Qin Hui, "Jing Ke Stabs Confucius"

Qin Hui, “'Jing Ke Stabs Confucius' and 'Zilu Sings the Praises of Qinshihuang'”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Qin Hui (b. 1953), who taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement, is a historian and one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals.  Translations of several of his essays, treating topics as diverse as Thomas Piketty’s Twentieth- First Century Capitalism and “China seen from South Africa” are available on this site.
 
The text translated here draws from Qin’s Leaving the Imperial System Behind (走出帝制), his 2016 volume that was banned in December of 2015, shortly before it was to be launched (pre-publication volumes were available, and were removed from the stores).  Although both Wang Chaohua and Jeremiah Jenne offer quite thorough reviews of Qin’s book, my impression is that the banning of the volume drew more notice than the book itself, particularly outside of China.  This is unfortunate, because the book is Qin’s heartfelt, polemical reply to a body of conservative (often New Confucian) scholarship that has, in recent years, called into question received wisdom concerning the Revolution of 1911, the May 4th/New Culture Movement, and indeed, much of the Republican period. 

These conservatives write from a presentist perspective, convinced that China’s rise, propelled by “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is the way of the future, American liberal capitalism and Soviet communism both having failed.  If China does not need the West now, the argument goes, she didn’t need it in the early 20th century either.  China was well on the way toward the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, which would have been a better cultural “fit” than either Republicanism or Soviet socialism.  Such Westernizing “errors” wrought an unnecessary rupture with China’s glorious traditional civilization as well as a series of wrong-headed revolutions.
 
Qin’s volume is meant to refute such arguments, and in fact offers a spirited retelling of China’s history from the early 20th century through the Communist victory.  To get a sense of the scope of Qin’s argument, consult Wang Chaohua’s review.  Here I will largely limit my remarks to the translated text.
 
Qin’s major point, which of course relates to much of his work over the course of his career, is that the Revolution of 1911 was hugely important, if still an unrealized promise.  It is important because it represents a break with China’s imperial history, what Qin calls the “Qin system.”  The core of the Qin system was Legalist autocracy, wrapped in thin layer of pliant Confucianism, in which all power was concentrated in the emperor, even if the emperor rarely assumed his responsibilities toward the people. 
 
This reading of China’s history means that imperial rule only pretended to be Confucian.  To find a genuine “Confucian tradition” we must return to pre-Qin times and rejoin Confucius, Mencius and their disciples, all of whom praised the Three Dynasties and detested the Qin, but who lost out to “Legalized” Confucians such as Han Fei and Xunzi.  Over the long centuries of imperial rule, most “Confucians” were in fact preening, corrupt power-seekers, praising the emperor in return for wealth and prestige.  That said, the original Confucian spirit did not completely die out, but continued to serve as an intellectual resource for those opposed to the abuses of the Qin system.
 
Of course, such posturing and hypocrisy did not cease with the end of the imperial system, and indeed continue to this day.  There were any number of figures during the transition from Qing rule to the Republic who claimed to be defending Confucianism while instead hoping to revive autocracy, as well as Westernizing iconoclasts who attacked the evils of China’s family system not to liberate the individual, but to make the individual more available to the state.  This is the source of the intriguing title of Qin Hui’s piece.  In traditional accounts, Jing Ke sought to assassinate the Qin emperor, and Zilu sang the praises of Confucius or the Duke of Zhou, but Qin wants to draw our attention to hypocrisy and role reversals, as well as to the blinders of ideology.
 
The major object of Qin’s scorn in this piece is Kang Youwei, the mercurial figure supposedly behind the 1898 Reforms, but who ultimately, in Qin’s reading, betrayed the original spirit of Confucianism by attacking China’s family system and arguing that China had all the freedoms it (or anyone else) needed before the end of the Han dynasty.  Kang Youwei is, of course, the darling of the Mainland New Confucians who, in Qin’s eyes, have revived the politics of hypocrisy in recent years by attempting to cast Xi Jinping’s China Dream in a Confucian light (see Ge Zhaoguang’s delicious take-down of the Mainland New Confucians elsewhere on the site).   
 
