Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond

Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond

Religion in Chinese Societies Edited by

Kenneth Dean, McGill University Richard Madsen, University of California, San Diego David Palmer, University of Hong Kong

VOLUME 3

Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond Edited by

Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney†

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Confucianism and spiritual traditions in modern China and beyond / edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. p. cm. — (Religion in Chinese societies ; v. 3) ISBN 978-90-04-21239-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Confucian. 2. Confucianism—China. 3. Confucianism—Relations. 4. China—Religion. 5. Confucianism. I. Yang, Fenggang. II. Tamney, Joseph B. B5233.C6C65 2011 181'.112—dc23

2011034514

ISSN 1877-6264 ISBN 978 90 04 21239 8 Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ....................................................................... List of Contributors ....................................................................

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Introduction: Nationalism, Globalization, and Chinese Traditions in the Twenty-First Century ................................ Joseph B. Tamney† and Fenggang Yang

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PART I

CONFUCIAN REVIVALISM IN CHINA AND BEYOND: POTENTIALS AND REALITIES A Study of the Renaissance of Traditional Confucian Culture in Contemporary China ........................................... Kang Xiaoguang

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Confucian Spirituality in Contemporary China ........................ Tu Weiming

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The Resilience of Confucianism in Chinese Societies .............. Joseph B. Tamney†

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From Beijing to Boston: The Future Contributions of the Globalization of New Confucianism ...................................... John Berthrong

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PART II

CONFUCIANISM AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE The Daoist Encounter with Modernity: Some Issues in the History and Sociology of Daoism in the Modern Era .......... David A. Palmer and Xun Liu

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contents

The Modern Significance of Some Basic Concepts in Chinese Buddhism ................................................................................ Fang Litian

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Indigenization of Imported Religions in China: The Case of Islam and the Hui People ...................................................... Jian Zhixiang and Ma Rong

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Protestantism in Modern China as “Foreign Religion” and “Chinese Religion”: Autonomy, Independence, and the Constraints of Foreign Hegemony ......................................... Daniel H. Bays Confucianism, Christianity, and Religious Freedom: Debates in the Transformation Period of Modern China (1900–1920s) ........................................................................... Liu Yi Spiritual Accomplishment in Confucianism and Spiritual Transcendence in Christianity ............................................... Zhuo Xinping

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PART III

THE SOCIAL REALITIES OF RITUAL: FROM EXEGETIC TO ANALYTIC Confucian Humaneness (Ren) Across Social Barriers ................ Robert Cummings Neville

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The Revival of Confucian Rites in Contemporary China ........ Anna Sun

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Religion, Ritual, and the Public Good in China ...................... Robert P. Weller

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Index ...........................................................................................

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is dedicated to the memory of my co-editor Joseph B. Tamney, who passed away on October 25, 2009, in Reston, Virginia, due to complications from cancer. He was born in Queens, New York City, on January 8, 1933. He served as Editor of Sociology of Religion (1994–2000) and President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (2003–2004). Joe was a humble and easygoing person with a great sense of humor. He was a great colleague to work with. I enjoyed his many visits to West Lafayette, Indiana, in preparation for the 2004 annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, for which I was the Program Chair under his presidency. Confucianism and other religions in Asian societies are one of the foci of his numerous publications. Joe actively participated in the Beijing Summit on Chinese Spirituality and Society at Peking University on October 8–10, 2008, at which the chapters in this volume were initially presented. Upon the conclusion of the summit, Joe readily agreed to join me in co-editing this volume and worked hard, even while enduring much pain in his last days, to draft the introductory chapter and send me his ideas about the volume. His contribution to this volume is indispensable, and for any fault or weakness in the editing I must take responsibility. The Beijing Summit on Chinese Spirituality and Society in 2008, and the publication of the two volumes it produced (the other one is Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories and Findings, co-edited by Fenggang Yang and Graeme Lang), were made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. I thank Dr. Yunfeng Lu of Peking University to serve as the host of the Beijing Summit, and all the authors of this volume for their cooperation, patience, and diligence in making the revisions. I am grateful to Dr. Lily Szeto, the tireless and efficient Project Manager throughout the long process. Many people provided assistance during the summit and during the editing of this volume, including the translators and on-site interpreters: Anning Hu of Purdue University, Joy Lam of the University of Southern California, Dr. Eric Y. Liu, Jun Lü of Purdue University, Dr. Joy Tong of Purdue University, Dr. Chi-ying Alice Wang of

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acknowledgments

Purdue University, Dr. Junmin Wang of the University of Memphis, Dr. Yuting Wang of the American University of Sharjah, Dr. Changqi Xia of Wuhan University, and Dr. Jiexia (Elisa) Zhai of Miami University. I would like to express my appreciation to Brill editor Katelyn Chin and copy editor Gene McGarry, whose excellent work made the final stage of editing this volume much enjoyable. Fenggang Yang May 18, 2011

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS John Berthrong (Ph.D. in 1979, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Comparative Theology (School of Theology) and Acting Director of Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. His most recent book is Expanding Process (SUNY, 2008). Fang Litian is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Renmin University of China, and the Dean of the Advanced Institute of Religious Studies. He is the author of ten books, including two national award-winning books: Buddhist Philosophy and Essentials of Chinese Buddhist Philosophy (in Chinese). Jian Zhixiang (Ph.D. in 2008, The Minzu University of China) is Associate Professor in School of Ethnology and Sociology at the Minzu University of China. One of her books is Self Identification and Social Definition of Ethnic Belonging: A Case Study of Bao-an (Minzu Press, China, 2006). Kang Xiaoguang is Professor in School of Public Administration at Renmin University of China. He has published eight monographs, more than ten co-authored books, more than 40 papers in “relations between state and society”, “Political development and political stability” and “political culture.” Liu Xun (Ph.D. in 2001, University of Southern California) is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Harvard, 2009). Liu Yi (Ph.D. in 2008, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) is Assistant Professor of History and Executive Director of Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Shanghai University. He is author of Religion and Politics in a Global Context (Shanghai University Press, 2011).

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Ma Rong (Ph.D. in 1987, Brown University) is Professor of Sociology at Peking University. His recent book is Population and Society in Contemporary Tibet (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Robert Cummings Neville (Ph.D. in 1963, Yale University) is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University where he is also Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology. Two of his recent books are Ritual and Deference and Realism in Religion (SUNY Press). David A. Palmer (Ph.D. in 2002, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for Anthropological Research at the University of Hong Kong. His latest book is The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Anna Sun (Ph.D. in 2008, Princeton University) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College. She is completing her book Confusions over Confucianism: Concepts, Methods, and Realities. Joseph B. Tamney† (1933–2009) was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. He received his Ph. D. from Cornell University in 1962. He published seventy-seven articles in scientific research journals and nine books on topics including religion, politics, and community. Tu Weiming (Ph.D. in 1968, Harvard University) is the Director of Institute for the Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University and Research Professor at Harvard University. His essay on the Confucian discourse in cultural China, The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity, was published by Centre for Studies in Civilizations in India, 2010. Robert P. Weller (Ph.D. in 1981, Johns Hopkins University) is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Boston University. His most recent book is Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford 2008, co-authored with A. Seligman, M. Puett, and B. Simon). Fenggang Yang (Ph.D. in 1997, the Catholic University of America) is Professor of Sociology and Director of Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University in Indiana. His latest book is Religion

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in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (Oxford University Press, 2011). Zhuo Xinping (Ph.D. in 1987, Munich University in Germany) is Professor and Director of Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His recent book is “Global” Religions and Contemporary China.

INTRODUCTION: NATIONALISM, GLOBALIZATION, AND CHINESE TRADITIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Joseph B. Tamney† and Fenggang Yang In the beginning of the twentieth century, Confucianism, which had been the state-sanctioned orthodoxy in imperial China for centuries, was first dethroned by the imperial court in 1905, then deposed by intellectuals in the New Culture and May Fourth Movements around 1919, and finally swept away from society during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Confucianism has returned, spurred by assorted domestic and international forces. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which continues to be under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, cultural and political elites have been seeking alternatives to replace the fraying orthodoxy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. A fraction of them have rediscovered Confucianism as a possible tool for maintaining the political order, social cohesion, and territorial integrity of China. Thus Confucianism has become a major political culture competing with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and liberalism to define Chinese national identity and politics.1 Beyond mainland China, the economic rise of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan has boosted confidence in Confucianism among Confucian intellectuals in these and other societies. In North America, some academic humanists and Christian theologians have begun to appropriate Confucian values to complement and amend modernist liberalism and Judeo-Christian culture for the rapidly changing and globalizing world. This revival and expansion of Confucianism in the twenty-first century has not received much scholarly attention in the West except among a small circle of Sinologists.2 However, a discussion of

1 Fenggang Yang, “Cultural Dynamics in China: Today and in 2020,” Asia Policy 4 ( July, 2007): 41–52. 2 For example, Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval, “Jiaohua: The Confucian Revival in China as an Educative Project,” China Perspectives, 2007, no. 4: 4–20; idem, “The Contemporary Revival of Confucianism: Anshen liming or the Religious Dimension

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Confucianism can easily draw large crowds in China today. When some of the articles in this volume were first presented at Peking University, during an evening session of the Beijing Summit on Chinese Spirituality and Society (October 8–10, 2008), at least eight hundred people packed the auditorium beyond its capacity, with people sitting in the aisles and standing outside the doors. Most of the people in the audience were young people—college students and faculty. In addition to the scholarly effervescence and popular movement taking place in China itself, since 2004 the Chinese government has provided resources to establish hundreds of Confucius Institutes in many countries on all continents to teach the Chinese language and culture. Indeed, Confucianism has become such a critical topic in China today that it has drawn a response from many scholars of various disciplines and specialties. This volume provides a unique combination of articles by both keen observers of and active campaigners in this revival and expansion of Confucianism. It includes anthropologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, and religionists specializing in Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and Christianity. These scholars met first at the Beijing Summit and engaged in an interdisciplinary exchange on many spiritual and religious issues raised by the social changes taking place in China and beyond, with a special focus on Confucianism and its relationships with other spiritual traditions and cultures. There are many issues to be sorted out: Given the troubled history of Confucianism in the twentieth century, will the Confucian revival in recent years have a future in China and beyond? How will it relate to other Chinese cultural traditions, Western spiritual traditions, and the Communist ideology that continues its dominance in the PRC, at least in name? While it is impossible to predict the future, can we learn anything from the past? What was the relationship in earlier centuries between the dominant Confucianism and other religions? What has happened to religions imported into China, including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity? If Confucianism reemerges as the new orthodoxy of China, how might it relate to other religions and modern liberalism, as envisioned by Confucian advocates but also as assessed by observers? What contributions will of Confucianism,” China Perspectives, 2008, no. 3: 88–106; idem, “Lijiao: The Return of the Ceremonies to Honour Confucius in Mainland China Today,” China Perspectives, 2009, no. 4: 82–100; Daniel A. Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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a revived Confucianism make to Chinese society and the globalized world? As China rises as an economic power, the prevailing cultural and ideological identities of the Chinese bear importance not only for China but also for the globalizing world. This volume is a collection of both descriptive and reflective chapters by Chinese and Western scholars in various disciplines that address some of these questions. Some historians and social scientists try to provide detached descriptions of historical developments or current social movements. The theologians and philosophers offer exegetic or prescriptive reflections. Indeed, to engage the issues at stake, which have great social, cultural, and political implications for China and beyond, strict disciplinary boundaries cannot stand as firewalls. The disciplinary separation or demarcation itself is an artificial, modern Western construct that deserves to be deconstructed in light of Confucianism, as many new Confucian scholars in China and the West argue. As a matter of fact, not only are philosophers and theologians often empirically informed, social scientists also frequently engage in active arguments for particular policies and directions of development in the future. This thoroughly interdisciplinary volume can be read both as a collection of source materials (data) on Confucianism and as a sample of engaged discussions of Confucianism and other spiritual traditions in China and beyond. Modernization and Globalization China is modernizing, the world is globalizing, and the Chinese state is adjusting its policies toward religion and cultural traditions. Old spiritual traditions are resurfacing, but their expressions are being affected by the new social context of nationalism, modernization, and globalization. The nature of modernization is explicitly discussed in the chapters by Joseph B. Tamney and by David A. Palmer and Xun Liu. The relevant aspects of modernization are structural differentiation (i.e., the appearance of new, independent institutions such as a religious institution free from state control or a capitalist economy), the fragmentation of societal culture (pluralism), and the growing importance of the individual at the expense of groups. Palmer and Liu describe in more concrete terms some of the structural changes associated with the modern period—the modern state, the gender revolution, and capitalism.

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The increasing importance of the individual has two aspects: individuation and individualism. Individuation means a person has an identity apart from social roles and group memberships.3 Thus modernization is a process in which people become increasingly self-conscious about a personal identity that is increasingly unique. As individuation proceeds, group-thinking declines. Palmer and Liu refer to “modernity” as “the changing subjectivity and increasing self-reflexivity of individuals” in a changing world. Individuation, in turn, gives rise to individualism, which is the cultural affirmation of the value of the individual, and of every individual. The human rights movement embodies individualism and is increasingly understood as universally applicable. As Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution emphasizes, in traditional societies groups such as families or tribes have more rights than individuals. “In America, groups have rights, but individuals have more powerful rights. That’s one of the fundamental clashes between America and the so-called Islamic world, but also between America and traditional societies everywhere.”4 But as Peter Berger wrote, individuation is now occurring everywhere: “All sectors of the emerging global culture enhance the independence of the individual over against tradition and the collectivity.”5 Globalization is the current stage of societal expansion, a basic feature of modernization. Globalization can be described in relation to social structure, culture, and personality. Structurally, globalization means “an ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences.”6 Culturally, globalization means the weakening of any relation between place and cultural options—that is, the same options are becoming available everywhere; more immediately the process refers to the appearance of “globalized cultures,” that is, not a single global culture but cultures sharing some basic characteristics such as support for human rights. As this process proceeds, individuals

3 Rose Laub Coser, In Defense of Modernity: Role Complexity and Individual Autonomy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 4 “Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization,” event transcript of June 13, 2007, http://pewforum.org/Muslim/Journey-into-Islam-The-Crisis-of-Globalization. aspx (accessed February 6, 2011). 5 Peter L. Berger, “The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization,” in Many Globalizations, ed. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–16, at 2. 6 John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2.

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borrow from different cultures, and people become “cosmopolitan”: they have “an identity that is not totally circumscribed by the immediate locality, but, crucially, that embraces a sense of what unites us as human beings, of common risks and possibilities, of mutual responsibilities.”7 Modernization is not the path to utopia. The change to a more modern society involves losses and gains. The judgment by a contemporary Confucian that Western modernism includes negative aspects, such as “exploitation, mercantilism, consumerism, materialism, greed, egoism, and brutal competitiveness,”8 could have been written by Western critics of their own societies. Indeed modernization results in a sense of moral crisis everywhere, the consequence of which is making spiritual traditions more salient in people’s lives.9 A major issue resulting from modernization concerns the separation of the religious institution and the state. During imperial times, the Chinese state controlled religion to the extent of its full capacity to do so. For about two thousand years, the imperial Chinese government regulated religions. Religious groups were required to register with the state. Institutional Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and in some centuries Christianity were recognized. Roaming monks, who were not associated with recognized temples, and members of sects were considered dangerous and were often suppressed. In practice, “the behavior of local authorities toward unregistered religious groups often varied from disinterested neglect to violent crackdown, depending on the locality.”10 Thus for about two thousand years, China had state-supported religious organizations that were pressured to serve the political goals of the ruling elite. World empires, such as the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Chinese empire, “were large bureaucratic structures that encompassed many peoples and many diverse cultural practices. . . .

Ibid., 194. Tu Weiming, “Implications of the Rise of ‘Confucian’ East Asia,” in Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 206. 9 For a more detailed discussion of the modernization/globalization model, see Joseph B. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 10–18; Joseph B. Tamney and Linda Hsuehling Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 5–9, 17–22, 27–30. 10 Daniel H. Bays, “A Tradition of State Dominance,” in God and Caesar in China, ed. Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 25–39, at 27. 7 8

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World-empires were sometimes imperious, insisting on obeisance to and observance of the dominant religious practices. But, on the whole, imperiousness caused unnecessary resistance, and undermined the stability of the empire. So world-empires worked out forms of tolerance for religious minorities, provided only that they accepted their minority status.”11 Han China exemplified this imperial response to diversity. The contemporary Chinese state still seeks to control religions. For instance, the government selects and appoints religious leaders, government officials are appointed to work within religious organizations, and religious leaders are co-opted by the government. But religion is no longer an “internal affair.” Increasing globalization is weakening the power of the state to control religion. The Chinese government is still seeking a unified ideology to legitimize a unified state. Marxism is too Western, and the nature of a Sinicized Marxism unclear. The loss of faith in Marxism has resulted in Confucianism gaining significance as the basis of a cultural nationalist movement. Confucianism, it is argued, is part of the essence of traditional Chinese culture. Although it is debatable to what extent historically Confucianism was the unifying ideology of China, today there is a movement to make Confucianism the basis of Chinese cultural and national identity. Confucian Revivals in China and Beyond Some European scholars based in Hong Kong have observed: “The new millennium has brought a significant and growing revival of classic Chinese traditions, particularly ‘Confucianism,’ in mainland China. This phenomenon is not limited to political utilization of culture, nor is it purely the prerogative of the elite. Rather, it has spread progressively to different strata of society, taking on different forms in various states of maturity.”12 In this volume, Kang Xiaoguang offers descriptions of the activists and the popular attitudes of this “cultural

11 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Render Unto Caesar?: The Dilemmas of a Multicultural World,” Sociology of Religion 66, no. 2 (2005): 121–134, at 124. 12 Billioud and Thoraval, “Jiaohua: The Confucian Revival in China as an Educative Project,” 4; see also idem, “The Contemporary Revival of Confucianism”; idem, “Lijiao: The Return of the Ceremonies to Honour Confucius in Mainland China Today.”

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nationalist movement.” Important reasons for the rise of this movement, according to Kang, are a pride in the increasing power of the Chinese nation that has increased nationalistic feelings, a loss of faith in Communism, and government support for a Confucian renaissance. Indeed, given the many achievements of the Chinese people and their current rise toward becoming a superpower, such a movement is not a surprise. However, what Kang means by this movement is ambiguous. He refers to traditional culture but also to “Chinese traditional culture centered on Confucianism.” Other than Confucianism, it is not clear what the movement is about. Actually, “the complexity and the ambiguity of the phenomenon” reflect the nature of this nascent movement itself.13 An increasing number of Chinese scholars assume that Confucianism is synonymous with Chinese culture, or the core of Chinese culture. Kang, as one of the leading advocates for Confucianism in recent years, has called to Confucianize the civil service cadres, the school system, and even the Chinese Communist Party. When elaborating on what Confucianism is, however, the Confucian advocates usually blend in some Daoist, Buddhist, and other notions. By carrying out an empirical study, Kang seems to be trying to sort out and clarify what this movement is and is about. In this mostly descriptive chapter, Kang uses both a representative sample of the Chinese public and a sample of the activists in the cultural nationalist movement. Survey data from a random sample of Chinese people purports to show that the people still believe in Chinese traditional values that could loosely be labeled as Confucian. The questions refer to “crucial political thoughts in Confucianism” that demonstrate support for a “patriarchic government.” For instance, 63 percent agree that “the government should decide if certain values can be discussed in society,” although only 54 percent agree that “the government leaders are like the heads of the households, and we should follow their decisions.” These questions seem to reflect acceptance of a patriarchal view of government, and support for these ideas seems to suggest a continuing belief in an aspect of the traditional culture that Confucians have accommodated rather than a commitment to Confucianism itself.

13 Sébastien Billioud, “Confucianism, ‘Cultural Tradition,’ and Official Discourse in China at the Start of the New Century,” China Perspectives 2007 (3): 50–65.

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Using data from the activists, Kang concludes: “This is a movement led by a group of highly educated, wealthy, open-minded, passionate, and powerful Chinese people.” Interestingly, 41 percent of the activists are members of the Communist Party. Moreover, 78 percent want the movement to be government-initiated. Participants in the movement favor political authoritarianism. They are more likely than the average citizen to believe that multiparty elections will have dire consequences such as increased crime, political corruption, and increased class and ethnic conflicts. Kang claims that the government does not directly control the movement, yet his findings raise the question: To what extent is this movement indirectly a creation of the government? To what extent does this movement have popular support? An observation by Sébastien Billioud puts the revival movement in perspective: (a) The nature of the relationship between the Communist Party and “Chinese tradition” (understood in the largest sense) is complex, since the legitimacy of the regime stems from a rupture with the old order even though certain aspects of that order (notably in terms of epistemology and the moralisation of politics, what is often call the “sinicisation” of Marxism) have been somehow perpetuated. (b) In the last thirty years there has been an evident shift in the regime’s attitude towards that “tradition”; Confucian-sounding references figure into the regime’s overall political orientation, although great care is taken to provide a Marxist justification for the new concepts and to avoid breaking the thread of ideological continuity. In certain domains, such as culture and education, a turning point nevertheless appears to have been reached whereby classical culture and popular traditions once again enjoy a place of honour or are being reinvented and students are encouraged to take an interest in them; the regime seems to have entered a new period of careful and critical reassessment of “traditional culture” in designating elements compatible with the socialist legacy. (c) While this re-evaluation serves clear political purposes (legitimation, fortifying national cohesion), it is not a simple matter of an authoritarian, top-down, cultural instrumentalism; it is a phenomenon that can be linked to a more general evolution of perspectives on classical culture (and Confucianism) at both the level of society as a whole and within more limited intellectual spheres; in this sense, it reflects a style of rule in which the Party no longer seeks to impose its will directly at all levels of society but instead allows for a certain degree of autonomy while tightly controlling the changes unleashed.14

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Sébastien Billioud 2007, p. 64.

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Kang’s essay shows significant differences between the “key participants” in the movement and nonparticipants. While many of the latter show admiration for Confucius, many more think highly of Mao and about the same percentage respect Sun Yatsen as well as Confucius. Among the nonparticipants, few think that Confucianism is the greatest religious or cultural tradition; more chose Buddhism. How will the activists win the people over to their view of Confucianism? One reason for such success could be the involvement of the government in trying to strengthen the appeal of Confucianism. But the government is mainly interested in aspects of Confucianism that serve its own political interests. The experience of other Chinese-led governments in Singapore and Taiwan that have attempted similar programs suggests that citizens are turned off by the self-serving nature of governmentsupported attempts to revitalize Confucianism.15 Alternatively, Confucianism in traditional China was transmitted through and reinforced by the elite literati class, while the masses were left to practice folk religion and absorbed Confucian ethics through their spiritual practices. If the elitist Confucianism is to be revived, the elite activists in Kang’s sample may not see the need to popularize Confucianism itself except through reviving traditional folk religion. Kang also suggests that the movement will “influence the world’s cultural and political systems through shaping China’s cultures.” What is needed is an interpretation that takes globalization into account. Today, contemporary Chinese artists exhibit their work in Western cities. The martial arts attract a popular following. Chinese chefs influence tastes around the world. Classical works by Confucius and other writers are available in major bookstores in the West. Some Westerners, such as those associated with “Boston Confucianism,” as reflected in this volume by Tu, Neville, and Berthrong, seek to develop this tradition further and to infuse it into Western culture. In turn, these interactions with the West will feed back to China. Cultural influence is not a one-way street. Moreover, it is even questionable whether the authoritarianism favored by the Confucianist tradition will win the day in China, let alone influence political developments in other parts of the world. At the end of 2008, China’s Charter 08 was initially signed by 303 Chinese intellectuals and then by several thousand citizens. It includes

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See the essay by Joseph B. Tamney in this volume.

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this statement: “The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years [since the writing of China’s first constitution in 1912], now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.” Apparently, the modern liberalism that originated in the West appeals to a substantial segment of Chinese intellectuals and citizens. A battle is taking place in China that Kang chooses to ignore in his chapter, but otherwise has engaged himself against it. While the government wants to portray it as a battle between Chinese and Western ideas, Charter 08 portrays it as a battle between traditional and universal values. In addition, Kang does not acknowledge that Confucianism is being interpreted in diverse ways, as evidenced in other essays in this book. Tu Weiming has been active in promoting Confucianism in Chinese and Western societies. His chapter in this volume recapitulates his endeavors over the decades toward the exposition and reinterpretation of Confucianism in the globalizing era. The major part of his chapter is his discussion of what he believes to be a new form of Confucianism that is emerging in China, what he calls a Confucian spirituality. It is distinct from the politicized Confucianism emphasized by Kang. “Having learned from the West for more than a century, New Confucianism inherited the Enlightenment legacy and became committed to universal values rooted in the modern Western experience: liberty, due process of law, human rights, and the dignity of the individual.” Note the basic differences between Kang’s Confucianism and Tu’s: the latter does not espouse a politicized Confucianism and refers to universal values such as liberty. Central to Tu’s understanding of the New Confucianism is the idea of holistic humanism. While the uniqueness of individuals must be recognized, it is equally important to appreciate the interconnectedness of all things. “The highest manifestation of humanity is cosmological and anthropological.” Self-realization must include the perfection of the cosmos. Tu Weiming, John Berthrong, and Robert Cummings Neville are members of the Boston Confucianism group. Their project, as Berthrong explains in his chapter, is to develop a form of Confucianism that would be viewed as appealing outside Chinese societies, using the United States as a test case. Today Confucianism is gaining global influence. The Boston group is trying to adapt Confucianism so that

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it can play a role in the spiritual life of Americans. But in a globalized world, such a development will have consequences for Confucianism in China. Joseph B. Tamney emphasizes that Confucianism is an ever-evolving tradition. He argues that three forms of Confucianism that exist in Chinese societies today are reactions to modernization. Traditionalist Confucianism expresses resistance to important aspects of modernity; proponents favor authoritarian government, patriarchal families, and compulsory filial piety. State-sponsored Confucianism is a form compatible with a capitalist society; proponents select those elements from the tradition that are likely to advance economic development and to maintain political stability. Finally, modernist Confucianism accepts modernity; proponents accommodate structural differentiation, cultural pluralism, and the importance of the individual. Tamney gives examples of people who support each of these forms. Such diversity characterizes all religious/ethical traditions in modern societies. In China, all three forms compete for a following. While Kang seems to assume the existence of a Confucianism, it is clear that many different interpretations of this tradition coexist. In the past, such diversity might have remained a secret among scholars. In the age of mass media, the Internet, and mass education, this can no longer be true. How, then, can a Chinese government impose its version of the scholarly tradition? Charles Taylor argued that the “affirmation of universal human rights—to life, citizenship, self-realization”—was accepted in Western society because of the demise of Christendom.16 A Christian society would not establish these rights because in such a society all institutions, cultural products, and individual acts would conform to what would be considered Christian values. In such a society, full rights would not be granted to non-Christians or to those who violated official Christian norms. These problems would not be caused by Christianity itself but by the nature of a society that is based on conformity to a total ideology. The issue in China is whether scholars and politicians will succeed in creating a Confucian society, that is, a Confucian version of Christendom. Public awareness of the diverse interpretations of

16 James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16.

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Confucianism, struggle among proponents of rival versions of Confucianism, and growing support for human rights would seem to make the creation of a Confucian society unlikely. Indeed, as the chapter by Liu Yi shows, at the dawn of the modern Republic era of China, the traditionalist Confucians tried hard, but failed, to institutionalize the dominance of Confucianism, whether it was called a religion or not. Following intense battles between the ardent traditionalist Confucians on the one hand and Christian-led believers of various religions on the other, freedom of religion was inscribed in the Constitution of the Republic of China. Confucianism and Religious Diversity The Chinese authorities have recognized only five major religions as legal, including Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant Christianity. Other religious groups and folk religion have to operate either underground or in an ambiguous legal/illegal status.17 Among the five legal religions recognized by the Chinese government, only Daoism originated in China. Sociologist Max Weber treated it as the major heterodoxy vis-à-vis the Confucian orthodoxy in imperial China.18 Modernization and the Communists have brought brutal damage to Daoism. In the globalizing era, Daoism has begun to attract non-Chinese practitioners. While the spread of Daoism may boost the pride of Chinese Daoists, it also makes it complicated for the Chinese reconstruction of nationalism based on traditional cultures. David A. Palmer and Xun Liu describe how, despite an initial belief that Daoism was “a crude assortment of superstitions” that would not survive modernity, it now appears that this religious tradition is successfully adapting to modernity. In part, the modernization of Daoism was encouraged by the Chinese state through the establishment of the China Daoist Association. In part, the modernization was the result of new scholarly interest in Daoism among both Chinese and foreign scholars who changed the image of the religion from “a heap of superstitions to a rich textual tradition.” In part, Daoist temples in

17 Fenggang Yang, “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China,” Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006): 93–122. 18 Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1968).

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Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia contributed to the revival on the mainland and the spread of Daoism to the West. While liturgical Daoism seems to be resilient in rural China, urban residents are exposed to the Daoist classics and to Daoist themes in martial arts films and novels and, especially, to various body technologies. The Daoist focus on nurturing the body fits the modern quest for individual selfhood and authenticity rooted in embodied experience, which makes Daoism a reservoir of cultural resources with global appeal. Daoist health and meditation techniques offer a form of individual spirituality grounded in the care of the body that can be practiced by people everywhere. But the modernizing of the tradition does not seem to be leading to an increase in people who identify themselves as Daoists. The Daoist tradition is “a storehouse of cultural resources, available to any and all who wish to delve into it.” Religious hybrids borrow from different religious traditions. They have been common in Chinese history. But there are two ways of understanding such mixing. On the one hand, it may reflect a traditional folk understanding of religion; that is, a person should honor whatever gods seem useful, as long as the various activities do not undermine one’s ethnic identity. On the other hand, such mixing may reflect a late-modern willingness to combine religious beliefs and practices from different traditions that are compatible with one’s lifestyle. In other words, mixing religious elements can have two quite different meanings. The changes in urban Daoism may reflect the effect of modernization, which favors a shift from the first to the second meaning of hybridism. Urban Daoism is now appealing to the second type of spiritual hybrid. At least in urban areas, Buddhism and Daoism are becoming less an expression of folk versions of these religions and more an expression of purer forms of these traditions. The emphasis is on personal spiritual development through studying the scriptures and using technologies to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Especially the well-educated followers of these religions may resemble young Singaporean Chinese, who see “their religious needs as personal, no longer tied to the religious needs of their families or community. Thus, religion, to many of them, is a personal quest for spiritualism.”19

19 Kuah-pearce Khun Eng, State, Society, and Religious Engineering (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003), 7.

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Buddhism did not originate in China, but it has been well integrated into traditional Chinese culture under the dominance of Confucianism. Fang Litian is a renowned scholar of Buddhist philosophy and the founding director of the Institute of Buddhism and Religious Theories at Renmin University, the largest center devoted to Buddhist studies in mainland China. Although his essay does not address Confucianism directly, he begins by describing the many problems of the Chinese as a consequence of modernization and globalization. In his Confuciantoned opinion, the people are less moral. Great economic inequalities exist, which are likely to fuel social unrest. People fight for jobs, races compete for economic success, and nations compete for world power. Moreover, in this globalizing world, religions compete with each other, and while some religious people take advantage of the opportunity for dialogue, others incite conflict and even violence. Finally, humans are creating ecological problems because they see nature as simply something to conquer. As Fang writes, the fate of Buddhism depends on whether it can help the Chinese people cope with or solve these problems. Buddhists in the East and in the West are developing a modernist or reformed version of Buddhism. This movement dates back to the first half of the twentieth century in China; its nature was partly shaped by contact with Christian groups.20 The reform movement is the result of the modernization of traditional societies, state policies (especially in mainland China), challenges from Christianity, and increasing contact between Asian Buddhists and Western Buddhists. Buddhism in China seems to have become less an amalgamation of folk and Buddhist traditions and more often a purer form of the religion. Fang, as one of the most respected scholars of Buddhist philosophy in China who himself does not claim to be a Buddhist believer, is nonetheless contributing to the modernizing project of Buddhism. He wants to increase the knowledge of and consequential effect of basic Buddhist ideas—dependent origination, karma, equality, compassion—as a means of solving contemporary problems. Fang believes that world peace is more likely to be achieved as the Buddhist ideas of equality, mutual respect, and compassion for others

20 Fenggang Yang and Dedong Wei, “The Bailin Buddhist Temple: Thriving under Communism,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 63–86, at 69.

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become more commonly accepted. At the same time, he acknowledges that social conflict is at least partly the result of the income gap among people in a society and among societies. But it is a leap to go from abstract Buddhist ideas to concrete plans that would reduce income gaps. The latter is not reducible to the former, nor does the latter require the acceptance of the former. As Fang points out, Chinese Buddhist groups have increasingly become involved in charity work such as disaster relief. But charity does not result in social justice, and in fact might make it easier for people to endure injustice. So in the end, Fang realistically says that although Buddhist philosophy cannot solve the fundamental social problems of our time, nevertheless the religion offers a way of thinking that could be useful in moving toward solutions. Fang argues that the doctrine of no-self, if accepted, would restrain materialism, lessen the desire for pleasure, and dampen the pursuit of wealth. In saying this, however, Fang assumes that nonattachment to the self means commitment to an ascetic lifestyle, which seems presumptuous. Moreover Fang claims that nonattachment to the self results in believing that “the well-being of the society is higher than that of the individual.” This Confucian attitude seems more a reflection of the influence of Chinese culture than of the philosophy of Buddhism. After all, society is just as much an illusion as the self. Why should one illusion be superior to another? Moreover, the profound theoretical ideas of Buddhism have been mostly confined to Buddhist scholars and high-ranking monks, whereas lay Buddhists tend to know little of them. Fang is on surer ground when discussing ecological issues. Buddhism, like Daoism, has a perspective on the nonhuman that seems more conducive to saving the environment. The ideas of the interdependence of all things and the equality of all living things are likely to favor working with nature rather than encouraging the conquest of nature. However, Buddhist groups did not become active in the environmental movement until secular groups had already started the movement.21 Empirical studies will likely clarify more of the positive functions of Buddhism claimed by Fang and other Chinese scholars.

21 Graeme Lang and Yunfeng Lu, “Religion and Environmentalism in Chinese Societies,” in Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories, and Findings, ed. Fenggang Yang and Graeme Lang (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 245–272.

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Buddhists in Chinese societies are increasingly well educated.22 This change should make Fang’s version of Buddhism more appealing. However, contemporary research on Buddhism has found that as people become more educated, the aspect of Buddhism that grows most attractive is meditation. Meditation was not important among the masses of Asian Buddhists.23 However, it is of central importance to Western Buddhists,24 and becoming more important to Asian-American Buddhists and to Buddhists in Asia.25 Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan is led by a monk who preaches the Buddhist philosophy discussed by Fang, but the main attraction seems to be not the doctrines but the meditation practice, which is undertaken for a variety of reasons including improving health. This practice pushes the practitioner “beyond commitment to bounded social institutions. . . . It creates an individuated self, separated from traditional attachments to family, ethnic group, or even nation—and then it strives to reintegrate that self with others on the basis of universalistic principles.”26 Meditation destroys the illusion of autonomy and creates a sense of nonattachment. The extent to which Fang’s prescriptions are being accepted by the people is a question to be studied by empirical research. However, it seems highly likely that the ideas discussed by Fang will become more widely accepted. One consequence of a greater knowledge of Buddhism may be an increase in the number of people self-identifying as Buddhists. Competition from Christian groups has pressured Bud-

Yang and Wei, “The Bailin Buddhist Temple,” 71; Tamney in this volume. Ian Reader, “Zazenless Zen? The Position of Zazen in Institutional Zen Buddhism,” Japanese Religions 14, no. 3 (1986): 7–27; Martin Baumann, “Protective Amulets and Awareness Techniques, or How to Make Sense of Buddhism in the West,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann (Los Angeles and Berkelely: University of California Press, 2002), 51–65, at 57. 24 Henry C. Finney, “American Zen’s Japan Connection: A Critical Case Study of Zen Buddhism’s Diffusion to the West,” Sociological Analysis 52 (1991): 379–396; Senryo Asai and Duncan Ryuken Williams, “Japanese American Zen Temples: Cultural Identity and Economics,” in American Buddhism, ed. Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen (Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1999), 20–35. 25 Paul David Numrich, Old Wisdom in the New World (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), xvii; Baumann, “Protective Amulets and Awareness Techniques,” 57; and see the discussion and references about reform Buddhism in Joseph B. Tamney, “Introduction,” pp. 1–18 in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 8–9. 26 Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007), 89. 22 23

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dhists to protect their following by clarifying their identities and more adequately schooling their youth in the meaning of their faith.27 As Robert P. Weller makes clear, Chinese religions traditionally provided temporary services, such as flood relief, to people with whom they shared particularistic ties of kinship or locality. Today this is changing. Under the influence especially of Buddhist groups, there has been a change in the nature of helping: “There has been a great increase in generalized charity, that is, attempts to help a broad range of humanity simply because they are humans in need, rather than because they share any particular ties of place, kinship, or even religious belief.” Today Buddhist organizations, especially the Tzu Chi Foundation, are leading the way. “All forms of religion are now actively involved in charitable work in all Chinese societies. They take on a very similar range of activities, including medical care, help for the poor and elderly, scholarships or classes for students, and emergency relief.” Moreover these groups do not respond only to immediate needs. They also seek structural changes that will have lasting effects. Weller notes that the members of Tzu Chi, for example, are interested in improving health care: “For medical care, they do not just help subsidize care for the needy, but attempt to advance and reform the entire medical system through direct provision of medical care and training of doctors and nurses.” Globalization has played a role in bringing about such change. Buddhist groups were, in part, motivated by a need to compete with Christian groups.28 Members of Tzu Chi (the Buddhist Compassion Relief Association), which originated in Taiwan, told Richard Madsen that their disaster relief work was an expression of their Buddhist sense of the interconnectedness of all beings.29 However in the past, people attending Buddhist temples would express their compassion only or mainly toward other followers. Why the change? During the 1970s, provincial governments “instructed all temples to carry out charity work. It fit a general strategy (common to East Asian NICs) of keeping government social welfare expenditures low by relying on the

27

157. 28

67.

29

Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma, 140; Yang and Wei, “The Bailin Buddhist Temple,” Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma, xvii.

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private sector to take care of the poor, sick, and weak.”30 Moreover the involvement in community service projects was, in part, an emulation of Christian groups in Taiwan. Buddhism was the first major foreign religion imported and integrated into Chinese culture and society. Islam and Christianity arrived hundreds of years later. Jian Zhixiang and Ma Rong provide a brief history of the entrance and growth of Islam in China. They emphasize the accommodation of Chinese Muslims to Chinese culture, especially Confucianism. But cooperating with the central government and helping to maintain or achieve political stability seem more important in explaining the continued existence of Muslim communities in China. China’s Muslim population is divided among ten ethnic groups, with the vast majority belonging to two ethnic groups, the Hui and the Uygur. The Hui speak Chinese and are widely distributed throughout the country. The Uygur speak a Turkic dialect and mostly live in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in western China.31 The chapter by Jian and Ma, both of whom are of Hui ethnicity, is mostly about the Hui ethnic group, which has been more integrated with the Han Chinese than the Uygur Muslims. Actually, “Hui” has been used to mean all Muslims or just the Chinese-speaking Muslims who are considered to constitute the Hui ethnic group. “In the past, if you wanted to ask if someone were Muslim, you would say, are they ‘Hui.’ ” Officially Hui is an ethnic identity, but people conflated ethnic and religious identities. In the minds of the Hui, to be Hui is to be Muslim.32 Things have changed. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it was official policy that “Hui” meant an ethnic group and not a religious group; this policy was part of the effort to lessen the significance of religion.33 “Now, Chinese Muslims very self-consciously will distinguish between being ‘Hui’ and their being Muslim. For example, the response could now be, ‘yes, they’re Hui, and they are also Muslim.’ Or ‘they are Hui, but they are not Muslim.’ ”34 30 This strategy has been promoted by conservative political movements in both the East and West; see Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 134. 31 Zhou Chuanbin and Ma Xuefeng, Beijing’s Hui Muslim Community (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2009), 1–2. 32 Ibid., 54. 33 Ibid., 33. 34 Jacqueline Armijo, “Islam in China,” in Asian Islam in the 21st Century, ed. John L. Esposito, John O. Voll, and Osman Bakar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 197–228, at 206.

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Today the Hui community may be in danger of disintegration. Zhou Chuanbin and Ma Xuefeng describe the decline of the Hui Muslim community in Beijing during the last fifty years. The government has closed down mosque-related schools; nationalized the more modern religious schools that taught Western science, Chinese history and literature, as well as Islam; and torn down old ethnic neighborhoods, scattering their residents. At the same time, the Hui lost their hold over such traditional occupations as the cattle, sheep, and camel trade. Intermarriage with Han Chinese is increasing. Thus Zhou and Ma worry about the possible decline of the Hui nationality in Beijing. Similar processes may be occurring in other parts of China. The story is different for the Uyghur in today’s Xinjiang. For about two thousand years, China and the many small kingdoms in the region had a kind of suzerain relationship. During the 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party encouraged Uighur separatism as a way to weaken the Kuomintang government. With Mao Zedong’s blessing, part of the region seceded, and the leaders established the East Turkistan Republic in 1944–1945. Soon after gaining power, the communist government destroyed the separatist movement.35 The Xinjiang region was overwhelmingly Uyghur until recently. The percentage of the population who are Han Chinese has grown from 6 percent in 1949 to 40 percent in 2000, according to a journalist report.36 Migrants were attracted by the government’s plan to develop the region economically, which the government has been doing. A Uyghur middle class has grown. However, the Uyghur believe that development has disproportionately helped the Han, who, the Uyghurs claim, get the better jobs.37 Being less educated than the Han migrants and concentrated in the rural parts of the region, Uyghurs have difficulty competing with the migrants.38 Moreover they claim that government restricts their religious practice and political activity. For example, it is said that the government has banned prayer at

35 Ching Cheong, “Ethnic Unrest in Xinjiang,” www.straitstimes.com/print/ Review/Others/STIStory_401117.html/ (accessed July 10, 2009). 36 John Pomfret, “In China, Following General Tso’s Imperial Recipe,” Washington Post, July 12, 2009, B5. 37 Edward Wong, “China Seals off Cities Battered by Ethnic Fight,” New York Times, July 7, 2009, A1, A6. 38 Sim Chi Yin, “News Analysis: Economic Grievances Behind Riots,” www.straits times.com/print/Asia/China/Story/STIStory_39987.html/ (accessed July 7, 2009).

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weddings.39 As a result, the region experiences periodic outbreaks of unrest. How might a revived Confucianism help to pacify the region? Jian and Ma seem to suggest that the historical experience of the Hui ethnic group might provide some hints. However, globalization is affecting Chinese Muslims on the other direction. Over the centuries, Chinese Hui Muslims developed a form of calligraphy that showed the influence of Chinese writing. Since the 1990s, as more Chinese students study overseas, the preference for traditional Arab calligraphy styles is spreading. Many Muslims are buying Islamic-themed posters from Pakistan and the Middle East that are viewed as more authentic than works in the local styles.40 This is a sign that a globalized form of Islam is gaining acceptance in China, which can be a centrifugal force. An editorial writer in the Straits Times of Singapore wrote immediately after the riot in Xianjiang in 2009 that the economic situation breeds resentment of the Han, “who do not help matters by their attitude toward the Uyghur. They see themselves as superior to the Uyghur and do not make an effort to understand or mix with them. They are also resentful of affirmative programs to give Uyghurs a leg-up.”41 After the recent riots in Urumqi in July 2009, a Han Chinese woman told a reporter that she favored the use of a lot of force to stop the disorder. “Their mind is very simple. If you crack down on one, you’ll scare all of them. The government should come down harder.”42 Journalist and author John Pomfret has compared the situations in Tibet and Xinjiang. In both places, China seems “more empire than nation-state.”43 He argues that the government sees the native peoples in both regions as needing to be civilized, an attitude shared by some, perhaps many, ordinary Han Chinese. Mixed marriages are common in the city of Kashgar. Pomfret asked his Han cabbie whether his wife was Uyghur. “The guy practically veered into an oncoming truck and

39 Erik Eckholm, “China Points to Another Leader in Exile,” New York Times, July 7, 2009, A6. 40 Armijo, “Islam in China,” 222 n. 3. 41 Editorial, “Xinjiang Unrest: Live and Let Live,” www.straitstimes.com/print/ Review/Editorial/STIStory_400735.html/ (accessed July 9, 2009). 42 Quoted in Wong, “China Seals off Cities Battered by Ethnic Fight,” A6. 43 Pomfret, “In China, Following General Tso’s Imperial Recipe,” B5.

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then proceeded to regale me with anecdotes about the wanton sexuality of Uighur girls. ‘But we’re civilizing them!’ he assured me.”44 At the Beijing Summit in 2008, Mou Zhongjian, a leading scholar of religion and ethnicity at the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing, made a claim in his presentation that the nature of Chinese history has resulted in a cultural tolerance of religious differences. Throughout its existence the Chinese nation has shown impressive cultural continuity; Confucianism, Daoism, and the traditional patriarchal religion have sustained the Chinese people for over two millennia. Other religions have been able to take root in China by accommodating these basic Chinese belief systems, although it is also true that the foreign religions influenced the Chinese religions. Most Chinese are religious “hybrids,” that is, they use more than one religion in real life. Mou asserts that “the Chinese people are religiously open and tolerant. There is no other country like China around the world with regard to this aspect.” And the experience of the Chinese may help other nations learn to accommodate both internal religious differences as well as civilizational differences. Mou has led a team of researchers at the Central University of Nationalities to develop a suggestive model for national unity in ethnic and religious diversity. His view of the nature of Chinese culture is echoed by many Chinese intellectuals, including those belonging to ethnic minorities. In this volume, the chapter by Jian and Ma, who are themselves ethnic Hui, demonstrates the influence of Mou’s perspective. Except for the Qing Dynasty, they argue, Islam in China was Confucianized and Muslims were very much integrated into Chinese society. Certainly, there were characteristics of Chinese society that favored peaceful relations among religions. Because they view Confucianism as primarily a moral code, Confucians can tolerate the existence of any religion that accepts this moral code. Moreover the emphasis on morality has separated ethnic identity from religious identity. Among the Chinese, religion is not part of their ethnic, and therefore personal, identity, and this separation of ethnicity and religion allows Chinese to convert to different religions relatively easily.45 For example, Malaysian Chinese find it easier and more acceptable to become Christians

Ibid. Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 157. 44 45

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than Muslims because “a Chinese Christian still remains a Chinese culturally.”46 In contrast, Chinese Muslims in Malaysia often feel the need to adopt Malay cultural practices. Chinese people can accept a religion if it does not come embedded in a foreign culture. Second, most Chinese were folk religionists, and this form of religion has weak boundaries and is open to the incorporation of elements from other religions. In China, “it is quite common for ‘religious people’ to worship whatever gods are being honored at a particular religious site without any feeling that such behavior might be open to question.”47 In Southeast Asia, Chinese folk religion regards the famous Admiral Zheng He, who led voyages to the region, as a deity, regardless of the fact that the admiral was a Muslim.48 During the last two thousand years, folk religionists have borrowed beliefs and practices from Buddhism and Daoism. Many of them believe in the doctrines of karma and seek help from the Buddha and other revered Buddhist figures. The Daoist belief in the need to balance the forces of yin (gentility, the feminine) and yang (ferocity, the masculine) is also influential among folk religionists, leading many of them, for instance, to follow dietary rules that are meant to balance hot and cold elements in the body as a way to a healthy life. Chinese folk religionists accept values that are associated with Confucianism, most notably filial piety; thus it is believed that only when husbands, wives, and children play their proper roles in the patriarchal family structure can there be balance, peace, and harmony in the home. Some folk religionists have formed voluntary formal organizations. These sects are consciously syncretistic, borrowing from folk religion, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, and in some cases from Christianity and Islam. These “five teachings” sects, such as the Universal Red Swastika Society, worship Confucius, Laozi, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad.49 Religious groups with weak boundaries are less likely to encourage religious violence. Third, the historic institutional religions of China, Buddhism and Daoism, are not generally missionary religions. Many key figures have

46 Lee Kam Hing and Tan Chee Beng, The Chinese in Malaysia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 306. 47 Xinzhong Yao and Paul Badham, eds., Religious Experience in Contemporary China (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 175. 48 Lee and Tan, The Chinese in Malaysia, 289. 49 Ibid., 296.

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chosen to withdraw to monasteries. Of course, Buddhism has become involved in religious violence. Monks associated with the current nationalistic form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka justify the numerous Tamil deaths in war by claiming they are necessary to save Buddhism. Some prominent modern Buddhist leaders have been sincere Buddhists who understood the universal message of Buddhism but also argued that the historic destiny of the Sinhalese people, and of the government of Sri Lanka that they control, is to protect true Buddhism, and that violence in this cause is justified.50 The combination of Buddhism and nationalism can cause religious violence. But generally nonmissionary religions are less likely to be involved in religious violence. Since the thirteenth century, however, folk religion has in different times and places crystallized into sects. The imperial governments always defined the sects as heterodox. Hence they were considered dangerous to the state and were suppressed. Other indicators of religious controversy, including the repression of Buddhism and the expulsion of the Jesuits by the imperial government, which supposedly upheld the Confucian orthodoxy, are also ignored. Some level of religious tolerance existed, but only with the understanding that all other religions were politically submissive to the state orthodoxy of Confucianism. Is this Confucianism-based culture similarly open to absorbing Christianity? Daniel H. Bays’s chapter is a commentary on the history of Christianity in China. Until recently, Western missionaries were motivated by the ideal of Christendom; their goal was to create a Christian/Western society wherever they went. Religious pluralism was an undesirable, evil, civilizational diversity. To be a proper Christian it was considered necessary to become Western. Globalization has all but eliminated that mindset. “Today Christendom as co-identity of Christianity and the West is gone forever.” Bays concludes, “At the end of the day, Christianity is neither a Western religion nor a Chinese religion, but a world religion.” Contemporary missionaries think in terms of contextualization, of trying to convey their religion through the language, beliefs, and practices of local cultures. Boston Confucianism is an example of the attempt to contextualize Confucianism in the United States. The

50 Patrick Grant, Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

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global reach of religions requires their contextualization, and this process further diversifies these religious traditions. But contextualization should also make Christianity more competitive locally, including in China. Liu Yi’s chapter is a historical study of contention over the place of Confucianism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Confucianism lost its orthodox status near the end of the Qing Dynasty. In 1905, the imperial examination system (ke ju), which had helped to reinforce Confucian orthodoxy for more than a thousand years, was abolished by the Qing imperial court. Instead, education in modern sciences was emphasized when selecting government officials. Facing the challenge of the modern West, some Chinese literati advocated reforming Confucianism and institutionalizing it as the Chinese state religion, on the model of Britain and other European countries that had some kind of Christianity as the state church. But the corrupt Qing government crumbled before it had the opportunity to implement social, political, and cultural reforms. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty and led to the establishment of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912. In the first decades of the new Republic, amid political and military turmoil, fierce debates about Confucianism arose in drafting and redrafting the constitution of the Republic. Confucian reformers allied with political traditionalists to make Confucianism the state religion of the Republic, whereas liberals united with religious believers to oppose it. The opposition was led by Chinese Catholic and Protestant leaders who effectively mobilized Buddhists and Muslims to fight for the constitutional separation of religion and state and the constitutional right of religious freedom. Besides the constitutional struggles documented by Liu Yi in this chapter, the campaign to make Confucianism the state religion eventually backfired in the socio-cultural sphere. From the mid-1910s to the 1920s, the New Culture and May Fourth Movements led by liberal intellectuals and young people rose up to attack and abandon Confucianism as the feudalist ideology that had held China back from social progress. Confucianism failed to gain establishment status and lost respect among the majority of intellectuals even before the Communist triumphs after 1949. Following decades of the destruction of Confucianism and other cultural traditions, however, a new social and political movement has emerged in the twenty-first century to revitalize Confucianism as a religion and even make it a kind of de facto or de jure state religion.

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Kang Xiaoguang’s chapter describes such efforts by activists and active participants in this cultural nationalist movement. Meanwhile, the Institute of World Religions (IWR) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) has been entrusted by the authorities with the task of studying various religions and providing policy suggestions. Interestingly, even though Confucianism has not been one of the recognized religions, the IWR has established a Division of Confucian Religion (ru jiao yanjiu shi). In 2005, it further developed the Center on Confucian Religion (ru jiao yanjiu zhongxin) in order to draw researchers and resources from other divisions as well as from beyond the CASS. In addition to the Marxist theoreticians, the director of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, Ye Xiaowen, was also present at the opening ceremony and spoke in endorsement of the center. Zhuo Xinping, a scholar of Christian theology who has been the IWR director since 1998, has also engaged in active discussion about Confucianism. As Zhuo made clear in his presentation at the Beijing Summit on Chinese Spirituality and Society in 2008, the relationship between religion and the Chinese state is being rethought. This shift is occurring at a time of increasing globalization that is weakening the power of the state to control religion. In this context, religious traditions in China have divided into “above-ground” and “under-ground.” The latter have more contacts with their counterparts in other countries and favor more democracy and a free civil society. The loss of faith in Marxism has resulted in Confucianism gaining significance because it is part of the essence of traditional Chinese culture. Thus it is important that scholars understand Confucian spirituality. Like the failed attempt to make Confucianism the state religion about a hundred years ago, the current movement to make Confucianism a state religion faces challenges from other religions, especially Christianity. The numbers of Catholics and Protestants are many times greater than they were in the early twentieth century, so much so that Zhuo’s chapter in this volume articulates the complementary contribution of Christianity to the Confucian culture. He argues that the key concept in the spiritual accomplishment of Confucianism is “benevolence” and its relationship with “rites” or social order. The Confucian notion of benevolence in social life and the Christian notion of the role of God’s love in human salvation are actually complementary to each other; benevolence and divine love represent, respectively, “realist concerns” and “ultimate concerns,” the “social order” and the “holy order,” and “inherent transcendence” and “external transcendence.”

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joseph b. tamney and fenggang yang Confucian Rites and the Social Realities of Ritual

What is Confucianism? Is Confucianism a religion? Will it become recognized as a religion in Chinese society? In this volume, we leave these questions open to multiple interpretations, as there are multiple perspectives, approaches, and forces competing to define Confucianism. Another interesting question is this: As the world religion of Christianity accommodates itself to the Chinese culture, will Confucianism accommodate itself to other cultures so that it becomes a genuinely global spirituality? This is what the Boston Confucianism philosophers hope to see, but the realization of this goal remains to be studied empirically. Confucianism is not only a system of ideas, but also a system of rites. Indeed, Confucianism has another name: li jiao, the religion of rites or the teaching of rites. During the New Culture and May Fourth Movements in the 1910s and 1920s, Chinese intellectuals rejected Confucianism as li jiao, blaming Confucianism for suppressing human nature and creativity and for weakening the Chinese nation as it faced the modernized Western political and military powers. However, nowadays an increasing number of scholars see the positive or beneficial consequences of rituals. The last group of chapters in this volume focuses on ritual. The Christian theologian and philosopher Robert Cummings Neville argues that modern societies would benefit from adopting the Confucian idea of “love with distinctions.” Moreover he urges the development of rituals that express humaneness across social boundaries, such as between social classes: “Put in a preliminary way, I advocate a Confucian project of social analysis that inquires into the existence of rituals that inhibit or prevent the expression of humaneness [albeit with distinctions] across social barriers, and that goes on to develop rituals for the interaction of contending groups that allow for all participants to treat one another humanely even while in conflict.” From a sociological perspective, Anna Sun examines the actual practices of people who conduct rituals that are related to Confucius, particularly the rites performed in Confucius temples (Confucius worship), and the rites performed in ancestral temples or by the graves of ancestors (ancestral worship). This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in China and Taiwan between 2005 and 2010, as well as the latest survey data on Chinese religious practice. The anthropologists do not find a distinct, unalloyed Confucianism in Chinese society. Rather, they have often found Confucianism

introduction

27

embedded in folk religious practices in traditional Chinese societies. As anthropologist Robert Weller makes clear, Chinese religions did not traditionally set up private organizations such as hospitals to provide public services. Today this is changing. Even local temples are providing services such as scholarships for local students. Activities such as medical relief missions were brought to China by Christian missionaries during the nineteenth century. Today Buddhist organizations, especially the Tzu Chi Foundation, whose founder was influenced by Christians, are leading the way. “All forms of religion are now actively involved in charitable work in all Chinese societies. They take on a very similar range of activities, including medical care, help for the poor and elderly, scholarships or classes for students, and emergency relief.” To some extent, religious groups are resuming the kinds of activities they carried out prior to the appearance of governments in China and Taiwan that sought to marginalize religious groups in order to strengthen the power of governments. However, under the influence especially of Buddhist groups, there has been a change in the nature of helping: “There has been a great increase in generalized charity, that is, attempts to help a broad range of humanity simply because they are humans in need, rather than because they share any particular ties of place, kinship, or even religious belief.” Modernization, then, has religious consequences. Purer forms of Buddhism, Daoism, and probably also of Christianity are becoming more popular. Followers are more interested in the classical texts and in techniques for personal spiritual development. The declining importance of particularistic ties is allowing the development of universalistic interpretations of moral norms. In turn, these changes mean that people will make personal decisions to borrow elements of different religions. Such borrowing should make a religious diverse society more socially acceptable. Further, the religious contribution to modern life is not only the provision of charity or social services. Following the Durkheimian understanding of the social function of ritual, Weller in his chapter argues that religious rituals, be they Christian, Buddhist, or folk religious, are themselves functioning as a kind of public good for the community and society.51 Indeed, in many areas of China today, people spend a 51 Also see Kenneth Dean, “Local Ritual Traditions of Southeast China: A Challenge to Definitions of Religion and Theories of Ritual,” in Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories, and Findings, ed. Fenggang Yang and Graeme Lang (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 133–164.

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significant amount of money on religious activities such as festivals for the gods; charitable contributions for such things as religious processions, but also for community projects; the construction of new ritual sites; and the hiring of diviners, spirit mediums, and geomantic masters. In addition, religious activities are performed to ensure business success, to improve or protect one’s social status, or to ensure an easier time in the afterlife. Many ritual activities make valuable contributions to strengthening kinship and local ties that normal business activities would never offer. The local community benefits from the building of a village park and of temples and churches. As the countryside undergoes significant modernization, many people have moved from rural areas into towns and cities. Some locals have traveled overseas. With such rapid modernization, the seemingly wasteful expenditures on rituals may help people avoid feelings of alienation that occur because of modernization. Religious experiences and the feelings aroused in religious rituals would allow people to transcend the alienation experienced in alienating labor. After decades of destructions in modern times, from the May Fourth Movement to the Cultural Revolution and then the economic marketization, Chinese intellectuals and scholars are once again reconsidering the restoration or invention of social and religious rituals for rebuilding Chinese society in the era of globalization. Conclusion Globalization and modernization are affecting all aspects of Chinese culture. Cultural revival is a self-conscious process and inevitably a selective one. In “traditional” societies “there is no conscious, ideologized attachment to the legacy of the past. In them, instead, the past lives on unproblematically, thereby continuing to shape the present.”52 In modernizing societies, traditionalists identify a legacy and claim to be the authentic defender of that legacy. Such a claim hopefully, from their point of view, lends legitimacy to their project. But cultural

52 Clive S. Kessler, “Archaism and Modernity: Contemporary Malay Political Culture,” in Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel Khan and Francis Loh Kok Wah (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 134.

introduction

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revival is a contentious process. Thus, for example, there is a struggle to shape the meaning of Confucianism. The essayists in this volume, understandably, argue for the need to change the way people think as a way to solve China’s problems. Certainly, convincing people of the value of compassion would make the world a better place. Spiritual traditions may also help people cope with their frustrations through meditation or accepting that certain things are simply beyond one’s control. But there are limits to spiritual solutions. Structural problems require structural changes. In an authoritarian society, religious or spiritual groups are unlikely to engage in the political campaigns necessary to achieve structural changes. The activists in the nationalist cultural movement studied by Kang Xiaoguang perceive traditional cultural values as a basis for solving the social problems experienced by the Chinese people. However, the activists themselves make distinctions between the personal and social effects of their work. On the one hand, three-quarters of them believe that rebuilding traditional culture will alleviate feelings of personal meaninglessness. On the other hand, less than half believe such rebuilding will alleviate the problem of social inequality. Kang argues that the activists believe that China’s problems can be solved by “rebuilding people’s mindsets through education,” but even the activists understand the limitations of this approach. Ultimately, China’s imperial mindset is unlikely to be sustainable. Globalization will expose more and more Chinese citizens to liberal, Western societies, and this will increase internal demand for the liberalization of religious policies. The traditionalists try to define values such as religious freedom as Western and therefore foreign, but modernists present them as universal. In addition, globalization is separating religions from specific cultural contexts, thereby enhancing their claim to be universal religions. Religions within China are clarifying their identities, becoming purer and less tied to an ethnic identity. Under these circumstances, it is questionable to what extent the government can use Confucianism or any other spiritual tradition to unify the Chinese people.

