King Kong in America

boundary 2 41:2 (2014) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2686115 © 2014 by Duke University Press

King Kong in America

Arif Dirlik

King Kong I, the first hereditary monarch of the newly established Middle Kingdom Confucian Constitutional Monarchy/Republic (for-

Books Reviewed: Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future, ed. Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan, trans. Edmund Ryden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). These works are cited parenthetically as CO and WR, respectively.

I am grateful to colleagues and friends who were kind enough to read the essay and offer comments at short notice: David Bartel, Victor Mair, John Makeham, Roxann Praz-niak, Stuart Souther, QS Tong, Wang Guo, and Shaobo Xie. While their comments and suggestions were much appreciated, they bear no responsibility for the argument. Inter-ested readers may be directed to the well- informed website The Peking Duck (www .pekingduck.org), where one commentator after another expressed incredulous astonish-ment at the July 12, 2012, op- ed piece by Jiang and Bell, and at the New York Times for publishing it. This article was presented as a keynote address at the conference on the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the Taiwan Studies Program, National Taiwan Normal University, September 5–6, 2013. I am grateful to the participants for their enthusiastic reception.

140 boundary 2 / Summer 2014

merly known as the People’s Republic of China), arrived in Wash-ington, DC, yesterday on the first state visit of his reign. The king is a scion of the Kong family, who traces its lineage to the venerable sage Master Kong (known in the West—and the Rest—as Confu-cius), who lived some twenty- five hundred years ago and is viewed by many in China and abroad as the fountainhead of Chinese culture and national identity going back some five thousand years. He was accompanied by His Highness, Imperial Tutor Jiang Qing, founder of the new state religion of Confucianism, Palace public relations counselor Right Reverend (Confucian) Dr. Daniel Bell,* and mem-bers of the Council of Worthies, guardians of moral rectitude under the new monarchical rule, which counts among its esteemed mem-bership CEO’s of the Middle Kingdom’s most powerful corporations as well as the cream of its cultural elite who had shown the foresight to throw in their lot with the monarchical movement early on. The king expressed his deep gratitude to America’s ruling elites—among them some venerable university presses—for the recognition they extended to the movement for monarchy when he was still just plain Mr. Kong, but also for the appreciation they long had shown for the system of beliefs unbreakably linked with his family name, rujiao, better known in the West (and the Rest) as Confucianism, which had suffered endless abuse at the hands of liberal democratic (and Marxist!) secularists like the infamous writer Lu Xun and his ilk for over a century. The king and his entourage were greeted by throngs of supporters, prominent among them graduates of Confucius Insti-tutes, waving placards with heartfelt (and heartwarming) messages that captured the American people’s enthusiasm over the newly minted partnership with the Oriental monarchy: “Hail King Kong,” “Have You Hugged a Sage Today?,” “Friends from Afar—in Our Very Midst,” “Kongzi Rocks,” “US Business Loves Confucius,” “The Middle Kingdom Above All,” etc. The New York Times report on the King’s arrival added that the paper took special pride in having anticipated the founding of the new monarchy when it was still a fuzzy fantasy of the sagely Mr. Jiang’s in his days in the wilderness preaching to the converted in the remote mountains of Guizhou Province in South-western MK.

*Not to be confused with famed sociologist of the end of ideology.

Dirlik / King Kong in America 141

• • • •

I have not conjured the above out of thin air. With some fanciful if not unfounded additions of my own, it is a projection into the future from the present state of affairs suggested in the two books under review here, Jiang Qing’s A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future and Anna Sun’s Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. A Confucian Constitutional Order is devoted to laying out a plan for the realization of just such a constitutional Kong dynasty, which Jiang and his editor, Daniel A. Bell, had already announced in a New York Times op- ed piece in 2012.1 Confucianism as a World Religion is a scholarly work with no such gran-diose ambition of its own, satisfied to lend its sympathetic support to the cause by identifying omens that the times are indeed moving in some such direction of Confucian ascendancy if not monarchy. The authors might object that it would be beneath the dignity of King Kong to visit Washing-ton, DC, rather than the other way around. But there are good reasons for locating the fantasy there. These works raise issues that concern not only China and Chinese, but also the United States and English- language read-ership in general. Given the place and language of publication, the “good news” is intended for the latter.

A Confucian Constitutional Order is organized around the design for a Confucian constitutional monarchy by Jiang, a radical Confucianist with some influence in revivalist Confucius circles but little known beyond them. He made a name for himself in 1989 by openly challenging the Commu-nist Party, but unlike liberals who have earned lengthy prison sentences for doing much less, he has not suffered serious consequences, which is worth pondering. Party Marxists think him to be of little intellectual or political sig-nificance, with no influence in the Party’s ideological orientation,2 but it is

1. Jiang Qing and Daniel A. Bell, “A Confucian Constitution in China,” editorial page, New York Times, July 12, 2012.2. Jiang nevertheless played a central part, under the auspices of the China Confucius Foundation, which the Ministry of Education funded, in the selection of texts for the edu-cation of children. See John Makeham, Lost Soul: “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chi-nese Academic Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 321–22. Makeham writes, “This should probably be read less as an indication of a new policy direction in regard to official support for the promotion of ruxue than as an indication of the complex political composition of behemoth institutions such as the Ministry of Educa-tion” (330). A note is in order on the term ruxue (lit. ru, or learning), which is one of several Chinese terms translated into English as “Confucianism” with confusing consequences. The other relevant terms are rujia and rujiao, which may be translated respectively as


also possible that Jiang’s cultural nationalist attacks on liberals and democ-racy are far more valuable politically than the threat presented by his anti- Marxist “political Confucianism.” Liberals view him with the same contempt that he shows them, while among serious Confucian scholars of a more lib-eral open- minded bent he is viewed with curiosity, disdainful bemusement, or outright dismissal for his guru- like pretensions. Indeed, his style is that of the guru in his glib convictions that rule out complexity and ambiguity.3 He runs a Confucius Center, the Yangming Spiritual House (Yangming jingshe) in the southwestern province of Guizhou, where he was born and raised.

