I

Confucius arrived in the Chinese capital one cold winter’s morning and proceeded down broad avenues and through splendid gateways before reaching the very heart of the city, where he took up a commanding position on the eastern side of the central ceremonial square. Standing stock-still upon a high platform, the philosopher assumed a pose suggestive of a massive jiànlóu watchtower, resolute and intractable, his clasped hands concealed beneath voluminous robes, his luxurious moustache and beard unmoved by the wind, his eyes heavy-lidded, and his expression enigmatic, with the corners of his mouth turned down in something approximating wry amusement commingled with a definite hint of disapprobation.

Laid out before the philosopher’s unblinking gaze was a vast quadrangle, with the Gate of Heaven-Sent Pacification to the north, the Gate of the Zenith Sun to the south, a Great Hall to the west, and a repository of priceless cultural relics to the east, while a former ruler’s tomb rose up from the middle of a 53-acre expanse of grey paving stones. Those pedestrians willing to brave the treeless square were inexorably drawn toward Confucius, and it was not long before a crowd had gathered round, though still not a single word escaped the savant’s sealed lips. Given his well-known preference for quietude, this was to be expected. “To store up knowledge in silence, to remain forever hungry for learning, to teach others without tiring — all this comes to me naturally,” he once observed about himself, adding that “firmness, resolution, simplicity, silence — these bring us closer to humanity.”

This visit was wholly unexpected, astonishing even. Born in Zou, in the State of Lu, around 551 B.C. during China’s turbulent Spring and Autumn period, Confucius had spent much of his life either in government or in exile, traveling between the principality states of central and north-eastern China — Wey, Song, Zheng, Cao, Cai, Chu, Chen, Qi, and others besides — but he had never made it this far before. His appearance in the capital was even more surprising, given that the philosopher was not in good odor with the authorities, who in living memory had branded his teachings “rubbish” that fostered “bad elements,” “monsters,” and “freaks.” Stranger still, the illustrious dignitary who was attracting so many onlookers had, as a matter of fact, been dead for 2,489 years.

The Confucius who entered the city of Beijing in the dead of night and took up residence on Tiananmen Square, atop a granite plinth placed before the National Museum of China’s columnar facade and directly across from Chairman Mao Zedong’s burial chamber, was not flesh and blood, of course, but had been designed and cast in bronze by the renowned sculptor Wu Weishan, and was unveiled on Jan. 11, 2011, much to the surprise of the good people of Beijing. Dismissed during the Cultural Revolution as a “feudal mummy” and a “stiff-necked protector of the slave society,” Confucius had suddenly been afforded pride of place in the symbolic heart of the Chinese Communist regime. The so-called “enemy of the past” had been rehabilitated, seemingly presaging a new era of cultural freedom and respect for tradition. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia)

Some of the gathering sightseers and selfie-takers might have recalled the last time a statue had materialized unexpectedly on the grounds of Tiananmen Square: 22 years earlier, on May 30, 1989, when pro-democracy protesters erected the iconic foam and papier-mâché Goddess of Liberty (民主女神), only for it to be destroyed five days later when the Chinese government declared martial law and violently suppressed the student-led demonstrations. This new sculpture, however, could hardly have been more different. Whereas the alabaster white, torch-bearing Goddess of Liberty was formed from perishable materials and provocatively modeled after the propulsive revolutionary realist works of the Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina, the green patinated bronze sculpture that had come to grace the square in the early days of 2011 possessed all the hallmarks of a permanent fixture, having been cast in metal alloy, designed by the regime-approved visual artist Wu Weishan, and installed with the express permission of the Politburo, while carrying no democratic revolutionary connotations whatsoever. And yet this new work of public art would prove nearly as controversial as its papier-mâché predecessor.