PART I

CONFUCIAN REVIVALISM IN CHINA AND BEYOND: POTENTIALS AND REALITIES

A STUDY OF THE RENAISSANCE OF TRADITIONAL CONFUCIAN CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Kang Xiaoguang Renmin University of China I. Research Background and Research Questions One of the fundamental features in China’s modern history is the decline of Chinese traditional cultures. Despite continuous resistance from culturally conservative groups, this “historical tendency” of the decline of Chinese cultures has continued. Since 1976, along with the end of the “anti-Lin Biao and anti-Confucius campaign,” the Chinese government has put a stop to formalized and organized anti-tradition activities. However, the nightmare for Chinese traditional cultures has not yet ended. Since China’s opening up, anti-tradition activities have been spreading in Chinese society. This anti-tradition wind reached its peak in the 1980s. Since 1989, the Chinese government has started to deliberately promote the renaissance of Chinese traditional cultures, resulting in the rise of “Guoxue fever” or the “fever of traditional cultures” in the 1990s. Unfortunately, this cultural movement quickly declined because it lacked roots in the populace. At the turn of the new century, however, a government-sponsored renaissance of Chinese traditional cultures has emerged and developed rapidly within a short period of time. A significant number of participants have been involved in cultural activities. They have organized themselves in various organizational forms. Although there is no unified leadership directing the events, most participants share common beliefs, embracing a strong commitment and identity. More important, these participants have challenged mainstream values and have pursued rebuilding the social value system. Thus, these cultural events have shown fundamental features of a “social movement.” Because this cultural movement clearly aims to reestablish the Chinese traditional culture centered on Confucianism in contemporary Chinese society, we define it as a “cultural nationalist movement.” This cultural nationalist movement is worthy of in-depth examination because it demonstrates three types of fundamental forces that

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will influence China’s direction of development in the future: China’s cultural traditions, its nationalism, and the elements of social movements. China’s cultural traditions represent a deep and enduring force for determining China’s fate. China’s nationalism has shaped China’s modern history considerably since 1840, representing a longlasting influential ideology. The elements of social movements play a role in these social changes. A school of thought cannot substantially effect social change unless it is embraced by a social movement. In this sense, the cultural nationalist movement is important because it is simultaneously a social movement. However, there is a lack of systematic academic studies of the cultural nationalist movement. The present empirical study of the renaissance of traditional Confucian culture in China poses three sets of questions. First, what are the causes of the emergence of the cultural nationalist movement? Will this movement develop more extensively and endure? Second, who has participated in this cultural movement? What has encouraged them to take action? What responses have they made during this movement? How have they defined the issues facing them? What solutions have they worked out accordingly? What actions have they adopted? What resources have they employed and in what ways? Third, what outcomes will this cultural movement bring about? What effects will this movement exert on China’s culture, domestic politics, and foreign relations? How will this movement influence China and the rest of the world? These three sets of questions seek to explain why this cultural movement arose, how it is unfolding, and what outcomes it will produce. II. Research Framework and Theoretical Approaches The main theoretical approaches drawn on in this study include the theories of social movements, nationalism, and political cultures. First, this article employs the classical research framework of social movement theory and describes the current status of China’s cultural nationalist movement.1 This theoretical framework includes a series of key terms such as structural tensions, collective action, mobiliza1 See Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Introduction to Social Movements [in Chinese] ( Juliu Books Inc., 2002); He Mingxiu, Introduction to Social Movements [in Chinese] (Sanming Books Inc., 2005).

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 35 tion structure, behavioral means, and political opportunity structures. These terms are helpful for our analysis of the rise of this cultural movement and its development. The existence of structural tensions causes the emergence of a movement, and certain political opportunity structures create the external environment for its development. A structure of collective action provides participants with new values, helps to find new problems and propose solutions, and motivates participants to take action. People share these values, take part in the movement, and mobilize a variety of resources. From these perspectives, this article analyzes the background of the cultural nationalist movement, the structure of collective action in this movement, and the characteristics of the participants and their behaviors. Second, the theories regarding nationalism examine the relationships between nations, national cultures, and nation-states.2 Political nationalism and cultural nationalism are two major representative forms of nationalism. Political nationalism stresses the establishment of modern nation-states based on the people’s sovereignty. Cultural nationalism emphasizes nationalistic spirit and the advantages of cultural traditions and thus advocates national unification on a cultural basis. This article concludes that the shared identity of the Chinese and their increasing national consciousness as well as China’s rise in the world as a more powerful nation-state have led to the emergence of the cultural nationalist movement. Finally, theories regarding political cultures state that the rise of any culture will bring about extensive and deep effects on the society as a whole.3 It will influence not only moral systems and social values but also political cultures. Moreover, a new culture will further influence the goals, developmental patterns, and directions of a political regime. Building on this logic, this article analyzes and predicts the effects and outcomes of the cultural nationalist movement, focusing on China’s cultural and political features following the emergence of this movement and their effects on international society in general.

2 See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism [in Chinese] (Chinese Central Edition & Translation Publisher, 2002); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism [in Chinese] (Shanghai Century Publisher, 2006); Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History [in Chinese] (Shanghai Century Publisher, 2006). 3 See Wang Leli, Introduction to Political Cultures [in Chinese] (Wunan Books Inc., 2002); Jin Yaoji, Chinese Political Cultures [in Chinese] (Oxford University Press, 1997).

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kang xiaoguang III. Sources of Data

This article is based on empirical studies.4 Our data are from interviews of core activists, a questionnaire survey of active participants, and a survey of the general public. The first interviewees were chosen on the basis of media reports and from the author’s own personal networks. Through snowballing we greatly expanded the number of interviewees. Eventually, the interview study of core activists covered twenty-six provincial-level administrative agencies, more than forty district-level and county-level administrative agencies, more than fifty organizations, and over two hundred interviewees. The interviewees include private individuals, business people, and government officials. The activities in which the interviewees engaged represented almost all the types of activity reported of this social movement. The organizations involved in the survey include formal and informal organizations, as well as close and loose alliances. Through the interviews we gathered information on the core activists of the movement, including demographic characteristics, perceptions of reality, main demands, methods of action, organization types, resources needed and mobilized in the activities, and the political opportunity structure that the activities had. On the basis of the interview study, we designed a questionnaire that we used to survey both the active participants and the general public in a randomly selected sample. These surveys were designed to identify differences between the attitudes and behaviors of the active participants and the general public. The term “active participants” refers to those who “have participated in relevant activities multiple times” or “played a significant role in certain kind of activities.” The list of active participants was compiled during the first phase of interviews with the core activists. To ensure the sample’s representativeness, we took into account activity types, demographic characteristics, and place of residence. Eventually we selected 954 active participants for the sample. We had previously interviewed some of them in depth and made brief contacts with some

4 This article derives from a research project entitled “A Study of the Social Movement of the Renaissance of Traditional Cultures in Contemporary China,” which is directed by the author and funded by the Ford Foundation (No. 1055-0790).

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 37 others. The rest of the respondents were either recommended by the interviewees or identified from media reports. The survey of active participants was conducted by a professional survey company. In order to improve the quality of the survey, we submitted the list of active participants to the research company in three batches. The first batch includes 500 people with whom we had established direct contact, including most of the core activists interviewed in the first phase of the project. The second batch includes 160 people whom we had interviewed or briefly contacted, or who were recommended by the earlier interviewees. The third batch includes 294 people who were recommended by interviewees or identified from media reports. We hoped that this arrangement would increase the rate of valid responses by core activists and ensure the quality of the survey of active participants. In the end, we received 382 valid responses in the survey of active participants (Table 1). Next, for the survey of the general public, we randomly selected ten cities, including Beijing, Shijiazhuang, Baoding, Taiyuan, Taigu, Chengdu, Luojiang, Mianyang, Shehong, and Ziyang. In selecting these cities, we considered two main factors: the geographical location and size of the cities. First, we selected three big cities—Beijing, Taiyuan, and Chengdu—located respectively in the eastern, middle, and western regions. Second, around these three big cities, we selected middle-scale (district-level ) cities and small (county-level ) cities. We then randomly selected our sample from these ten cities. We selected a sample of 1,299 people, of whom 1,254 were valid cases. The valid response rate is 96.5% (Table 2). Table 1: The Response Rate and Number of Cases in the Survey of Active Participants Group

Number of submitted names

Number of valid cases

Response rate (%)

1 2 3 Total

500 160 294 954

262 67 53 382

52.4 41.9 18.0 40.0

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kang xiaoguang Table 2: The Valid Response Rate of the Random Sample of the General Public

Area Eastern Middle Western

Total

City

Number of cases in the sample

Number of valid cases

Response Rate (%)

Beijing Shijiazhuang Baoding Taiyuan Taigu Chengdu Luojiang Mianyang Shehong Ziyang

406 103 55 104 52 309 54 110 53 53 1299

388 101 55 96 51 307 52 98 53 53 1254

95.6 98.1 100.0 92.3 98.1 99.4 96.3 89.1 100.0 100.0 96.5

IV. Background of China’s Cultural Nationalist Movement The key reason for the rise of China’s cultural nationalist movement is the transition initiated by Deng Xiaoping. A series of social problems during China’s transition have produced structural tensions in Chinese society, creating the essential conditions for the cultural movement. China’s transition has also shaped a new political system that determines the political opportunity structures of this movement. Such a new political system has not only created new space for this movement, but also drawn the boundaries for people’s behaviors in the movement. In addition, China’s transition has stimulated the rise of China as a powerful nation in the world, making possible and necessary the renaissance of Chinese culture. Moreover, the vitality of Chinese culture has provided a solid foundation for this cultural movement. Only by examining the above-mentioned backgrounds can we understand both the crises and opportunities facing China and understand why this cultural movement has emerged at this moment. 1. Transition China’s “transition” refers to the structural changes taking place during Deng’s era. The fundamental outcomes of this transition include the following three developments. The first is institutional change.

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 39 During three decades of market-oriented economic reforms, market mechanisms have become the dominating force in China’s distribution of resources. At the same time, the government has withdrawn its control over economic activities, and the “private sphere” has been freed. Accordingly, other cultural spheres such as thought, speech, media, and the press have obtained a certain degree of freedom. Certain collective actions have emerged on a small scale. However, the Chinese government has maintained a tight control over the public sphere and continued its political monopoly. The marketization process has gradually destroyed the sacred status of Marxism in Chinese society. The ideology and corresponding moral values of Mao’s era have lost their hegemony, no longer providing effective legitimization for the ruling party. In general, China’s previous totalitarianism has been replaced by an authoritarian regime. The second outcome of this transition is a change in social class structure. The capitalists and landlords who were eliminated in Mao’s era have arisen again and become new elites because of their newly gained wealth. The intellectuals who were once abandoned have now become social elites as well, while the previous “leadership class” (workers) and its allied class (peasants) have become the new lowest classes. The third outcome is that the ruling circle has developed new control strategies, choosing to unite capitalists and intellectuals in an “elite alliance,” and at the same time abandoned the working class and peasants. These three developments account for the fundamental roots of China’s cultural nationalist movement. 2. Structural Tensions China’s market-oriented reforms, led by an authoritarian government and its “elite alliance,” have brought tremendous accomplishments in many areas. However, during this process a number of problems have emerged in the political, economic, cultural, and social spheres. In the economic field, due to the immaturity of the market and the government’s misconduct, a major portion of the new wealth has flowed into the government’s pockets while workers and peasants have shared the economic burden created by the reforms. Severe social inequalities have emerged in line with economic inequalities. In the political field, corruption has spread into every corner of the country. The official ideology has lost its credibility. In the cultural field, the introduction of

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Western values accompanying the “intellectual liberation movement” has challenged Chinese culture. The Chinese people have felt confused, frustrated, and lost. With the old values being destroyed, the Chinese people have been faced with a “value vacuum” (see Table 6 for the “structural tensions” felt by the participants). On the surface these are the problems of individuals. But an in-depth examination shows that these problems are in essence institutional and cultural. Individuals’ behaviors are controlled and influenced by institutions and cultures. The cultural force is even more influential than the institutional force. Thus, in this sense, the current problems in Chinese society can be treated as a cultural crisis. This is probably the logic used by participants in this cultural movement when exercising their judgment and making choices. 3. Political Opportunity Structures According to the theory of political opportunity structures, social movements are unlikely to emerge in an entirely open or closed political environment, but a half-open political environment helps to breed social movements. As a natural outcome of the economic transition, China’s political regime has been transformed from a totalitarian to an authoritarian one, creating a half-open political environment and thus favorable conditions for the emergence of social movements. In addition, historical materialism offered a legitimate basis for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to hold power. The most crucial things that the CCP promised to maintain include public property rights, the planned economy, and rule by the proletariat. China’s reforms and opening up have made the CCP give up its commitment to public property rights and the planned economy. As a result, the legitimacy offered by historical materialism has been gradually lost. Facing a legitimacy crisis, the Chinese government has realized that it must enforce ideological innovations in order to confront newly introduced Western ideologies and cultures. At the same time, the government has realized that Chinese culture must be rebuilt in order to deal with all kinds of social problems. The leadership in the CCP has adopted two strategies: saving Marxism and seeking new sources of thought. In addition, the CCP has begun to focus more on traditional culture in Chinese society and less on Western cultural sources. Thus the government has begun to change its attitudes towards Confucianism and has

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 41 become the active stimulator of the renaissance of Confucianism. This is the biggest political opportunity for this cultural movement. 4. The Rise of China as a Powerful Nation in the World Since the reform and opening up, China has made unprecedented strides, and its international economic and political status has risen rapidly. It can be said that China is realizing the dream of becoming a great power. What Samuel P. Huntington calls “the modernization of the instrumental culture”5 has achieved great success in our country. According to Huntington’s theory, China’s rise also indicates the possibility of the revival of traditional Chinese culture. He thinks that with China’s rise and success in modernizing its “instrumental culture,” China’s cultural development will follow a “reformism” model.6 During the initial phase, in line with the modernization of the instrumental culture, China’s “consummatory culture” was quickly Westernized. However, at some point, the Westernization process will be reversed while the basic values in the Chinese culture are reemphasized, and the society will begin to reject Western values. Put in another way, accompanying its successes in the economic, political, and military fields, China has gained cultural confidence and China’s cultural nationalism has grown. The Westernization process of this nation’s “consummatory culture” has followed an inverted “U” curve (see the curve “E” in Figure 1). To test Huntington’s theory, the best way is to gather relevant national time-series data, and then see whether the relationship between these data accords with Huntington’s theoretical predictions. Unfortunately, we do not have such time-series data. However, we can use the cross-sectional data collected for this project to carry out a less stringent test.

5 Samuel Huntington distinguished between “instrumental culture” and “consummatory culture” in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Instrumental culture includes not only the sciences, but also economic and political systems, while consummatory culture contains the core values of a civilization. Consummatory culture is often reflected in the teachings of the great religions of a civilization. 6 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [in Chinese] (Xinhua News Press, 2002).

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kang xiaoguang B

Westenization

D

E

A

C

Modernization

Figure 1: Alternative Responses to the Impact of the West

First, we invited the experts7 to score “the degree of modernization of the instrumental culture” of ten sample cities,8 assuming that these scores from small to large are able to indicate the modernization process of China’s instrumental culture from low to high. This process

7 The selected experts are Liu Dehuan, Kang Xiaoguang, Li Lianfeng, Ma Qingbin, Han Heng, and Lu Xianying. Liu Dehuan is an experienced market research expert, associate professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University, deputy director of Peking University’s Marketing and Media Research Center, and vice chairman of the China Market Research association. Professor Kang Xiaoguang is the author of this article, director of Renmin University of China’s NPO Research Center. Li Lianfeng is the CEO of the company that conducted our questionnaire survey. Dr. Ma Qingbin is an expert in the study of urban competitiveness, and the author of Urban Competitiveness and Urban Ecological Environment. Dr. Han Heng is an associate professor at the Public Administration School of Zhengzhou University. Dr. Lu Xianying is an assistant researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Dr. Han Heng and Lu Xianying were deeply involved in the project from which this article derives. 8 Based on the scores for the degree of modernization of instrumental culture, the experts assigned each of the ten sample cities to one of eight levels. The lower the level of the city, the lower the degree of modernization of its instrumental culture. The following are the experts’ ranking of the cities: level 1, Luojiang, Shehong, and Taigu; level 2, Ziyang; level 3, Mianyang; level 4, Baoding; level 5, Taiyuan; level 6, Shijiazhuang; level 7, Chengdu; level 8, Beijing.

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 43 yielded eight levels of modernization. Next, we reviewed the survey results of the 1,254 participants selected at random from those ten cities, and we identified the percentage of respondents in the city or cities at each level of development who identified with Confucian values (see part VI below for a definition of “identifying with Confucian values”). This gives the proportion of people identifying with the native culture in each stage of development: the larger the proportion, the higher the degree of people’s identification with the native culture at that stage of development, and the lower the degree of the local culture’s Westernization. If we take the modernization degree of the instrumental culture of the ten sample cities as the horizontal axis, and the percentage of people who identify with the native culture as the vertical axis, then according to Huntington’s theory, as the modernization degree of the instrumental culture increases, the change in the percentage of people who identify with the native culture should be represented as a U-shaped curve. Figure 2 shows the results of the test. Obviously, it confirms Huntington’s theory. With the increasing modernization of the instrumental

PIWIC

DICMSC Figure 2: The Test of Huntington’s Theory. X: Degree of the Instrumental Culture Modernization in Selected Cities (DICMSC); Y: Percentage of Respondents Who Identify with Confucianism in Each City (PIWIC).

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culture, the percentage of individuals who identify with Confucianism falls and then rises. Thus we can employ Huntington’s theory to analyze Chinese cultural changes. We may conclude that Confucianism, as the essence of the Chinese traditional culture, is not out of date. On the contrary, its revival signals an era of renaissance. In addition, the current renaissance of Confucian culture is a historically necessary outcome rather than an accidental event. Therefore, we conclude that the rise of China as a great power is the largest factor contributing to the emergence of a Confucian revival movement at this time. 5. The Vitality of Chinese Culture The revival of native culture also presupposes that it has a lengthy and enduring heritage. If there had been no heritage of a great culture, it would have been unlikely for China to experience a cultural renaissance. Based on the survey of 1,254 people in ten cities, we evaluated the current status of Chinese traditional culture and the historical and realistic bases for China’s “cultural nationalist movement.” Our analysis shows that the Chinese people still love their own culture. They are culturally confident and under some circumstances even arrogant: 60% of the respondents are proud of China’s history and culture and 90.8% agree that “our traditional culture is the best although our nation is not the most powerful today.” Confucianism is still the essence of Chinese traditional culture despite more than a century of chaos in Chinese society. The Chinese people still love and believe in Confucian values, and 24.7% of respondents think that Confucius is the greatest thinker. Most Chinese people accept Confucian political thought and support the “patriarchic government”: 90.1% of respondents agree that “the government should be responsible for advocating good moral values,” 84.8% of respondents think that “the government is responsible for its people’s happiness,” and 62.7% of respondents agree that “the government should decide whether certain values can be discussed in society.” Most respondents trust leaders who are morally respectable, with 69.1% of respondents agreeing that “if a leader is honest and morally correct, we can let him/her determine political affairs,” and 53.5% of respondents thinking that “the governmental leaders are like the heads of the households, and we should follow their decisions.” Most people support the family-centered and state-centered approaches, with 72.2% of respondents thinking that “the individuals should place their own interests

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 45 behind their family interests” while 71.9% of respondents agree that “for the nation’s interests, the individuals should be prepared to sacrifice their own interests.” Most people respect the authority of senior people, with 54.1% of respondents thinking that “the senior people should handle the conflicts, tensions, or fights among people.” In addition, the Chinese people hope to rebuild the social and moral value system based on national traditions and cultures. As shown in Table 3, 47.5% of respondents think that Chinese culture is the most important source for rebuilding China’s value system. The socialist tradition is the second most important source, behind Chinese culture. The capitalist tradition is the least important source; only 4.5% respondents selected it as their answer. In sum, China has said goodbye to the anti-tradition and antiConfucianism era. The traditional culture is still alive and even more deeply embedded in people’s lives. This is the most fundamental basis for the rise and rapid development of China’s cultural nationalist movement. V. Government Participation in the Movement In social movements, the government usually appears as a factor of the external political environment or political opportunity structure. The movement will emerge only when the political opportunity structure opens space for it, as we discussed above (IV.3). However, this movement is different from general social movements because the Table 3: Sources for Rebuilding China’s Moral Values

Chinese traditional culture Socialistic culture Capitalistic culture Other N/A Sum

Number of Respondents who Agree

Percent of Respondents who Agree (%)

Order

596 428 57 1 172 1,254

47.5 34.1 4.5 0.1 13.7 100.0

1 2 3

Note: The question is, “If China rebuilds its moral value system in the future, which one among the following cultures do you think is the necessary source that China has to depend on?” The respondent can choose only one option.

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government is the main participant in and supporter of the movement, a partner of the participants, and in some sense a speculator on the movement, with a direct interest in its outcome. Therefore, this movement has two main actors: the government and civil society. This section focuses on the framework, strategies, and characteristics of government action. The next section examines civil participation in the movement. It should be noted that “government” here is a broad concept that includes the administrative system, the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultation Conference, the Communist Youth League, and institutions that the government controls directly, such as China Central Television and all kinds of Communist Party organs. Data used in this section were mainly obtained from interviews with core activists. 1. The Government’s Action Framework Based on our analysis of the central government’s official documents and the speeches of major leaders, the Chinese government aims to deal with some urgent and important issues through rebuilding the key position of traditional culture in society. The first goal is to rebuild the collapsing moral and value system. In September 2001, the central government published “Guidelines for Establishing Moral Rules for Chinese Citizens.” This document admits that there are numerous problems in our citizens’ moral system, such as moral disorder, money worship, gluttony, extreme individualism, and selfishness, as well as blurred boundaries between right and wrong, kindness and malice, and beauty and ugliness. In addition, dishonesty, cheating, corruption, and degeneration have spread in Chinese society. If these problems are not solved in a timely and efficient manner, China’s economic and social order will be damaged, and China’s stable and promising reform environment will be destroyed. The second goal is to prevent Western culture from encroaching on Chinese society. In March 2003, the Central Propaganda Department and the Department of Education announced the “Guidelines for Developing and Cultivating Nationalist Spirit among Middle- and Primary-School Students.” This document states that we are faced with a world where various schools of thought are in conflict with each other, and that hostile Western forces have been trying to “Westernize” and “divide” our citizens and especially to “win over” our com-

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 47 ing generations. Thus it is an urgent task to develop and cultivate nationalist spirit in middle and primary schools and strengthen young people’s confidence in and commitment to our national culture. The third goal is to strengthen the nation’s cohesion and identification. In June 2005, the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Cultural Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Civil Affairs, and the Department of Culture Affairs announced the “Remarks on Developing the Fine Traditions in the Nationalist Culture during the Traditional Holidays.” According to these “Remarks,” we should take full advantage of the traditional holidays to emphasize the fine traditions in national culture. This will be important for shaping mutual relationships among individuals and building a friendly and harmonious social environment. In addition, the nation’s cohesion will be strengthened, which will help realize China’s unification as a nation, advance the Chinese culture, and maintain the nation’s cultural interests. The fourth goal is to improve China’s competitive capacities in the world. In November 2006, Hu Jintao pointed out in the eighth National Meeting of the Representatives in the Cultural Field and the seventh National Meeting of Writers Representatives that a crucial realistic issue is how to determine our direction for developing China’s cultures, create a new summit for China’s national cultures, improve the competitive capacities of Chinese culture, and advance our nation’s soft power. This issue is important and urgent because we are faced with a world where various ideas have emerged and come into conflict with each other. Domestically, we are faced with the urgent need to develop our culture in response to people’s changing lives. 2. The Government’s Action Strategies The general aim of the government is to rebuild traditional cultures, especially the Confucian culture. Several strategies have been employed to serve this aim. The first strategy of the government is to change its previously hostile attitude towards traditional cultures and gradually accept traditional values, especially those of Confucianism. Since 1976, the Chinese government has put an end to the “anti-Confucius” movement. In October 1977, the Central Government provided funds to renovate the “three Confucius sites” (san kong, which includes the Confucius Temple, the Confucius Mansion, and the Confucius Cemetery). In May 1978, Li Xiannian, then vice president and vice prime

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minister of the State Council, visited the three Confucius sites. In February 1981, the Chinese government arranged for François Mitterrand, then the leader of the French Socialists, to visit the Confucius Temple. On September 13, 1982, Kuang Yaming published in the Guangming Daily an article entitled “Restudy and Reevaluate Confucius.” This was a significant political signal that triggered strong responses. In November 1982, Hu Yaobang, then the CCP’s General Secretary, visited Qufu and ordered the rebuilding of the Confucius Statue in the Great Palace (Dacheng Dian) in Qufu. Afterwards, Deng Yingchao, Li Ruihuan, Jiang Zemin, and other leaders visited Qufu and the three Confucius sites. Since 2004, the government has begun to hold memorial ceremonies for Confucius, and the scale of these activities has gradually increased. In 2007, administrative responsibility for the institutions in charge of the memorial ceremonies for Confucius was transferred from the county-level government to the provincial-level government in Shangdong, and on the national level to the Department of Cultural Affairs and Department of Education. Ideologically, the Chinese government has gradually abandoned Western discourses and instead employed traditional Chinese terms to describe its own blueprints for development. During Mao’s era, the Chinese government used “communism” and “international revolution”—leftist concepts in Western societies—to define its idealistic goals. During Deng’s era, “modernization” was used. This is a relatively objective rightist concept in Western societies. Under Jiang’s leadership, the goal was changed into extensively building a xiaokang shehui (a moderately prosperous society), which is entirely a traditional Chinese term. During Hu Jintao’s era, the concept of a hexie shehui (a harmonious society) has been used, and this is a typical key concept in Confucian social thought. Hu employed Chinese traditional culture to explain the ideas of a “harmonious society” in his speech at the conference regarding “improving provincial-level governmental officials’ social capacity to conduct a socialist harmonious society.” During the current transitions, there is a clear tendency toward returning to Chinese discourses. The second strategy of the government is to directly make use of its resources to initiate, organize, and carry out relevant actions. In recent years, Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and other leaders have given a series of relevant public speeches, and the central government has issued a series of official documents regarding this goal. Examples include

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 49 Hu’s speech at the conference regarding “improving provincial-level governmental officials’ social capacity to conduct a socialist harmonious society,” “Statements on Further Advancing the Youth’s Moral Values,” “Guidelines for Developing and Cultivating Nationalist Spirit among Middle- and Primary-School Students,” “Remarks on Developing the Fine Traditions in the Nationalist Cultures during the Traditional Holidays,” and “Guidelines for China’s Cultural Development during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan Period.” These speeches and documents have considerably stimulated the development of China’s cultural nationalist movement. In addition, the government has taken advantage of the media it controls to produce large-scale, continuous, and high-quality propaganda. For example, the Channel of Science and Education in the Chinese Central Television (CCTV) network has started a program called Baijia Jiangtan (One Hundred Schools Forum). A series of lectures such as Yu Dan’s expositions of the Analects have been given on this program, inducing the “fever of the Analects” in the society. To take another example, during the Spring Festival of 2006, CCTV’s Channel of Science and Education aired a documentary film, “Our Festivals,” that carefully analyzed traditional Chinese holidays. This film was broadcast on many other channels afterwards. Moreover, the government has directly initiated and organized a series of significant events. For example, in 1998, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences carried out the “Chinese Cultural Ties Project.” In 2000, the city-level government in Jining proposed to construct an emblematic “symbol city of Chinese cultures” in the city of Jining— Confucius’s hometown—and submitted its proposal to the committee of the Chinese Cultural Ties Project. In March 2004, Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and other leaders made significant suggestions about this proposal. On September 28, 2004, the first government-initiated memorial ceremony for Confucius was held in the Confucius Temple in Qufu. This ceremony was broadcast live by CCTV. Since then, government-initiated ceremonies have been held annually, and the scale of these ceremonies has increased in recent years. The government’s third strategy is to guide, encourage, and support civil activities pertinent to rebuilding Chinese traditional culture. The government has propagandized its attitudes in support of this goal and extensively publicized representative examples in society. For example, since the first official memorial ceremonies for Confucius were held in

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2004, the CCTV has produced a live broadcast of these ceremonies every year, and numerous domestic and international media organizations have reported these ceremonies in many ways. All levels of government-controlled media have extensively reported on exemplary cases such as Li Li, Fu Lujiang and his village private school, Feng Fei and his Tamma Hall, Jiang Qing and his Yangming Jingshe, and Wang Caigui and his speech on “children reading the classics.” These extensive reports have exerted a powerful exemplary force on society. On the other hand, the government has actively responded to suggestions and actions made by civil groups. For example, in September 1997, Ye Jiaying wrote to Jiang Zemin, suggesting that the government organize children to study China’s traditional poems in order to build citizens’ essential qualities of character. Jiang swiftly made a supportive response. In June 1998, China’s Youth Development Foundation began to carry out a project of chanting Chinese traditional poems and classics. This project has been supported by both the central government and local governments. Another strategy adopted by the government is to actively export Chinese culture, which enlarges the scope of cultural communication between China and the world. The government aims to export Chinese culture in order to improve China’s soft power, advance China’s competitive capacities in the world, eliminate the prejudices of the “China threat theory,” and create a favorable external environment for China’s “peaceful rise.” For instance, since 2002, the Department of Education and State Leading Group for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language has been establishing overseas institutions where Chinese can be taught. In March 2004, these institutions were officially named Confucius Institutes. In July 2004, the “Chinese Bridge” project was established, aiming to build Confucius Institutes as overseas organizations for teaching Chinese language and culture. By April 2007, there were 140 Confucius Institutes located in fifty-two countries and regions. These projects are government-initiated but carried out in a nongovernmental way. At the same time, both governmental resources and overseas resources have been used in these projects. 3. Characteristics of Government Action On the whole, the government’s action framework responds to almost all the urgent and serious cultural issues it faced. This shows that the

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 51 government has not only recognized these issues but also anticipated using the cultural nationalist movement to address these issues. The government has taken a variety of actions. Different actions with different functions for different environments can solve different problems. They have their own strengths, but each also has its shortcomings. If these actions are organized rationally and systematically, they can achieve complementary effects. In fact, the government has organized them effectively and established a “system toolbox.” The government’s overall strategy is “to mobilize all positive resources.” Resources that the government has mobilized come from both the government and civil society, and from domestic and overseas sources. Overseas resources are provided by foreign governments and nongovernmental and international organizations. The means that the governmental strategy used to mobilize resources is flexible and diverse. It changes according to the locations, the time, the events, or the persons involved. For the government, administrative orders are the main means of mobilizing. Even for government agencies and local governments, however, administrative orders are not the only means of mobilization, due to historical factors and ideological taboos. The government encourages agencies and local governments to act but does not punish those who do not participate. The government guides civil society using positive methods and never advances it forcibly nor seeks to replace it. In accordance with its own interests, the government has supported civil society selectively, but at the same time has not relaxed its restrictions. Civil society has received encouragements from the government but still maintains its independence. The government has received inspiration and support from civil society and kept pace with its development, neither too far ahead nor too much behind. Overall, the government and civil society have interacted positively, and the relation between them can be defined as “tacit agreementbased cooperation.” The government’s action is rational. In accordance with its capabilities and environmental conditions, the government has selected and organized activities, resources, and means of mobilization, and it has pursued its goals efficiently in a more reasonable way. The government is rational because its agencies and officials are rational. In fact, as long as the institutions and their members are pursuing their own best interests, the action of the government is bound to follow and reflect a “rational” logic.

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kang xiaoguang VI. Civil Society’s Participation in the Movement

The cultural nationalist movement has two main objectives. One objective is to promulgate Confucian values in mainstream society and thereby control the leadership of culture. The other objective is to change the existing system of values and establish a new system that is consistent with and supportive of the movement’s advocated values. Mobilizing more and more people to participate in the movement is the precondition for seizing leadership in the development of culture. The number and strength of the participants in the movement are the key factors that will directly determine the movement’s fate. 1. Definition of the Participants There is controversy over the definition of the participants in this cultural movement. The mainstream understanding is that participants are individuals who both participate in and identify with the movement. We adopt this view and define “participant in the cultural nationalist movement” as one who takes part in at least one activity widely recognized as part of the movement and who identifies with the movement. Through interviews with core activists, we have learned about the types of action taken by the movement. Therefore, it is easy to identify participatory behavior. But it is hard to define what it means to “identify with” the movement. Based on our understanding of the key goals of the movement, we think the answer is “identifying with Confucianism,” and more accurately, the answer is to confirm the contemporary function of Confucianism. However, to measure this concept is undoubtedly an enormous challenge. Confucian culture is an all-inclusive system. It is a knowledge system, an ethical value system, a political philosophy, and a principle of international affairs. We employed a Likert scale based on seven statements to measure the respondents’ identification with Confucianism. The seven statements cover all the aspects of Confucianism mentioned above. Statement 1 refers in a general and loosely positive fashion to the secular function of Confucianism: “Many Confucian ideas can still be used to guide regular practices in today’s China.” Statement 2 focuses on the knowledge dimension: “Chinese people should know Confucian classics such as the Analects.” Statement 3 pays attention to the moral dimension: “Chinese people should follow Confucian moral

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 53 values in their everyday lives.” Statements 4 and 5 are about the philosophical dimension: “Chinese politicians should rule according to Confucius’s and Mencius’s political ideas”; “Today’s China needs a politics of benevolence instead of multiparty democracy and elections.” Statements 6 and 7 address the contemporary features of Confucian culture from the perspective of international relations: “Confucianism helps China become a powerful nation in the world”; “China should follow Confucianism in order to become a powerful nation.” The seven statements are significantly correlated to each other and measure the same concept, and thus can be used to measure the respondents’ identification with Confucianism. Survey results show that, in both the sample of activists and the sample drawn from the general public, people who participated in activities aimed at reviving the traditional culture scored high on statements 1, 2, and 3. This means that people identify with these statements very much (see Table 4). Table 4: Percent of Respondents Who Agreed or Strongly Agreed on Each Statement

Statement 1: “Many Confucian ideas can still be used to guide regular practices in today’s China.” Statement 2: “Chinese people should know Confucian classics such as the Analects.” Statement 3: “Chinese people should follow Confucian moral values in their everyday lives.” Statement 4: “Chinese politicians should rule according to Confucius’s and Mencius’s political ideas.” Statement 5: “Today’s China needs a politics of benevolence instead of multiparty democracy and elections.” Statement 6: “Confucianism helps China become a powerful nation in the world.” Statement 7: “China should follow Confucianism in order to become a powerful nation.”

Activist sample

Respondents in the public sample who have participated in activities of the movement

88.7

69.6

93.2

65.2

78.5

56.4

54.5

31.3

60.2

57.3

70.4

41.0

54.7

30.8

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Further analysis finds that there is a certain hierarchy among the seven statements. Most of the respondents who agreed with statements 4, 5, 6, or 7 also agreed with statements 1, 2, and 3. Therefore, we think that the first three statements indicate a basic level of identification (or sharing of opinions) with this cultural movement. Using a scale of 1 to 5 (strongly disagree = 1, disagree = 2, neutral = 3, agree = 4, and strongly agree = 5), if a respondent receives a score of four or more on all three statements, the respondent is classified as one who identifies with the basic aims of this cultural movement. Reckoned according to our definition of “participant,” the number of the participants among the activist sample and the public sample can be seen in Table 5. In the discussion that follows, “participants” refers to the 279 participants in the activist movement, and “nonparticipants” refers to the 1,164 nonparticipants in the sample drawn from the general public. 2. Characteristics of the Participants The most noteworthy finding is that a large proportion of the participants are CCP members, 40.9% to be precise. This is 4.6 times the proportion of CCP members among the nonparticipants. Considering that there is some tension or even conflict between the CCP’s ideology and Confucian ideas, we can reason that in reality most CCP members have no genuine or substantial belief in Communist ideology. Another possibility is that the CCP does not restrict its members from participating in this cultural movement. Among the participants, 68.5% are male, and 89.6% have received a college or higher degree. Among the nonparticipants, 75.7% do not have a college degree. The participants tend to have higher professional positions: 13.3% are governmental officials, 14% are owners or managers in the private sector, 52% belong to white-collar professions, Table 5: Number of Participants and Nonparticipants Sample Group

Activist Sample Public Sample

Participant Nonparticipant Act and Identify but Act but do Neither act Subtotal identify do not act not identify nor identify 279 90

0 341

103 137

0 686

103 1164

Total

382 1254

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 55 and only 2.3% belong to blue-collar occupations. Among the nonparticipants, 0.9% are government officials, 3.8% are owners or managers, 22.2% are white-collar workers, and 30.2% are blue-collar workers. It is clear that the percentage of non-blue-collar workers is higher among the participants, and the percentage of blue-collar workers is lower among the participants. As for retired people, students, housewives, and other nonemployees, these individuals make up 17.2% of the participants and 42.4% of the nonparticipants. Participants tend to have a higher income: 68.8% received an average monthly salary of 3,000 yuan or above, while 65.9% of nonparticipants received an average monthly salary of less than 3,000 yuan. Participants pay more attention to the media. They are more interested in both domestic and international news regarding politics, culture, education, and religion. They spend much more time using the Internet and BBS (Bulletin Board Systems). They read more journals. The participants have more travel opportunities domestically and internationally: 35.1% have traveled abroad (including Hong Kong and Macao), while only 2.4% of the nonparticipants have done so. In the past year, 83.5% of the participants traveled in other provinces or regions, while only 25.3% of the nonparticipants did so. In addition, as for the number of foreign countries and regions where the interviewees have traveled, the mean for participants is 32.3 times the mean for nonparticipants. As for the number of provinces and regions visited in China, the mean for participants is 6.8 times the mean for nonparticipants. Our findings with respect to the respondents’ exposure to media and external environments strongly support Huntington’s theory that international communication stimulates individuals to determine or strengthen their own cultural identification. In addition, participants are more satisfied with their personal and family life. They have a more positive opinion of government officials. They are more likely to think that social problems are severe. These two findings help us understand why participants tend to adopt a more activist approach to solving social problems, and why they prefer to cooperate with rather than confront the government. The participants are more likely to trust other people. In addition to their “family members,” participants’ most trustworthy individuals are “those in the same camp” and “those with the same interests or hobbies who have been known for many years.” This is perhaps one of the reasons why participants are more likely to become involved in collective action with idealistic characteristics.

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Participants tend to have a strong sense of social responsibility. They are more likely to employ advanced technologies and modern institutions to solve their own problems. This means that they are more familiar with modern institutions and advanced mechanisms, and they believe that they can find solutions through their own efforts. In sum, we can conclude that China’s cultural nationalist movement is not led by a group of people who are relatively naïve, poor, isolated, poorly educated, selfish, conservative, voiceless, and powerless in society. Instead, this is a movement led by a group of highly educated, wealthy, open-minded, passionate, and powerful Chinese people. Simply put, this is a cultural movement led by the middle class instead of the lowest class. It is a reformist movement led by the group that has benefited the most from the current institutions and has sought to improve upon them. It is not a confrontational or revolutionary movement led by those who are oppressed in Chinese society. 3. Civil Society’s Action Framework Based on our literature review and interviews, we designed a set of questions about social problems for the questionnaire that covers cultural, social, and political fields as well as international relations. The multiple-choice questions are, “What do you think are the current problems in China nowadays? And which problems do you think can be resolved by reviving traditional culture?” The answers of the participants are reported in Table 6. Our survey shows that participants are strongly aware of the existence of these problems in China. All the problems are identified by more than 60% of the participants. Among the above-mentioned problems, problems in the social field are recognized by the greatest number of participants, with 92.8% of participants agreeing that “social inequalities are becoming severe; the gap between the richest and the poorest is increasing.” More than 85% of the participants recognize the existence of severe cultural problems, especially with respect to moral values in Chinese society, with most participants agreeing that “money worship is spreading in Chinese society” (88.9%), “moral education is missing; the current education system urgent needs to be reformed” (87.1%), and “people feel that their spiritual world is empty, and their lives are meaningless” (86.4%). In addition, more than 80% of the participants point to political problems and the problem of China’s international competitiveness, while 82.4% of the participants agree

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 57 Table 6: Attitudes of the Participants toward Social Problems No. Social Problems

Problems identified by the participants Percent (%) Order

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

China’s moral system has collapsed. State officials are corrupt and are not concerned with the people’s well-being. Social inequalities are becoming severe; the gap between the richest and the poorest is increasing. Money worship is spreading in Chinese society. Sympathy, morality, and justice are lacking in Chinese society. Unfairness is severe; disadvantaged groups are in hot water. The number of believers in Communism has decreased. Social tensions and conflicts have intensified. People feel that their spiritual world is empty, and their lives are meaningless. People have lost their ideals. Chinese culture is gradually declining. Western cultures are heavily invading China. China has no cultural charms as a rising powerful nation. Moral education is missing; the current educational system urgently needs to be reformed.

Problems that participants believe can be solved by reviving traditional culture Percent (%) Order

82.1 82.4

6 5

73.1 53.8

3 10

92.8

1

45.2

12

88.9

2

70.6

5

69.2

11

60.2

8

75.6

9

48.0

11

66.3

13

28.0

14

63.4

14

43.4

13

86.4

4

74.6

2

72.4 69.2 78.9

10 11 8

60.0 60.9 65.9

9 7 6

80.3

7

73.1

3

87.1

3

76.7

1

that “state officials are corrupt and are not concerned with the people’s well-being,” and 80.3% of the participants think that “China has no cultural charms as a rising powerful nation.” The participants think that the root of all the problems listed above is the decline of traditional culture, and that rebuilding traditional Chinese culture will help to solve all the problems, especially the cultural problems. More than 60% of the participants agree that traditional Chinese culture can solve the problems of the declining moral system, people’s empty spiritual world, and the declining Chinese culture; 76.7% of the participants think that traditional Chinese culture can improve moral education; 74.6% think that bringing back traditions can revitalize people’s spiritual world; 70.6% agree that traditional

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cultures can weaken the Chinese people’s money worship, and 60% believe that the return of traditional culture can make people more idealistic. In addition, 73.1% of the participants believe that the renaissance of Chinese cultures can advance China’s cultural competitive capacities, 65.9% think that this approach can prevent Western culture from dominating Chinese society, and 60.9% believe that traditional cultures can prevent Chinese culture from collapsing. In addition, we examined the motivation of participants in the movement. Our analyses show that the strongest motivation for the participants is to solve the problems of the moral system and moral education. The second strongest motivation is to “prevent Western culture from spreading in China and save the national culture.” The third strongest motivation is to “employ traditional cultures to solve the current social, political, and international problems.” It can be seen that this is consistent with the analysis above. Of course, reviving traditional culture to solve contemporary problems is not the only motive of the participants acting in the movement. In fact, besides the basic demands, any social movement would have some “speculative motives,” including the participants’ own political goals, profits, reputation, religion, or pleasure in participating in a movement. This type of motivation is selfish. With such a motivation, the participants treat the movement as an instrument to realize their own personal goals. It should be said that during this initial period of the movement, the framework of the movement is quite decentralized, and it seeks to advance multiple goals. But this feature does not mean that this movement has no common goals. In fact, from the analysis above, we find that participants followed the same logic when they tried to identify problems, find their causes, and propose solutions. That is, participants identify many problems in society and regard the decline of traditional cultures as the cause of these problems; thus reviving traditional culture will certainly be the method to address all these problems. It is precisely on the basis of this consensus that the participants design and implement a variety of activities in accordance with their resources and political opportunity structures. At the same time, cultural chaos has put the common interests of the Chinese people in danger. The cultural crisis in Chinese society has become the common crisis facing the entire nation. As a strategy for solving the cultural crisis, the renaissance of Chinese traditional cultures has become the common pursuit of the entire nation. It is

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 59 because of this common pursuit that China’s cultural nationalist movement aiming to rebuild the moral system has developed into a social movement involving various social groups and having an extensive social basis. However, there is no doubt that consensus is not enough; a mature movement also needs a dominant framework that can only be constructed as the movement develops. 4. Features of Civil Society’s Action Based on our surveys, we have a basic grasp of the activities in this movement (see Table 7). By asking the survey respondents what activities they had participated in, we learned that the three most popular kinds of activities are the most direct and efficient educational activities: “Chanting traditional classics and organizing learning courses for Guoxue” (84.2% of the participants), “Conducting academic work, participating in conferences, or giving speeches on traditional cultures” (69.2%), and “Reporting and publicizing traditional cultures and other relevant activities” (67.7%). Holding memorial ceremonies for Confucius is practiced by 64.5% of the participants, which means most participants still worship Confucius. Over half (57.7%) of the participants employ traditional cultures in their regular management activities. A large proportion of the participants are involved in activities related to traditional music (51.6%), costumes (46.6%), rituals (44.8%), and schools (41.2%). Two-fifths (40.9%) of the participants are involved in relevant discussions via the Internet. The least popular activities are political ones that carry a high risk and are thus difficult to carry out, so it is reasonable for the participants to avoid these activities: “Instituting and enforcing laws and rules to publicize traditional cultures” (9.7%), “Advocating relevant activities (e.g., wearing traditional costumes, using traditional scripts, etc.) among a larger group of individuals” (27.2%), and “Launching research associations for education about traditional cultures” (34.4%). Table 7 shows that the movement does not engage in confrontational activities, such as demonstrations, strikes, violent conflicts, taking over offices, and obstructing traffic, which are often used in social movements in the West. The absence of evidence for such activities is not due to our negligence; they were not mentioned in media searches, the interviews, or the surveys. In fact, the most important feature of this movement is precisely that its activities are free from antagonistic

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Table 7: Categories of Activities in China’s Cultural Nationalist Movement No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Categories of Activities

Percent (%)

Order

Selling products and services relevant to China’s traditional cultures, such as traditional costumes, books, music products, etc. Regular management activities based on traditional ideologies and values Instituting and enforcing laws and rules to publicize traditional cultures Reporting and publicizing traditional cultures and other relevant activities Publishing books and journals relevant to traditional cultures Conducting academic work, participating in conferences, or giving speeches on traditional cultures Designing, making, or purchasing traditional costumes (e.g., Tang and Han costumes) or other relevant activities Studying or educating traditional music Exhibiting, publicizing, and educating people about traditional rituals and rites Holding memorial ceremonies for Confucius Chanting traditional classics and organizing learning courses for Guoxue Building schools and classrooms for educating people about traditional cultures Launching research associations for educating people about traditional cultures Advocating relevant activities (e.g., wearing traditional costumes, using traditional scripts, etc.) among a larger group of individuals Discussing traditional cultures via the Internet

40.5

11

57.7

5

9.7

15

67.7

3

34.8

12

69.2

2

44.8

8

51.6 46.6

6 7

64.5 84.2

4 1

41.2

9

34.4

13

27.2

14

40.9

10

or destructive tendencies or fierce actions. Alternatively, it can be said that participants in the movement rely on “quantitative logic” and “attraction logic” instead of “material damage logic” to achieve their purposes; in other words, their success depends on the large number of participants and the inspiring nature of their goals. Three main reasons account for the peaceful nature of the movement. First, with respect to political opportunity structures, the Chinese government has exerted strict control over marches, demonstrations, and political gatherings, which makes it impossible to adopt certain

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 61 forms of action or organization. Second, this cultural movement is centered on the renaissance of Confucian culture. Because the essence of Confucian culture is harmony, participants are unlikely to adopt confrontational actions. The third reason pertains to the strategies adopted by participants. Our survey shows that 99.3% of the participants think that the government should directly take part in this cultural movement; 72.4% of the participants think that the government should be the main initiator of this movement; and 78.5% of the participants agree that a government-initiated movement would be more efficient. Thus, most participants hope for the government’s assistance, support, and even leadership. They have never treated the government as their enemy, and naturally they would not intentionally oppose the government. One of the main features of this social movement is that its organization is diverse and informal. The movement as a whole has no nationwide organizational system, nor any leader or leading group recognized by all the participants. Many loose or tight small-scale groups exist in the movement, but there is no vertical affiliation among them. On the “micro” level, the organizational patterns used in the movement are very basic. The movement includes four types of organizations: formal organizations, informal organizations, tightly united entities, and loosely united entities. Formal organizations are registered legal persons governed by an official constitution and various organizational structures; they have a stable membership and conduct regular organizational activities. Our survey shows that in this movement the formal organizations are the most active organizations, as 69.9% of the participants have joined formal organizations to act in the movement. These organizations are established infrastructures. The participants actively and efficiently “take advantage of” these existent social infrastructures. In addition, there are a few organizations that were formed exclusively for this movement, such as the Confucian Association founded by Liu Hedong and Yan Ping. The informal organizations, the tightly united entities, and the loosely united entities are also very active. The informal organizations are not registered with the government. They have constitutions, organizational structures, stable members, and regular organizational activities. The tightly united entities, also unregistered, do not have formal constitutions or organizational structures. Their membership is relatively stable and members regularly participate in activities. The

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loosely united entities, also unregistered, do not have constitutions or organizational structures, and their membership is not stable. These entities hold regular activities. The questionnaire survey shows that 47.7% of the participants have acted in the movement through informal organizations, 36.2% of the participants have acted in the movement through tightly united entities, and 45.2% of the participants have acted in the movement through loosely united entities. These entities were quite likely created during and exclusively for this movement. They are many in number and very active. They have played a significant role in mobilizing members and resources for the movement. With regard to mobilization channels, social networks have played an important role in human resource mobilization: 67.7% of the participants have mobilized colleagues and friends, and 48% of the participants have mobilized families and relatives. This finding is highly consistent with general theories of social movements. In addition, 40.9% of the participants have mobilized strangers to take part in their activities. In terms of the instruments of mobilization, 31.9% of the participants make use of the Internet, and 64.9% of the participants take advantage of their own institutional systems. Only 26.5% of the participants use professional associations for human resource mobilization. As for the subjects mobilized, the participants prefer social elites, as 46.2% of the participants have mobilized social elites and 21.9% have mobilized political elites. Among those participants who have successfully encouraged other people to participate, more than 90% of the participants report that their subjects have taken part in activities without being paid. Only 10% of the participants report that they have paid their subjects. These findings show that this movement is highly voluntary. Among the participants, 68.8% reported that they have used their own money to carry out their activities; 9% have received funds of some sort, 19% have received money from their own work units, and 27.2% have obtained social funds. Thus, we may conclude that the government and social groups have provided some funds for this movement, but the most common services are contributed by participants free of charge. In addition, 13.3% of the participants have obtained funds by collecting fees for their activities or selling their products and services. This indicates that those participating in this movement have certain capacities for financial self-maintenance. The participants place a high emphasis on the media. They have actively taken advantage of the media and also won a great deal of

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 63 attention from the media: 68.1% of the participants have accepted requests for interviews or have been invited to attend public events, and 43.7% have actively contacted the media. Many activists in the movement have frequently appeared on television or in other media. Some examples are Fu Lujiang, Li Li, and Pan Fei. However, citizenparticipants are not the only force that has mobilized the media. The government has played a crucial role, which is closely related to the government’s control of media institutions and the government’s attitude towards this movement. Among the external supports that the participants have obtained, their social networks are the most important: 60% of the participants have received support from their families, relatives, friends, and colleagues, 46.2% from the media, 45.2% from civil society groups, and 44.1% from celebrities. Participant have also received support from the government (24.4% of participants), enterprises (22.1%), religious organizations (12.2%), and overseas organizations (10.4%). Among various difficulties that the participants have faced, economic pressure is the biggest (54.1%). The second most difficult factor (29%) is other people’s misunderstanding of the movement, opposition to it, and even intervention in its activities. Participants tend to care greatly about the attitudes of people around them. The responses of their primary groups are usually the most influential. Pressure created by media criticism is the second most influential factor (16.3%). In addition, pressure from the government still exists, but is not quite as influential (less than 10%); 9.3% of the participants have been prevented from registering a formal organization, 7.9% have had their activities stopped by the relevant government departments, 7.9% have been investigated, and 6.5% have been forbidden to take action. Considering the general attitudes of the Chinese government towards largescale collective actions, this cultural movement has met with relative favor from the government. It may be concluded that the political climate for this movement is quite favorable. VII. The Nature of the Movement: Social or Political? Based on the analysis above, we find that China’s cultural nationalist movement is not purely a social movement like those in Western societies, nor a political movement like those during Mao’s era. Its major difference from Western-style movements is the lack of antagonism. Few confrontational methods have been used in this movement, and

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thus little damage has been caused. Almost all the activities have been carried out within the legal framework or the boundaries defined by the government. Second, the goals of this movement are consistent with the government’s goals. The participants’ actions are allowed by the government. Third, the government is not the target of this movement or a potential enemy, but a direct actor and supporter. In some circumstances, the government is the leader of this movement. Several features distinguish this movement from Mao’s political movements. First, the participants have volunteered to join this movement. They are not mobilized by the government. Second, the participants are independent. Although they must take into account the government’s responses, the government has no direct political effect on their activities. The government functions as part of the political opportunity structure. Third, there is no hierarchical relationship between the government and the participants. They have interacted with each other as equals. Fourth, the government is not the only leader or initiator. The government has not provided a set of guidelines for the participants to follow. It has not taken advantage of its administrative system to mobilize social groups. No one has been forced to participate in activities. Thus, this article concludes that this cultural nationalist movement is a combination of a Western-style social movement and a Maoist political movement. It is a hybrid movement grounded in interaction between the government and civil society. Their cooperation has stimulated the rapid development of this movement. In today’s China, only this type of mixed movement can obtain support from both the government and society and thus survive and continuously develop. Such a mixed movement can effectively pass on new ideologies, mobilize people, influence social norms and institutions, and even affect the international world. A pure Western social movement or Maoist political movement cannot be effective or last for a long time. VIII. The Outcomes of China’s Cultural Nationalist Movement The success of the movement will ultimately be judged according to the dominant framework adopted in the campaign to reintroduce Confucian values into the social mainstream. However, the movement has not yet created a dominant framework so far, and thus we have to find alternative ways to evaluate the results of the movement.

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 65 Who dominates the development of the movement? Who is determining its fate? It is the core activists or, we might say, the fanatic participants. Their views are ahead of the times, clear-cut, and revolutionary. They are full of enthusiasm, energy, and activity. They are selfless, indomitable, and full of the spirit of sacrifice. They are the beacons, engines, and sowers of the movement. Although they are few in number, they are extremely powerful and have a profound impact on the movement. Assuming that their ideas will not change in the future, we can use their values today to project the shape that the dominant framework of the movement will assume, and accordingly to predict the movement’s consequences. To do this, we must first determine who the core activists or fanatics are; they will constitute the “core activists sample group.” Next, we define the core values of the members of the sample through statistical analysis and treat these values as representing the “values” or the “political culture” of the movement as a whole. We will then use these values in our prediction. In Table 4 above, we defined “participants” as those who scored more than 4 on each of the first three statements of the Likert scale. Out of those 279 participants we make a further selection: those participants who scored more than 4 on all seven statements of the Likert Scale in Table 4 are defined as “core activists” of the cultural nationalist movement. According to this criterion, we have 171 core activists. We will compare them with the 1,164 nonparticipants (see Table 5). Here we treat the values of the nonparticipants as the current mainstream values and the values of the core activists as the future mainstream values. The comparison between current and future values will provide information allowing us to predict the consequences if the movement succeeds. Note that the test variables include age, gender, education, income, place of residence (city), international travel, and domestic travel. The p-value for testing the significance of difference is 0.1. 1. Cultural and Political Effects of the Movement As Table 8 shows, the core activists identify with ancient thinkers more than modern thinkers. Confucius, Laozi, Sakyamuni, and Mencius are the ancient thinkers with whom the core activists most identify. Mao Zedong and Karl Marx are the modern thinkers with whom they most identify. As for the nonparticipants, they identify with modern thinkers more than ancient thinkers. The modern thinkers with whom the

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kang xiaoguang Table 8: Identification with Thinkers Core activists Order Portion (%)

Confucius Laozi Sakyamuni Mao Zedong Mencius Karl Marx Sun Yatsen Jesus Plato Mo-tse Muhammad Rousseau Darwin Hanfeizi Adam Smith Others Don’t Know

1 2 3 4 5 6

95.9 57.9 34.5 23.4 19.3 12.9 9.9 8.2 5.3 3.5 2.3 2.3 2.3 1.8 1.8 4.1 0.6

Nonparticipants Significance of Order Portion (%) difference 2 5 1 6 4 3

57.9 15.5 3.1 82.4 8.4 29.9 51.5 3.1 4.7 2 1.3 1.4 7.3 2 0.4 1.6 1.4

+

Note: The question is, “Among the following figures, which one(s) do you think are the greatest thinkers?” (The respondents may select up to three answers.)

nonparticipants most identify are Mao, Sun Yatsen, and Karl Marx, and the ancient thinkers with whom they identify are Confucius and Laozi. Both groups identify with national thinkers more than foreign thinkers. Only Karl Marx is cited by more than 10% of both core activists and nonparticipants. It is worth noting that Marx represents the socialist camp in the West. For both groups, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Darwin are the thinkers with whom they identify least. Table 9 shows that the core activists identify with Confucianism much more than nonparticipants do. The nonparticipants are most likely to identify with Buddhism. Both groups identify with Chinese national religions much more than foreign religions. Especially among the core activists, their identification with foreign religions is considerably weak. Only 0.6% of the core activists identify with Catholicism, Christianity, or Islam. Therefore, as this movement advances the status of Confucianism in Chinese culture, it will at the same time weaken the effects of imported religions, cultures, and ideas in Chinese society. Compared with the nonparticipants, the core activists have a stronger belief in the government. They are more likely to think that “the government should be responsible for the people’s well-being” and

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 67 Table 9: Identification with Religious or Cultural Ideas Core activists Nonparticipants Significance of Order Percentage Order Percentage difference (%) (%) Confucianism Buddhism Daoism Catholicism Christianity Islam Others Don’t Know Sum

1 2 3

59.6 26.3 4.1 0.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 9.4 100.0

2 1 3

14.5 32.1 3.2 2.5 6.4 2.4 6.9 32.0 100.0

+

Note: The question is, “Which one do you think is the greatest among the following religious or cultural traditions?” (The interviewees may select only one answer.)

that “the government should be responsible for advocating good values.” In regard to political culture, the core activists are more likely to identify with Confucianism and particularly with authoritarianism as it appears in Confucian thought. The important institutions in a democratic regime are the multiparty system and universal elections. Table 10 shows the respondents’ opinions on democracy and authority. Our survey finds that compared with nonparticipants, core activists are more likely to distrust the multiparty system and universal elections, and they tend to have an unfavorable attitude towards the results that enforcing these institutions would have in China. They tend to think that if these institutions were enforced, the government would be more likely to treat citizens unfairly, the economy would probably decline, the crime rate would probably rise, the political system would probably become more corrupt, tensions between social classes and ethnic groups would probably increase, and Taiwan would be more likely to declare independence. These beliefs show that the core activists have a much weaker identification with democracy than the nonparticipants. The core activists are more “radical” reformers, whereas the nonparticipants are more “conservative.” Only 2.9% of the core activists are unwilling to reform and prefer to “keep the current institutions.” 15.1% of the nonparticipants prefer not to reform. Regarding the reform approaches, 87.7% of the core activists and 55.2% of the nonparticipants agree on a gradualist reform approach, while 2.9% of

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Table 10: Perception of the Outcomes of Enforcing a Multiparty System and Universal Elections in China Core Nonparticipants Significance activists (%) (%) of difference Everybody could freely express his/ her opinions.

39.8

38.5

–

The government would treat every citizen fairly.

25.1

25.5

–

Individuals could join any organization they like. The economy would decline.

41.5

22.9

+

19.3

8.8

+

39.2

20.3

+

26.3

12.6

+

30.4

16.3

+

38.0

20.1

+

35.7

13.9

+

26.3

10.8

+

Crime rates would rise, and society would become more disorderly. The political system would become more corrupt. Tensions between classes would increase. Ethnic relationships would become worse. China’s sovereignty would be challenged. Taiwan would declare independence.

Results of the elaboration analysis Suppressor variables take effect; there is association; the core activists’ identification is stronger than that of the nonparticipants. Suppressor variables take effect; there is association; the nonparticipants’ identification is stronger than that of the core activists. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs.

Note: The question is, “What do you think would happen if China enforced the institutions of multiple parties and universal elections?” (The interviewees may select one or more answers.)

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 69 the core activists and 12.4% of the nonparticipants tend to agree on a radical approach. It can be inferred that compared with nonparticipants, the core activists prefer gradual changes in a stable environment. Therefore, this cultural movement plays a positive role in the renaissance of Confucian political philosophy and the establishment of a Confucian authoritarian regime. This cultural movement intensifies Chinese people’s worries about the effectiveness of free democracy. In turn, this disbelief in democracy is harmful to China’s democratization process and thus indirectly helps maintain the stability of China’s current authoritarian regime. At the same time, this movement helps to enforce and stabilize the gradualist reforms and thus improves China’s political stability. 2. Effects of the Movement on International Relations As Table 11 shows, compared with the nonparticipants, the core activists are more likely to agree with the following statements: China’s national culture is the best; the Chinese should live according to the traditions inherited from the ancestors; and the government should protect the Chinese lifestyle, limit foreign influences, and at the same time export nationalist fine culture in an organized way. These opinions demonstrate that the core activists have a stronger cultural nationalist consciousness than nonparticipants. Table 12 shows that, compared with the nonparticipants, the core activists are more likely to think that “China should not seek to develop into a powerful nation in the world.” This indicates that the core activists are more likely to pursue peace than the nonparticipants. For the Chinese people, a “super-powerful nation” is more of a negative concept and often used to describe the status of the United States. Therefore, this cultural movement helps to improve Chinese citizens’ identification with their nation-state and to restore the high status of Chinese traditional culture. In addition, this movement will stimulate the government-led export of China’s nationalist culture and encourage China’s entry into the international community in a peaceful way, resulting in the “peaceful rise” of China. Table 13 examines the opinions of core activists and nonparticipants on China’s relations with Japan. Regarding the issue of Japanese politicians’ praying at the Yasukuni Shrine, our survey shows that nonparticipants are more likely to oppose Japanese politicians’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. This indicates that nonparticipants have a stronger

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kang xiaoguang Table 11: Opinions on National Cultures Mean Core Nonparticipants activists

Although our nation is not the most powerful in the world, our national culture is the best. Chinese people should live according to the traditions inherited from the ancestors. The government should protect the Chinese lifestyle and limit foreign influences. The government should export nationalist fine culture in an organized way.

