That has always been the strategy behind the classic Confucian education: memorize moral precepts in the hopes of improving one’s character. The sixth-century B.C. philosopher believed in maintaining a strict social order, and he also provided advice on good governance: “Promote the straight and throw out the twisty,” he advised, “and the people will keep order.” In the early years of the 20th century, however, Chinese intellectuals blamed the Confucian system for stifling creative thought. After the communists took over in 1949, Confucius himself became a class enemy; a mob famously ransacked his birthplace of Qufu during the Cultural Revolution. For decades his works were castigated as medieval pap.
But in their quest for something to believe in other than the party or money, Chinese have begun to rediscover their most renowned moralist. Nationwide more than 2 million children are enrolled in programs teaching Confucian classics, and several major universities now offer degree programs in Chinese traditional culture. Confucian temples abandoned for the last half century have been spruced up and now draw crowds of students. “Even real-estate companies have called to ask us to set up schools in their complexes,” says Yang Disheng, vice president of the China Confucius Society. “They thought this would help them sell apartments faster.”
The appetite for a return to “traditional values” is also drawing critics. Education experts in Asia now generally agree, for instance, that the problem with the region’s schools is too much rote memorization, not too little. Feng Zhonglian, a 72-year-old psychology professor who received an old-style education, told the newspaper Beijing Today that reciting Confucian classics was “boring and useless.” Others have argued that young people are unable to discriminate between what one history professor called “the essence and the dregs of traditional culture.”
Thus far the government has not taken an official stand on the Confucian revival. But authorities clearly want to remain on the right side of this growing–yet politically unthreatening–popular movement. Last year, without official objections, a $25 million research institute devoted to Confucian studies opened in Qufu, and a statue of Confucius was erected at the People’s University in Beijing. “Do you know whose university this is?” asks a prominent philosophy professor. “It’s the party’s university. The party knows that Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought have no value, and that we need to value our own past.” Don Wyatt, professor of Chinese history at Middlebury College, worries that the government may try to harness the movement for its own purposes: “China discovered long ago that the same values in Confucianism can be used to create docile and obedient citizens who are in the service of the state,” he says. The country’s youngest Confucianists may indeed be learning more than they realize.
