By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
President Xi's Thought
In 2023, Hunan TV,
China’s second-most-watched television channel, unveiled a series called When
Marx Met Confucius. The conceit was literal: actors playing the two
thinkers—Confucius dressed in a tan robe and Karl Marx in a black suit and a
leonine white wig—met at the Yuelu Academy, a thousand-year-old school renowned
for its role in developing Confucian philosophy. Over five episodes, Marx and
Confucius discussed the nature of politics, concluding that Confucianism and
Marxism are compatible—or that Marx may have subconsciously drawn his theories
from a Confucian well. In one episode, Marx noted that he and his companion
“share a commitment to [political] stability,” adding that “in reality, I was
Chinese for a long time,” suggesting that his thinking had always been
harmonious with traditional Chinese worldviews.
The series was backed
by the Chinese Communist Party and formed part of President Xi Jinping’s
sweeping political project to reconceptualize his country’s ideological
identity. Since taking office in 2012, Xi has made it imperative for Chinese
people to understand his interpretation of Chinese ideology, which he calls “Xi
Jinping Thought.” Bureaucrats, tycoons, and pop stars have been required to
endorse it; students now learn it in school; CCP members must use a smartphone
app that regularly communicates its precepts. Key to Xi’s thought is pairing
Marxism with Confucianism: in October 2023, he declared that today’s China
should consider Marxism its “soul” and “fine traditional Chinese culture as the
root.”
Xi’s efforts to
redefine China’s ideological underpinnings feel increasingly urgent as a
slowdown in growth has fed doubts among investors and public distrust at home.
He leads a country whose economic might is far more respected than its form of
government: China has now won a place among the world’s major
economies but remains an aspirant within the international order. To the
frustration of Xi and other Chinese leaders, Western countries will be
reluctant to accept China’s global influence unless China conforms to modern
liberal values. But his attempted synthesis of Marx and Confucius has prompted
bafflement, even mockery, among observers outside and inside China.
Over the past
century, Chinese communist thinkers have tended to believe that a flourishing
future demands a complete break from the past. China’s formative early Marxist
thinkers, in particular, generally condemned Confucianism, a philosophy that
stresses hierarchy, ritual, and a return to an idealized past. Mao
Zedong and other Chinese Marxists believed that Confucianism was
theoretically incompatible with Marxism, which celebrates revolution and
perpetual change, and that its practical influence on politics had made China
weak. Confucian thinking, in their view, had generated a moribund bureaucracy
that failed to adapt to the challenges of modernity; this renunciation found
its ultimate expression during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when the Chinese Red
Guards dynamited the philosopher’s tomb before hanging a naked corpse in front
of it.
But erasing the past
in a country with so rich a history was always a struggle. It has consistently
also seemed to matter to Chinese thinkers and Chinese people in general, that
their country should be seen as responding to political change with methods derived
from a recognizably Chinese source. Even as many of China’s
early-twentieth-century political theorists condemned Confucianism, other
thinkers strove to show that China did not have to imitate Western ideas—be
they nationalist, liberal, or Marxist—to modernize. They found a road map for a
different but potentially effective kind of modernization within the universe
of traditional Chinese ideas.
In The Rise
of Modern Chinese Thought, his magnum opus, Wang Hui, a scholar of Chinese
language and literature at Tsinghua University, returns to the
late-nineteenth-century thinkers who worked to reshape Chinese philosophy.
First published in Chinese in 2004, it appeared last year in a new English
edition, the work of several translators under the direction of Michael Gibbs
Hill. Although the translation clocks in at over 1,000 pages, it represents
just over half of the four-volume Chinese original. Wang analyzes the
connections between political theory and more concrete issues of governance
over a millennium of Chinese history. But he notes that “explanations of modern
China cannot avoid the question of how to interpret” the Qing dynasty, which
ruled China from 1644 to 1912. Wang’s deep exploration of the work of a group
of late Qing thinkers implies that China’s embrace of Marxism did not arise
from a wholesale rejection of Confucianism. Chinese Marxism may have had the
space to emerge precisely because these late thinkers sought to apply Confucian
thought to the challenges of modernity.