Significance of difference

Results of the elaboration analysis

4.72

4.29

+

The original relationship holds; specification occurs.

3.58

3.20

+

4.04

3.68

+

The original relationship holds; specification occurs. The original relationship holds; specification occurs.

4.64

3.98

+

Replication.

Note: The question is, “Do you agree with the following statements?” Scores are assigned to each response: strongly agree (5), agree (4), unsure (3), disagree (2), and strongly disagree (1). The interviewees may select only one answer.

Table 12: Opinions on Building China into a Super-Powerful Nation Core activists (%) China should seek to develop into a powerful nation in the world. China should not seek to develop into a powerful nation in the world. Don’t know No answer Sum

Nonparticipants (%)

46.2

60.3

43.3

18.5

8.8 1.8 100.0

20.1 1.1 100.0

Significance of difference

+

Note: The question is, “Do you think that China should seek to develop into a powerful nation in the world?” (The interviewees may select only one answer.)

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 71 Table 13: Opinions on Japanese Politicians’ Praying at the Yasukuni Shrine Core activists Order Percentage (%) Japanese politicians should not visit the Yasukuni Shrine. Japanese politicians may visit the Yasukuni Shrine if the tablets of the war criminals are removed from the shrine. Praying at the Yasukuni Shrine is Japan’s internal affair; China should not interfere. None of the above No answer Sum

Nonparticipants Significance Order Percentage of (%) difference

1

41.5

1

65.4

2

37.4

2

14.9

3

6.4

3

6.7

9.4 5.3 100.0

+

6.4 6.5 100.0

Note: The question is, “The Chinese government and people are discontented with some Japanese politicians’ visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. Which opinion do you agree with most?” (The interviewees may select only one answer.)

conviction on this issue. The core activists are more likely to agree that “Japanese politicians may visit the Yasukuni Shrine if the tablets of the war criminals are removed from it.” It seems that core activists are more reasonable than nonparticipants. In general, with respect to China’s relationship with Japan, core activists are more rational than nonparticipants. Therefore, this cultural movement helps to advance Chinese citizens’ knowledge of international issues and helps them to analyze the national interests of different countries more objectively and accurately. This movement encourages Chinese citizens to view the relations between China and other nations more rationally and to evaluate other countries more generously, and thus it lessens Chinese citizens’ emotional response and extreme thoughts and even actions towards other nations. In addition, this movement weakens the functions of the Chinese government’s propaganda and improves individuals’ capacity to evaluate international issues independently. As a result, China’s cultural nationalist movement will contribute to world peace and ultimately to China’s national interests.

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In sum, this article concludes that if China’s cultural nationalist movement succeeds in the future, it is likely to change China’s cultural system. First, the movement will weaken the influences of imported cultures and ideologies—mainly liberal democracy and Marxism—in Chinese society. Second, this movement will strengthen the status of China’s national culture. If it succeeds, this movement will establish the leading position of traditional culture in China’s cultural system. Consistent with Gramsci’s theory, the reestablishment of Confucianism as the leading culture in Chinese society will shape the Chinese people’s valuation of political legitimacy, influence their political choices, and thus likely direct China’s political development towards the Wang Dao politics (王道政治) advocated by Confucianism. In addition, this cultural movement will exert an impact on other fields through its influence on culture and politics. It will influence the world’s cultural and political systems by shaping China’s culture. Thus, China’s cultural nationalist movement may shape the fate of not only the Chinese nation but also the entire world. The question we discuss here is what the consequences for China and the world’s culture and politics will be if this movement succeeds. First of all, we do not claim that the movement will inevitably succeed. We simply evaluate what would happen if the movement were to succeed. We argued earlier that China’s emergence as a great power and the modernization of its instrumental culture provide a historical basis for the revival of Chinese traditional culture, and we do hope for that result. However, we know very well that the success of a movement depends on a variety of complex factors. The movement’s goals and aspirations, its framework, and its actors and their behavior, as well as the political opportunity structures that the movement faces, are all important factors affecting the movement. Many unexpected and uncontrollable factors, as well as the power balance between support and opposition, will also have a complex and profound impact on the movement. In the early stages of a social movement, the situation is even more uncertain. Therefore, at this stage, we cannot and do not conclude that the movement will succeed in the future. However, we note that the movement developed rapidly and is presently healthy. If things continue thus, the movement does have a substantial likelihood of achieving success. This explains why we carried out this study to assess and predict the consequences of the movement. Second, we mentioned in this article that Confucian culture is an all-inclusive system. It is a knowledge system, an ethical value system,

a study of the renaissance of traditional confucian culture 73 a political philosophy, and a principle for the conduct of international affairs. As a complete system, the Confucian culture ruled China for over two thousand years. But today, people have many controversial views about the contemporary value of Confucian culture as a political philosophy, rather than as a system of knowledge or a moral standard. This article is focused on this most important dimension of Confucian culture. We discussed the impact that Confucian culture, considered as a political culture, may have in the future on China and the world as a result of a successful revival movement. Other dimensions of Confucian culture are beyond the scope of this article.

CONFUCIAN SPIRITUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA TU Weiming Peking University and Harvard University An American theologian visiting China might assume that the Chinese are not religious. This is because the influence of secular humanism is so prominent that the Chinese appear to be practical, pragmatic, realistic, and materialistic. In addition, the market economy is so powerful that it penetrates all aspects of life, including educational institutions and religious organizations. After visits to churches and temples, one has the impression that the Chinese do not take religion seriously, or at least they are eclectic and utilitarian. The fact that the so-called Three Teachings (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) are honored in the same temples and embraced by the same persons shows that purity of faith, the quest for authenticity of belief, and exclusive commitment to one God are not prominent on the Chinese religious landscape. This assumption is basically correct from the perspective of monotheistic religions, notably Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but the Confucian way of life may offer an explanation. I will focus on the elite. But a full picture of the Chinese religious landscape requires an appreciation of both the elite and the folk traditions, and cultural anthropologists are better equipped to deal with the latter. Nevertheless, a discussion of the Confucian legacy in a historical context is necessary to understand the modern transformation of Chinese consciousness. This will provide an opportunity to probe the psycho-cultural background of the contemporary Chinese religious mentality. Scholars who study ancient Chinese intellectual history propose that a salient feature of Confucianism is rationalism. We can characterize Confucian development since the time of Confucius in the sixth century BCE. as a process of rationalization. Indeed, Confucius is noted for his decision to reject nonrational, not to mention irrational, elements in the human experience. Such evidence is found in The Analects. When the Master was asked about death, he retorted that if we do not know life well, how can we know death? His response to the question about serving spirits was similar: If we cannot serve

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humans well, how can we serve spirits?1 The conclusion is that an educated person should know life rather than death and serve humans rather than spirits. Based on this critical passage, scholars accept that although people of simple intelligence are affected by “religious sentiments,” the educated elite are not. This assertion was enhanced with the advent of Marxism as the dominant Chinese ideology for more than five decades. If we examine the mentality of the modern Chinese intelligentsia since the May Fourth Movement (1919), we find an antireligious attitude. The impact of the West that reduced China from the “Middle Kingdom” to a geographic expression compelled the Chinese to become nationalistic for survival. The lifelong mission of patriots of all persuasions was to save the nation. Military, economic, and political issues loomed large, whereas culture was relegated to the background and philosophical contemplation was treated as a dispensable luxury. Religion became a form of escapism to be avoided. The case of Liang Shuming is revealing. Liang preferred the Buddhist way of renouncement, but given the gravity of the situation at the time, he chose the Confucian commitment to social activism. However, Liang’s choice was exceptional. The majority of his contemporaries, especially those who had returned from abroad, did not believe that the Confucian way, a defining characteristic of Chinese cultural identity, was adequate to deal with China’s poverty, impotence, and helplessness. Other indigenous traditions, such as Buddhism, Daoism, and the folk traditions, were also irrelevant to saving the nation. Thus, the source of strength for China’s survival had to be imported from the “advanced” Western civilizations. The West symbolized a host of factors that Chinese civilization lacked, in particular science and technology, military might, and economic dynamism based on effective political institutions, including the core values of liberty, rationality, due process of law, human rights, and the dignity of the individual. Understandably, politically conscious Chinese were preoccupied with wealth and power. They agreed that science and democracy were the necessary “methods” to save China from subjugation by Western imperialism and colonialism. As a result of this tough-minded approach to politics, religion became a private matter of the heart. Among radical

1 Xie Bingying et al., eds., Xinyi Sishu Duben (Taibei: Sanmin Shuju, 2002), 190; Analects 11.11.

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revolutionaries, it was condemned as a weakness of will. Detrimental to national reconstruction, it had to be expunged from the minds of the young. Ironically, even though “wholesale Westernization” was in vogue, this Westernization did not include Christianity. The Confucian elements that remained in the public discourse were those that were compatible with science and technology. For example, Hu Shi regarded philological studies and textual analyses of the socalled Qian-Jia School of the Qing dynasty as progressive because they employed proto-scientific methodology. There were also efforts to reconstruct Confucianism to keep it consistent with democratic ideas. In short, Western criteria were used to judge the values of Confucian and other indigenous traditions. However, despite decades of iconoclastic attack by some of the most brilliant minds, such Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu, why has Confucianism survived? Indeed, it has even flourished. Apparently Confucian rationalism is compatible with Marxist materialism. By focusing on the world here and now, Confucians, like Marxists, are committed to the transformation of the world from within. They both emphasize social praxis and education as important to their political mission. They both stress the importance of economic well-being for all, especially for the underprivileged and marginalized, and they also share ideas of equality and distributive justice. In a sense, Confucianism may be regarded as Marxist in its life-orientation. Indeed, some scholars have noted that Confucianism provided fertile soil for Chinese acceptance of Marxism. Arguably, the indigenization of Marxism in China turned it into an ideology with Chinese characteristics. Although Confucianism may have helped to develop Marxism in China, it is a mistake to understand Confucianism from a Marxist perspective. Without an appreciation of Confucianism, it is difficult to understand Maoism, but any attempt to understand Confucianism through Maoism leads to gross distortions. As a revolutionary ideology, Maoism advocates violence. Mao Zedong’s insistence on class struggle as an essential part of one continuous revolution is Marxist to the core. For Mao, Chinese society could transform itself from feudalism to socialism only through struggle. Furthermore, the Confucian way of learning to be human is diametrically opposed to the Marxist project of liberation. Marxism is an extreme form of secularism that rejects religion as an outmoded stage of development. Marxists take for granted the Comtean thesis that history progresses from religion to metaphysics to science. The five stages

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of productive relationships are an inevitable process of history. Unless feudalism is transformed into capitalism, it cannot lead to socialism. Confucianism as a product of the feudal age cannot contribute to a self-understanding of capitalism, let alone socialism. If we follow this line of thinking, the legitimacy of Confucianism as a vibrant trend of thought in the current intellectual ethos is highly problematical. Yet, Confucianism did indeed flourish, and it is likely to continue to flourish for years to come. It is now widely recognized that Confucianism, together with socialism and liberalism, is one of the three dominant intellectual trends in China. By contrast, Maoism, the former guiding principle for loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party, has faded from the scene. An easy explanation is that external and internal circumstances signaled an end to the revolutionary period, ushering in a new era of reconstruction and development. China has maintained relative peace since its “reform and opening” in the 1970s, especially after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 trip to the South. As a result, the standard of living in China has improved dramatically. With China’s “peaceful rise” significantly altering the global geopolitical order, a new confidence appeared, especially among the political and intellectual elite, along with a rise in nationalist sentiment. This naturally led to a reexamination of China’s past. The iconoclastic attacks on tradition have been replaced by admiration for China’s great historical achievements. The Chinese invention of paper, printing, and gunpowder, as well as advances in astronomy, medicine, weaponry, agriculture, and maritime technology, are common knowledge. The humanities, notably literature, history, and philosophy, have produced awe-inspiring cultural achievements. In practical terms, reading the classics is now a widely observed phenomenon. Many executives, officials, journalists, and lawyers attend lectures on The Four Books, particularly The Analects. Even children are encouraged to recite the classics. Harmony rather than struggle is promoted by the government and accepted by the people. This philosophical turn is profoundly significant. The tough-minded commitment to change the world through violence delegitimized positive feelings of commiseration and harmony that are congenial to building communities based on organic solidarity. Harmony is an attempt to seek common ground for different opinions, commitments, and ideological orientations. It presupposes diversity, recognizing the other and celebrating difference.

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The New Confucianism that is emerging in China is not a form of rationalism, nor is it secular humanism. In many critical areas, it is diametrically opposed to Marxism and Maoism. In the 1980s, following the rapid economic development of the so-called “Four MiniDragons” in the Confucian cultural area, Max Weber’s classical idea was applied and the Confucian ethic was promoted as a motivating force to generate a spirit of capitalism. This forcefully refuted the assertion that Confucianism was feudalistic. Rather, Confucianism was believed to be compatible with a modern form of life and instrumental in facilitating East Asian modernization. This thesis is controversial, but the idea of an “elective affinity” between Confucian ethics and the rise of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mainland China, and Vietnam is widely accepted. The advent of New Confucianism since the May Fourth movement is central to our discussion of Confucian spirituality. It indicates the likely course of action that the modern transformation of Confucian humanism may take in Cultural China and beyond. When teaching Confucian philosophy at Peking University in 1985, I witnessed this immensely complex phenomenon both as an outside observer and as an inner participant. The Confucian value-orientation, as I envision it, is guided by a critical spirit. It is consciously different from politicized Confucianism willingly co-opted as a mechanism of symbolic control. It is a refutation of the marketization of society and a rejection of materialism, commercialism, economism, and scientism. Instead, it is a comprehensive and integrated spiritual humanism, unlike the radical forms of secularism noted for their dispirited and denatured worldviews. Yet, this New Confucianism is neither a romantic attack on rationality nor a postmodern rejection of modernity. Having learned from the West for more than a century, New Confucianism inherited the Enlightenment legacy and became committed to universal values rooted in the modern Western experience: liberty, due process of law, human rights, and the dignity of the individual. It considers Western institutions, such as the market economy, democratic polity, and civil society, as necessary vehicles for human security and development. Although it is keenly aware of the negative consequences of science and technology, it celebrates the scientific spirit as a great human achievement. Furthermore, New Confucianism has already found a niche in modern society that is characterized by highly differentiated spheres of

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interest—economics, politics, society, and culture. It can function in complex modern organizations, such as bureaucracies, multinational corporations, universities, and financial institutions. It also has a vision of self-identity in the idea of the public intellectual in contemporary society. Politically concerned, socially engaged, and culturally sensitive, a Confucian personality can function in government, the mass media, academia, business, the professions, and nongovernmental organizations. A historical and comparative note is in order here. In traditional China, the Confucian idea of an accomplished person was a scholar, a literatus, or an official. More specifically, he was a scholar-official who was also actively involved in public activities such as security, economics, governance, and social organizations. These dimensions of his work enabled him to combine self-cultivation and social service. The inner dimension of the quest for cultural fulfillment and the outer dimension of serving the people were inseparable, if not fully integrated. Thus, a Confucian as a member of the elite could be easily differentiated from accomplished persons in other civilizations, such as persons in the Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, Greek, Christian, or Islamic traditions. The Hindu’s commitment to the unity of the real self and cosmic reality makes it explicit that the Brahman is primarily, often exclusively, devoted to inner spirituality and the transcendent realm. Similarly, for the Buddhist, delivery from worldly affairs is a precondition for entering Nirvana. The Jewish Yahweh as source of all values takes precedence over all worldly concerns, for the covenant with God defines the identity of the Jewish community. Greek philosophers aspire to the Truth through the contemplative life of the mind and, in general, theory takes precedence over the practical. Christian faith is in the Lord on high rather than in the world of the Caesars, and Muslim devotion is directed to Allah through the Prophet. All of these great religious traditions presuppose that the spiritual sanctuary, which is essentially different from the world here and now, gives ultimate meaning to our existence. Their engagement in and management of worldly affairs is often relegated to the background and is secondary to their ultimate concern. By contrast, Confucians take the world here and now as their point of departure. They may find involvement with nature and communion with Heaven profoundly meaningful for personal self-realization, but they always return to ordinary daily life as the proper home for human flourishing. They are self-consciously in the world, even though they

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are often not of the world. This distinctive feature of Confucianism enables it to provide an antecedent for the idea of the intellectual as we understand it today. A person passionately devoted to a higher reality beyond the mundane concerns of the secular world seems to choose not to be an intellectual. I would contend that the minimum requirements for an intellectual include three closely linked qualities. (1) The intellectual must be politically concerned. One need not become an official or assume an active role in the political process, but those who are not interested in politics broadly defined, for instance those entering a monastic order, apparently have chosen not to be intellectuals. (2) The intellectual must also be socially engaged. A defining characteristic of an intellectual is one who considers social affairs to be relevant and significant. Without this supposition, it is impossible to have a social conscience and, as a result, the role of the intellectual is rejected either by choice or by default. (3) Finally, the intellectual is culturally informed and sensitive. An intellectual should enhance the cultural life of society. It is difficult to imagine that an intellectual does not integrate culture into his or her way of life. Taking culture, especially education, seriously is a salient characteristic of the intellectual. A religious person may consider culture to be marginal to a meaningful life, but an intellectual recognizes that cultural activities are essential for creating a rich and varied lifestyle. Surely all spiritual traditions are inevitably embedded in the ordinary lives of their devotees. Yet it is undeniable that, by and large, their relationship to ordinary life is rife with tensions. Understandably, the modern intellectual is significantly different from the guru, monk, rabbi, philosopher, priest, or mullah. But the Confucian as scholar, literatus, or official is quite compatible with the form of life of the modern intellectual. What are the implications for Confucian spirituality? Confucius made the existential decision to be an integral part of the world in order to transform it from within. He opted for a form of life unique among the axial-age civilizations. Confucian followers came from many walks of life. His closest disciples were talented in politics, diplomacy, military affairs, and business. Some were rich, others poor, even poverty-stricken, but they were all primarily action-oriented intellectuals, deeply immersed in “managing the world” ( jingshi ) in order to bring benefits to the people. They tried to transform politics, defined in terms of wealth and power, through culture, specifically through moral education. Historically, Confucian moral education was instrumental in developing a distinctive East Asian leader who

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was not necessarily in government, but who exerted a great influence on society as a teacher, community leader, bureaucrat, or official. The influence of Confucianism extended beyond governmental affairs. It was also manifested in social norms, cultural values, ethics, and artistic expressions. Confucian scholar-officials were regarded as the guardians of the people, for they served the long-term well-being of the entire community. This is also what we expect of a modern intellectual. Can a modern Confucian intellectual find a proper niche in a highly differentiated academic community? In general, intellectuals today are thought to be scholars affiliated with institutes of higher learning. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences who emphasize culture are considered exemplars of the intellectual. This is understandable because scholars who dedicate themselves to the study of literature, history, and philosophy are supposed to take an active role in the preservation of the cultural heritage, maintenance of social solidarity, and protection of the political order. Yet the actual situation is much more complex. Scholars as researchers and teachers are independent-minded. There is a wide variety of possibilities in their academic pursuits. They study cultural traditions throughout the world, analyze the structure and function of society, investigate the formal and informal aspects of the political process, and probe the nature of the economy. They may not be interested in anything beyond their own scholarly inquiries. Overwhelmed by the demands of their professions, they refuse and sometimes resist the temptation to engage in activities that do not have a direct bearing on their careers. Viewed in this context, the Confucians are generalists without expertise. They are very different from academicians—linguists, literary critics, archaeologists, theoreticians in the social sciences, and developmental economists, not to mention analytical philosophers. However, it is not inconceivable that even the most self-consciously restricted academicians may have broad and deep humanistic concerns beyond the humanities. These concerns are readily observable not only among scholars of literature, history, theology, philosophy, and the social sciences, but also among natural scientists. It is quite possible that evolutionary biologists, high-energy physicists, or chemists are as humanistically concerned as their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. The relevance of the Confucian tradition to this phenomenon is not obvious, but we can imagine that the Confucian intellectual as a generalist exemplifies the humanistic values shared among academically-oriented scholars.

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Academia is not the only arena that provides a public forum for intellectuals. There are also self-conscious intellectuals in government, the mass media, business, social organizations, and particularly NGOs. Unlike the Russian model, intellectuals in Europe and North America are critics of the status quo, but because they principally function not as adversaries but as loyal opponents or deliberate collaborators with the government, their criticism is often from within. This is also the case in contemporary China. The liberals’ choice to distance themselves from the political center as dissidents in the 1980s has been gradually replaced by a desire to exert their influence on government policies as reformers and even as consultants. Actually, even in the 1980s some of the most vocal and effective protesters against the central government were high officials and party members. They were widely referred to as conscientious intellectuals in the great tradition of the Confucian spirit of protest. Definitely more significant was the embodiment of the Confucian principle of rightness among the student demonstrators in 1989. They identified themselves as inheritors of the student movements of the past and as transmitters of Confucian moral indignation against corrupt government. It is important to note that Confucians are not necessarily conservative. There are liberal as well as socialist Confucians. Although Confucian humanism sometimes conflicts with liberal individualism, it is not only compatible with democracy but also supportive of democratization. China is not a liberal democracy, but it is readily observable that Chinese political culture has been substantially transformed since the “reform and opening” period of the late 1970s. This transformation has gathered great momentum during the last two decades. It will take time for China to develop into a vibrant “civil society,” but it is undeniable that Chinese society has become pluralistic, and this pluralist trend is unstoppable. As a result, there is more than one center of influence. The central government is still the most powerful political force in the country; indeed politics is more influential than society. But other centers of influence are also emerging. The central government cannot be immune to public opinion. Gradually and surely, the role of the central government is being transformed into one of less proactive leadership, even into the role of negotiator. Currently, the mass media have limited freedom for self-expression. The discipline imposed from above is comprehensive and pervasive. The potential of independent-mindedness, especially in social reporting, is being realized. There is an inevitable trend to develop a more open society.

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The government’s preoccupation with stability has continuously prevented that trench from becoming a visible force. A noteworthy case is the explosive vibrancy of the Internet. Due to the rapid expansion of active participation by “Netizens” in the political process, the Internet is perhaps the most powerful force in shaping a new order. Given its unpredictability and in numerous cases irresponsibility, it may also present a major threat to any form of stability. The emergence of business leaders as articulate members of society has not yet been fully appreciated, but their influence in the political process, even in policy formulation, cannot be underestimated. The increasing sophistication of senior executives in understanding traditional Chinese culture as well as modern styles of management enables them to assume leadership roles unprecedented since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The increasing presence of NGOs is another noteworthy phenomenon. Even though China still does not have full-fledged NGOs, with the exception of those focusing on environmentalism, the potential for domestic and international NGOs in China is great. It is most promising that even the ostensibly statesponsored and state-controlled civic organizations maintain substantial de facto independence. With respect to the activism of NGOs, China lags far behind India. With its estimated one million NGOs, India can serve as a valuable point of reference for China. Of course, the Chinese situation is radically different from that in India, but the unintended positive consequences of NGOs in cultivating public-spiritedness in order to make political and social leaders more accountable will greatly benefit China’s quest for a more equitable and just society. Against this background, the upsurge of Confucian teachings during the last three decades must be recognized as the single most important cultural phenomenon since the iconoclastic attack on traditional culture during the May Fourth movement of 1919. It is worth noting that the Confucian revival on the current cultural scene has widely been characterized as a genuine renaissance. This new movement is not confined only to the academic community. Government sponsorship of the Confucius Institutes is an outstanding example. In merely five years, more than three hundred such institutes have been established throughout the world. The mass media continually sponsor a variety of programs on traditional Chinese culture. Through their encouragement and even demand, parents have compelled primary and secondary schools, mainly in major cities, to offer programs in Confucian teaching as part of the regular curriculum as well as in extracurricular

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activities. Numerous private academies have been established to provide lessons on the classics for both adults and children. Some of the best sellers are commentaries on Confucian classics such as the Four Books. What are the implications of the Confucian revival against the background of the growing pluralism in China? We need to put this question in the broader intellectual context. As the eminent University of Chicago professor Edward Shils observed, the Confucian literati, scholars or officials, can very well be conceived of as the forerunners of the modern intellectual. We may support Shils’s claim with some comparative examples. First of all, as scholar-officials, they perform their social functions through the bureaucracy. Also, like Indian gurus, they are teachers; like Buddhist monks, they are moral exemplars; like Jewish rabbis, they are erudite scholars; like Greek philosophers, they are wise men; like Christian priests, they are spiritual guides; and like Islamic mullahs, they are community leaders. From a comparative religious perspective, their commitment to the improvement of the human condition, rather than to the transcendent beyond this world, forces them to take on social and political responsibilities comparable to those of modern intellectuals. It is undeniable that the Confucian literatus is most compatible with the modern intellectual in both theory and practice. For the Confucian literatus, this shore and the other shore, the sacred and the secular, and the mundane world on earth and the Kingdom of God yet to come are inseparable. Any perceived rupture is neither necessary nor desirable. Confucians take for granted that a conscientious ethical and religious leader is deeply concerned with politics, actively engaged in society, and profoundly sensitive to culture. Today, this seemingly unique Confucian spiritual orientation has been embraced by most, if not all, major religious traditions. Like the Confucians, the secular is regarded as sacred, or, more dramatically, the separation between the defiled earth and the sublime Heaven is rejected. Indeed, virtually all axial-age civilizations have undergone substantial transformations in order to respond meaningfully to the crises confronting humanity in the modern world. No mainstream religious leader can afford to ignore environmental pollution, abject poverty, social instability, terrorism, torture, crime, or drugs as worldly affairs only marginal to their God-centered spirituality. All religions subscribe to compassion and sympathy as core values; thus, all forms of suffering, from violence to boredom, are to be dealt with by spiritual leaders. However, since the “ultimate concern” is a transcendent commitment,

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salvation is seldom found in the world here and now. Understandably, religious leaders do not consider politics to be a calling, nor do they accept the secular bureaucracy as religiously relevant. Under the influence of Max Weber, modernization entails rationalization and secularization. In the rationalized and secularized world, virtually all religions have undergone fundamental transformations. Unlike premodern communities, contemporary societies are managed by secular governments. The United States is currently the most religious country in the West, but it still maintains the separation of church and state. In the political process, religion is perceived of as a matter of the heart inappropriate for public debate. Educational institutions prohibit religious advocacy and they insist on neutrality in religious disputes. Religious leaders, challenged by the demands of the secular world, are compelled to deal with problems and issues outside of the religious domain. It is obvious that they have to learn to become bilingual. First, they must remain proficient in the language of their respective faith communities. The Christian language, with its symbol of the cross, ideas of incarnation, virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection, and the doctrine of the trinity, is fundamentally different from the Buddhist language, with vocabulary such as dharma, karma, nirvana, and bodhisattva. The two languages cannot be translated nor can they be compared. Therefore, in addition, religious leaders must also learn to be proficient in the language of global citizenship. In other words, they must assume the role of a public intellectual. Bilingualism enables them to recognize the distinctness of their religions and at the same time encourages them to bring their own spiritual resources to address the crises of the global village: environmental degradation, abject poverty, gender inequality, child labor, drug trafficking, and terrorism, to mention just a few. In the information age, religious leaders may choose to focus on their own communities, but the spiritual well-being of their followers is intertwined with the major events occurring in the world at large. If religious leaders are duty-bound to be global citizens, responsible persons in other occupations must be even more involved in the secular world. The secular world is noted for specialization and professionalization. The most prominent feature of the specialized and professionalized modern secular society is its bureaucracy. An example of a highly efficient bureaucracy is the military establishment, but modern bureaucracies in general are civic organizations. The word “civil,” as in “civil society,” features prominently in the Confucian tradition. It

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is contrasted with “barbaric” and “military.” As expected, an ethos of civility, rather than a martial spirit, pervades the Confucian idea of bureaucracy. Civility is one of the cardinal virtues in Confucian teaching. Although law is necessary to maintain social order, organic social solidarity is only possible when civil discipline takes precedence over legal sanctions. Confucian literati were humanists, the Chinese version of the Renaissance man. As a rule, they were seasoned in poetry, calligraphy, music, and painting. Although Confucian scholar-officials were generalists, they handled concrete affairs both efficiently and conscientiously, such as legal cases, budgets, public works, famine relief, criminality, and, above all, education. Under extraordinary circumstances, they even led military campaigns against rebellions. Of course, they were assisted by a group of experts from various fields. But their leadership was crucial for the success of their missions. It was not their expertise or professionalism, but rather their personality, vision, and leadership that really mattered. Expertise and professionalism are distinctive features of a highly differentiated modern bureaucracy. Virtually all aspects of our life have been touched by experts or professionals. Lawyers and doctors are the most conspicuous. Even in religion, priests and nuns try to learn and relearn new technologies in order to compete with psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social workers to do their ministerial work. Nevertheless, it is premature to conclude that we are already living in a technocracy. The epoch-making debate on “red vs. expert” in the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s should be revisited. Mao Zedong’s attempt to “hoist a red flag against bureaucratization in the party, systematization in the economy, and professionalization in the university”2 failed miserably and Mao’s romantic revolutionism is no longer present in Chinese politics. Even the idea of revolution has been definitively rejected by official ideologists. On the surface, the “reform and opening” policy strongly suggests that expertise has triumphed and redness has faded away. Yet, although China’s rise as an economic power may have enhanced her political stature on the world stage, in the ethos of China’s quest for a cultural identity, the technocratic mindset is incapable of providing the necessary leadership. In

2 Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism: Symbol and Substance in Recent Times,” in Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation (repr., Boston: Cheng & Tsui Co., 1998), 259.

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this connection, Confucian humanism is profoundly meaningful as a point of reference. The dominant ideology in China is no longer Marxism or Maoism but rather scientism. The ubiquitous presence of scientists, especially engineers, in all spheres of interest clearly indicates that Chinese political and intellectual leadership is fundamentally different from the Confucian idea of the literatus. The technocratic mentality is short-term, quantitative, instrumental, and utilitarian. It is a form of rationalism that is inadequate to face up to the challenges of the contemporary world. A defining characteristic of leadership in the twenty-first century is insight into the long-term benefits for the entire society. Equally important is the ability to accumulate social capital, educate cultural competence, enhance ethical intelligence, and cultivate spiritual values among all citizens, especially the young. True leaders are resourceful and inspiring. They must be able to tap the rich symbolic resources of their own cultures. They are immersed in living traditions shared by the populace as their habits of the heart. Furthermore, they are capable of exemplifying their vision through concrete action. A narrowly focused technocratic mindset is not sufficiently imaginative, creative, or flexible to serve as an inspiration to accomplish such tasks. The complexity of the human condition requires a broad humanistic vision to serve as a guide for action. It entails a new cosmology and a new way of life. We are sure that there will be enough data, information, and knowledge to guide us. But we are in need of an ideological vision beyond expertise. The issue of the priority of values underlying the “red vs. expert” debate is far from being settled. The outmoded and damaging “redness” in the Maoist era will definitely be rejected, but we cannot embrace expertise uncritically. Public-spirited intellectuals must go beyond their expertise to identify the best practices for managing the world. They should offer us a reasonable course of action to survive and flourish on our blue planet. The contemporary Confucian literati are thus charged with a heavy burden. Zengzi, one of Confucius’s most famous disciples, observed: “A scholar [ literatus] must be strong and resolute, for his burden is heavy, and his journey is long. His burden is humanity: is this not heavy? His journey ends only with death: is this not long?” 3

3 Analects, 8.7; Simon Leys, trans., The Analects of Confucius (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 36.

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Confucian humanism, unlike secular humanism in the modern West, is a comprehensive and integrated vision of the human condition. It seeks to integrate four dimensions of the human experience: self, community, nature, and Heaven. As a holistic humanistic way of life it proposes that the agenda of human flourishing entails (1) sustained integration of the body and mind; (2) fruitful interaction between the self and community; (3) a harmonious relationship between the human species and nature; and (4) mutual responsiveness between the human heart-and-mind and the Way of Heaven. A human being so conceived is an observer, appreciator, partner, and co-creator of the evolutionary, indeed the cosmic, process. Human responsibility must be expanded from the self, family, community, nation, world, nature, and ultimately to the “great transformation” of the cosmos. At the same time, primordial ties such as race, gender, age, language, place, class, and faith are also relevant here. In a way, each of us is fated to be that unique person, situated in a particular time and space, who has never existed before and will never appear again. Indeed, we are as different as our faces. Yet Confucians also believe that the commonality and communicability of our heart-and-mind is such that we can and should share our experience. This confluence of difference and similarity enables us to become what we ought to be not by severing the primordial ties that have allowed us to be concrete and living persons. Rather, we can and should transform these ties into vehicles for self-realization. This is the reason that as learners our lives are enriched by encountering a variety of humans who are individually unique and communally integral parts of the same universe. Therefore, learning to be human is a central Confucian concern. Indeed, the great strength of modern East Asia is its intellectual and spiritual self-definition as a learning civilization. This may very well be the most precious legacy of Confucian humanism. The first character in the Confucian Analects is “learning” (xue). Learning to be human is a ceaseless process of self-realization. Confucius, in his spiritual autobiography, envisions his life history as a lifelong commitment to learning: At fifteen, I set my heart upon learning. At thirty I established myself. At forty I no longer had perplexities. At fifty I knew the Mandate of Heaven. At sixty I was at ease with whatever I heard. At seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing the boundaries of right. (Analects, 2.4; Simon Leys, trans., The Analects of Confucius (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 6.)

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In the Confucian perspective, not only a person, but also a family, a community, a nation, a region, and the world at large must learn. All human constructions—economic organizations, social structures, political institutions, universities, churches, philosophical systems, and ideologies—are evolving processes. Without learning guided by a communal critical self-consciousness, they will inevitably become stagnant. Learning for the sake of the self is learning to be fully human. The actualization of humanity entails our ability to embody all forms of interconnection in our self-awareness and personal knowledge: self, family, community, society, nation, world, nature, and cosmos. Not surprisingly, in both theory and practice, the self is not an isolated individual but rather a center of relationships. As a flowing stream rather than an island, the self is a constantly evolving process and never a static structure. For the self to grow, develop, and realize its full potential, it needs to learn to transcend egoism, nepotism, parochialism, communalism, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. As we expand our intellectual and spiritual horizons to incorporate an everexpanding network of meaningful relationships into our sensitivity, we come to the realization that we are integral parts of an immensely complex, highly differentiated, and yet integrated wholeness. This sense of wholeness is captured by the idea of “forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriads.” This is the basis for several salient features of Confucian humanism: (1) As a comprehensive and integrated anthropocosmic vision, its humanism encompasses both nature and religion. This is a clear rejection of any identification of the humanist as fundamentally different from the naturalist or the spiritualist. Indeed, it is human to be both a naturalist and a spiritualist. (2) It assumes that a concrete, living person is a center of relationships. In terms of a center, the dignity, independence, and autonomy of the individual is an essential feature of the living person; in terms of relationships, sociality is indispensable for personal identity. (3) The Confucian idea of the person is rooted in body and home, and yet it is always connected with community, world, and cosmos. But it must learn to transcend egoism, parochialism, nationalism, and even anthropocentrism.

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(4) Confucians regard the secular world as sacred by overcoming the exclusive dichotomies of body/mind, spirit/matter, creator/creature, and sacred/profane. (5) The Confucian way of life embodies self, community, nature, and Heaven in an ethic of care and responsibility. (6) Humanity as the core value of Confucianism “embodies Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things” in its sensitivity and consciousness. (7) Confucianism seeks “harmony without uniformity” through dialogue. The five core values in the Confucian tradition—humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust—are not merely Asian values but universal values rooted in East Asian theory and practice. Together, they present a coherent vision of human flourishing. Liberty without justice, rationality without sympathy, legality without civility, rights without responsibility, and individual dignity without social solidarity cannot bring about an enduring world order nurtured by a richly textured culture of peace. It is obvious that a remarkable transformation of the cultural scene in Mainland China has taken place during the last twenty years. Confucian discourse is no longer confined to the academic community. This crossing of boundaries is evident in a number of spheres of interest—government, business, mass media, the professions, and social movements. The reemergence of the Confucian discourse definitely symbolizes a fundamental and thorough rejection of the anti-tradition mentality. It is also an acknowledgment by the politically concerned, socially engaged, and culturally informed elite that the ideological vacuum and corrosive power of the market and its excessive consumerism have seriously eroded public mores and have substantially undermined the effectiveness of the body politic. For Chinese public intellectuals, beneath the apparent economic achievements, the social costs (inequality, insecurity, incivility, and disharmony) are high and there is a strong and urgently felt need for a sense of direction. Worries about the blatant lack of social capital, cultural competence, ethical intelligence, and spiritual values at all institutional levels throughout the country loom large in the minds of Chinese intellectuals. Whither China? This question weighs heavily on the conscience of all reflective minds in the Sinic world (the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and the Chinese Diaspora). With a view

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toward the future, China’s modernization cannot be guided by an unflinching faith in materialism, instrumental rationality, progressivism, and social engineering. Policies formulated by a technocratic mentality without reference to culture and ethics are not sustainable. In a deeper sense, a critical reflection on the strengths and limitations of the modernist mentality that taps into traditional resources is both necessary and desirable to formulate a wholesome cultural identity. The time is ripe for Chinese intellectuals to transcend the Westernoriented modernist mentality and to formulate their own cultural identity with full recognition of the value of openness, cultural diversity, and self-reflexivity. Learning from great non-Western civilizations will nurture a new cosmopolitan spirit. Confucianism as humanism addresses the perennial human condition with a new sense of urgency and responsibility. It offers a worldview that is open, pluralistic, and self-reflexive. Deeply rooted in the philosophical insights of the first two epochs of the tradition (Cultural China and East Asia), it also is transformed into a globally significant local knowledge, with the West no longer “the other” threatening its inner identity. Rather, as a radical otherness, the West is a source of inspiration and a point of reference. For more than half a century “Big Brother” Russia, the functional equivalent of a mentor, served the same purpose. Increasingly, this is also the case with India, the Islamic world, Latin America, Africa, and so forth. Confucian humanism can contribute substantially to China’s quest for a new cultural identity. Through dialogue among civilizations, it can play a mediating role in the new age. This may be an authentic possibility, but, in my view, the essential requirement for Confucian humanism to reemerge as a source of inspiration for the global community is its ability to continue but also to transcend the Enlightenment mentality, in particular its instrumental rationality, anthropocentrism, and secularism. Confucian humanism is not secular, anthropocentric, or instrumentally rational. Rather, it is rooted in a philosophy of life characterized by a profoundly spiritual “anthropocosmic” vision. In R. Balasubramanian’s felicitous depiction, Confucian humanism is a form of spiritual humanism. But this dimension of Confucian spirituality has been neglected for so long that, with the exception of the major New Confucian thinkers, there is little evidence that it is still a viable tradition in the Chinese intellectual heritage. However, I am confident that my sketch of the core ideas of Confucian humanism will strike a sympathetic resonance in the minds of

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those who are willing to probe the underlying reasons why the Confucian persuasion persists in contemporary China. The majority of Chinese public intellectuals, including specialists in Chinese thought who are obsessed with China’s restless march toward modernity, may consider it irrelevant at the moment, but I would argue that if and when they begin to reflect upon China’s new cultural identity, these core ideas will appeal naturally to their philosophies of life and worldviews and they will inevitably address these core values that have always been an integral part of their “habits of the heart.” Let us begin with things at hand. Since the late 1960s, with the help of the astronauts, our naked eye has been endowed with the capacity to gaze at the earth from a transcending perspective. Never in history had the human seen the blue planet holistically. We have come to the realization that minerals, soil, water, and air are all vulnerable to degradation and pollution. We are not merely the outcome of evolution but also active participants in the evolutionary process. Direct and conscious intervention as well as unintended negative consequences have fundamentally changed the human-earth relationship. Our increasing capacity to destroy our environment has enhanced our awareness that the “global village” is also a lifeboat for human survival. Through information and communication technologies the interconnectedness of the human world is growing exponentially. The sense of vulnerability is greatly heightened when news about disasters can be instantaneously shared throughout the world. Tragically, as our knowledge grows and our awareness of the necessary steps we must take to deal with the viability of the human species intensifies, we are even more incapacitated by the infrastructure we have inherited and the developmental trajectory to which we are committed. This is not simply a question of science and technology. It is also rooted in attitude and belief. China is at a critical developmental and environmental juncture. The idea of the “continuity of being” can serve as a point of departure. In this view, the human is connected with all modalities of being—minerals, plants, and animals. If we probe deeply to find some linkages, we are part of a continuum. But the uniqueness of being human is qualitatively different from all other modalities of being. The defining characteristics of human being are not reducible to any of the properties that have become constitutive parts of the human condition. For example, Xunzi observes:

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This idea of being human is predicated on interconnectedness. The distinctiveness of the human is based not on separation but on connection. Although an emergent property is unique and cannot be reducible to its constitutive parts, structurally it is always intertwined with all the elements that contribute to its particular form of existence. A contemporary implication of the “continuity of being” is that it is evolutionary rather than materialistic or secular. One can well imagine that human beings are interconnected not only with the human world but also with all members of the animal kingdom, the life world, the earth, and beyond. This connectedness enables the human to develop a vision of cosmopolitanism. A manifestation of this is acceptance of the earth as our proper home, all humans as our brothers and sisters, and all things our companions because they share the continuity, indeed the consanguinity, that makes the universe an integral part of our existence.5 By implication, spirituality is embedded in the lifeworld. It is not defined by reference to the transcendent. Radical transcendence is not even a rejected possibility. The contrast between the secular and sacred does not exist. Herbert Fingarette’s characterization of Confucius, “the secular as the sacred,” is revealing, but the dichotomy is problematic.6 All exclusive dichotomies, such as body/mind, spirit/ matter, mental/physical, and flesh/soul, are alien to the Confucian conceptual thinking of yin/yang. They are different, conflictual, and sometimes tension-ridden, but in both principle and practice, they are complementary. More significantly, they are coexistent and mutually infiltrating. There is no yang without yin and no yin without yang. There is always yang in the yin of the yang, and so forth. This enables Confucians to see unity in contradiction and to experience the world as both materiality and spirituality.

Xunzi (Hunan: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999), 236; Wangzhi 9.19. See Zhang Zai’s “Western Inscription”. Wing-tsit Chan, trans., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 497–500. 6 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 4 5

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Since human nature is endowed by Heaven, the Heavenly Way is encoded in human nature.7 Heaven makes humans human, but what the human does affects Heaven as well. Thus Confucius observes that the Way can be enlarged by the human but it cannot enlarge the human.8 This implies that humans have the capacity and responsibility to bring the Way to fruition in the world. The highest manifestation of humanity is cosmological and anthropological. In short, it is “anthropocosmic,” predicated on a holistic and integrated humanism that is substantially different from secular humanism. The “anthropocosmic” vision presupposes a unity between anthropological and cosmological perceptions of the human condition. In the Book of Change the cosmos is always a dynamic process generating new realities by creatively transforming the existing order.9 Through their own personal cultivation, human beings can actively take part in Heaven’s creativity. They are also capable of committing grave mistakes contrary to the Heavenly virtue of genuineness and vitality, damaging to themselves and detrimental to their environment. Human beings may survive all natural catastrophes, but they can definitely be destroyed by their own doing. Man-made disasters, beyond Heaven’s power to prevent them, raise doubts about the viability of the human species. Let us return to the initial question. Under the influence of Confucian humanism, Chinese religiosity is predominantly immanent. It may point in the direction of the transcendent, even to a “radical otherness,” but it is the lived reality here and now that serves as a point of departure and the destiny of eventual return. The Confucian conviction that the ultimate meaning of life is realizable and ought to be realized in this world comprised of body, family, community, and earth makes it possible to configure the transcendent as an integral part of the immanent. Thus, what happens in daily life is meaningful in a cosmic, anthropological, and sociological sense. An obvious negative consequence is the instrumentalization and vulgarization of religion. However, it is important to note that underlying the apparent utilitarian and materialistic appropriation of religious ideas and practices is the potency of the ritualization of life, which Xie, Xinyi Sishu Duben, 25; Zhongyong. Xie, Xinyi Sishu Duben, 258; Analects 15.29. 9 See, for instance, the description of the hexagram qian in the Book of Change. Guo Jianxun, ed., Xinyi Yijing Duben (Taibei: Sanmin Shuju, 2004), 7. 7 8

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is profoundly significant for understanding how religions, including the Three Teachings, indeed the Five Teachings (including Christianity and Islam) function in Chinese society. The implication—manifest in a variety of patterns of ritualization for religious tolerance, peaceful coexistence of distinct religious communities, mutual respect and learning among religions, dual or multiple membership in more than one religious tradition, and interreligious dialogue—is far-reaching. It is worth exploring from an intercivilizational perspective. Yet marketization is pervasive in China today. It penetrates all spheres of interest—government, academia, mass media, social institutions, and even religion. China’s market economy is flourishing but its market society has major difficulties in accumulating social capital, educating cultural competence, and cultivating ethical intelligence. The restless march toward money and goods motivated by sheer necessity for survival, the reasonable quest for an adequate life, and blatant greed have converted China into a land of economism, modernism, progressivism, commercialism, and materialism. In this spiritual void, a revival of all religions, whether those committed to uplifting the spirit and improving the life of the mind or those damaging to personal wellbeing and social solidarity, is understandable. Confucian humanism is likely to play a major role in shaping China’s cultural identity. It can either promote narrow-minded nationalism in the guise of patriotism or it can encourage an open, pluralistic, and reflexive self-understanding. The emergence of a corporate critical consciousness engendering a wholesome environment for a sympathetic religious understanding is no longer wishful thinking. For its psycho-cultural health, China cannot afford to be unattuned to human spirituality.

THE RESILIENCE OF CONFUCIANISM IN CHINESE SOCIETIES Joseph B. TAMNEY† Ball State University There is, of course, no such thing as “Confucianism.” A set of texts that are collectively identified as the scholarly or Confucian tradition exists, but these texts are understood through various interpreters. Moreover Confucianism is not an internally consistent body of teachings. As ancient texts were passed down and commented on by generations of scholars over many centuries, “they received various interpretations, in which new elements were introduced, and non-Confucian ideas were creatively adapted and assimilated.”1 There is no unchanging essence of any tradition. Today different “carriers,” to use Christian Jochim’s term, of the Confucian tradition—classical scholars, social scientists, governments (and especially the schools), religious groups, and popular writers—are self-consciously working to save Confucianism by accommodating it to modernity. The interpretations of such carriers constitute the contemporary Confucian tradition.2 In turn, these interpretations are filtered through people’s experiences. The eventual products are the various forms of lived Confucianism. A movement to modernize Confucianism began in the early twentieth century, was lost from sight on the mainland from 1949 until the late 1970s, but was actively pursued in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West from the 1940s until now.3 To be successful, this movement must 1 Joseph Chan, “Confucian Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism,” in The Many and the One, ed. Richard Madsen and Tracy B. Strong ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 129–153, at 106; see also Liu Shu-hsien, John Berthrong, and Leonard Swidler, “Contemporary Confucianism and Western Culture,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40, nos. 1/2 (2003): 2–11, at 4. 2 Christian Jochim, “Confucius and Capitalism: Views of Confucianism in Works on Confucianism and Economic Development,” Journal of Chinese Religions 20 (1992): 135–171. 3 Song Xianlin, “Reconstructing the Confucian Ideal in 1980s China: The ‘Culture Craze’ and New Confucianism,” in New Confucianism: A Critical Examination, ed. John Makeham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 81–104; Chan, “Confucian

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understand the nature of modernity. In this chapter, I offer a modernization/globalization model that might be useful in understanding attempts to modernize Confucianism. Then I discuss two basic forms of Confucianism: one that seeks to reverse the modernization process, and one that accommodates the process. At the present time, there is a third kind—state Confucianism—which I describe and relate to the two basic forms of Confucianism. Following the introduction of these three types, I illustrate the different reactions of their proponents to the modernization of personal life. Throughout the essay, the reactions of various carriers of Confucianism to social changes are presented. I conclude with a consideration of how Confucians might relate to the current moral crisis in Chinese societies. Modernization and Globalization Modernization, as I conceive it, has five basic components: technological development, societal expansion and increasing population density, structural differentiation (i.e., the appearance of new, independent institutions such as a religious institution free from state control or a capitalist economy), the fragmentation of societal culture (pluralism), and the growing importance of the individual at the expense of groups. Modernization does not result in homogenization. For instance, the degree of separation of “church” and state is different in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, but the situation in all three countries is clearly distinct from Iran, where the religious institution tries to control everything, or Singapore, where state policies set definite limits on the political involvement of the religious institution.4 The increasing importance of the individual has two aspects: individuation and individualism. Individuation means a person has an identity apart from social roles and group memberships.5 Thus modernization is a process in which people are more and more self-conscious about a

Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism”; Liu, Berthrong, and Swidler, “Contemporary Confucianism and Western Culture,” 2003. 4 Joseph B. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 35–37. 5 Rose Laub Coser, In Defense of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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personal identity that is increasingly unique. Individuation undermines traditional or “folk-religious” ethics, to use Gustav Mensching’s term, in which moral values “are related to the welfare and security of the folk.”6 That is, good and evil are what is valuable or harmful for the survival of a particular people. As individuation proceeds, such groupthinking declines. Individuation, in turn, gives rise to individualism, which is the cultural affirmation of the value of the individual, of every individual. As Emile Durkheim wrote: “Individualism . . . is the glorification not of the self but of the individual in general. It springs not from egoism but from sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all suffering, for all human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for justice.”7 Modern ethics embodies individualism and is increasingly understood as universally applicable. This form of morality values the use of reason (rather than appeals to force or tradition), democracy, and ending patriarchy. Globalization is the current stage of societal expansion, a basic feature of modernization. Globalization can be described in relation to personality, social structure, and culture. As this process proceeds, individuals borrow from different cultures; people become “cosmopolitan,” that is, they have “an identity that is not totally circumscribed by the immediate locality, but, crucially, that embraces a sense of what unites us as human beings, of common risks and possibilities, of mutual responsibilities.”8 Cosmopolitans know that each ethnic group believes in the value of its own culture, but they also understand the impossibility of using reason to prove the superiority of any one culture. Structurally globalization means “an ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences.”9 Culturally globalization means the weakening of any relation between place and cultural options; that is, the same options are becoming available everywhere. More immediately the process refers to the appearance of “globalized

6 Gustav Mensching, “Folk and Universal Religion,” in Readings on the Sociology of Religion, ed. Thomas F. O’Dea and Janet K. O’Dea (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1973), 83–91, at 84. 7 Emile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 43–57, at 48–49. 8 John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 194. 9 Ibid., 2.

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cultures,” that is, not a single global culture but cultures sharing some basic characteristics such as support for human rights. Modernization is not the path to utopia. The change to a more modern society involves losses and gains. The judgment by a contemporary Confucian that Western modernism includes negative aspects, such as “exploitation, mercantilism, consumerism, materialism, greed, egoism, and brutal competitiveness,”10 could have been written by Western critics of their own societies. Indeed modernization results in a sense of moral crisis everywhere.11 Chinese Modernity Chinese societies are changing in ways consistent with the modernization model. Technological development and societal expansion are obviously occurring. Structural differentiation is also taking place in Chinese societies. Economies are being given more freedom from governmental control. Scholars are changing from being priest-like guardians of the scholarly tradition to being intellectuals—scholars who are guided by the spirit of inquiry and a faith in reason. Although censorship and self-censorship are practiced,12 cultural diversity is increasing. In the People’s Republic, for instance, artists react not only to political reality, but also to commercial considerations as well as to aesthetic and personal moral concerns.13 Popular culture is about having fun, feeling good, and ultimately making money, which goal empowers not only “arts angels” but also ordinary people.14 While some changes have made Chinese societies more democratic, the process is obviously further along in Taiwan.15

10 Tu Weiming, “Multiple Modernities—Implications of the Rise of ‘Confucian’ East Asia,” in Chinese Ethics in a Global Context, ed. Karl-Heinz Pohl and Anselm W. Muller (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 55–77, at 66. 11 For a more detailed discussion of the modernization/globalization model, see Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 10–18; and see also Joseph B. Tamney and Linda Hsueh-Ling Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 5–9, 17–22, 27–30. 12 Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul. 13 Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China. 14 Ibid., vii–ix; Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 124, 103. 15 For a detailed discussion of modernization in Singapore, see Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, and the references cited therein.

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While there is one process of modernization, there are many forms of modern society. Modernization is not the same as Westernization. In the current global situation, all societies must react to the West because of the political-economic dominance of this region; however, the long-term implication of globalization is a decentering of the historical process.16 According to the model that I am suggesting, while all societies will experience modernization/globalization as just described, the resulting societies will be a mix of global and local features. Consider the matter of conflict resolution, as analyzed by Albert H. Y. Chen. In the past, there has been a difference between the American and Chinese approaches to conflict resolution: the former favors litigation, the latter mediation. The latter approach supposedly fit an agrarian society composed of fairly homogeneous communities. Mediation was championed by many, if not all, Confucians because it was more likely to reestablish harmonious relationships and because mediation involved the use of persuasion and education rather than force; the latter aspect meant that the individuals involved in a conflict might grow morally in the process of resolving the dispute. However Westerners are increasingly using mediation, most notably in divorce cases.17 They recognize that litigation might in itself generate hostility; moreover it is accepted that mediation can empower individuals and aid moral growth. But there are problems with mediation—for example, inequality between disputants can result in unjust outcomes. Given all these considerations, Chen suggested that mediation should be used in all modern societies under the following conditions: that it is not the predominant mode of conflict resolution, that those who choose mediation have the option of using litigation later, and that the basis of the discussion between the disputants is mutual equality.18 Given the importance of mediation in Chinese tradition, it is likely that mediation will for the foreseeable future be more frequently used in Chinese than Western societies, although the nature of the process

16 John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29, 105; Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London: Routledge, 1995), 3–4. 17 For a discussion of the use of mediation and litigation in divorce cases in the People’s Republic of China, see Margaret Y. K. Woo, “Contesting Citizenship: Marriage and Divorce in the People’s Republic of China,” in Sex and Sexuality in China, ed. Elaine Jeffreys (London: Routledge, 2006), 62–81. 18 Albert H. Y. Chen, “Mediation, Litigation, and Justice: Confucian Reflections in a Modern Liberal Society,” in Confucianism for the Modern World, ed. Daniel B. Bell and Hahm Chaibong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 257–287.

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as well as the motivations for undertaking the process are likely to become more and more similar. Thus while Chinese and Western societies might converge in how conflicts are resolved, they will also remain distinct.19 Chinese societies, then, are changing in ways that are consistent with the model. What is the role of Confucianism in this process? A Confucian Society Some scholars in the People’s Republic advocate policies that would reverse the modernization process as I have described it. Jiang Qing and Kang Xiaoguang advocate making Confucianism the state religion, while allowing other religions to be practiced. Jiang has argued that Confucian religion is the core of Chinese civilization and should be made the state religion so that it will be the basis for a national cultural consensus.20 The educational system would spread this religion.21 Kang rejected liberal democracy, because it could lead to national fragmentation on the mainland, with Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan seeking independence.22 Moreover democracy requires equality, but in a market economy, economic inequality is necessary, and such inequality means political inequality; in practice, the bourgeoisie control not only the economic and political sectors but they also control culture through civil society organizations. “There has never been such a thing as the people being the masters of their own country, neither in the past, nor now; neither in the United States nor in China.”23 In both countries, the powerful moneyed classes control everything. Jiang criticized democracy because of the possibility of the tyranny of the majority, or even the tyranny of those who can vote; for instance, policies may hurt children or future generations. Moreover, in societies without a historical commitment to democracy, if a democratically

19 A similar analysis might be done regarding the “West’s dichotomous worldview” and “the Chinese holistic mode of thinking.” Tu, “Multiple Modernities—Implications of the Rise of ‘Confucian’ East Asia,” 61. 20 Huang Qing, “Confucianism Will Never Be Embraced as Religion,” China Daily, January 6, 2006, 4; “Confucius Makes a Comeback,” Economist, May 19, 2007, 48. 21 Kang Xiaoguang, “Confucianization: A Future in the Tradition,” Social Research 73, no.1 (2006): 77–120, 95. 22 Ibid., 90. 23 Ibid., 93.

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elected government failed to provide economic development, then the people might prefer other political forms such as fascism.24 Kang favors rule by benevolent people, that is, people who embrace and practice Confucianism: “Benevolent government is a dictatorship by the community of Confucian scholars.”25 The scholars would respond both to the will of heaven and to public opinion. To ensure that the people are heard, there should be an open mass media, consultations with the people, and the use of occupational groups, which would be organized democratically. Realistically the power of the scholars would also be limited by the wealthy class in a capitalist society. Jiang proposed “a legislature that includes representatives of Confucian elites, of elites entrusted with the task of cultural continuity, and of the people.”26 Members of the first component would be chosen by Confucian organizations. Those elites entrusted to provide cultural continuity would be representatives of the various religions in China and descendents of great sages. Members of the third component would be chosen by popular election and by occupational groups. The component composed of Confucians would have more power than the one representing the people, although Jiang also proposed a limit on the number of times the scholars might overrule the people in a five-year period. As Daniel A. Bell wrote, a deeply rooted idea in Chinese culture is “that the most talented and public-spirited members of the political community should rule, or at least should be given extra shares of political power.”27 However, the proposals of Kang and Jiang for such an elitist form of government do show the influence of democratic criticisms of authoritarian societies. An Alternative View of Confucianism Yu Dan wrote a popular book on the Analects and has hosted a television series on the classics in the People’s Republic. As of 2008, her

24 Daniel A. Bell, China’s New Confucianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 25 Kang, “Confucianization: A Future in the Tradition,” 96. 26 Daniel A. Bell, “Confucianism Gaining Ground in Modern China,” The Star (Malaysia), September 18, 2006, W36. 27 Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 186.