Indeed, I suspect the perfidy of the Mainland New Confucians (or perhaps of the Chinese intellectual scene in general) is the true object of Qin’s text, which appeared at the end of June 2020 on one of his blogs (and not his WeChat feed), and which strikes me as more strident and angry than Qin usually is.  I happened onto the piece because I was working on another text related to his book on the imperial system, and, as is often the case, wound up reading three or four similar texts in order to understand what Qin was getting at.  The other texts, however, came out in 2015 or 2016, around the time of the publication and the banning of his book.  Why return to these themes in the summer of 2020?  Perhaps because of the saga of Xu Zhangrun, Qin’s erstwhile colleague at Tsinghua?  Perhaps because of recent events in Hong Kong, for which Chinese intellectuals have provided intellectual cover if not legitimacy?
 
My thanks to David Kelly for helping me with some of the more obscure bits of Qin’s text. 
 
Translation
 
Since the late Qing Dynasty, “anti-Legalist Confucianism,” the strain of original Confucianism represented by figures such as Xu Jiyu 徐继畬 (1795-1873), Guo Songtao 郭嵩焘 (1818-1891), Tan Sitong 谭嗣同 (1865-1898), and even Lao Naixuan 劳乃宣 (1843-1921),[2]  which opposes the Qin system 秦制[3] and criticizes Legalism, has gradually lost its voice. An “anti-Western Confucianism,” which opposes the "Westernization" championed by the New Culture Movement, has taken its place and has become increasingly common among self-proclaimed Confucians.

Apart from extreme “foreign Confucians” like Gu Hongming 辜鸿铭 (1857-1928) [4] who “studied in the West” and stands out as unique, after Lao Naixuan, most Confucians claiming to be "orthodox" have been keen to draw a clear line between Confucianism and Western learning, but have at the same time have blurred the boundaries between ancient Confucianism and the Qin-Han system, or even gone so far as to extol this system, falling once again into the muddy pit of “Legalism masquerading as Confucianism 儒表法里” a vision in which Confucians are no better than bureaucrats.  This is something that has become increasingly common.
 
This is, in fact, one of the tragic features of Confucianism under the Qin system. From the Warring States period onwards, the ancient Confucians, who worshipped the Zhou and hated the Qin 崇周仇秦 and resisted the "Zhou-Qin transition 周秦之变," came to be divided under the increasing pressure of the tyrannical rule of the Legalists.   Although it is often said that “there were eight groups of Confucians,”[5] the basic division was between Confucius’s grandson Zisi 子思 (482-403 BC) and Mencius 孟子 (372-289 BC), who upheld the moral orthodoxy of the Three Dynasties,[6]  and Xunzi 荀子 (310-235 BC), who supported the Qin on the principle that “the talented man is the one who can recognize current trends.”
 
This second group rejected the optimism of the ancient Confucians on the premise that man’s basic nature is evil.  They chose the strength and power of the latter-day Legalist king 法后王 over the orthodoxy of the former kings, upended the ancient Confucian logic of the small community of the pre-Qin order (“kill the ruler for your father if you must, but do not kill your father for the ruler”), their new logic being “respect your ruler, not your father.”  Xunzi trained Han Fei 韩非 (280-233 BC), Li Si 李斯 (280-208 BC), and other lackeys of the Qin system on the basis of this philosophy.
 
This does not in fact prove what some people argue, which is that Legalism traces its origins to Confucianism, because there is a straight line from Legalist pioneers like Zichan 子产 (Guo Sunqiao 公孙侨, d. 522 BC) and Li Kui 李悝 (455-395 BC), to the three branches of Legalism identified throughout history:  Shang Yang’s 商鞅 (390-338 BC) “law “法,” Shen Buhai’s 申不害 (400-337 BC) “techniques 术,” and Shen Dao’s 慎到 (350-275 BC) “tendencies 势,” as well as Han Fei, generally considered to be the one who combined the three, all came before Xunzi.[7] 

But Xunzi, Han Fei and Li Si did embody a movement of the some Confucians toward an accommodation with power.  The conflict between the Confucians and the Legalists arising out of the Zhou-Qin transition evolved into the conflict between two groups of self-proclaimed Confucians :   the “anti-Legalist Confucians” and the fake, “Legalist” Confucians, defending what I called above “Legalism masquerading as Confucianism.”
 