II

The installation of Wu’s monumental sculpture was the culmination of a veritable Confucius-mania that gripped the People’s Republic in the first decade of the new millennium. Books like the 2006 Yu Dan Lunyu xinde (Yu Dan’s Insights into the Confucian Analects) and the 2008 Rujia shehui yu daotong fuxing: Yu jiang qing duihua (Confucian Society and the Revival of Taoism: A Dialogue with Jiang Qing) became surprise bestsellers, the former inspiring an even more popular television lecture series. Parents began enrolling their children in primary schools based on the principles of guoxue, or “national learning,” with an emphasis on character building, formal good manners, and the recitation of classical Confucian texts, as well as traditional art forms like calligraphy and the chadao tea ceremony. In 2009, hundreds of Confucius’ descendants gathered in the Kong clan cemetery in Qufu, in Shandong Province, to celebrate their ancestor’s 2,560th birthday and to mark the Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, with observances featuring kowtowing, the lighting of incense sticks, and animal sacrifices. As the Kong clan carefully swept Confucius’ tomb — a site that had been systematically desecrated by the Communist Red Guard back in 1966 — the China Film Group was busy shooting the film Kong Fuzi, starring Chow Yun-fat, a production that was expected to be a blockbuster but came under fire for its inappropriate martial arts and romance scenes. The result was a lawsuit brought by the philosopher’s descendant Kong Jian, who demanded that certain salacious scenes involving Confucius and the royal consort Lady Nanzi be excised from the final print. Ultimately the Kong Fuzi bio-pic was a box-office failure, but the controversy it engendered only underscored the reverence and esteem with which the sage was increasingly being regarded in contemporary China.

Whereas the Cultural Revolution ideologue Hung Kwang-szu and his fellow genocidal philistines had considered Confucius inextricably linked “with the historical fate of the declining reactionary classes,” serving as he did “all the darkest social forces,” under Hu Jintao the ancient philosopher was apparently being restored to official favor. The most potent sign of his return to the good graces of the Chinese government could be found in a pilot program that began in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in June 2004 and subsequently spread all over the world: The establishment of the Kongzi Xueyuan, or Confucius Institutes, aimed at promoting Chinese language and culture, not to mention providing potential bases for influence campaigns and military-industrial espionage. Germany had its Goethe-Institut, Spain its Instituto Cervantes, Portugal its Instituto Camões, Italy its Società Dante Alighieri, France its Alliance française, and so on, and now China would have its Confucius Institute, a propaganda outfit named after a man once branded a “typical counterrevolutionary” but now providing the acceptable international face of Red China.

Wu Weishan had been obsessively sculpting Confucius for years, producing more than 200 likenesses of the philosopher, but the larger-than-life bronze installed on Tiananmen Square was arguably his greatest artistic triumph. “The rise of a big country requires a cultural foundation, and Chinese culture upholds the spirit of harmony,” Wu explained at the time, adding: “The essential thoughts of Confucius are love, kindness, wisdom, and generosity. And peace and prosperity are what the people are striving for.” The return of Confucianism would, Wu hoped, produce a kinder, gentler Chinese society, one capable of simultaneously looking backward and forward. The Politburo evidently agreed, hence the surprise unveiling, to considerable fanfare, of the prominent monument in modern-day Beijing.

Not everyone in the Chinese government agreed. Hardliners in the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party immediately began agitating for the sculpture’s removal, on the grounds that the mausoleum of Mao Zedong should not be literally overshadowed by a memorial to a long-despised reactionary figure. Confucius’ place was on the ash-heap of history, they insisted, not on Tiananmen Square. The anti-Confucians eventually triumphed, and on April 21, 2011, Wu Weishan’s bronze Confucius disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. He had spent precisely 100 days on the square, longer than the Goddess of Liberty did, but not by much in the grand scheme. A certain Jiangxi Li Jianjun, writing for the communist website Maozedong Qizhi Wang, or Mao Zedong Flag, was exultant: “The witch doctor who has been poisoning people for thousands of years with his slave-master spiritual narcotic has finally been kicked out of Tiananmen Square!” So much for the “all-pervading unity” of which the Master had often preached.

