Jiang Qing, "Only Confucians"

Jiang Qing, Only Confucians Can Make a Place for Modern Women

Jiang Qing 蒋庆, “只有儒家能安顿现代女性,”interview dated August 12, 2015, originally available online at https://www.rujiazg.com/article/id/6034/.  A pdf of the original Chinese site is available here.

N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019). 
 
Introduction and translation by David Ownby

Jiang Qing (b. 1953) is China’s best-known New Confucian thinker, and has devoted most of his career to building a new “political Confucianism” that will respond to China’s current conditions.  This Confucianism is political in two ways.  First, Jiang has broken with New Confucian thinkers as they have existed in the Chinese diaspora (chiefly Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States) for some decades.  These thinkers, perhaps best represented by Tu Wei-ming 杜维明 (b. 1940), have largely accepted the universal claims of modernity, particular in terms of political economy and governance, but have continued to insist on the relevance of Confucianism as a possible communitarian counter-weight to the excessive individualism and consumerism of modern life.  Jiang Qing rejects the universal claims of modernity, and insists that the Confucian way is superior.  Second, Jiang has invested considerable intellectual energy in the imagination of Confucian institutions that could, theoretically, replace those of the ruling Communist Party.  Jiang imagines a tricameral government with one body selected by the people (the House of the Commoners 庶民院), one body made up of a meritocratic, largely Confucian, elite (the House of Confucian Tradition 通儒院), and one body made up of actual descendants of Confucius himself (The House of National Essence 国体院).  Jiang’s aim is to construct a legitimacy that will go beyond the petty, grasping utilitarianism of modern democracies and ground authority is something sacred and traditional.  It is perhaps the audacious impracticality of Jiang’s propositions that have so far kept him out of serious political trouble.
 
The text translated here—in fact, it is an interview—is quite different.  Here, Jiang attempts to establish the superiority of Confucianism as a guide to life and happiness for Chinese (and presumably other) women who have been beguiled by the false charms of modern life.  The “interviewer” is one of Jiang’s assistants, a retired woman named Fan Bixuan 范必萱, who serves up one softball after another, allowing Jiang to hold forth at length.  Presumably, Fan’s role is to break up the monotony and to suggest that women are part of Jiang’s conversation.
 
In any event, most of Jiang’s arguments are concerned not directly with women, but with the denunciation of Confucians as oppressors of women during China’s May Fourth and New Culture Movements (roughly 1915-1930).  During this period, iconoclastic radicals condemned Confucianism as the main reason for China’s weakness and backwardness, claiming that Confucian insistence on family hierarchy and ritual had perverted the development of the sort of individualism necessary to survival in the modern world.  The place of women in traditional Confucian society served as a glaring example, and modernizers and revolutionaries competed to denounce foot-binding, concubinage, arranged marriage…
 
Jiang argues, first, that Confucianism had little or nothing to do with these practices, and furthermore that China’s record on this score is no worse than that of other countries, past and present.  He is probably right that critics exaggerated somewhat the degree to which Confucianism as a body of thought or doctrine contributed to the ill-treatment of women; the condemnation of Confucianism in early twentieth century China was based on politics, not scholarship.  On the other hand, the fact that corsets inflicted lasting harm on Western women in centuries past, or that plastic surgery continues to defigure women today hardly proves that “Confucianism has a place for modern women.”  That we are all sinners does not remove or excuse the sin.
 
When Jiang tries to describe the Confucian “way” for modern women, he falls immediately into crude and conventional stereotypes and arguments.  Premodern societies were “natural,” built on families and hierarchies rather than abstractions deduced by rationality.  Men and women are by nature different.  Men are extraverted, action-oriented; women introverted and passive.  Women have their own superiority, most developed in the feminine realms of domesticity and motherhood, where they can be a true helpmate to their husband and children.  Of course, some women might be interested in professional careers, but if China had a genuine family policy (like South Korea) which paid husbands enough for wives to remain home, Jiang is sure that this is the path Chinese women would follow.
 