The end of the Qin period thus saw, on the one hand, the “burning of books and burying of Confucians,” and Mencius was a particular object of suppression; as the saying has it  “all of the followers of Mencius are now dead.”  This led to a fierce resistance, culminating in the general Confucian practice of  “criticizing the present on the basis of the past.”   An example is the story of Kong Jia 孔甲, the eighth-generation descendant of Confucius, who led his disciples…“to gather up the ritual vessels that had belonged to Confucius and went to serve under King Chen [She].”   Kong eventually joined Chen She’s uprising against the Qin, and died with him in a revolt alongside “gentlemen and scholars” as well as “farmers and laborers.”[8]

But a second outcome of the late Qin was represented by the emergence a great number of Confucians like Shusun Tong 叔孙通 (d. 188 BC) “who served ten masters, and earned trust and riches by flattering them to their faces.” As Sima Qian put it,  what Shusun Tong and his ilk aimed for was “to follow the Qin.” “Although the Qin did not conform to the sacred institutions, and exalted the rulers while constraining the ministers,” nonetheless, people like Shusun earned imperial favor, “and as the times evolved, this is what Han Confucianism became.”[9]
 
This struggle continued even into the late Qing-early Republican period.  In the late 19th century, Tan Sitong noted:
 
“Confucianism developed into two branches :  one originated with Confucius’s disciple Zengzi 曾子 (505-435 BC) and went through Zisi to Mencius, and Mencius preached the principles of democracy, carrying forth the will of Confucius…Sadly, this branch died out.  Xunzi then pretended to carry forward a fake Confucianism in order to destroy the Confucian way. He talked about the ‘latter-day Legalist king and the tradition of exalting the ruler,’ and pretended this was Confucianism…But in fact, his only concern was that constraints not limit the power of the ruler.  This he transmitted to Li Si, and the disaster made itself known in the world [i.e., in the form of the Qin dynasty].  Scholarship for these people meant pragmatism, plus craving for wealth and fame, and they publicly flattered the powerful in a slavish way with no concern from their status as ministers, seeing their role as accomplices in evil as ‘loyalty;’ they profited from exalting the ruler, suppressing the officials and keeping the people ignorant, allowing violence to run amuck…Over time this meant that two thousand years of government was two thousand years of Qin rule, a collection of great bandits; two thousand years of scholarship was nothing but Xunzi and hypocrisy.  With the bandits using hypocrites 乡愿[10], and the hypocrites exploiting and flattering the bandits, the two fed on one another, and consistently justified all they did as ‘Confucian.’  Yet between the bandits and the hypocrites who propped themselves up this way, and the Confucianism they cite to prop themselves up, how could anyone know Confucius?” 
 
Tan Sitong himself wished to carry forth Mencius, “spreading the ideal of democracy as a reflection of the will of Confucius,”  and saw Qin rule and the teachings of Xunzi as the enemy.  A few decades later one of his fellow Hunanese (Mao Zedong) talked about the “struggle between the Confucians and the Legalists,” and sided with the Legalists, which reflects a difference in value judgements even if Tan and Mao understood Confucianism and Legalism in similar ways.  Yet Kang Youwei 康有为 (1859-1927), Tang’s teacher, moved steadily toward Qin and Xunzi after Kang’s exile in Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform in 1898. 
 
After the 1911 Revolution, Kang consistently opposed democracy and the Republic and remained loyal to the Qing dynasty, as is his right.  Constitutional misrule[11] is not necessarily a bad thing, and the process of regime failure followed by takeover by a worthy successor is something that ancient Confucians would have approved of.  The problem was that in the Republican period, Kang started to extol Qinshihuang and to badmouth the “Three Dynasties,” which goes against ancient Confucian principles.
 
Kang began to criticize the Three Dynasties for being feudal and unequal, and said that :  “Since the Qin and Han abolished feudalism, everyone has been equal, and any commoner could become an official; there remained feudal titles, but they were empty sinecures; there were uniforms but they were only symbols.  But in legal terms, kings, ministers and the common people could be accused of the same crimes.  Rents and taxes were light, coming to roughly ten percent of people’s earnings, and this was the same for rich and poor.  Aside from paying taxes and filing lawsuits, villagers had nothing to do with the officials.  With the exception of one or two ceremonies decorated with yellow and red dragons and phoenixes, the people were free to do as they please.  All sorts of personal freedoms, including commercial freedom, property rights, the right to assemble, the right to speak and to publish, freedom of religion—all of these had been around forever.  Which of the two thousand rights and freedoms obtained the great French Revolution have not been available in China all along, and who had them first?”
 
So the Qin system all along had “freedom of assembly, speech, publication, and religion,” just like after the French Revolution?  Wow, we might as well say that “if there were no Qinshihuang there would be no new China!”
 