III

Confucius’ brief sojourn in Beijing was not the high-water mark of Confucius-mania, much to the chagrin, one suspects, of the Maoist zealots in the Central Party School and elsewhere. If anything, Confucianism would play an even more central role in Chinese politics in the years that followed. In 2013, the newly installed general secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, made a point to pay homage to the ancient sage while visiting the Confucius Temple in Qufu. Flipping through copies of the Analects and another anthology of writings about Confucius, Xi became carried away, announcing that he wanted “to read these two books carefully.” From then on, his speeches would indeed be liberally sprinkled with citations of Confucius, Mencius, and other Confucian philosophers. At a 2014 conference titled “Confucianism: World Peace and Development,” organized in honor of the 2,565th anniversary of the Master’s birth, China’s paramount leader affirmed:

Present-day China is the extension and development of China of the past. The ideology and culture of today’s China is also the continuation and sublimation of traditional Chinese ideology and culture. To understand present-day China, one must delve into the cultural bloodline of China, and accurately appreciate the cultural soil that nourishes the Chinese people.

A year later, the book Xi Jinping: How to Read Confucius and other Chinese Classical Thinkers was released to positive reviews, with the China Daily applauding “the achievements of Xi Jinping’s extensive reading and diligent studies.”

Four decades earlier, the Peking Review was publishing articles like Hung Kwang-szu’s “Criticize the Doctrines of Confucius and Mencius to Consolidate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” which called on all good Chinese subjects to “wag[e] an indefatigable struggle against the ideology of all the exploiting classes, particularly the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius.” Now China’s helmsman was to all appearances an ardent Neo-Confucian. How had such a profound transformation taken place? The failure of the Cultural Revolutionaries to eradicate the “birth-marks of the old society,” as Hung had put it, was undeniable. Now, Xi and his cadres preferred to “use the past to serve the present,” as Confucianism was “made to play a positive role in the conditions of the new era,” as Xi advocated in a speech delivered to an assembly of Confucian scholars. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: Dead Souls: A Case Study in Collective Psychopathology)

The ongoing instrumentalization of Confucianism by China’s communist authorities can be explained in part by its sheer adaptability. Not quite a religion but not merely a philosophical tradition, Confucianism represents an attempt to grapple with renzhing (human nature) and the Way of Heaven (tiandao) in order to lay the groundworks for the datong, or Great Unity, a utopian society in which all participants become part of one family and even one body. Loyalty is the primary virtue in Confucianism, as exemplified by xiao, or filial piety, which can be translated into an equivalent fealty to one’s regime, and it is not hard to see why a doctrine predicated on unity and loyalty would appeal to Xi Jinping, just as it has appealed to so many different politicians, philosophers, and social reformers throughout East Asian history. Kiri Paramore, in Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History (2016), identified a range of different and often contradictory applications of Confucianism, including “Confucianism as religion,” “Confucianism as subversive politics,” “Confucianism as science,” “Confucianism as ultra-individualism,” “Confucianism as relativism,” “Confucianism as liberalism,” and “Confucianism as fascism.” Xi’s fondness for Confucianism provides yet another manifestation: “Confucianism as scientific socialism.”

There is nothing particularly deep or even sincere about Xi’s purported adherence to Confucianism. He does not engage in ancestor worship, he does not perform sacrificial rituals, and he does not arrange gifts of wine and silk in front of temple altars, but he does wish to invoke the Confucian precedent when conducting anti-corruption campaigns, or pursuing a stricter political meritocracy, or promoting consensus through laws against “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.” Confucianism is treated like an ersatz civil religion, one far less threatening to communist rule than Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity. It is not clear whether this is even an effective strategy for advancing the regime’s reformist interests, given that Confucianism has long been accused of encouraging “soft corruption” (nepotism, cronyism, favoritism, and the like), with Liu Qingping arguing in his provocative 2007 Dao article “Filial Piety: The Root of Morality or the Source of Corruption?” that Confucian culture “encourages a special kind of corruption through its fundamentally consanguineous affection.” Be that as it may, Xi’s misunderstanding of Confucianism is even more fundamental.

