First, let me say Happy New Year!  I was remiss over the weekend getting a post up to mark the occasion, so here is a link to my post last year wishing everyone Fu for the New Year. 

     Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s death (I wonder what it means, if anything, in Chinese thinking to have the tenth anniversary of a patriarch’s death fall on New Year’s day?  Good luck or bad luck?).   The past decade has seen ever more intensified growth and transformation in China.  A question that comes to mind, then, is: have these changes gone beyond what Deng would have been comfortable with or would he be happy with the China of 2007.

     In the grand geo-political scheme of things I think he would generally be happy.  I understand Deng as a nationalist.  He was moved in the direction of "reform and opening" in the 1970s because he saw China as weak and backwards and he wanted a strong and respected country.  That has certainly come to pass.  China’s economic growth now commands global attention and it has created a vast pool of financial resources which, among other things, has been used to build up the PRC’s military power.  In 2007 we can say that the country has largely achieved what Deng had set out to accomplish in the 1970s: fuguo chiangbing – "rich country, strong army."

      The desire for national prosperity and strength  goes back at least to the nineteenth century, when China was besieged by internal dissolution and external assault.  The educated elite then watched as Meiji Japan embraced the same slogan – fukoku kyohei – and realized it in practice, much to China’s disadvantage.  The upsurge of 21st century PRC power thus fulfills the long term aspirations of Chinese nationalists at the same time that it diverts historical attention away from the deep and tragic failures of Maoism.  For all of that, Deng, the nationalist, would be happy.

    Perhaps he would be uneasy, but not terribly worried, with the burgeoning inequality that has come in the wake of economic growth.  But he was, after all, the man who gave us the slogans "to get rich is glorious," and "let some people get rich first."  Sacrificing a sector of the population in the interest of national strength seems quite consistent with his thinking.  He did, it should be remembered, endorse the early phases of the Great Leap Forward and he did nothing to save Peng Dehuai at the Lushan plenum.

     He would also be supportive of the party’s continuing repressive efforts to maintain its monopoly of political power.  He was never a democrat and, of course, expended a great deal of energy to impel the military to kill Beijing residents during the protests of 1989. 

    What would Deng make, however, of the revival of Confucianism that has accelerated since his death?  On the one hand, he came of age during the May Fourth period and studied in France, experiences that made him into a modernizing Marxist materialist.  For men of his generation and political outlook, Confucianism was the essence of "feudalism," the thing that had to be struggled against and overcome to make China strong again.  He was a committed socialist; thus, any inklings of Confucianism after the turn toward reform in 1979 could not, for him, be allowed to upset China’s socialist modernization. 

     He would, therefore, almost certainly be against some of the more traditionalist manifestation of Confucianism – the schools that focus on rote learning and the anti-Marxist contentions of some New Confucian intellectuals.

     Other aspects of revived Confucianism would possibly be acceptable to him.  Although he would probably want to maintain some sort of socialist ideology at the center of state legitimization, he would likely agree that pride in China’s past, of which Confucianism is an important part, is essential to national achievement in the present.  He might also like the idea of spreading Chinese "soft power" around the world with Confucius Institutes. 

     And he would likely be comfortable with some of the apparent contradictions of modernized Chinese Confucianism – like its invocation by rich entrepreneurs to demonstrate their neo-traditionalist virtue (can they be cut-throat capitalists by day and Confucian gentlemen in the evening at home?).  Confucianism in the service of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (read: capitalism) would be fine by Deng, even if it would make Confucius himself frown.

     On balance, then, I think he would be a bit nervous with how far Confucianism has come back, at least as a popular cultural discourse that displaces socialism in the public square, but he would generally accept it as long as Chinese power was growing.  If the Venerable Sage got in the way of nationalist purposes or party authority, however, Deng would be as quick to crush Confucians as was the first Qin emperor.