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book had sold over 10 million copies, which makes it a best seller. While the book is full of quotes from the Analects, Yu also quotes from Daoism, the Bible, and other sources; “her rather eclectic references express an open-mindedness.”28 As Yu told an interviewer: “We cannot go back to a single culture theory anymore. Chinese culture and Western culture must complement each other.”29 Part of the book’s appeal is that Yu Dan relates the scholarly tradition to daily life.30 On the first page of her book, Professor Yu says that “The essence of the Analects is to tell everyone how to live the happy life that our souls crave.”31 Yu wrote that the Analects is a guide to “spiritual happiness.”32 In this classic, Yu finds advice for stress reduction, simple living, and success. She told an interviewer that with people having so many choices in modern China, the country is in danger of becoming a society that “knows wealth but not value.” Yu Dan preaches that everyone can become an exemplary person.33 A cost of the present stage of development in the People’s Republic is the gap between what people now expect in terms of jobs and income and the reality of what most of them will get. Daniel A. Bell paraphrased Yu’s response as follows: “One solution is to reduce the expectations, and that’s what Yu Dan counsels. Don’t worry so much about your car, your house, or your career. Don’t worry about what other people think of you. What matters is your inner heart. So long as you have confidence and a strong sense of self-worth, you will be happy.”34 Another problem in a modernizing society is, to use my term, individuation, and the increasing temptation to be selfish. “Here too, Yu Dan provides a soothing message. And best of all, it doesn’t require much effort! All we have to do is focus on our own inner happiness. If we do that, others will also benefit and the world will be better for

Ibid., 164. Quoted in Sheila Melvin, “In China, a Return to Confucius,” International Herald Tribune, August 30, 2007, 7. 30 Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 165. 31 Quoted in Clarissa Oon, “Clearing up Confucian Confusion,” www.straitstimes .com/vgn-ext-templating/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=06a21008ce59901/ (accessed March 24, 2007). 32 Quoted in Melvin, “In China, a Return to Confucius,” 7. 33 Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 166. 34 Ibid., 165. 28 29

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everyone!”35 The message seems to be that it is not wrong to think about the self. Professor Yu believes that many parts of the Analects are out-of-date. She favors the “democratization of culture.” As she told an interviewer: “Everyone can get something out of reading the classics, but what that ‘something’ is, is serendipitous. It is like climbing a mountain—what each person sees depends on the day and the weather.” Again: “Must interpreting the classics only be the prerogative of the elite? I believe everyone, from a 60-year-old grandmother to a 14-year-old child, is entitled to personal insights from the Analects.”36 Two Forms of Confucianism Today all moral/religious traditions react to modernity in two ways: traditionalists try to eliminate three characteristics of modernization: structural differentiation (especially the separation of religion and the state), the fragmentation of societal culture (pluralism), and the importance of the individual at the expense of groups. Modernists try to accommodate these characteristics. They emphasize individual responsibility for choosing values, accept diversity, and perceive the essence of a tradition to be abstract ethical values such as love, justice, or peace, which approach allows these religions to accommodate the separation of religion and the state.37 The Confucians Kang and Jiang are traditionalists. They want to create a Confucian society, that is, a society in which scholars run a state that ensures that all institutions express Confucian values, and in which the entire culture supports these same values. Traditionalists limit the significance of the individual, such as by minimizing opportunities to choose among alternative value systems and by opposing democracy.38 Of course, traditionalists vary in the extent that they fit my description of this type. For instance, the relationship between Confucianism and democracy is a complex matter. Confucians who favor democracy

Ibid., 165. Oon, “Clearing up Confucian Confusion.” 37 Joseph B. Tamney, The Resilience of Conservative Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 38 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 60. 35 36

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have argued that several important traits of Confucianism are consistent with democracy, such as “defining the purpose of government to be the welfare of the people, a preference for persuasion rather than force [and] the valuing of self-cultivation.”39 Moreover over the last two hundred years, there have been important Chinese scholars who espoused both Confucianism and democracy.40 However, a democratic society in the narrow sense of having a popularly elected government may also be morally traditionalistic. In making an assessment of the degree to which a particular Confucian political program is traditionalistic, specific issues need to be considered: how much power would be given to Confucians because they are Confucians, would the state financially support Confucianism, how much ideological freedom would intermediate groups between the family and the state have, would education and the arts be dominated by Confucian values, and would the state practice moral policing—that is, would violations of Confucian norms be criminalized to preserve Confucianism. Traditionalists would want to make everyone a follower of their version of Confucianism, but some might prefer to accomplish this through moral policing, others through the control of the schools, and yet others through both methods.41 The last group would be the most traditionalistic. Yu Dan offers a modernist form of Confucianism: an acceptance of different interpretations of classic texts and of alternative ideologies, a concern for individual well-being with an emphasis on the importance of the individual’s self-esteem, and a message that everyone can become a sage. Anthony C. Yu has criticized contemporary attempts to harmonize Confucianism and human rights, and in the process has implied some other traits of modernist Confucianism. First, the classical view of relationships is hierarchical and therefore ensures inequality. Second, Confucians have not argued for establishing institutions to defend subordinates when their superiors fail to act virtuously. “Subjects, wives, Ibid., 41. Wang Juntao, “Confucian Democrats in Chinese History,” in Confucianism for the Modern World, ed. Daniel A. Bell and Hahm Chaibong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69–89; John Makeham, ed., New Confucianism: A Critical Examination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). However, the message is not always unambiguous; see Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 43–46. 41 J. Chan, “Confucian Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism,” 142. 39 40

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children, and inquisitive journalists may be swiftly penalized if they err, but who will effectively censure, curb, or bring to justice the transgressive emperor, the patriarch, the judge, the senior minister, or the members of the ruling party?”42 The presence of ways to challenge those in authority would threaten harmony, at least temporarily, but such procedures are necessary if human rights are to be respected. Third, Chinese governments have equated the merit of a religion with “the performance of meritorious service to the state,” in the words of a Ming Dynasty degree establishing how to evaluate religious practices.43 That is, traditionally good behavior meant advancing the interests of the state. In contrast, modernist Confucianism emphasizes equality, would institutionalize procedures enabling the less powerful to challenge those with power, and evaluates an ideology in terms of the extent to which it advances individual well-being. Lee H. Yearley has argued that there have always been two strands in Confucianism, one associated with Xunzi and the other with Mencius. In the Xunzi strand, a Confucian elite should rule societies because “past sages best understood heaven’s plans and provided highly differentiated social forms that need to be followed if humans are to be perfected.” In this strand, “virtues like ritual (li ) and loyalty are highlighted.” In the Mencius strand, “anyone can become a sage,” and the emphasis is on the virtues of benevolence and righteousness.44 Traditionalist and modernist forms of Confucianism can be seen as contemporary examples of these two strands. The State and Confucianism At different points in time the governments of the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, and Taiwan have sponsored Confucian programs. During the period 1945–1990, the Taiwanese government actively propagated Confucianism in the schools, especially through

42 Anthony C. Yu, “Which Values? Whose Perspective?,” Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 299–304, at 301. 43 Quoted in ibid., 303. 44 Lee H. Yearley, “Two Strands of Confucianism,” in The Many and the One, ed. Richard Madsen and Tracy B. Strong (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University press, 2003), 154–160, at 155–156.

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classes on moral and civic education but also in literature classes.45 During the 1980s, there was a revitalization movement in Singapore to promote Confucianism. It had been preceded by public discussion about a moral crisis accompanying economic development. To resist evil influences coming from the West, it was considered necessary to revive traditional values, and thereby to increase people’s confidence in their own culture and ethnic identity. The movement was led by the government, which among other things created a course for secondary-school students on Confucian ethics, established the Institute of East Asian Philosophy, which focused on Confucianism, and initiated the still-ongoing Speak Mandarin Campaign. The movement was well supported by the Chinese-speaking part of civil society, such as the Chinese-language newspapers and organizations such as the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry.46 Since the 1980s, the mainland government has funded the revival of Confucianism.47 Today there are Confucian study programs in primary schools, secondary schools, and universities.48 The Communist Party’s Central Party School in Beijing now teaches the Confucian classics.49 Chinese governments have been interested in Confucianism to achieve economic development and to revive Chinese nationalism. However, they have made a distinction between useful and harmful aspects of the tradition. Undesirable Elements The keynote speaker, Gu Mu, at a conference in Beijing presented a familiar framework for cultural modernization. The first rule was described as “inherit the essence and discard the dross” of the traditional national culture. The second rule was to incorporate elements from “the advanced cultures of the outside world,” keeping the tra45 Christian Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World: The Taiwanese Case,” in Religion in Modern Taiwan, ed. Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 48–83. 46 Eddie C. Y. Kuo, “Confucianism as Political Discourse in Singapore: The Case of an Incomplete Revitalization Movement,” in Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 294–309. 47 Song, “Reconstructing the Confucian Ideal in 1980s China”; Liu, Berthrong, and Swidler, “Contemporary Confucianism and Western Culture.” 48 Bell, “Confucianism Gaining Ground in Modern China”; “Confucius Makes a Comeback,” Economist, 2007. 49 Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 194.

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ditional culture “as the mainstay.”50 But who determines what the essence of Confucianism is? In effect, political leaders have been trying to design a Confucianism that retains from the scholarly tradition what is useful for economic development and political stability. These leaders have criticized aspects of Confucianism that seem to inhibit economic development, such as the low prestige of entrepreneurs and the idealization of the “gentleman,” as well as the traditional preference for studying the arts rather than science. Moreover since constant change is the only way to avoid falling behind economically, governments want to “reform” obstacles to change: the emphasis on a status-quo oriented state and the use of past dynasties as a political model; the “canonization of tradition”; fatalistic references to fate and heaven; and an educational system that emphasizes memorization rather than creativity and individual initiative.51 What, then, should be retained? Confucianism and Economic Development Beginning in the 1970s, social scientists both in the West and in East Asia explained the economic miracle of Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan as, at least partially, the result of an equivalent to the Protestant ethic within the Confucian tradition.52 The shared view was that certain elements of this tradition in the right social context could increase productivity. Prominent among the various lists of such values have been thrift, hard work, educational achievement, social harmony, respect for authority, acceptance of paternalistic forms of government, the need to achieve worldly success, which was related to a fear of shame and a need to glorify the ancestors, and filial piety.53

50 Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “The New Confucianism in Beijing,” The American Scholar 64, no. 2 (1995): 175–189, at 181. 51 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 9, 22, 71–75. 52 Jochim, “Confucius and Capitalism.” 53 Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World,” 69–70; Lee Seunghwan, “Asian Values and the Future of the Confucian Culture,” www.ieas.or.kr .vol12_1/leeseunghwan.htm/ (accessed May 29, 2008); Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul. A preference for family-like business relations also appeared on some lists. However, “crony capitalism” has also been blamed on such a preference; see Richard Madsen, “Ethics and the Family: China/West,” in Chinese Ethics in a Global Context, ed. Karl-Heinz Pohl and Anselm W. Muller (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002), 279–300, at 296.

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Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore said there is now a Beijing Consensus alternative to the Washington Consensus. The latter is an economic policy that favors free trade, minimal state intervention in the economy, and democratic politics. The Beijing Consensus claims that economic growth requires “order, certainty, hard work, market-friendly policies, savings and investment, trade, education and training.”54 The Beijing consensus combines traits from capitalism and tradition. Nationalism Nationalism implies that people incorporate into their personal identities their role as citizens, and also that, given the universal desire to be esteemed, they want to protect and enhance the honor of the nation. In the People’s Republic, national honor is perceived in comparison to the United States, primarily, and Japan, secondarily.55 China is insecure about its international status. Moreover the Chinese people are influenced by the widespread awareness of the “century of humiliation,” beginning with China’s defeat in the First Opium War and ending with Communist victory. This collective memory is joined by the evidence, such as the invasion of Iraq, for the desire of American leaders to control the world, including China. Nationalists respond in two ways: trumpeting increased economic and political power, and claiming cultural or spiritual superiority. The latter strategy includes an emphasis on the merits of Confucianism.56 By mid-2007, the People’s Republic had established over 140 Confucius Institutes in more than fifty countries, and more are on their way.57 The name was chosen because Confucius is internationally recognized as a symbol of Chinese culture.58 The institutes organize cultural exchanges, exhibitions, and language classes. They 54 Quoted in Li Xueying, “MM: Beijing Leads New Approach to Growth,” www .straitstimes.com/print/Singapore/Story/STIStory_23475/ (accessed May 7, 2008). 55 Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 135. Singaporeans probably place more emphasis on ethnic identity than national identity. The Taiwanese situation is complicated by the tension with the People’s Republic. 56 Gries, China’s New Nationalism, 8. 57 Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 2008. 58 Anna Sun, “The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 229–253, at 249.

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seem to be part of a program to gain international prestige for Chinese culture. Linking the scholarly tradition with nationalistic purposes puts pressure on Confucians to argue for the global superiority of their moral views. The attempt of states to use Confucianism brings out the problematic nature of lived Confucianism. In practice, traditional teachings resulted in people focusing on the family to the detriment of the state. Among ordinary Chinese people, lived Confucianism meant being devoted to protecting and advancing the family—the nuclear family, the extended family, the ancestors, and the lineage. In the words of Lin Yutang: “The family, with its friends, became a walled castle, with the greatest communistic cooperation and mutual help within, but coldly indifferent toward, and fortified against, the world without. In the end, as it worked out, the family became a walled castle outside of which everything is legitimate loot.”59 Familism preempts nationalism and thus is a problem for governments. Moreover familism eliminates what Lin called “Samaritan virtue,” that is, benevolence toward strangers. Richard Madsen found “familistic selfishness” to be prevalent in the rural part of China that he studied.60 But an urban society, in which mobility is high, needs people to practice Samaritan virtue. For example, the Singaporean government has struggled “to bring volunteer charity work up to the Western level. Traditional kinship selfishness is not a foundation on which to build a caring society.”61 So, familism must go. Thus the Taiwanese government sought to use the schools to convince students that the orthodox Confucian principle was to expand loyalty from the family to the state.62 The nature of state Confucianism must be understood in the context of capitalist societies. Modern societies, Chinese and Western, are capitalist societies, that is, societies in which all institutions are shaped by the goals of a free-enterprise economy: higher GNPs, better industrial infrastructure, more adequate financial planning, and such. “The main national goal, whether in Chinese societies or elsewhere, is no 59 Quoted in David K. Jordan, “Filial Piety in Taiwanese Popular Thought,” in Confucianism and the Family, ed. Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 267–284, at 276. 60 Richard Madsen, China’s Catholics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 80–81. 61 Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 198; see also 116 n. 24. 62 Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World”; see also Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 113 n. 9.

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longer to be in harmony with the cosmos; it is to respond to the ebb and flow of market forces.”63 A capitalist society is one in which the economy is the dominant institution and all others serve the goal of economic growth (of the nation or of the wealthy minority). The state gives priority to a growing economy. In schools, moral development is secondary to the development of needed skills; competition among students replaces cooperation.64 The government treats the arts as a growth industry— valuable in producing economic development.65 Popular culture is useful to the extent it focuses people’s attention on consumption and momentary pleasures, thereby distracting them from critical reflection.66 Thus prized elements of the Confucian tradition are ones that advance economic goals—that is, state Confucianism.67 State Confucianism in Decline? Today the Singaporean and Taiwanese governments play less of a role in defining and promulgating Confucianism.68 In Singapore the revitalization movement fizzled out by the early 1990s. Chinese values are still being taught in moral education classes and elsewhere, but the movement itself dissolved in Singapore. There was some awareness among the Singaporean public of practical reasons for the government’s manipulation of Confucianism, such as to legitimize the paternalistic form of government favored by the ruling party, to use a Confucian work ethic to achieve economic development, and “to reduce the pressure on the government to provide public housing and

Jochim, “Confucius and Capitalism,” 158. Huang Yufu, “Chinese Conceptions of Moral Development,” in Chinese Ethics in a Global Context, ed. Karl-Heinz Pohl and Anselm W. Muller (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 119–136, at 135. 65 Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 230; Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 154–157. 66 Kenneth Paul Tan, Cinema and Television in Singapore (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 67 An alternative model of society portrays it as composed of increasingly independent institutions; see the collected writings of Max Weber in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Max Weber, Economy, and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). For instance, the professionalization of artists in the People’s Republic has meant that artists use rules they have developed for their practice (Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 167). Social reality is a mix of Marxist and Weberian ideas. 68 Kuo, “Confucianism as Political Discourse in Singapore”; Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World,” 75. 63 64

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social welfare” by promoting the three-generation family.69 Developments in Singapore suggest that when governments define their own form of Confucianism, this state form of Confucianism is perceived as self-serving, which perception creates cynicism and undermines the usefulness of governmental support for the scholarly tradition. Another problem for proponents of state Confucianism has to do with the use of the tradition to strengthen nationalism. They may have difficulty convincing scholars, especially, to support the notion of the superiority of Confucianism. Confucians are not of one mind about this situation. Globally and nationally Confucianism is involved in a competitive ideological market. Confucians have a dilemma: emphasize what is shared with other traditions so as to form alliances with their supporters and thus increase the influence of Confucianism both nationally and globally, or emphasize what is distinctive in Confucianism to strengthen the loyalty of the support base and enhance competitive advantage in the national and global competitive markets.70 The responses of traditionalists and modernists to competition differ. The former assert their superiority over all competitors and either seek to eliminate the others or reluctantly tolerate them. Such attitudes are consistent with the desire to establish a Confucian society. Modernists accept diversity; they are interested in dialogue and search for common ground. While some modernists continue to believe in the superiority of their values, others perceive all or many competitors as equally valid or useful.71 Nationalists favor the traditionalists, cosmopolitans, the modernists. But there may be a middle way. The well-known Confucian modernizer, Mou Zongsan, believed “that there are universal truths and values that can be appreciated by the entire humanity, but that no one culture expresses all of these truths and values. Rather, each culture tends to express in its particular way some of these truths and values, and cultures enrich one another by offering different paths to the realization of universal truths and values.”72 Mou’s approach would seem

69 Kuo, “Confucianism as Political Discourse in Singapore,” 303; see also Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 37–40. 70 For a more detailed discussion of the responses of Confucian scholars to globalization, see Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 202–204. 71 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies. 72 J. Chan, “Confucian Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism,” 135.

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to allow both for efforts to create a Confucian society and for cooperative actions at the global level. The diversity of approaches among Confucian scholars to competitive markets means there will not be a closing of the ranks among them around the nationalistic ambitions of Chinese governments. Moreover Christian Jochim claimed that as the role of the Taiwanese state in defining Confucianism decreased, and as the importance of independent scholars and lay-led sects has increased, interpretations of Confucianism in Taiwan have become more universalistic and less nationalistic, linked more to personal cultivation than to the usefulness of the ideology as a support for nationalism,73 that is, the interpretations are becoming more modernist. State Confucianism is closer to the traditionalist version of the scholarly tradition than to the modernist version. Both traditionalists and proponents of state Confucianism emphasize self-sacrifice, for instance, by being filial children. Both stress maintaining harmony and respecting authority. Of course, state Confucianism is inconsistent with both of the other forms because of the greater importance of material development than of spiritual cultivation in the state version. Modernist Confucianism would seem least useful in a capitalist society because of the primacy given to abstract values, especially benevolence, and because of the importance of individual needs. However, even modernist versions of Confucianism may indirectly support a capitalist society. Bell criticized the failure of Yu Dan to address the structural reasons for people’s frustrations. For instance, people are advised to reflect on their own failures to explain the lack of work opportunities.74 By concentrating on inner happiness, Bell believes that “Yu Dan deflects attention from the economic and political conditions that actually cause people’s misery, as well as the sorts of collective solutions needed to bring about substantial improvement to people’s lives.”75 Modernist versions of morality that ignore the need for structural changes can fit into capitalist societies. In the next section, I will illustrate the reaction of each of the three forms of Confucianism to the changes taking place in private life as a result of modernization.

73 74 75

Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World,” 76. Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 228. Ibid., 174.

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Modernization of Personal Life: The Family and Gender Based on research in a variety of societies, including Hong Kong and Singapore, Wardlow and Hirsh concluded that there is a “global ideological shift” in favor of companionate marriage. Spouses are chosen by each other, often on the basis of romantic love. Intimacy provides the binding power between spouses, who are seeking companionship. Personal fulfillment, pleasure, and personal happiness are accepted goals within marriage, at times even replacing reproduction as the purpose of marriage. The marital relationship takes precedence over ties to parents and other family members. The companionate marriage ideal is part of modernization. The ideological shift is linked to smaller families and longer life-spans, which factors increase the number of years parents live without dependent children. Moreover changes in the lives of women have meant changes in what they expect from marriage—from economic security to personal fulfillment.76 The ideological shift represents a change to a society in which people are experiencing individuation and coming to accept individualism. This shift is being encouraged by popular entertainments, advertisements, and even Christian publications.77 Selina Ching Chan compared the marriages of women in Hong Kong and Singapore who were married during the 1960s and such marriages that took place during the 1980s.78 The changes that she found are consistent with the shift in favor of companionate marriage. For the older group, marriages were arranged; romantic love was not relevant; people got married to have children, especially sons; and the jewelry given to women symbolized the transfer of rights over these women from the natal family to the husband’s family. All had changed by the 1980s. Marriages now serve the interests of the couple. “Marriage has today been transformed from an event that was strictly embedded in a large [patriarchal] complex family system to an occasion that is largely taken charge of by the couple.”79 Today, wedding 76 Holly Wardlow and Jennifer S. Hirsch, “Introduction,” in Modern Loves, ed. Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1–31, at 8. 77 Ibid., 2–5. 78 Selina Ching Chan, “Love and Jewelry: Patriarchal Control, Conjugal Ties, and Changing Identities,” in Modern Loves, ed. Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 35–50. 79 Ibid., 40.

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rings are no longer unilateral gifts given by the groom’s parents to the bride, but are chosen by the couple. The rings “emphasize the symbolic transition of both bride and groom from single to married,” and not “the symbolic transfer of the bride from the natal family into her husband’s family.”80 As modernization proceeds, Chinese families are becoming more similar to Western families. However, the two forms of family remain different; for instance, the divorce rate remains relatively low in Chinese societies.81 An important empirical question is just how far convergence will go. The global women’s movement, as well as the national movements in Chinese societies, is also changing private life among Chinese people. Women’s issues have become politically prominent: equal opportunity in education and work, sexual harassment, and family abuse.82 In addition, issues considered radical or Western are now being discussed in Chinese societies: the end of the cult of virginity for unmarried women, the sexual liberation of women, the pressure on women to remain in relationships with unfaithful husbands, and enforced celibacy among widowed and divorced women. Discussion of the aforementioned issues must contribute to the heightened awareness of “women,” of the human rights of individual women. Indeed, only recently in Chinese societies has attention been given to “ ‘woman’ as a category of analysis separate from class or kinship.”83 Generally in the scholarly tradition, women were to be restricted to the home, in which the men had the final authority.84 But Patricia Ebrey claimed that contemporary Confucian scholars accept the ideal of gender equality. They do not want to reinstate arranged mar80 Ibid., 46. Men in modern societies sometimes use gifts of jewelry as a way to buy wifely submission. The prevalence of the ideal of companionate marriage does not mean that all marriages embody this ideal. Chan, “Love and Jewelry,” 48. 81 Madsen, “Ethics and the Family,” 293. Summaries of research about the changing Chinese family are in Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 95–96, 127–140. 82 Catherine S. P. Farris, “Women’s Liberation Under ‘East Asian Modernity’ in China and Taiwan,” in Women in the New Taiwan, ed. Catherine Farris, Anru Lee, and Murray Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 325–376, at 365, 369–370. 83 Vivian-Lee Nyitray, “The Real Trouble with Confucianism,” in Love, Sex, and Gender in the World Religions, ed. Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 181–200, at 194. For a more detailed discussion of changing gender roles in Chinese societies and of the women’s movements in these societies, see Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 133– 142, 142–148. 84 J. Chan, “Confucian Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism,” 133–134.

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riages, do not want wives or children to accept mistreatment out of filial duty, and do not want widows to renounce remarriage. Feminists sympathetic to Confucianism argue that the core ideas of the founders such as Confucius and Mencius are worth preserving; supposedly they “may have been guilty of ignoring women or taking their status for granted,” but they “never set out to denigrate or oppress them.”85 Joseph Chan has suggested that a modern Confucian approach to gender issues could be built on these Confucian principles: women and men have the same moral potential, education should be available to all, government positions should be filled using a meritocratic process.86 But Chan noted “the difficulty of searching for a social and political perspective that is attractive to modern men and women and yet sufficiently connected with traditional Confucianism to be worthy of the name ‘Confucianism.’ ”87 I discuss three examples of how Confucianism is being related to family life that represent the three forms of Confucianism. State Confucianism and the Family In the People’s Republic, Singapore, and Taiwan, governments make reference to Chinese tradition or specifically to Confucianism to justify the primary dependence on the family to provide welfare services.88 Thus these governments have used the traditional emphasis on filial piety to gain support for welfare policies that are believed to aid economic development. In all three countries, adult children, if they are able, are legally required to take care of their aging parents. After reviewing studies of the welfare policies of East Asian countries and of Singapore, two social scientists concluded that the main use of Confucianism was to legitimate the provision of limited welfare services, an outcome that is consistent with the pressure coming from a capitalist global economy.89

85 Patricia Ebrey, “Foreword,” in The Sage and the Second Sex, ed. Chenyang Li (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000), ix–xiii, at x. 86 J. Chan, “Confucian Attitudes toward Ethical Pluralism,” 144–145. 87 Ibid., 151. 88 Alan Walker and Chack-kie Wong, “Conclusion: From Confucianism to Globalization,” in East Asian Welfare Regimes in Transition, ed. Alan Walker and Chack-kie Wong (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2005), 213–224. 89 Ibid., 215, 221.

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However, social changes are not consistent with the welfare ideology of Chinese governments. Extended families are in decline, and more and more women are in paid employment. Aging populations are increasing the demand for services at a time when families are less able or willing to provide care. In addition, a growing number of the elderly in Singapore, and perhaps elsewhere, are expressing a preference to live apart from their children as a way of avoiding familial conflict. “Sociologist Paulin Straughan said: ‘Wanting to live alone is probably a pragmatic reaction on the part of these seniors, as they know their kids want to live by themselves.’ ”90 Moreover filial piety is less often perceived as an automatic duty. The tribunal that hears cases regarding the parental maintenance law in Singapore told the media that parents who neglect or abuse their children should not expect their children to support them.91 The changes taking place in the family life of Chinese peoples may force their governments to change their policies regarding welfare. Traditionalist Confucianism and Gender in Morality Books Civil society also influences the development of Confucianism, for example through the “morality books,” many of which are written and published by members of lay-led sects. Dating back to the Song Dynasty (tenth–thirteenth centuries), these books are meant for a popular audience. They prescribe moral duties and present them often within a religious worldview, which may include Buddhist, Daoist, or currently, even Christian ideas. Today they appear not only as books but as audiotapes and CDs.92 Philip Clart compared two morality books meant especially for women that, he says, are representative of the periods in which they were written.93 One book was published on the mainland in 1921;

90 Quoted in Theresa Tan, “More Elderly People Want to Live Alone,” http://straitstimes .asia1.com.sg/sub/storyprintfriendly/0,5578,323855,00.html?/ (accessed June 21, 2005). 91 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 73. 92 Ling Chi-shiang, “Morality Books and the Moral Order: A Study of the Moral Sustaining Function of Morality Books In Taiwan,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 203–208. 93 Philip Clart, “Chinese Tradition and Taiwanese Modernity: Morality Books as Social Commentary and Critique,” in Religion in Modern China, ed. Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 84–97.

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the other appeared in Taiwan in 1989. Both were produced by spiritwritings sects and were predominantly Confucian in orientation. Both accept male domination of wives and are critical of divorce. However, Clart found important differences between the two books. Whereas the earlier book simply told women to obey their husbands, the later book says that now obedience is a choice because women are more economically independent, and so it is necessary to reason with women to get them to accept the subservient role. The book from the twenties focuses on the lineage, but the later book is more concerned about the husband-wife relationship and stresses the need for coordination. The newer morality book expresses a minimal accommodation of modernization. Wives need to be reasoned with because they are more financially independent, but men should rule the home. More stress is placed on cooperation between spouses, but divorce is still condemned. Changing Traditionalism: The Influence of Christianity on Gender Relations among Taiwanese Migrants in the United States Based on his study of Chinese Christians in the United States, Fenggang Yang argued “that the Chinese Christian church has become an institutional base for passing on transformed Confucian values to younger generations.”94 These Christians embrace Confucian values, such as love (ren), filial piety, and family harmony,95 and at the same time provide a stronger foundation for them by relating these values to supernatural expectations of humans.96 In the process of passing on Chinese tradition, Christian churches are also changing it. Carolyn Chen studied Taiwanese migrants who converted to Christianity in the United States.97 In part, the ChineseAmerican church that they joined provided continuity with traditional Chinese culture by reinforcing the importance of obeying parents and respecting elders.98 At the same time, their experience in this Christian

94 Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 51. 95 Ibid., 149–150. 96 Ibid., 153. 97 Carolyn Chen, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 98 Ibid., 200.

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congregation encouraged transforming tradition. Conversion was the source of a new-found freedom from traditional expectations regarding who they are as women. The Taiwanese women told Chen stories of discovering “authentic selves that transcend familial and societal definitions,” especially the “patriarchal definitions of women’s selfhood.”99 Some of them used Christian teachings to become more independent. Chen described one interviewee as follows: “After becoming Christian, her new identity as a ‘daughter of God’ takes precedence over her secular identities and legitimates her freedom to act outside of traditional expectations, even if it means disobeying her mother-inlaw.”100 In another case, the woman expressed her willingness to challenge her husband if he asks her to do something contrary to biblical teachings.101 Chen emphasized that familial roles remained important to these women, but they did experience more freedom within these roles after conversion.102 As Chinese women join Christian churches, even conservative ones such as the churches studied by Yang and Chen, they are likely to become a force for change regarding the marital expectations of women, because these women tend to perceive themselves apart from the roles they play in the family as individuals with rights. Chinese Christianity may influence Chinese culture, and therefore Confucians, by weakening the appeal of patriarchal families. Modernist Confucianism and the Family: Shirley Yuen Shirley Yuen was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in the United States, where she lectures and writes about parenting and child development. Her book, The Three Virtues of Effective Parenting, is subtitled Lessons from Confucius on the Power of Benevolence, Wisdom, and Courage.103

Ibid., 111–112. Ibid., 122–123. 101 Ibid., 128. 102 Women in a village in the People’s Republic were supposedly attracted to Christianity because of the subordinate role of women in traditional organizations (“When Opium Can Be Benign,” Economist, February 3, 2007, 25–26); see also Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 174–175. 103 Shirley Yuen, The Three Virtues of Effective Parenting (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2005). The book was published by Tuttle Publishing, which has distribution organizations in the United States, Japan, and Singapore. My son bought a copy of the book for me in Taipei. 99

100

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Benevolence is equated with ren. Signs of benevolence are respectfulness, forgiveness, trustworthiness, and generosity. Self-examination is stressed as a way to ensure that the three aforementioned Confucian virtues are applied in parenting. We must be honest with ourselves and become aware of our feelings, thoughts, and actions. At the same time, we must strive to understand others, such as our children. Meditation is a useful tool. We must struggle against a culture focused on externals such as success and recognition that disconnects us from our inner selves.104 Parents must learn to play three roles in their relations with children: ruler (absolute authority figure), teacher, and friend. Which role is played should depend on what the parent feels a child needs at a specific time and place. Although at times parents must be rulers, children should not feel that challenges to authority are out of the question, as long as they behave politely. Moreover this aspect of the parent should become less prominent as children grow into teenagers. Familial harmony does not require sameness. Parents and children need to accept their differences.105 If the child needs support and companionship, the parent needs to be a friend. When playing this role, the parent must allow the child freedom. In Chinese families, adult children are sometimes ill at ease with their parents because their relationship has been based on respect, obedience, and fear. They are not friends. Parents need to remember that when children become adults, the ruler and the teacher will retire, “but a friend will never need to retire” and parent-child friendship “can last a lifetime.”106 Confucius is criticized for emphasizing authority-oriented groups. Many Chinese parents use shaming too much, which is likely to damage a child’s self-esteem and self-confidence. In democratic societies, absolute obedience is not acceptable. “It does not matter if you are the president, the boss, the teacher, the parent, or anyone else in a position of authority, you will be expected to be accountable for the things

Ibid., 120–121, 19, 128. Ibid., 12. 106 Ibid., 108; see also 65, 86, 89, 93, 109. At least two well-known Confucian scholars, Ho Hsin-yin and Tan Sitong, chose friendship out of the five traditional relationships to be the model for social relationships. Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 25–26. 104 105

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you do.” Subordinates are expected to respect and obey superiors only if they have earned it.107 Filial piety traditionally forbade disrespectful behavior to parents. But not all parents deserve respect, because they may have treated their children poorly, abusing or neglecting them. “Just like autocratic sovereignty, or job loyalty, absolute filial piety is a thing of the past, and today’s parents should wake up and recognize that filial piety is no longer an obligation for today’s young people.”108 Filial piety can result from tradition, a sense of duty, money, or the nature of the particular parent-child relationship. The first two bases are declining in relevance. Money, at best, buys “cosmetic filial piety.” Only in a parent-child relationship that has included friendship will the child become “the forever friend that will provide his parents with love and care from the heart.” In traditional China, regardless of the kind of relationship they had with their parents, children “were obligated to repay their parents with care and obedience.”109 They had no option. Today filial piety is optional. This new attitude is not limited to American Chinese. As David Jordan found when studying Taiwanese during the 1970s, among traditional Chinese, filial piety has been the supreme virtue. As passed on in popular tales and family socialization, filial piety meant the unquestioned obedience of parents, the obligation of children to nurture their parents, and the duty to express affection for them, especially while mourning their deaths.110 Jordan’s informants stressed that filial piety related to the status more than to the personalities of their parents. “A child honors its father because he is a father, whether or not he is by any other criterion a worthy person.”111 However, Jordan found some evidence in the mid-1980s for the emergence of a modernist view of filial piety “as an emotion of gratitude felt toward parents (and parent surrogates) because of their earlier nurturance rather than as a duty owed to the status of parent.”112 The mainland scholar, Li Zehou, has

107 108 109 110 111 112

Yuen, The Three Virtues of Effective Parenting, 123–125. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 116. Jordan, “Filial Piety in Taiwanese Popular Thought.” Ibid., 274. Ibid., 278.

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speculated that in the modern context filial piety will become voluntary, an earned reward.113 These examples illustrate three levels of accommodation to modernization. Yuen’s approach is modernist: She gives priority to abstract values and redefines roles to reflect both traditional and modern values. The parental role is less identified with authority, parents and children should be friends, and filial piety is optional. However there are important traditional ideas in Yuen’s book. As parents, she wrote, we should focus on the well-being of our children and not be selfcentered. “ ‘Sacrificial love’ is called for by benevolence.”114 Parents, of course, are expected to make sacrifices for their children, but the equating of love with self-sacrifice is part of the traditional outlook. Modernization and Moral Crisis Given all the changes taking place in Chinese societies, it is not surprising that people talk of a moral crisis. However, not everyone perceives the same crisis. Political leaders both decry business practices that prevent economic development and public actions that threaten stability. “New Left” intellectuals are concerned about social inequality, corruption, the unavailability of health care, and the absence of democracy. Various kinds of critics lament the widespread worship of money, gambling, and corruption.115 There are multiple crises, which I will try to understand using the modernization model. For some people, the mere fact of significant social change generates a sense of crisis. Given that Confucians of all types believe that the tradition must be changed, they cannot meet the need for stability. However, the traditionalists would be more appealing to those who are fearful of change itself because traditionalist ideologies provide greater continuity with the past than modernist ones. In contrast, some specific problems stem from incomplete modernization,

113 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 54. 114 Yuen, The Three Virtues of Effective Parenting, 103. 115 Wang Hui, China’s New Order, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 75; Ling, “Morality Books and the Moral Order,” 208.

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such as authoritarianism and familial abuse. Modernist Confucianism would seem more relevant to the elimination of these problems. Other problems are related to the capitalist form of modernity that is currently prevalent in the world. Capitalist societies encourage selfishness and greed in economic matters. They require consumerism and social inequalities. How, then, do moralists deal with the crises stemming from the capitalist nature of modern societies? Professor Kang Xiaoguang argued that Confucianizing the Communist Party leadership as well as the masses of ordinary people would lessen political corruption, economic inequality, and moral degeneration.116 Wang Hui claimed that ending such problems requires institutionalizing political, economic, and cultural (media) democracy.117 Yu Dan counseled people to place less importance on material things and to concentrate on spiritual development. Yet other problems stem from the very nature of modernization. Globalization and pluralism favor the appearance of cosmopolitans, who are more likely to question their own cultural assumptions, myths, and so on. While such questioning might result in openness to other cultures, it might also lead to cynicism.118 Deviant acts of all kinds, such as gambling, are a likely result of the loosening of social control that results from social processes associated with modernization, such as increased physical mobility. Individuation seems always to increase selfishness and loneliness. Since these features of modernization—globalization, pluralism, mobility, and individuation—come as a package, a decision must be made to modernize or not. For instance, suppose we decide to eliminate individuation. Such change would require eliminating structural differentiation and cultural pluralism. The latter condition, for example, means that people are aware of alternative values and goals, and thus pluralism pressures individuals to make choices. Moreover individuation is related to characteristics of late modernity, notably affluence (a significant middle class) and the spread of tertiary-level education. Late-modern people are more concerned about mental health, self-actualization, and defining what the meaning of the good life is once necessities are no longer an issue. Life is no longer deter-

116 117 118

“Confucius Makes a Comeback,” Economist, May 19, 2007, 48. Wang, China’s New Order, 174. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture.

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mined by fate or tradition, but by us. Because late-modern individuals are both no longer poor and powerless and have the time and training to reflect, they are more likely to seek personalized lifestyles.119 Are we willing to eliminate structural differentiation, pluralism, affluence, and tertiary-level education? Moreover, if we pursued the draconian procedures necessary to eliminate individuation, we would also destroy commitment to individualism, and thus to human rights. Is that what we desire? Given the inevitable costs of modernization, moralists must weigh them against the benefits of modernization. If the decision is to modernize, then the moralists must discuss how best to cope with these unavoidable costs. A problem such as loneliness may, in part, be a result of unique features of American or European societies that are not part of the modernization model. Catherine Farris has suggested that, although both men and women in Chinese societies seek more autonomy in the family, they will not seek independence in the American sense.120 As in Farris’s analysis, there is a tendency to equate individualism with American attitudes about the individual. The American form of modernity is probably distinguished by its emphasis on self-reliance. Supposedly Americans believe that they “owe nothing to any man, [and] they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.”121 Indeed, Americans more than other Westerners value independence. Modernization should not be equated with what seems to be a peculiarly American, or perhaps Anglo-Saxon, form of individualism, which to avoid confusion I prefer to call “radical libertarianism.”122 Thus theoretically there is no reason to assume that Chinese societies will come to accept radical libertarianism. Farris believes the Chinese will continue to emphasize interconnectedness among people, as well as the rights and responsibilities attached

119 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 120 Farris, “Women’s Liberation Under ‘East Asian Modernity’ in China and Taiwan.” 121 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1952), 2:105. 122 Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 12.

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to specific roles.123 But such emphases are not unique to the Chinese. Around the world, people continue to value connectedness. For example, the family is a valued institution globally. When a national sample of South Koreans was asked in 2000 whether or not they agreed that “the ideal society is like a family,” 87 percent said they agreed. Soon after, the researchers were surprised when they asked the same question in a Danish survey, because 75 percent agreed with it.124 However, while “the family” remains very important everywhere, there is wide disagreement about what is meant by this term. The issue is not whether people should be connected but what form connectedness should take. The traditionalist response would be different from the modernist response.125 Consider the matter of divorce, which although relatively rare is increasing in Chinese societies. Divorce is becoming more socially acceptable.126 In reaction, 180 couples took part in a “renewal of marital vows” ceremony in Beijing in 2004 before family, friends, and government officials as special guests. In front of a portrait of Confucius, the couples declared that they would never divorce.127 Divorce can be considered a cost of modernization. The renewal ritual identified Confucianism with eliminating the option of divorce, a traditionalist response. Such an approach ignores the causes of divorce. Singaporean social scientists suggested that reasons for the increase in divorce in their country include the improved social status of women, which means that if a marriage is not satisfying, women are freer to leave the relationship; changing expectations about marriage as people come to expect marriage to bring happiness; and having more opportunities to meet others via the Internet. As sociologist Paulin Straughan said:

Farris, “Women’s Liberation Under ‘East Asian Modernity’ in China and Taiwan.” 124 Geir Helgesen, “The Case for Moral Education,” in Confucianism for the Modern World, ed. Daniel B. Bell and Hahm Chaibong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161–177, at 162, 165. 125 State Confucians would take positions on the family similar to those of the traditionalists. 126 Winnie W. Kung, Suet-Lin Hung, and Cecilia L. W. Chan, “How the SocioCultural Context Shapes Women’s Divorce Experience in Hong Kong,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 35, no. 1 (2004): 33–50. 127 Melissa Sim, “Number of Divorces to 5,937 Last Year,” www.straitstimes.com/ print/Prime%2BNews/Story/STIStory/ (accessed May 8, 2008). 123

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“So those who feel trapped in a loveless marriage are more likely to want to exit.”128 “Chinese-style divorce” was a phrase used in popular women’s magazines in Taiwan to refer to people who stayed in unhappy marriages, who were divorced in spirit although not in fact. Such marriages were said to be the result of women’s fears about economic security and about being able to keep the children.129 However, in the People’s Republic, as elsewhere, some contemporary women are speaking “a new personal language of ‘self-fulfillment,’ ” and their increased financial independence is allowing them to leave unhappy homes.130 Divorce is a cost of modernization but it also has benefits. People, especially women, in unhappy marriages are freer to leave them. At least in part, the unhappiness is a result of new expectations related to the shift in favor of companionate marriage. One response to the increase in divorce, then, would be to help people make the transition to new family forms, thereby increasing happiness within the family. Traditionalists and modernists would help in different ways; for instance, the former, as in the contemporary morality book discussed earlier, might try to save the patriarchal family, while at the same time encouraging more reasoning and cooperation between spouses. Modernists would emphasize a shift to equality. Quite possibly the traditionalists will find a wider audience because their responses involve a less radical break with the past. Conclusion Confucianism is resilient for two fundamental reasons: first, it is being adapted to modernity, and second, it is taking different forms that allow it to meet different needs. I have given examples of adaptation from different carriers of Confucianism: scholars, government officials, popularizers in the mass media, morality books, Chinese Christians,

128 Quoted in ibid.; see also Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, 125–126; Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 137–139. 129 Ibid., 137. 130 Woo, “Contesting Citizenship,” 75, 69.

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and overseas Chinese self-help writers. In this essay, three forms have been discussed: traditionalist, state, and modernist Confucianisms.131 Traditionalists want to create a Confucian society: leaders would be Confucians and Confucian values and practices would be supported by the state. Traditionalists emphasize creating strong families and strong states. The key virtues are filial piety and patriotism. Institutions are hierarchical structures, lacking any mechanisms enabling subordinates to challenge those in authority before a third party. “Self-cultivation, in this institutional approach, means developing one’s abilities to carry out the assigned duties within the family and the state.”132 State Confucianism supports those elements of the scholarly tradition thought to aid economic development (e.g., valuing hard work, educational achievement, and filial piety) and those elements that contribute to social harmony (respect for those in authority, patriotism, and a belief in the superiority of Confucianism). Because traditionalist and state forms of Confucianism have overlapping traits (emphasizing self-sacrifice for the family, nationalism), their supporters are likely to cooperate. However, proponents of state Confucianism have problems, such as overcoming a cynical view of their efforts, gaining support for the portrayal of Confucianism as superior to other moral systems, and convincing new generations that families should be the primary provider of welfare services. Modernist Confucianism gives priority to values such as benevolence and pluralism. Dependence on moral experts is criticized. Yu Dan’s “democratization of culture” is the ideal. The social goal is not strong social institutions but the spiritual advancement of individuals. Ideally individuals should give themselves a sense of self-esteem. They should not be stressed out by the roles that they play. Modernists seek to design roles in conformity with these values and attitudes. “For instance, while modernists continue to value filial piety, they see it as a reward to be earned by family members who act with each other in a manner that expresses reciprocity, mutual respect, and love.”133

131 The Confucian scholar Harry Hsiao proposed a somewhat similar typology of Feudalistic Confucianism, Imperial Confucianism, and Junzi Confucianism. Jochim, “Confucius and Capitalism,” 161. 132 Tamney and Chiang, Modernization, Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies, 53. 133 Ibid., 197.

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Given the dynamic world in which we live, however, nothing stays unchanged, and this applies to all forms of Confucianism.134 In the past, the Xunzi strand was dominant in Chinese history.135 Thus the stress on authority within Confucianism was more prominent than the concern about mutuality in lived Confucianism.136 Today traditionalist Confucianism is probably more influential than modernist Confucianism. It is the traditionalists who are most likely to be able to help people cope with the moral crises that they are experiencing, because the traditionalists provide both continuity with the past and a way to adjust to the changing world. However, this advantage may lessen with continuing modernization. Little is known about contemporary lived Confucianism. How does it differ among Chinese societies? To what extent does it reflect the different forms of Confucianism? Which carriers are having the most influence, and why? Is familism still the core of lived Confucianism? To what extent is lived Confucianism helping people cope with their sense of moral crisis and, if it is helping, how is it doing so? Research is needed on these matters.

I have developed this idea with regard to Christianity in The Resilience of Conservative Religion. 135 Yearley, “Two Strands of Confucianism.” 136 Madsen, “Ethics and the Family: China/West,” 297. 134

FROM BEIJING TO BOSTON: THE FUTURE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE GLOBALIZATION OF NEW CONFUCIANISM John BERTHRONG Boston University Without a doubt the movement called New Confucianism will have an impact on the philosophical, spiritual, social, and ethical development of global philosophy, although just what the impact will be is still clouded in the realm of speculative prophecy. For instance, how can a tradition in the midst of a profound internal process of reform, renewal, and regeneration have an impact on other cultural regions that do not share in any historical or social memory of a “Confucian” past? Can modern New Confucianism—and we must remember that this in and of itself is a highly contested notion—be transmitted to an alien environment such as Boston? What would be the dialogical connections between the New Confucianism of Beijing, Hong Kong, or Taipei and Boston Confucianism? The very question of the globalization of New Confucianism is complex in terms of the task of the hermeneutics of retrieval and renewal within the intellectual matrix of East Asia itself, not to mention conversations with those who share different historical worldviews and inherited cultural patterns. Yet globalization drives just such a conversation about the future role of Confucian philosophy. Coda The following presentation is a research project about the future of contemporary New Confucianism in a globalizing world. Globalization will ultimately include ideas, as well as the myriad items of material culture making inroads around the world. Anyone who visits East Asian universities knows that this is already the case for the transmission of Western philosophy into Vietnam, China, Korea, and Japan. We need to find new forms of philosophical and religious imaginaries and more encompassing and nuanced forms of cross-cultural communicative repertories in order to enable this modern transformation

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of our inherited cumulative traditions, including the Confucian Way (rudao 儒道).1 What will follow is a particular kind of presentation, a thought-experiment in a cross-cultural form as one version of the reappropriation and re-visioning of Zhu Xi’s daoxue. St. Aquinas argued that when you present the work of another scholar you have the obligation to provide the best possible version of the argument; in fact, if you can think of a stronger version than the one offered, you are obligated to give your revised version in order to avoid simply attacking a weak position. This is what I intend to do, although it would be presumptuous to claim that I will improve on Master Zhu; rather, the great Southern Song philosopher provides my point of departure. However, I am aware how complicated and conflicted the history of Confucian discourse and practice has been in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. For instance, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman2 has written with great precision about how utterly complex and contested the history of the Confucian/Ruist3 Way (siwen 斯文), or “this culture of ours” in Peter Bol’s felicitous phraseology, has been. The history of Ruist philosophical discourse as well as private and social praxis was not always a pretty picture, to say the least, in terms of the actions of individuals or the anticipated and unanticipated social consequences—philosophical speculation that in the Confucian case was often indeed designed to influence private and public social policy.4 But in terms of the philo-

1 I have used pinyin Romanization except when citing sources that use the WadeGiles system. 2 Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, “Reflections on Classifying ‘Confucian’ Lineages: Reinventions of Tradition in Song China,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin A. Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms (Los Angeles: Asia Institute’s UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2002), 33–64. 3 I will explain below why I have used the term “Ruist” 儒學 as an alternative or supplement to the more common English terms “Confucian” and “Confucianism.” Professor Tillman’s essay is also an apt reminder to students of Ruist thought of the complex nature of the various strands of Song and post-Song philosophy. Moreover, he further reminds us that even such a great scholar as Zhu Xi sometimes transgressed the boundaries of scholarly propriety in his role as the editor of the work of others. No one philosophy is ever what Whitehead called a perfect or complete philosophic dictionary; and we are all made of, as Kant reminded us, the crooked timber of humanity. Of course human flaws, ambition, and lack of vision in no way diminish our overall admiration of the work of intellectual giants, nor our need to stand on their shoulders to try to see farther. 4 For instance there is little doubt that Song and post-Song Ruist philosophy could not be considered positive for the lives of women. Of course, as my colleague Rita Gross pointed out long ago, this does not mean that all Ruist philosophers after the

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sophical thought experiment that follows, I hope to provide what I deem is a plausible and intrinsically worthy revised and adapted version of Boston daoxue. This is, of course, only one of many possible revisions of the lineage of Ruist discourse that takes Zhu Xi’s daoxue as its Song model. This experiment rests on the very large, and to some objectionable, assumption that Ruist thought is what Robert Neville5 has called a portable tradition, that is, it is a philosophical vision that spread from China to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan and could and probably will now move onto the complex stage of the twenty-firstcentury global philosophical republic of letters. Exegesis and Extensive Elaboration Scholars of the history of religion and philosophy have always commented on a dialectical balance in the study of any cumulative tradition: (1) First there is exegetical piety towards the inherited tradition, even when it takes the form of a strong rejection of the tradition. The critic takes aim at a cumulative tradition and attempts to demonstrate that it is wrong, mistaken, or unworthy in its current form—and in doing so nonetheless provides an exegesis of the traditional material, arguing that the critic’s reading of the tradition is actually superior, albeit hostile, to those who defend the tradition as some kind of orthodox or influential authentic deposition. In the classical period of the emergence of Chinese philosophy, Mozi 墨子 represents a prefect example of this dialectical encounter via his criticism of the Confucian betrayal of the proper praxis of genuine ritual action through excessively lavish performances. Then, of course, on the other hand, (2) there are the faithful exegetes who seek to carefully preserve as much of the inherited cumulative tradition in as pristine a form and format as possible. Even when it is embraced through this kind of pious rehearsal of the past, there is an inevitable extensive elaboration of the cumulative tradition. Change and some kind of creativity seem to govern the lives of all cumulative religious and philosophical traditions. Various forms of expansion Song were intentional misogynists. But it is fairly clear that Ruist philosophy could not be counted as having an overall positive impact on the life of East Asian women. 5 Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

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or tinkering always happen as the tradition is passed down from one generation to the next. Take the famous saying about his position on tradition attributed to Kongzi (Analects 7.1),6 “transmit but do not create” (shu er bu zuo 述 而 不 作). This rubric is taken to demonstrate the great piety of the Master for the grand and cumulative contributions of the ancient sages and the rulers of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Yet as scholars have now recognized, in transmitting faithfully—and we need harbor no suspicion concerning Master Kong’s aims—no one could have been more creative than the First Teacher of the Ten Thousand Generations. For instance, the famous discussion of ren in terms of the one thread of zhong 忠 (dedicated loyalty) and shu 恕 (empathy) demonstrates how even the most history-loving of exegetes expands or extends the meaning of the inherited philosophical lexicography (Analects 4.15). The same phenomenon can be observed in the Neo-Confucian7 scholars of the Song-Ming-Qing period in diverse manifestations. Each of the various schools that comprise this vast religious, social, political, and philosophical Song and post-Song Confucian/Ruist movement vied with each other in claiming that their particular school embodied the true teachings of the classical tradition. Zhu Xi 朱 熹 (1130–1200) went as far as to perfect the theory of the daotong 道統 (transmission of the way) in order to claim that “true” Confucian thought had been cut off after the death of Mengzi, only to be revived in the Northern Song dynasty by a series of public intellectuals whom Master Zhu considered the masters of the authentic truth of the Mencian tradition. Based on this understanding of the daotong, Master Zhu called this newly restored ancient classical wisdom daoxue 道學 (Teaching of the Way), implying that it was the one true path of the Confucian Way/Rudao 儒道. Needless to say, other great Song, Ming, and Qing masters, along with some Korean and many Japanese scholars, hotly contested Zhu’s exegesis of the classical tradition and offered a plethora of alternative interpretations and transmissions of the Confucian Way. This debate about what constitutes the “main line” of “this culture of ours” continues down to today and is beautifully exemplified, for

6 Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, trans., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophic Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998). 7 As if the term “Confucian” weren’t problematic enough, “Neo-Confucianism” may be even more variegated because of its myriad forms in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

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instance, in the work of Mou Zongsan 牟 宗三 (1909–1995) and his brilliant attempt to reconstitute the true transmission of the Mencian mainline of the Confucian Way for the modern world.8 Just as was the case with his Song, Ming, and Qing ancestors, there are those who champion Mou as a true transmitter of mainstream Confucian discourse and those who object to what they take to be his many mistakes and extravagant flights of exegetical and philosophical fancy— not to mention his fascination with Kant and Tiantai Buddhism. In Mou’s case his main criticism is that Zhu Xi paid too much attention to the purely philosophical and external, scattered epistemological issues of discernment of the exterior world and did not manifest enough concern for the complex personal dynamics of genuine Mencian self-cultivation. If this exegetical battle over the “true orthodox transmission of the way” were not enough, there was and is the equally vexing question of the potential international portability of the Confucian Way. For instance, could a Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese scholar contribute to the emic transmission of the Confucian Way? On the whole most premodern Chinese intellectuals were blissfully unconcerned with nonChinese Confucian scholarship. Yet in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam debates about the Confucian Way were intricate and integral aspects of the religious, historical, political, and philosophical developments of all of these countries, especially since the fourteenth century. And the question of portability now becomes even more complicated. Contemporary Chinese scholars have begun to take a much greater interest in the Confucian Way as it was expressed in Korean, Japan, and Vietnam. The reason for the easy appropriation of this material is relatively simple: in the premodern era, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Confucian scholars wrote philosophy in literary Chinese, the scholarly lingua franca of East Asia. With the rise of New Confucianism in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as an attempt, much like the great revival of Confucian 8 For an exhaustive study of Mou Zongsan’s attack on Zhu Xi’s philosophy in general and Zhu’s daotong, see Matthew A. Levey, “Chu Hsi As A ‘Neo-Confucian’: Chu Hsi’s Critique of Heterodoxy, Heresy, and the ‘Confucian’ Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1991). Mou’s thesis is that Zhu, by the power of his justly famous philosophical synthesis, hijacked the legitimate Mencian Song mainline represented by Cheng Hao and Hu Hong. One of the sad outcomes, according to Mou, is that someone as prescient and important as Hu Hong has been relegated to the status of a mere footnote to the history of the development of Song philosophy.

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learning in the Song dynasty, to reform and reconstitute the Confucian Way for the contemporary world, the very question of the relevance of exegesis and expansion or extension arises again with a renewed vengeance. One of the most amazing questions among many others is, Can there be something worthy of the name “Boston Confucianism”? The answer to this complex question of portability, as Robert Neville9 explained, rests on the related answers to two different questions. First, how do we define “Chinese” philosophy? In one instance it is the case that “Chinese Philosophy” is simply philosophy composed at any given time by ethnic Chinese, such as great medieval Buddhist scholarmonks or contemporary Chinese academics writing about Heidegger, Whitehead, Quine, Rorty, or postcolonial theory. Or it could mean scholars writing about the contemporary relevance of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, or any other indigenous Chinese cultural tradition. Here the second question arises. Can a non-Chinese scholar write about indigenous Chinese philosophical and religious traditions in an emic mode? Would Chinese scholars, for instance, recognize the great Korean Four-Seven Debate as Confucian discourse? In the contemporary world the simple answer would be yes, and the proof is to be found in the growing recognition of the brilliant contributions of generations of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese scholars to the rich foliation of the Confucian Way. Therefore, based on historical precedence, there is no reason logically to deny that the Confucian Way could establish a branch or branches on the shores of the Charles River in Boston and Cambridge. While I hate to indulge in speculative prophecy about the future of any religious or philosophic cumulative tradition, I see no reason why Confucianism cannot play a role in the philosophical and religious life of North America. Therefore Boston Confucianism may be a harbinger of future transcultural developments in religion and philosophy in North America. Again, it is important to note that such an extensive transcultural elaboration of the cumulative Ru/ Confucian 儒 tradition has already occurred in East Asia. The first fruits of this elaboration are, of course, found in what is now called the New Confucian movement. The term

9 Neville, Boston Confucianism; and idem, Ritual and Deference: Extending Chinese Philosophy in a Comparative Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

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“New Confucian” is used to designate and distinguish contemporary Confucian thought from its ancestors in the classical, Han, medieval, and Song-Ming-Qing periods, and also from the parallel, though often highly divergent, developments from the fourteenth century on in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Of course, the New Confucian movement is already a highly variegated movement well into its fourth generation of development.10 Moreover, just as was the case with its Song-Ming-Qing ancestors, some scholars relish the revival of Confucian discourse and others rue the day when Confucianism might again lay its heavy hand of ritual hegemony and outdated metaphysics on the living body of modern China. Even among the New Confucians and scholars sympathetic to their aims, there is universal recognition that the world has changed dramatically again compared to the world of the great medieval and early modern East and South Asian Song and post-Song philosophers.11 The arrival of imperial Western influences and political hegemony in the middle of the nineteenth century forever disrupted all aspects of religious, philosophical, cultural, economic, social, and political life in East and South Asia. One of these changes has been the encounter of Chinese intellectuals such as Xiong Shili, Liang Shuming, Hu Shi, Xu Fuguan, Tang Junyi, Fang Dongmei, Mou Zongsan, Liu Shuxian, Du Weiming, and many others with the Western theological and philosophical world. The only comparable encounter of this magnitude in China was the arrival of the Buddhist Dharma in China at the end of the classical world and the beginning of the medieval period. The impact of Western philosophy, for instance, has been profound and massive. While most Western philosophers are almost completely ignorant of any East and South Asian philosophical history, all the scholars mentioned above and their students, in various degrees, have acquired a profound understanding and appreciation of Western philosophy. Many of the second, third, and fourth generation New Confucians have studied and taken advanced degrees in philosophy in Western

10 John Makeham, Lost Soul: “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Thomas A. Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005). 11 For instance it can be questioned whether post-fourteenth-century Vietnamese Confucian scholars joined in the Neo-Confucian debates with anything like the verve of their Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cousins.

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universities and have often been visiting professors at prestigious Western academic institutions. Most modern Chinese philosophers can discuss insightfully the preSocratics and the Yijing. I have heard wonderfully nuanced discussions of Whitehead, Quine, Gadamer, Ricouer, Heidegger, Levinas, and Rorty (among others) along with Mengzi, Xunzi, Zuangxi, Zhiyi, Zongmi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming, and Dai Zhen in various Chinese university settings. So in one sense, the grand experiment in transcultural global philosophy has already begun. With the rapid political, economic, and cultural rise of East Asia, it is only a matter of time before Western philosophers and theologians will have to take as much notice of East and South Asian modes of thought as East and South Asians have achieved in the study of various Western intellectual traditions. One does not have to be a Marxist or a prophetic magus to discern that intellectual interests will follow economic, political, social, and cultural success in the global city of the twenty-first century. An Exploration of Boston Confucianism One of the concerns that has constantly been expressed about the viability of Boston Confucianism is that it lacks a crucial characteristic that distinguishes it radically from Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Confucianism. This is the issue of the language of transmission. It has been noted that in the case of the transmission of the Confucian Way from China to the other countries of East and South Asia, the linguistic medium was always classical or literary Chinese. For instance, Japanese scholars during the Tokugawa era became so proficient in the study of classical and literary Chinese that they carried on elaborate and sophisticated philological contestations with Song and Ming philosophical texts in terms of the interpretation (or Song-Ming misinterpretation) of the true teachings of the classical Confucian corpus. Korean philosophers were famous for arguing over the finer points of Zhu Xi’s philosophy in a brilliant and creative set of debates about critical unresolved issues in the massive deposition of Master Zhu’s daoxue 道學. The use of classical or literary Chinese was the medium by which the Confucian Way was transmitted in East and Southeast Asia. This style of linguistic transmission is hardly likely to occur when the Confucian Dao comes to the West. However, there are examples even

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within East Asian intellectual history that can be deployed to counter the claim that great cultural constructs such as the Confucian Way must everywhere and always be richly and exhaustively appropriated in the original Chinese. The case of Buddhism in China itself is a counterexample. While it is true that some Chinese Buddhist scholarmonks did develop facility with Sanskrit, Pali, and a variety of Central Asian languages as the medium of the transmission of the Dharma, it is entirely fair to say that most of the greatest Chinese Buddhist scholarmonks worked completely from Chinese translations of the South and Central Asian original texts. Few would deny the philosophical genius of philosophers and religious thinkers like Zhiyi and Kueifeng Zongmi. In the Western world almost all modern Western philosophers work with the classical texts of the Western tradition in modern vernacular translations rather than in the original Hebrew, Greek, or Latin (of course there are scholars who do use the classical languages, but they are in a distinct minority). Would we throw out the whole of contemporary Anglo-American analytic or pragmatic philosophy simply because these thinkers, if they engage the pre-Enlightenment world of Western thought, do so via modern scholarly translations of the premodern Western classics? I doubt that we would do so any more than modern Buddhists ignore Zhiyi and Zongmi. Notwithstanding the importance of linguistic facility for religious and philosophical thought, there has been a blossoming of scholarly translations of various Chinese texts for the last century in Western academic and popular circles. A modern Western scholar who develops an interest these days in comparative philosophy can find access to many excellent translations of all forms of Chinese philosophical and religious texts. Therefore there is no reason to assume that a Western scholar cannot play the same role within her or his philosophical world as did the great Chinese Buddhist masters of the golden age of Buddhist philosophy in China. However, I must stress that this is merely a speculative hypothesis about what might happen in Western philosophy if Western philosophers finally begin to notice the importance of South and East Asian philosophical and religious traditions.12

12 I have written about the potential benefits of such an intercultural exchange in Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).

