember the dead, especially close family members, is in keeping with Confucian ideals of respectful cultivation and care of loving social relationships.

     Qingming is not officially recognized in the PRC today, an outgrowth of the Communist Party’s anti-Confucian origins in the May 4th Movement, which fundamentally rejected ancestor worship and other "backward" social practices and ideas.

     But, as the newspaper story suggests, people in China do informally observe Qingming.   And that could be politically problematic.

     If you go to a graveyard to sweep the tomb of your parents, and if you speak out about how they may have died, you may be telling stories that the current regime does not want to hear, stories that push against a simplistic nationalist narrative of continuous and unsullied national greatness.  Qingming becomes a time for family members to remember events like the Cultural Revolution and, for some, the Great Leap Forward:

Mr. Xi, the man who built his mother’s tombstone, believes the
Communist Party must still air the true historical record of the era
and accept full responsibility. "There has to be a clear explanation of
what happened," he said. "My mother was innocent and was shot because
the groups were encouraged by Mao Zedong."

Mr. Xi said his
mother, Huang Peiying, a member of the 8.15 group, had found shelter in
a quiet area at the height of the fighting. But when she returned to
fetch Mr. Xi and his brothers, a sniper shot her as she led her
children across a street.

"The guy who shot my mother was just
shooting at anyone who came into sight," said Mr. Xi, then 15, who tore
off his shirt to sop his mother’s blood. "I was waving my white shirt,
but they wouldn’t stop shooting. When it finally quieted down, I
climbed over to see my mother, but she was already dead."

    Mr. Xi is being a good son.  He is remembering his mother, demanding that the injustice that caused her death be recognized and kept in the national memory.   There are many people whose parents or grandparents or other relatives similarly died terrible, government-created deaths during the Great Leap Forward.  They, too, keep those sad memories alive at Qingming.  And none of these kinds of stories do anything good for a regime that continues to preserve the frozen body of Mao Zedong in a mausoleum in the center of the capital city, always under the watchful eye of the apparently permanent portrait of the Chairman on Tiananmen Gate. 

     According to Confucian values, a person’s first loyalty should be to his or her family, even when that means telling stories that lay bare the worst excesses of nationalist violence against the nation.  In encouraging Confucianism, the CCP is providing a basis for people to criticize the party and its misuse of nationalist mobilization, a good thing for the prospects of a more open society and polity, but not what the CCP is hoping for in its embrace of the Sage.