The volume issued from a workshop in Hong Kong organized by the editors, who are both avid proselytizers of Confucianism and, in the case of Bell, a critic of democracy, equality, and critical thinking.4 It is ironic, then, to read that the workshop, “Confucian Constitutionalism and the Future of China,” was convened in Hong Kong because, “due to the politi-cal sensitivity of this material, it would have been difficult to secure official

“Confucians” and “Confucian teaching.” The latter assumed the coloring of “religion” in the twentieth century, when that term was introduced into Chinese conceptual vocabu-lary. Ru, roughly referring to classicists who specialized in canonical texts associated with the works of Confucius, was the term used by Chinese during the imperial period. The terms Confucius and Confucianism are of Jesuit “manufacture.” Note that Make-ham places Confucianism in quotation marks and prefers in his own analysis to use the Chinese terms. For a cogent discussion of these textual problems, see Thomas A. Wil-son, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), editor’s introduction, 1–40, esp. 21–25. For the Jesuit “manufacturing” of Confucianism, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manu-facturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). The introduction of “religion” into Chinese thinking is discussed in Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 50–55.3. One of his interlocutors here, Bai Tongdong, of Fudan University, writes that “Jiang only makes assertions. He offers no arguments” (CO, 124).4. Bell, whose early work was on communitarianism, apparently has found in Confucian-ism a medium for his communitarian politics. He is a professor of philosophy at Tsing-hua University, Beijing, and the author of several volumes promoting Confucianism, most notably China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). His web page describes him, rather immodestly for a “Confucian,” as “Confucian philosopher and scholar.” Fan is the edi-tor, with the assistance of Erika Yu, of The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contempo-rary China (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011). This collection is also devoted to the promotion of Jiang’s “authentic Confucianism,” although Fan describes his own views as a “recon-structionist Confucianism.” See Ruiping Fan, “A Reconstructionist Confucian Account of Environmentalism: Toward a Human Sagely Dominion Over Nature,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32, no. 1 (March 2005): 105–22.


permission or funding for such a workshop in mainland China” (CO, 1). In addition to the City University of Hong Kong, the Center for Studies of Cul-ture, Ethics and the Environment, an obscure foundation based in Homer, Alaska, and the Confucius Family Net in mainland China provided funding. Princeton University Press bore the costs of translation.

The book is organized around Jiang’s constitutional design for China. The introduction by Bell offers a brief account of Jiang’s career and a summary of his constitutional ideas. It is followed by Jiang’s exposition of his design and by commentaries on it by four scholars from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, all but one of them specialists in Chinese phi-losophy and sympathetic to the cause but critical of Jiang’s totalistic inter-pretation of Confucianism.5 The lone exception is Wang Shaoguang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who is critical of Jiang’s ideas from a social science and socialist perspective. The book concludes with a lengthy response by Jiang to his critics, where he mostly reaffirms his earlier points and further elaborates on them.

The point of departure for Jiang’s call for a new Confucian constitu-tional order is a presumption that the current order under the Communist Party is unsustainable because it suffers from a terminal crisis of legiti-macy. At the same time, liberal democracy, the alternative most commonly offered as a solution, is no alternative at all because it lacks any kind of foundation for legitimacy in Chinese society. The only option, therefore, is for China to seek a solution in its own divine and cultural roots, which are embedded in Confucianism, understood not as a secular philosophy but as a system of ritual practices and religious belief (rujiao). As he puts it in the opening paragraph of his proposal,

The way ahead for China’s political development is the Way of the Humane Authority and not democracy.6 This is the only way Chi-

5. Joseph Chan, City University of Hong Kong; Chenyang Li, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Bai Tongdong, Fudan University, Shanghai. The preferred term in these discussions, after John Rawls, is “comprehensive doctrine.” Jiang’s advocacy is closer, in my view, to totalistic, or even totalitarian, in invoking not just state but cosmo-logical legitimation for regulation of public belief as well as the individual’s interior space.6. The Chinese term for “the Way of the Humane Authority” is wangdao, literally “the kingly way,” which was juxtaposed to badao, “the way of the despot.” The despot, who secured order through coercion, was at best a second best to the true king, who ruled by virtue and charisma, loosely corresponding to Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between domination and hegemony. Virtue was indeed a central issue, but it is not irrelevant that it was an attribute of the King. The English translation here conveniently glosses over the problems presented to ruxue (“Confucian” learning) of the troubled relationship between


nese culture can respond to the challenge of Western culture. How-ever, in recent years China’s political development has begun to go astray. Every current of political thought in China assumes that democracy is the way ahead for China. This goes without saying for liberal democracy’s Western- style “genuine democracy,” or for the pursuit of “socialist democracy” by socialism that is supposed to dif-fer from “capitalist democracy.” It even includes the neo- Confucians who exalt Chinese culture and make democracy the “new kingship” derived from the Confucian view of the sage. A glance over China’s current world of thought shows that Chinese people have already lost their ability to think independently . . . are no longer able to use patterns of thought inherent in their own culture . . . to think about China’s current political development. It is, therefore, necessary to go back to the inherent patterns of Chinese culture to ground the development of Chinese political thought. . . . By the “inherent pat-tern of Chinese culture” I refer to the “politics of the Way of the Humane Authority.” (CO, 27)7

While Jiang’s arguments are couched in the language of restoration of a once existent past, the order he wishes to establish demands a radical remaking of contemporary society as well as a radical reinterpretation of a past shrouded in myth that is its inspiration. By his own account here, “the

kingship in actuality and the expectation of virtue: namely, the reality of kings without virtue and the virtuous who never became kings (most significantly, Confucius). The usage here is, in other words, already an interpretation. For a discussion of wangdao and badao in Confucius and Mencius, see Kung- chuan Hsiao, A History of Chinese Political Thought, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century AD, trans. F. W. Mote (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 170–71.7. The reference here to “neo- Confucians,” usually referred to in the literature as New Confucians, is to a group of scholars and philosophers during the mid- twentieth century who played an important part in creatively reinterpreting and keeping alive Confucian-ism, and were responsible for the influential 1958 “A Manifesto of Chinese Culture to the World,” popularly known as the New Confucian Manifesto. Through the efforts of close fol-lowers, such as Du Weiming, their works were foundational to the Confucian revival in the 1980s. Discussions in English of the ideas of these scholars may be found in John Make-ham, ed., New Confucianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). It is hard to tell if the use of “neo- Confucian” here is intended to lump these twentieth- century thinkers with Song- Ming Confucianism, for which the term is usually reserved, or if “new” refers to con-temporary Confucianism, which indeed is suggested by the title of a book by Daniel Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Others have described it as the “New New Confu-cianism.” See Makeham, Lost Soul, 126.


inherent patterns” of Chinese culture no longer “inhere” in Chinese culture of the present, which will have to be remade to return to its past culture, which itself is obviously a radically transformative undertaking. Equally important, however, the past culture itself has to be recovered from a long lost past. The recovery inescapably must also account for the present, which is its point of departure, as is acknowledged implicitly by the very idea of a constitution, which Jiang recognizes as a “Western” idea. What is at work here is not recovery or restoration but innovation, revitalization, and renaissance. Jiang’s occasional acknowledgment of the interpretive pro-cesses at work does not seem to deter him from speaking with the voice of authenticity for his readings in ancient texts both of “Chinese culture” and Confucianism—or from the radical denial of authenticity to a living Chinese culture that has moved far beyond its imagination in texts composed two millennia earlier (CO, 65, 95, 197).