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Finally, perhaps the most fascinating early modern example of this kind of hybrid translation project is the Confucian Islamic philosophy and theology of Liu Zhi’s 劉智 Tiangfang xingli 天方 性理 (Nature and principle in Islam), written in 1704. This brilliant explanation, replete with a set of diagrams, of a Confucian-Islamic cosmology is part of Liu’s trilogy of works designed to explain Islamic philosophy and theology via a highly sophisticated Neo-Confucian lexicography. It functions as an Islamic daoxue, even though it is not a work based on Zhu Xi’s Southern Song corpus per se. In fact one suspects that Chinese literati from many different perspectives on Ruist thought would read this cosmological work without hardly realizing they were being presented with an Islamic vision because the creative fusion of Ruist thought and Islamic themes is almost seamless. Of course, one of the maps included among the many diagrams in the text would introduce Chinese readers to a map of the world according to learned Islamic geography from the early eighteenth century13—which would be something novel to a Chinese reader. The Boston Daoxue Philosophical Imaginary and Repertoire The noted French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff 14 has made the point that all philosophers have an imaginary, a set of deeply seated beliefs, views, and metaphors15 that govern how they think about the world and frame their philosophical vision. In other works (both published and forthcoming) I have attempted to outline what would be a plausible philosophical lexicography of Boston daoxue’s imaginary. It is an imaginary because it is not designed to present a historical account, exegesis, or exhaustive terminological index of Zhu Xi’s vast corpus. Rather, it is a concise lexicon or terminological imaginary of the 13 Sachiko Murata, William C. Chittick, and Tu Weiming, The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 14 Michèle Le Deouff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 15 Stephen C. Pepper made this point in 1942: see his World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1942); and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have continued the analysis of the pivotal role of metaphor in the construction of philosophy through a series of influential texts: Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

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Chinese philosophical vocabulary that appears in Master Zhu’s mature cosmological axiology and is divided into four major domains: Ti 體 = States/Conditions & Coherent Patterns Yong 用 = Functions or Processes He 和 = Civilizing Cultural Achievements De 德 = Axiological Outcomes & Virtue

Moreover, this fourfold architectonic schema serves to link the vision of the Southern Song master to the completely different world of Boston in the twenty-first century. This philosophical lexicon provides the raw material for the creation of a new form of Confucian discourse; it is one that will be a distinctively new elaboration and yet conjoined to its ancestor through a shared cumulative and expansive tradition.16 Another hypothesis to test is whether or not other scholars will judge the selected terms adequate and applicable in providing a credible cross-cultural parallel between the modern and revised English lexicon17 and the traditional East and South Asian Neo-Confucian and New Confucian philosophical lexicography. If the match is deemed plausible, one very important step will have been taken in the creation of a thematic lexicon for a new version of Boston Confucianism in the twenty-first century. The initial elaboration of a new imaginary is a fruitful exegetical connection between the historical traditions of the Confucian Way in its East and Southeast Asian home countries and its extensive elaboration in new venues such as Boston. The elaboration of the new lexicography is, of course, not a reproduction of a pristine Southern Song religious and philosophical vision.

16 Furthermore, there is a cross-cultural linguistic parallel in how the lexicon is organized. I framed my first formulation of Master Zhu’s mature cosmology in the vague general terms of the fourfold pattern of coherent form, dynamics, unification, and a moral goal. This terminology owes its debt to Western process, pragmatic, and naturalist philosophy. These traits, terms, and metaphors that order and schematize this repertoire of philosophical terms and concepts are generally drawn from the first six quan 卷 of Master Zhu’s yulei 語類 and various essays and writing from the wenji 文集 and a careful comparison of the vocabulary of these sources with Chen Chun’s famous philosophical glossary, the Beixi ziyi 北溪 字義. However, this vague English formulation is not the terminology that Master Zhu would have used. My hypothesis is that in Zhu’s own thought ti 體, yong 用, he 和, and de 德 parallel the general vague traits of coherent states (patterns), dynamic functions or processes, unifying cultural achievements, and axiological goals and outcomes in the lexicon of Boston daoxue discourse. 17 In this case the English lexicon is indebted to pragmatism, American naturalism, and process philosophy.

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No retelling or elaboration could ever be. Chen Chun,18 admired for his lucid fidelity and insight into Zhu’s vision, still had subtle differences with the work of the master and added some elaborations of his own. The great Korean daoxue scholars Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok19 likewise present us with an extensive elaboration of certain contested points in the development of the lixue 理學 imaginary. Boston daoxue is a modern20 attempt to select aspects and traits of Master Zhu’s daoxue and transpose this imaginary into a contemporary North American cross-cultural philosophical speculative exploration. In this respect it is both Neo- and New Confucian, in the sense that the faithful transmission of the way daotong 道統 was a critical feature of Zhu’s mature discourse and imaginary.21 However, being incurably a child of the post-Enlightenment world, I cherish creative elaboration as much as faithful transmission, and hence feel the freedom and necessity to try to find a new voice for a revived and reformed daoxue philosophical discourse and imaginary for the twenty-first century. What, for instance, would be a few relevant examples of the lexicographical bridge between Song daoxue and contemporary Boston daoxue?22 I will select four clusters of traits from the Song and post-Song

18 Chen Chun (1159–1223), Neo-Confucian Terms Explained (The Pei-hsi tzu-I) by Ch’en Ch’un (1159–1223), trans. and ed. Wing Tsit-chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 19 John H. Berthrong, Transformations of the Confucian Way (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Edward Y. J. Chung, The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok: A Reappraisal of the “Four-Seven Thesis” and Its Practical Implications for Self-Cultivation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). 20 Or postmodern attempt, if one assumes that all contemporary comparative philosophy is postmodern in that it moves beyond the confines of the modernist project as defined by the Enlightenment. 21 My daotong will diverge dramatically from Zhu’s famous version. As generations of East Asian and Western scholars have shown, Zhu’s daotong is what we might generously call a pious fiction. My version will not be nearly so pious but is still intended to indicate those thinkers I consider highly useful in formulating Boston daoxue. For instance, Xunzi will play just as great a role as Mengzi in my version of Boston daoxue. 22 The genre of what John Tucker calls philosophical lexicography has a long tradition in East Asia. One of the most famous early examples is Chen Chun’s glossary of daoxue terminology. Tucker himself has provided excellent translations and explanations of the Japanese legacy and adaptation of the genre, both pro and con daoxue discourse, in Tokugawa Japan; see his Itō Jinsai’s “Gomō Jigi” and the Philosophical Definition of Early Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1998). In China we can remember the work of Dai Zhen in the late Qing period and the contemporary work of Zhang Dainian in continuing the discussion of the repertoire of key Confucian philosophical semantic markers.

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period that I think will be critical to a renewed global Confucianism repertoire in the twenty-first century. I frankly think it would be hard to conceive of the future of any kind of New Confucianism without recourse to these traits, and this would hold both for daoxue-style philosophy and alternative formulations of the contemporary Confucian Way such as that offered by Mou Zongsan. Of course, there are countless other aspects of Song and post-Song Ruist thought that must be considered as well. As so many scholars have now pointed out,23 the transition to contemporary study of the Confucian Way is incredibly complex and no one account can be considered exhaustive or normative for the entire range of Ruist studies and culture in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. In terms of the lexicon of Boston daoxue, in the first place we have the hallowed notion of xue 學 study—the Analects begins by reminding us of the pleasures and necessity of study in the cultivation of the person and indeed society as a whole. Kongzi’s praise of study is literally the first step on the path of self-cultivation, and with the Neo-Confucians, the transformation of the entire cosmos. Without the study of the teachings of the sages and the things and events (wushi 物事) of the cosmos, a person cannot begin to follow the Dao. Moreover, study leads to teaching ( jiao 教; see below) what one has learned in dialog with other people. If virtue loves neighbors (Analects 4.25), then study and teaching love friends equally dedicated to the examination of the way of the sages. A key question will be, What do we mean by study? For instance, do we follow someone like Zhu Xi with a broad program of study (daowenxue 道問學) that includes self-cultivation along with a robust agenda of empirical studies as well? Or do we follow the line of what we might call therapeutic self-cultivation (zundexing 尊德性) identified with the teaching of Wang Yangming—the uncovering of our innate moral mind-heart? This is, of course, the grand debate about how to find a balance point that recognizes both of these twin traditional cultivation goals of the person in service to self, family, society, nation, world, and even the cosmos. As Thomas Metzger24 has pointed out,

23 Benjamin A. Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms, eds., Rethinking Confucius in Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (Los Angles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, University of California Press, 2002). 24 Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific.

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the New Confucians are as committed to these kinds of goals as were their ancestors. Because of the persistent Ruist (儒學, 儒教)25 demand that study (xue 學) is foundational for any elaboration of the Confucian Way, jiao 教 as the function and role of teaching, education, and learning will remain a prime process by which a person becomes a profound ( junzi 君子) or worthy (xian 賢) person. Sheng 聖 (sagehood) is held out as the ultimate goal for a person who cultivates her/himself with further education and self-cultivation—the highest and most perfect state a person can aspire to achieve, though it is almost impossible to achieve. Just how difficult it is to attain the final sought-for end of study and education as sagehood is always inscribed on the Ruist mind-heart and memory because Kongzi never claimed to be a sage or even a person who practiced ren 仁 (humaneness) consistently.26 The root method of Ru/Confucian 儒 self-cultivation is the process of learning, educating, teaching, reflection, discernment, and authentic ethical action. As we shall see in the section below on gewu, Zhu’s Song daoxue specification of the proper methodology of xue (learning) and jiao (teaching) is by means of gewu, the investigation of things. Agreeing with but expanding Zhu’s broad scholarly interests, I would argue that the path of learning is long and in fact does not end until death itself. If we radically expand the range of the notion of daotong to include reflections on the fine arts, literature, science (both natural and social ), medicine, political theory, ecology, technology, and in fact any and all forms of human inquiry that conduce to the creation of a flourishing human society set on a sustainable and viable planet earth, we have added new branches to the robust root of Ruist thought.

25 As we have seen, the whole complex question about the use of the English terms “Confucian” and “Confucianism” has become more and more troubling. As we have also seen, one of the best suggestions for an alternative rendering is to use “Ru” 儒 or “Ruist” for the whole complex as found in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It is in fact what scholars such as Zhu Xi and Chen Chun would call themselves when contrasting their Way 道 with those of Lao 老 (i.e., Daoism) and Fo 佛 (i.e., Buddhism). Of course what we mean by “Daoism” and “Buddhism” is just as complicated. I rather doubt that after long usage scholars will be able to replace “Confucian” as a general term for a long, long time. But this does not mean that we can shirk the obligation to explain the great complexity and even confusion that arises without a carefully qualified use of “Confucian” or “Confucianism.” 26 Though Kongzi did mention that his favorite student, Yan Hui, did practice ren for three months running.

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Gewu 格物, the investigation or rectification of things, was and is a key (and highly contested) epistemological methodology for the examination of the concrete objects and events of the world and the inner workings of the mind-heart. It covers both the outward examination of the world and human interaction with the world. But, typical of Song and post-Song Ruist philosophy, the examination of things also included what we would now consider personal self-cultivation, perhaps even going so far as to say that study and gewu had a spiritual dimension in terms of the transformation of the person toward the goal of becoming an exemplary human being. In terms of a naturalist theory of human query ( Justus Buchler,27 for example) the range of what counts as “things” worthy of study is expanded in directions not anticipated by Song scholars. For instance there is parity between the reality (shi 實) and concreteness of physical objects and social events. In terms of moral epistemology, gewu is a crucial aspect of the regimen of personal cultivation such that the “examination of things” is pivotal as the praxis of zhujing qiongli 主敬窮理 (to reside in reverence in order to exhaust coherent pattern) in Zhu’s daoxue.28 When a person “resides in reverence in order to exhaust [comprehend] coherent patterns” through a progression of steps that include study, learning, and reflection with gongfu 工 ／功 夫 as a structured moral and cognitive effort, it is possible to transform a person’s mind-heart (xin 心) so that the person can make real moral progress on the path to becoming a worthy or authoritative person. Jing 敬 (reverence) is the marker for the kind of sincere effort, a true reverence for the task of self-cultivation, that is necessary to make the kind of epistemological and axiological progress mandated in daoxue. Study, teaching, and the examination of things are just three of the traits needed to reappropriate daoxue in terms of contemporary global philosophy. Of course, the process of study, teaching, and the examination of things, in and of themselves, are not ultimate ends, but rather are organic penultimate means to actualize zhishan 至善 (or yuanshan 圓善, 27 Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, 2nd ed. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). 28 Of course it is precisely at this point that the great split occurs between Zhu’s methodology and that of what is called the Lu-Wang School. While Zhu does want attention given to the study of the external world, he is by no means unaware of the need for the inner cultivation of the xin (mind-heart). But Zhu really does want to examine the external world and not simply (as if this kind of Lu-Wang philosophy were really simple, which it most definitely is not) to rectify the mind-heart itself.

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the highest good) as the realization of harmony 和 and centrality 中. The ideal for a self-actualized (cheng 誠) person would be to become a sheng (聖 sage)—a theoretical ideal but in practice very difficult to achieve; perhaps more realistically a junzi 君子 or a xian 賢 (worthy or noble person) seeking harmony with tiandao 天道 (the supernal Way of Heaven). The person who achieves such a lofty goal finds le 樂, the quality of true happiness or joy, and the reward of virtue for a Ru/ Confucian. The notion of genuine happiness (le 樂) is vital. The final ideal goal of a revived Ruist philosophy as an expansive humanistic axiology would be of little worth if it were not an object of genuine pleasure. It must provide a true and authentic happiness for the person and a flourishing and just society for humankind, as well as an ecologically oriented moral anthropology in tune with the modern world. Boston Confucianism as a global philosophy must be a joyful celebration of the co-creative potential of heaven (tian 天), earth (di 地), and human beings (ren 人). Anything less would not be worth the effort involved. As I mentioned above, a critical first test of a thought-experiment focused on the hybrid daoxue is to discern whether fellow scholars of the Confucian Way consider the various items in the philosophical lexicon necessary and sufficient for the task of articulating a new cross-cultural contemporary Boston Confucian daoxue. W. C. Smith has argued that theology and comparative philosophy are best done in dialog with both etic and emic dimensions.29 One of the marks of good dialog is that members of a philosophical or religious cumulative tradition recognize the tradition in a new perspective, either in an emic or etic mode. The presentation might express a different, even startling, sensibility, but nonetheless it is a vision that can be acknowledged as representing noteworthy innovations germane to the cumulative tradition. So the dialogical question is, Does the brief sketch of a revised contemporary philosophical lexicon and schematic architectonic for Boston daoxue sufficiently and plausibly transmit, elaborate, appropriate, and represent a modern and globally expansive vision for the future? This will be for the international Ruist community to decide. The second anticipated step is to query Boston daoxue’s contribution to the emer-

29 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978); idem, Toward a World Theology: Faith and the History of Religion (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981).

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gence of a truly global philosophical future for the diverse branches of the cumulative traditions of the Confucian Way, in both East and West. These are questions for dialog among philosophers, scholars, and public intellectuals concerned with reflection on the Ruist siwen 斯文 (“this culture of ours”). The debate about the future of the Ruist tradition has begun in earnest in Asia. Perhaps the same will happen on the banks of the Charles River as well.

PART II

CONFUCIANISM AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

THE DAOIST ENCOUNTER WITH MODERNITY: SOME ISSUES IN THE HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF DAOISM IN THE MODERN ERA1 David A. PALMER and Xun LIU For the mainstream of Chinese reformers, modernizers, and revolutionaries, as well as for many Western scholars of China, the twentieth century was long seen as the twilight of Chinese religion in general and of its chief institutionalized indigenous form, Daoism, in particular. Dismissed as a crude assortment of superstitions, whatever remained of Daoism after the effects of modernization could only be the exotic remnants of an archaic Chinese past. And yet, as we begin a new century and secularist ideologies are reevaluated and their utopian promises put into doubt, Daoism appears to be playing an increasingly significant role in a variety of social and cultural developments: it structures much of the revival of popular religion in contemporary rural China; it provides a trove of symbols, concepts, and practices for the elaboration of new intellectual discourses and cultural movements aiming to revitalize Chinese tradition or to synthesize it with modernity; and it supplies many ingredients to the palette of spiritual and therapeutic resources popular in the West under the rubrics of “alternative medicine” and “Oriental spirituality.”

1 This chapter is a slightly modified version of the introductory chapter to the volume Daoism in the 20th Century: Between Eternity and Modernity, ed. David A. Palmer and Xun Liu (University of California Press, 2011), which includes papers presented at the conference on the same theme held in June 2006 at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, Harvard University, cosponsored by the Fairbank Center and the École Française d’Extrême-Orient, with the financial support of the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank all our colleagues whose contributions at the conference or at the preparatory meeting held in 2005 helped shape the ideas presented in this chapter: Franciscus Verellen, Wilt Idema, Kristofer Schipper, Alain Arrault, Adam Chau, Ken Dean, Prasenjit Duara, Fan Guangchun, Patrice Fava, Vincent Goossaert, Adeline Herrou, Gai Jianming, Paul Katz, Lai Chi-tim, Lee Fong-mao, Livia Kohn, Li Dahua, Li Yuanguo, Liu Zhongyu, Lü Xichen, Rebecca Nedostup, Michael Puett, Elijah Siegler, Elena Valussi, Wang Ka, Robert Weller, Yang Der-ruey, Mayfair Yang, and Everett Zhang.

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These contemporary developments are a product and a continuation of an evolution that has taken place since the late nineteenth century, as Daoist practitioners, communities, and networks attempted to survive, adapt, and thrive under the impact of ideological and political campaigns, modern state construction, and global capitalism. The field of Daoist studies, however, has until now paid little attention to this fascinating period in the history of the religion. An important reason is simply that Daoism remains one of the least studied of the world’s main religions; its foundational scriptures, rituals, practices, and early movements are still not adequately understood and have thus drawn more attention than modern developments.2 Another reason is that for too long our understanding of Daoism has been affected by two doggedly persistent views. One has held that Daoism is a timeless system of philosophical and ethical teachings that have changed little since its inception in time immemorial. The other has viewed Daoism as a religious tradition whose political power and cultural relevance have declined irreversibly since the Song era.3 These views partly derived from the long-held Confucian view of Daoism, which privileged its early philosophical classics over its later religious traditions, and partly stemmed from the early Western missionary bias that regarded Daoist spiritual and religious beliefs and practice as superstition. Until recently these views have hindered a social scientific and historical understanding of the development of Daoism during China’s late imperial and especially her modern and contemporary periods. Since the late 1990s, however, scholars from various disciplines and fields in the West and China have begun to focus on this gap. Using multidisciplinary methods of analysis, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, scholars of religion, and sinologists have investigated various aspects of the relationship between Daoism and social and political change in the modern period. The new data they 2 For example, Isabelle Robinet’s seminal work Taoism: Growth of a Religion, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), which is the only historical survey of Daoism existing in English, covers the period from antiquity to the fourteenth century CE. 3 The post-Song decline thesis remains persistent among many historians of Daoism. See Qing Xitai 卿希泰, ed., Zhongguo daojiao shi 中國道教史 [A History of Daoism in China], vol. 4 (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1995); and Ren Jiyu 任繼愈, Zhongguo daojiao shi 中國道教史 [The History of Chinese Daoism] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1990). But the view is not limited to scholars of Daoism. It is even more prevalent among historians of modern China. For example, the venerable Cambridge History series on the Late Qing, the Republic, and the Peoples’ Republic of China contains hardly any discussion of Daoism within its multiple volumes.

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have uncovered through fieldwork and textual analysis, and the fresh perspectives and innovative arguments they have advanced through their individual work, have opened our eyes to the history of modern Daoism by creating a new area of inquiry for scholars of both Daoist studies and modern China. For example, Vincent Goossaert, in The Taoists of Peking and other publications,4 as well as his ongoing project on “Temples and Taoists,”5 has engaged in a pioneering study of Daoist institutional history and clerical changes from the late Qing until the present. Xun Liu’s Daoist Modern follows Chen Yingning (1880–1969) and his associates’ efforts at reforming and reformulating Daoist inner alchemy theories and practice in the context of rising nationalism, science, and new urban culture in Shanghai,6 while his “Quanzhen Proliferates Learning”7 examines how a major Daoist temple in Nanyang actively participated in modern social and educational reforms in the late Qing and Republican periods. Kenneth Dean8 and Lai Chi-tim,9 4 Goossaert, Vincent, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); idem, “The Quanzhen Clergy, 1700–1950,” in Religion and Chinese Society, vol. 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China, ed. John Lagerwey (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient; Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2004), 699–771; idem, “Daoists in the Modern Self-Cultivation Market: The Case of Beijing, 1850–1949,” in Daoism in the 20th Century; idem, “Quanzhen, What Quanzhen? Late Imperial Daoist Clerical Identities in Lay Perspective,” in Quanzhen Daoism in Modern Chinese Society, ed. Xun Liu and Vincent Goossaert, forthcoming. 5 See a preliminary presentation in Goossaert, Vincent, and Fang Ling, “Temples and Daoists in Urban China since 1980,” China Perspectives 2009, no. 4: 32–40. 6 Liu Xun, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2009). 7 Liu Xun, “Quanzhen Proliferates Learning: The Xuanmiao Monastery and the Modern Reforms in Nanyang, 1880s–1940s,” in Quanzhen Daoism, ed. Liu and Goossaert. 8 Dean, Kenneth, Daoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); idem, Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); idem, “Further Partings of the Way,” in Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Contemporary China, ed. Ashiwa Yoshiko and David L. Wank (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 179–210; idem, “Daoists and Transnational Chinese Society: The Circulation of Daoist Priests, Three in One Self-Cultivators, and Spirit Mediums between Fujian and South-East Asia,” in Daoism in the 20th Century; Kenneth Dean and Thomas Lamarre, “Ritual Matters,” in Traces 3: Impacts of Modernity, ed. Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nai-hui (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2003), 257–284; Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 9 Lai Chi-tim 黎志添, “Minguo shiqi guangzhoushi nahm-mouh daoyuan de lishi kaojiu” 民國時期廣州市喃嘸道院的歷史考究 [History of “Nahm-Mouh Daoist Halls” in Republican Canton], Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica 37 (2002): 1–40; idem, “Daoism in China Today,” in Religion in China Today,

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through painstaking historical and ethnographic research, have reconstructed the modern history of Daoist traditions within the broader context of the religious culture of the Putian plains of Fujian and in the Pearl River Delta, and traced the impact of the revival of Daoist ritual among rural communities in South and Southeast China in the wake of China’s reforms. Several works on Daoist temples, ritual specialists, and spirit-writing cults in Hong Kong and Southern China consider the impact of historical and political changes of the twentieth century.10 John Lagerwey,11 Wang Chiu-kui12 and their collaborators in Southeast China, Alain Arrault,13 Patrice Fava14 and their collaborators in Hunan,15 and Stephen Jones in North China,16 in the course of collecting oral histories and organizing local field studies on communal religious and musical traditions, have uncovered several previously unknown local Daoist ritual traditions that have remained alive until today. Yang Der-Ruey’s doctoral dissertation, “The Education of Taoist Priests,” traces the influence of modern educational reforms and their impact on the Zhengyi Daoist clerical training in post-Mao Shanghai.17 Adeline Herrou’s ethnographic study of Quan-

ed. Daniel L. Overmyer, China Quarterly Special Issue, n.s., 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 107–121; idem, “Hong Kong Daoism: A Study of Daoist Altars and Lü Dongbin Cults,” Social Compass 50 (2003): 459–470; idem, Guangdong difang daojiao yanjiu 廣東地方道教研究 [The Study of Local Daoism in Guangdong] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007). 10 See, for example, Bartholomew P. M. Tsui, Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 1991); Graeme Lang and Lars Ragvald, The Rise of a Refugee God: Hong Kong’s Wong Tai Sin (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11 John Lagerwey, ed., Traditional Hakka Society Series 客家傳統社會叢書 (Hong Kong: Traditional Hakka Studies Association and EFEO, 1996–2008). 12 Wang Ch’iu-kui 王求貴, ed., Minsu quyi congshu 民俗曲藝叢書 [Studies in Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore], 80 vols. (Taipei: Shih Hocheng Foundation, 1993–2003). 13 Project on “Daoism and Local Society: Liturgical Structures of Central Hunan.” 14 Han Xin’s Revenge: A Daoist Mystery, directed by Patrice Fava (Paris: EFEO/CNRS Images, 2008). 15 See for example David Mozina, “Quelling the Divine: Thunder Ritual in South China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008), and Georges Favraud’s forthcoming doctoral dissertation at the Université de Paris-Nanterre. 16 Stephen Jones, In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China (London: Ashgate, 2010). 17 Yang Der-ruey, “The Education of Taoist Priests in Contemporary Shanghai, China” (D.Phil. diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2003); idem, “The Changing Economy of Temple Daoism in Shanghai,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill,

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zhen monasticism in contemporary Southern Shaanxi (La vie entre soi) describes the revival and reconfiguration of inter-monastic networks in a context of market reforms and state management of religious affairs.18 David Palmer’s study of the qigong movement in the post-1949 period (Qigong Fever) looks at attempts to reinvent Chinese tradition through modernizing Daoist self-cultivation technologies, and their impact on contemporary Chinese health care, sports, science, social life, and politics.19 Elijah Siegler has studied the dissemination and transformations of Daoism in American religious culture.20 At the same time, the past few years have seen a rapid growth in the scholarship on religion in modern and contemporary China. These works have led to questioning of the longstanding narrative of the decline and destruction of Chinese religion followed by its partial revival in the post-Mao era, pointing instead to complex and intense processes of constant reinventions and innovations of Chinese tradition, in which the pivotal changes occurred in the very last years of the Qing21 and during the Republican era (1911–1949). Three decades after the pioneering work of Holmes Welch on modern Chinese Buddhism,22 Prasenjit Duara, in Rescuing History from the Nation and 2005), 113–148; idem, “Revolution of Temporality: The Modern Schooling of Daoist Priests in Shanghai at the Turn of the 21st Century,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 18 Adeline Herrou, La vie entre soi: Les moines taoïstes aujourd’hui en Chine (Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, collection “Haute Asie,” 2005); idem, “Daoist Monasticism at the Turn of the 21st Century: Ethnography of a Quanzhen Community in Shaanxi Province,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 19 David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); see also Xu Jian, “Body, Discourse, and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Chinese Qigong,” Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 4 (Nov 1999): 961–991; Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); David A. Palmer, “Embodying Utopia: Charisma in the post-Mao Qigong Craze,” Nova Religio 12, no. 2 (Nov 2008): 69–89; David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 20 Elijah Siegler, “Chinese Traditions in Euro-American Society,” in Chinese Religions in Contemporary Societies, ed. James Miller (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Press, 2006), 257–280; idem, “ ‘Back to the Pristine’: Identity Formation and Legitimation in Contemporary American Daoism,” Nova Religio 14, no. 1 (2010); Elijah Siegler and David A. Palmer, Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality, forthcoming; see also Louis Komjathy, “Qigong in America,” in Daoist Body Cultivation: Traditional Models and Contemporary Practices, ed. Livia Kohn (Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press, 2006), 203–236. 21 Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006): 307–336. 22 Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); The Practice of Chinese Buddhism: 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

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Sovereignty and Authenticity, was one of the first to evoke how the process of modern Chinese and Japanese nation-building entailed a profound restructuring of the Chinese religious field, with campaigns against “superstition” on the one hand and the invention of new forms of religion on the other.23 These themes have been pursued in more detail in studies of the anti-superstition policies of the Nationalist regime in Nanjing, by Rebecca Nedostup, and in Guangzhou, by Shuk-wah Poon.24 The continuities between the Republican-era state policies on religion and superstition and those of the People’s Republic of China, and in forms of religious reinventions and reconfigurations spanning the entire twentieth century, have led to fruitful dialogues between scholars of both periods, resulting in works such as Mayfair Yang’s edited collection Chinese Religiosities 25 and Goossaert and Palmer’s The Religious Question in Modern China.26 We are thus beginning to understand how Daoism, as a set of religious institutions and self-cultivation traditions, has fared during the profound social, political, and cultural transformations of the past century. Studies are beginning to reveal how Daoist monasteries, lineages, clerics, practitioners, techniques, and traditions interacted with modern ideologies and social processes such as nationalism, scientism, gender revolutions, state-nation building, and social and political movements. We are even beginning to gain some insights on how modern Chinese culture and society might have in turn been affected or even shaped by its encounter with Daoism as a living tradition.

23 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); idem, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 24 Rebecca Allyn Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010). 25 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). 26 Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Other representative collections among the rapidly growing literature on religion in contemporary China include Yang and Tamney, eds., State, Market, and Religions; Ashiwa and Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State; Sébastien Billioud and David A. Palmer, eds., “Religious Reconfigurations in the Peoples’ Republic of China,” thematic issue, China Perspectives 2009, no. 4; Adam Yuet Chau, ed., Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (London: Routledge, 2011.)

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This chapter is a brief sketch of the social history and anthropology of Daoism from the end of the nineteenth until the early twenty-first century, with special attention to the interactions between Daoism and the sociopolitical transformations of the modern era. We begin with the question of labeling: In the absence of a universally recognized Daoist orthodoxy, on what grounds can we consider a certain group or practice to be relevant to a discussion on the theme of “Daoism”? Having laid out some parameters, we continue with a brief outline of the historical development of Daoism during this period. This leads us to a few conceptual questions that need to be raised in order to frame a social-scientific approach to the study of Daoism: Firstly, the issue of modernity—how can we trace and understand how broader processes of social and cultural change play themselves out in Daoism? And secondly, the issue of analytical categories, such as religion, superstition, science, sports, and medicine, and how these categories not only shape our understanding of Daoism but also the modern evolution of the Daoist tradition itself. The “Daoist” Label When we consider what is done and said in the name of “Daoism” today, we are confronted with a diversity of practices and discourses that do not present themselves as a unified whole. Scholars of modern Daoism are in broad agreement that Daoism cannot be limited to the Quanzhen and Zhengyi orders. At the other extreme, the understanding of Daoism should not be so broad as to encompass all of Chinese culture, based on its purported roots in Daoism or its expression of Daoist patterns of thought. The question lies with borderline communities and movements such as local temples, qigong, salvational groups, martial arts, and Chinese medicine, which are not affiliated to Daoist institutions but draw heavily on Daoist practices, concepts, and symbols, and often consciously engage with what is posited as the “Daoist” tradition and assign it a place within a repertoire of other traditions and discourses such as Buddhism, science, or Western medicine. One way to approach this diversity without getting bogged down in debates on the definition of Daoism, or on the degree of orthodoxy of various movements, is to include in our discussion whatever is claimed by the actors themselves to be Daoist, but not require that the Daoist affiliation be exclusive. The Daoist affiliation may, in some cases, be weak.

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Field research has shown that the lay clients of ritual specialists, for example, are often completely indifferent to the religious affiliation of their priests; for the priests themselves it often hardly matters. Daoism is usually only a secondary affiliation of redemptive societies and qigong groups. Westerners who sign up for courses in Mantak Chia’s courses in Healing Tao may also be involved in Sufism, Native American Shamanism, or other contemporary spiritual movements. It is among Quanzhen clerics that the sense of exclusive Daoist identity is strongest—but, in spite of its high visibility and (or perhaps because of ) its orthodox and government-supported status, Quanzhen monasticism is perhaps the least dynamic of all the social forms of Daoism—again, in stark contrast to its monastic counterparts in Buddhism. The result of all this is that although Daoist ideas and practices are widely diffused in Chinese societies and rapidly spreading in the West and elsewhere, there is little sense of a collective Daoist identity or a broader Daoist community encompassing all the different types of groups and networks that claim a “Daoist” affiliation. Indeed, any consideration of the evolution of Daoism in the twentieth century must consider the relationship between the broadly defined tradition of texts, symbols, and practices commonly designated as “Daoist” and specific forms of social networks, organizations, and movements that consciously, but not necessarily exclusively, draw on that tradition. In spite of the diversity of forms we might call “Daoist” presented in this book, all draw, directly or indirectly, on practices recorded in a self-consciously Daoist scriptural tradition, especially as it pertains to ritual and liturgy, the cultivation of the body, and philosophical texts—what Schipper has called the “gene bank of Chinese culture.”27 Much of the practical and symbolic content of modern Daoist practices can be linked to this common scriptural tradition, while the social containers of the tradition present a bewildering diversity. Different “containers” draw on different components of the scriptural tradition, mix them differently with elements of other traditions and ideologies, interpret them in different ways, and associate them with different sets of practices. With the onset of modernity and the appear-

27 Kristofer Schipper, “The Gene Bank of Culture: Reflections on the Function of the Humanities,” 1992 Uhlenbeck Lecture, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Wassenaar: NIAS, 1994); French edition, Kristofer Schipper, La religion de la Chine: La tradition vivante (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 415–438.

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ance of new types of social organization, new ideologies and forms of discourse, and new configurations of social life, we see the appearance of many new or hybrid social containers, each of which has been the result of efforts to reform or repackage the Daoist tradition so that it could better suit contemporary times. What is of interest in these cases is not whether they correspond to an essentialized definition of Daoism, but how their claimed links to Daoism are constructed. Any group, movement, or discourse that claimed an affiliation to Daoism as part of its self-identity or genealogy would then be considered relevant to our discussion. Such a definition can just as well encompass rural ritual specialists of the Three-in-One Teachings in Fujian and Canadian practitioners of “Taoist Tai Chi.” The Daoist affiliation need not be exclusive, nor even the primary affiliation of the group in question. Many Republican-era redemptive societies, for example, often claim to incorporate Daoist practices and teachings alongside those of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, while post-Mao qigong groups typically claim to combine the best of Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Chinese medicine, and martial arts. To include such groups in the history of twentieth-century Daoism is not to say that they are primarily Daoist; indeed, they should also be considered in any history of Buddhism, Confucianism, or martial arts. Similarly, recent fieldwork has discovered that many ritual specialists in parts of South and Southeast China claim both Buddhist and Daoist affiliations; they are thus legitimate subjects for the history and anthropology of both Buddhism and Daoism.28 As we know too well, rigid compartmentalization is simply not a common feature of Chinese religion in its lived practice. But discussion of, say, a temple cult or of qigong would need, to be relevant, to consider how the temple or movement in question conceived of and constructed its affiliation to or relationship with “Daoism.” How such claims are constructed, justified, contested, and diffused in

28 John Lagerwey, “Popular Ritual Specialists in West Central Fujian,” in Shehui, minzu yu wenhua zhanyan guoji yantaohui lunwenji 社會、民族與文化展演國際研討會論 文集 [Collected Papers from the International Conference on Social, Ethnic and Cultural Transformation], ed. Wang Ch’iu-kui 王求貴, Chuang Ying-chang 莊英章, and Chen Chung-min 陳中民 (Taipei: Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin, 2001), 435–507; Tam Wai-lun 譚偉倫, “Cong Yuebei Yingde de ‘nahm-mouh’ jiaoyi kan minjian fojiao” 從粵北英德的‘喃嘸’醮儀看民間佛教 [A perspective on popular Buddhism from the Nahm-mouh jiao rituals of Yingde, Northern Guangdong]” Minsu quyi 民俗曲藝 163 (2009): 71–115.

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the modern era thus becomes one possible line of questioning that can allow the comparison of a broad array of groups and practices within a common historical framework. Indeed, the revolutions and transformations that mark the history of the twentieth-century Chinese world have seen the breaking off of lineages and the loss of genealogies, but also their reconstruction and their reformulation. While on the one hand much has disappeared, on the other hand modern mass literacy, printing, media, and information technologies have made possible the dissemination and appropriation of the memory of Daoism to an unprecedented degree, often in new forms and new settings. A Historical Overview For historians, the “modern period” for China or Daoism often begins in the Qing (1644–1911), the Ming (1363–1644), or even as early as the Song (960–1279).29 Here, however, when we speak of “modern Daoism,” we simply mean Daoism within the modern period beginning in the late nineteenth century—a time when Chinese society and culture, including Daoism, began its intensive encounter with various forces of modernity such as state building, nationalism, science, social and gender revolutions, and Christianity. By the late Qing, the Zhengyi tradition—which claimed to inherit the teachings of the Han dynasty Celestial Masters, and had been privileged by the imperial state during the Ming—had lost official favor and its social status was in decline. It did maintain an orthodox status, however, with its hereditary masters conferring prestigious ordination certificates on Daoist priests who visited their headquarters at Longhushan, paid a fee, and demonstrated their knowledge of Daoist ritual.30 To have an ordination certificate from Longhushan was a rare and highly respected accomplishment among the hundreds of thousands of local priests who served the ritual needs of communities

29 See, for example, Lagerwey’s edited volume on Religion and Chinese Society (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press; Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2004), which defines the “modern period” as beginning in the Song. 30 Vincent Goossaert, “Bureaucratic Charisma among the Daoists: The Zhang Heavenly Master Institution and Court Daoists in Late Qing China,” Asia Major, 3rd series, 17, no. 2 (2004): 121–159.

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and temples throughout China, claiming Zhengyi but also Lüshan, Meishan, and other Daoist affiliations.31 It was the elite Quanzhen Order, however, which was favored by the imperial state as the dominant, orthodox institution of Daoism. In its idealized form a monastic community exclusively devoted to spiritual cultivation and textual study, in reality the vast majority of Quanzhen clerics were employed by small temples that lacked a strong Daoist affiliation. The Quanzhen label32 was also claimed by a proliferation of spirit-writing cults that received revelations from Daoist immortals such as Lü Dongbin and Zhang Sanfeng, and had their own lay priests who were not celibate monks but claimed a Quanzhen lineage—a situation that was especially common in South China. Texts revealed by these groups included manuals of inner alchemical meditation, medical and ritual healing prescriptions, exhortations to philanthropic deeds, and morality books. Many of these groups were small and loosely organized, and overlapped with even more diffuse networks of body cultivators, while others were organized on a more permanent basis as philanthropic societies, the shantang.33 Several martial arts lineages and traditions that appeared during this period, such as the Taijiquan, Baguazhang, and Wudangshan lineages, were based on Daoist practices and concepts of self-cultivation and were loosely organized as networks of masters and disciples.34 Also widespread were the salvational movements, often referred to in the scholarly literature as the “popular sects,” which worshipped the Unborn Mother goddess (wusheng laomu) and subscribed to an incipient millenarian message.35 These groups, the most widespread of which

31 See Lagerwey, ed., Traditional Hakka Society Series; Tam Wai-lun 譚偉倫, ed., Minjian fojiao yanjiu 民間佛教研究 [Studies on Popular Buddhism] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007). 32 Goossaert, “Quanzhen? What Quanzhen?” 33 See Vivienne Shue, “The Quality of Mercy: Confucian Charity and the Mixed Metaphors of Modernity in Tianjin,” Modern China 32, no. 4 (2006): 411–452; Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Benevolent Societies: The Reshaping of Charity during the Late Ming and Early Ch’ing,” Journal of Asian Studies 2 (1987): 309–337; Yau Chi-On (You Zi’an) 游子安, Shan yu ren tong: Ming Qing yilai de cishan yu jiaohua 善與人同: 明清以來 的慈善與教化 [Charity and Community: Philanthropy and Moral Education since the Ming and Qing] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005). 34 Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). 35 Daniel L. Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Hubert Michael Seiwert, in

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was Xiantiandao, practiced Buddhist vegetarianism as well as Daoist inner alchemy.36 The Republican period (1911–1949) was marked by the collapse of the imperial social order, the construction of a modern state in a context of civil and international war, ideological polemics, and campaigns for cultural reform, which had a differential type of effect on the various forms of Daoism. The newly introduced concepts of “religion” (zongjiao) and “superstition” (mixin) had a profound impact, creating a new standard of orthodoxy for Daoism. The monastic Quanzhen order, which corresponded most closely with Western, Christianderived notions of religion, fared best under the new configuration, although, as was the case with Buddhist monks, Daoist clerics were under pressure to devote themselves exclusively to spiritual pursuits and stop providing ritual services for communities. Such activities clearly fell under the category of “superstition,” which was banned by law in 1929 and was the subject of iconoclastic campaigns.37 These campaigns primarily aimed to convert temples into schools or government offices,38 and, as described by Lai Chi-tim, had a direct impact on the Daoist priests and ritual specialists who worked for those temples and their communities.39 They were ostracized as mere peddlers of superstition, falling outside the purview of the new discourse on the “freedom of religion.” In this generally hostile sociopolitical context, Daoists of both the Quanzhen and Zhengyi traditions established modern-style national representative associations to defend their interests vis-à-vis the new state and to propose reform projects (which never came to fruition).40

collaboration with Ma Xisha, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 36 Jan Jakob Maria De Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China: A Page in the History of Religions (repr., Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Co., 1976), devotes several chapters to Xiantiandao-related groups; other studies of Xiantiandao include Marjorie Topley, “The Great Way of Former Heaven: A Group of Chinese Secret Religious Sects,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 26, no. 2 (1963): 362–392, and the ongoing research by Shiga Ichiko, Yau Chi-on, and Ngai Ting-ming (see the forthcoming Minsu quyi 民俗曲藝 no. 173). 37 Rebecca Allyn Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 38 See Goossaert, “1898.” 39 Lai Chi-tim, “Zhengyi Daoist Masters in the Pearl River Delta: Ruptures and Continuities in the Transmission of Tradition,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 40 Vincent Goossaert, “Republican Church Engineering: The National Religious Associations in 1912 China,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State For-

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It was outside of the monastic institutions and liturgical lineages, however, that Daoist practices were the most widespread, in the form of the “redemptive societies” that grew out of the flourishing spiritwriting groups and salvational movements.41 From the 1910s to the 1930s, offshoots of Xiantiandao such as the Tongshanshe, for instance, disseminated neidan meditation to millions of followers,42 as did the Daoyuan, which operated the Red Swastika Society (Hong wanzihui ), China’s largest charitable organization during that period.43 Some individuals, notably Chen Yingning, who operated outside of Daoist institutions, also set out to modernize the Daoist tradition. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the redemptive societies were banned and ruthlessly exterminated as “reactionary sects and secret societies” ( fandong huidaomen).44 The priests and ritual specialists fared little better under the land reform campaigns and later during the collectivization of the late 1950s, when they were accused of engaging in “feudal superstition” and ordered to engage in “productive” activity. The large urban temples and mountain monasteries were maintained, however, and with the establishment of the state-sponsored China Daoist Association in 1957,45 Daoism was belatedly included as one of the five officially recognized religions, alongside Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam. Chen Yingning, with his credentials as a reformer and secularizer of Daoism, was appointed as one of the early leaders of the association,

mation, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 209–232. 41 See David A. Palmer, Paul Katz, and Wang Jianchuan (Wang Chien-ch’uan) 王見川, eds., “Redemptive Societies and Modern Chinese Religious Movements,” double thematic issue, Minsu quyi 民俗曲藝 2011, nos. 172–173. On the category of redemptive societies, see Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, chap. 3; David A. Palmer, “Chinese Redemptive Societies: Historical Phenomenon or Sociological Category?,” Minsu quyi 172, 1–51. 42 Wang Jianchuan (Wang Chien-ch’uan) 王見川, “Tongshanshe zaoqi lishi (1912– 1945) chutan” 同善社早期歷史初探 [A Preliminary Survey of the Early History of the Tongshanshe (1912–1945)], Minjian zongjiao 民間宗教 1 (1995): 57–81. 43 Thomas D. DuBois, “The Salvation of Religion? Public Charity and the New Religions of the Early Republic,” Minsu quyi 民俗曲藝 172. 44 See Shao Yong, 邵雍, Zhongguo huidaomen 中國會道門 [Chinese Sectarian Societies] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1997); David A. Palmer, “Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults: Labelling Heterodoxy in 20th Century China,” in Chinese Religiosities, ed. Mayfair Yang, 113–134. 45 For an official history of the China Daoist Association and its activities and policies, see Li Yangzheng 李養正, ed., Dangdai daojiao 當代道教 [Modern Daoism] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2000).

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which was largely composed of representatives of the Quanzhen tradition—which came to be seen as the only orthodox and legitimate Daoist school. After the interlude of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), in which even the Daoist Association was dissolved and the monasteries closed or converted to secular uses, Daoism, together with the four other official religions, was reinstated. The China Daoist Association was re-formed and provincial and local associations gradually established in most parts of the country, under the supervision of the Religious Affairs Bureau. A process began, through arduous negotiations with the government departments that occupied the premises, of restoring Daoist monasteries to religious uses under the management of the local Daoist association. The academic study of Daoism, which during the Maoist period had been largely confined to Japan and France, began to flourish on the Chinese mainland, giving Daoism a legitimate place within scholarly discourse and giving rise to a generation of researchers who, in a context in which most Daoist clerics were poorly educated, acquired the role of exponents of Daoist politico-religious orthodoxy, compatible both with textual tradition and Marxist ideology. Chinese and foreign scholarship thus played a significant role in changing the image of Daoism from a heap of superstitions to a rich textual tradition with a systematic body of knowledge and important contributions to Chinese philosophy, art, music, architecture, medicine and health cultivation, and local culture. All of this helped to enhance the status of Daoism in the eyes of the Chinese state—a status consecrated with the World Daodejing Forum, held in Xi’an and Hong Kong in April 2007 under the auspices of the State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA).46 The post-Mao period also witnessed the revival of local temple religion in many parts of rural China, as well as the activities of unregistered Zhengyi priests and other liturgical specialists. Although most of these temples and priests still theoretically fell under the category of superstition, being recognized as neither religious nor Daoist, by the end of the twentieth century many had found paths to legitimacy: official Daoist associations in various parts of China began registering popular temples and priests, and SARA began to consider the issue of

46 At the national level, the Religious Affairs Bureau was renamed the State Administration of Religious Affairs in 1998.

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“popular faith,” while ritual practices were in some places designated as “intangible cultural heritage.”47 Daoist practices were also widely disseminated in the post-Mao era through the qigong movement, in which mass transmission networks of body cultivation techniques, led by charismatic masters, many of them claiming Daoist affiliations, were able to expand under the guise of Chinese medicine, traditional health and life-cultivation practices, sports, and the promise of a new paranormal science. Tens if not hundreds of millions were exposed to Daoist self-cultivation practices during the qigong boom in the 1980s and 1990s, until the crackdown on Falungong in 1999 led to the disbanding of all the mass qigong groups.48 Many qigong practitioners then turned to more explicitly religious forms of Daoism (as well as Buddhism and Christianity)—as did many readers and viewers of martial arts fiction, popularized by the best-selling works of the serial novelist Jin Yong,49 as well as Hong Kong kung fu films, which were often replete with Daoist themes and characters. In Taiwan, the historical and political context led to a different configuration after the Guomindang regime moved to the island in 1949. Quanzhen monasticism had little historical presence on the island, while the Zhang Heavenly Master fled to the island and became the chairman of the Daoist Association of the Republic of China, through which the state hoped to control the Daoist community.50 Many of the redemptive societies had also moved to Taiwan from the mainland; although most were banned by the KMT, they drew a wide following and often secured legal protection by becoming members of the Daoist Association. Overall, although there were restrictions on religious activity prior to the lifting of martial law in 1987, they were light in comparison with the mainland: Daoist body cultivation traditions took a wide range of forms ranging from loose networks to the fully formed new religious organization of Tiandijiao. Daoist temples in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia played an important role in the revival of Daoism on the mainland and in 47 See Goossaert and Fang, “Temples and Daoists”; David A. Palmer, “China’s Religious Danwei: Institutionalizing Religion in the Peoples’ Republic,” China Perspectives 2009, no. 4: 17–31. 48 Palmer, Qigong Fever. 49 On Jin Yong, see John Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). 50 Holmes Welch, “The Chang T’ien Shih and Daoism in China,” Journal of Oriental Studies 4 (1957–1958): 188–212.

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the spread of Daoism in the West. Most of the early Daoist temples in Hong Kong were originally spirit-writing cults or branches of the Way of Anterior Heaven (Xiantiandao), a lay tradition that is best known for being the matrix out of which the Way of Pervasive Unity (Yiguandao), the largest redemptive society in Republican China and Taiwan, was born in the late nineteenth century.51 In Hong Kong, the trend has been for the Way of Anterior Heaven temples to be progressively integrated into the Daoist mainstream, and for the largest temples to abandon the practice of spirit-writing.52 These temples have financed the reconstruction of Daoist temples on the mainland, sponsored multilingual websites and international conferences, and established branches overseas. They have become key nodes in an expanding transnational circuit of Daoist funds, personnel, events, and practitioners, a circuit that yet had little overlap with another global network: that of Western Daoists—practitioners of qigong, Tai chi and “Daoist yoga”—which grew through the followers of Chinese masters who first emigrated to North American and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, dovetailing with the counterculture and New Age movements.53 These masters and groups established their own training centers and retreats and organized spiritual tours at Daoist sacred sites in China.54 The Question of Modernity Parallel to these developments at the level of organizations and practices has been an intellectual exploration of the potential contributions of Daoism to contemporary public discourse. The issue of Daoism and modernity has been the subject of several conferences and edited

51 On Yiguandao, see David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer, The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Lu Yunfeng, The Transformation of Yiguan Dao in Taiwan: Adapting to a Changing Religious Economy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). 52 Yau Chi-on (You Zian) 游子安, “Xianggang Xiantiandao bainian lishi gaishu” 香港先天道百年歷史概述 [Hong Kong Xiantiandao: Outline of 100 Years of History], in Xianggang ji Huanan Daojiao yanjiu 香港及華南道教研究 [Studies on Daoism in Hong Kong and South China], ed. Lai Chi-tim 黎志添 (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2005), 66–73. 53 Siegler, “Chinese Traditions.” 54 Siegler, “Back to the Pristine”; David A. Palmer, “Globalization and the Quanzhen Daoists,” in Quanzhen Daoism, ed. Liu and Goossaert; Siegler and Palmer, Dream Trippers.

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volumes in China in the past few years,55 fruits of a lively and ongoing debate among Chinese scholars of Daoism. These discussions have mostly focused on points of convergence between an abstracted “Daoist culture” and modern needs and values, such as in the areas of health cultivation, ecology, or ethics. But how did concrete instances of practices and discourses claiming a link to Daoism interact with, resist, or participate in the historical processes collectively referred to as “modernity,” including ideologies, sociopolitical systems, and individual subjectivities? We may look at this question by considering several related but distinct dimensions of the concept of the “modern”: first, in terms of “modernist ideology,” which self-consciously aims to bring about a wholesale transformation of culture and society, defining itself against the “traditional”; secondly, in terms of “modernization”—the objective changes that have occurred in society, culture, economics, and politics since the late nineteenth century; and third, in terms of “modernity”—the changing subjectivity and increasing self-reflexivity of individuals who live and experience the world as it undergoes such transformations. At the level of ideology, in the early twentieth century Chinese modernism was especially hostile towards Daoism. Reformist intellectuals, inheriting their Confucian forbears’ disdain for Daoism, saw it as emblematic of the thick forest of traditional superstition which needed to be cleared to make way for the advance of modern science, which was seen as China’s only path of salvation. Daoism was only belatedly accorded the status of “religion” within the new organization of

55 See, for example, Ge Rongjin 葛榮晉, ed., Daojia wenhua yu xiandai wenming 道家文 化與現代文明 [Daoist Culture and Modern Civilization] (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1991); Luo Chuanfang 羅傳芳, ed., Daojiao wenhua yu xiandai shehui 道教文化與現代社會 [Daoist Culture and Modern Society] (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 2001); Guo Wu 郭武, ed., Daojiao jiaoyi yu xiandai shehui 道教教義與現代 社會 [Daoist Teachings and Modern Society] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003); Zhongguo Daojiao xiehui Daojiao wenhua yanjiusuo 中國道教協會道教文化 研究所, Shanghai shi Daojiao xiehui 上海市道教協會, and Shanghai Chenghuangmiao 上海城隍廟, eds., Daojiao jiaoyi de xiandai chanshi: Daojiao sixiang yu Zhongguo shehui fazhan jinbu yantaohui lunwenji 道教教義的現代闡釋：道教思想與中國社會發展進步 研討會論文集 [The Modern Interpretation of Daoist Teachings: Proceedings of the Conference on Daoist Thought and China’s Social Development] (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2003); Chen Guying 陳鼓應, ed., Daojia wenhua yanjiu di ershiyi ji “Daojiao yu xiandai shenghuo” zhuanhao 道家文化研究弟二十一輯 “道教與現代生活” 專號 [Daoist Culture Studies, vol. 20, “Daoism and Modern Life” special issue] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2006).

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knowledge, but, as was the case with Buddhism, only if it was purged of its superstitious elements. These attacks did not fail to provoke a response from Chinese traditionalists, who sought to preserve and defend the “national essence” ( guocui ) in the fields of culture, philosophy, art, Chinese medicine, and the martial arts. Common to these projects was the notion that Chinese civilization is not only morally and spiritually superior to Western culture, but also possesses within itself the resources for strengthening the Chinese nation and restoring its lost dignity. Thus, Chen Yingning saw in inner alchemy the key to restoring the weakened body of the Chinese nation.56 Li Yujie, a May Fourth activist who became a politician and mystic active in Daoist circles and finally founded the Tiandijiao (Heavenly Lord Teachings) religious movement in 1979, is seen by his followers as having saved China from defeat at the hands of the Japanese, thanks to his mysterious connection with the Dao at Huashan.57 Both of these cases are examples of how Daoist cosmology and practices are tapped to build a concept of the Chinese nation. Such attempts typically draw heavily on scientism, reformulating Daoist ideas in scientific terms and repackaging self-cultivation regimens into rationalized body cultivation technologies, thereby claiming that Daoism not only has scientific validity but is itself a form of science that goes further in piercing the mysteries of the universe than the mechanistic methods of the West. Such ideas were particularly salient in the qigong movement and have been popularized in the West through best-selling books such as Kapra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters.58 The compatibility of Daoism with progressive social ideals has also been stressed by some advocates, beginning with Chen Yingning’s reflections on gender and his popularization of feminine inner alchemy in the 1930s, and continuing today with a stress on the ecological orientation of Daoist thought and practice.59 Drawing on these elements, 56 Liu Xun, “Scientizing the Body for the Nation: Chen Yingning and the Reinvention of Daoist Inner Alchemy in 1930s Shanghai,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 57 David A. Palmer, “Dao and Nation. Li Yujie: May Fourth Activist, Daoist Cultivator, and Redemptive Society Patriarch in Mainland China and Taiwan,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 58 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Wildwood House, 1975); Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (London: Rider/Hutchinson, 1979). 59 See Norman Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan, eds., Daoism and Ecology: Ways Within a Cosmic Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Center for the Study of World Religions, 2001).

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the scholar Hu Fuchen at the China Academy of Social Sciences, a student of the architect of China’s atomic bomb and promoter of paranormal research Qian Xuesen, has been advocating the adoption of “neo-Daoism” (xin daoxue) as a new ideology for China in the twentyfirst century.60 At the level of ideas, Daoism has thus been recast by advocates as a scientific system of knowledge and practice rooted in ancient spirituality and mysticism, which is essentially compatible with ecological and progressive social ideals. Looking at the level of objective social changes brought about through modernization, however, a far more complicated picture appears. Urbanization and the associated changes in social structure have radically changed Daoism’s social base. In late imperial China, social life was largely structured through the ritual life of families, lineages, and corporate and territorial communities; Daoist priests (alongside Buddhist monks, Confucian ritualists, and others) were among the most widespread types of ritual specialists. In both cities and villages, most people, even if they did not identify themselves as Daoist, regularly participated in rituals officiated by Daoists; thus Kristofer Schipper has argued that Daoism provided the “liturgical structures of Chinese society.”61 Daoism was thus an integral part of the dense fabric of local community, with its lineages, its guilds, and its neighborhood and temple associations, in which everyone took part—a type of traditional community life that has largely disappeared in most of the cities where the majority of the Chinese people now live. Even in Hong Kong, where Daoist priests were never persecuted as they had been on the mainland during much of the twentieth century, and have, as described by Lai Chi-tim,62 preserved the historical continuity of the Heavenly Masters tradition, the Zhengyi priests now operate primarily in the indigenous villages of the New Territories and the outlying islands, while the vast majority of the inhabitants, living in dense apartment blocks, have no

60 Hu Fuchen 胡孚琛, “21 shiji de xin daoxue wenhua zhanlue” 21 世纪的新道学 文化战略 [A Cultural Strategy for Neo-Daoist Studies in the 21st Century], in Daoxue tonglun 道学通论 [Daoist Studies], ed. Hu Fuchen & Lü Xichen (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 716–744. 61 Kristofer Schipper, The Daoist Body, trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 220 n. 33; idem, “Structures liturgiques et société civile à Pékin,” Sanjiao wenxian 1 (1997): 9–23. 62 Lai Chi-tim, “Zhengyi Daoist Masters in the Pearl River Delta: Ruptures and Continuities in the Transmission of Tradition,” in Daoism in the 20th Century.

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contact with them or their rituals, save at funeral services, which are centralized at two locations in the city and offer a choice of standardized funeral packages, one of which includes a Daoist service.63 In Shanghai, Hangzhou, and other large cities, the number of Daoist priests is increasing, but their current repertoire of services is not as extensive as it was prior to 1949.64 To be sure, in many parts of rural China, as described in Kenneth Dean’s work, liturgical Daoism is resilient, even flourishing in some areas, and has fully integrated the financial, technological, and cultural resources offered by modernity, with priests plying transnational circuits connecting mainland and diasporic temples. But in the urban context, where the majority of Chinese now live, what remains of liturgical Daoism are but residual fragments of a once mighty tradition. The type of Daoism that urban residents are likely to encounter— besides exposure to the Daodejing and Daoist themes in martial arts films and novels—is characterized by its self-cultivation technologies. Be it through qigong, martial arts, taijiquan, inner alchemy, or meditation techniques promoted by new religious movements, this type of Daoism fits well with modern urban lifestyles, with their individualized life trajectories and concern for the care of the body. Whether through redemptive societies, mass qigong organizations, new religious movements or looser networks of adepts,65 or even commercialized packages,66 Daoist body cultivation traditions have been promoted in a wide diversity of forms and social settings, both in the Chinese world and abroad. Another key feature of modern life is the pervasive expansion of capitalism. In this area, it has been easy for Daoist practices, be they ritual services or body cultivation techniques, to be offered in a commercial context: as argued by Goossaert, a self-cultivation “market” has long existed in China, with masters of self-cultivation techniques competing against each other to offer their services to spiritual seekers;67 the same

63 Chan Yuk Wah, “Packaging Tradition: Chinese Death Management in Urban Hong Kong,” Asian Anthropology 2 (2003): 139–160. 64 Yang Der-ruey, “The Changing Economy”; Goossaert and Fang, “Temples and Daoists.” 65 See Lee Fongmao, “Transmission and Innovation: The Modernization of Daoist Inner Alchemy in Post-War Taiwan,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 66 See Elijah Siegler, “Daoism beyond Modernity: The ‘Healing Tao’ as Postmodern Movement,” in Daoism in the 20th Century. 67 Goossaert, “Daoists in the Modern Self-Cultivation Market.”

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holds for priests offering their ritual services, for a fee, to communities and temples willing to hire them. What has changed in the twentieth century has been the forms of organization, marketing, and packaging adopted by some groups, especially in the realm of qigong and body cultivation regimens. It might appear, then, that, having survived decades of ideological and political assaults, Daoism’s encounter with modernity is finally turning out to be more than a process of victimization and persecution. Indeed, it promises to be a more optimistic experience than might have been expected. Liturgical Daoism flourishes in some areas where its social base continues to exist; Daoist teachings offer the possibility of marrying tradition and spirituality with avant-garde science, and are compatible with environmentalism and progressive social principles; Daoist health and meditation techniques are well-adapted to modern life, offering a form of individual spirituality grounded in the care of the body that can be practiced by people of any cultural background; they lend themselves easily to commercial dissemination, and can be practiced in a wide variety of formats, from isolated individual practice and one-off retreats and courses, to more structured membership in religious communities. Categorizing Daoism But if that is the case, why is Daoist identity so weak? After all, in China Daoism has by far the lowest number of self-identified followers— a number that is dwarfed by the rapid growth in the number of those who identify as Christians and Buddhists.68 The immediate explanation of this problem is simply that Daoism is not a mass religion and does not require formal membership in the way Christianity or Islam do. The same, however, was true of Buddhism in traditional China, but by the late twentieth century growing numbers of lay Chinese had identified themselves as Buddhists, a trend that began in Taiwan and

In recent surveys in urban China, less than 1% of respondents identified themselves as Daoists, compared with almost 4% of Christians and 11–16% of Buddhists. For a discussion of these surveys, see Benoît Vermander, “Religious Revival and Exit from Religion,” China Perspectives 2009, no. 4: 5–6. 68

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has spread to Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China.69 One explanation for this phenomenon is the success of the modern Buddhist movements such as Foguangshan and Tzu Chi, which have created viable paths of Buddhist identification for masses of lay people.70 And yet, there is no shortage of modern mass movements that have a strong Daoist content or inspiration, from redemptive societies to qigong movements to new religious groups like Tiandijiao—but few of these groups have claimed a dominant Daoist identity, thereby offering a path for mass identification to Daoism. Another historical explanation might be that Daoism never underwent a robust and expansive laycentered activist revival movement in its name in the early twentieth century, as its Buddhist counterpart had.71 This question remains to be further explored and debated, but any discussion needs to consider the role of modern categories in shaping not only debates on the nature of Daoism, but also the forms of relating to and identifying with the Daoist tradition. Indeed, a crucial factor in the diverse trajectories of different Daoist practices and networks through the twentieth century has been the classification, by both the emerging modern state and reform-minded intellectuals within and outside Daoist circles, of the tradition within sets of exclusive categories imported from the West in the early 1900s—classifications that could have significant legal and political consequences. One of the first of these sets of categories was religion and superstition—in which, from Republican China until today, the former is regarded by the intellectual elite as having some degree of legitimacy, while the latter should be stamped out. For Daoism to be recognized as a religion at all, and thus for its institutions and temples to enjoy legal protection, was not a given: both in the Republican period and in the PRC, Daoism was

69 In Taiwan, by the 1990s, surveys indicated that between 26% and 38% of Taiwanese identified as Buddhist. See Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao and David Schak, “Taiwan’s Socially Engaged Buddhist Groups,” China Perspectives 59 (2005): 43–55. Among the Chinese of Singapore, the number of self-identified Buddhists increased from 34.3% to 53.6% between 1980 and 2000, while the number of “Taoists” (a survey category including all forms of Chinese popular religion) declined from 38.2% to 10.8%. See Chee Kiong Tong, Rationalizing Religion: Religious Conversion, Revivalism, and Competition in Singapore Society (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 63. 70 See Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); C. Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 71 Welch, The Buddhist Revival.

