A revealing interview with Wu Jianmin, President of Chinese Foreign Affairs University, in today’s People’s Daily.  The nameless interviewer asks some leading questions:

Reporter: Culture is a component of China’s soft power strategy to
develop national strength, and culture can only extend its influence
through communication. What do you think is the significance of
cross-cultural communication in soft power building?

    And Wu answers (actually his response to a later follow up) without directly responding to the power question of his own:

I think many Chinese still do not understand the true meaning of Chinese culture…

First of all, we need to know what Chinese culture is and why
we should develop it. China’s social and cultural development cannot be
separated.

 I find Wu’s uncertainty more comforting than the reporter’s nationalism.  Indeed, the whole project of "reviving" China’s "ancient culture" to serve its national power is, to my mind, fraught with various problems.  Most importantly, core elements of "Chinese culture" – such as the original thinking of the Analects and Mencius, together with virtually everything to do with Taoism, both philosophical and religious – resist nationalist appropriation.  This is obvious in the case of Taoism, so let me make the case regarding Confucianism.

     Yes, Confucianism had long been tied to the power of the state and used as a legitimating ideology of an essentially Legalist political order.  But it was also always deeply problematic because, when taken seriously, it undermines national obligation.  Think about it.  Nationalism requires that individuals give themselves over to the national interet, to die for the nation if need be.  Confucianism quite clearly places family interests above all else.  We find our Humanity in cultivating and maintaining our closest social relationships and those begin, in most cases, with our immediate family.   If a son had to make a choice between protecting his family or going off to fight in a war, Confucianism would clearly demand the former over the latter. 

    And we haven’t even begun to consider the anti-war, anti-violence stance of Mencius.

    It seems to me, then, that Confucianism – a central element of "Chinese culture" – cannot really be used to "build national strength" because, when push comes to shove, a Confucian would honor his family before his nation.  Sun Yat-sen had this idea a century ago when he complained that Chinese society was like a "sheet of loose sand" because people were more powerfully connected to their families and clans than to the larger national community.  A modern "cement" had to be added to the traditional "sand:"

But we, because we have had too much liberty without any unity and
resisting power, because we have become a sheet of loose sand and so
have been invaded by foreign imperialism and oppressed by the economic
control and trade wars of the Powers, without being able to resist,
must break down individual liberty and become pressed together into an
unyielding body like the firm rock which is formed by the addition of
cement to sand.

    Ironically, then, the way in which the reporter asked the quesion confirms Wu’s reponse: it seems that the interviewer does not understand Chinese culture.  Has he read Mencius?  Does he know that Mencius not only advocates principled political opposition but also regicide? 

    So, Wu is asking the right question: what is Chinese culture and why should it be developed?  I think one answer would be that it holds within it powerful ideas that provide a fundamental critique of modern state power and that it should be developed to allow us to better understand our Humanity outside the categories of "state" and "nation." 

    In a modern (postmodern?) context, Confucianism and Taoism are – or can be – radical standpoints that can challenge the stultifying materialism and bureacratism that infects so much of our lives.   They can push against both nation and state.