Jiang views himself as heir to an esoteric exegetical tradition that has its origins in the Gongyang Commentary, one of the competing com-mentaries on a venerated classical work attributed to Confucius, the Spring and Autumn Annals. What distinguished this commentary was its empha-sis on “the importance of human institutions to enable humans to over-come their shortcomings and perfect their nature.”8 In this tradition of exe-gesis, Confucius appeared as an innovative reformer rather than a simple transmitter of past learning, as in the competing Zuo Commentary. During the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), the formulation of an imperial Confu-cianism coincided with the ascendancy of the Gongyang tradition, which was synthesized with philosophies of nature to produce a Confucian cos-mology in which the human and natural realms were integrated in a mutu-ally inductive relationship mediated by the ruler, and Confucian values were endowed with cosmic significance.9 Following the fall of the Han dynasty,

8. Makeham, Lost Soul, 265. For a discussion of the Gongyang Commentary, see Hsiao, A History of Chinese Political Thought, 124–42. Key to the institutions was “ritual” (li ), which required not just ceremonial correctness but the utmost reverence for the subject of ceremony. Ritual in Confucianism was key to social and political order. Jiang is a “ritual-ist,” defined by Kai- wing Chow as a stress on “ritual practice as the most effective method or cultivating Confucian virtues and a reliable way to exclude heterodox practices.” See Kai- wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 8. This is, of course, also a major problem for Jiang’s Confucianism in the context of a social and politi-cal order marked not by the stable hierarchies of imperial China but by dynamic change.9. Michael Loewe, Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 6. See also Hsiao, A History of Chinese Politi-


the Gongyang tradition receded before the Zuo exegesis. It did not achieve renewed vigor until the nineteenth century, when the figure of Confucius as a reformer served as legitimation for the first radical reform movement, initi-ated by the scholar Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who led an abortive attempt in 1898 to establish a constitutional monarchy and, subsequently, after the abolition of the monarchy in 1912, an effort to make Confucianism into a state religion, which also proved to be futile.10 Though he is critical of Kang Youwei’s infatuation with “Western” constitutionalism, Jiang sees Kang as the last representative of the Gongyang tradition and, by implication, as his predecessor.11

Kang Youwei was viewed by his contemporaries as a radical (“the Martin Luther of China”) for his challenge to received tradition in the name of his reading of ancient classics. The reforms he advocated were intended to bring the Chinese polity closer to contemporary “Western” and Japanese societies by opening up the monarchy to some measure of public participa-tion and scrutiny. He sought to transform Chinese education in a “modern” direction. His goal in promoting Confucianism as the state religion was to make up for what he felt was a “lack” in the Chinese polity that accounted for its incoherence vis- à- vis the religiously inflected polities of the “West.” And, as expressed in his influential utopian work Datong shu (The book of great unity), he was cosmopolitan in outlook. His reforms, nevertheless, were intended not to overthrow but to save the system of which he was the product, which accounts for his conservative image among his more radical revolutionary successors.

Despite common grounds in the Gongyang tradition, and formal similarities in political advocacy, Jiang is no doubt justified in stressing his differences from Kang Youwei. Unlike Kang, he is by his own acknowledg-ment anti- Western, antidemocratic, anticosmopolitan, and antimodern.12

cal Thought, 484–530. Jiang’s text repeatedly refers to Dong Zhongshu, whose name is most closely associated with this synthesis. See, for examples, CO, 50, 191. According to Bell’s introduction, Jiang sees “political Confucianism” to have developed through Xunzi (Warring States), Dong Zhongshu (former Han dynasty, second century BC), Huang Zongxi (late Ming/early Qing, seventeenth century), and Kang Youwei (late Qing/Repub-lic) (CO, 5).10. On Kang Youwei, see Kung- chuan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu- wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975). My comments on Kang here are based on this seminal study.11. Makeham, Lost Soul, 274; see also CO, 45–46.12. Indeed, judging by his reification of the state, which will be discussed below, Jiang departs radically from his Gongyang “predecessors.” Dong Zhongshu is viewed by


In a nutshell, “the exaggerated importance given to the will of the people leads to extreme secularization, contractualism, utilitarianism, selfishness, commercialism, capitalization, vulgarization, hedonism, mediocratization, this worldliness, lack of ecology, lack of history, and lack of morality” (CO, 13). Cosmopolitanism is undesirable, as it opens the way to moral rela-tivism. Rendering Confucianism into state religion is not to emulate the “West” or Japan but to restore the religious nature of the ancient Chinese state. Unlike Kang Youwei, he is devoted not to salvaging the system of which he is a product but to replacing it with an imaginary one that never existed except as “spiritual” legacy, which is now conjured out of ancient textual traditions.13 His goal, ultimately, is to rescue China’s present and future from modernity—and globality. He writes,

The establishment of a Chinese constitution need no longer entail a rejection of her own self in order to follow the international line. The renewal of China’s political civilization will no longer have to be carried out under the banner of human political civilization. Instead it will be done on the basis of China’s own civilization, having absorbed and digested the positive values in Western civilization, to create a new Chinese civilization that embodies features of Chinese civiliza-tion. No longer will the cry that democracy is a good thing be heard in China, that naïve cry that implies the loss of national identity, and a lack of critical reflection of the deficiencies of Western political thought. (CO, 96)14

some as a defender of people’s rights “against oppression and exploitation by the rich and powerful.” See Honghe Liu, Confucianism in the Eyes of a Confucian Liberal: Hsu Fu- kuan’s Critical Examination of the Confucian Political Tradition (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Huang Zongxi, in the seventeenth century, was the author of a critique of the state and despotism, “A Plan for a Prince” (Mingyi daifang lu), which should rightly be viewed as a classic of political literature. A translation with extensive commentary is available in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “A Plan for the Prince: The Ming- I tai- fang lu of Huang Tsung- hsi,” trans. and explained by Wm. Theodore de Bary, PhD diss., Columbia University, 1953. What he writes of the princes usurping the rights of the people still resonates with the life under global capitalism: “They believed that since they held the power of weal and woe, it was perfectly alright to take for themselves all the wealth and to impose on others all the woe” (228).13. Jiang writes, “In the course of Chinese history the Way of the Humane Authority has been implemented in only a fragmentary fashion; there is still a significant gap between the Way of the Humane Authority and the political realities of Chinese history” (CO, 31).14. I will say more below on “absorbing and digesting the positive values in Western civili-zation,” which pervades Jiang’s presentation, seemingly contradicting his anti- Western


Jiang claims as the legitimizing basis for his constitutional design the Gongyang Commentary, which says that “to rule one must ‘share in the realms of heaven, earth and human beings,” or that “the Way of the Humane Authority links three spheres,” which means that political power must have three kinds of legitimacy, that of heaven, earth, and the human, for it to be legal and justified. He continues,

In Chinese culture “heaven” has both the character of a ruling will, personal yet hidden, and a transcendent, sacred sense of natural morality. The legitimacy of “earth” refers to the legitimacy that comes from history and culture because cultures are formed through his-tory in particular places. The legitimacy of the “human” refers to the legitimacy of the will of the people because conformity to the will of the people directly determines whether or not people will obey politi-cal authorities. (CO, 28)

These three dimensions of political legitimacy lead with a simplistic elegance to the tricameral parliamentary state that is at the heart of Jiang’s constitutional design: the House of Ru (Tongru yuan, lit. accomplished Confucian scholars), corresponding to heaven, which “represents sacred legitimacy” and is composed of scholars “chosen by recommendation and nomination”; the House of the People (Shumin yuan, lit. common people), corresponding to the Human, “which represents popular legitimacy” and is “chosen by universal suffrage and by election from functional constitu-encies”; and the House of the Nation (Guoti yuan, lit. house of national polity), corresponding to earth, “which represents cultural legitimacy,” with its members “selected by hereditary criteria and by assignment” (CO, 41).

