Xu Jilin, "What Body for Confucianism"

Xu Jilin, What Body for Confucianism's Lonely Soul?[1]

Translated by David Ownby
 
Translator’s introduction
 
This essay was originally published in 2014 in Southern Weekend (Nanfang zhoumo 南方周末), one of China’s most popular weekly newspapers, known for its relatively liberal and independent stance.  As such, the tone of the text is relatively informal and non-academic (there are no footnotes).  Often, Xu attempts to write both for his colleagues and for the educated public.  Here he appears to be writing for the public in general, although many references are still fairly learned.  The text is closer to a long op-ed than to a scholarly article, in accord with Xu’s vision of himself as a public intellectual.
The subject of the essay is the role that Confucianism will play in China’s future, a topic often addressed in contemporary China, if more frequently by New Confucians and other cultural conservatives than by liberals.  Consequently, if Xu’s quarrels are basically with the New Left in his essays on statism and historicism, here his “adversaries” are New Confucians like Jiang Qing 蒋庆 [2], who argues that Confucianism should become China’s “national religion” and serve as the core of China’s future politics via a tricameral arrangement that will include a meritocratic Confucian elite, a separate body of descendants of Confucius himself, and a third elected body.  Xu is scornful of the New Confucians, in part because of what he sees as their nakedly political ambitions, but also because, as an intellectual and historian, he doubts the quality of their “Confucianism.”  Consequently, as he does elsewhere in this volume, Xu uses history as a means to frame the issues, get the “facts” straight, and render his judgement, which might be read as a sort of liberal appropriation of Confucianism. 

It is perhaps striking that Xu takes for granted that Confucianism will necessarily play a role in China’s future (and that a discussion of China’s future does not include the words “socialism,” “communism,” “revolution,” “Mao” or “Deng”).    The point is to decide—intellectually—which role Confucianism should play, which Xu frames as a series of choices.  The first choice is for Confucianism to resume a political role much like it had under the dynasties, a choice that Xu implicitly associates with the propositions of China’s contemporary New Confucians.  For Xu, this is not possible, first because the New Confucians have oversold the supposed “benevolence” that was at the heart of Confucian rule.  Following his fellow liberal Qin Hui 秦晖 [3], Xu argues that traditional rule in China was in fact dominated by a Machiavellian Legalism masquerading as compassionate Confucianism.  And even if Xu admits that there were many periods of strong, effective rule under the dynasties, the Legalist-Confucian order never solved the riddle of good government: “the legitimacy of rule, effective limits to power and orderly succession.”

A second choice would be for Confucianism to become the religion of the Chinese people.  Not the state religion, which would be part of the first choice, but a genuine religion that addressed popular concerns concerning the meaning of life and death.  Here, Xu finds Confucianism itself wanting.  Traditionally, Xu insists, Confucianism was an elite affair; “cultivated gentlemen” adopted it as a life strategy and a personality type.  Of course, some elements of Confucianism deeply penetrated and structured China’s “little tradition,” whose operating principles included filial piety, hierarchy, and kinship ties.  Confucian rituals were omnipresent, but, in Xu’s reading, did not respond to transcendent questions of life and death as did Buddhism, Daoism, Islam and Christianity. 
Xu’s choice for the future of Confucianism is as a “civil religion,” a term he borrows from the influential American sociologist Robert Bellah (although the idea goes back to Rousseau).    Civil religion refers to the basic values that bind a community.  These values may have been “religious” at some point, supported by scripture and preached in places of worship, but at some point have become secularized and inform both daily social interactions and political practice.  A recurring theme in Xu Jilin’s work—and in contemporary Chinese culture at large—is the moral vacuum in which China finds itself.  Maoism debunked and discarded Confucianism, but the revolutionary culture created in the People’s Republic was itself discredited by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and by the materialism of the reform period.  For Xu, Confucianism can and should fill this vacuum, both because as a central part of China’s past it continues to resonate with many of China’s people, and because it can easily coexist with liberal political institutions.  Thus the future China that Xu images is one in which social cohesion is provided by a reembrace of Confucianism, and democratic politics provided by liberalism.
           
For 2000 years, Confucianism served as traditional China's common culture and official ideology, but a hundred years ago, under Western attack, Confucian culture disintegrated, losing its institutional and social basis.  Despite the efforts of several generations of New Confucian scholars to turn back the tide and carry forward the lost tradition, Confucian principles are still but a lonely soul[4], drifting about in the sky of a small number of elites, unable to reconstitute its body on mother earth.