The Rise
of Modern Chinese Thought is
densely detailed, but a fine introduction by Hill helps situate the
English-language reader. And the text brilliantly reveals a China that has
always been lively and pluralist in its political thought. That picture is at
odds with the typical perception held by outside observers—and even some
Chinese historians—that Chinese thought has been monolithic and prone to sudden
ruptures.
In one sense, The
Rise of Modern Chinese Thought makes Xi’s attempted synthesis of
Marxism and Confucianism seem less implausible. It has a history; serious
thinkers have tried it before. Many writers have suggested that Xi’s
“ideological work” does not or cannot have any relevance to ordinary Chinese people,
who increasingly struggle with material problems such as making hefty mortgage
payments or providing health care for their elders. But China’s anomie is also
a crisis of national identity. And implicitly, Wang’s book suggests that
efforts to redefine the country’s ideology could help address that crisis.
But Wang’s analysis
also reveals where the CCP is going astray. The party expresses its new
ideology in simplistic, brassy terms, drawing on unsubtle readings of classics
and disallowing critiques. The thinkers who argued for Confucianism’s relevance
at the turn of the twentieth century believed that a key to that relevance was
letting thinkers debate Chinese philosophy’s very nature.
Philosophers And Kings
Wang, one of
contemporary China’s most influential intellectuals, has frequently written
about the period after the communist revolution. A participant in the 1989
student movement for democratic reforms, he became a leading member of what
others have called China’s “New Left” in the 1990s. In his 2010 book, The
End of the Revolution, he criticized China’s turn toward marketization in
the 1990s.
In The Rise
of Chinese Thought, however, Wang does not deal explicitly with
any aspect of China’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Mao makes just one
appearance. In this work, Wang is more interested in earlier Chinese thinkers
who had already wrestled with the challenges posed by modernity, arguing that
when China changed, it did so by drawing on internal resources. (The later
volumes, not translated in Hill’s edition, do move into the early twentieth
century.)
Wang’s study begins
in the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1386–1644) dynasties with neo-Confucianism, a
school of thought that adapted traditional Confucianism in the face of
challenges by Taoism and Buddhism. His analysis gains its strongest
contemporary salience when he discusses a strain of thought that emerged toward
the end of the Qing dynasty. At the height of the Qing era, China doubled its
population and ran immensely successful military campaigns that expanded its
territory. Europeans sought to buy and copy its distinctive art and porcelain.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, economic failures and a defeat at the
hands of the British in the Opium Wars had brought China to a point of
existential crisis. After China was forced to sign humiliating treaties with a
host of rising powers including Japan, Russia, and the United States, it
appeared as if it might simply be unfit to flourish in the modern era.
One potential
conclusion was that Chinese traditions were antiquated and had to be jettisoned
in favor of Western ideas, including nationalism and Marxism. Wang argues that
the problem that bedeviled the late Qing empire was not just a geopolitical one
in which other states had secured material advantages over China. It was a
crisis of worldview. Scholars have long asserted that how Confucianism was
applied to nineteenth-century Chinese politics had left the country
sclerotic—unable to engage with modern Western ideologies such as capitalism,
liberalism, and nationalism. Confucianism’s emphasis on tradition and respect
for hierarchy had justified an entrenched, sometimes corrupt bureaucracy that
failed to respond deftly to foreign invasions and internal revolts or to
maintain sufficient tax revenue to maintain security and infrastructure.
But Wang also
suggests that this kind of stagnation is not inherent in Confucianism. The
Confucian thought world was capacious and flexible. Confucian thinkers often
relished encounters with foreign ideas, incorporating or synthesizing them to
adapt China to new historical conditions. Notably, toward the end of the
nineteenth century, thinkers in the “New Text” movement—so-called because it
drew on texts written in a new script unveiled by the ancient Han
dynasty—explored ways in which their Confucian cultural universe might reshape
itself when confronted by Western ideas.