While the three elements of the trinity are all indispensable to true legitimacy, heaven has priority over others as the voice of sacred authority, which is also reflected in the structuring of the state and the distribution of power between its components. Ordinary “democracy” is restricted to one house. As any law will require approval by at least two houses, there is good likelihood in this scheme for the human to be routinely trumped by heaven and earth. The House of Ru, by virtue of its sacred legitimacy and

Confucian purist stance against his critics. The reference to “democracy is a good thing” is most likely a reference to a work by the respected Party theoretician Yu Keping, Democracy Is a Good Thing: Essays on Politics, Society, and Culture in Contemporary China (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), which is hardly “uncritical” or “devoid of national identity” but advocates “incremental” moves toward a socialist democ-racy in keeping with the conditions of a contemporary national circumstance.


its access to heaven’s will, “enjoys a permanent power of veto” (CO, 41). Further dominance of heaven is to be guaranteed by another organ that is key to the Confucian identity of the constitution, the Academy, composed of scholars and parliamentarians selected by an examination system, which serves a supervisory function over the parliament and government. The Academy would be responsible not only for the education of the highest state leaders but also for state rituals and ceremonies. It is “the highest holder of legitimacy in the state” (CO, 63).

Finally, to represent the continuity of the new constitutional order with Chinese tradition, a symbolic monarch will be installed. By the very prestige of the position, the symbolic monarch will nevertheless serve as a check on the parliament. He will also appoint the head and members of the House of the Nation, which, like him, represents historical continuity. In order to command loyalty from the whole population, the monarch must be the noble scion of an ancient lineage that commands unquestionable and incontestable prestige and respect. The only lineage that fulfills these requirements in China is the Kong lineage that goes back to the Shang dynasty in the second millennium BC and has born the title of duke through-out the imperial period. The lineage bears the charisma of Confucius him-self, whom the Gongyang tradition long had viewed as “the uncrowned king.” Hence, a descendant of Confucius is to be installed as monarch to initiate a hereditary monarchy. This Confucian constitutional order will be a “symbolic monarch republic” (CO, 79–86).15

Jiang’s interlocutors differ among themselves, but they are at one in their criticism of the totalistic thrust of his constitutional design, its oblivi-ousness to the demands of contemporary politics, society, and culture, and his privileging of a religious interpretation of Confucianism over more secu-lar (and “democratic”) alternative traditions that locate the will of heaven in the voice of the people.16 Joseph Chan is critical of Jiang for his “ideological

15. For a history of the construction of the Kong lineage, see Thomas Wilson, “Ritualizing Confucius/Kongzi: The Family and State Cults of the Sage of Culture in Imperial China,” in On Sacred Grounds, 43–94.16. While I agree with these interlocutors’ criticisms of Jiang, the agreement should not be construed as an endorsement of their views on Confucianism or its relevance in the contemporary world. They are not the subjects of the discussion here. I also have little to say about Daniel Bell, who, in his introduction, distances himself from some of Jiang’s proposals, which strikes me as disingenuous, given that he was a cosignatory to Jiang in the New York Times op- ed piece cited earlier. For a trenchant criticism of his China’s New Confucianism by a distinguished expert on ancient China, Michael Nylan, see Jour-nal of Chinese Religions 36 (2008): 121–24. Nylan probably voices the puzzlement of


politics” and suggests in response a “moderate perfectionism” that would employ appropriate Confucian values to support the demand for “civility” (search for the common good) of a pluralistic society.17 Bai Tongdong, who views Jiang as a radical “idle dreamer,” writes that “at a time when pluralism is inevitable, such a system cannot be universally adopted by everyone. . . . Confucian constitutionalism (the religious kind) cannot even be a constitu-tionalism for all Chinese, but only for a cult that follows a particular reading of Confucianism.” Bai himself advocates a philosophical Confucianism that stresses the secularization of Confucianism in the late Zhou dynasty and focuses on the people- oriented interpretation of Confucius’s ideas by Mas-ter Mencius in the fourth century BCE.18 Li Chenyang admires the elegant symmetry of Jiang’s design, which he finds to be “reminiscent of the doc-trine of the Trinity in Christianity.”19 He is, however, critical of the notion of a “transcendent heaven,” which he suggests perceptively to be a justification for the Academy. He himself argues for the integration of Confucian values into a “democratic form” consistent with contemporary demands.20

many when she writes, “Given how many people will probably pick up Bell’s latest book, it is distressing to see a major university press promoting this sloppy, self- indulgent, and disorganized work that is as apt to confuse its readers as enlighten them about impor-tant debates on Confucianism’s role in the twenty- first century” (123–24). The criticism obviously has not stopped Princeton University Press from publishing more of the same.17. Joseph Chan, “On the Legitimacy of Confucian Constitutionalism,” in CO, 99–112.18. Bai Tongdong, “An Old Mandate for a New State: On Jiang Qing’s Political Confucian-ism,” in CO, 113–28, esp. 118. Bai nevertheless agrees with Jiang’s criticism of “Confucian socialism” advocated by another well- known contemporary, Gan Yang, for his promotion of a Confucianism synthesized with the legacies of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping (116–17). He also shares Jiang’s cultural nationalism and elitism, albeit of a more open kind. Bai’s own work suffers from methodologically unsophisticated (if not bizarre) historical parallels between Zhou dynasty “modernity” and Euro- modernity, as well as a cultural-ism that reproduces obscurantist Orientalist assumptions in the discovery of a seemingly unchanging “Chinese mind” in a few texts from that period. See Bai, China: The Politi-cal Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (London: Zed Books, 2012). Cultural stagnation apparently has once again become a virtue. I am grateful to John Makeham for drawing my attention to this work as well as Nylan’s review of Bell’s China’s New Confucianism cited earlier.19. Li Chenyang, “Transcendent Heaven? A Critique of Jiang’s Grounding of the Right to Rule,” in CO, 129–38, esp. 133.20. For a New Confucian view on the possibility (and necessity) of complementing liberal democracy with Confucian ethical values that would help further the goals of both political traditions, see Liu, Confucianism in the Eyes of a Confucian Liberal. Like others who per-ceive Confucianism and democracy to be compatible, Hsu drew upon the Mencian (after Master Mencius) tradition with its emphasis on the people.