Xi began his reign by paying homage both to Kong Fuzi and Mao Zedong, but there is simply no way to square the philosophies espoused by those two historical figures. The former championed tradition and the worship of ancestors, whereas the latter treated the relics of the past like dead carrion to be left rotting on the side of the road. In one of the most famous sections of the Analects, we are told of how:

The Lord of She instructed Confucius, saying, “There is an upright man in my district. His father stole a sheep, and he testified against him.” Confucius said, “The upright men in my district are different. Fathers cover up for their sons and sons cover up for their fathers. Uprightness lies therein.”

A laudable sentiment, and one entirely incompatible with China’s surveillance state, with its millions of security cameras, hordes of informants, and sprawling concentration camps. In another passage in the Analects, Confucius counsels policymakers:

Guide them with policies and align them with punishments and the people will evade them and have no shame. Guide them with virtue and align them with li [rules of propriety] and the people will have a sense of shame and fulfill their roles.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, threatens jail sentences for wearing the wrong T-shirt, reading the wrong book, attending the wrong church, or telling the wrong joke, even handing out draconian punishments for aligning one’s furniture in accordance with the principles of feng shui. The Analects are full of exhortations to “study broadly” and “question closely,” and Confucius was wary of rote conformity to meaningless dogma, maintaining that “the junzi [ideal ethical person] acts in harmony with others but does not seek to be like them; the small man seeks to be like others and does not act in harmony.” Yet Xi’s regime has brutally cracked down on religious expression and free speech not only in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia but in every province and prefecture and village in the country. It should hardly need to be said that there is nothing remotely Confucian about a concentration camp.

Confucianism as interpreted by Xi represents little more than an ideological fig leaf in the present-day People’s Republic, meant to cover up at least some of the government’s crimes against humanity. If anything, the ruling ideology resembles a noxious admixture of scientific socialism and the rigid Legalist (Fu-jia) School. The legalists were, according to the Israeli Sinologist Yuri Pines, “political realists who sought to attain a ‘rich state and a powerful army’” and were “generally devoid of overarching moral considerations, or conformity to divine will.” Zhengyuan Fu has dubbed them the “first totalitarians.” Xi Jinping himself said that “one must delve into the cultural bloodline of China,” but if we are to do so in search of the origins of his oppressive regime, we will surely trace it back not to Confucius but to Han Fei and other Machiavellian legalist philosophers.

IV

In June of 2023, a student at the Jiangxi Industrial Vocational and Technical College entered the school’s dining hall and ordered rice with duck, only to find a rat’s head — fur,  teeth, whiskers, and all — included his meal. He posted a video of his unsavory repast on social media, which led first to widespread revulsion online, and then to a hostile reception in the college’s administrative offices. The student was made to delete the video and was informed that “a rat is a duck if the Party says so.” Memes based around the phrase zhi shu wei ya (指鼠为鸭), or “calling a rat a duck,” went viral anyway, prompting the formation of a Jiangxi Provincial Government committee to “study the incident.”

It was a minor event, all in all — except for the student and the ill-fated rat — but the dismissive initial reaction of the arrogant college administrators speaks to a broader issue. Consider the position taken by the communist legal scholar Jiang Shigong, who posited in the aftermath of Ukraine’s democratic Orange Revolution that “the crucial questions in politics are not questions of right and wrong, but of obedience and disobedience. If you do not submit to political authority, then ‘If I say you’re wrong, you’re wrong, even if you’re right.’” If it looks like a rat, and smells like a rat, and tastes like a rat, it’s probably a duck, at least if some sinister party activist says so. Nothing, but nothing, could be further from cardinal Confucian principles of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and (above all) shame.

