Ancient wisdom of Confucius reverberates in modern China

By Andrew Higgins
Saturday, May 15, 2010; A01

QUFU, CHINA -- Zhong Yong, a wealthy metals trader from the far west of China, recently took a long weekend off work, boarded a four-hour flight across the country and then drove for two hours. His mission: to dress up in a long black robewith crimson trim and tap his head on the ground in front of a wooden statue of Confucius.

"Any businessman with some success wants to do more than just get rich," said Zhong, the chairman of EverSunny trading, who traveled here to the birthplace of Confucius as part of a crash course in Chinese philosophy and religion. It cost him nearly $12,000.

Dressed in mock ancient garb, Zhong, 45, knelt on a gold cushion and sipped Chinese wine from a bronze goblet. Then, amid giggles from bystanders and smoke from burning incense, he kowtowed to honor the ancient sage.

The ceremony, a mix of theme-park gimmickry and earnest ritual that dates back more than two millennia, took place at Qufu's Confucius Temple, the focal point of what, in imperial times, was China's guiding creed.

Today it's the center of a burgeoning personality cult built around a philosopher who died in 479 B.C. It's a movement endorsed by the government but one that is also providing cover to some who question China's direction.

A revival of interest in Confucius and other aspects of what Mao Zedong vilified as China's noxious feudal past has been underway for years, spawning best-selling novels, television dramas and films set in the Imperial Era. The Communist Party, tapping into a deep vein of cultural nationalism, has encouraged the trend, in part as an antidote to Western ways.

Overseas, Confucius has become China's standard-bearer, with dozens of state-sponsored Confucius Institutes, including one at the University of Maryland, promoting the study of Chinese language and culture.

But a Confucian revival sanctioned and initially steered by the party has grown into something more vibrant and also more unpredictable. It has become a quest for alternative ideas that challenge not only foreign imports such as democracy but also some of the homegrown results of China's dash to modernity.

Confucianism, an elaborate system of moral philosophy and political theory, has always been a two-edged sword, both deeply conservative and potentially subversive.

Successive Chinese dynasties, deploying Confucianism to cement their rule, distilled its complexity to a simple message: obedience. Confucius prized hierarchy and order, but he also believed that virtue, not wealth or power, should decide who governs: "If a ruler departs from benevolence, how can he be worthy of that name?"

China's current government is still backing Confucius and has adopted as its own one of his favorite concepts: harmony. But it sometimes has a hard time selling its preferred image of the sage as a bookish patriot, now on display in movie houses across the country thanks to "Confucius," a multimillion-dollar bio-epic. It has been widely panned as a snooze.

Zhong and fellow entrepreneurs who trekked to Qufu to worship at the Confucius Temple are by no means unruly dissidents. They cheer the party's emphasis on stability, applaud its economic success and mostly scoff at the idea that China would be better off with democracy.

But, well-off and well-educated, they relish a once rare but now increasingly widespread privilege: While proud of China's achievements, they have questions about where their country is headed.

"For the past 30 years, China has constantly stressed the economy, not culture, philosophy and reflection," said Michael Ning, who returned from studies in New York and a job outside Chicago to work for a chemical company in Beijing.

The result, said Ning, who also donned a black robe for the visit to the Confucius Temple, is that people "don't have any fixed values" and often feel at sea. "But after you reach a certain economic level, you can start to think," he said.

Ning and Zhong belong to the first batch of 50 students enrolled in the Three Wisdoms Business School, an intensive program in Chinese culture started last year by professors in Beijing. In Qufu, they were tutored by Duan Yanping, a technician at the local electricity company and one of the town's most zealous Confucians. He instructed them on how to bow properly, explained ancient rites and presided over worship at the Confucius Temple.

Far more interested in philosophy than electricity, Duan has set up his own Confucius academy, part of China's growing network of private schools and study groups dedicated to the revival of Confucianism. Unlike government-funded scholars who "just research Confucius," Duan said, "we live Confucius."

Duan's school has formal approval from the state, and he shares the leadership's distaste for democracy. But he also shares many of the concerns of government critics: rampant corruption, corrosive greed and what he called the "ideological chaos" of a nominally communist country guided mostly by the pursuit of profit.

He wants the "Analects" and other Confucian classics put back at the center of education and thinks the country should be run by an elite imbued with Confucian values. "This does not match Western democracy, but it is not dictatorship, either," he said.

Not far from Duan's school are the vast and, on a recent afternoon, mostly deserted premises of the Confucius Research Institute, a state-financed organization.

"If Confucius were alive today, he would probably join the Communist Party," said the institute's deputy director, Kong Xianglin, a 75th-generation descendant of Confucius and a party member for 30 years.

He said Confucianism will never supplant China's official state creed of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" but can complement and reinforce it. Confucius, said Kong, citing an oft-repeated maxim, "believed in 'harmonious while different.' "

At Duan's private academy recently, students gathered for a lecture by Miao Chunbao, a teacher in a state middle school who moonlights on weekends teaching about Confucius. Miao explained how, through the ages, politics has often distorted Confucius's message, with rulers rejecting and then embracing Confucianism as the fortunes of dynasties waxed and waned.

Confucius, he said, would be "smiling in his grave" now that he is back in favor with a regime that in the 1960s unleashed Red Guards to ransack his temple and plunder his tomb.

Today, Miao said, China is again "on its way to prosperity, on its way up. Whether we will sink into this strange loop again, I don't know. Hopefully, we won't."