While critical of Jiang, these commentators share in the belief that Confucian values may contribute positively one way or another to a plural-istic democratic society. The exception is Wang Shaoguang, who reaffirms existing socialism and the Maoist legacy. Wang, on the one hand, refutes the presumption of a crisis of legitimacy by adducing statistics that show popular support for Communist rule. More interestingly, he raises questions about the historical realities of Confucian politics that are ignored in most discussions of Confucianism that focus on the promise of textual evidence rather than the actual practice of Confucianism over two thousand years of imperial rule. His statement is worth quoting at length, as it is relevant not just to Jiang’s advocacy but to the Confucian project in general:

In the history of Confucianism, Han Confucians turned Confucian-ism into a theology lost in the smoke of corruption and ghost stories. In the Wei- Jin period, the scholar- officials pursued abstruse studies and made Confucianism into abstruse metaphysics. Under the Sui the system of state examinations was established. In the follow-ing thirteen centuries, Confucianism essentially became a stepping stone for one generation after another of clueless scholars to pursue a career in officialdom. Popular sayings in Chinese—“A mouth full of virtue and morality; a stomach full of burglary and concubinage,” “hypocritical Confucian scholars”—are the result of observations that the words and deeds of Confucians did not match. . . . A book like the Anecdotal History of the Scholars lets us see how many Confucians were lazy loiterers, yes- men in search of petty gains.21

Given the ecological promise Jiang and his colleagues hold forth, we may add here that, historically, China under Confucianism did not do noticeably better than other societies. The contemporary regimes’s pen-chant for large- scale construction projects, without regard for social and environmental destruction, is, if anything, reminiscent of the hydraulic engi-neering that Karl Wittfogel associated with “Oriental despotism.”22 The premise of “harmony between heaven and humans” (tianren heyi ), a com-monly encountered slogan in Chinese self- identification, did little to con-strain damage on the third node of the trinity, the earth. Some scholars have suggested that such sentiments should be read not as expressions of

21. Wang Shaoguang, “Is the Way of the Humane Authority a Good Thing? An Assess-ment of Confucian Constitutionalism,” in CO, 138–58, esp. 153–54.22. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).


reality but as protests against it.23 It may be a good warning to keep in mind when dealing with other values, as well. As the Daoist sage Laozi wrote of Confucian values, somewhat cynically, “When the great Tao declined, the doctrines of humanity ( jen) and righteousness (i ) arose. . . . When the six family relationships are not in harmony, there will be the advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children.”24

In all fairness, the gap between promise and reality, or word and deed, is as much a problem for contemporary Chinese socialism or, for that matter, for the turn “democracy” has taken in the “West,” of which Jiang is justifiably critical. More to the point here, Jiang, in his response to his crit-ics, is surprisingly silent on the questions Wang raises about the realities of Confucian politics. His lengthy response merely reaffirms and elaborates his belief in the moral corruption of democracy, its incompatibility with Con-fucianism as well as the “natural inequality” of human beings, and moder-nity rather than just the “West” as the object of the “real struggle.”

Surprisingly, the critics in this volume ignore the prevarications and contradictions in Jiang’s presentation of his ideas. Two are particularly noteworthy. First is the issue of the “West” and modernity. Jiang cannot seem to make up his mind whether his simpleminded reductionist depic-tion of democracy as a system based on self- interest without any hint of morality is a characteristic of a timeless “West,” a “Western” modernity, or a “vulgarization . . . brought about by capitalist consciousness,” which all appear in different parts of his presentation, although given the incessant juxtaposition of Chinese and “Western” traditions, the overall impression on the reader is that of “the West” as the culprit (CO, 38). Similarly, despite acknowledgment of the modernity and “Western” origin of his idea of con-

23. In his study of Chinese clichés about humans and nature, the German scholar Heiner Roetz wrote that “a sympathetic feeling for nature, such as that in the Zhuangzi, was simply a reaction against the course being taken in an entirely opposite direction by reality as it developed” (quoted in Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004], 323–24). The attractions of benevolent government, likewise, disguise the process of colonization that was the reality of “Chinese” cultural formation. Viewing Confucianism from the periphery, Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian’s alter ego in Soul Mountain exclaims, “This is a folk song which hasn’t been vandalized by the literati! It is song gushing straight out of the soul. Do you realize this? You have saved a culture! It’s not unique to the smaller nationalities, the Han nationality also has a genuine folk culture which hasn’t been contaminated by Con-fucian ethical teachings!” (Soul Mountain, trans. Mable Lee [New York: Perennial, 2000], 358).24. Wing-tsit Chan, trans. and comp., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 148.


stitution (we might add “religion” to that), his claims to Confucian native purity blind him to the inevitable “modernity” of any effort to bring Confucian values or spirit into “Western” forms.

Second is the contradiction between Jiang’s insistence on the cultural groundedness of politics and the universal relevance of his own scheme. While he complains with good reason about the “colonial implan-tation of Western- style democracy on non- Western states” (CO, 36), he writes in his conclusion that “[p]olitical Confucianism is not only intended for China. It is also of significance for the whole of humanity” (CO, 207), without explaining why this culturally bound system should be acceptable to others or how it is to be implemented.

It is possible that Jiang’s uncompromising defense of his Confu-cian constitutionalism is motivated not by the naïve utopianism of an “idle dreamer” but by a calculated strategy that only intransigence will force rec-ognition of a Confucian alternative in a situation where “China’s old system of government has collapsed, and a new system has not yet been estab-lished. History stands open” (CO, 40). He readily acknowledges that no satisfactory way presents itself so far to implement his ideas (CO, 43), and while there are “the beginnings of a Confucian cultural revival, the Confu-cian circles that exist are “quite small, scattered, and with few resources or personnel” (CO, 67). It makes some sense under such circumstances for anyone seriously interested in promoting Confucianism to insist on an inte-gral identity that resists dissolution in fragments into competing ideologies of liberal democracy or socialism.

There is, however, another explanation for Jiang’s totalism that rests upon his conception of the relationship between the state, the nation, and the people. Jiang believes that,

[a]ccording to the Confucian historical view, the state is the prod-uct of an autonomous long evolution of history and culture. It is a spiritual, organic, and living body that has a spiritual life that runs through past, present, and future and forever. The spiritual life of the state will not be cut short or destroyed by the rational choices or deliberate decisions of a group of people at any given time. This is what the Spring and Autumn Annals refers to as one body of the state that endures through the centuries. This means that the state is one body with the nation and not with the people. (CO, 74)

Likewise, “the nation refers to a historically enduring idea that tran-scends the present period, whereas the people refers to a defined contem-


porary group and is a modern political idea. . . . The spiritual life of the state embodies the spiritual life of the nation” (CO, 75). While the government is a secular idea and belongs to the people, the state owes its existence to “the decree of heaven” and has “a transcendent sacred existence” (CO, 75). It follows that “the purpose of state power is to protect the state as an organic, living body, to ensure its continuity, and to guarantee that the nation’s historical identity is not destroyed” (CO, 76).

This mysticization/mystification of state power goes beyond the divine sanctity claimed by imperial rulers in the past in its abstraction of state and nation beyond the reach of the people. It identifies the state with the divine will of heaven, and the nation with a transhistorical cultural essence that defines its identity. While it claims inspiration in ancient texts, it is clearly set in its contemporary context against contractual, populist, or socialist ideas of the state that view people as the source of the nation and the state. Sovereignty here lies with those who can read the will of heaven or, as Jiang and his ilk would have it, the “people in whom the Way becomes present” (CO, 175). In its reification of the nation, state, and reli-gion, and its naturalization of inequality and hierarchy, its affinity is less with radical right- wing Fascist and Nazi ideologies, with which it has some over-lap, than with early nineteenth- century counterrevolutionary responses to the French Revolution.