But this is nothing.  In his later years, even if Kang Youwei was ridiculed as old and useless because of his hostility to the New Culture Movement and his ostentatious display of numerous wives and concubines, yet in his “scholarship,” he opposed family morality, if not in the more fashionable way of May Fourth youth.  In his Book of Great Unity 大同书, published in his dotage, he noted that “this work is made up of hundreds of thousands of words, but the key is to destroy the family system.”  Could this be called Confucian?
 
Here I should point out that Tan Sitong was executed after the Hundred Days’ reform, and his book, Renxue 仁学, whose goal was to ‘bring in the West to save Confucianism” and which denounced Qin rule and Xunzi, was undoubtedly written before the Hundred Days’ Reform.  Kang’s Book of Great Unity was not.  Everyone knows that Kang liked to invent “historical documents,” either in the case of the “Gongche petition 公车上书,” opposing the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, which falsely inflated his influence, or that of the “imperial edict hidden in the pocket of his gown 衣带诏,”[12] which he forged, are both representative examples.  It is obvious that the Book of Great Unity was one of Kang’s major works, but it is not at all clear that it was written before 1898, as he claimed.
 
Today’s scholars argue that the book was written in the early 20th century while Kang was in India, meaning several years after his exile in Japan, which explains the highly “Meiji” flavor of the work, its exaltation of the powers of the emperor.  Once it was written, Kang constantly revised it, and the first two chapters were finally published in the early Republican period, two chapters that are fairly dull and uninteresting.  The remaining eight chapters, containing the crucial, interesting parts were only published when the entire work appeared after his death, and were probably written in the early Republican period, reflecting his thoughts in his later years.
 
The chief characteristic of these writings is their strong condemnation of the family system.  Indeed, as one researcher noted :  “Kang’s most important theory leading the world toward utopia was ending the family system and making us all ‘people of the world 天民.’”  He proposed the abolition of the family, the suppression of the relations between father and son, the implementation of complete sexual liberation and the “sharing of children,”  all of which surely represent the complete upending of Confucian family ethics.  Kang’s Book of Great Unity shares nothing with the “great unity 大同” we find in the ideals of ancient Confucianism.
 
Although the “great unity” that we find in original Confucianism contained sentiments such as “people should not treat only their parents as parents, nor only their sons as sons,” which is similar to the ethical ideal of “honoring all elderly people as we do our own aged parents, and caring for other people's children as one's own,”[13] which is the same as “loving and respecting others.”  But there is a fundamental difference between this “broad love 泛爱” and the institutional ideal of “universal love 兼爱”  promoted by Mohists[14] at the time.  Confucian broad love still required the institutions of familial order, and the underlying logic of the small community.  “Universal love” was without boundaries, and the authority and responsibility of the father would thus have very firm limits.  “Mohist universal love meant no more fathers,” and according to Mencius’s understanding reduced people to “animals”…In Mencius’s view, this Yang Zhu 杨朱-like individualism was heterodox. 
 
From this perspective, it would make more sense to say that Kang’s Book of Great Unity was Mohist rather than Confucian, but Kang obviously was not a Mohist, because the Mohists, who preached “universal love and pacifism” would not have liked the Qin system.  It is probably significant that Kang Youwei at this point was planning an imperial restoration, or it could be perhaps be explained as part of his attempt to undermine constitutional government, because he was also trumpeting the idea that the Qin and Han had “abolished feudalism” and brought about freedom and equality (which surely suggests that the “restoration” he wanted to bring about was not the restoration of some “ceremonial ruler,” or the “virtuous king of the Three Dynasties,” but was instead the reembodiment of Qinshihuang). 
 
The Kang Youwei of this period looks even more like a Legalist—dismantling the “pseudo-individualism” [15]  of the family system through the manipulation of imperial power to a create a “militarism,” affording unlimited power to the ruler, was his best trick, after all.  But the Confucian ideal based on the small community would be destroyed under the double pressure of the extreme power of the militarized country and “pseudo-individualism.”
 