Traditional Confucianism was impressive because it had two institutional bodies.  The first was the Han dynasty appointment of the Masters of the Five Classics 五经博士 and the examination system established under the Song.  Thanks to these institutional innovations, Confucianism became the official ideology established by the monarchy, and Confucian scholars also became the sole source of officials serving the empire.  The second body was the custom of social organization via patriarchal lineages, rituals, and popular religion.  Confucianism was premodern culture's "little tradition," and was deeply embedded among the people, becoming the source of daily ethics conduct, if at an unconscious level.  Yet these two bodies were both shattered by the arrival of modern society, and the institutions completely disappeared.  After a century of tribulation, Confucianism seems to have hopes of revival in the twenty-first century, but most of the current excitement is confined to the academy, where a small number of elites argue for its vigorous return, in the hopes of reversing the desolate state of institutional Confucianism. But the soul of Confucianism continues to float; if the skin is not saved, where will the hair grow?[5] 

    How can one transform a Confucianism which for a century has had its soul divorced from its body, so that it can find an institutional attachment?  Compared to the older generation of academic New Confucians like Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909-1995), Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909-1978), and Tu Wei-ming  杜维明 (b. 1940), who emphasized Confucian doctrine, there is today a new generation of Confucians who have begun to understand the importance of institutional Confucianism.  This, plus the encouragement of the authorities, together with the spiritual hunger of society at large, has provided an unprecedented opportunity to the institutional Confucians for the revival of Confucianism.  So the question is:  which body will the soul of Confucianism inhabit?  Will it look up, and manifest the Way through winning the rulers?  Or will it look down, and manifest the Way by enlightening the people?
                           
Confucianism as Official Ideology:  A Dead-End Idea
 
Unlike Protestantism or Buddhism, Confucianism is not only a philosophy of life, but also has a strong political nature.  Indeed, its greatest accomplishments lay in government, in realizing the goal of ruling the country and bringing peace to the world.  Despite the Confucians' heavy political burden, they had fatal weak spots:  compared to Protestants, Confucians lacked economic power, as well as an independent organization that would have allowed them to stand up to monarchical power.  Compared to the citizens of ancient Greece, they also lacked systemic channels permitting political participation.  Although Confucian scholars supposedly swore by Confucius's injunction to "set their will on the Way," and sincerely believed that this Way was superior to the king's power, in fact, in political practice, the Way could only be achieved through power.  The ideal of carrying out the Way required flattering the ruler and using his power.

Because of this unbreakable linkage between Way and power, from ancient times down to the present day, all ambitious Confucians seeking to serve society learned to take the path upward toward power, and constantly sought out enlightened rulers in the hopes of transforming their personal studies into ruling ideology.  Confucians need enlightened rulers, and enlightened rulers need Confucians.  The lesson that Han Wudi 汉武帝 (r. 141-87 BC) and subsequent emperors drew from the fact that the Qin dynasty fell after the reign of the first emperor was that relying solely on legalists and draconian laws to rule the country was insufficient.  Violence and intimidation can subdue the people, but will not win their hearts.  Confucianism preaches benevolent paternalistic government, which rules in the people's interests.  Adding Confucian principles to Legalism brought long-term legitimacy to imperial rule.  As a result, most of China's emperors, from Han Wudi through the great Qing emperors, ruled through a combination of a Confucian exterior and a Legalist interior, occasionally seasoned with elements drawn from Huang-Lao 黄老 Daoism[6] and the realpolitique of the hegemon.      

The alliance between the monarchy and the Confucians was limited, mutually exploitive and fragile.  The monarchy was superstitious and Machiavellian.  As the physical embodiment of power, even the emperor most familiar with the Confucian classics knew that the blood flowing through his veins was the blood of Legalism, and believed that the "laws and methods of governing" were all encompassing.  As for Confucians, benevolent rule was the goal and the monarchy a means to that end.  But even the best Confucians were only tools for the dynasty; the heart of the emperor remained Legalist.  Look at the late Qing Foreign Affairs Movement 洋务运动of the late 19th century, the 1898 Hundred Days’ reform 戊戌变法and the New Policies 新政 of the early twentieth century, all of which sought to reform China through partial Westernization; while scholars and the Qing court both claimed to be "protecting the country," in fact both had ulterior motives.  What the scholars sought to protect by strengthening China was tianxia 天下, the civilizational order dear to Confucians, while the Qing court sought to strengthen China so as to protect the empire, the physical territory dominated by the Manchu nobility.  To save tianxia, the Confucians were willing to change dynasties; to keep their empire, the Qing were willing to sacrifice tianxia.