John Makeham, in his analysis of contemporary Confucianism, has noted the entanglement of Jiang’s Confucianism in the surge of cul-tural nationalism in China since the 1990s.25 Indeed, it is interesting that while in its early phase in the 1980s the Confucian revival in peripheral Chinese societies revolved around questions of modernization, the cultural nationalist element moved to the fore once Confucianism was embraced by mainland scholars starting in the late 1980s.26 Confucianism has been a beneficiary of this surge in cultural nationalism while also steering it in a traditionalist direction. “Political Confucianism” is, however, not a reasser-tion of tradition but a very modern ideology. Other prominent advocates of a political Confucianism, such as the sociologist Kang Xiaoguang, openly proclaim their cultural nationalism, acknowledge the formative influence in their thinking of Samuel Huntington’s prognosis of an imminent “clash of

25. Makeham, Lost Soul, 264–67.26. Arif Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Globalization, the Developmental State, and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” in Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011), 97–155.


civilizations,” advocate “dictatorship by the community of Confucian schol-ars,” and seek a resolution to problems of Communism in “the corporate state,” an idea that has its origins in Mussolini’s Fascism.27 There is more to cultural nationalism than political Confucianism, just as there is more to Confucianism than cultural nationalism—and these particular political ver-sions. I will return to that important question by way of conclusion.

Jiang’s Confucianism is on prominent display among the diverse Confucianisms that find their way into Sun’s account of the Confucian revi-val in Confucianism as a World Religion. She finds in the Confucianism of Jiang and Kang Xiaoguang “an influential way of understanding Confucian-ism” (WR, 129). Jiang’s collaborator Bell provides her with an alibi for “the increasing importance of Confucianism in contemporary Chinese political, social, and cultural life” (WR, 139–40). She recounts in her preface an epi-phanous moment when, listening to Jiang in his office in bustling Shen-zhen, she realizes that “Confucianism as a religion represented for [him] a uniquely Chinese solution to the problems of socialism and global capital-ism” (WR, xvi).

If she has any doubts about what these Confucianists advocate, they are not part of the discussion. The book’s intended goal is “to solve . . . confusions and controversies over the religious nature of Confucianism” (WR, 1). Sun pursues two major themes that cut across the three- part orga-nization of her account: “The Puzzle of Classification: How Did Confucian-ism Become a World Religion?,” “The Problem of Methodology: Who Are the Confucians in China?,” and “The Reality of Practices: Is Confucianism a Religion in China Today?” The first theme is that of the status of Con-fucianism as a religion, from the initial appearance of the question in the Jesuit “manufacturing” of Confucianism to its invention as a “world religion” as part of the invention of world religions by Oxford University scholars Max Mueller and James Legge, the great translator into English of the Confu-cian canon, to its twentieth- century fate in China and the United States. The account here hints at the influence of the brilliant study of world religions

27. Kang Xiaoguang, “Confucianization: A Future in the Tradition,” Social Research 73, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 77–120. See also David Ownby, “Kang Xiaoguang: Social Science, Civil Society, and Confucian Religion,” China Perspectives, no. 2009/4 (2009): 101–11. Kang views belief in democracy as a “superstition.” His suggestion that substituting Con-fucian for Marxist texts in Party schools would go a long way toward implementing his goals seems somewhat naïve, judging by the effectiveness of Marxist texts in produc-ing good Communists. Kang, as a social scientist, has done important work on Chinese agrarian society and political organization with a strongly populist orientation.


as an academic enterprise by Tomoko Masuzawa, albeit without the critical sharpness of the latter.28 Aside from a useful summary and a few anecdotal details, Sun adds little to Norman Girardot’s monumental work on Legge and Victorian controversies over Confucianism.29 Despite her recognition of the Orientalist construction of Confucianism as a religion, she writes that “because of the late nineteenth- century formulation of the ‘world religions’ paradigm, it has already become a social fact that Confucianism has been understood as a world religion for over a century, both in our popular imagi-nation and in our academic knowledge production” (WR, 8; emphasis in the original).

Fair enough, if this understanding has indeed become a “social fact.” Not in China, apparently, where “it is neither considered a religion by most people . . . nor counted as a religion by the Chinese government” (WR, 1). The issue gets even more puzzling when she writes in her concluding para-graph, quoting Wilfred Cantwell Smith, that “the question ‘Is Confucianism a religion’ is indeed a question ‘the West has never been able to answer, and China never able to ask’” (WR, 183).

This is the second theme the book takes up: the status of Confucian-ism as a religion in China. Part 2, mysteriously subtitled “Who Are the Con-fucians in China?,” consists of one chapter on US scholarship and teach-ing on Confucianism and another on how to become a Confucian, which is largely of the author’s own design, with only one chapter devoted to empiri-cal evidence for the popularity of Confucianism in China. Self- identification as Confucian is a negligible 0.2 percent of the total in available surveys (WR, 115–16). The author is correct to point to the diffuseness of religious practice in China, which complicates statistical measures, and the impor-tance of ritual practices, such as ancestor worship, which may be “a better indicator of ‘Confucianness’” (WR, 116). She does not say what this practi-cal absence of “self- identification” might imply for Confucianism, especially when compared to nearly 17 percent for Buddhism (some of whom may even be members of the Falun Gong), the overwhelming 78 percent who “don’t believe in anything,” and the rapid increases in the number of Chris-tians, who are deemed a threat by the likes of Jiang and Kang Xiaoguang. Indeed, given the diffuseness of religious practice in China, one of the

28. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universal-ism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).29. Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pil-grimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).


major flaws in the evaluation of the evidence here is the failure to examine Confucianism within the overall context of the surge in religious practice, of which it has been a possible beneficiary, just as it has benefited from inten-sifying cultural nationalism politically.30 As for ancestor worship as a sign of “Confucianness,” whatever the merits of that problematic connection, it is a far cry from the totalistic culturalist claims of “political Confucianism.”

The third part of the study offers further discussion of “the realities” of Confucianism in contemporary China. The chapter on the Confucian turn among women is possibly the most interesting in the whole study. Another chapter on goings- on in Confucian temples offers some material on popular Confucianism that has been studied more thoroughly elsewhere. Sun con-cludes that while the future remains uncertain, Confucianism may yet suc-ceed as a “civil religion.” This would seem to be a solution to the question the study set out “to solve.”