This Kang Youwei, who preached “destroy the family and worship the Qin” had completely turned his back on the original Confucian idea of “worshipping the Zhou and hating the Qin,” and was even further away from the ideas seen in the 1898 Reform efforts to “bringing in the West to save Confucianism” or in Kang’s Confucius as Reformer.   Kang completely reverted to the stereotype of the “Legalist masquerading as a Confucian,” and was the spitting image of the “hypocrite” attacked by Tan Sitong for “pretending to be a Confucian in order to destroy Confucianism.”  Moreover, he was also trying to set up the Confucian Religion Society 孔教会 and have himself made the head of the church.  From the looks of things, Kang at the time thought that anything was “Confucian” just as long as it did not advocate democracy or republicanism, or uproot the heterodoxy of the Western barbarians.  No wonder that his relatives rejected him and wanted to burn his books and throw him in a pit!   
 
It is no surprise that, even if Kang is worshipped as a sage by some of today’s Mainland New Confucians, it is true that at the time, there were many old Confucians, New Confucians, and various Confucians in between who refused to follow Kang.  For example, Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890-1969),[16] who located his own thought somewhere between that of Zeng Guofan 曾国藩 (1811-1872) and Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 (1837-1909),[17] drew clear distinctions between Kang and his grandfather, Chen Baozhen 陈宝箴 (1831-1900), who was also involved in reviving ancient Confucianism, arguing that even if people at the time took his grandfather to be part of the Kang-Liang reformist group, in fact, his goals and intellectual values were not the same as Kang’s.  According to Chen Yinke, his grandfather was more like Guo Songtao with his emphasis on importing the West to save Confucianism and worshipping the Zhou and hating the Qin.
 
In fact, looking at things dispassionately, the differences between Kang, Tang Sitong, and Chen Baozhen at the moment of the 1898 Reforms were not particularly pronounced, but by the early Republican period, the historical moment that Chen Yinke was discussing, Kang had become a very different person.  The “extreme” nature of his thinking, however, is not mutually exclusive with his practical support for an imperial restoration, which is not hard to understand in terms of the argument developed above. 
 
Nor is it difficult to explain another strange phenomenon of that period :  within the space of just a few years, members of the “law faction 法理派,”[18] who, before the 1911 Revolution, had been the most vociferous critics of “ritual teachings 礼教,” were by this time, that is to say, after the first failure of the Republic, preaching on just such ritual teachings.  Although Yang Du 杨度 (1875-1921) was condemned by his elders having “changed names,”[19]  Yang and people like Zhang Zongxiang 章宗祥 (1879-1962), Dong Kang 董康 (1867-1947), and Wang Youling 汪有龄 (1879-1947), during two imperial restoration attempts of the early Republican period, once again hauled out the banner of “respecting Confucius and reading the classics,” going so far as to advocate that ritual teachings such that criminalizing consensual sexual relations with an unmarried woman 无夫奸入罪, which, prior to the 1911 Revolution they had roundly criticized and done their utmost to remove such statues from legal texts, be reinserted the legal texts at the moment when Yuan Shikai was revising the statutes.[20]
 
Legal scholars have been perplexed by the “collective retreat” engaged in by these figures, who had been part of  “a new school of legal reform in the late Qing.”  But in fact, their original proposals to get rid the legal statues of ritual references to “filial sons” was not to in order establish the Republic, but instead to increase “loyalty to the sovereign” as demanded by the Qin system, and this time around their return to “ritual teachings” was again not for the sake of Confucius, but rather to increase “loyalty to the sovereign” as demanded by the Qin system [in a context of imperial restoration].  Their past posture of “Jing Ke stabs Confucius” was a “fake extremism,” and this round of “Zilu praises Qinshihuang” was a fake conservatism.  They were not protecting the moral king but rather the hegemon king.  Is this a difficult maneuver to pull off?
 
Twenty years earlier, Tan Sitong seems to have seen this coming.  He denounced the first posture as “putting the blame on Confucius without knowing who Confucius was,” and the second as “pretending to be a Confucian in order to destroy Confucianism.”  What he had not imagined was that “magnificent transformation”[21] of one to the other could occur so naturally.
 
In China, for “Jing Ke to stab Qinshihuang”  is much more dangerous than for “Jing Ke to stab Confucius,” and the tangible benefits of “Zilu sings the praises of Confucius” are nowhere near those of “Zilu sings the praises of Qinshihuang.”  As a result, “fake radicalism” and “fake conservatism” tend to be both prolific and interchangeable, while true radicalism and true conservativism are both quite rare.  At a certain point, people were complaining that the word "conservative" was misleading, but the "radicalism" of stabbing Confucius directly, bypassing Qinshihuang, is even more dangerous.  Then a bit later they discovered that “radical” was misleading, but a “conservatism” which is an empty exaltation of Confucius which in fact sings the praises of Qinshihuang is even more nauseating.
 