There is very little, in the end, especially Confucian about Xi Jinping’s counterfeit Confucian revival. But there is a potential upside here for the Chinese people. By legitimizing Confucian thought after decades of criticism and suppression, the Chinese authorities have unwittingly exposed the populace to the words and deeds of the Master and his followers, thereby unintentionally putting the government to shame. Readers will find in The Doctrine of the Mean “how far-extending was the filial piety of King Wu and the Duke of Chau,” who each spring and autumn “repaired and beautified the temple halls of their fathers, set forth their ancestral vessels, displayed their various robes, and presented the offerings of the several seasons,” and who “served the dead as they would have served them alive.” Through their sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, the just rulers of old “served God, and by the ceremonies of the ancestral temple they sacrificed to their ancestors. He who understands the ceremonies of the sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, and the meaning of the several sacrifices to ancestors, would find the government of a kingdom as easy as looking into one’s palm.” (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: Lying Flat: China’s Demographic Decline)

Today, the authorities destroy folk religion temples on a daily basis; they burn books, they shutter churches, they torture pastors, and they positively revel in the destructive iconoclasm of their campaign against “bad” religions and alleged cults. They are even attempting to “sinicize” Taoist temples — an outright absurdity, given that there is nothing more quintessentially Chinese than Taoism itself — by forcing Taoist priests to provide lectures on “thoughts of loving the Party, the country, and socialism” and demanding an end to the practice of burning incense sticks and joss paper, on the grounds that such offerings “produce a large amount of chemical waste, which not only pollutes the environment, but also poses a safety hazard,” as if the non-stop environmental catastrophe that is modern China could in any way be attributed to a few piles of compostable incense ash.

Fearful and contemptuous of religion in equal measure, Xi and his party would prefer the Chinese citizenry stick to Confucian texts. Yet violently irreligious communists cannot hold a candle, in moral terms, to traditionalists like the pious King Wu and the Duke of Chau, as readers of Confucian texts will inevitably realize. Pick up a volume of Mencius, and you will learn that:

Humanity is man’s mind and righteousness is man’s path. Pity the man who abandons the path and does not follow it, and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people’s dogs and fowls are lost, they go to look for them, and yet, when they have lost their hearts, they do not go to look for them. The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

During the Cultural Revolution, China lost its mind and it lost its heart, and it has yet to fully regain either. The philosophy propounded by Confucius, Mencius, and other traditionalists may yet enable China to find the path to humanity once again, and to abandon the foreign death-cult that is Marxism-Leninism. Confucian scholars have long understood that:

民為貴，
社稷次之，
君為輕。

Most precious are the people;
next come the spirits of land and grain;
and last, the rulers.

Such an immortal sentiment cannot help but inspire those fighting for a more civilized future in China and all over the world.

Xi Jinping, upon taking power, rightly acknowledged that Confucianism is part of the “cultural soil that nourishes the Chinese people.” His own philosophy, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, provides no such nourishment, and calling a rat a duck will never change that. Mao and his Red Guard tried to extinguish the legacy of Confucianism, while Xi is instead trying to co-opt it. Neither approach will succeed in the end. Confucianism flows like ichor through the veins of the Chinese body politic, while rigid legalism and supposedly scientific socialism are barbaric superimpositions that can only bring more tyranny. Confucianism is about far more than unthinking loyalty and deference to authority. It is really about humanity, divided into the four dimensions of self, community, nature, and Heaven, all of which are being extirpated by Xi’s inhuman regime.

“Things have their root and their branches,” observed Confucius in The Great Learning, while “affairs have their end and their beginning.” Confucianism, rehabilitated and as relevant as ever, may not be able to do away with communist rule in China all on its own, but it can provide the signposts toward a more humane mode of government, and toward a more thoughtful way of life, as it has done for thousands of years and will continue to do so for thousands more to come.