Sun writes in her preface, “It has been my great privilege to follow and chart Confucianism’s course” (WR, xvi), which describes the goal of this study much more accurately than the promise of solving “confusions and controversies” on Confucianism as a religion. She writes, by way of methodological warning, that “I am not offering an analytical and substan-tive definition of religion as a scholar because it is essentially irrelevant to my subject matter. What I am studying is not whether Confucianism is a religion but whether and how Confucianism has been constructed and con-tested by various social forces” (WR, 8). What she might have added, as the statement in the preface suggests, is that her study itself is conceived and executed as a construction intended to further promote a religious Confu-

30. Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval have suggested with brilliant insight that “spiri-tual quests” in contemporary China “sometimes translate more into a greater desire for religion than actual religiosity.” See “The Contemporary Revival of Confucianism: Anshen liming or the Religious Dimension of Confucianism,” China Perspectives, no. 2008/3 (2008): 88–106, esp. 105. See also the discussions of the surge in religious activity in “Religious Reconfigurations in the People’s Republic of China,” ed. Sébastien Billioud and David Palmer, special issue, China Perspectives, no. 2009/4 (2009). Indeed, as sug-gested in note 23, in the quotation by Gao Xingjian, the identification of Confucianism with Chinese identity, especially religious identity, suppresses the far greater importance in the daily life of Daoism, Buddhism, and a variety of localized faiths that have been con-signed to the realm of “superstition” since the secular reorganization of the religious field in the early Republic in the 1910s. Daoism and Buddhism also held dominant status at the state level for most of the first millennium AD. Most scholars of Chinese religion believe that Daoism rather than Confucianism should be the proper identification for China. See John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).


cianism, most importantly for her English- speaking audiences. Indeed, in its tone, as well as its use of available evidence, the study impresses the reader most as sociology in the service of Confucian religiosity, “focus-ing on the uniqueness of Confucianism . . . [to] arrive at a more complete account of the fate of religion in our rationalized, scientifically advanced, yet still often miraculously enchanted twenty- first- century life” (WR, 6).

Sun stresses the importance of ritual and not just ideas as evidence of religion, which is an anthropological perspective also adopted widely in studies of Chinese religion.31 Ritual is hardly sufficient, however, in adjudi-cating intellectual issues or evaluating the doctrinal affinities of ritual. What is remarkable about this study is the refusal of the author to engage issues thrown up by her own undertaking. While she observes that most of Jiang’s “ideas cannot be found in the actual history of Confucianism in China” but owe more to Christian inspiration (WR, xv–xvi), she nevertheless proceeds to envision on their basis a Confucian future for the country, as if there was nothing problematic about a Confucianism that is not quite Confucian.32 Creative interpretation of Confucianism is a possibility, of course, but how far creativity can be taken before Confucianism ceases to be Confucian-ism or religion, religion requires at least some acknowledgment. Recog-nition of highly ambiguous evidence of Confucian stirrings does not deter Sun from reaffirming a bright future for Confucianism. On the other hand, she is quick to smooth over the implications of conflicting readings of and interest in Confucianism. Confucianism as philosophy, thought, social and political ethos, religiosity and spirituality, rituals and practices (WR, 25–29) (we might add self- cultivation) does not add up to a teleology of religious Confucianism, while “becoming human” as a goal of Confucian becoming says little about the content of that humanity. Propaganda organs, such as the Confucius Institutes or the quirky Confucius Peace Prize (WR, 12), con-ceived in frustration with the Nobel Prize, hardly serve as indicators of the progress of Confucianism. Neither does Confucian tourism. For a work by a sociologist, there is a curious absence of attention in the study to the differ-ent social forces and the different reasons for interest in Confucianism that are not necessarily in harmony or point to any kind of unity even among the small fragmentary groups that would seem to make up the contemporary Confucian scene—from “Confucian merchants” (rushang) to merchants

31. See Lagerwey, China: A Religious State.32. On this issue of the Confucianism of contemporary Confucians, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), preface.


who merely support causes like Jiang’s, from children gathered to read the classics to popular Confucian groups interested in temple rituals, from fol-lowers of the popular New Age TV Confucianism of Yu Dan to intellectual women interested in Confucianism. And, of course, above all of them looms the Party- State, one part of which puts a Confucius statue on Tiananmen Square only to have it taken out by another part. These problems are all swept under the rug in a seeming effort to accentuate the positive.33

Especially puzzling to this reviewer is why Sun ascribes the forma-tion of the religious field in China to the Communist state, when studies of religion in twentieth- century China have shown that the Communists mostly followed the practice that was established right after the founding of the Republic in 1912. She writes in chapter 5, “The conception of the Five Major Religions was formed in the 1950s behind the closed doors of the Chinese Communist leadership” (WR, 79). The five religions consisted of Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Islam, and Daoism. The official religions excluded Confucianism as well as most popular religious prac-tices, which were classified as “superstitions.” According to Goossaert and Palmer, “during the first months of the Republic [in 1912], five religions—Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism—came to acquire state recognition, a situation that would remain in place for the fol-lowing century. National associations were set up for each of them in order to define and negotiate the scope of their autonomous organizations.”34 The Marxist state was committed to atheism, but where religious policy was concerned, it was continuous with the secular policies of its predecessors. It was not some conspiracy “behind closed doors” that led to the exclusion of Confucianism, moreover, but a refusal beginning with the Republic to recognize Confucianism as a religion (contrary to the efforts of Confucians like Kang Youwei).

The issue here is not merely one of historical accuracy. It raises a fundamental question concerning Sun’s approach to Confucianism as a “world religion”: why, at the very moment of its establishment as a “world

33. Stephen C. Angle’s enumeration of different Confucianisms includes Confucian capi-talism, scholarly Confucianism, Marxist Confucianism, soft- power Confucianism, tourist Confucianism, revivalist Confucianism, family values Confucianism, feel- good Confu-cianism, and global Confucian philosophy. See “Confucianism on the Comeback: Cur-rent Trends in Culture, Values, Politics and, Economy,” Social Education 74, no. 1 (Janu-ary–February 2010): 24–27. Some of these various categories have their own internal differentiations.34. Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, 58.


religion” in Europe and North America, Chinese themselves would refuse to accept Confucianism as any kind of religion, let alone a world religion—as they mostly have since then. It also underlines the fact that the promo-tion of religious Confucianism does not merely challenge the Communist regime but turns its back on a century of secularism, including Confucian secularism.

These works should be read for what they are: works of advo-cacy based on interpretations of Confucianism that have limited appeal even among the small groups of Confucians in China and overseas. Jiang and his editors are quite explicit in their goals. Jiang zealously pursues his “political Confucianism,” which, in its backward- looking Confucianism, seems determined to confirm Cultural Revolution depictions of Confucius as “the reactionary sage of the feudal classes.” His editor and collabora-tor Bell has been peddling a communitarian conservatism dressed up in Confucian garb all the way to Davos, Switzerland, in hopes of catching the attention of the rich and powerful, trying his luck even with “political progressives” with doublespeak about challenging “oppressive social prac-tices” with “Confucian values of hierarchy, deference and ritual.”35 Sun’s cri-tique of the Orientalist invention of Confucianism as a world religion largely bypasses evidence of Chinese resistance to the idea for the past century that was not restricted to the Communists and ends up as an effort to con-firm Confucianism as a world religion that “holds for us anxiety, but also great hope” (WR, 183). The vagueness of her pronoun suggests perhaps that her work is addressed more to English- speaking readers, some of whom cannot bear the idea of whole countries without their kind of religion.