Since the alliance between the monarchy and the Confucians was based on mutual exploitation, and since their ultimate goals were not the same, a split was inevitable.  For the Confucian scholar, serving a ruler was like serving a tiger:  if he managed to give his all to a ruler for a certain time, then the pain and effort of his life was worthwhile.  In the Former Han period, the fiercely ambitious Han Wudi "discarded the hundred schools and accorded his sole respect to Confucian methods," and the great Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179-114 BC), who gave the empire the Yin-Yang 阴阳and Five Elements 五行theories in a new “Confucian” intellectual synthesis, received imperial favor.  But what the emperor wanted was the legitimacy that Dong's theory conferred on the empire, and he hated Dong's notion of the "concordance between heaven and man" which placed the "heavenly mandate" above imperial power.  In 135 BC, the Gao temple 高庙 in Liaodong 辽东 where Han Wudi sacrificed to his ancestors burned to the ground, and in thoroughly scholarly manner, Dong Zhongshu argued that this was an expression of heaven's anger with the ruler.  Dong composed a memorial entitled "Disasters resulting from unusual phenomena" but someone secretly informed the court before he could submit it.  Han Wudi was furious, and decided to have Dong Zhongshu beheaded.  Later he relented out of respect for Dong's abilities, and granted a pardon, but Dong lost his position, and he never again intervened in the affairs of government.  He spent his sunset years studying and writing.   

The link between Confucianism and Legalism suggests that the monarchy and the Confucians ruled tianxia together, but in fact in terms of power the bond was unequal and lacked institutional guarantees.  Imperial power was active and dynamic, while the scholars were passive.  The political space available to the Confucians depended completely on whether the ruler was enlightened, on the extent to which he was open to their proposals.  Over the centuries, China knew good times and bad in cycles of good governance and disorder.  This was not caused by the system but rather by the nature of the rulers and ministers who governed the state.  Of course there were the enlightened reigns of the Wen 文帝 (r. 180-157 BC) and Jing 景帝 (r. 157-141 BC) emperors under the Han, the peak of Tang prosperity during the Kaiyuan 开元 period of the Tang (713-741), but as 20th century Chinese historian Qian Mu 钱穆 (1895-1990) said, even if Han Wudi or Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 598-649) were able rulers, they still did not establish a good system.  Under an enlightened ruler, everything flourishes, but if he is followed by a poor ruler, the people are lost as government disappears.  What was lacking was precisely long-range institution building.

The 20th-century New Confucian Mou Zongsan had an important insight:  premodern Chinese politics paid attention to ruling, but not to government.  Confucianism provided abstract theories concerning paternalistic rule in the people’s name, and Legalism provided mature tools to control society and ride herd on a bureaucracy.  But Confucian doctrine was too empty, and Legalism too focused on the nuts and bolts of ruling, and neither was able to achieve a government transcending the ruler and according the greatest power to the legislature, which would be a hardy constitutional order.

Of course, traditional Confucian politics was not without value.  Over the course of several thousand years of historical practice of alliances with and struggles against imperial power, Confucians accumulated a rich store of political wisdom: the marriage of moral and political authority, the collaboration of Confucians and rulers to rule tianxia, the practice of listening to criticism from below, the examination system and the censorate—such political wisdom and institutional practice derived from the popular will and took heavenly principles as their highest value.  With Confucian scholars serving as a nexus of social power, over a comparatively long period they limited imperial absolutism, so that in certain dynasties and periods Chinese politics maintained an enlightened, rational order, enabling the ancient Chinese empire to maintain more than two thousand years of enlightened rule over a vast territory, a huge population, and a varied culture.