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almost forgotten when the state indentified which “religions” would enjoy official recognition. Claiming Daoism as a legitimate “religion” involved purging it of its “superstitious” elements—practically and politically speaking, this meant further stigmatizing liturgical Daoism and favoring the more “other-worldly” Quanzhen. But “religion” was not necessarily the preferred category of all those who engaged in or drew on the Daoist tradition. In the case of redemptive societies, for instance, while some, such as Tiandijiao, explicitly tried to present themselves as fully fledged religions, with their own scriptures, priesthood, hymns, and rituals, others, such as the Daoyuan, rejected the exclusivist connotations of the “religion” concept. For some individual reformers such as Chen Yingning, who promoted the notion of “immortalist studies” (xianxue), and for many qigong groups, which aimed to create a new “somatic science” (renti kexue), the goal was to see the Daoist tradition as part of a scientific and not religious project. These “scientific” approaches implied an emphasis on body technologies and rational cosmology, and the discarding of rituals and divinities. And then there was the Western-style academic institution, which saw a place for Daoism in philosophy departments—but this required making a distinction between a so-called “philosophical Daoism,” based on abstract speculations and divorced from any form of practice, and “religious Daoism,” which became a catch-all term for everything that wasn’t relevant to Western philosophical discourse. Other groups have stressed the medical, sports, cultural, heritage, or touristic nature or value of Daoist traditions—categorizations which, in the PRC, could make it easier to promote them, but also implied eliminating, circumscribing, or commodifying the elements of worship and community associated with Daoism. And in the West, Daoism is often pursued under the category of “spirituality,” which is seen as a way to avoid not only organized “religion,” but any kind of obedience to master, lineage, tradition, or precept, in a consumer-oriented spiritual supermarket. All of these categories were narrower than the Daoist tradition itself, which had come into being and achieved a stable form long before the introduction of categories from the West in the early twentieth century. Their application to Daoism, then, inevitably led scholars to divide, cut, and sort elements of Daoism in ways that were not natural to the tradition itself—leading to endless controversies and debates, and to a profound tearing apart of the fabric of the tradition—even if, ultimately, it was impossible to neatly separate the “religious,” “superstitious,” “scientific,” “medical,” or “cultural” aspects of Daoism.

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The history and sociology of modern Daoism thus largely intersects with the story of how an array of containers of the tradition have appeared, evolved, and been categorized in changing sociopolitical contexts, in the form of different types of social groups, configurations of practices, and conceptual and symbolic formulations. The lack of a strong identity and sense of community, coupled with the easy commercialization of Daoist practices, has turned the Daoist tradition into a storehouse of cultural resources, available to any and all who wish to delve into it, to mine gems from it, to sell or buy from it, and to pack it into new containers.

THE MODERN SIGNIFICANCE OF SOME BASIC CONCEPTS IN CHINESE BUDDHISM Fang Litian Renmin University of China In the global modernization process, does Chinese Buddhist philosophy still have any value for contemporary society? If so, what is its modern value? This is a question that researchers of Chinese Buddhist philosophy must answer. Only after we reconstruct the value of Buddhism can it achieve full vitality. What modern transformation do we need to perform in order to reestablish the modern value of Chinese Buddhist philosophy and let its modern function be actualized? This is a question that researchers of Chinese Buddhist philosophy should answer and explain. Buddhism, which offers a way of deliverance relevant to the ultimate concerns of mankind, is an enormous system of beliefs, philosophy, and values. Buddhism has had billions of believers in its long history of more than twenty-five hundred years, including more than two thousand years in China. This shows the lasting vitality and eternal value of Buddhism. But we should also recognize that how Buddhism should reestablish its value and develop its function in the future is both a tremendous problem of theory and a serious and urgent problem of practice. The fate of Buddhism depends on its caring for society. The modern value of Buddhism depends on its function in the human society of the twenty-first century. Since man parted ways with apes, human society has made unprecedented progress. In our time of constant progress, however, men have also developed the means to destroy the earth and nature. The progress of human society should be credited to mankind, and so should the threat that endangers the existence and development of human society. In the meantime, we should also recognize that modernization has an impact on many aspects of our material life, institutional regulations, and thoughts. Human society today faces the problems of a crisis in belief, moral decline, and loss of conscience, which collectively indicate a grievous loss of the spirit of humanity. This provides an unprecedented historical opportunity for

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Buddhist philosophy, which is equipped with a conception of cosmic totality and a humane religious spirit that pursues transcendence and readjusts the relationship between men themselves and between man and nature. In order to reevaluate and reconstruct Chinese Buddhism to enhance its modern value, we must conduct an in-depth analysis of current human society and its characteristics, and the basic trajectory of future society. We must sort through the resources of Chinese Buddhism to reveal the fundamental concepts and principles that can have real meaning for societies in the present and future. We need to combine the basic principles of Buddhism with social reality in order to offer meaningful suggestions for the steps to take to solve basic conflicts in contemporary human society. I. Basic Characteristics and Conflicts of Twenty-First Century Human Society Since the 1970s, the progress of Chinese modernization has achieved great results that have attracted the world’s attention. The developed coastal regions have been industrialized and have begun the progress of “intellectualization.” The development of the western regions has also unfolded energetically. The coordinated development of industrialization and intellectualization will certainly hasten the pace of China’s modernization. There are great differences in the production, circulation, and distribution of intellectual and industrial economies. These developments, especially the rise of the intellectual economy and the globalization that characterizes it, have a broad and profound impact on the relations between man and himself, men and other men, ethnicities and nations, and man and nature. Thus these developments have in turn given rise to the development of new contradictions and conflicts in human society. Because of the great achievement of modernization, the material conditions of men’s life keep improving and their lifestyles keep renewing. In today’s world, material wealth and man’s material desires grow at the same pace. In the pursuit of external material wealth, some neglect their own internal values and spiritual life, so much so that they lose their humanity and values in a life of wealth and comfort. With the improvement of material life, the spiritual life declines. With the increase of scientific knowledge, moral cultivation becomes deprived. The contrast between the abundance of material life and the

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lack of spiritual life will be prevalent and long-lasting. Emptiness of spirit and poverty of mind are a spiritual crisis of humanity as well as a crisis of values. This spiritual and moral decline has become a great barrier to man’s progress today. It has also become one of the sources of the many problems of human society. Man’s desires and needs are dictated by certain values. If man’s desires and needs remain for a long time on the level of material enjoyment, they fuel a pernicious consumption, which in turn brings forth pernicious development and affects the sustainable development of the society. In the mean time, such materialism also lowers the level of spiritual life, causes a decline in the quality of citizens, and affects the holistic development of man himself. Due to the achievement of an industrial economy and the development of an intellectual economy, the economies of various nations and regions are moving toward globalization. Globalization of an economy drives the development of a world economy, which also means that the time will come when all mankind will share the same fortune or misfortune. However, international enterprises have taken hold of the current globalization of the economy. The rapid expansion of these enterprises creates a widening gap between rich and poor. In particular, the globalization of the economy brings opportunities for developing countries, but it also creates a tremendous impact that forms a widening gap between rich and poor in the northern and southern hemispheres. The developed countries generate 86% of the GDP and control 82% of the global export market, while the developing countries that have the world’s largest populations generate 14% of the GDP and control 18% of the global export market.1 The rich become richer and the poor become poorer. History and current events have repeatedly proven that a world with a large gap between rich and poor is unstable and unsafe. The condition of inequality between the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the weak, fosters rich and powerful hegemonies on the one hand, while on the other, the poor and the weak tend to grow discontented and hateful, and their resentment gradually becomes a significant source of social instability and conflict.

1 See Jiang Zemin’s “Speech in the United Nation’s Meeting of the Millennium for National Leaders,” Guangming Daily News, September 7, 2009.

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Due to a lack of regulation in a new international social, political, economic, and cultural order, globalization of the economy will also create or increase a series of social tensions, such as people fighting for jobs, or competition for outstanding human resources. Moreover, under the condition of deepening economic globalization, countries compete to develop their own economies, which intensifies international competition. In addition, due to historical or contemporary causes, racial conflicts keep growing; some even escalate to regional wars. The acceleration of global economic progress and the formation of the global Internet will surely hasten the clash of civilizations and values between East and West. It will also lead to more frequent interaction between different religions. When different religions meet, on the one hand there is an opportunity for mutual dialogue, interaction, communication, understanding, respect, and caring for each other; on the other hand, among some extreme fundamentalist sects of religious fanatics, interreligious contact provokes bigotry, self-righteousness, the rejection of “heretics,” and the rejection of others, and causes conflicts among sects and religions, even appealing to violence. Religion, often interwoven with contemporary international struggles and conflicts, becomes a major factor in international and global politics. How to transform the concept of extreme fundamentalism in order to resolve religious conflicts is a major project on the agenda of adherents of various religions in the world. With the unprecedented progress of modern scientific technology, in macroscience, man has reached a universe of 18 billion light years away. In microscience, man has unveiled the secret of genes. Scientific technology is a two-edged sword that can be used to create benefits for mankind, but if the human spirit is distorted to such an extent that it fails to use scientific technology with rationality, it may destroy humanity. In his conquest and reformation of nature, the more man achieves, the stronger the force with which nature retaliates. The loss of equilibrium in ecology, as well as environmental pollution, global warming, the population explosion, the crisis of energy sources, and shortage of food—all these tribulations have become increasingly disturbing for mankind. This is another great conflict of the twenty-first century. Man conceives of the earth and nature to be objects of conquest and pays a tremendous price for it. Mankind must strive harder to invent and develop new scientific technology to alleviate the vicious effects of his exploitation of nature, and he must strongly promote the concept of humanity to strengthen awareness of the importance of

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environmental protection in order to safeguard the harmonious relation between man and nature. II. Basic Concepts of Chinese Buddhist Philosophy As we examine the trajectory of the twenty-first century’s development, we think many concepts of Chinese Buddhist philosophy fit the needs of human society. Among those, the most important ones are the following: 1. Dependent Origination (or Dependent Arising, 缘起) There is a Buddhist ode, “The Verse on the Dharma-Body,” that is often engraved on the base of statutes of Buddha or inside pagodas: Whatever groups of dharmas arise from causes, The Tathagata has declared their causes and Also their extinction through the extinction of causes Thus spoke the Great Samana.2

The Great Samana is a respectful form of address for the Buddha. This verse teaches that all the dharmas in the universe rise and become extinct on account of dependent origination, which includes the external material environment and the spiritual mind. They all come or cease to be depending on certain conditions. When the given conditions come together, the dharmas are born; when the conditions are gone, the dharmas also become extinct. This is the basic idea of dependent origination. Dependent origination is the most basic concept of Buddhism, its most fundamental teaching, which reveals the basic Buddhist view with regard to the universe, human life, existence, and life. The thought of dependent origination is a specific teaching and significant concept of Buddhism, just like its fundamental philosophical concepts of cause and fruition 因果, equality 平等, compassion 慈 悲, the Middle Way 中道, and complete interfusion 圆融. In other words, all the various teachings and important concepts of Buddhism

Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo《大正新修大藏经》, or 《大藏经》第14卷，768页中。 English title in citation abbreviated as T14, 768b. English translation: A Dictionary of Buddhism: Chinese-Sanskrit-English-Thai (Bangkok: Chinese Buddhist Order of Sangha in Thailand), 43. 2

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are an expansion of the idea of dependent arising. Different from the theories of “no-cause,” chance, creationism, and fatalism, the theory of dependent origination is a more reasonable theory of the formation and evolution of all the beings of the universe and the reality of the world. The theory of dependent origination is a unique Buddhist worldview; it is the most important characteristic of Buddhism and the fundamental feature that distinguishes it from other religions and philosophies. The Buddhist idea of dependent origination includes two important concepts: namely, “relation” and “process.” The idea of dependent origination is a worldview based on the theories of “relation” and “process.” In chapter 10 of the Samyuktagama Sutra, it is said, “That being, this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises; that being absent, this is not; from the cessation of that, this ceases.”3 “This” and “that” constitute an indivisible totality in their mutual interactive relationship, i.e., any thing or object can only exist under a multitude of conditions in combination with certain relations. Things and objects cannot create themselves or exist by themselves. They come to be in relations and they exist in relations. They are the embodiment of relations. Chapter 12 of the Samyuktagama Sutra says, “It’s like three reed stalks standing in the field by leaning against each other. If one were removed, the other two would not stand; if two were removed, one would not stand, either.”4 This is to say, dependent origination rises from mutual dependence, which includes the theory of the coexistence of things and objects, and the theory of mutual connection and integral wholeness. Dependent origination is a relationship as well as a process. Buddhism holds that due to the dependent origination of all things in the universe, everything shares the four phases of birth, staying, change, and extinction. So do human beings, who dwell in the constantly moving process of birth, aging, sickness, and death. One should acknowledge that this concept contains the ideas of movement, change, and development, and should be regarded as a manifestation of dialectical thinking.

3 T2, 67a. English translation: Samyutta Nikaya; trans. C. A. F. Rhys Davids and F. L. Woodward, The Book of Kindred Sayings, 5 vols. (London: PTS, 1917–1930). 4 T2, 81a.

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2. Cause and Fruition (因果) Dependent origination maintains that causes and conditions give rise to “effect or fruition” (果). What the teaching of dependent origination discusses is also the relationship of cause and fruition. What generates the fruition is the cause; what is generated from the cause is fruition. In terms of time, the cause comes before the fruition, which is to say the cause and fruition exist at different times. In terms of space, as in the above-mentioned image of leaning reed stalks, the cause and fruition exist simultaneously. Cause and fruition exist in consequential transformation as well as in interdependent coexistence. Where there is a cause, there is fruition, and vice versa. All things and phenomena come into existence and change according to the principle of cause and fruition. This tenet of cause and fruition is what Buddhism uses to illuminate the basic law of the interdependent relationship of all things in the world. Based on the tenet of dependent origination, Buddhism takes a further step to elaborate the concept of cause, effect, and consequence to explain the karma resulting from the physical and mental activities of all living beings and its relationship to fruition. This idea, manifested in ethical terms, is the theory that good is rewarded with goodness, and evil with evil: good cause/joyful fruition and pernicious cause/ pernicious fruition. This theory offers a strong and effective basis of thought for believers’ practice of eradicating the evil and following the good. Buddhism holds that the physical and mental activities of living beings not only bring forth fruition for themselves, but also impact the space and environment in which they exist. Therefore, fruition is divided into two kinds: direct fruition (正报) and dependent fruition (依报). The so-called direct fruition refers to the present state of one’s physical body and mind, as a direct result of one’s past karma; that is, the present existence of life is the subject of the direct result of the fruition. So-called dependent fruition refers to the external condition and environment generated from past karma, which sentient beings live in and depend upon. This includes clothing, houses, the territory of a nation, landscape, even the entire world environment. To put it simply, direct fruition refers to living beings and the world of people; dependent fruition refers to the world in which sentient beings exist: the land and the external world. As is the case with dependent fruition, Buddhism also holds that the background of time, living environment,

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land, nature, and so forth constitute the shared fruition that all living beings engender collectively; thus it is called “shared fruition” (共报). These Buddhist concepts of cause and fruition express the Buddhist insight into the relationship of the interrelated dependent origination of the subjective and the objective worlds, and the worlds perceived from subjective or objective perspectives. It also embodies the Buddhist concern for the results of the activities of all beings, and for natural environment, life environment, and ecological environment. 3. Equality (平等) Buddhism is a religion that promotes equality. The Buddhist definition of equality covers four levels: (1) Equality among individual people. The Ekottarikagamah Sutra says in book 37, “In my teaching, there are people from the four castes who have become the samana of my teaching. Their former names are not recorded, let alone other things. They are like the four rivers throwing themselves into the sea and becoming one flavor without any other names.”5 This teaching maintains that in the ancient society of India, people of the four castes—the Brahmins, the warrior rulers, the merchants, and the laborers—ought to be equal. Buddhism is opposed to any hierarchy based on caste or class; it emphasizes one’s achievement in terms of morality and wisdom, and advocates that one should elevate one’s moral and intellectual quality and practice in order to enter the ideal state of life. The Buddhist postulate of the equality of the four castes embodies the thought of equal human rights. This is ancient Indian Buddhism’s unique human rights stance against discrimination based on caste and class oppression, which is consistent with modern society’s requirement of equal human rights. (2) Equality among sentient beings ( 生). In Buddhism, the term “sentient beings” refers to all beings that have consciousness and are thus considered to be living beings. In general, Buddhism considers, except for those in the realm of the Buddha, the beings in the nine of the ten dharma realms from that of the Bodhisattva to hell, and especially the six realms from the realm of deities to hell, to be sentient

5

T2, 753a.

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beings.6 Buddhism maintains that in spite of the differences among sentient beings, the basic nature of their existence and life is equal. Moreover, it emphasizes that all sentient beings have the Buddhanature; as the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra states, “All living beings have the Buddha-nature.”7 In theory, Buddhism affirms that all living beings have the Buddha-nature; that is, on the grounds that all share the cause, the foundation, and the possibility of becoming a Buddha, all are equal. Although the Buddhist discourse on sentient beings focuses on human beings, its concept of equality for all living beings is a warning against and a rejection of anthropocentrism. (3) Equality between living beings and the Buddha. Buddhism teaches that “the living beings and the Buddha are not two,” rather “the living beings and the Buddha are one and alike.” They maintain that in their inherent nature, all sentient beings and the Buddha have the complete “suchness” of the Buddha-nature. Confused living beings do not lose their Buddha-nature, nor does the enlightened Buddha have an augmented Buddha-nature. In terms of their nature and possibility of becoming the Buddha, sentient beings and the Buddha are equal. This is very different from some religions that regard humans and God as two distinct entities and claim that man was created by God, or generated from God. (4) Equality between sentient and non-sentient beings. Non-sentience refers to objects without perception or feelings, and without spirituality. For instance, the Chinese school of Tiantai Buddhism holds the doctrine of “the inherent nature without sentience” and maintains that all vegetation, rivers, mountains, and the earth have the Buddhanature; the fragrance of blossoms and the greenness of trees, the movement of the wind and the flow of the water are all physical expressions of the Buddha-nature. In terms of having the Buddha-nature, all the non-sentient things and living beings are not different in nature, but one and the same. This view asserts the dignity of both living beings and non-living beings in nature; it calls for respect and compassion for the myriad things in nature, and for their protection. The Buddhist view of equality is based on the theory of dependent origination and built on the idea of the equality of cause and fruition. “九界”依次为菩萨、缘觉、声闻、天、人、阿修罗、畜生、饿鬼、 地狱。In descending hierarchical order, the nine realms are the realms of Bodhisattva, Pratyekabuddha, Sravakas, deities, human beings, demons, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell. 7 T12, 574-575a. 6

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All living beings and the Buddha have the same Buddha-nature, which shows that they are equal in their potential to become the Buddha. All living beings and the Buddha can achieve supreme Buddhahood and enter the highest realm of Parinirvana; this demonstrates equality on the level of results. All living beings and the Buddha are equal without differentiation. This Buddhist concept of cause and fruition is built on potentiality instead of actuality, and on what can be instead of what already is. This provides the theoretical basis for the Buddhist thesis of deliverance. The Buddhist view of equality shows consistency between Buddhist views of life, nature, and values. Buddhism emphasizes the equality of all lives in the universe; it cares about life, cherishes life, and respects life. Buddhists also uphold the theory that even non-sentient beings have the Buddha-nature, and thus they respect, hold in awe, cherish, and safeguard nature. They also uphold the ultimate goal of the final deliverance of all living beings and the myriad of things, and the highest ideal of entering the pure, wonderful, and sublime Pure Land of the Buddha. All of these beliefs represent the prevailing, universal, and sacred nature of the Buddhist view of equality. In modern times, the view of equality highlights the equality of God-given human rights: everyone is equal before the law. This is truly complementary to the equality of deliverance promoted by Buddhism. In this light, it is not by chance that people like Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong would uphold the banner of Buddhist equality in their promotion of the Reformation Movement in the late Qing Dynasty. 4. Compassion (慈悲) On the basis of dependent origination and equality, Buddhism thinks that at a certain point of time, in the great cosmic gyre, all living beings might have been our kinsmen, and nature is what our lives depend on. We ought to bestow happiness and relieve all living beings from suffering through the mind’s understanding of equality, feelings of gratitude, and the heart’s sense of compassion. Compassion is an indiscriminate, deep, and sincere care and love for all living beings. Buddhism promotes the theory that there are three kinds of compassion (慈) and pity (悲) directed toward three different objects. Hence the three kinds of compassion and pity are described as follows:

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There are three kinds of pity: 1. Pity for all beings: because all beings are in pain, one wants to relieve them from the pain. . . . As one observes living beings floating and turning in the twelve-linked dependent origination of life and death, one feels pity for them. . . . 2. The pity that rises from one’s knowledge of all things and their consequences: one observes that living beings, oneself and others alike, are all trapped in the mental and physical sufferings arising from the full-orbed activities of the skandhas (五阴), and feels pity for them. . . . 3. Pity without external cause, i.e., because of his own nature: as one recognizes that all living beings and all their sufferings are empty after all, and feels pity for them. . . . There are also three kinds of compassion: 1. Compassion for all beings: it rises from one’s compassion for all beings that makes one want to share one’s joy with them. . . . 2. The compassion that rises from one’s knowledge of all things and their consequences: one observes that living beings, oneself and others alike, are all trapped in the mental and physical sufferings arising from the full-orbed activities of the skandhas (五阴), and generates compassion. . . . 3. Compassion without external cause, i.e., because of his own nature: as one recognizes that all living beings and all their sufferings are empty after all, and generates compassion.8

These three respective kinds of compassion and pity arise from the concern for living beings, the Buddhist teachings, and the ultimate extinction (i.e., emptiness). They are based on the theory of emptiness and dependent origination. Among these three kinds of compassion and pity, the highest is the “compassion and pity of no cause.” The Mahaprajnaparamita-sastra says in book 40, “There are three kinds of compassion and pity: for the living beings, for the teachings, and for no cause. For ordinary people, there is (compassion and pity) for living beings. For Sravakas, Pratyekabudhha, and Bodhisattva, there are first (compassion and pity) for the living beings, and then for the teachings. The Buddhas’ practices of goodness achieve the ultimate emptiness, therefore their compassion and pity have no cause but rise from their nature.”9 “The great compassion of no cause” and “the great pity of no cause” promoted by Buddhism are absolute and indiscriminate love and compassion; they are generated from the understanding of the indiscriminate reality of the theory of emptiness. Compassion/pity is a unique concept of Buddhism. It is not exactly the same as the benevolence and love upheld by some other schools. Compassion/pity is not restrained by hierarchy or class. It also excludes 8 9

T44, 743b. T25, 350b.

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narrow selfishness. Buddhist compassion/pity is also pragmatic and underscores concern for people, the world, and the society. On this basis, it is strongly involved in activities of social welfare and charities, functions as a lubricant in history and in current society, relieves the plight and sufferings of the weak and those who labor hard at the bottom of society, and brings hope for all. 5. The Middle Way (中道) The Middle Way transcends the bias of polarities such as existence and emptiness, oneness and difference, suffering and joy, and love and hate. It does not lean toward one side or the other. The Middle Way is the fundamental position and basic characteristic of Buddhism. Sakyamuni opposes the Brahmanist teaching of “the gods vs. the self ” and promotes his theory of dependent origination: “That being, this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises; that being absent, this is not; from the cessation of that, this ceases.” On this basis, he stresses that it is necessary to “stay away from the two sides and teach the Middle Way.”10 On the basis of dependent origination, he teaches neither existence nor emptiness, neither one nor difference, neither lasting nor breaking, and neither coming nor going. In practice, Sakyamuni proposes the “Eightfold Path,”11 which is against hedonism and asceticism, and teaches the neither-hedonistic-nor-ascetic Middle Way: one’s thinking, discourse, behavior, mind, and lifestyle should all be appropriate and within restraint, holding onto the middle unbiased way. Emptiness and existence are the two basic Buddhist views regarding the universe and humanity. One may even say that all the Buddhist teachings are concerned with the realms of emptiness and existence. After Sakyamuni, Buddhism gradually develops into the schools of emptiness and of existence. In the Theravada School, the Jushe (Kosa, 俱舍) school belongs to the school of existence, and the Chengshi (Satyasiddhi, 成实) school belongs to the school of emptiness.

10 T2, 85c. Samyuttea-nikaya, II, 28. English translation: Donald W. Mitchell, Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (New York: Oxford University Press), 39. 11 “八正道” 为正见、正思惟、正语、正业、正命、正精进、正念、正定。The “Eightfold Path” consists of “right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration” (Mitchell, Buddhism, 50).

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Mahayana Buddhism also consists of two similarly paired traditions. The Madhyamika school (中观学派) belongs to the tradition of emptiness, and the Yogacara school (瑜伽行派) belongs to the tradition of existence. The traditions of both emptiness and existence agree on the basic theoretical framework of emptiness and dependent origination, differing only in their views on how this basic theory unfolds itself; in relative terms, the school of emptiness stresses the perspective of the emptiness of the dharma teachings, while the school of existence stresses the perspective of the existence of the dependent origination of the dharma. The thesis of emptiness is based on the theory of dependent origination. Because all things are dependent-arising, they exist only in relation to other things; emptiness is thus “self-less.” Without the self, there is no substantiality, i.e., the inherent nature and essence are thus empty. This is the original meaning of emptiness. Along the same lines, since all things only exist in relation to one another, they must exist in a process of interacting transformation that has an inherent nature of impermanence. Both their birth and cessation are impermanent, hence also empty. One may say that the theory of dependent origination gives rise to the doctrine of emptiness; therefore the theory of dependent origination is the doctrine of emptiness, and the terms are synonymous. One may also say that since the theory of dependent origination gives rise to the doctrine of emptiness, emptiness is the permanent reality that denies the substantial construction of all things, and hence is the denial of the substantiality of things. This is a declaration of the nature of no-inherent-essence and the state of insubstantiality of all things. Emptiness is not merely void. Emptiness is to empty, to cease the attachment to substantial objects. Emptiness itself is not a substantial object. The teachings of the Middle Way School also include the rejection of all biases or set opinions. In their view, all differentiations and opinions are relative, and thus none can be qualified as the highest truth. As far as this theory is concerned, emptiness is a principle, the highest absolute truth. When one perceives and grasps the principle of emptiness and gains the wisdom of emptiness, one enters the realm of emptiness, i.e., the ideal realm of extinction. In general, there are two kinds of emptiness: the emptiness of the (human) individual, and the emptiness of things. The emptiness of the individual is also called the emptiness of the self, which is to say that the subjective individual has no inherent essence. The emptiness of things is that objective things also have no intrinsic substance. As

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for the question of whether things have substantial existence, which is to say the question of the relation and distinction between dependent origination and substantial existence, things and their inherent essence, and phenomena and substance, it is a very complex problem. In general all Buddhist schools agree with the ideas of dependent origination and the emptiness of essence, but the Reality School of Theravada Buddhism claims the constant existence of things, which in a sense acknowledges the substantiality of the existence of objects and things. The Mahayana Yogacara school proposes the theory of the three natures of all existence: attachment by pervasive discrimination, arising in dependence on other things, and the nature of complete becoming. This teaching states that in addition to things arising in dependence on other things, there is also the perfect nature of “suchness.” In Chinese Buddhism, the Tiantai and Huayan schools consider the appearance and substance of causal dependent things to be one, i.e., all existence is their apparent substance, and hence rule out the idea of any substance beyond existent things. The schools of Tiantai and Sanlun also claim that Theravada Buddhism underlines “analytical emptiness (析空),” while Mahayana Buddhism accentuates “essential emptiness (体空).”12 Analytical emptiness refers to analysis of the composing elements of things. In the end, through the process of analysis, one discovers the lack of inherent existence in all things; things are merely insubstantial names, or emptiness. Instead of breaking things apart in the process of analysis, the theory of essential emptiness asserts the empty nature of things. Chinese Buddhist scholars affirm the superiority of the theory of essential emptiness to the theory of analytical emptiness. While the essence of all things of dependent origination is asserted as empty, the phenomenal nature of all things of dependent origination is affirmed as existent. All things originate in dependence, expressing themselves in myriad complex appearances. These phenomena present themselves to people’s eyes; each has its unique form, shape, and sustaining quality, which exerts specific functions and impact. This phenomenon is existence (有). As opposed to emptiness (non-being 空/无), existence refers to existing phenomena. As far as existence is concerned, Buddhism distinguishes between “provisional existence” or “phenomena” (jiayou 假有), the real existence (实有), and the supernatural existence (or the absolute reality 妙有). Provisional existence refers to phenomenal existence. Real existence refers to substantial 12

参见《大乘玄论》卷1，《大正藏》第45卷，18页下。

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existence. While Sarvastivadha, the Realistic School, maintains that as the three states (past, present, future) are real, so the substance of all things is permanent, the Yogacara school emphasizes the existence of the substantial nature of all things. However, what the two schools mean by substantial existence (实有) is also different. As for supernatural existence, some Buddhist scholars conceive of it as “suchness,” others as the non-emptiness attained after breaking up the attachment to emptiness. From what has been stated above one may recognize that when one looks at it from the aspect of phenomena of the dependent origination, things exist; when perceived from the aspect of the essence of the dependent origination, they are empty. Existence and emptiness are perceptions of two sides of one thing. The existence of all phenomena is the emptiness of substance. Emptiness is the absence of phenomenal existence; there is no emptiness beyond existence. Zhiyi says, “There is not a single form or a single smell that is not the Middle Way.”13 “A single form or a single smell” is any blade of grass or any blossom. All ordinary things and objects embody the highest truth of the Middle Way. Zhiyi also says, “The meaning of the Middle is ‘nottwo’ (不二), the Way is so named because it passes through.”14 The Middle Way is the state of staying away from oppositions, from the two sides of existence 有 (常) and emptiness 空 (断), the highest truth that combines being, non-being, and non-duality. The Middle Way is the unswerving right understanding. The perceptions of existence and emptiness are narrow and biased marginal perceptions. The Middle Way is to exclude the erroneous view of attachment to the duality of existence and emptiness. Just as the perspective of existence will lead one to the claim of an imperishable soul, so will the perspective of emptiness lead one to the nihilism that sees all things as nonexistent. Either view will violate Buddhist teachings and create greater dangers. The theory of the Middle Way requires one to see the two sides of phenomena and essence in order to establish a framework of thinking that leans to neither extreme. This is to advocate dualism (两点论), to avoid extremism, and to stress the observation of things in their totality to avoid partiality, which contains the rational elements of dialectical thinking.

13 14

T46, 1c. T38, 525c.

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6. Yuanrong ( perfect interfusion 圆融) On the theoretical basis of dependent origination and the Middle Way, the Chinese Huayan and Tiantai schools both stress the idea of yuanrong (圆融), or perfect interfusion and complete communion. The Huayan school emphasizes the wholeness and unimpeded interpenetrations of essence and phenomena, and among the phenomena themselves. The Tiantai school claims the coexistence of the Three Levels of Truth: emptiness (空), illusory existence (假), and the Middle Truth (中), which is to say that these three levels of truth are one and interfused with each other. Yuanrong is an important concept of Chinese Buddhist views regarding the universe and truth. It is also the foundation of a method for promoting tolerance and harmony, coordination and adjustment. Yuanrong requires respect for the various constituents of things and objects, and respect for the coexistence and shared prosperity of different parties. In the light of the Buddhist view of yuanrong, the world is a coherent whole of richly colored multitudes. In the theory of yuanrong, there is no hierarchy between the cultures of various nations and races, nor does there exist the inevitability of mutual conflicts, as all characteristics of various cultures ought to be respected. We think, given the current rapid homogenization of regions and the globalization of economies, it is particularly important to protect the cultural characteristics of each nation and race. This is an essential element of constructing a harmonious world. The intrinsic yuanrong of Chinese Buddhism mainly manifests itself in the following: (1) differentiation and elucidation of religious sects and schools; (2) interfusion of the heterogeneous Chinese and Indian cultures; and (3) confluence of the diversified schools. Differentiation and elucidation of religious sects and schools is to differentiate various religious schools. Buddhist sutras are as vast as the clouds and the ocean. Moreover, when the various teachings of both Theravada and Mahayana schools were introduced to China, they were not properly distinguished from each other, and there exist many inconsistencies in these teachings. Chinese Buddhist schools commonly use the means of differentiation and elucidation to sort through the scriptures and arrange the teachings in accordance to chronological order, intended audience, content, and form to establish a consistent system and eliminate contradiction. With regard to the Chinese and Indian cultures, the Indian culture looks to the future and stresses resolution in the coming world. The Chinese culture, following the doctrines of loyalty,

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filial piety, humanity, and righteousness, stresses concern for the present. The basic natures of these two cultures are different. Chinese Buddhism uses the spirit of the Middle Way and yuanrong to interfuse the two and successfully realize the integration of Sinicizing Buddhism. In accordance with the above theory, from the Tang Dynasty on, interfusion between various schools also becomes increasingly strong. First comes the cohesion of the Chan school and the the Buddhist religion, then the combination of all other schools with the school of Pure Land, followed by the great interfusion of all schools centering around the unified Chan and Pure Land schools. This is also an important reason why Chinese Buddhism maintains its lasting strength without being marginalized. The external yuanrong of Chinese Buddhism appears in its interpenetration with Chinese society, politics, ethics and morals, values, beliefs, and customs. For instance, Buddhism advocates the polity of humanity (仁道) and maintains that the existence of Buddhism needs the support of the leaders of the nation. Buddhism takes the initiative to adjust points of its discourse that are at odds with Chinese ethics and morality, and promotes filial piety to parents and loyalty to the monarch in order to be consistent with Chinese concepts of ethics and morality. Buddhism combines the theory of cause and fruition with the traditional Chinese concept of recompense and retribution to put forth a new value of life and death. It also combines traditional Chinese folk practices, customs, and needs with the system of god-worship evolved around the bodhisattva belief of Guanyin and Maitreya. The interfusion of Buddhism and traditional Chinese culture may also be said to have occurred in its interfusion with Confucianism and Daoism. Buddhism has points of both conflict and interfusion with Confucianism and Daoism, but it is mostly interfused with the others. In comparison, the combination of Buddhism and Confucianism focuses on ethics and morality, and the combination of Buddhism and Daoism focuses on the level of philosophical concepts. Most noteworthy is that Buddhism constantly claims that Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism share one source, one body, and one Way, hence an amalgamated one. Regarding the interfusion of the three religions, the focus lies on the mind and nature. Stressing that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are mere names, Buddhism maintains that their heart/mind is the reality. The heart/mind is the basis that brings the ideal character of human beings or deities in the three traditions to perfection. Because of the commonality between the heart/mind of the three traditions,

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the heart/mind becomes the point of interfusion for the three; hence, “to keep the original heart uncovered” becomes the common goal for the three teachings/religions. Buddhism teaches that its center of interfusion with Confucianism and Daoism is the theory of heart/ mind and nature. This is of great significance for understanding Chinese Buddhism, philosophy, and cultural characteristics. III. The Modern Significance of Chinese Buddhist Philosophy The first part of this essay showed that in modern society, some of the fundamental conflicts between man and the self, man and other men, and man and nature have appeared in different forms, and others have become more acute. The modern significance of Chinese Buddhism lies in the following: as its important principles become increasingly elaborated and more creatively interpreted, its functions become more evident. The application of Buddhist philosophy in relieving the basic conflicts of human society will surely help to raise the quality of human spirituality, alleviate people’s pain in real life, fulfill the new needs of the human race, and foster peaceful coexistence and shared development in human society. 1. Focusing on the conflict between man and himself to elevate man’s spiritual well-being With regard to its path of deliverance in human life, Buddhism has developed systematic theses on man’s position in the universe, his basic nature, his values, his ideals, and so forth. Among these teachings, the concepts of no-self and deliverance are especially edifying as a point of reference for transforming men’s view of the self, making psychological adjustments, and perfecting the mind and the spirit. On the basis of the theory of dependent origination that gives rise to the myriad of mutually related things, Buddhism posits the concept of no-self. Here, the self refers to the permanent, whole, and predominant self. This permanent, unchanging own-being is the self. Buddhism denies the substantial self or the existence of the soul, and excludes the concept of self existence. No-self is the basic Buddhist concept. The major content of no-self includes no attachment to the self, no illusion of the self, no (selfish) love for the self, no arrogance of the self, and so forth. Attachment to the self in Buddhist teaching

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refers to holding on to the self as a permanent substantial entity. Illusion of the self is holding on to the illusion of a substantial permanent self. Selfish love of the self is an egoistic love, or greed. Arrogance of the self is a self-centered attitude of arrogance. Attachment to the self will certainly bring forth illusion, selfish love, and arrogance of the self. Buddhism considers self-attachment as the source of all evils and the root of all sorrows, and maintains the ideas of no-self and no self-attachment. No self attachment requires the elimination of all biases and errors in cognition, desire, and psychology. In light of the modern view, the concept of no-self includes the ideas that spiritual life is superior to material life, the value of character is higher than that of life, and the well-being of society is more important than that of the individual. Currently, some people in society have become slaves to their physical needs and materialist desires. They become money worshipers, hedonists, extreme individualists, or even commit corruptive crimes, engaging in robbery and theft, smuggling, drug addiction, prostitution, and so on. These are distortions of human nature, causes of degeneration in human character, and sorrows of mankind. The Buddhist view of no-self is helpful in alleviating man’s attachment to his environment, restraining the materialist desires, toning down the desire for pleasure, and cooling the pursuit of fame and wealth, hence elevating the spirituality. In substance, the Buddhist concept of deliverance is the transcendence of the meaning of life, and the elevation of spirituality. The pursuit of such transcendence and elevation makes one objectively and calmly reflect on one’s life journey and examine one’s imperfections from a long-term perspective. It constantly requires that one strive toward self-discipline for spiritual advancement. It also helps to generate the multitude functions of psychological contentment, comfort, adjustment, support, and encouragement, hence the alleviation or even elimination of helplessness, worries, anxiety, sorrows, and pain. Buddhism holds that deliverance is the karma of each person. It is the joyful fruition of good karma. If one can follow the principles of cause and fruition, he or she will affirm an upward course of efforts to overcome immoral mental elements and open one’s heart toward goodness, to eradicate evils forever. Therefore, Buddhism is helpful for purifying one’s heart and perfecting one’s life. As its practice spreads, it helps to raise the morality of society and to maintain social order.

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2. Harmonizing conflicts among people to safeguard world peace Here, the human relationships in question are the relationships between one and another, man and society, man and his race, and man and his country. In terms of the world, there are presently two great problems of human relationship. First, due to conflicts of interest regarding race, religion, territory, and resources, regional upheavals break out one after another. People in some regions are suffering the plight of war. In the meantime, not only do the above problems remain unresolved, in recent years terrorism and other unconventional problems of security issues have become increasingly severe. Second, the gap between the rich and the poor and the global South and North is widening. There are a considerable amount of people living in poverty, without enough clothing to wear or food to eat, suffering from cold and hunger. On the theoretical level, some basic Buddhist ideas are significant to a certain extent for solving these problems. With regard to the two problems stated above, peace and peaceful coexistence are the greatest problems. As we all know, during the two World Wars of the twentieth century, men killed one another; tens of millions of lives were destroyed. If a world war should break out in the twenty-first century, human beings could cause their own extinction. In order to avoid wars, we must eliminate the sources of war. One of these sources is that people do not know how to relate and exist with each other, nor do they understand the principle, derived from dependent origination, of helping oneself by helping others. People fail to appreciate communication or reconciliation. Instead, they regard others as enemies and fail to respect others’ lives. The Buddhist concept of equality underlines the equality of everyone’s nature, personality, and dignity. Equality suggests respect and peace. The Buddhist idea of mutual respect is helpful for promoting peaceful coexistence, the pursuit of common ideals, and the construction of the Pure Land in this world. Peace comes from a profound understanding of the equality between the self and the other. Peace is established in equality. Peace constructed on the basis of equality is the true, substantial, and lasting peace. The Buddhist idea of love and compassion embodies sympathy and care for others; it keeps war at a far distance and safeguards peace. The Buddhist teachings of love and compassion, deliverance,

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the Five Precepts,15 and the “ten kinds of meritorious paths of action,”16 all include the prohibition of killing as their primary principle. Killing is considered the greatest crime and causes one to descend into hell. Buddhists’ strong opposition to killing manifests their sublime character and their respect for life and for others. Ever since the Venerable Taixu’s vigorous promotion of “Buddhism for the human world,” Chinese Buddhism has concerned itself with world peace, both longing for world peace and calling for world peace. Safeguarding world peace has become an important issue on the agenda of current Buddhist evangelism. In promoting and safeguarding world peace, Buddhism has developed its unique, irreplaceable function. The problem of the gap between the rich and the poor of the global South and North and the problem of poverty are not only directly relevant to the survival of the weak and of the laborers at the bottom of the society; they will also become a source of upheaval and have a direct impact on regional or world peace. The Buddhist view of equality, love, and compassion offers guidelines for resolving these problems. Buddhism has always underlined love and compassion, deliverance of the world, helping others to relieve their pain, and bringing happiness to people. Giving is an important Buddhist way of practicing the dharma. It is to give blessing and well-being to others with a heart of love and compassion. It is to give others wealth and physical and intellectual help, to create blessings for others, and to help them attain wisdom. Currently, Buddhism on both sides of the Taiwan Strait (both in Mainland China and in Taiwan) endeavors to develop the bodhisattva’s spirit of the great love and compassion that “seeks peace and joy not for the self, but wishes that all living beings be delivered from suffering.” Practitioners have fully developed the Buddhist function of charity and disaster relief by supporting the poor, helping 15 “五戒”是不杀生、不偷盗、不邪淫(或不淫)、不妄语和不饮酒。The Five Precepts include refraining from killing, stealing and cheating, improper sexual behavior, telling lies, and consuming intoxicating drinks. 16 “十善”是不杀生、不偷盗、不邪淫、不妄语、不两舌、不恶口、不绮语、 不贪欲、不瞋恚和不邪见。The “ten kinds of meritorious paths of action” include abstaining from killing, from stealing and cheating, from improper sexual behavior, from telling lies, from backbiting, from rambling speech and nonsense, from coveting, from being vindictive, and from wrong understanding or views which are not in line with the dharma.

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the distressed, offering medical care, patronizing “Project Hope,” and providing instruction for fallen criminals, in order to give the recipients of their help both material aid and spiritual advancement. In addition, some people’s thoughts and behaviors—selfishness, greed, vindictiveness, and cheating—have severely eroded harmony and trust in relationships among modern people. In these respects, the Buddhist disciplines, such as the ten meritorious acts of refraining from theft, sexual promiscuity, lying, backbiting, rambling speech and nonsense, coveting, and vindictiveness, and shunning wrong understandings or views that are not in line with dharma, all have direct significance for resolving these problems. It should be pointed out that the first four of the five precepts—refraining from killing, stealing, improper sexual behavior, and lying—may be used as an important starting point for the construction of a universal ethics currently under discussion. One may foresee that if we promote the Buddhist ethical principles of eliminating evil and following the good, practicing equality and love and compassion, helping the self and others, and other pertinent moral codes of social and ethical significance, so that they are widely accessible and permeate human relations, it will definitely help alleviate callous, opposing, or even hostile relationships among people, and will help establish relationships of friendship, love, harmony, honesty, and trust. 3. Harmonizing the conflicts between man and nature to advance common and sustainable development The greatest problem that modern human society faces is achieving peace and development. If human relationships must be harmonized in order to safeguard world peace, the achievement of common and sustainable development needs even more effort. It also requires man to harmonize his relationship with nature to ensure that the entire ecology of nature, on which human beings rely for their present and sustained existence, is well protected. A large number of facts make it clear that, in the process of modernization, man may at times follow a path that injures nature. Overdevelopment and savage looting are seriously damaging the harmony between man and nature and altering the environment of man’s growth and rest, hence creating a severe threat to the existence of humanity.

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At present, insightful people have become aware of the severe, pressing, and acute nature of environmental problems, but their awareness still needs to be raised, and their direction fine-tuned. With regard to these challenges, to a certain extent, Buddhist philosophy is worth considering. First, as the basis of Buddhist philosophy, the thesis of dependent origination stresses that all things are composed of a multitude of causes and conditions; nothing exists independently. The Tiantai and Huayan schools of Chinese Buddhism also propagate the idea that all things and objects in the universe are mutually dependent, interpenetrating, and interfusing. One can be sure that all this sophisticated thought is uniquely significant for our understanding of the universe and of human society. For instance, the global village in which we live consists of the earth, ocean, sky, and all kinds of animals and vegetation. If the earth were polluted, the ocean poisoned, the ozone layer thinned, and animals and vegetation kept moving toward extinction, the existence of mother earth would be problematic, and so would man’s existence. We think that the Buddhist worldview of dependent origination and the theory of organic wholeness may offer a theoretical basis for a contemporary philosophy of environment. Next, the Buddhist theory of direct and dependent cause and fruition underlines the living context of all lives, including rivers and mountains, the land and the earth, nation and homes, even the entire environment; all of these are the fruition brought forth by the behavior of all living beings. Buddhism also advocates the thesis that “purity of the heart is purity of the nation’s land,” to promote one’s contribution to the welfare of the nation’s land. Here, the subject and the environment are inseparable. The spiritual activities of the subject generate the idea of the transformation of the subject and the environment. The improvement of the environment depends on the purification of the subject’s subjective view of the world, and on fostering a mentality that respects nature and treats it kindly. These are all inspiring idea. Furthermore, on the basis of dependent origination, the Buddhist declaration of respect for others, for the differences among us, and for life—including the idea that all living beings are equal, all sharing Buddha-nature and possessed of the potential to become the Buddha—acknowledges the right to existence of various forms of life. This is not only different from harmful behaviors such as killing others, vandalizing the environment, and breaking the equilibrium of ecology; it is also different from the view that conceives of environmental

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protection as man’s demonstration of pity and mercy toward the weak. The Buddhist view of equality is different from “human-centrism,” “environment-centrism,” or “creature-centrism.” On the basis of equality, Buddhism also advocates a vegetarian diet and the release of animals into nature; these practices are not only beneficial for people’s physical and mental health, helping them to purify their heart and mind and to reduce their desires and still their thoughts, they also help to protect species from extinction and maintain the equilibrium of ecology. Thus, if one applies the Buddhist idea of equality to ecology, it will undoubtedly help in the construction of a more complete theory of ecological ethics. Finally, the Buddhist ideal is the advancement of all living beings into the world of utmost bliss. This world of utmost bliss is described as a beautiful place with fresh air, lush vegetation, chirping birds, and sweet-smelling flowers. It embodies the Buddhist vision of an ideal ecology. Ever since ancient times, monks have built many structures on well-known mountains. Buddhists have always enjoyed building temples and monasteries in the mountains or by the water. The temples and the landscape interfuse into one in the dignified serenity of the bright mountain and charming water, green pines and emerald cypress, the Buddhist temples and the treasured pagodas. Even when they are constructed in loud and boisterous cities, Buddhist temples, graced with trees and flowers, are serene and elegant. One may say that Buddhism is a model of environmental awareness and the desire to protect the ecology. In sum, the modernization of human society and the fundamental conflicts caused by this transformation are related to the fate of all humanity and to global development, which is an issue worthy of our close attention. Managing relationships between man and himself, among individual people, and between man and nature will involve society, the economy, and the system, as well as scientific technology and human intelligence. Buddhism has its share of inherent and adherent errors and misconceptions, nor can Buddhist philosophy solve the fundamental conflicts of human society or its multitude of problems. But from certain perspectives, it can offer a way of thinking that is missing from the secular society of politics, economy, and law. Buddhism’s contribution is to cultivate a high regard for the construction of people’s own spirituality in order to adjust one’s values, modify one’s mentality, transform one’s awareness, and advance one’s wisdom, all with the goal of helping to resolve the conflicts and problems

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of human society. Given this conclusion, we would like to emphasize again that in order for Buddhist philosophy to fully develop the social function, we need to dig deep into the resources of thought and make timely, responsive interpretations. We need to continue to strengthen our concern for and contact with modern society. We need to make timely responses to the great problems occurring in this new society. We think Buddhist philosophy undoubtedly has value in the modern world. The application and full-scale presentation of the value of Buddhist philosophy in modern society awaits and hinges on people’s efforts. (Translated by Wang, Chi-ying Alice)

INDIGENIZATION OF IMPORTED RELIGIONS IN CHINA: THE CASE OF ISLAM AND THE HUI PEOPLE Jian Zhixiang Minzu University of China Ma Rong Peking University Confucianism, like Daoism, Legalism, and other schools that came to exist in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods (770–221 BC), is not a “religion” in the strict sense, as that term is usually understood in Western civilization. First, these schools provide no story of the creation of the world by God. Second, they contain no concept of reincarnation nor do they imagine a final judgment and the end of the world. Third, there is no human representative of a god or gods in these secular schools, such as Jesus Christ in Christianity, Mohammed in Islam, or Sakyamuni in Buddhism. The leaders of these schools were considered “master teachers” and they were mainly concerned with the ethics and moral norms that men should follow in their daily lives. Confucianism, which became dominant in Chinese culture during the Han Dynasty and had its status reinforced through the imperial examinations (ke-ju), shows a very open-minded tolerance toward other schools of thought and various kinds of religions. For example, during the Tang Dynasty, as the historian John K. Fairbank argues, “The revived Confucian bureaucracy was remarkably tolerant of foreign creeds. Foreign visitors brought with them all the variety of medieval religions: Judaism, the fifth century Christian heresy known as Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism from Persia.”1 The main content of Confucian classics centered on social philosophy and addressed the question of how to be a good person in a secular society—as a son or a father in a family, or as a king or a gentleman in a society, and so forth. These works said little about

1 John K. Fairbank, The United States and China, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 64.

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the sacred world of gods, demons, and ghosts. Beginning with the Qin Dynasty, many emperors and commoners practiced Daoism in order to achieve longevity. But this did not threaten the dominant position of Confucianism. The emperors might search for the elixir of immortality themselves, but they needed soldiers, workers, and farmers to fight and work hard to maintain the empire. Therefore they paid respect to Taoists while continually supporting Confucianism as the source of moral principles in secular societal life. After Buddhism came to China around the time of the Han Dynasty, both Daoism and Confucianism borrowed some ritual forms from Buddhism.2 Those rituals made Confucianism appeared to be a “religion,” but the basic spirit and principles of Confucianism were not altered: they concerned only the affairs of secular society. Because Confucianism maintained a tolerant attitude toward other schools or religions in general, the latter managed to develop in Chinese society. Because Confucianism always occupied the central, leading position in Chinese cultural and social tradition, the attitude of this school toward other schools of thought and religions, whether they were native-born or adopted from other cultural traditions, might explain how the distinctive Chinese cultural tradition of “religious” coexistence originated, and why this pattern endured for about twenty centuries from the Han to the Qing dynasties. One example of the treatment of imported religions was the encounter with Buddhism. The Chinese sect of Buddhism (Chan) was regarded as “Confucianized Buddhism.”3 Many of the ideas and ethical tenets of Confucianism and Buddhism were blended together, with the result that Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism became three coexisting and interacting faith systems in China. Visitors can see these three systems practiced in the same temples in central and coastal China. To a certain extent, Buddhism was indigenized and integrated into the Chinese cultural system. While religious competition has been one of the major causes of strife in Europe and the Middle East throughout history, wars of religion are rarely mentioned in the Chinese historical record.

2 “The Taoist church as an organization in China was influenced profoundly by Buddhism.” Fairbank, The United States and China, 125. 3 “The process of indigenization of Buddhism in the Tang dynasty took two steps. The first one is ‘xuan xue hua’ (metaphysicization), the second step is ‘ru xue hua’ (Confucianization).” Fan Wenlan 范文澜, Zhongguo tongshi jianbian [Short Course of Chinese History] 中国通史简编, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 1964), 614.

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Islam and Christianity are two more religions that came from the West to China, but they were not integrated into the mainstream of Chinese cultural tradition. Islam is an important religion in today’s China. According to the 2000 census, the ten ethnic groups (Hui, Uyghur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Khalkhas, Sala, Tajik, Uzbek, Bao-an, Tatar) that traditionally practice Islam had a total population of 20.34 million.4 The Hui are the largest group, with a population of 9.83 million in 2000. A large proportion of the Hui population is spread throughout China and lives together with other groups. Hui people commonly speak Mandarin (Putonghua) as their mother tongue, which helps them to communicate with the majority people, the Han. Study of the Hui group provides a very important example of the relationship between Muslim groups and the Han Chinese. In general, China presents itself as an interesting case for research on cultural dialogue and religious coexistence. This chapter focuses on the Hui community of Muslims in China. After describing the dissemination and development of Islam in China in general, the chapter will focus on the development of the Hui group in northwestern China. Two dimensions will be discussed: one is the group’s transition from the Islamic tradition of “combining religion and civil administration” (or integration of church and state) to the traditional Chinese system of separating the two; another dimension is the transition from traditional Islamic “tribal identity” to the modern “civil identity” of a nation-state. Based on the study of the Hui community, this chapter explores the history of dialogue between imported religions and local traditional cultures in China. The Evolution of Islam in China: Localization, Secularization, and Confucianization Muslims Who Came to China in the Tang and Song Dynasties Shortly after Islam was founded in the Middle East, its leaders started to establish relations with the Tang Empire. According to the records of the Chinese imperial court, the first Arab delegation arrived in

4 In the 1950s, the Chinese government organized a “nationality identification campaign” and fifty-six ethnic groups (“nationalities”) were officially recognized.

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China in 651 AD.5 Afterward, some Muslims came from the Middle East and Persia to China by sea to conduct business or for other reasons. When these businessmen settled down and married local people, the first Islamic community was formed in coastal China.6 The harbor city of Qianzhou, in today’s Fujian Province, became an important Muslim settlement at that time. Mohammed, the founder of Islam, started his missionary work in 610 AD. The Arabian Peninsula at that time was populated by independent tribes. The Arab world, which knew a variety of beliefs, was not united. The new religion founded by Mohammed stressed the cohesion and unity of Muslims, becoming very effective in social regulation. That is why Islam featured the integration of church and state from the very beginning, a trait that has remained ever since no matter where the religion spread.7 When Islam came to China, however, the Tang Dynasty had already formed a large and well-organized empire. The social conditions Muslims faced in Tang China had the following features: (1) The scope and depth of social differentiation and political integration was much greater in China than in the Arab world: the empire boasted a sound regulatory system and Confucianism played the key role in maintaining social order, thus China had no need for a regime that would integrate state and church. When the Muslims came to China, they were immediately incorporated into the existing rule and placed under the management of local government. Though the Muslim population contributed to social and economic life, their religion had no influence on those outside of their own community. (2) Chinese society had already developed a rather sophisticated cultural and value system; the dominant Confucian culture, centered on the teachings of Confucius and Mencius and traditional Chinese philosophy, was char-

Bai Shouyi 白寿彝, Minzu zongjiao lunji [A Collection on Ethnicity and Religion], 民族宗教论集 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 204. 6 Yang Huaizhong 杨怀中, Huizushi lungao [History of the Hui Group] 回族史论稿 (Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1982), 50–81. Ma Mingliang 马明良, Jianming yisilan shi 简明伊斯兰史 [Brief History of Islam] (Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 2001), 495. 7 Until today, integration of church and state remains one of the most important features of Islam. Under the influence of this idea, most Chinese Muslims see virtually no difference between “Islam” and “Islamic states,” a reflection of which can be found, though perhaps unconsciously, in some scholarly works in China. See Ma Mingliang, Brief History of Islam, and Nan Wenyuan 南文渊, Yisilanjiao yu xibei muslim shehui shenghuo [Islam and the Social Life of Muslims in the Northwest] (Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe, 1994). 5

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acterized by openness and a lack of orthodoxy. This made it possible for external beliefs to be introduced and disseminated and to evolve in Chinese society. There was much room for the competition and coexistence of various religions. (3) Islam was introduced into China mainly by immigrating Muslims. After they entered into China either due to political reasons (making alliances to fight nomadic tribes)8 or economic reasons (trade and commerce), many Muslims married local people where they had settled down and their population gradually grew through intermarriage and childbearing. Living in such an open social system and cultural environment, the immigrant Muslims, on the one hand, formed their own community and built mosques. They enjoyed religious freedom and were quite independent of the Chinese communities, dealing with their own affairs according to Islamic Sharia. On the other hand, they also actively embraced mainstream society, learning the Chinese language, acquiring Chinese names for themselves, sitting for imperial examinations, and receiving government appointments.9 The four earliest famous mosques (Huaisheng, built in the Tang Dynasty; and Fenghuang, Qilin, and Xianhe, built in the Song and Yuan dynasties) followed the traditional Chinese architectural style used in Confucian and Buddhism temples.10 This period of immigration to China and integration into Chinese society lasted for nearly six hundred years, throughout the Tang and Song Dynasties. Islam managed to survive and endure within the communities of Muslim immigrants in China during the Tang and Song Dynasties, which can be attributed to the Confucian cultural tradition of tolerance and the relatively open and tolerant polices adopted by the imperial government. However, because only a limited portion of the

8 The Tang army that put down rebellions between 756 and 763 CE included Muslim troops from Central Asia; the emperor Su Zong permitted them to settle down in China and marry Chinese women. One record in Zi-zhi-tong-jian (资治通鉴) shows that over four thousand Hu-ke (胡客, used of people from the Middle East, Persia, and Central Asia) settled down and purchased land and houses in Chang-an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty. See Jin Yijiu 金宜久, ed., Yisilanjiao shi 伊斯兰教史 [History of Islam] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2006), 380. 9 For example, Li Yansheng 李彦升, an Arab by ancestry, successfully passed the imperial exam in 848 AD and became a distinguished official. Some poems written by Persian descendants (e.g., Li Shunxian 李舜弦) were included among the classics of “Tang Poems.” See Jin Yijiu 金宜久, History of Islam, 380. 10 Li Rongzhen 李荣珍, Yongyuan de puhading 永远的普哈丁 [Immortal Puhadin], Huizu wenxue 回族文学 [Hui Literature] (2006), 3:34–36, at 35.

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Koran was translated into Chinese,11 the majority population had no way to really understand the basic beliefs and teachings of this religion. For nearly six hundred years Islam “existed in Chinese society as an immigrant culture.”12 The Islamic influence stayed within the Muslim communities and had little impact on the culture and politics of Chinese society. Muslim Immigration in the Yuan Dynasty and the Formation of the Large Hui Community The Yuan Dynasty was founded by Mongolian groups in northern China. After their expedition into the Western world, on their way back they took by force many Central Asians who had converted to Islam. When the Mongolian rulers were classifying the society, they put these Muslims into the second-highest class, Semu,13 just below the rank of the Mongolians themselves, hoping that they would play an important bridging role in politics, economy, and culture. During the Yuan Dynasty, Muslims in China not only experienced a big increase in population but also spread throughout the country through military service and doing business. It was said that “in the Yuan Dynasty, the Muslims can be found everywhere in China.” In fact, this was the golden age for Muslims in China: because of their

11 Only short pieces of the Koran had been translated into Chinese by the end of the Ming Dynasty, and the full version was not translated until 1927. See Ma Jian 马坚, “Preface of the Translator,” The Koran 古兰经 (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1981), 2.There are at least seven places in the Koran that emphasize that the Koran was written in the Arabic language, e.g.: “This classic is in clear Arabic” (16.103); “This is a Koran in the Arabic language without evil tune” (39.28); “This is a Heaven Classic with a clear structure, it is the Koran in Arabic for the intelligent people” (41.3); “If I provided a Koran in a foreign language, people would ask why the content is not explained, and why there is a classic in foreign language although from an Arab prophet?” (41.44); “This is a classic in the Arabic language to prove the previous Heaven Classics, to warn the persons in injustice and those of good behavior” (46.12). Ma Jian, The Koran, 209, 355, 366, 369, 389. It is still common in today’s China that many people believe Arabic to be the only language in which Islam and the Koran can be explained. 12 Ma Mingliang, Brief History of Islam, 500. 13 The four classes were Mongolians, Semu (various Muslims from central Asia, Persia, and Arab), Han (the residents of northern China, including the Han, the Khitan 契丹 who formed Liao Dynasty, the Nuchen 女真 who formed the Jin Dynasty, and the Dangxiang 党项 who formed the Xixia Dynasty), and “Southerners” (the residents of southern China, including the Han of the Southern Song Dynasty and various minority groups).