There has been much talk in recent years of a surge of interest in Confucianism, spurred by works like these. Surge there is, to be sure, espe-cially in the PRC, where it was not possible to speak of Confucianism dur-ing the years of the Cultural Revolution, except as a monstrosity, but also among scholars both in China and abroad who relegated it to a dead past. Confucianism, of course, was kept alive by the New Confucians, who con-tributed new syntheses inspired by the encounter with Euro- American phi-

35. See his blurb on the back cover of Stephen C. Angle, Contemporary Confucian Politi-cal Philosophy: Toward Progressive Confucianism (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). Angle’s book, ironically, draws upon Mou Zongsan, whose ideas are rejected by Bell’s collabora-tor Jiang for their receptivity to liberal democracy. Angle himself argues for a necessary reinterpretation of Confucianism to alleviate oppressive legacies and bring it closer to democratic values. His emphasis is on how Confucian ethical values and ritual practices may contribute to improving the practices of law, democracy, and individual rights.


losophies. The surge began not in the PRC but in other Chinese societies and among Chinese abroad, drawing energy from rapid capitalist develop-ment, which instigated interest in Confucianism as a developmental ideol-ogy, and also producing fertile soil for philosophical Confucianism, among whom the American Confucian Tu Wei- ming was the most prominent. It was only in the 1990s that it was appropriated by mainland scholars, politi-cians, and the public at large as part of a surge in cultural nationalism, as well as a new, almost desperate, longing for religion.

Publications such as Constitutional Order or World Religion leave the impression if not of imminent then at least immanent Confucian trans-formation of the PRC, which is highly misleading. Where Confucianism belongs in the radical cultural transformations of the last two decades, and what significance is to be attached to it, remains highly problematic for Chi-nese, as well as for most serious scholarly studies of Confucianism and the religious revival in the PRC. How we estimate the popularity of Con-fucianism depends on how we define Confucianism in the first place. A Confucianism defined in terms of practices of ancestor worship or vaguely defined ideals of “becoming human” would include not only most Chinese but a great many among the world’s populations as well. “Popular Confu-cianism” is blended with other beliefs in the diffuse religiosity of the Chi-nese, which does not permit easy classification of religious belief.36 The sagely ideal is one we may all share in so long as it is not constrained by moral dogmatism and cultural parochialism. But then, what is Confucian about such diffuse Confucianism?37

As I noted above, there is good reason for Jiang’s insistence on institutions and ritual practice in the establishment of a Confucian iden-tity. The distinguished historian Yu Ying- shih has used the metaphor of the wandering or disembodied soul (youhun) to describe the fate of Confucian-ism unmoored from its institutional context.38 Similarly, in his seminal work

36. Sun notes that the TV popularizer of Confucianism, Yu Dan, followed up with a pro-gram on the Daoist Zhuangzi, the book for which sold more than one million copies in the first two weeks after publication (WR, 143–44).37. Tu Wei- ming is the most prominent example of openness in the pursuit of “sagehood.” For more recent examples by American Confucians, see Stephen C. Angle, Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo- Confucian Philosophy (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2009); and Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in a Late- Modern World, with a foreword by Tu Wei- ming (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). A brief survey of “American Confucianism” is available in Cai Degui, “American Confucianism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32, no. 1 (March 2005): 123–38.38. Makeham, Lost Soul, 1–2. Makeham’s own title is inspired by Yu.


on the “modern fate” of Confucianism, Joseph Levenson argued that the tension between monarchical institutions and Confucian values provided a source of vitality that had disappeared with the fall of the monarchy in 1912. It led him, in hindsight ironically, to pronounce that the fall of the monarchy in 1912 signaled the inevitable demise of Confucianism.39

The divorce of Confucianism from its institutional context, of course, also meant a kind of freedom for Confucian learning and Confucianism to develop in new ways as it was articulated to other beliefs and systems of learning—not just “Western,” as in prejudicial closed- circuit “China- West” juxtapositions, but inclusive of other philosophical traditions. This may be the legacy of “New Confucianism,” which continues to motivate contempo-rary Confucianism in the works of Tu and others. It also inspires the search for a place for Confucian values in contemporary political and cultural think-ing by self- identified American Confucians, such as Stephen Angle and the “Boston Confucianism” of Robert Neville, who writes that “the world culture of philosophy needs and benefits from Confucianism and other philosophic traditions outside the West . . . to embrace all the traditions within the world culture of philosophy.”40

For cultural nationalists, however, this kind of freedom presents a predicament: the loss of Confucianism’s identity as a Chinese tradition, cru-cial to the definition of national identity. The Confucius church they propose to salvage this identity, ironically, owes its inspiration to the Christian para-digm of religion, while “political Confucianism” has more affinity with mod-ern counterrevolutionary ideologies than anything in the imperial Chinese past. Orientalist notions of Chinese exceptionalism aside, their attacks on democracy share much with declarations of incompatibility between Islam and democracy by the likes of the Taliban, while Jiang’s Academy bears strong structural and ideological resemblance to Iranian Ayatollahs’ Council of Guardians. If anything, the latter is more democratic in its parliamentary system than what is proposed by Jiang, who would further restrict popular sovereignty with his houses of heaven and earth.

There is no question presently of a crisis in modern values of democ-racy, secularism, and freedom. Class inequalities threaten democracy in advanced capitalist societies and block its advance elsewhere, as in the

39. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1968), vol. 2, pt. 2. See also Levenson, ed., European Expan-sion and the Counter- example of Asia, 1300–1600 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1967), 44–55.40. Neville, Boston Confucianism, xxix.


PRC. Political manipulation in international affairs by the United States and other European regimes continues to undermine its prestige, also playing into the hands of reactionary political forces that nourish off cultural nation-alism to perpetuate “traditional” forms of inequality and oppression. Cul-tural nationalism also has enabled the revival of religious practices, which are placed beyond criticism by essentialist notions of multiculturalism and newfound norms of cultural “sensitivity.” Needless to say, these issues of culture are entangled in global as well as national reconfigurations of economic and political power. The surge of interest in Confucianism is as much about the “rise of China” as it is about the worth of Confucianism as such. China also sells, which may partly explain why respected university presses and the nation’s “newspaper of record” would publish works of dubious scholarly merit and fatuous op- eds attacking democracy, with irre-sponsible endorsements by reputable scholars and journalists.

An elitist and hierarchical Confucianism no doubt has great appeal for foes of democracy, whether in China or the United States, while Con-fucian religiosity resonates with the so- called postsecular turn in contem-porary culture.41 It is all the more important at this crucial juncture to be reminded that despite its failures and betrayals, democracy, which is no longer just “Western,” continues to provide inspiration in struggles globally against state and corporate malfeasance for the right to life and welfare, justice, freedom, and human dignity. The exercise of democracy demands a spiritual commitment and ethical perseverance every bit as exacting as the search for “sagehood” or humaneness. It may be a worthy cause for Con-fucianism in search of contemporary relevance and universality.

41. For an illuminating critical discussion of the predicament of democracy in its original homelands, see Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (Lon-don: Verso, 2006).

King Kong in America

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