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Intonation matters, in English as well as in Chinese. We may describe an item in the human record as historically (really) significant, or as (merely) historically significant. The distinction is between an empirical judgment of fruitfulness in time and a normative judgment of aridity in the here and now.

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In Chinese Communist fashions, Confucius seems to be “in” this year. Earlier, certainly in the nineteen-twenties, revolutionaries were quite ready to see him out, and even now, in the first decade or so of the People's Republic, there are plenty of people with little patience for the sage of the old intelligence. Indeed, “despise the old” and “preserve the national heritage” have been chasing each other down the mneteen-fifties and incipient sixties, and contemporary historians, hi this area, should perhaps not dwell too seriously on trends pro and anti, so foreshortened, if discernible at all, in the foreground of our age. What seems historically significant is the range, not the petty successions, of recent Communist options in evaluating Confucius. For all the possibilities are equally modern, all plausible and consistent within a new Chinese view —an essentially anti-Confucian view informing even the pro-Confucius minds.