With all of these transformations, the Jing Ke that stabbed Qinshihuang and the Zilu that sang the praises of Confucius are both beaten black and  blue, and are on the verge of death; and the “fake Jing Ke” who stabbed Confucius, as well as the “fake Zilu who sang the praises of Qinshihuang” are becoming increasingly ambitious.  And the debates since the New Culture Movement, on both “radicalism” and “conservatism,” have grown ever more twisted.
 
During the New Culture Movement, certain extreme conservatives cursed Chen Duxiu and  others of the “Enlightenment” group for “rejecting their fathers and hating filial piety,” which meant destroying Chinese culture, to the point of arguing that the goal of the Chinese Enlightenment was to cast “filial piety as the worst among ten thousand evils, and licentiousness as the first among one hundred benefits.”  Chen’s reply was :  “We do not advocate parents’ and elders’ unreasonable suppression of the legitimate behavior of their sons and daughters and grandchildren solely in the name of filial piety, but we have never opposed the expression of filial piety by children and grandchildren toward parents and elders, to say nothing as having identified filial piety as the worst of all evils which must be detested.”  This is an excellent reply :   when is opposing unreasonable abuse of parental authority, the idea that “if the father wants the son to die the son must die” a rejection of filial piety?  The logic of this is clear and obvious :  true filial piety is not the result of paternal pressure.
 
If the people that make up “Chinese culture” are naturally pious, then why would such threats be necessary to make them toe the line?  And if in the absence of such threats they become rebellious, then how can we say that a “culture of filial piety” truly exists?  If any kind of “cultural value” is only accepted under the threat of death, then what’s the point of talking about “culture?”  To use an extreme example, in Auschwitz, when millions of Jews were forced at gunpoint to enter the gas chambers, can you then say that entering the gas chamber is part of “Jewish culture?”
 
Of course, Chen Duxiu was not without his flaws.  From today’s perspective, what Chen Duxiu and company should be criticized for is perhaps exaggerating the strength of patriarchy at the time.  “If the sovereign wants the minister to die, the minister must die” is truly a Chinese reality.  But the notion that “if the father wants the son to die, the son must die” is an outrageous exaggeration.  
 
Does the greatest obstacle to the achievement of human rights in China really come from our own parents?  Chen Duxiu already said that he did not “oppose parents,” but instead “unreasonable abuse” practiced by parents, and we should acknowledge that harsh, uncaring parents and their “unjustified oppression" of their children truly existed.   But was this “unreasonable abuse” really more representative than that inflicted by “father and mother officials” on strangers in the big community?  Are biological parents the principle source and expression of “unreasonable abuse?”  If we wish to protect human rights in China, do we really need to start by opposing the “unreasonable abuse” by parents?
 
Two thousand years ago, when “a hundred schools of thought contended,” both Confucians and Legalists acknowledged that “the relation between minister and sovereign is not that of flesh and blood,” “the difference between the sovereign and the father, is that the sovereign and the minister do not reside together, so there are limits.”  Comparing the relation of ruler and minister to that of father and son is not a comparison of what should be, but what is.  The ruler should love his minister as the father loves his son, and only then will a minister be loyal to a ruler as a son is loyal to his father.  But the fact that things should be like this does not mean that they are.
 
In reality, the notion of flesh-and-blood family ties, expressed in the saying, “even the tiger, as fierce as it is, does not eat its young 虎毒不食子,” is the way of nature.  There are exceptions, but not many.  The same goes for a father’s love for his children, which rarely makes use of institutional measures.  But there is a great difference when it comes to the ruler’s love for a minister, and evil tyrants and abusive ministers, unconstrained by institutions, “nasty politicians more fierce than tigers,” are not rare at all.  This in fact is a depiction of reality that neither Confucians nor Legalists denied. 
 
They differ however in terms of values:  the Confucians argue that since the relationship between the ruler and the minster should be (but not necessarily will be) modeled on the relationship between father and son, then the ethical position of the father-son relationship is more elevated than that of ruler-minister.  If the ruler-minister relationship cannot duplicate the practice of loving father-filial son, why even talk about that of the benevolent ruler and the loyal minister?  For the Confucians, family love is more important than political exaltation:  “you can kill the king for your father, but not your father for the king.”  Yet the Legalists, with their respect for concentrated power, curse the notion that “the son who is filial to his father is the minister who betrays his ruler,” and Xunzi, who transitioned from Confucian to Legalist, said that it was impossible to respect both ruler and father and that respect for the ruler was greater than respect for the father.  Han Fei finally trumpeted the idea that “the ruler’s steadfast minister is the father’s disobedient son.”
 
