The Place of Confucius in Communist China

Abstract

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.

Guo Moruo on Marx and Confucius

“…(Cf. Levenson 1958Levenson 1962; also see Fokkema 1965, 58) period, Mao Zedong wrote a poem on Guo Moruo, in which he stated that "He (Guo Moruo) is said to be a Communist, but revers Confucius and Laozi" (名曰 共产党，崇拜孔老二). (Yang 2014) Still according to Mao Zedong, "the way Old Guo treats Qin shi huang and the way he treats Confucius are like Lin Biao" (郭老对待秦始皇，对待孔子那种态度和林彪一样).…”

Explaining China's Contradictory Grand Strategy: Why Legitimacy Matters

“…Socialism with Chinese characteristics was de facto delegitimized as a leading ideology for China's international interactions with the economic development of the Chinese mainland. In this ideological vacuum, "Han nationalism" in particular has become the aspiring successor to 30 For some time after 1911 and 1949, Confucianism was still widely present, and scholars wrote about similarities between Confucian philosophy and Communist ideology; see, e.g., Lee (1973), or Levenson (1962).…”