Yet Confucian politics had internal limitations that it could not overcome.  It had abstract doctrine and was skilled in the craft of ruling, yet it lacked basic laws in matters of government administration, so that at its best it still had to rely on the individual moral character of virtuous rulers and officials, and could not at a basic level resolve the three core questions of modern politics:  the legitimacy of rule, effective limits to power, and orderly succession.  From this perspective, the value of restoring Confucian politics in a modern society is not immediately obvious.  Whether Confucianism can have value in the future is entirely dependent on how Confucianism is attached to the system.  If we return to a system with a Confucian exterior and a Legalist heart, consistent with the ancient Qin-Han system, an old system which was never entirely functional for two thousand years, how can we expect it to flourish in the twenty-first century?

The true hope of political Confucianism is to be carefully grafted onto a modern system containing the rule of law and democracy, after which the wisdom of the elite would transcend private interests and cancel out the populist politics of one-man-one-vote, and the public-minded notion of “the world belongs to all” (tianxia weigong 天下为公) would redirect struggles between interest groups toward common concerns.  Confucian politics itself is neither good nor bad in the abstract; everything depends on who they partner up with.  If it can, as the former generation of New Confucians like Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi suggested, relocate its place within a legal, democratic framework, then it might generate its own transformation.
 
Confucianism as Religion:  An Unrealizable Dream
 
The road up toward official ideology is a dead end.  But Confucianism still has another option, which is to take the road down to the people and transform itself into a Confucian religion, becoming a religion of the soul, like Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism and Daoism.

In the past few years, the process of secularization in China has hollowed out people's souls.  In response to spiritual emptiness, a vacuum of values and loss of meaning, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam and many kinds of popular religion have developed very quickly, accompanying the spiritual crisis provoked by secularization, and the religious revival has reached a point of no return.  Where is Confucianism in all of this?  Can Confucianism transform itself to become like Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity and Islam, a genuine religion with a place among the people?

Turning Confucianism into the Confucian religion has been tried in the past.  The late Ming left-wing Confucians, Wang Yangming 王阳明 (1472-1529) and the Taizhou school transformed the Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) orthodox Neoconfucian tradition and set its sights on the people, giving lectures to the masses.  They believed that everyone possessed innate knowledge and that everyone could become a sage.  They preached among the common people of all walks of life and attracted a good many followers, and were not far from establishing a religion.  Of course, the greatest effort to turn Confucianism into a religion was undertaken in the early Republican period by Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858-1927) and Chen Huanzhang 陈焕章 (1881-1933) and their organization, the Confucian Religion Society 孔教会.  Kang Youwei was merely the spiritual leader; the real organizer was Chen Huanzhang, the philosophy Ph.D. from Columbia University.  Chen not only set up the Confucian religion in a way that imitated Protestantism, he also added modern content and rituals.  Still, his efforts ended in failure.  The most important reason for the failure was that although Kang and Chen circulated among the people, their hearts were in the imperial court.  They couldn't bear the indifference of the people, and sought to use state power to make Confucianism into a state religion.  Those involved in the Confucian Religion Society were old and young fogeys from the Qing court as well as frustrated, unemployed politicians and traditional gentry.  They were backward-looking and greedy, and unconcerned about saving souls—their ambitions were political. The Confucian Religion Society was not even up to the standards of the Wang Yangming movement of the late Ming, and was quite distant from society and out of touch with the common people.  They borrowed Christian forms, but had none of the Christian spirit; they did not resist political power, or diligently sow their seeds among the people, and displayed none of the true religious spirit of changing the world through saving people's souls. 

In the past few years, the New Confucian group led by Jiang Qing (b. 1953) has set off on the same dead-end path as the Confucian Religion Society.  They have set up popular academies and studies, but are not content with grass-roots society and instead want to return to the halls of power and have Confucianism recognized as the national religion, with the traditional Four Books and Five Classics at the center of education, or perhaps even the subject matter for national exams.  If Confucianism were to become the national religion, and the Four Books and Five Classics 四书五经 the subject of the college entry exams, that would be the end of the Confucian religion, which would either turn into a ruling ideology or a stepping stone to self-promotion that scholars would honor and loathe at the same time.

