This just in: foreign descendants of Confucius (Kong Zi) will now be counted in the official Kong family tree.  Here’s how Xinhua tells it:

This is also the first time that overseas citizens
and those who converted to Islam will be included in the family tree.
The philosopher’s descendants who converted to Islam during the Yuan
Dynasty (1271-1368) live in compact communities in the eastern part of
Northwest China’s Qinghai Province.

    The changes in the pedigree,
especially the inclusion of women, are significant because Confucius
considered women to be inferior to men, making it part of traditional
Chinese belief. And in a role reversal, the names of their husbands
will be written in smaller characters.

    About 50,000 descendants of
Confucius, or Kong Zi, live abroad, said 81-year-old, 77th-generation
descendant Kong Deyong, who chairs the committee.

 It was last summer that the keepers of the Kong family books decided to count women as full-fledged descendants of the Master.   And now foreigners and Muslims are in!  I think the inclusion of Muslim’s could be interesting, and not just because it fits in with official government policy to be nice to Islam in certain ways (like no TV ads of pigs in the year of the Pig).  It might suggest that a daily ethical practice that is largely outside traditional Chinese culture, such as Islam, can be wholly consistent with the creation and reproduction of Humanity (ren).  Can you be a Muslim Confucian?  The new family tree suggests that the answer is not automatically "no."  Thus, the same might be said for Christian Confucians, or Jewish Confucians, or Buddhist Confucians, etc.

      Of course, the family is not necessarily endorsing these possibilities, not explicitly at least.  But they are opening up these outcomes since they would not want to suggest, at the outset, that family members of Confucius are, because of their religious practice, clearly excluded from the higher accomplishments of civility and sage-hood. 

     I don’t see any problem with this, insofar as Confucianism has a universalistic quality to it (i.e. there is no inherent reason why Humanity cannot manifest itself in different cultural contexts).  But it might raise some hackles among nationalists who want to claim Confucianism as a uniquely "Chinese" practice.

     It is also great that the foreigners are now counted.  I wonder how far they have wandered.  Any in New York?  We’ve heard of the Boston Confucians.  Now, maybe we’ll have the Brooklyn Confucians.  Cleveland Confucians?  Certainly Cupertino Confucians! 

     There is one other thing to mention in this Xinhua story.  Notice how it blames Confucianism for traditional Chinese patriarchy: "….Confucius
considered women to be inferior to men, making it part of traditional
Chinese belief."   Now, it is true that Confucius, just like virtually all Chinese males of his time, considered women to be inferior to men.  And it is true that the institutionalization of Confucianism contributed to the persistence of patriarchy.  But it is not true that Confucianism is somehow uniquely responsible for patriarchy and gender discrimination in China.  I think it is the other way around: Chinese culture – before, during and after Confucius – was mysogynistic.  Confucianism operated within that cultural context and contributed to it.  But if Confucius had never existed (how’s that for a thought experiment!), I bet that Chinese gender discrimination would be just about the same historically.

     While we can recognize the part that Confucianism played in excluding Chinese women from political power and social standing, we should not pin all the blame on Confucius.  He did not "make it part of traditional Chinese belief."

    And, most importantly, we should be open to the possibilities of what Confucianism might mean when we place it in a modern cultural context of gender equality.