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business sense and management and technical skills, they enjoyed a highly favored political and cultural status and were “embedded” in the social and economic structures of Chinese society. Many Muslim officials, magnates, and talented figures are recorded in Chinese history.14 By the end of the Yuan Dynasty, immigrant Muslims in China had already adopted the Chinese language; some of them even became famous singers or composers of Yuan verses. It was at that stage that Muslims became real citizens of the empire and were no longer perceived as “aliens.” China was still dominated by traditional culture, with Confucianism at its core. The religious influence of Islam still remained within Muslim communities. Yet one thing worth mentioning is that under the religious policy of Mongolian rulers, mainstream society started to regard Islam as a religion alongside other accepted systems of belief, including Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, and Judaism. Although the Muslim population was on the rise and mosques could be found everywhere, most Chinese had only an outsider’s knowledge of Islam.15 Meanwhile, some Muslims accepted the mainstream cultural values of China and started to adjust their behavior accordingly. Most Chinese historians agree that the Hui people as a group or community did not become solidly formed until the Yuan Dynasty.16 This group was different from other groups in China in the following three aspects: they were immigrants who still had a fresh memory of their places of origin; as members of the second-highest class, Semu, they enjoyed privileges in the social hierarchical system; and they believed in Islam. As history advanced into the Ming Dynasty, the first two features slowly became lost and religion became the main difference between the Hui people and the Han Chinese. However, as their connection with Central and Western Asia was broken, Islam

14 Bai Shouyi 白寿彝, Huizu renwuzhi ( yuandai) [Figure Annals of the Hui (Yuan dynasty)] (回族人物志 (元代), Ningxia People’s Press, 1985). 15 Yang Yongchang 杨永昌, Zaoqi yisilanjiao xueshu zai zhongguo chuanbo qingkuang de tantao 早期伊斯兰教学术在中国传播情况的探讨 [Study on the Dissemination of Early Islamic Academic Results in China], in Yisilanjiao zai zhongguo 伊斯兰教在中国 [Islam in China], ed. Ethnic Research Institute of Gansu Province (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1982), 42–96. 16 Weng Dujian 翁独健, ed., Zhongguo minzuguanxi shi gangyao 中国民族关系史纲要 [Sketch History of Ethnic Relations in China] (Beijing: zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2001).

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lost its external resources for further development. With the weakening of the religion, many Hui people who were not very firm believers became fully integrated into the Chinese people and were no longer distinguishable as Muslims.17 Evolution of the Hui Community after the Ming Dynasty During the Ming Dynasty, there were two changes in China’s Hui community, changes that seemed to point in opposite directions. On the one hand, the large and concentrated Muslim communities in northwestern China saw their population growing, either through marriages inside the group or intermarriage with people outside the community. As they still retained their own sense of common descent, lifestyle, and way of conduct, they were easily distinguished from nonMuslims. On the other hand, through further integration into Chinese society by intermarriage and migration, the smaller Muslim communities in the eastern coastal areas slowly lost their physical characteristics and cultural heritage (language, architectural styles, etc.). The only characteristic that distinguished them from other groups was their preservation of Islamic beliefs and customs,18—which, however, were not strictly followed any more. Thus, they did not have the resources to fully maintain their own religious beliefs, nor did they fully accept mainstream values. This is a unique feature of the development of Islam in China. The first change was the indigenization and secularization of Islam in northwestern China. At that time there were many Muslims living in the border areas of the empire, where the tusi (hereditary tribal chief ) system was the major form of local governance. These Muslims mainly included those who migrated from Central Asia in the early Yuan Dynasty, the Mongolian tribes who converted to Islam in the

17 Yao Dali 姚大力, Beifang minzushi shilun 北方民族史十论 [Ten Essays on the History of Northern Ethnic Groups] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007), 122. 18 One of the most significant customs of Chinese Muslims, including the Hui and other groups, is the taboo against eating pork. In the Koran, drinking alcohol is considered a more serious sin than eating pork, yet many Chinese Muslim drink alcohol while remaining very sensitive about pork.

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late Yuan Dynasty,19 and the Uygurs of Xinjiang.20 All of them kept their original social systems and were directly ruled by their tribal chiefs. These Muslims lived side by side with other ethnic groups in the border areas; some of them still spoke Mongolian or other mother tongues and had the same lifestyle and occupations as local people. The central government, however, made no differentiation between them and other ethnic groups, nor did they treat them any differently according to the religions they were following. In fact, an Islamic master imam or a-hong was regarded by the imperial government as a living Buddha or an accomplished monk (in Tibetan Buddhism) and received a title similar to that of an imperial priest.21 Thus the “integration of church and state” was maintained within Muslim communities, with Islamic Sharia ruling their life in the same way as “domestic disciplines” governed other ethnic groups. Of course, it was inevitable that Islamic beliefs and practices would gradually merge with the language and customs of local believers; examples can easily be found in traditional Muslim communities in northwestern China. In the Central Plains, however, Muslims were hardly different from their Chinese neighbors except for their belief in Islam. Some Islamic elites who were integrated into mainstream society slowly lost their religious identity as their social mobility increased. For those who managed to retain their identity, social mobility usually meant a lowering of their status in local society. Two factors put pressure on Chinese Muslims: the absence of external supports and the dominant rule of secularized Confucianism in China. As a result, the sacred symbolic system of Islam slowly lost the distinctive traits of a foreign culture and adopted a great many local cultural elements. As time went by, this tendency toward indigenization and secularization became evident in the understanding and interpretation of Isalamic teachings and Sharia law. In the late Ming and early

19 Duosang 多桑, Duosang menggoshi [History of Mongolia by Duosang (I)] 多桑蒙古 史（上）, trans. Feng Chengjun 冯承钧译 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2001). 20 He Yan 和龑, Mingdai xiyu huihui rufu zhongyuan kao 明代西域回回入附中原考 [Study on the Integration of the Huis from Western Regions into the Central Plains in the Ming Dynasty], in Lin Song and He Yan 林松，和萠 eds., huihui lishi yu yisilan wenhua 回回历史与伊斯兰文化 [The History of Hui and Islamic Culture] (Beijing: jinri zhongguo chubanshe, 1992), 22–38. 21 Linxia huizu zizhizhou zhi [Annals of Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture] 临夏回 族自治州志 (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 1993).

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Qing Dynasty, some books appeared that based their interpretation of Islamic classics on Confucian terms or borrowed Confucian ideas. Such interpretation announced the Confucianization of the beliefs and practices of China’s Muslims.22 This, however, was not a passive adaptation. To some extent, it could be regarded as an “initiative” taken by Muslims who had been integrated into Chinese society. In this period, the masters of the interpretation of Islamic classics reached a consensus that Islam had to take the road that Buddhism had taken in order to eliminate cultural misunderstanding, halt the decline, and obtain the same standing as Buddhism. Though it was also a foreign religion introduced into China, Buddhism managed to settle down and get established among the Chinese because in its early days the accomplished monks started to make use of local thoughts and culture to interpret Buddhism. As a result of this effort, Buddhism became integrated into and thus an important supplement to the worldview and moral value systems that had already been in place. This is how Buddhism became part of the mainstream culture of China

The most influential advocate for using Chinese to interpret Islam was Wang Daiyu 王岱輿, whose works include Zhengjiaozhenquan（《正教真诠》）and Qingzhendaxue（《清真大学》）. When his students were collecting his thoughts and remarks, they called him “Wangzi” (Master Wang), following the traditional Chinese practice of hailing Confucius as “Kongzi” (Master Kong) and Mencius as “Mengzi” (Master Meng). It is in one of these works compiled by his students, Xizhenzhengda （《希真正答》）, that his attempt to use Confucianism to interpret Islamic classics is most noticeable (see Yu Zhengui 于振贵, Yibu dui yisilan zheli juewei xiao de daibiaozuo: wang daiyu “xizhen zhengda” chutan一部对伊斯兰哲理抉微悉奥的代表作——王 岱舆《希真正答》初探 [A Classic on Islamic Philosophy That Explores Its Mystery from Small Aspects—Preliminary Study on Wang Daiyu’s Xizhenzhengda], Zhongguo yisilanjiao yanjiu wenji bianxiezu, ed. 中国伊斯兰教研究文集编写组 [Editorial group of Collected Essays from the Qing Dynasty on Islam in China], Zhongguo yisilanjiao yanjiu wenji 中国伊斯兰教研究文集 [Collected Essays from the Qing Dynasty on Islam in China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1981), 75–88. Another example of the Confucianization of Islam is that the father of the famous expert on Islamic classics from Yunnan, Ma Zhu, named himself “learning from Confucius” and sent Ma Zhu and his elder brother Ma Wo to study with a renowned local Confucius expert, Zhang Xubai. For more on the influence of Confucianism on Islam in China, see Feng Jinyuan 冯今源, “Cong yisilanjiao hanwen yizhu kan rujia sixiang dui zhongguo yisilanjiao de yingxiang he shentou” 从中国伊斯兰教汉文译著看儒家思想对中国 伊斯兰教的影响和渗透 [The Influence and Penetration of Confucianism on Islam in China—From the Perspective of Chinese Translations of Islamic Works], in 甘肃 省民族研究所编, Yisilanjiao zai zhongguo 伊斯兰教在中国 [Islam in China], ed. Ethnic Research Institute of Gansu Province (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1982), 257–281. For an introduction to historical figures in China who interpreted Islamic classics and sciences using the Chinese language, see Bai Shouyi, A Collection on Ethnicity and Religion, 209–212. 22

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and managed to be disseminated among officials and the masses. Of course, the Muslims did not start this journey until their religious classics had been translated into Chinese and a group of Hui intellectuals had received a systematic education in Confucianism. National Strategies of the Qing Dynasty and External Influences on the Islamic Movement Muslims first came to live in China in the seventh century but did not start using the Chinese language and concepts to interpret Islam until the seventeenth century. When they finally decided to do so after nearly one thousand years, however, great changes were taking place in the political and social environment of China. The Qing Dynasty, like the Yuan Dynasty, was also founded by an ethnic minority group. To contain the Han majority who lived in the plains of Eastern Asia, the Manchus formed an alliance with Mongolia in the north, and with Tibet and the Hui people in the western regions. Using this strategy, the Qing Dynasty managed to expand Chinese territory to its maximum extent. This strategy, however, had two main influences on the development of Islam in China in the eighteenth century. Development of Transportation and Cultural Exchange between the Chinese Empire and the Western Regions In the early Qing Dynasty, the Silk Road along the Gansu Corridor, which connects China with Central Asia and the Middle East, was reopened. As a result, the once-isolated Muslims in China reconnected with the outside Muslim world and initiated religious and academic exchanges. Developments in the international Islamic world thus started influencing Muslims in China. In addition, as Sufism was introduced into China along with different interpretations of Islamic classics, the menhuan（门宦, religious sect）system became popular in the Muslim societies of northwestern China.23

23 “The menhuan system was established first in the late Ming Dynasty, then developed in the Qing Dynasty.” Bai Shouyi 白寿彝, Minzu zongjiao lunji [A Collection on Ethnicity and Religion], 民族宗教论集 198.

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In general, there have been three major sects of Islam in China. The Gedimu（格底目）sect was the first Islamic group to arrive in China, in 651 AD, and it remained stable for about eleven hundred years. After Sufism came to China in the eighteenth century, the Gedimu sect (“old sect”) divided into several groups. A second sect, Ikhwan (“new sect”), appeared. There have been debates for a long time among Chinese Muslims about whether Ikhwan was related to the Wahabi sect in Arabia. The third sect of Islam, Xidaotang（西道堂）, was established around 1891. A distinctive feature of Xidaotang was its use of Chinese translations of Islamic classics in disseminating Islam.24 Meanwhile, there were four other major menhuan among Hui Muslims in China: Hufuyya, Gadilinyya, Jahriyya, and Kuburiyya.25 The menhuan system of Hui Muslims was closely related to Sufism, with master chiefs serving as menhuan leaders and presiding in Sufi lecture places and mosques. This system advocated reviving Islam and at the same time demanded more secular rights,26 marking the first time in China’s Muslim society that religion and the arrangement of the social system were combined, resulting in a stronger desire and mobilization for greater autonomy among Muslim communities. At the same time, however, the Qing government, in order to strengthen its administrative authority in border areas, adopted the policy of gaituguiliu 改土归流 (changing the traditional hereditary tribal chief system into the official system appointed by the emperor), gradually weakening the autonomous power of local rulers. In the process, the imperial government integrated the minority ethnic groups in the northwest into the Han people, or as they are called in historical records, Shufan（熟番）, under the direct administration of Qing officials. This pushed Muslims in northwestern China, who were regarded as Shufan or simply Han Hui (Muslims who had already adopted Han culture), to the margins of politics.27 As their autonomous rights were

24 Ma Tong 马通, Zhongguo yisilanjiaopai yu menhuanzhidu shilue [A Brief History of Islamic Sects and the menhuan System in China] 中国伊斯兰教派与门宦制度史略 (Yinchuan: Ningxia remin chubanshe, 1983), 164. 25 There were nineteen sub-menhuan under Hufuye and six sub-menhuan under Gadilinye. Ibid., 3–5. 26 Ibid., 119–451. 27 The term “Han Hui” was used to distinguish those among the Hui population who spoke Chinese and adopted Chinese culture from the “Chan Hui,” the term for the Muslims in Xinjiang who spoke different languages and had different physical characteristics, such as the Uygur and Kazak.

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weakened or even taken away, they directed their hopes and efforts toward confronting and challenging the central government. The Special Place of the Northwestern Hui Area in the Strategic Plan of the Qing Dynasty The alliance established in the early Qing Dynasty among the Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Hui peoples was of strategic importance for imperial control of the huge Han territory. The Gansu Corridor was the key region connecting the Central Plains to Xinjiang, the northwestern frontier. The Hui area in Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia is centrally located and communicates with several strategic areas: Han areas to the east, Mongolia in the north, Uygur areas to the northwest, and the Tibetan Plateau to the west. The Hui Muslims were different from the Han majority and shared similar religious beliefs with Muslims in Xinjiang. These characteristics made the Hui area an important yet weak section of the dominating chain of the Qing Dynasty. The situation became more serious when there were internal conflicts among various sects of Uygurs in the western areas. They had extensive connections with the governments in Central Asia and the Mongolian tribes ( Junkar) who always wanted to rule Xinjiang and Tibet. Therefore, the Hui area of northwestern China became the place where Manchus had the weakest rule, and the region whose instability would definitely pose a threat to imperial strategy. Russia became a new factor during the middle period of the Qing Dynasty, as it expanded into Central Asia and Siberia. Its influence and ambition could be observed in fights between sects of Muslims in the western regions of China. Under such circumstances, the alliance the Manchus built with Mongolia, Tibet, and the Hui people had a second function—to defend the Qing Empire against external aggression from Russia. The Muslims among the Hui, who were trying to revive their religion with the help of the Holy City and beginning to interpret the Koran in Confucian terms, soon fell into a disadvantageous situation. The instability of Hui society in northwestern China started with military encounters between different Muslim sects, which then turned into a widespread riot. This lasted for as long as a century, involving almost all Hui communities throughout China. The government of course tried to quell the uprising. The process of suppression fostered hatred between the Hui people and the Han and other ethnic groups.

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In many areas, Islam was forbidden by the government, Muslim beliefs and lifestyles were derided, and the Confucianization of Islam, which had just started in China, was forced to stop. On the other hand, the Hui people also started to harbor dislike and repulsion toward Han culture: some of them would even treat learning Chinese as something that went against their Islamic beliefs.28 When looking at this century-long period of wars and turbulence, scholars from China and abroad tend to take very different perspectives. Chinese scholars, for example, always construct their analyses from the perspective of class struggle within Chinese society, conflicts between sects, or conflicts between various ethnic groups.29 Some foreign researchers, however, try to understand this period by considering the social conflicts in China against the larger picture of the Sufism movement, which had effects throughout the Eastern Muslim world.30 They hold that the backbone of the conflicts in China—the Jahriyya sect—was in fact under the influence of Arab extremist sects that were responding to attacks on the Arab world from Western societies.31 There are also others who try to understand Hui society using the theory of ethnic group-nationalism transformation.32 When we combine these perspectives in studying the situation of China’s Hui Muslim society in the mid- and late-Qing Dynasty, we find that when China was first attacked by the Western world, the government and mainstream society were under the immediate pressure of economic, technological, and military forces while daily life and social ideas were largely untouched by Western modernization. However, Muslim elites in Hui society were under the direct political influence of the Islamic world through religious channels. When they acted in China, they were following the extremist thoughts generated

28 Zhang Chengzhi 张承志, Xinliushi 心灵史 [History of the Soul] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1991). 29 Qiu Shusen 邱树森, ed., Zhongguo huizu shi 中国回族史 [History of the Hui Ethnic Group in China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1996); Li Xinghua, Qin Huibin, et al., 李兴华、秦惠彬等, Zhongguo yisilanjiao shi 中国伊斯兰教史 [History of Islam in China] (Beijing: China shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998); Gu Bao 谷苞, ed., Xibei tongshi 西北通史 [History of the Northwest], vol. 4 (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2005). 30 Joseph F. Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (London: Valorium, 1995). 31 Raphael Israeli, Muslims in China (London: Curzon, 1978). 32 Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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by conflicts between the Islamic world (the East) and colonialism and imperialism (the West). The Hui society thus became opposed to both Western culture and the fundamentalism of “successive traditions”— the Islamic traditions that came into being after the period of the Four Caliphs. The various revivalist sects of Islam born in modern times had a tendency toward fundamentalism, and they opposed “successive traditions” and held the ideal of restoring the pure Islamic traditions of Mohammed’s time. However, the Islamic world, situated between China and Europe, had already faced the difficult choice of accepting or rejecting Western thought, technology, culture, and social systems. Thus the various revivalist thoughts that influenced the Hui people in China were in fact drawn from the response of Muslim elites to social transformation they were experiencing back in their own Islamic societies, with their own specific social goals and political ideals. Yet neither the Hui community nor Chinese society was undergoing the transformation of modernization at that time. In other words, there were no social goals that corresponded to the religious orthodoxy and way of action of the imported ideas, nor did social and political conditions encourage the Chinese Hui group to accept modernization. Under such circumstances, the majority of China’s Hui Muslim community underwent a change that did not correspond to their conditions of life: (1) In their religious belief they were opposed to both “other” cultures and “successive traditions.” When opposition to “foreign” culture emerged in China after the Opium War, in Hui communities this idea was reformulated as a rejection of Han culture or Confucian culture. The rejection of “successive traditions” became an attack on the indigenization and secularization of Islam in China, as well as on efforts to interpret Islamic classics from a Confucian perspective. (2) In politics, the Hui society denied the existing Qing authority by maintaining their religious identity, but they had no compelling and legitimate reasons to engage in an all-out war against the Qing. As a result, though the Hui people were opposed to the government, they were far from being able to overthrow it. There were many cases of rebels seeking amnesty from the government.33 Though small-scale

33 Wu Zhongli and Liu Qinbin 忠礼、刘钦斌, eds., Xibei wu ma 西北五马 [The Five Ma Warlords in the Northwest] (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1993), 2–18.

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riots were scattered, they were all regarded as serious crimes during the Taiping Rebellion and were “quelled in all ways” by the imperial government. The opportunity for the development of Islam in Hui communities in China thus came to a dead end. An extreme example of the Confucianization development was the menhuan of Jahriyya. Religious Strategies Adopted by Hui Elites in the Northwest in the Modern Period (1840–1949) The armed riots of the Hui people in northwestern China ended with Ma Zhan’ao (马占鳌) leading his troops to surrender to Qing General Zuo Zongtang（左宗棠）and assisting the imperial government in quelling other Hui riots across the country. The end of the disturbances and the restoration of peace was dependent on the Hui people themselves. They had to compromise with mainstream Chinese society: they gave up any ambition to establish an autonomous region under the flag of Islam, and they identified themselves as loyal subjects of the Chinese empire. This part of history shows that Hui society in China could not find a way to survive and develop until it acceded to the official ruling order. Zuo Zongtang trusted Ma Zhan’ao and put him in an important position in the Qing Army and government. By this move, the Hui community was recruited into the imperial system, and henceforth it contributed to mainstream society through its highly organized system and potential production power. Ma Zhan’ao and his troops were “turned from enemy to loyal power” and became an important force under Zuo Zongtang’s command. The benefits of this change were fully realized when the Eight Power Allied Forces occupied Beijing after the Boxer riots occurred and Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi fled to Xi’an. Ma and his troops protected the empress dowager well. Their loyalty was greatly appreciated and rewarded. Though the Qing Dynasty was in its last days, the trust and rewards with which it favored these Hui generals made them into influential local warlords in northwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century. Intense competition among local powers started in the late Qing Dynasty. Hui local powers were at first loyal to the imperial government, but when the anti-Qing and pro-Republic revolution started, they quickly shifted their allegiance to the other side. By this time they had already obtained legitimacy during the days of “being loyal to the

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central government.” Now, with the Hui community as their social basis of power and military forces under their command, they managed to secure power in the local administration and to balance the power of Han communities. They controlled four of the eight military bases in Gansu Province.34 After a hundred years of war with the government, the newly united Hui elites showed some new features: (1) Most of them knew that if they wanted to survive and develop in China they would have to be officially recognized by the central government and be incorporated into it. Those Hui warlords who managed to maintain their own separate regimes by using armed forces were very clear and firm on this. (2) They also knew that in the fierce competition for power, it was crucial to retain the social basis of their power and to use a designated region as their base. Therefore they would try their best to maintain and strengthen their social and religious ties with local Hui communities, satisfying to some extent the expectations of both Hui communities and non-Muslim communities in practical interests while keeping a certain degree of religious identity as a religious tie to connect to the Hui communities who were their basic supporters. Anyone who managed to survive the fierce fights among local powers had proven his ability to keep a good balance between them. Tilting too much toward the Hui people would undoubtedly bring about discontent among non-Hui people, thus weakening their power and authority. And working too hard to win the religious identification of Islam would result in fights between religious and secular powers and cultural isolation from local non-Islamic people and other parts of China. (3) All of the Hui elites could understand and make use of all kinds of political rules, obvious or hidden, and participated and excelled in various complicated political game-playing, which was another sign that the Hui elites had been fully integrated into Chinese society and culture, including orthodox Confucianism, political culture, and rules and norms.

34 In the Qing system, a “base” (镇) was an administrative-military unit within a province. One province might have five or ten “bases,” each of which had their own administrative area where they could collect taxes, levy troops, and exercise power in local jurisdiction, education, and religious management. In the late Qing Dynasty, Gansu Province had eight “bases,” covering today’s Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai. Ningxia and Qinghai became separate provinces from Gansu in 1929.

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These Hui warlords in northwestern China were closely related to Islamic powers from the day they started; in fact some of them were imams. Therefore, from where they stood and how they acted, we may, from a fresh perspective, examine the trend of changes in Islam since the mid-Qing Dynasty. The following analysis examines several representative Hui warlords in northwestern China. Ma Zhan’ao (马占鳌) and His Posterity Ma Zhan’ao, whose Islamic name was Abuduliazezi （阿不都里阿则兹） , was a famous Imam in Hezhou (modern Linxia City in Gansu). He was proficient in both the Islamic classics and the Chinese language and taught students in local schools. This man, who was outstanding in both civil and military affairs, was trusted and admired by his followers because he was articulate and brave. On the basis of his local reputation, he was asked by all Hui people to take a position of leadership and to unify all sects and menhuans at key moments in the fighting between the rebellious Hui people and government troops. However, when the crisis was over, the power structure would once again return to the hands of different menhuans, the organizational bases of local Hui communities. Ma Zhan’ao, who served as military commander during the fighting, would then have to give up his authority and return to his home. In 1869, the Qing general Zuo Zongtang 左宗棠 attacked the political center of the Hui rebellion, Hezhou. When things became urgent, the various menhuans once again asked Ma Zhan’ao to lead them, promising with the Koran on their heads that they would all obey his orders. The troops led by Ma won the battle in Taizisi in 1872. The Hui army was in high spirits after this victory, but Ma pointed out that there would be no way out for them if they continued to fight against the much stronger Qing Empire. He suggested that this victory offered the best opportunity for them to surrender to the Qing troops, and he himself would shoulder all the responsibilities incurred and would try his best to negotiate with the royal court for a reduced punishment. This plan was supported by some prominent figures in the Hui community, and thus the Hui troops in Hezhou surrendered to Zuo Zongtang, who was in a very difficult position at that time. After his defeat by the Hui troops, Zuo Zongtang did not know what to say to the royal court, nor could he find anyone to help him out of his trouble. After coming to Gansu, Zuo Zongtang realized that local

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governments were highly corrupt and officials from other provinces would not stay here long. Therefore, the solution would be “ruling the Hui people with Hui officials”—appointing men of high reputation in the Hui communities to local government positions. When the defeated Zuo was attempting to select a proper Hui candidate, Ma Zhan’ao led his troops to surrender, an act that changed the course of the fight.35 Before Ma could surrender, the greatest opposition came from various menhuans. As the power of the menhuans in the Hui community was based on religious authority, they would strictly defend their own areas and fight with each other for power. In fact, the menhuan system had been one of the most important internal causes of instability and disturbance in the Hui community since the mid-Qing Dynasty. Ma Zhan’ao, however, belonged to the “old sect” (Gedimu, 格底木), and was relatively unconcerned with sectarian differences. On the contrary, his war experience taught him the great danger of separate rules and inconsistency among various sects and menhuans. Therefore when he was once again invited to lead the rebellious Hui troops, he confirmed his power of command and decision-making by having sect leaders promise, with the Koran on their heads, that they would obey his orders. In this way, he secured their authorization of his leadership. After surrendering, Ma Zhan’ao submitted himself to Zuo Zongtang to assist him in quelling Hui uprisings in other parts of northwestern China. When Ma and other Hui elites like him sought to reincorporate Hui communities into the imperial system, the first to oppose them were menhuans who all wanted to expand their own powers and maintain control of their Hui communities. However, because Ma and other elites recognized that the division of power between menhuans was the root cause of chaos, they advocated weakening, and even suppressing, menhuan powers. Ma’s surrender had a direct influence on the Hui community in at least the following ways: (1) Leaders of other Hui uprisings started following him and begged to submit themselves to the Qing troops. In this way, the Hui troops, as well as their elite leaders, were reincorporated into the military and political systems of the Qing empire. (2) As instructed by Zuo Zongtang, Ma Zhan’ao took charge of “post-war affairs” in Gansu and Qinghai. He followed the rules ordered by Zuo

35

Wu Zhongli and Liu Qinbin, The Five Ma Warlords in the Northwest.

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Zongtang and put half of the military-civil bases under the control of Hui troops. The administrative structure of power distribution among ethnic groups in the whole area was thereafter officially accepted by the royal court, which was highly beneficial to the prosperity of the four Hui troops. (3) After surrendering to the Qing troops, Ma recommended some religious figures for military posts, like the religious leaders of Huasi menhuan Ma Yongrui and the leader of Dongxiang menhuan Ma Wuzhen. These Hui elites then remained loyal to the Qing government. Gradually, this softened the oppositional attitude of the Hui communities towards the Qing court and changed their relations with the central government of China, which further inserted local Hui powers into the framework of imperial power. (4) Ma Zhan’ao paid special attention to mediating the conflicts between sects and menhuans in Hui society. When he was keeping order for the central government, he would repress the sects that started fighting each other so as to maintain cohesion and stability in the Hui community. Under the combination of these four influences, Hui communities throughout China slowly realized how relations between the powers of religion, the military, and the emperor should be arranged. During the process, there emerged in Hui society a group of powerful figures who acted in their own ways and thus created a context for future changes in the religious structure. Ma Zhan’ao was both a powerful political figure and a senior imam, and his offices had a restraining influence on his posterity. His son Ma Anliang and grandson Ma Tingrang, who inherited both his military and political positions and religious influence, were content to stay in Hezhou. When Chinese society was undergoing tremendous social changes, they failed to adapt to the times and because of their misjudgments were finally defeated by other powers. What restricted them most, perhaps, was religion, which stopped them from transforming Ma Zhan’ao’s troops into modern military forces and accepting other steps that were necessary for competition against other local powers. Ma Qi (马麒) and Ma Bufang (马步芳) Qinghai had been under the rule of Ma Bufang’s family from the late Qing Dynasty until 1949, when it was liberated by the People’s Liberation Army under the Communist Party. This rule started when Ma Zhan’ao surrendered to the Qing troops: Ma Bufang’s grandfather Ma Haiyan was Ma Zhan’ao’s assistant officer, who took part in the battle

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in 1900 against the foreign army. After Ma Haiyan died on the way from Beijing to Xi’an when he was protecting the empress dowager, his son Ma Lin inherited his position. Because he spared no effort in guarding the empress dowager, his service was highly appreciated and rewarded. Ma Lin was born in 1869. He was tall, elegant, quiet, but trustworthy. When he started working as an official, he was always quick to adapt to any change in events and was a skilled communicator. As for his lifestyle, he was considered to be a person with limited knowledge but he thought about everything very carefully. In an urgent situation, he would carefully weigh the pros and cons and would not rush into action. For him, the result was the most important. He knew the features of ethnically and religiously distinctive areas well, and he made the best use of his knowledge to achieve what he wanted. Though he was not well educated, he greatly respected intellectuals. When he appointed subordinates, he would trust them with all his heart and follow their advice, which in turn attracted talented local people to work for him. Therefore, by the time he died, he was highly praised and had earned his reputation among the eight Bases.36

After he was appointed Xining Guarding Commander during 1912–1928, Ma Lin, with his outstanding political talents, managed to control the whole Qinghai area. His strong leadership during the period paved the way for him to become the first governor when the province of Qinghai was established in 1929. There are three points worth mentioning about Ma Lin’s rule: (1) In all important affairs, Ma Lin would always consult with his assistants and advisors and follow their advice, which in turn made the people who assisted him loyal and hardworking. These assistants and advisors were either well acquainted with both Chinese and foreign knowledge, or they were experts in Han, Hui, and Tibetan affairs, most of whom were knowledgeable people who had extensive social networks. Ma’s strategy for filling government positions was to appoint Han people instead of Hui people, and people from Gansu, Qinghai, or other provinces instead of those who came from his hometown, Hezhou. (2) Ma made skillful use of his knowledge of ethnic relations to win trust from all ethnic groups (Han, Tibetan, Mongol, etc.) instead of focusing on the Hui

36 Chen Bingyuan 陈秉渊, Mabufang jiaozu tongzhi Qinghai sishi nian [The Forty Years Rule of Ma Bufang’s Family in Qinghai], 马步芳家族统治青海四十年 (Xining: Qinghai remin chubanshe, 2007 [1986]), 278.

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community alone. (3) Compared with other Hui warlords, Ma Lin paid special attention to the legitimacy of his acts in state politics. When conducting important affairs or making important decisions, he would always try to obtain approval or authorization from the central government. From the three points above, we may see the political and cultural tendencies adopted by this warlord from the very beginning, which were further strengthened in the way he arranged for the education of his sons. Ma Lin was very careful with the education of his son Ma Bufang. At first, Ma Lin made separate plans for his two sons, one to work in the military and the other in politics. But when he saw that in the Hui society of Gansu and Qinghai, the one who controlled religion would win the recognition and dependence of the Hui people, he sent his second son Ma Bufang to a mosque to receive a traditional Muslim education. When he went to Qinghai, he invited local Confucian experts to teach Ma Bufang calligraphy, the classics, and books about the art of war, thus equipping him with education from both the Muslim mosque and the Confucian school. In addition to educating his sons, Ma Lin donated funds in support of the education of the Hui people. To promote modern education based on the language of the Han Chinese, he followed the practice of the Hui people in the coastal regions, setting up a Hui Education Promotion Association and starting to build schools in most county towns in Qinghai. Hui warlords in northwestern China all had to win support from local Hui communities or else they would not be able to hold on to their power in the fierce competition. And to win local support, they had to establish close relations with those who wielded religious power. The posterity of Ma Zhan’ao held religious power, so they used to be the most powerful among northwestern warlords. Ma Lin’s family was in fact a newly independent branch and was also thinking of securing religious power. However, most of the religious resources of the Hui communities in northwestern China were already dominated by Ma Zhan’ao and his direct posterity, so Ma Lin and Ma Bufang chose to support a new sect, Ikhwan, which was not introduced into China until the early twentieth century. This strategy worked very well for them, as a new and less conservative sect would be a perfect match for a warlord with an Islamic background who wanted to have his own loyal modern troops. The teachings of Ikhwan were in line with Ma Lin and Ma Bufang’s plans for local society: erasing sectarian division,

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eliminating customs that were too complicated and undesirable, promoting modern education, establishing modern social systems, and using armed forces to establish a political regime and revive religion. With the full support of Ma Lin and Ma Bufang, Ikhwan quickly disseminated in Hui society and dominated all the sects in Qinghai and Gansu. Ma Lin and Ma Bufang realized not only the importance of religion, but also the potential threat religious power might pose to them. Thus when they won support from religious sects, they carefully controlled these religious powers. Ma Bufang knew the Muslim classics very well and was very pious. But from his instructions for the reformation of Islamic education in 1946, we can see that he strictly limited religion to the areas of promoting education, promoting intellectualism, disseminating orthodox religion, maintaining morals, and lifting people’s spirits. Imams were forbidden to interfere with civil or criminal suits or to take part in business or administration. Ma Bufang’s reform also set moral standards and rules of conduct for religious personnel, as well as their level of remuneration. This was a very modern attitude toward religion for a governor with an Islamic background. Ma Fuxiang（马福祥）and Ma Hongkui（马鸿逵） Ma Fuxiang’s father, Ma Qianling, was one of the Hui officers who followed Ma Zhan’ao and surrendered to Qing troops. He was not an important figure back then, so he was appointed as a Lanling (bluecollar) officer, an unimportant post. However, he managed to keep his family and assets intact during conflicts with Hui rebels. He paid special attention to the education of his sons. His second son Ma Fulu was good at both civil and military affairs and was very loyal to friends. After he passed the preliminary imperial military exams, he managed to get the best results in the empire-level exam. However, because he misbehaved when meeting the emperor, he was demoted and became a guard at the royal palace, where he would learn royal etiquette. His fourth son Ma Fuxiang was born in 1876. It was said that his mother was a Han who, although not educated herself, rested all her hopes on her son. In fact, from the stories of Ma Qianling’s sons, we can get a glimpse of the cultural and political values adopted by the Hui elites in Gansu and Qinghai. From the very beginning, Ma Fuxiang and Ma Fulu were loyal to the Qing Empire and were known as devoted and brave

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officials. Ma Fulu died in a fight against the Eight Power Allied Forces in 1900. Ma Fuxiang succeeded and did his best to defend the royal family in the west. Though Ma Fuxiang was only twenty-five years old then, he exhibited great interpersonal skills and became close friends with important figures in the royal court, which paved the way for his future political career. In addition, Ma Fuxiang was good at poetry and calligraphy. He befriended many Confucian masters throughout the country and was praised as a general who was equally accomplished as a man of Confucian knowledge. Ma Fuxiang upheld the tradition of the Chinese scholar-bureaucrat: he believed in “respecting education and classics while my religion believed in only one God.” In his military and political careers, Ma Fuxiang stressed maintaining good relations between Hui and Han people and worked hard to safeguard the state and protect ordinary people. This was perhaps due to his attitude toward religion. Ma Fuxiang thought that the chaos in northwestern China was closely related to incitement by sects. He was opposed to expanding sectarian power through menhuan, partisanship, and the new sect established by Ma Lin and Ma Bufang. He did not place any emphasis on worship and gave no preferential treatment to imams. Instead, he put much of his effort into Hui education, new schools of thought, and publication. For example, he built many schools in places where he held posts and funded the teachers’ school and overseas education. He also attached great importance to the Chinese (Han) translation of Islamic books, funding the publication of over thirty books written in Chinese by Wang Daiyu, Liu Jielian, Ma Zhu, Ma Fuchu, and others to introduce the Islamic classics.37 The closest contact between Ma Fuxiang and the Islamic sects in northwestern China was perhaps in 1920 when he allied with Jahriyya to compete with Lu Hongtao for the post of governor of Gansu. To strengthen his power, he asked Ma Yuanzhang, the religious leader of Jahriyya, to recommend him to the president. Though Ma Yuanzhang promised to do so, it turned out that he recommended that the central government not appoint local people, lest the practice lead to domination by powerful individuals.38 At that time, however, all the Shi Lun 师纶, Xibei majia junfa shi 西北马家军阀史 [History of the Ma Warlords in the Northwest] (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2006), 39–48. 38 Ding Mingjun 丁明俊, Mafuxiang zhuan [Bibliography of Ma Fuxiang] 马福祥传 (Yinchuan: Ningxia Renmin chubanshe, 2001), 83. 37

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other local warlords in the northwest were supporting Ma Fuxiang for this post, so Ma Yuanzhang’s gesture may be interpreted as a sign that religious power and political-military power in Hui society were not that close, as the growing strength of the latter had in fact posed a threat to religious menhuan. Ma Yuanzhang, who advocated fights between sects, died in an earthquake at Haiyuan in December 1920. It was said that his death shocked Ma Fuxiang, who interpreted it as a warning from Allah. To avoid conflicts that would bring more death, he withdrew from the competition for the Gansu governorship. We can determine Ma Fuxiang’s religious attitude from his acts. When he died, Hui communities throughout the country gave him very high praise. Following the teachings of Islam, he tried to maintain peace to fulfill his desire for a quiet life; he was against partisanship and promoted the integration of Hui people; he did not repress religion and promoted the Hui education; and he advocated the publication of Islamic books to disseminate the real essence of Islam. Commemorative events were held around the country, a very rare occurrence in Hui history.39 From this we may conclude that Ma Fuxiang had won recognition and support from the majority of Hui communities in China at that time. His son Ma Hongkui, however, took a different road in terms of religion, a road that was more in line with the position of Ma Lin and Ma Bufang. In some cases, he was even more open. Ma Hongkui highly respected and depended on the famous classics scholar of Ikhwan, Hu Songshan, and from the acts of Hu Songshan we may discover his religious values.40 Unlike his father, who was renowned beyond local areas and traveled to many places, Ma Hongkui’s orbit was largely restricted to Ningxia and saw the religion of the local Hui community as an important issue he must deal with. In this aspect he had the same needs as Ma Lin and Ma Bufang, which explained his support of Ikhwan. Ma Hongkui had a very different life background from Ma Bufang; the situations in Ningxia and Qinghai also varied. However, in both Ibid., 173–180. Ye Zhenggang 冶正纲, Ningxia yihewani zhuming jingxuejia husongshan 宁夏伊赫瓦 尼著名经学家虎嵩山 [The Famous Master of Ikhwan in Ningxia], Qingdai zhongguo yisilanjiao lunji 清代中国伊斯兰教论集 [Collected Essays from the Qing Dynasty on Islam in China], ed. Ningxia zhexue shehuikexue yanjiusuo 宁夏哲学社会科学研 究所编 [Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences of Ningxia] (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1981), 308–325. 39 40

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provinces the Ma warlords took the same approach to religion, which suggests that in the Hui communities of Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai during the first half of the twentieth century, a modern system was needed to develop modern education and technology, and Ikhwan was the sect that could satisfy this need and maintain the integrity of the Hui community. What should be noted is that the warlords in Ningxia and Qinghai made the best use of the modern and tolerant side of Ikhwan, introducing it into the Islamic teachings of local communities. Yet at the same time they put the sect itself under strict political and military control and disregarded the Ikhwan principle of “using armed forces to strengthen the army and establish a political regime.” Conclusion This chapter briefly described the introduction and development of Islam in China. Because traditional cultures and religions in China were diversified and largely tolerant, Muslims and Islam managed to survive here, as did another imported religion, Buddhism. To secure the acceptance of mainstream society and expand their influence, Muslims carried out localization, secularization, and Confucianization in the organization and dissemination of Islam. For example, mosques were remodeled into Han-style temples, and many Confucian terms were used to interpret the teachings of the Koran. Because of these efforts, Islamic communities survived and developed throughout China and finally became integrated within the diversified Chinese religious system and coexisted peacefully with each other. In an evolution that lasted for several centuries, the Hui community had their own unique experience as one of the important Muslim groups in northwestern China. The mentality and tactics of some Hui elites during the Hui uprisings at the end of the Qing Dynasty were analyzed here. Pursuing a strategy of balance between religious and political powers, Hui elites managed to become local warlords. Their existence and development was supported by the Qing Dynasty and by the central government of the Republic of China, to which they had always been loyal. The local warlords of “Ma’s Troops” in Qinghai and Ningxia shared some basic features or goals: (1) They diverged from the Islamic ideas of “integration of church and state” and of governance based on power and military force; instead they were submissive and obedient to the secular central government. (2) They made

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use of Islamic sects for restructuring and integrating local powers and at the same time strictly controlled the development of religious power. (3) They tried to improve relations between the Hui, Han, and other ethnic groups so as to win respect and submission from all. (4) They made efforts to promote the development of modern education and industry. These features show clearly the indigenization of Muslims in the late Qing and early Republic Period. This helps us to understand the evolution of Islam in modern China. All the lessons we can learn from the experiences of Hui Muslims only became possible because of the cultural tolerance of mainstream Chinese tradition, with Confucianism as its core. Confucianism as a theoretical system and a set of moral principles has always had a secular orientation. It is not an exclusive monotheism, not even a religion. To understand Confucianism is the key to understanding the religious atmosphere in China. In comparison with major cultural systems in other continents, coexistence has been a distinctive and fundamental feature of religious interaction in China for over two thousand years. This may explain many aspects of the Chinese religious situation at the present time.

PROTESTANTISM IN MODERN CHINA AS “FOREIGN RELIGION” AND “CHINESE RELIGION”: AUTONOMY, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE CONSTRAINTS OF FOREIGN HEGEMONY Daniel H. BAYS Calvin College The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The fact of change itself is undeniable. —Philip Jenkins* The missionary movement is in some respects the last flourish of the Christendom idea, and, in its early days at least, it was borne forward by the hope of adding to Christendom. —Andrew Walls At the same time in the 1960s and 1970s that the academy . . . was revalorizing the nontheological study of religions as a legitimate humanistic discipline, sinologists, with the important interdisciplinary and comparative assistance of religionists and social scientists, were rediscovering the crucial role of religion throughout all periods and social divisions of Chinese history. —Norman J. Girardot

The Long Life of the “Christendom Idea” and its Relevance to China For several years I have been studying the history of Christianity in modern China. That story begins, of course, with the arrival of foreign missionaries carrying a message about new ways to look at the * Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3; Andrew Walls, “The Old Age of the Missionary Movement,” in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 258; Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 533.

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world and humankind. That is, they brought ideas and practices of Christianity, a “religion.” I have also been dealing directly or indirectly with the phenomenon of “Chinese religion(s).” But despite my appreciation of the academic “rediscovery” of religion’s important role across the gamut of Chinese history, as described above in the quotation from Norman Girardot’s fine book on James Legge, it had never occurred to me to ask the very basic question of exactly what “religion” is, or was, either in China or the West. If asked, I suppose my answer for both China and the West would have stressed a combination of doctrine and ritual. My understanding of the functions of “religion” in China was greatly enriched by a workshop at Harvard in 2005. Ideas from this workshop were a breakthrough for me, rather like the way in which the first books of Dan Overmyer and Susan Naquin in 1976 occasioned my first realization of the possible points of contact between Christianity and Chinese society and religion.1 Likewise in the 1980s when I first heard K. C. Liu expound on the role of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in imperial China, especially the idea of “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy” (or, as he put it slightly differently at times, “socioethics as orthodoxy”), it seemed to sum up nicely several important insights into traditional society and culture.2 It helped, at least for me, to explain why there was so much overlap in China between ideas and behaviors variously called religion, culture, ethics, ritual, propriety, and so forth. Professor Liu’s formulation also helped to explain the intensity with which the imperial state at times monitored all these aspects of society: they all had links to questions of orthodoxy, potentially including political orthodoxy. This helped me better to conceptualize how an originally “Western” religion could eventually at least partially compensate for its doctrinal “foreignness” (and worse, its heterodoxy) by orthopraxy in socioethics (following lijiao, doctrines and behaviors of propriety). An observation from the recent past may be relevant here: It has been claimed by several observers that one reason for the rapid recent growth of Christianity in China has been the practice of

1 Daniel Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 2 Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, eds., Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

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traditional ethical behavior by Christian individuals and communities. For example, I have heard several reported cases of Christians during the Cultural Revolution performing acts of kindness towards neighbors who were under political attack and were shunned by others. Since the 1980s Christians have sometimes been applauded by officials for their behavior. In some minority areas, local communities that are largely Christian and expend a lower proportion of family resources on cigarettes, liquor, gambling, and lavish weddings and funerals, all of which results in higher disposable income, are sometimes even held up as models by local cadres. Some local governments are actually promoting Christianity and encouraging the development of new Christian communities because of this association with ethical behavior.3 As a result of this more conscious realization on my part of the complexities and multiple meanings of the term “religion,” I will try to be more careful in what I label as “religion” or “religious,” and I will also endeavor to be more aware of its many components or associated behaviors. Although I am ultimately interested in the functioning of Christianity as a religion in China, for the moment I actually find it most useful in helping me to gain some leverage on issues in the history of Christianity in the West. I believe we need to gain a better understanding of the mental world of nineteenth-century missionaries as they tried to understand Chinese religion (or Chinese society, culture, values—however they conceived of it). Of course not all missionaries made the intellectual effort to understand these aspects of China, but many of them did. It is important to remember that the missionary movement was the first major cross-cultural learning experience of the West.4 For me, the point of access to the historical problem of understanding Christianity both in the West and in China lies partly in the Walls quotation on the “Christendom idea” at the beginning of this essay. Let me try to explain. 3 My own experience in travels in Shandong province in 1986 and after. See also Tetsunao Yamamori and Kim-kwong Chan, Witnesses to Power (Cumbria, UK: Paternoster Press, 2000), especially chap. 5. 4 That idea is yet another insight of Andrew Walls expressed in several of his writings, including The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 254–258, 271–272, for example. Walls is in many ways the John K. Fairbank of new approaches to missions history and “world Christianity.” Another recent work making this point, i.e., that “missionary ethnography became one of the foundations of Western Sinology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology,” is Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); quotation p. 7.

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In the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the modern missionary movement from the West, the word “Christendom” denoted a very real and totalistic entity. Christian identity was the same as territorial identity, and in the political unit from the local community up to the level of the state, all members were expected to participate in the common rituals, observances, and ethical practices of the whole society, whatever one’s economic station or social class. In other words there was an expectation of orthodox belief and behavior or customs incumbent upon all members of the group, tribe, or (later) nation.5 This historical pattern, which had gradually come to characterize basically all of Europe during the period from the dissolution of the Roman Empire to the late Middle Ages, and which involved entire tribes and peoples converting to Christian identity en masse, directed by their leaders, explains a good deal of history.6 It explains, for example, much of the Crusaders’ obsession with gaining physical control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. And it explains the fervent hope of the first modern missionaries to Asia, the Jesuits, of converting all of China, Japan, Vietnam, and India by strategically converting the ruler and/or the ruling class; this strategy had worked for the tribes of northern Europe. The European context of the early Catholic missions to China in the 1500s was the crucial fact that, in the aftermath of the last defeat of the Moors in Spain and the forced conversion or expulsion of the Jews (in Walls’s words): By around 1500, the time when a long-isolated Europe at last found itself in contact with the non-Western world, circumstances dictated that Christianity became more European than it had ever been before, and did so just at the point when Europe became more Christian than it had ever been before. Events so welded Christianity and the West together, and the domestication of Christianity in the West was so complete, the process of acculturation there so successful, that the faith seemed inseparable from the categories of European life and thought.7 5 I am reminded of Charles Litzinger’s essay in a book I edited, on the holistic nature of local village religion and culture and society, all rolled up together: “Rural Religion and Village Organization in North China: The Catholic Challenge in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 41–52. 6 It did, however, take Europe a fairly long time to become Christian—several centuries. 7 “From Christendom to World Christianity,” in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, 49.

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The territorial aspects of this merging of the West and Christianity seem key to me. There was no room for religious plurality in Christendom. This, then, was the mindset, or package of cultural assumptions, of the early modern Catholic mission to China. I would submit that it still substantially shaped the assumptions and perceptions of the Protestant missionaries of the nineteenth century. Between 1500 and 1800, despite the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, little had yet changed in Europe that would render the idea of Christendom obsolete. The long-established, deeply held assumptions and mental constructs of Christendom encountered in China the even longer-established, also deeply held features of Chinese civilization, including those which were “religious.” On both sides it was more or less an all-encompassing package—religion and culture and civilization all rolled up together. And for both sides, the West and China, it seemed that their package, Christendom or Tianxia, respectively, represented the divinely ordained system, whether of the Christian God or Chinese Tian, for humankind.8 In fact, however, much had changed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly the practical power balance between Europe and China. The Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no gunboats, and they remained in China at the sufferance of the imperial state; no European state yet had a significant presence in East Asia. By the early nineteenth century the great age of European imperialism was well underway. This meant the projection of Western trade, technology, at times military power, and usually some missionaries as well, all over the globe. And I think it safe to say that most of the missionaries coming to China were full of assumptions about the seamlessness of Christendom, or as some called it, “Christian civilization.” With these assumptions in the minds of the Westerners, a logical corollary would be that in order for a non-Western society to convert properly to Christianity, a “cultural conversion” was necessary as well as a change of religious affiliation or belief. As late as 1910 at the great World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, the discourse of the delegates and the published proceedings utilized the categories of (1) the West, which was considered “fully

8 I realize that tianxia, “all under heaven,” is not an exact analogue to “Christendom.” But it connotes something of the same aspiration to universality.

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missionized,” that is, all Christian; and (2) the other, considered to be “not yet fully missionized.”9 The images projected by the elaborate exhibit on China by the Church Missionary Society for the Great Missionary Exhibition of 1909 in London also showed the tenacity of the view of Chinese religion and civilization as “heathen,” and Chinese customs and language as absurd and irrational.10 And of course the model for conversion was to the West, or Christendom. There was no serious thought yet entertained here of Chinese adopting faith in Christ and fitting that faith into their already existing culture, reorienting that culture but not displacing it (although at times missionary rhetoric seemed to endorse the possibility of salvaging the culture).11 Thus in the 1890s appeared Arthur Smith’s famous Chinese Characteristics, which criticized not only Chinese religion as in need of replacement by Christianity, but Chinese culture and society across the board as in need of Christianization and wholesale revamping. Smith’s book must have hit a responsive chord; it apparently remained the most popular English-language book on China until the 1920s.12 I come back to the main point here, which is that if these assumptions were still rife at the turn of and into the twentieth century, they must have been still stronger earlier in the nineteenth century, when the international system of Western hegemony, i.e., imperialism, into which China had been coerced between 1842 and 1860, made it impossible for China to prevent the missionaries from pressing their case, albeit to a largely unresponsive Chinese society. The one creative adaptation of Christianity to China by Chinese in these decades was

9 “From Christendom to World Christianity,” in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, p. 60. 10 Reinders very effectively begins his study Borrowed Gods with this huge exposition of 1909. 11 Such a generalized statement must be qualified, of course. By the late nineteenth century certainly there were many individual missionaries who were conscious of the differences between Christian faith and Western civilization. Already in mid-century the issue had arisen in the strategic thinking of mission society executives (e.g., Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM). But the view that the focus should be all on Christ, little or none on changing culture, was a minority one. 12 Lydia Liu has extended comments on Arthur Smith’s work in Translingual Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), chap. 2. She also has a brief but stimulating introduction to the recent reprint of Smith’s book: Chinese Characteristics (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2002). Reinders’s Borrowed Gods is a creative treatment of perceptions of Chinese religions by missionaries of the Church Missionary Society (Church of England) during the Victorian era, circa 1850–1910, although it has limitations because of its sole reliance on CMS records.

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the Taiping movement, which turned into a disaster for the publicrelations image of Christianity as well as for the lives and property of the residents of the lower Yangzi valley. Post-Taiping Qing fears of Chinese adopting sedition along with Christianity, and the anger of local elites at the privileged power position in local society that foreign missionaries enjoyed through extraterritoriality under the “unequal treaties,” made it difficult for missionaries to point to much success— though by the early 1900s much had been contributed by missions to education, medicine, and early forms of community building. Yet with few exceptions (such as Timothy Richard, Gilbert Reid, and Young J. Allen), it was not until the twentieth century that the handicap to Christian growth of the fact of foreign hegemony inherent in the treaty system became apparent, both to a relatively small number of missionaries but especially to a great many Chinese. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, some Chinese Christians cobbled Christianity together with many diverse elements of the traditional Chinese cultural mix, “converting” the culture, not replacing it by forcing it to join Christendom. Besides, there was no more Christendom by now. What was beginning to happen around the world, even as the 1910 Edinburgh Conference intoned the old assumptions, was the local appropriation of Christianity, from South Africa to India, in Japan, and steadily in China.13 “Christendom” as we have used it here was gone (though one can still hear echoes of it, not in Europe, where Christianity itself has nearly disappeared,14 but in the United States). And it crumbled very quickly, looked at from the long term; the first epigraph above, from Philip Jenkins, whose engagingly written and popular book states this point succinctly.15 Today Christendom as coidentity of Christianity and the West is gone forever, and although the center of gravity of Christianity has indeed shifted decisively from the West to the South and East, it is impossible to 13 This characterization of the shortcomings of the Edinburgh conference is unfair to many of the delegates, to be sure. In several ways Edinburgh pointed the way to important developments later in the century in the world Christian movement. 14 Another essay by Andrew Walls, developing the theme of a “Post-Christian West and a Post-Western Christianity.” “Christianity in the Non-Western World,” in The Cross-cultural Process in Christian History, pp. 27–47. 15 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). A recent short, creatively written essay on the theme of Christianity having already become a majority non-Western religion in its worldwide presence, and the implications of that, is Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

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imagine that “the next Christendom” arising in our world of religious pluralities will characterize practically all societies around the globe. Applications to the Study of Religion in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Prevalence and long life of the Christendom-derived “Christian civilization” idea Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics of the turn of the century was the latest of a well-established series of even larger and more detailed books, some in two volumes, written by China missionaries on Chinese society and culture. Walter Henry Medhurst was the first, publishing his China: Its State and Prospects in 1838.16 S. Wells Williams, missionary-diplomat-professor, published his The Middle Kingdom in two volumes in 1847 (and a revised edition in 1883—in the field of China punditry, Williams was to the nineteenth century what Smith was to the early twentieth century).17 Justus Doolittle, who also wrote useful language textbooks, came out with his two-volume Social Life of the Chinese, highlighting the city of Fuzhou but covering all of China as well, in 1865.18 These books, presenting broad portraits of Chinese history and culture, included many discussions of Chinese religion; we could benefit from a close scholarly comparison of how these works describe Chinese religions. But Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, first published in book form in 1894, edged all of them aside after its appearance. Smith is clear about his view that China could not graft Christianity onto a continuing Chinese culture. After more than twenty chapters describing the deficiencies (and, it must be said, some positive features as well ) of Chinese culture and “national character,” Smith concludes: In order to reform China the springs of character must be reached and purified, conscience must be practically enthroned. . . . What China needs is righteousness, and in order to obtain it, it is absolutely necessary that she have a knowledge of God and a new conception of man, as well as of 16 The rest of the title was . . . with Especial Reference to the Spread of the Gospel, Containing Allusions to the Antiquity, Extent, Population, Civilization, Literature, and Religion of the Chinese (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1838). 17 New York: John Wiley, 1847. Like Medhurst’s, the title goes on and on; Doolittle’s book (next citation) is the same. 18 New York: Harper, 1865. One wonders what sales were in the last year of the American civil war.

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the relation of man to God. She needs a new life in every individual soul, in the family, and in society. The manifold needs of China we find, then, to be a single imperative need. It will be met permanently, completely, only by Christian civilization.19

I think it is safe to conclude that there was not a strong movement for adapting Christianity to Chinese society and culture emanating from the missionary sector. The crucial nature of the translation process and product For Protestants, access to the Scriptures in one’s own language is essential. The nineteenth-century Protestant Bible translation projects in China may reveal a great deal not just about religious terms but also about concepts and perceptions of Chinese religions. There have been a few very good studies of Bible translation, including analysis of the disputes among missionaries over the “term question,” referring mainly to whether the Hebrew and Greek terms for God should be rendered as Shangdi or Shen (or yet something else).20 Ironically, the overwhelmingly popular Chinese Bible, the Mandarin (baihua) “Union version” of 1919, the product of almost thirty years of arduous work by several missionaries and their unheralded Chinese assistants, which still remains today the standard biblical text for most Chinese Christians around the world, is available in both a Shen and a Shangdi version. This general topic of translation appears to be extremely important in the transmission of Christianity worldwide, and it probably deserves more attention from China scholars. A closer look at it in China might reveal much in the patterns of equivalence or divergence in “religious” terms or in concepts of religion.21

Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2002), 330. Jost Zetzsche, The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Institut, 1999); Irene Eber, The Jewish Bishop and the Chinese Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and Irene Eber, Sze-kar Wan, and Knut Walf, eds., Bible in Modern China (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Institut, 1999). As portrayed by Norman Girardot in The Victorian Translation of China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), James Legge was at the center of the fierce and traumatic battles fought among missionaries over these terms, and imputations of heresy by opponents of Legge’s strong pro-Shangdi stance probably hastened his abandonment of the mission field and flight to Oxford. 21 A stimulating study is Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989). An early related study is Suzanne W. Barnett 19 20

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Popular religion, superstition, autonomy, independence, and the constraints of Western hegemony Relationships between Christianity and Chinese “popular religion” in the nineteenth century (and the twentieth as well ) are varied and interesting. There is the whole issue of the missionaries’ views of “popular religion,” that is, their views of the varied ritual observances and localized cults all over China. On the whole they viewed these as superstition, not really “religion,” at least not at all in the same category as Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucianism (if they considered Confucianism a religion). Of course the local elite had its own reservations about popular cults, and governments in the twentieth century, Communist and non-Communist alike, have tended to see them as superstition as well. Thus Chinese officials, local elites, and the missionaries were not far apart in their views of popular religion. However, there is also a clear pattern of appropriation by indigenous popular religious elements of parts of the Christian menu that the missionaries had on offer. Of course there are the Taipings, who were nothing if not creative in their theology. And later in the century there was a pattern of sectarian groups, some of them in the White Lotus category and many from other categories of sectarians as well, joining Christian churches and sometimes bringing with them their established sectarian behaviors, such as vegetarianism or spirit possession. Sometimes such elements would be disruptive, challenging or evading the missionary’s authority. Then in the twentieth century some entrepreneurial and energetic Chinese Christians rejected some aspects of the Christian presence in China (e.g., its foreign domination and its divisive denominationalism). Yet at the same time they were attracted by other features of that same foreign Christian presence (e.g., some took to new post-1900 ideas of Pentecostalism, or the doctrine of “gifts of the spirit”). They left their old missionaryrun churches and in the late 1910s and 1920s founded new Christian movements, eliminating what they did not like and retaining and adapting what they did. These movements included, among others, the True Jesus Church, the Jesus Family, and the group headed by Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng), which is referred to by outsiders as

and John K. Fairbank, eds., Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

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the Little Flock. The first two of these were (are) Pentecostal. There are other cases and examples, individuals as well as groups.22 By 1949, these totally independent Protestants probably constituted about one quarter of all Protestants. The Catholic case is different, of course, having little leeway for the growth of an overtly independent offshoot from the main trunk. Thus gradually occurred, quite unsurprisingly in retrospect, the twentieth-century development of local appropriation of the imported goods, local agency if you will, resulting in the creation of indigenous products. Yet the whole process was compromised, or skewed. The presence of the semicolonial framework within which this religious transmission took place meant that the largest (though probably not the most important) part of the Christian movement remained associated with foreigners, extraterritoriality, the treaty system in general, and all in all was embedded in the overall system of foreign hegemony.23 After 1949, given the Marxist-Leninist/atheist religious zeal of the new regime, combined with its claim to be the apotheosis of Chinese nationalism, it is not surprising that foreign missionaries were expelled, and that Chinese Christians were put through a harsh (harsher than for the followers of the other major religions) purge of alleged foreign influences and of leaders deemed too close to foreigners. This campaign also conveniently lent itself to tightening up controls on completely indigenous Christian groups that had no connections whatsoever with foreigners. Thus both as a causal factor and as an excuse for general extension of control, the legacy of the system of which the missionaries had been a part helped bring on a very difficult three decades for Chinese Christians. Their situation did not improve until the changes and reforms begun in 1978–1979.