According to my own observations, there is a great difference between popular Confucian religion on the mainland and in Taiwan.  Taiwan's Confucian religion has a grass-roots feel and a human touch.  It is rooted in popular society and concerned with the suffering of the people.  It is devoted to the reconstruction of the spiritual order.  On the mainland, while some of the followers of Confucian religion are among the people, most seem like grifters or officials.  These two occupy different positions, but they share a personality type in that they both want to tell people what to do.
Huang Jinxing 四书五经 (b. 1950), a Taiwan-based scholar of Confucian religion and Confucian temples, has pointed out that the traditional Confucian temple was a sacred space closely linked to state power.  Sacrifices at the Confucian temple were displays of state power, in a space that the people dared not enter, a closed space that evoked respect and fear.  There was a Confucian whose penname was "man awakened from dreams 梦醒子," who even in his dreams wanted to eat a piece of cold pork in the Confucian temple, exclaiming that "it would be a shame to live a whole life without eating a piece of sacrificial meat." Huang Jinxing pointed out that the common people respected Confucius but felt no intimacy toward him, and that Confucian religion "is at the base a national religion, not the religion of a private person.  It is a public religion, not an individual religion."  The basic nature of Confucian religion is too elitist, and its preoccupations are the great questions of governance, and in a society that lacks democracy, Confucianism has no other choice than to rely on state power to carry out its ideal of saving the world.

For the average person, the heavens are distant and the emperor far away.  The average person's religious needs are for salvation, spiritual support, faith in destiny, and a sense of the meaning of life and death.  Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity and Islam all make such promises and hence can serve as something for the people to believe in.  Confucianism has a religious character, but it is a scholar's religion, that pays more attention to the here and now, human affairs, and rationality.  Jiang Qing built his Yangming Study 阳明精舍in Guizhou, and led followers there to read the sacred books, but they have no connection with local villagers, who don't identify with Jiang and his followers.  The villagers also took the tiles specially made for Jiang’s study and used them on a Buddhist Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin 观音) temple in the village that needed it more.  Clearly, today's Confucian revival remains the affair of a small number of elites running around in their own little circles.  It has nothing to do with grass-roots society.

This is not surprising.  Confucianism is not a religion of revelation, and belief is not the most important thing.  What Confucians hold dear is individual cultivation, in which one achieves a certain enlightenment at the level of knowledge, and then through moral practice becomes a model gentleman or a sage.  But the demands in terms of knowledge and moral character are too high, and can only be the ideal of a small number of scholars.  Average people need "belief," or more precisely, they hope to obtain spiritual protection through simple religious rituals.  It doesn't matter whether it is the protection of a transcendent god, or a simplistic religious ritual.  These two are Confucianism's weak points.  Were Confucianism to become a popular religion like Christianity or Buddhism, this would go against Confucianism's original nature, and abandon its historical tradition and social position. The Confucian tradition has been very well preserved in South Korea and Taiwan, yet to date we see no moves toward the creation of a Confucian religion at the level of individual religious meaning.  Why would this happen on the mainland where the Confucian tradition has been cut off?                 
  
Confucianism as a Set of "Civil Teachings"; Investing Hope in the People
 
Historical Confucianism had a single soul, yet it had three bodies, or modes of existence:  one was as the “national religion” of the rulers and officials, and another was as Neo-Confucian philosophy.  Both of these have fairly clear religious components.  The third is as a religion of order building on ethical and moral concerns.  Instead of calling this a religion, I prefer to adopt the contemporary New Confucian scholar Qiu Feng's 秋风 (b. 1966) term "civil teachings."

These "civil teachings," as I understand them, refer not to the Western notions of religion that we might find in Confucianism, but instead Confucianism's own "human transformations." We can identify four dimensions:  First, Confucianism is less concerned with belief and revelation than other religions, and instead seeks to carry out the Way through rational self-consciousness and moral practice. Second, Confucianism does not communicate with the spirits to ask for protection via prayer, worship, and other religious means, nor does it aspire to an eternal life in a transcendent realm.  Instead it focuses on actual life as lived, and through civil transformation, employing the rituals of secular daily life, conveys Confucian doctrines to people's hearts, producing excellent customs.  Third, Confucianism does not provide the meaning of life and ultimate values for individual spiritual order, but rather builds an ethical, moral order commonly shared by society as a whole, through the transformation of "benevolence" into "ritual."  Fourth, Confucian ethical and moral values and its norms are internalized in other formal religions, in popular religions, in ancestor worship, and in sacrifices in daily life.  This is what is meant by the expression "using the spirit world to inculcate virtue."  Confucianism might be seen as a sort of "latent religion," quietly working among the people, who employ it without their conscious knowledge.