In addition, since the idea of  “benevolent ruler-loyal minister” is a question of “ought” rather than “is,” what does the minister do when the ruler is not benevolent?  The Confucians argue that if the ruler is not a ruler than the minister is not obliged to be a minister; tyrants should be overthrown, as in the expressions “support me and I follow you; abuse me and I reject you” or, as Mencius put it, “a man who plunders humanity is called a thief; a man who plunders righteousness is called an outcast. I have heard of the execution of outcast Zhou; I have not heard of the execution of a ruling lord Zhou.” But the Legalists stress unconditional one-sided loyalty, to the point of blatantly advocating loyalty to a tyrant:  “even if the ruler is unworthy, the minister dare not betray him;”  “you must be unconditionally loyal to me, regardless of whether I grace you with my presence.”
 
So people like the elderly Kang Youwei who sing the praises of the Qin and oppose mom and dad are indeed dyed-in-the-wool fake Confucians.   As for Chen Duxiu, while he did not “reject fathers and filial piety,” and while his opposition to “unreasonable abuse”  of patriarchal power is certainly reasonable, nonetheless focusing the campaign for the liberation of the individual on the family system is a case of confusing priorities, and we will neither achieve the liberation of the individual, nor will we distinguish ourselves clearly from Kang Youwei and his Book of Great Unity if we fail to see this.
 
After Kang Youwei, the historian Qian Mu 钱穆 (1895-1990) stands out as the representative figure for the “oppose the West and not the Qin” New Confucians in the Republican period, and while he debated the virtues of Western values versus Confucianism, he said little about the Three Dynasties and rather a lot of nice things about the Confucian system as it existed from the Qin-Han through the Song-Ming periods (Qian Mu disliked the Qing, perhaps for ethnic reasons).
 
Toward the end of the Republican period he noted, in a way that sounds quite contemporary, that he could not bear the violence of the revolution that was destroying the “old society,” because this was a disaster of “Westernization.”  But what is interesting is that he finally took refuge in barbarian-ruled Hong Kong, where he could concentrate on his teaching.  And yet his most famous students, like Yu Ying-shih 余英时 (b. 1930), did not shy away from praising the freedom and democracy created in the West, and while praising the independent character of China’s traditional scholars, also criticized China’s current dictatorship, as well as the pre-1911 dictatorship, which of course was the Qin system. 
 
In fact, most diaspora New Confucians in Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere, such as Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909-1995), Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909-1978), and even Li Minghui 李明辉 (b. 1953), have had similar attitudes.  They all criticize Qin rule, and identify with freedom and democracy.  Especially our era of “opposition to Confucianism and praise for the Qin,” has stimulated the mood of praise for the Zhou and hatred for the Qin among New Confucians outside of China.  Some people, like the Taiwanese economist Hou Jiaju 侯家驹 (1928-2007), have even talked about the “Legalist command economy” and the “Confucian free economy,” not only linking the Confucians the freedom and democracy of  “the world belongs to all 天下为公,” and even to what the Confucian Guo Songtao belittled as the “scraps of Western studies,” meaning commercial techniques.
 
As for the “Confucians” who “oppose the West but not the Qin,” whom we might call “modern-day Shusun Tang-style Confucians,” on the mainland they only began to multiply after the 1990s.  Although some of these New Confucians, like Li Cunshan 李存山 (b. 1951) and Huang Yushun 黄玉顺 (b. 1957), respond to Li Minghui’s call to uphold “anti-Legalist Confucianism,” their voices seem weak in a crowd of Zilus singing the praises of Qinshihuang.
 
Notes
 
[1] 秦晖, “荆轲刺孔子”与“子路颂秦王,” published on Qin Hui’s personal blog on June 28, 2020, available at http://qinhui.blog.caixin.com/archives/230708 .

