An op-ed in the NYT last week, by Zhang Weiwei, links China's successes of the past 30 years to various strands of tradition, Confucianism included. 

On the face of it, this is yet another example of how the PRC is redeveloping (reinventing) traditional legitimation.  As Max Weber says: "Authority will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers."  Of course, tradition is not the only basis of PRC legitimacy.  As Zhang Weiwei notes, a kind of "performance legitimacy" is in play – essentially a matter of delivering the economic goods.  If people feel that their, and their children's, material lives are improving, then they will accept authoritarian government.  I would add that, in keeping with the Weberian analysis, legal-rational legitimation is also part of the picture.  What has changed is the move away from what we might call revolutionary legitimacy (if some political action can be shown to be consistent with the general notion of "revolution," then it is good) and the return of traditional legitimacy. 

What is most notable about Zhang's piece, however, is the absence of Mao.  He is mentioned once, when Zhang notes Deng Xiaoping's rejection of the "Maoist utopia."

This made me think of Mikhail Gorbachev and the late Soviet Union.  Then, in trying to find a way to reform the declining state socialist system, Gorbachev said the country should "return to Lenin."  This was a means of getting out from under the dead weight of Stalinism.  A "return to Lenin" would allow for a critique of all that had gone wrong in the Soviet Union, conveniently blamed on Stalin, while preserving the legitimacy of the initial revolution, and thus the legitimacy of the then still extant Soviet Communist Party.

The PRC has a harder time with all of this because instead of two people – Lenin and Stalin – there is only one: Mao.  Back in 1981, the CCP issued its "Resolution on CPC History," in which it established the good Mao/bad Mao distinction.  Everything up until the Great Leap Forward was basically good, while what came after was contaminated with "left errors."  This became the basis for the formula: Mao was 70% good and 30% bad.

What Zhang's article does, in essence, is to have Confucius play the part that Lenin played for Gorbachev.  The Sage, and the tradition for which he stands, is now the target of return, and in that return the "bad Mao" can be elided. Tradition is the thing that now legitimates the post-Mao era of the PRC.  Mao, especially the bad Mao, in the meantime, is shunted off to a historical siding alongside comrade Stalin.

The October 1 ceremonies
thus did not really celebrate 60 years of the PRC.  They  celebrated 30 years.  The
1949-1979 period is to be ignored and the glories of the ancient empire
resurrected to facilitate that forgetting.

The danger here is that PRC citizens might start asking: if tradition is now a fundamental basis of regime legitimacy, why did there have to be a revolution in 1949?  The KMT has already made something of a come back on the mainland.  Could this go further?  Could Lung Ying-tai's new book, Big River, Big Sea gain traction among PRC readers and stoke the question: was all the violence of the revolution really worth it, if the ultimate goal was a return to tradition?

But this may not be too likely an outcome.  Legitimation everywhere, in any country, is a mish-mash of tradition and legal-rationality and particularism.  The PRC's odd concoction of a Mao-forgetting return to tradition is no more cognitively dissonent than the historical amnesias of Americans and others.