I confess for my part that I can’t see Jiang’s arguments (or his supercilious tone) appealing to many of the smart, feisty, independent Chinese women I have met over the course of my career, but perhaps he knows his audience better than I do.  To me, this interview suggests that Jiang’s creativity at an institutional level does not extend to the level of culture or society.  The problem is larger than Jiang; the Mainland New Confucians can, at moments, seem very much like an old boys’ club.  The casual misogyny that we find in certain New Confucian texts, in which women are blamed for divorce and other marital problems afflicting contemporary Chinese society, is shocking.  In this light, the New Confucians look less like principled cultural conservatives, and more like alt-right groups in the West, some of whom of course see themselves as “principled cultural conservatives” as well.  Jiang’s defense of Confucianism would be more convincing if he acknowledged at least some of the gains achieved by modernity.
 
Translation
 
Confucians did not encourage concubinage; the phenomenon of one man taking several wives was a custom found among all traditional peoples, and has no direct relationship to the basic principles of Confucianism

Fan Bixuan:  With the acceleration of the Confucian cultural revival, the Confucian view of women has attracted more and more attention.  The social conditions that face contemporary Confucians are different than in traditional times.  In traditional social life, women had little position.  Men set the tone for society, and most social customs discriminated against and limited women.”  This was expressed in well-known sayings like "men are noble and women are base 男尊女卑," "the husband guides the wife 夫为妻纲," "women and petty people are difficult to endure 唯女子与小人难养," "a woman's lack of talent is her virtue 女子无才便是德," and in the system of concubinage, among other things.  This directly influences women's affinity for Confucian culture.

With the development of productivity and the advance of human civilization, women have greatly entered social life.  Yet in the process of assuming roles in society, modern women have encountered new obstacles and difficulties.  Neither Buddhism nor Daoism provides a positive valuation of women as they face these problems.  Confucianism emphasizes social ethics, and not only argues that there are differences between men and women and that each has a role to play, but in addition takes seriously the kind of moral transformation suggested by the "three obediences and the four virtues 三从四德.” In this sense, Confucianism has a positive message that protects women.  However, the exaggerated negative view of Confucianism propagated since the "May Fourth” period has seriously damaged the feelings of contemporary women toward Confucianism.  How can we convince contemporary women, and particularly intellectual women, to identify with and embrace Confucianism as a philosophy of life?  How can we bring them to construct a sense of reliance and belonging to Confucianism in the course of the Confucian cultural revival?

Jiang Qing:  You provide a comprehensive overview of the question.  Since the beginning of the modern period, Confucianism has faced a question that demands a positive resolution and response, and this is precisely the question of women.  What is the value of women in Confucian doctrine?  What place should be made for women?  This kind of question did not exist in traditional society because traditional society was a natural society.  This question did not exist in pre-modern Christian, Islamic or Indian civilizations, because they all provided an appropriate place for women based on nature and society, a place that embodied women's value.  And in the specific case of Confucianism, this was not an important question either.

However, we should not completely equate Confucian ideas about women with the social existence of women in traditional societies, because some aspects of the social existence of women in traditional societies were the product of social customs, and had no relationship with Confucian principles.  For example, we find no textual support for the practice of concubinage in Confucian teachings.  In fact, according to classical customs, the nobles could not remarry, and indeed could only marry once, even if their wife died, because remarriage might lead to confusion in the inheritance of political power.  But if they couldn't get married, then what happened when a wife died?  A nobleman could not remain single just because his wife died, so in ancient society the custom came to be to allow the nobility to have one wife but many "companions." This was the system wherein the nobility took as companions the sisters of the wife.  But this system was confined to people with national power, and was not widespread in society.  When we look at traditional Confucians like Confucius, Mencius 孟子, Sima Guang 司马光, Zhu Xi 朱熹, Wang Yangming 王阳明, and Liu Zongzhou 刘宗周, we note that none of them had concubines.  Liu Zongzhou established a "group of witnesses 证人会" whose charter clearly stated that none of the members could take a concubine without a good reason.  This meant that only when the wife was unable to bear children could one take a concubine to continue the family line.  But Confucians did not universalize concubinage, arguing that anyone could unconditionally take a concubine, much less encourage concubinage.  In fact, the custom of one man taking many wives was a widespread custom among all traditional peoples, and has no direct connection to basic Confucian principles, and when "May Fourth" period intellectuals blamed concubinage on Confucianism, this was unjust.