[2] Translator’s note:  Xu Jiyu was a geographer, best known for his A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit (1849), and is identified as an early supporter of the Self-Strengthening Movement.  Guo Songtao was a Chinese diplomat and statesman and an admirer of England.  Tan Sitong was a Kang Youwei disciple, executed in the wake of the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898.  Lao Naixuan, an influential educator, played an important role in shaping what would eventually become Beijing University.  All of these figures are generally characterized as “reformers” or innovators, and their “Confucian” side, while not ignored, is not usually highlighted.  Qin’s choice of these figures is meant to to underscore the fact that “true” Confucians understood how reform, and particularly Western ideas, could defeat the “Qin system” and restore the spirit of original Confucianism. 

[3] Translator’s note:  The “Qin system” is Qin Hui’s way of referring to the entire imperial period, from the Qin through the Qing dynasties.

[4] Gu Hongming was from Penang, now part of Malaysia, and educated in Scotland.  In the latter part of the nineteenth century, he moved to China where he served in various posts and came to be strongly identified with the imperial regime.

[5] Translator’s note: The 8 groups were “Mencius, Xunzi, Dong Zhongshu, Song Confucianism, Ming Confucianism, Korean Confucianism, Qing Confucianism, and modern Confucianism.”  See http://www.francislewissocialstudies.com/confucianism2.html#:~:text=1)%20After%20the%20death%20of,Qing%20Confucianism%2C%20and%20Modern%20Confucianism .

[6] Translator’s note:  The “Three Dynasties” refer to the Xia, Shang, and Zhou periods, on which Confucius drew to construct his ideas of proper rule.

[7] Translator’s note:  All of these figures and concepts relate to the formative period of the development of Legalism.  For a brief but authoritative overview of this development, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-legalism/ .

[8] Translator’s note:  The incidents and citations in this paragraph are all drawn from various chapters of Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian. 

[9] Translator’s note :  Qin once again cites Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian. 

[10] Translator’s note:  The expression comes from the Confucian Analects, where Confucius denounces 乡愿之徒, “hometown good guys,” what we would have called “good old boys” where I grew up in the American South.

[11] Translator’s note:  Qin uses the expression 君主立陷, which is meaningless in Chinese, except perhaps as a pun on 君主立宪, which means “constitutional rule.”

[12] Translator’s note:  The only reference to this that I was able to locate has to do with Cao Cao, the famous figure of the late Han period, so I do not know what Qin Hui is referring to.  That said, Kang Youwei has often been accused of playing fast and loose with documents.

[13] Translator’s note:  The citation if from Mengzi.

[14] Translator’s note :  Mozi 墨子 (470-391 BC) offered a competing vision to that of Confucius and his followers, preaching, among other things, universal brotherhood—as opposed to the Confucian family vision—an end to excessive ritual practices, and defensive war.  For an overview of Mohist teachings, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohism/.

[15] Translator’s note:  The idea of the “pseudo-individualism” of the family system has to do with Qin’s broader work on Chinese traditional society, in which he both defends the “small communities” at the base of China’s social order against the authoritarian abuses of the Qin system, but also suggests that the “individualism” that one finds within the small communities was compromised by the very Qin system, and was thus less free than in certain other traditional societies. 

[16] Translator’s note:  Chen Yinke was a well-known Chinese historian and humanist who identified strongly with the Confucian tradition.

[17] Translator’s note:  Two important figures in late Qing politics, Zeng being identified more with “Confucianism” and Zhang more with “reform.”

[18] Translator’s note:  The reference is to a debate between ritual and law in late Qing times, see https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%A4%BC%E6%B3%95%E4%B9%8B%E4%BA%89 .

[19] Translator’s note:  For reason’s of personal ambition, Yang changed his given name to “Du” at the age of 16.  See http://www.yhcqw.com/53/12305.html .  In the context of Qin’discussion here, I suppose that changing one’s name without the approval of the elders constituted a violation of ritual practices?

[20] Translator’s note:   In this paragraph, Qin is discussing a debate over law versus ritual that played out in late Qing times, in which proponents of Western concepts of law, like all of the people mentioned in this passage, argued that Chinese legal texts should be purged of items based solely in traditional rituals, and particularly family rituals.  His broader point is to point out the hypocrisy of those who “returned to Confucianism” so as to “seek imperial favor.  For more information on the original debate, see https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%A4%BC%E6%B3%95%E4%B9%8B%E4%BA%89 .

[21] Translator’s note:  Qin’s reference appears to be to a Hong Kong movie, the English title of which is “The Limelight Years.”  See https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%8D%8E%E4%B8%BD%E8%BD%AC%E8%BA%AB/14089943 .