Modernity did not,
Wang argues, present them with an unanswerable challenge, setting up a clash
between the old and the new. Instead, the New Text thinkers proposed that
translating Confucian rites or principles into laws could accomplish a “grand
reunification” of those principles with the new demands posed by globalization
and Western imperialism. The New Text thinkers wanted to find ways to push back
against the debilitating influence of government corruption. Wang describes how
the prominent New Text thinker Wei Yuan challenged Chinese leaders’ presumption
that Confucianism demanded they strictly privilege ideas and strategies that
had arisen from within China. He sought to dissolve the distinction between
“inside” and “outside”; which allowed him to argue for military modernization
that incorporated Western innovations, including new measures for defending
China’s frontiers and the construction of a shipyard and arsenal in southern
China. Thinkers such as Kang Youwei discovered
modernizing elements within Confucianism, arguing that a proper interpretation
revealed it to have components that could parallel or meet the energy of
Western modernizing ideas. Drawing on Confucian theories, Kang formulated the
idea of datong, or “great unity,” a day
“when everything on earth, great or small, far or near, will be as one.”
Kang saw no
distinction between holding a Confucian worldview and advocating a world that
dismissed borders as meaningless. His proposals won him influence, and he
played a central role in the 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform movement, which aimed to
move China toward a constitutional monarchy resembling Japan’s. Alarmed,
China’s conservative ruler, the empress dowager Cixi,
ordered his arrest and forced him into exile. But his ideas did not die. The
late Qing era was a time of great intellectual ferment, and Chinese
thinkers—some in exile in Japan—continued to debate theories such as Kang’s in
an array of new journals.
The New Text
thinkers’ stance arguably enabled the next generation to be open to Marxism. In
1925, the author Guo Moruo wrote about Marx “entering the Confucian temple” in
a short story that partly inspired Hunan TV’s new series. In a 1939 text titled
“How to Be a Good Communist,” Liu Shaoqi, a central figure in the Chinese
communist revolution, referred to communist “virtues,” a phrasing more
Confucian than materialist.
Crisis Of Faith
The Rise
of Chinese Thought is,
in one sense, historical scholarship. But its account of the intellectual world
of the late Qing dynasty shines a sharp light on China today. One of the
central propositions advanced by the late Qing thinkers was that China needed
not merely to find a way out of the crisis facing China at that time but also
to embed the solution in premodern Chinese cultural forms. The situation facing
the late Qing thinkers might not appear remotely similar to that of today’s
China. When they were writing, China was deeply mired in fiscal crisis and
beset by internal rebellions; many of its rural areas were deeply impoverished,
and its sovereignty had been hugely compromised by foreign invasions and the
imposition of biased treaties. China now boasts immense economic and military
strength. There are no meaningful threats to its national sovereignty.
But like many
countries on the rise today, China does not feel a sense of ownership over the
world’s international norms, which were largely created by the West in the
twentieth century. Chinese elites believe that these norms and their
universalist intellectual premises have largely been imposed on China. And
despite China’s strength, it is increasingly afflicted by a sense of crisis.
This sentiment is partly a reaction to material circumstances. China’s urban
youth unemployment, now estimated at 20 percent or higher, and a growing
rural-urban inequality are rooted in economics. So, too, is the difficulty that
Chinese families now have in meeting their mortgage payments or coping with
inadequate health care and pensions.
China’s sense of
anomie is also sociological, however, especially for young people. It cannot be
resolved by economic fixes alone. The recent era of spectacular economic growth
generated a self-concept among Chinese citizens: China is a daring, rising power,
and being Chinese means being on the cutting edge. The core of that
understanding is now being challenged. China’s astonishing growth trajectory
appears to have crested, leaving not only people’s bank accounts hollowed out
but their sense of identity, as well.
Today, the word that
many Chinese professionals often use to describe themselves is “depressed.” In
a culture in which acknowledging mental health problems is profoundly
stigmatized, 35 percent of respondents to a 2020 national survey said they were
experiencing distress, anxiety, or depression. On social media, young Chinese
people express disillusionment and disaffection, declaring that they are “lying
flat” (tangping) or “rotting away” (bailan). The COVID-19 lockdown period
eroded trust in the state.
CCP members reflected in a party emblem, Beijing,
February 2019
More and more, young
Chinese professionals in business, academia, and the media are confronted with
restrictions that they find baffling. (For instance, many Chinese students are
eager to study abroad, but many are also told that if they do, their rise in
the Chinese bureaucracy will be hampered.) As China’s population starts to age,
young people are becoming aware that the costs of looking after elderly parents
will fall heavily on their shoulders.