Looking at the three historical bodies of Confucianism in the context of modern society, the idea of hoping for a new honeymoon with state power as official ideology is a dead end.  I would add that seeing it as tool for self-cultivation is also the affair of a small number of elites, with little relationship to most citizens.  In my opinion, Confucianism's most important function in China's future is to develop into a set of civil teachings with common ethics and morals at its core that would contribute to the reconstruction of a proper Chinese social order.

In that case, if Confucianism were seen as civil teachings leading to the establishment of an ethical, moral order, then what would its relationship be to other religions and to liberalism?  China is different from the West in that it is polytheistic.  Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism were combined as the “three teachings,” but Daoism and Buddhism were religions, while Confucianism was a sort of civil teaching, and all three had their own function and territory.  Qiu Feng argues that China has "one civil teaching and many religions," which in a word sums up the true nature of the relationship between Confucianism and other religions.  Because Confucianism was a civil teaching that sought only to create public order, it maintained an open, inclusive attitude to other religions that worked at the individual, spiritual level.  Even though the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming periods incorporated Buddhism into Confucianism and developed its own cultivation system and sense of life direction, Confucianism remained nonetheless too rational and its teachings too elevated.  It was a religion only for scholars, and ordinary people couldn't digest it.  And even among scholars, Confucianism as a system of religious cultivation had its limits, because it only talked about the present world, not about the after-life.  Given its over-emphasis on human concerns and its insufficiency in matters of gods and spirits, those Confucians who were concerned about cycles of rebirth or who had spiritual pursuits turned to Buddhism or Daoism or Christianity.

From the opposite perspective, Buddhists, Daoists and Christians living in the Confucian world also followed secular Confucian ethics, honored their parents, sacrificed to their ancestors, and respected local customs, which produced Confucianized Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and Daoist priests.  As a set of civil teachings, Confucianism was supple and yielding, and worked its way into all religious traditions, whether native or foreign.  On the one hand it nativized and Confucianized foreign religions; on the other it absorbed elements from other religious traditions, further consolidating its position as a civil teaching that transcended other religions.

So is Confucianism, seen as a set of civil teachings, in conflict with liberalism, which also seeks to establish a good public order?  Although Confucianism and liberalism are both secular theories, they nonetheless have their own points of emphasis and territories.  Even if liberalism has its own ethical values, at base it is a set of political philosophies, and it pursues political philosophies that conform to personal ethical values.  While Confucianism, seen as civil teachings, has its own political thoughts, it remains at base a set of ethical philosophies, and it pursues a ritual and political order in daily life.  The Confucianism that truly conflicts with the political philosophy of liberalism is not the Confucianism of civil teachings, but rather political Confucianism, the doctrine of rulers and officials.  Of course, this conflict is not absolute.  As I said above, some of political Confucianism's political wisdom can complement areas where liberal politics are insufficient.

Confucianism as civil teachings should not conflict with liberalism.  Should the two come to blows it will be at their own expense and will profit their common enemy, Legalism.  They should act like husband and wife on the weekend, sometimes together, sometimes apart, helping one another out.  According to the theory of Habermas (b. 1929), modern society is divided into a systems-world and a lifeworld.  The systems-world revolves around the market and power.  Liberalism aims to be the master of the world of systems, using power and contracts to set norms for the market, and using law and democracy to constrain power.  But outside of the world of systems there is another world that is not utilitarian, where people exchange feelings.  In many countries, this world is governed by religion, but in China, this is the territory that Confucianism should govern. 

Habermas particularly stresses that systems-world and the lifeworld each has its own values, which are valid as long as they do not transgress their boundaries.  The problem is that in today's society, the systems-world is colonizing the lifeworld, applying the principles of the market and of power, so that the natural relations among people are full of utilitarianism bereft of personality, feeling and ethics.  If it's not the domination of hierarchies of power, then it’s the control of the money from market exchange.  In China, we also have the inverse situation, wherein the lifeworld invades and colonizes the world of systems.  As the ethical principles of the lifeworld, Confucianism invades market space or political territory, looking for connections in the egalitarian space of the market, talking about personal connections in the sober world of the legal order.  In these cases, Confucianism transgresses its proper status, and the harm it does is not less than what occurs when systems colonize the lifeworld. 