Such developments do
not make life in China intolerable, as it was for the late–Qing dynasty
thinkers. But they do make it unsatisfying. China may be able to go on creating
solid economic growth. “Solid but not spectacular,” however, is unexciting.
“Weak and fragile” would be worse.
Many Western
observers point to Japan as a warning to China about what happens when a
property bubble collapses and a country enters a period of aging. Yet Japan
remains a powerful global economy with an important regional role and a
reputation for being one of the best places in the world to live. China may
well be able to follow Japan’s track by adjusting its domestic economy to
create new service-sector jobs and concentrating on elder care. Such a China
could be a decent place to live. But it would not provide the heroic energy
that underpins a rising power.
Traditional Medicine
In this context, it
makes a bit more sense that Xi has begun trying to present a refreshed ideology
that fuses a Marxist view of society with a Confucian one. Marxism promotes
self-criticism, and when applied to real politics has tended to lead to purges.
These are phenomena Xi wishes to avoid at a fragile political moment. On the
surface, his synthesis may appear to be just an effort to defend himself and
the party against criticism, since Confucianism prioritizes stability and
respect for authority.
Wang’s study,
however, implicitly suggests that Confucianism and Marxism may not be
inherently incompatible. His analysis has immense relevance for China today,
even if he does not address contemporary China directly. His work shows that
the effort to use traditional Chinese philosophy to face emerging challenges
has a precedent. Recently, I spoke to a student enrolled in a prominent school
of Marxism-Leninism in China. “What does Marxism mean to you?” I asked her. She
explained that studying Marxism offered her a way of reflecting on her personal
development. Marxism, she said, gave her profound peace of mind.
I was intrigued, I
told her. What she described sounded more like Confucianism than Marxism to me.
Perhaps she had simply absorbed some of Xi’s growing emphasis on traditional
culture. But perhaps, intuitively, it seemed to her that elements of the two philosophies
were compatible—and it was comforting to her to feel that her own culture had
some answers to her generation’s dispiriting sense of uncertainty and
driftlessness.
If a sincere effort
at a Marxism-Confucianism fusion could get off the ground, it might help
address this anomie by allowing China to hold two ideas at once. A Marxist
worldview anticipates a future that continues to be shaped by dramatic changes
and convulsive confrontations with, for instance, the challenges of a clean
energy transition, U.S. hegemony, or the liberal international order. A
worldview informed by Confucianism can accommodate the idea that China will
need more calm, predictability, and stability in the future—and that direct
military confrontation would likely undercut China’s interests.
Chinese political
thought retains liveliness and diversity: it is a work in progress. In 2019,
Bai Tongdong, a philosopher at Fudan University in
Shanghai, published a book called Against Political Equality.
Despite the provocative title, the work is a strong defense of liberalism,
arguing that some forms of nondemocratic rule, such as a meritocracy based on
Confucian values, could better preserve liberal values than democracy can.
Other Chinese thinkers who are often considered realists also wrestle with classical
ideas; in his 2011 book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,
for instance, the international relations scholar Yan Xuetong draws on
premodern Chinese thinking to interpret the contemporary global order.
Given the precedents
over centuries of Chinese philosophy for the kind of synthesis Xi is
attempting, it is curious that he relies so heavily on very ancient sources. A
television series reconciling Confucianism with modernity could easily have
been longer and richer: Kang, the New Text thinker, might have appeared to
discuss Confucius’s role as a reformer. The maverick twentieth-century thinker
Liang Shuming could have debated Mao about what,
precisely, constitutes “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” These two
thinkers did conduct a lively debate about just that, in 1946. But to
acknowledge the New Text thinkers, in particular, might be dangerous because
they valued internal debate and plurality of thought.
Xi’s effort to
synthesize Confucius and Marx is not invalid, as an exercise. It is worth
lingering, however, on the fact that Wang’s original Chinese text was published
in 2004. Only two decades ago, China’s intellectual environment was very
different. Academics were freer to debate various political alternatives, and
the media could risk more pointed political commentary. Chinese identity is
still multiple, not monolithic, and Chinese thought has always best contributed
to China’s flourishing when it has been free and disputatious, not closed and
sterile. This is the aspect of Chinese tradition that today’s CCP cannot afford
to ignore.
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