In today's twenty-first century world, systems are increasingly globalized and universalized.  This is what modern civilization is.  But the lifeworld is different, its space is cultural, and different countries, different peoples, different groups quite rightly have their distinctive cultures and lifeworlds.  Civilization is universal; culture is particular.  The reason that Confucianism is important to China is that China lives not only in a universal civilization governed by systems, it also has a vibrant lifeworld with its own history, tradition, and cultural nature.  "The end of history" is not frightening from the perspective of systems.  It is frightening to imagine the end of the lifeworld, the "universally homogenized state" that worried the Russo-French philosopher and statesman Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968).  From this perspective, China needs Confucianism, a Confucianism of civil teachings that protects the lifeworld itself.

China's future cultural order should be three-dimensional.  The first dimension is that of political culture, which has to do with the proper choice, the right choice, of our common political order.  Here, liberalism will play a leading role, but the Confucian tradition and the socialist tradition will both contribute their wisdom.  The second dimension is that of that of public ethics, with the way we envision human relationships.  This is the proper territory of the civil teachings brand of Confucianism, which ethical liberalism and other religious traditions will serve as complements.  The third dimension is that of the individual soul, and has to do with choices concerning morality, the meaning we attribute to life on earth, questions of life and death, or forgiveness and salvation.  This will include Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in a plural space with many religions.  China's particular tradition of religious pluralism will allow Chinese citizens to make their choices from within this space, or even combine them to make their own.

Which body will the lonely soul of Confucianism inhabit?  As a doctrine for rulers and officials, history has shown that this is a dead end.  As a form of cultivation, it's only a religion for the elite.  The broadest perspective for Confucianism in China's future is as a civil teaching that will build a public ethical order.  This civil teaching should not be propagated by state power, but should join together with civil society, and develop naturally and spontaneously at the popular level.  From its origins with Confucius, Confucianism began in the countryside, and developed among the people.  Only later did it enter into the imperial court and become official doctrine, and finally at the end it followed the dissolution of imperial power and fell into desuetude, becoming a lonely soul for a full century.  If Confucianism wants to reassume a full, vibrant life, its only choice is to return to its original point of departure, and take up its place once again with the people.

Notes

​[1] “Rujia guhun, roushen hezai? 儒家孤魂肉身和在” Nanfang zhoumo, September 4, 2014.  Also available online at http://www.infzm.com/content/103951.
 
[2] A helpful English-language introduction to and discussion of Jiang’s views can be found in Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order :  How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape its Political Future, Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan, eds. (Princeton :  Princeton University Press, 2012).
 
[3] Qin Hui is profiled online in Australian National University’s “The China Story.”  See https://www.thechinastory.org/key-intellectual/qin-hui-%E7%A7%A6%E6%99%96/ .  See also, Qin Hui, “Dividing the Big Family Assets,” in Wang Chaohua, ed., One China, Many Paths (London:  Verson, 2003), pp. 128-159.
 
[4] Translator’s note:  Xu here modifies the well-known historian Yu Ying-shih’s reference to Confucianism as a “wandering soul,” first employed in a talk given in Singapore in 1988.  For a published version of Yu’s lecture, see Yu Ying-shih, Zhongguo wenhua yu xiandai bianqian 中国文化与现代变迁 (Chinese culture and modern change), (Taibei: Sanmin, 1992), pp. 95-102. John Makeham pursues a similar strategy in his Lost Soul, “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).  
 
[5] Translator’s note:  A Chinese four-character expression (chengyu 成语) which means “how to restore something once its original foundation has disappeared?”
 
[6] Translator’s note:  Huang-Lao Daoism (the Daoism of the Yellow Emperor and of Laozi) was an influential body of thought in the early Han period, combining Daoist, Confucian, and Legalist traditions.
 
[7] Translator’s note:  Yin-yang and Five Element theories are cosmological explanations for the origin and evolution of natural and social life that preceded Confucius (and the Zhou period in general) by centuries.  Dong Zhongshu “integrated” them into his version of Confucian doctrine.
 
[8] Translator’s note:  The Four Book and Five Classics were the core of the Confucian textual corpus, and the basis of the examination system by which government officials were selected from the Song dynasty forward.
 
[9] Translator’s note:  Xu’s tone is sarcastic here, suggesting that many Confucians dreamed only of becoming an object of sacrifice in the Confucian temple.