Daniel Bays, “The Growth of Independent Christianity in China, 1900–1937,” in Bays, ed., Christianity in China, 307–316, has a brief summary description of the most important groups and individuals. 23 I have described elsewhere the combined Chinese and foreign leadership of the major institutions of the Protestant presence in China during the period of the Republic (1912–1949) as the “Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment.” This was supposed to be a partnership, with the Chinese gradually assuming full control, but most of the resources continued to be controlled by the foreign missions organizations, even as late as 1949. 22

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For the remainder of this chapter, I will identify and discuss briefly a few aspects of Chinese “religion” from the late Ming to the present which seem to have “receptors” open to a link or bridge to Christianity. The first permanent congregations of Chinese Christians date from the late Ming. What aspects of Chinese religion at that time might account for this? One of the interesting issues here is the attraction of some members of the elite to Christianity in the late Ming.24 The concept of “Confucian monotheism,” or “orthodoxy” (zheng), that is, morally orthodox in a Confucian sense, has been used to describe the beliefs of late Ming elite Christians such as Xu Guangqi.25 K. C. Liu’s concept of “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy,” referred to above, is also useful on this point. Likewise there seems to have been from the start of Chinese Catholicism a resonance between the Chinese practice of meditation and self-examination, found in different forms in both Confucianism and Buddhism, and Catholic recognition of sins and confession. The concept of “merit” (gong) also appears in both Catholicism and Chinese religions, especially in Buddhism.26 Despite the prominence of some of the late Ming converts among the elite, they constituted only a small proportion of Chinese Catholics. Many more converted from the lower social classes, that is, the seemingly rather un-Confucian realm of “popular religion,” or even that of heterodox or sectarian religious elements. This sort of “popular Christianity,” in addition to placing high value on baptism and confession, had much of the mysterious and the irrational—healings, exorcisms, miracles, the supernatural in many forms.27 In fact, however, as

24 An early effort to analyze this question objectively was Willard J. Peterson, “Why Did They Become Christians?,” in Charles E. Ronan, S. J., and Bonnie B. C. Oh, eds., The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773: East Meets West (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), 129–152. 25 This is well stated by Erik Zurcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity in Late Ming China,” The Catholic Historical Review 83 (1997): 614–653. 26 Ibid. Zurcher’s discussion here is very insightful. These factors were not limited to the elite, of course. 27 Jacques Gernet’s classic China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) has several examples of “popular Christianity,” which flourished exuberantly in some less urbanized and less elite-dominated areas. A very successful recent effort to get beyond the Jesuits at the Ming court and consider the remarkably effective work they did in small towns and rural areas, where sometimes high levels of religiosity were cultivated in nonelite Chinese believers,

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Eugenio Menegon points out, we should not draw artificial distinctions between elite and popular versions of Christianity. Many members of the elite also believed in the supernatural, and on the whole, substantially the same doctrinal beliefs and ritual behaviors characterized both elite and commoner Christians.28 The tenacious manner in which many Catholic families held on to their identity from the final proscription of Christianity in 1724 to its legalization in the mid-1800s is testimony to the achievement of a stable mixture of foreign and domestic elements in their construction of a Sino-foreign faith. Another promising area for future research and rethinking is Taiping religiosity. The apparently bizarre nature of Taiping ideology, seemingly so patently heterodox in terms of classical Christianity, may have led us to forego the insights that might be derived from close description and comparative analysis of Taiping ideas and praxis. Jonathan Spence has done some of this in his fine study of Hong, but the most ambitious rethinking of Taiping Christianity has been carried out by Thomas H. Reilly, who in his recent book views the Taipings as a form of Chinese Christianity that deserves to be taken seriously as such.29 I am interested in what appear to me to be some contemporary analogues of the Taipings. I am struck by similarities between, in the nineteenth century, Hong Xiuquan and what his originally Christian movement became, and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a whole host of self-appointed, charismatic, originally “Christian” leaders who behave not unlike Hong—often, like him, leading their flock into confrontation with a wary and suspicious state and, finally, disaster. These groups, for example one of the most troublesome to the authorities, “Eastern Lightning” (Dongfang Shandian), are remarkably dynamic and seemingly solidly based in a stratum of popular culture that serves as a referent for some Christian concepts.30 Clearly, indigenous popular culture shapes religious identity. is Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 28 Eugenio Menegon, “Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2002). 29 Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). An older source here is Vincent Y. C. Shih, The Taiping Ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences (Seattle: University of Washington Press). 30 A fine study of Eastern Lightning is Emily C. Dunn, “ ‘Cult,’ Church, and the CCP: Introducing Eastern Lightning,” Modern China 35, no. 1 (2009): 96–119.

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There is an interesting case of this phenomenon in mid-nineteenth century Catholicism. Our impression of the Catholic Church in China from the 1840s to the 1950s is that it was thoroughly dominated by foreign priests and bishops, and that Chinese Catholics were basically quite docile under this foreign (European—no American Catholics were on the scene until almost 1920) leadership. But recently published documents of the 1840s and 1850s from the Vatican archives in Rome show that when, after an absence from the 1720s to the 1840s the Jesuits returned to their old stronghold of Jiangnan (especially Jiangsu province), they found that Jiangnan Christians had, during the decades-long absence of the missionaries, developed their own leadership and practices, including more responsible roles for women, extensive lay leadership, altered ritual and devotional customs, and so forth. These were seemingly viable religious communities, built on a combination of Catholicism and traditional Chinese social patterns. When the returning foreign priests used strong-arm tactics to wrest power back from the locals, some local Chinese Catholic spokesmen wrote directly to the Holy See in protest. It is their sometimes poignant letters, among other things, that document this story.31 It is an open question whether, if these congregations had been able to continue their own way, they would have developed extreme heterodox practices and become syncretic sects. Just as I can see in the Taipings portents of potentially heterodox currents today among Protestants, it appears to me that sectarian tendencies among Chinese Catholics are likewise inherent in the last half-century split between the politically docile Catholic Patriotic Association and the self-styled Vatican loyalist priests and bishops (and lay believers as well ) of the “underground church.”32 The secretive, even conspiratorial, atmosphere of the Vatican loyalists reminds one of the strong sectarian traditions near the surface of popular culture, even today. Might the popular cultural matrix surrounding the dissident Catholic groups eventually encroach sufficiently on the dogma and 31 Sources here are David E. Mungello, “The Return of the Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian Backlash,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 27 (2005): 9–46. Also Xiaojuan Huang, “Christian Communities and Alternative Devotions in China 1780–1860” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006). 32 The term “underground church” is also often used to designate Protestant congregations that are not registered with the local government’s Religious Affairs Bureau (although its name was changed not long ago to the State Administration for Religious Affairs [SARA], it is still usually called the RAB).

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ritual of the church that it calls into question the identity and legitimacy of part of the entire Roman Church in China? I will conclude with a brief discussion of one of the “independent churches” of the Republican period of Chinese history, the Jesus Family (Yesu Jiating). The Jesus Family was founded in the 1920s and disbanded by the People’s Government in 1953. It is, I would argue, an excellent example of popular culture shaping both ritual behavior and understanding of that ritual behavior, with the result being that a cultural practice originating in the surrounding “pagan” culture is adapted to Christianity as the latter takes root in Chinese society. What is especially interesting is that the same feature of popular culture seems to have impacted the Boxer Movement in Shandong three decades earlier.33 Let me first give a brief overview, then focus on the particular ritual we will discuss.34 The Boxer Uprising culminating in 1900 has been the subject of several studies. One of the most stimulating is that of Joseph Esherick.35 One of Esherick’s major contributions is discussion of the religious rituals of the developing Boxer groups, in particular the “spirit-possession” ritual ( jiangshen futi) of the key Boxer group. This involved going into a trance and being possessed by a god, thus taking on aspects of the god’s identity. The possession ritual was in many ways the highest ritual experience for the Boxers, an act of empowerment bringing them closer than any other experience to the divine. This seems to have been the case even though the “gods” that possessed the Boxers were often figures from operas, much more representative of popular culture than of a “religion.”

33 I presented the essentials of this analysis at the 1990 symposium on the ninetieth anniversary of the Boxer movement, but it has never been published in English. Pei Shidan (D. Bays), “Ihotuan de zongjiao tiyan yu 20 shiji 20 niandai Shandong Jidujiao ‘Yesu jiating’ de bijiao” [Comparison of the religious experiences of the Boxers compared with the Christian Jesus Family in Shandong in the 1920s], Ihotuan yundong yu jindai Zhongguo shehui guoji xueshu taolunhui lunwenji [Proceedings of the international symposium on the Boxer movement and modern Chinese society] ( Jinan: Qilu Publishers, 1992), 521–525. 34 General sources on the Jesus Family are Wang Xipeng, Ji Yesu jiating [Recalling the Jesus Family] (Shanghai, 1950); and Tao Feiya, Zhongguo de Jidujiao wutobang: Yesu Jiating (1921–1952) [China’s Christian Utopia: The Jesus Family 1921–1952] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004). The latter won the prize for the best doctoral dissertation at Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002. 35 The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

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The Jesus Family was also a product of the north China plain. It began in Mazhuang village, Tai’an county (not far south of Ji’nan), and by 1949 there were over one hundred “families” with several thousand members. Each settlement was a community in which the believers worked and lived together and held all property in common, under the firm direction of the “family head.” Religious ritual was an important part of the daily life of the Jesus Family. Some of those rituals were also often seen in other churches of the “spiritual gifts” (ling’en) category. The following rituals occurred regularly: “Receiving the Gift” (meng’en) “Being filled with the Holy Spirit” (Shengling chongman) “Speaking in tongues” (shuo fangyan) “being born again” (chongsheng) “giving testimony” ( jianzheng)

The most important religious ritual experience was having a “divine trance” or being “raptured” (beiti), where the believer went into an apparently unconscious state, but his or her soul was “elevated” to see and hear God or Jesus, and thus to receive direct divine revelation and power. It appears that this beiti experience was the most highly valued in the community. It occurred less frequently than did the others, perhaps twenty or thirty times per year in a single community. All members, adults and children alike, could experience this; in it believers received their most intense form of empowerment, by coming close to God. While apparently not entirely the same, the Boxer experience of “spirit possession” (being possessed by one or more of a variety of gods embedded in local culture) and the Jesus Family’s “divine trance” (being transported to the presence of the one God) seem to me to be quite similar, in that both involve a seemingly unconscious state, both take place in one person, and both result in significant empowerment. There is another written source that may link the two phenomena. Wang Shipeng, who was affiliated with the National Christian Council in Shanghai, studied the Jesus Family very closely in the 1940s. He has a very interesting short section in his 1950 book on the Jesus Family which is actually a report by an old eyewitness of the Boxer events concerning a Boxer ritual called Shangti. This seems to be an initiation ritual of some kind. Is it the same as jiangshen futi? I do not know. I am also not sure how to translate Shangti in this context. The character ti is different in the two phrases, but the ti in Shangti is the same as that

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in the Family ritual beiti. So while the latter probably means “to be elevated or lifted up [to see or be in the presence of God],” (passive; initiative is God’s), perhaps the former means “entering upon elevation [to the god]” (active; believer takes initiative to approach god[s]). Jing Dianying (1890–1957), the founder and leader of the Jesus Family, was influenced by a myriad of elements swirling around him in the early twentieth century. Jing entered an American Methodist middle school in Tai’an in 1912 at the age of twenty-two and converted to Christianity around 1914, but he retained an interest in Buddhism and had contact of some kind with a White Lotus sect which in turn may have had links to a sect of the Boxer era. Later in the 1920s he was influenced by American missionaries from whom he learned the basics of Pentecostalism and “spiritual gifts.” And he could have hardly been ignorant of the wave of ecstatic “revivals” sweeping across Shandong in the late 1920s: among the Chinese, the “Spiritual Gifts Movement” (Ling’en Hui), and among the missionaries the “Shandong Revival.”36 All these elements Jing put together in his own very creative way, producing a movement that was undeniably Christian, yet thoroughly Chinese as well. Moreover, this Christian sectarian movement may have been significantly shaped by totally non-Christian cultural elements of the region that had also influenced the Boxers. Some Conclusions This chapter has ranged broadly over Christianity in both the West and in China. I have tried to further the goal of the larger project by identifying where we stand in the study of the history of Christianity in China, and indicating in which directions we might go in the future. I think that the key thing to keep in view is the principle that Christianity is flexible and adaptive, variable in its surface appearance, and quite experienced in crossing cultural divides. It has done this in many places around the world in the last century, rendering obsolete the old Western idea of “Christendom” and creating new Christianities by interacting with different cultures. Those of us studying the Christian movement in China should remember the very common phrase often

36 These are described briefly in Bays, “The Growth of Independent Christianity,” 311–312.

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heard in the first part of the twentieth century: “One more Christian, one fewer Chinese.” That was the perception, and there may have been some truth in it during the period of the association of Christianity with the system of foreign Western hegemony that constrained China’s development in many areas. But in the big picture that phrase has not been true; many Chinese have exercised freedom and creativity in turning elements of culture towards Christianity, not trying to replace their culture by Christianity. So I think that the most interesting and significant projects in the history of Christianity in China in the next few decades will be those that focus on this intersection of culture and “religion,” perhaps especially in the realm of ritual.37 Finally, Christianity has been a dynamic factor in the culture of many societies during the past century, not in China alone. I think we can heighten our understanding of the case of China if we make some comparisons and conduct some cross-studies to track the pattern of Christian expansion (or contraction) in other areas of the world. At the end of the day, we may conclude that Christianity is neither a Western religion nor a Chinese religion, but a world religion.

37 I will give just three examples of what I have in mind. One is a very recent book by Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Another is Nicolas Standaert and Ad Dudink, eds., Forgive Us Our Sins: Confession in Late Ming and Early Qing China, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 55 (Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 2006). On the Protestant side, there is forthcoming (from Yale University Press) a stimulating analysis by Xi Lian of how twentieth-century Chinese independent churches were significantly shaped in their formation and development by the popular religious culture of the traditional society in which they were incubated.

CONFUCIANISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: DEBATES IN THE TRANSFORMATION PERIOD OF MODERN CHINA (1900–1920s)* Liu Yi Shanghai University In the context of modernization and globalization, traditional culture paradoxically becomes a hot topic once again. This has been true especially in China, with Sino-Western cultural exchange as a main theme in modern times. The discussion beginning in the 1980s about whether Confucianism is a religion1 echoes in many ways a historical development: the movement of the Confucian Society (Kongjiao hui) and their effort to make Confucianism the state religion in the early Republic of China. In the new social and cultural contexts of the 1980s and 1990s, however, researchers paid much attention to the ideas and the movement of the Confucian Society itself but ignored major components of the event,2 especially the Christians’ role as the main opposition * This research was supported by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission Key Discipline: “The Social and Cultural History of Modern China” ( J50106). 1 Ren Jiyu, ed., Rujiao wenti zhenglun ji [The Debate on Confucianism] (Beijing: Religious Cultural Press, 2000). 2 Fang Deling, “Kang Youwei yu kongjiao yundong” [Kang Youwei and the Confucian Movement], Journal of Beijing Normal University, 1988, no. 6: 24–31; Liu Ping, “Lun minguo chunian de guojiao yundong” [On the Campaign for State Religion in the Early Republic of China], Journal of Sichuan Normal University (Chengdu), 1995, no. 1: 133–140; Ma Yong, “Xinhai hou zunkong sichao pingyi” [A Review of the Ideas on Worshiping Confucius after the 1911 Revolution], Historical Research in Anhui (Hefei), 1992, no. 2: 31–36; Qiu Wei, “Minchu kongjiaohui ji kongjiao yundong” [The Confucian Society and the Confucian Movement in the Early Republic of China], Journal of Zhejiang Provincial Party School, 2001, no. 2: 53–59; Hou Jie and Cai Weihong, “Chen Huanzhang yu kongjiaohui zazhi pingxi” [A Review of Chen Huanzhang and the Magazine of Confucian Society], paper presented at the Symposium on the 90th Anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, Taibei, 2001; Huang Lingjun, “Lun qingmo minchu de ding kongjiao wei guojiao yundong” [On the Campaign to Make Confucianism the State Religion in Later Qing and Early Republican China], Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Techonology (Wuhan), 2001, no. 3: 112–119; Gan Chunsong, “Kang Youwei he kongjiaohui: minguo chunian rujia fuxing nuli jiqi cuozhe” [Kang Youwei and the Confucian Society: The Confucian Revival and Its Failure in the Early Republic of China], Seeking Truth (Haerbin), 2002, no. 4: 110–114; Han

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party in that movement. In the history of Christianity in China, compared to the Boxer Movement and the Anti-Christian Movement, “the Golden Age of Christianity in China (1901–1920)” has been relatively neglected. The conflicts between Christians and Confucianists regarding state religion and religious freedom have often been perceived merely as a prelude to the Anti-Christian Movement in the 1920s.3 This perception prevents us from exploring other historical sources. For example, Shengjiao zazhi,4 the Catholic magazine published in Shanghai, has received little attention from scholars, even though it can be a major resource for studying church-state relations in Republican China. This chapter is first of all a historical study that aims to construct a comprehensive picture by exploring historical materials from the Christian side. Second, it is a case study of church-state relations in the Xing, “Qingmo minchu kongjiao huodong jiqi zhenglun” [The Confucian Movement and the Debate on Confucianism in Later Qing and Early Republican China], Journal of Religious Studies (Chengdu), 2003, no. 2: 91–103; Fan Yuqiu, Qingmo minchu kongjiao yundong yanjiu [A Study of the Confucian Movement in Later Qing and Early Republican China] (Qingdao: Ocean University of China Press, 2006); Zhang Weibo, Minguo chuqi de zunkong sichao yanjiu [A Study of Ideas on Worshiping Confucius in the Early Republic of China] (Beijing: People’s Press, 2006); Han Hua, Minchu kongjiaohui yu guojiao yundong yanjiu [A Study of the Confucian Society and the Campaign for State Religion in the Early Republic of China] (Beijing: National Library of China Publishing House, 2007). 3 Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The Anti-Christian Movement of 1920–1928 (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural Publications, 1988); Arne Sovik, Church and State in Republican China: A Survey History of the Relations between Christian Churches and the Chinese Government, 1911–1945 (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1952), chap. 3, “The Struggle for Religious Liberty”; Huang Kewu, “Minguo chunian kongjiao wenti zhi zhenglun, 1912–1917” [The Debate on Confucianism in the Early Republic of China, 1912–1917], Bulletin of Taiwan Normal University 12 (1984): 197–221; Cha Shijie, “Minchu de zhengjiao guanxi: jianlun jindai zhongguo zhengjiao guanxi de san moshi” [The Church-State Relationship in the Early Republic of China: With a Review of Three Models of the Church-State Relationship in Modern China], in Li Qifang, ed., Zhongguo jindai zhengjiao guanxi guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji [Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Church and State in Modern China: Past and Present] (Taibei: Tamkang University, 1987), 243–265; Charles A. Keller, “Nationalism and Christians: The Religious Freedom Campaign and Movement for Independent Chinese Churches, 1911–1917,” Republican China 17, no. 2 (1992): 30–51. 4 Shengjiao zazhi was published in Shanghai from 1912 to 1938. In addition to church matters and theology, it published a lot of essays on political and social affairs in Republican China. It is of special importance to this study because it reported in detail the process of making Confucianism the state religion as well as the debates between Confucians and Christians. Also, it reported not only the activities of Catholics, but also of Protestants and other religious people.

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early Republic that seeks to understand the movement in the context of both constitutional history and religious history. The paradoxical relations between politics and ideas, culture and religion, and religion and politics will be discussed in the end. The article is divided into four sections: Confucianism as a constitutional problem, the protests from Christians, the Society for Religious Freedom (Xinjiao ziyou hui), and the final inclusion of the guarantee of religious freedom in the constitution. Confucianism and the State Religion: A Constitutional Problem This chapter mainly concentrates on the early Republican era (1912–1917), with a brief historical retrospect of the last decade of the Qing dynasty. In 1913, according to the Provisional Constitution of 1912, the Congress was established in April, and the Constitution Drafting Committee was organized in July with thirty elected members from both the Senate and the House. All articles were passed after three readings. However, the final document could not be issued due to the dissolution of the Congress by Yuan Shikai. A review of the constitution, based on the 1913 draft, was initiated in 1916 but broke down in 1917 because of the second dissolution of the Congress; the whole draft did not pass the second reading. The first constitution was not enacted till 1923 and it remained in effect for only one year.5 The question of whether Confucianism is a religion was raised in the political reform movement in 1898. According to Kang Youwei (1858–1927),6 the leading intellectual of the reform, under the imperialists’ threats to the Qing government, Confucianism as the dominant ideology of the empire was likewise threatened by Christianity. So

For a study of the early constitutional history of Republican China, see Yan Quan, Shibai de yichan: zhonghua shoujie guohui zhixian (1913–1923) [The Legacy of Failure: The First Chinese Constitution (1913–1923)] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007). 6 Kang Youwei (1858–1927) was well known as a scholar, political thinker, and reformer. He proposed a new interpretation of the Confucian classics in order to prepare for political reform. He also put forward an amazing social vision in Datongshu (The Great Harmony). As an intellectual leader of the political reform movement in 1898, he had to flee to Japan after its failure. Kang was a cultural nationalist and an advocate of constitutional monarchy. An excellent study of Kang’s life, thought, and activity is 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). 5

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he wanted to reform Confucianism in a Christian way, then to save the empire through this cultural renewal. This can be seen as a kind of cultural nationalism, reflecting the ambivalent, love-hate mood of Chinese intellectuals toward the West. Their effort to change Confucianism from culture to religion was a Chinese response to Western challenges. Owing to the Boxer Movement’s disastrous effects, the issue of religious freedom drew the attention of Chinese Christians.7 In 1901, in a translation series on freedom in Wanguo gongbao (Review of the Times),8 there was an essay on “state religion,” with an argument that “it is not appropriate for the state to support any religion financially.”9 This might be the first document in modern China to discuss the problem of a state religion. In 1905 and in the same magazine, a Chinese author compared the religious wars in Europe and the missionary incidents in modern China and opined that religious freedom was the key to preventing such problems.10 In 1906, there were many reports published in Wanguo gongbao about the separation of church and state in Britain, France, Spain, and Japan. Confucian worship in imperial China was especially criticized, in contrast to the development in Western powers such as Britain and France.11 In 1901, the Qing government prepared to implement the “New Policy” (xinzheng), and in 1905 five senior statesmen were sent to 7 On the influence of the Boxer Movement, see Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 8 Wanguo gongbao (originally the Church News), also Wan Kuo Kung Pao, was established by the American missionary Young J. Allen (1836–1907). As the organ of the Literature Society since 1889, it became a main source of Western knowledge in the late Qing period, with a great influence on the political reform movement in 1898. Wanguo gongbao took the lead in introducing modern ideas during this period, which is why I trace the idea of religious freedom through this magazine. On Young J. Allen and Wanguo gongbao, see Leung Yuen Sang, Lin Lezhi zaihua shiye yu wanguo gongbao [Young J. Allen in China: His Careers and Wan-kuo kung-pao] (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1978); Adrian A. Bennett, Missionary Journalist in China: Young J. Allen and His Magazines, 1860–1883 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). 9 W. E. Macklin (trans.), “Ziyou pian, di shiba pian: lun guojiao” [On Freedom, No. 18: On State Religion], Wanguo gongbao [Review of the Times], vol. 150 ( July, 1901): 7. 10 Huang Zicai, “Zhengjiao fenquan lun” [On the Separation of Church and State], Wanguo gongbao, vol. 196 (May, 1905): 14–15. 11 “Faguo zhengjiao fenli zhi yuanyin” [On Reasons for the Separation of Church and State in France], Wanguo gongbao, vol. 206 (March, 1906), p. 68. “Shijie guojiao zhi weixiang” [The Dangerous Situation of State religion in the World], Wanguo gongbao, vol. 216 ( January, 1907), p. 64.

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survey political institutions in the West. In 1906, the United Society of Chinese Protestants in America (Lümei huamin yesujiao lianhui) sent a petition to these visiting Qing officials: “In order to avoid the occurrence of anti-missionary incidents and then to remove the imperialists, religious freedom should be written into the constitution, so that political authority will be respected and the people’s livelihood will be protected.”12 This can be regarded as the first petition for religious freedom in Chinese history. With the Qing government’s decision to formulate a constitution, a constitutional campaign began in 1910 and became the first opportunity for Chinese Christians to struggle for religious freedom in practice. In the winter of 1910, Cheng Jingyi (1881–1939)13 and Yu Guozhen (1852–1932)14 along with others founded the Association for Religious Freedom (Zongjiao ziyou qingyuanhui). They noted that all kinds of issues such as politics, law, academics, and technology were being discussed, with the exception of religious freedom. They argued that religious freedom is a very important issue that is related to both the state and the people, and that it is the duty of Christians to promote such freedom.15 Responses came from many places. One point raised in this early stage of the debate was that Chinese Christians were still dependent on missionaries and foreign forces. They needed to consult with missionaries and request consent from foreign consuls in order to participate in the movement for religious freedom. The campaign ended suddenly and unexpectedly due to the collapse of the Manchu reign.

12 “Lümei huamin yesujiao lianhehui shang kaocha zhengzhi duan zai er dachen bin” [The Paper of the United Society of Chinese Protestants in America Submitting to Minister Duan and Zai], Wanguo gongbao, vol. 208 (May, 1906): 87–89. 13 Cheng Jingyi (Cheng Ching-yi) was born into a Christian family of Manchu descent. His father was a pastor of the London Missionary Society. Cheng studied at the Angelo-Chinese Institute in Beijing, the Theological Institute in Tianjin, and Glasgow Bible College in Britain. He was one of the three Chinese representatives to the 1910 World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh. During the 1920s and 1930s, Cheng became a prominent leader of Chinese churches, attaining high positions in both the National Christian Council and the Church of Christ in China. He was an active promoter of the indigenous movement. 14 Yu Guozhen (Yu Zongzhou), a Presbyterian pastor, was a leader of the independence movement among Chinese churches in the early twentieth century. He was one of the founders of the China Christian Union (1902) and the founder of the China Christian Independent Church (1906). 15 “Faqi zongjiao ziyou hui yuanqi” [The Founding of the Association for Religious Freedom], Sheng jiaohui bao [ Journal of the Sacred Church] 4, no. 4 (1911): 38.

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In 1912, with the founding of the Republic of China, the Provisional Constitution contained clear declarations: “All people of the Republic are equal regardless of race, class and religion. . . . All people have religious freedom.”16 Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the leader of the Republican revolution and the first president of the Republic, also affirmed the right of religious freedom on many occasions. Of course, it was a welcome message for Chinese Christians.17 However, for others, especially traditional intellectuals, it was just the opposite. Because they viewed this article in the Provisional Constitution as a threat to the status of Confucianism as the dominant ideology, they suggested adding a new article that would make Confucianism the state religion. On October 7, 1912, Chen Huanzhang (1880–1933)18 along with others founded the Confucian Society in Shanghai. Their aim was to “promote Confucianism and save society.”19 In November, they announced it to the new president, Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), and to the Department of Education and Department of Internal Affairs.20 Following the founding of the Confucian Society, many similar organizations emerged, such as Zongsheng Hui (Society for Worshiping Confucius), Kongdao Hui (Society of Confucian Teachings), and Kongshe (Society of Confucius). In August 1913, the representatives of the Confucian Society, including Chen Huanzhang and the two leading scholars, Yan Fu (1854–1921) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), submitted to the Congress a proposal to make Confucianism the state religion. It stated that “morality is the foundation of the Republic and Confucian-

16 “Zhonghua minguo linshi yuefa” [The Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China], in China’s Second Archives, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi dang’an ziliao huibian [Historical Archives of the Republic of China], vol. 2 (Nanjing: Jiangsu Guji Press, 1981), 106–107. 17 For the relation between Christianity and the Republic of China, see Leung Sau Wah, Geming xianqu: jidutu yu wanqing zhongguo geming de qiyuan [Pioneers of the Chinese Revolution: Christians and the Origins of the Late Ching Revolution] (Hong Kong: China Alliance Press, 2007). 18 Chen Huanzhang obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on “The Economic Principles of Confucius.” In 1912, he founded the Confucian Society under the direction of his teacher, Kang Youwei. In 1930, he moved to Hong Kong and established the Confucian Academy, which is now an important organization promoting Confucian teachings. 19 Han Da, ed., Pingkong jinian, 1911–1949 [Chronology of Confucian Review, 1911–1949] ( Jinan: Shandong Educational Press, 1985), 5. 20 Ibid., 7.

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ism is the source of Chinese morality . . . therefore Confucianism should be the state religion of the Republic.”21 In the view of Chen Huanzhang, the type of religion is one of the features that distinguish barbarian tribes from civilized nations. Confucianism is the religion of the Chinese people, and Confucius was its founder. There are religions centered on gods and ghosts, and there are religions centered on humans; the latter are of a higher order, and they include Confucianism. In China, the word jiao has three different meanings: religion, education, and enlightenment. Confucianism consists of all three, with religion as the most fundamental.22 That Confucianism is the state religion of China is an unwritten constitutional article. Confucianism is to the people what water is to fish.23 Confucianism represents the national character of China.24 Today, to promote Confucianism is simply to save the country.25 State religion and religious freedom are both Chinese customs. If there is not an article guaranteeing religious freedom in the constitution, there will be no need for one on a state religion. If one is present, the other should be too. It would be overindulgent to include only an article on religious freedom, but to prescribe a state religion would constitute too much interference.26 Religious freedom does not mean the elimination of the state religion, but permitting one to practice other religions freely in addition to the national one. People will not be killed and their official recognition will not be denied just because of their religion. Without violating the law, they can build their temples, worship their gods, read their classics, practice their rituals, and teach their doctrines

21 “Kongjiao hui qingyuan shu” [Petition of the Confucian Society], in Shen Yunlong ed., Jindai zhongguo shi ziliao congkan zhengbian [Collections of Historical Resources of Modern China], vol. 50, no. 498 (Taibei: Wenhai Press, 1966), 5120–5127. 22 Chen Huanzhang, “Kongjiao lun” [On Confucianism], in Minguo congshu [Collected Books of Republican China], vol. 4, no. 2 (Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore, 1992), 91–93. 23 Chen Huanzhang, “Kongjiao lun,” 50. 24 Ibid., 54–55. 25 Chen Huanzhang, “Lun feiqi kongjiao yu zhengju zhi guanxi” [On the Relation between the Abolishment of Confucianism and the Political Situation], in Shen Yunlong ed., Jindai zhongguo shi ziliao congkan zhengbian, vol. 50, no. 498, 5098–5108. 26 Chen Huanzhang, “Mingding yuanyou zhi guojiao wei guojiao bingbu aiyu xinjiao ziyou zhi xin mingci” [The Establishment of the Original State Religion Is Not Contrary to the New Conception of Religious Freedom], in Shen Yunlong ed., Jindai zhongguo shi ziliao congkan zhengbian, vol. 50, no. 498, 5058–5059.

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freely.27 In addition, Chen Huanzhang also cited the constitutions of Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and Turkey to support his idea.28 On June 22, 1913, President Yuan Shikai issued a decree establishing the worship of Confucius. It stated that Confucius had been the model of Chinese teachers for generations, as a founder of the imperial system and official institutions. The rituals would be regulated according to the traditional custom and communicated to the whole nation.29 On September 9, 1913, the vice president, Li Yuanhong (1864–1928), by telegram directed the State Council, the Congress, and the local governors and congressmen to support Chen Huanzhang’s proposal to make Confucianism the state religion. The governors of Henan, Yunnan, Guangdong, and Jiangxi approved.30 In the middle of September 1913, Chen Mingshu (1889–1965), one of the early revolutionaries of the Republic and later a senior general in the Nationalist army, formally proposed to the Constitution Drafting Committee that Confucianism be declared the state religion. Observing that Confucianism had been the national heritage of China for more than four thousand years, he said, “To make Confucianism the state religion is just to make the unwritten article a written one.” This proposal did become one of the discussion topics of the Constitution Drafting Committee.31 On September 27, 1913, the Constitution Drafting Committee discussed the topic of making Confucianism the state religion. Chen Mingshu started by saying that Confucianism is the religion of the civilized period and is different from the religions of barbarians, so it should be made the state religion. A committee member protested, citing four reasons: (1) China is not a religious country; (2) Confucius

27 Chen Huanzhang, “Mingding yuanyou zhi guojiao wei guojiao bingbu aiyu xinjiao ziyou zhi xin mingci,” 5056. 28 “Kongjiao hui qingyuan shu,” 5120–5127. 29 “Da zongtong fabu zunchong kongsheng mingling” [Answer to the President’s Decree on Worshiping Confucius], in China’s Second Archives, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi dang’an ziliao huibian [Historical Archives of Republican China], vol. 3 (Nanjing: Jiangsu Guji Press, 1991), 1–2. 30 Division of Republican China, Institute of Chinese Modern History, China’s Academy of Sciences, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi ziliao conggao [Collections of Historical Resources of Republican China], special issue, no. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1974), 32. 31 “Xianfa zhong guiding kongjiao zhi tiyi zhe” [The Proposal of Writing Confucianism into the Constitution], Shenbao [Newspaper of Shanghai], September 16, 1913, p. 6.

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is not a religious leader; (3) religious freedom is the general rule of constitutions, and thus to make Confucianism the state religion is contrary to the constitution; and (4) the Republic consists of five races. To make Confucianism the state religion will lead to the disloyalty of Mongolians and Tibetans. Wang Rongbao (1878–1933), another early revolutionary and congressman, responded that the Confucian ideas of affluent society (xiaokang) and great harmony (datong) are so distinctive that even Jean-Jacques Rousseau had never thought about them. Therefore it is misleading to say that Confucius supports a totalitarian system. Confucianism is not hostile to other religions. The problem of Mongolia and Tibet depends on political power, which has no relationship to the state religion. Two other committee members protested again, arguing that Confucius is the heir of the ancient emperors Yao and Shun, and of Wen and Wu in the Zhou dynasty. To establish a state religion, they argued, we have to find the real origin of Chinese culture. Due to the opposition of the majority of the committee, the proposal did not pass.32 The second reading of the proposal regarding state religion came on October 13, 1913. The members were divided into two parties. Supporters argued that Confucianism is a religion centered on humans, and this is the model that would replace religions of gods and ghosts; indeed, it would be popular all over the world. Thus, it was necessary to make it the state religion in China. Additionally, national character is vital to a nation, and Confucianism is the core of Chinese national character; thus it should be embodied in the constitution. The opposition made two objections. First, Confucius was the heir of the ancient emperors Yao and Shun, as well as of Wen and Wu in the Zhou dynasty. They, rather than Confucius, should be the lords of a state religion, if having one is really necessary. Second, loyalty (zhong) and forgiveness (shu) are the fundamentals of Confucianism. If they are written into the constitution, anyone disobeying them must be punished, or the constitution will be invalid. In the final vote, the supporters were again in the minority and the proposal was rejected.33

32 “Xianfa guiding guojiao wenti zhi shezhan” [The Debate on Establishing a State Religion in the Constitution], Zhonghua shenggonghui bao [Bulletin of China’s Anglican Church] 6, no. 11 (1913): 32. 33 “Jinshi: benguo zhi bu” [News: Domestic Part], Shenjiao zazhi, 1913, no. 11: 423–424.

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On October 28, 1913, when the second reading was over, Wang Rongbao proposed to add a second clause to the nineteenth article: “Confucian teachings should be the basis of public education.” Lan Gongwu (1887–1957), a philosopher and politician who studied law in Japan and Germany, said it would be better to say that “Confucian teachings that are not incompatible with the Republic should be the basis of public education.” Chen Mingshu proposed that “Confucian teachings should be the ethical basis of public education.” Another committee member said that “the ethical basis” should be replaced by “the basis of self-cultivation.” Wu Zongci (1879–1951)34 together with a few other members opposed the addition of a second clause. After several votes, the committee approved a compromise version of the clause: “Confucian teachings should be the basis of self-cultivation in public education.” This was only the beginning of the constitutional debates about religion in the Republic of China.35 On October 25, 1913, Yuan Shikai instructed the provincial governors by telegram to oppose the constitutional draft. On November 4, he declared the dissolution of the Nationalist Party (KMT, Guomindang) and revoked their membership in the Congress. On November 5, he ordered the troops to check the assemblymen’s identity. For lack of a quorum, the Congress was closed. Then Yuan convened the Administrative Meeting (Xingzheng huiyi) to discuss national affairs; this later became the Political Meeting (Zhengzhi huiyi). On January 10, 1914, according to the resolution of the Political Meeting, all members of the Congress were dismissed. The Congress was thus declared to be formally dissolved.36 On November 26, 1913, Yuan Shikai issued a decree on worshiping Confucius (zunkong ling) to the whole nation and submitted it to the Political Meeting as a resolution. It stated that the Confucian teachings are eternal and enlightening, just like the sun and the rivers. They are comprehensive, delicate, and distinctive, and should be even

34 Wu Zongci was a historian who had experience in politics, business, and education. He was the author of three local chronicles and the well-known constitutional history of Republican China, which was the first in Chinese history. 35 Wu Zongci, Zhonghua minguo xianfa shi [The Constitutional History of Republican China], vol. 1 (Beijing: Oriental Times Bureau; Shanghai: Dadong Book Company, 1924), 38. 36 Li Jiannong, Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi [The Political History of China in the Last One Hundred Years] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1948; repr., Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2002), 359–363.

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more respected at the founding of the new nation. All the descendants of Confucius should receive special benefits, just as in the imperial period.37 On January 14, 1914, the Political Meeting discussed the issue of offering sacrifices to Confucius and Heaven ( jitian sikong); most people agreed. Only a few details were discussed, such as the date of worship and the costumes. On the question of offering sacrifices to Confucius, the speaker insisted that this was different from establishing a state religion and cited a few examples to support his position. Ma Xiangbo (1840–1949)38 and another Christian at the meeting were intensely opposed to the sacrifices. However, with a majority approval, the proposal was passed.39 Religious Freedom: Voices of Christians Christians, especially Protestants, played a prominent role in the campaign for religious freedom, both as the initiator and the majority, and both intellectually and organizationally. From the perspective of Confucians, Christianity was also the main opposition party. Therefore, the present author prefers to interpret the movement for freedom of religion generally as a struggle between Confucians and Christians, though other religious groups also participated. Efforts to make Confucianism the state religion aroused protests from Christians. The first question was whether Confucianism was really a religion, and Confucius a religious founder. A journalist of Shengjiao zazhi commented that “there were still some semi-religions Zhengfu gongbao [Government Bulletin], November 27, 1913, no. 563. Ma Xiangbo (Ma Liang) is well known as the founder of three institutions of higher education: Aurora Academy, Fudan Public School (later Fudan University in Shanghai), and Catholic University of Peking (later Fu Jen Catholic University). He was born into a prominent Catholic family in 1840. At the age of 11, he enrolled in a French Jesuit School in Shanghai and remained there till 1870 as a student and later a teacher. His idea of establishing an institution of higher learning was finally realized in 1928 by his close friend, Cai Yuanpei, who founded the Academia Sinica. On Ma Xiangbo and his contributions, see Ruth Hayhoe and Yongling Lu, eds., Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China, 1840–1939 (Armonk, NY: M. Sharpe, 1996). 39 “Zhengzhi huiyi taolun jitian zunkong liang’an jiwen” [Record of the Discussion of the Sacrifice to Confucius and the Heaven in the Political Meeting], Shenbao, January 19, 1914, p. 2. “Jitian sikong liang’an chengli shimo ji” [Record of the Establishment of the Two Proposals on the Sacrifice to Confucius and the Heaven], Shengjiao zazhi, 1914, no. 3: 105. 37 38

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in China before Confucius; religion just disappeared with his birth.”40 Another journalist listed the general characteristics of religions, such as belief in gods, prayer, and punishment in afterlife, and concluded that “Confucianism has none of these three.”41 The more important reason for opposition to the establishment of Confucianism was that it was contrary to the article on religious freedom in the constitution, and harmful to the identity and welfare of citizens. For example, Cheng Jingyi said, “If any one religion should be made to interfere with the liberty of our citizens, although based on the pretext of preventing them from evading responsibility, the despotic poison will have entered into the very bones and marrow of our national life, whereas the old despotism in comparison did little more than scratch the skin.” Chen Huanzhang and his associates wanted to make Confucianism the state religion in order to unite the thoughts of the people and to maintain the national character. “Their intention is doubtless excellent, but their method cannot avoid the charge of bias.”42 Moreover, we should pay attention to the collective nature of Christian protest. It was the Protestants in Beijing who first gathered together to found the Beijing Association for Religious Freedom and against State Religion (Beijing xinjiao ziyou buding guojiao qingyuantuan). In their declaration, they criticized the Confucian Society on five counts: (1) Confucianism is not a religion; (2) there is no religion in Chinese history; (3) state religion is outdated, and most countries have discarded it; (4) state religion is incompatible with religious freedom; and (5) to make Confucianism the state religion is harmful to customs, people’s minds, and freedom of thought. For the benefit of the churches and the nation, they decided to call the different religious groups together, to petition the president and Congress, and to issue a statement to believers all over the country.43

Bing Zhi, “Kongjiao shi yi zongjiao” [Confucianism Is a Religion], Shengjiao zazhi, 1913, no. 1: 13. 41 Zhang Bailu, “Kongzi fei zongjiao jia” [Confucius Is Not a Religious Founder], Shengjiao zazhi, 1913, no. 12: 441–447. 42 Cheng Ching Yi, “Translation of Protest against the Movement in Favor of Making Confucianism a State Religion,” The Chinese Recorder 44, no. 11 (1913): 687–688; idem, “Zhonghua minguo ding guojiao yijian shu” [Opinions on Establishing the State Religion in Republican China], Dagong bao [Ta Kung Pao], November 7, 8, 9, 1913, p. 1. 43 “Faqi qingyuan xinjiao ziyou buding guojiao tonggao shu” [Declaration of Petition for Religious Freedom and against State religion], Dagong bao, September 5, 1913, p. 1. 40

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They submitted their statement to the Congress and argued that it was really unnecessary to make Confucianism the state religion. They gave a few reasons: First, from the perspective of legislation, a state religion is incompatible with religious freedom in the Constitution. Second, from the perspective of politics, it would destroy the harmony among the five races, do harm to the sovereignty of the Republic, and lead to religious conflicts. Third, from the perspective of reality, there is no strong country with a state religion in the world, and it is wrong to say that Confucianism as the state religion is an unwritten constitutional article.44 The Protestants’ activities in Beijing won support from leaders of other faiths. The Catholic representatives said, “All religions should be equally treated in one nation.”45 The representatives of China’s Buddhist Society (Zhonghua fojiao zonghui) argued that Confucianism is purely a “law of the world” (shijian fa) and that the legislation should be appropriate to the society and beneficial to the stabilization of the country.46 The representatives of China’s Daoist Society (Zhonghua daojiao zonghui) thought that religious freedom was already guaranteed in the Provisional Constitution, which the government should not reverse.47 The different religious groups united together under common aims. On October 20, 1913, the Protestant representatives of different denominations had a meeting in Beijing.48 On October 31, the Christians called the other religious groups to hold a united meeting of five religions in Beijing.49 On November 27, the representatives of Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam, with the Catholic and Protestant representatives in Beijing, held the second united meeting. As a result 44 “Jidujiao qingyuan daibiao Zhang Shouchun Liang Jiangyi Cheng Jingyi deng shang canzhong liangyuan shu” [Petition of the Protestant Representatives Including Zhang Shouchun, Liang Jiangyi, Cheng Jingyi and Others to the Congress], Dagong bao, November 27, 28, 1913, p. 1. 45 “Ni tianzhujiao quanti gongmin qingyuan xinjiao ziyou buding guojiao shang canzhong liangyuan shu” [Petition of All Catholic Citizens to the Congress for Religious Freedom and against State Religion], Dagong bao, September 24, 25, 26, 27, p. 1. 46 “Zhonghua fojiao zonghui qingyuan guiding xinjiao ziyou shu” [Petition of China’s Buddhist Society for Religious Freedom], Dagong bao, November 2, 1913, p. 1. 47 “Beijing baiyunguan daojiao zonghui shangshu canzhong liangyuan qingyuan xinjiao ziyou shu” [Petition of the General Society of Beijing Baiyun Temple to the Congress for Religious Freedom], Dagong bao, November 10, 1913, p. 1. 48 “Jinshi: benguo zhi bu” [News: Domestic Part], Shengjiao zazhi, 1913, no. 11: 423. 49 “Jinshi: benguo zhi bu” [News: Domestic Part], Shengjiao zazhi, 1914, no. 1: 37.

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the United Petition League of All Religions (Zongjiao lianhe qingyuantuan) was finally established.50 The aim of this league was to “ask for religious freedom and protest against the state religion, as well as to prevent any law that would lead to religious inequality.” People from all religions could become members. There was no president and vice president, only a united council that would coordinate all kinds of things. Each religious group should have its own council of communication, to maintain connections within and without their group. All religious groups should unite together to present petitions to the Congress and the government.51 The foundation of this league strongly stimulated the activities of different religious groups. They sent telegrams to the president, the vice president, the premier, and the congressmen, and even presented their ideas in personal visits. Their efforts won some replies. For example, in November 1913 the Protestant representatives went to visit the vice president, Li Yuanhong; the latter replied that “Confucianism or any other religion should not be made the state religion of the Republic.”52 On December 1, the Protestants went to visit the president, and the president replied through his secretary, saying that he looked upon Confucianism as a source of learning and virtues, not as a religion, let alone the state religion.53 Additionally, the premier Xiong Xiling (1870–1937) also proclaimed that it would be better to keep the religious situation as before: no state religion and no religious conflict.54 The president’s proposal to offer sacrifice to Confucius and Heaven aroused fresh protests. Ma Xiangbo commented that the separation of church and state was based on scientific rules. “Religion and politics each have their own spheres.” The president’s role as a priest belonged neither to the political sphere nor the religious one. No particular religion could be imposed on the people, let alone the president. “Everyone should insist on his own belief, without intervention from the government.”55

Ibid., 35. “Gejiao lianhe qingyuantuan jianzhang” [General Regulations of the United Petition League of All Religions], Shengjiao zazhi, 1914, no. 1: 22. 52 “Jinshi: benguo zhi bu” [“News: Domestic Part”], Shengjiao zazhi, 1914, no. 1: 34. 53 Ibid., 33–34. 54 Ibid., 34. 55 Ma Xiangbo, “Yiguo yuanshou ying jian zhuji shi fou” [“Should the President be in Charge of Sacrificial Matters”], in Zhu Weizheng, ed., Ma Xiangbo ji [Collected Works of Ma Xiangbo] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1996), 144–145. 50 51

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The united league submitted a letter to the president, the Political Meeting, and the State Council, listing the disadvantages of offering sacrifice to Confucius and asking for religious freedom. It stated that “to declare that the fundamental principles and policies of the state be based on Confucian customs, is just to tell the people of all religions that the government has determined to make Confucianism the state religion.”56 They questioned the government on six issues: (1) Do the sacrifice to Confucius and the sacrifice to Heaven mean the fusion of religion and politics, or the separation of church and state? (2) Will it be illegal for believers of other religions not to sacrifice to Confucius and Heaven, and contrary to their beliefs to do it? If so, how can this dilemma be resolved? (3) The expenditure for the sacrifice to Confucius and Heaven comes from the national treasurer. Should people from other religions contribute to this expense? (4) Is the president the leader of the whole nation, or just of a particular religion and race? (5) If the next president does not insist on this sacrifice, will he be dismissed, or will the regulation be abolished? (6) Are officials and students from other religions who do not obey this rule because of their religious belief still citizens of the Republic?57 Given the intense opposition from other religions, Yuan Shikai and the government had to change their minds. On February 7, 1914, Yuan Shikai issued a new decree. In the third part of the decree he said, “Religious freedom is the general principle of the contemporary world. The Republic consists of five races, and each of them has different customs and religions; thus it is contrary to the people’s ideas to establish a state religion.” However, sacrifices to Confucius and other great ancestors are not religious rites but traditional customs that “people with a religious belief can just practice freely.”58 The establishment of a state religion was denied, and religious freedom was secure. But the proposal for sacrificing to Confucius and Heaven was passed, as well as the second clause of article 19. Thus the Christians had not fully accomplished their aims. However, partly because of the partial success of their efforts, and more importantly

56 “Gejiao lianhe qingyuantuan shang da zongtong shu” [Petition of the United League of All Religions to the President], Shengjiao zazhi, 1914, no. 3: 116. 57 “Jiaotuan zhi zhiyi” [Questions of the United League of All Religions], Zhonghua shenggonghui bao 7, no. 3 (1917): 42–43. 58 “Mingling” [Decree], Shenbao, February 9, 1914, p. 2.

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because of the Congress’s inability to continue the discussion, the Christians concluded that although the Constitution had not yet been established, the national issues had been decided. “It is reasonable that Confucianism will not be made the state religion, and people will have religious freedom in the future Congress.”59 They thought their objective was realized for the time being, and the Beijing Association for Religious Freedom and against State Religion was then dismissed.60 The decision marked the end of the first half of the campaign. The Society for Religious Freedom: Organization and Ideas In June 1916, after Yuan Shikai died and Li Yuanhong became the new president, the Provisional Constitution and the Congress were both restored. The constitutional draft was reviewed again, and of course, the problems of state religion and religious freedom were once more raised. It meant the start of a new stage of the campaign for religious freedom. The founding of the Society for Religious Freedom was an example. In November 1916, the Society for Religious Freedom was formally founded, with its general office located in the Central Park of Beijing. Xu Qian (George Hsu, 1871–1940)61 was elected president.62 The society’s aim was to ensure that “all people of the Republic have the constitutional right of complete religious freedom.” The general body was in Beijing, and local offices were built all over the country. Everyone who agreed with the platform of this society could be a member,

59 Chen Chunsheng, “Jidujiao duiyu zuijin shiju zhi gailun” [General Views of Christians on the Recent Situation], in China Continuation Committee, ed., Zhonghua jidu jiaohui nianjian [Annals of the Chinese Christian Churches], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1914), 12. 60 Zhang Shuxian, “Jielu beijing xinjiao ziyou buding guojiao qingyuantuan baogaoshu” [A Brief Record of the Beijing Association for Religious Freedom and against State Religion], in China Continuation Committee, ed., Zhonghua jidu jiaohui nianjian [Annals of the Chinese Christian Churches], vol. 2 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1915), 258. 61 Xu Qian was an imperial scholar of the late Qing and became a prominent figure in the Republic of China. He contributed to the judicial system of modern China, writing a few books and holding special positions in the government. 62 Chen Tiesheng, “Xinjiao ziyou hui shulüe” [A Brief Introduction of the Society for Religious Freedom], China Continuation Committee, ed., Zhonghua jidu jiaohui nianjian [Annals of the Chinese Christian Churches], vol. 4 (Shanghai: The Christian Literature Society, 1918), 204.

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whether he had a religious belief or not. There were four departments: the Department of General Affairs, the Department of Communication, the Department of Documents, and the Department of Accountancy. In each department there was one executive secretary, who was responsible to the general secretary. Xu Qian was appointed as the general secretary and executive secretary of the Communication Department. Local members were in charge of the local offices. General meetings were called by the general office or the local branches, and the meeting of secretaries was held by all the departments together. Membership dues as well as donations were collected and contributed by the secretaries. The money was to be deposited in a reliable bank, and the General Secretary was in charge of the account.63 The Society for Religious Freedom had similar aims, forms, and membership as the United Petition League. In other words, it succeeded and developed the former organization. However, the Society for Religious Freedom had more members, a more rigid organizational structure, more avenues of protest, and more activities. Compared with the United Petition League, it became a more experienced organization and was suited to the later stage of the campaign. The society held meetings and speeches, sent letters and telegrams, propagated its ideas, and established local offices. As the organization grew, issues and opinions multiplied and the ideas of different religious groups could not be unified. The Protestant representatives proposed that every religious group should act on its own, with a general meeting held weekly. The society was divided into three parts: Catholics, Protestants, and other religions.64 The activities of the general body included the following: (1) General meetings: There was a general meeting of the leaders from different religions every week. Each division reported its activities. Issues were discussed and decisions made in the general meetings. (2) Visiting the president: There were two visits. In the first visit, the organization’s representatives were limited to two Catholics and two Protestants, including Cheng Jingyi. At the second visit, each religious group had its own representative. During both visits, the president replied that the proposal of the society was reasonable, and suggested that they

63 “Xinjiao ziyou hui xuanyanshu: yueyan” [Declaration of the Society for Religious Freedom: A Brief Introduction], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 2: 80–81. 64 Chen Tiesheng, “Xinjiao ziyou hui shulüe,” 204.

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submit their plan to Congress. (3) Communicating with congressmen: Beginning with the foundation of the society, religious leaders visited the congressmen both personally and collectively and presented the society’s ideas. Many congressmen agreed with the proposal of the society and some of them even became members.65 The Protestant division was especially active. Cheng Jingyi was elected as the general secretary of this division. The general office was set up in the Beijing headquarters of the Church of Christ in China (Zhonghua jidu jiaohui). Many local offices were founded as well, in provinces including Zhili, Shandong, Fengtian, Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, Shannxi, and Sichuan. Their activities were as follows: (1) Sending representatives to the local provinces: Many church leaders were sent from Beijing to Shanxi, Fengtian, Shandong, Tongzhou, and Henan to propagate the society’s ideas, collect the ideas of the people, and ask the local churches to work together. (2) Sending representatives to work in Beijing: As a response, the Petition League for the Separation of Church and State (Zhengjiao fenli qingyuantuan) was founded in the South. Five members were sent to Beijing to work together with the church leaders there. (3) Telegrams, publications, and donations: Expressions of support for the society included more than forty telegrams, ninety letters, and thirty works by believers who agreed with the society. In addition, some ten thousand pamphlets were printed and distributed. Cheng Jingyi collected records of the proceedings and other materials, edited News for Religious Freedom (Qingyuan ziyou jinxun), and sent it to the local churches. The Protestant division also sent telegrams to both the houses and offices of congressmen. In total, the division received donations of about 1,300 yuan (nearly the current value of US $13,000).66 The society’s ideas can be interpreted from two perspectives. Negatively, the organization opposed making Confucianism the state religion; positively, it argued for religious freedom. Different points were emphasized on different occasions, but these two ideas are just different sides of the same issue. The society protested the establishment of Confucianism as the state religion because it would harm religious freedom; they argued for religious freedom as a means of protesting against a state religion. In a word, a state religion is incompatible

65 66

Ibid., 204. Ibid., 204–205.

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with religious freedom; one cannot get along with the other. In general, there are four main points of incompatibility between the two positions: (1) Religious conflicts and religious freedom: According to the declaration of the Society for Religious Freedom, religious freedom is the outcome of reflection on religious conflicts. The religious conflicts in medieval and early modern Europe led to wars among nations and the sufferings of the people. The survivors of wars began to reflect that only religious freedom could end the conflicts and ensure people’s happiness. Therefore, religious freedom was written into European constitutions as a fundamental principle. The United States and Japan are also religiously pluralistic societies. They adopted religious freedom to prevent religious wars. The Qing government’s hostile attitudes toward other countries led to a lot of missionary incidents followed by imperialist intervention. In particular, during the Boxer Movement of 1900 the whole nation was nearly destroyed. With the founding of the Republic, religious freedom was written into the Provisional Constitution. It would not only protect the rights of religious people but also prevent religious conflicts. “Therefore, religious freedom is just one of the reasons why the Qing government collapsed and the Republic was established.” It would be shortsighted to repeat the mistakes of Europe and the Qing government by denying people the right of religious freedom. It would also be harmful to the new Republic.67 (2) The state religion and the republic of five races: In the view of the society, a state religion should be the religion of the whole nation. All citizens of the Republic must embrace this state religion, whether they are Manchurians, Chinese (han), Mongolians, Muslims, or Tibetans. Apart from the protests from other religious groups, a state religion would still be incompatible with Republican principles. The Republic consists of five races; all people are equal regardless of race, class and religion. However, the state religion would introduce difference among the people. Some would even lose their citizenship for not practicing the state religion.68 No religion can be established

67 “Xinjiao ziyou hui xuanyan shu” [Declaration of the Society for Religious Freedom], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 2: 77–79. 68 “Beijing xinjiao ziyou zonghui wei guojiao wenti jinggao zhuda yiyuan” [Proposal of the General Office of the Society for Religious Freedom in Beijing to the Congressmen about the Problem of State Religion], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 2: 75.

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as the state religion of the Republic, for it is really contrary to the principles of the Republic. Again, the establishment of a state religion would lead to differences among the people; difference would lead to conflicts, and then the collapse of the country.69 As Senator Ma Junwu (1881–1940) said,70 the union of Tibet and Mongolia with the central government depends not only on military power, but also on religious toleration. The history of the Yuan and Qing Dynasties provides examples. To make Confucianism the state religion would soon cause the Mongolians and Tibetans to separate from the Republic.71 (3) Confucianism and public education: There are two points here: first, from the perspective of civil rights, whether the Confucian teachings can be the basis of self-cultivation; second, from the perspective of Confucianism itself, whether it can be the basis of self-cultivation. Relatively, the former issue is more important, while the latter is collateral to the former. According to the petition letter of the society, there is no reason for the new Republic to impose a particular religion or doctrine on the people. Public education is necessary for the citizens; without it, they would not be citizens of the Republic. Each of the five races in China has its own characters and languages. Some people do not even use the Chinese language, let alone Confucian teachings. It is impracticable to permit only Confucianism, while all other religions are prohibited.72 Also, the role of Confucianism itself is questionable. The Confucian teachings led to the totalitarian political system, the anti-foreignism seen during the Boxer Movement, imperialist interventions, and national tragedies. How could they be the basis of public education? Additionally, there are superstitious ideas in Confucianism, which are contrary to science in modern times. In a word, Confucianism is inappropriate to the contemporary situation.73

69 “Gesheng jidu jiaohui qingyuan shu” [Petition of Christian Churches from the Local Provinces], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 2: 68–69. 70 Ma Junwu was one of the first members of Tung Meng Hui and a prominent politician in early Republican China. He received a doctorate of technology from the University of Berlin. He was the founding president of Guangxi University and a professor in a few other institutions, having a reputation similar to that of Cai Yuanpei, the famous president of Peking University. 71 Ma Junwu, “Fandui xianfa cao’an di shijiu tiao di’er xiang zhi yijian shu” [Proposal of Protesting against the Second Clause of Article 19 of the Constitutional Draft], Zhonghua shenggonghui bao 10, no. 3 (1917): 31. 72 “Xinjiao ziyou hui qingyuan shu” [Petition of the Society for Religious Freedom], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 4: 158–159. 73 Ibid., 160.

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(4) Religious freedom and civil rights: This is the last and most important reason. According to the society, religious freedom can be understood in two ways. Literally, religious freedom means that all people should choose their own religion freely; even those who hold no religious belief also have this right.74 Implicitly, religious freedom means freedom of conscience, which the government should not interfere with.75 Ma Xiangbo explained this in detail on behalf of the Society for Religious Freedom: Belief depends on conscience. No political law or custom can force people to believe in any religious doctrine, or to practice any religious ritual. Belief follows understanding. No political law or custom can prohibit people from believing in any religious doctrine, or practicing any religious ritual. In brief, where religious matters are concerned, belief will not be prohibited, and disbelief will not be punished. It is not unconstitutional to believe in no religion, or to convert from one to another. That is what constitutional religious freedom means. Conscience is a personal matter, which has no relation to the constitution. For example, one may help the poor just to seduce the latter. It is unethical, but not forbidden by the constitution. Therefore, whether it is a religion or not, or whether it is the only one true religion, constitutionally one is free to believe it or not. No political law or custom can interfere with it.76

To draw a distinction between the sacred and the secular and between the private and the public, as well as between conscience and law, reflects the core meaning of the church-state relationship in modern times. The ideas of the Society for Religious Freedom accord with the general principles of the contemporary world. Two more points need our attention here: one is the relation between the separation of church and state and religious freedom; the other is the difference between religious freedom as it is conceived in Chinese traditional thought and as it is conceived in modern political thought. In one letter of petition, Christians listed three reasons why there should be a separation between church and state in order to guarantee religious freedom: (1) From the perspective of the state rituals of the Republic, Yuan Shikai and others’ efforts to promote sacrifices Ibid., 76. Ibid., 79. 76 “Xinjiao ziyou hui yuefa shang zhi xinjiao ziyou jie” [Interpretation of the Constitutional Religious Freedom from the Society for Religious Freedom], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 3: 106. 74 75

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to Confucius and Heaven are harmful to religious freedom. (2) From the perspective of public education, it is unreasonable that Christians should contribute to the country even though they are unable to enjoy public education because of their religion. (3) From the perspective of national finance, public properties are handed over to a particular religious group, which is harmful to religion and to the whole nation.77 The authors of the letter did not articulate the theoretical relations between these two items, but their position marks an advance in thinking about the issue, especially when compared to the stance of Chen Huanzhang and others who promoted the state religion. Ma Xiangbo’s view on another question is also worth noting. In Chinese history, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism got along with each other, and the Chinese always chose their religions freely. Thus Ma Xiangbo argued as follows: Religious freedom means that one can believe anything or nothing, believe or not believe, and change his belief freely.78 It does not, however, mean that one can believe in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity at the same time.79 Once a person has chosen a religion, he cannot give it up or simply choose another. Religious freedom and belief in a particular religion are not contradictory.80 Ma Xiangbo’s view partly reflects his personal understanding of religion and his own Catholic belief. However, more importantly, it distinguishes the constitutional idea of religious freedom from the understanding common in Chinese traditional thought. This is a great contribution to the understanding of the church-state relationship in the transformative period of modern China. The Establishment of Religious Freedom in the Constitution Christians struggled hard to win religious freedom, and their opponents responded in equal measure. As Cheng Jingyi wrote at the time, “When the tentative Constitution came up last fall for reconsideration and was adopted as the permanent Constitution of the Chinese Republic, there was an opportunity to continue the old fight. Those who believe strongly in the principle of religious liberty had an oppor77 78 79 80

“Gesheng jidu jiaohui qingyuan shu,” 70–71. Ma Xiangbo, “Xinjiao ziyou” [Religious Freedom], Ma Xiangbo ji, 283. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 164.

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tunity to fight for the removal of this objectionable clause. Those who wished to see Confucianism as the state religion of China had also the opportunity to fight for the insertion of a new article in the Constitution.”81 On September 17, 1916, Kang Youwei submitted a letter to the new premier, Duan Qirui (1865–1936), and proposed that Confucianism be made the dominant religion, the sacrifice to Confucius restored, and special officials appointed for local schools and sacrificial fields. He added that it should be written into the constitution and that the Congress should not discuss it again.82 On October 4, the Qing-loyalist general Zhang Xun (1854–1923), together with thirteen local governors, sent telegrams to President Li Yuanhong, arguing that Confucianism should be made the state religion, all schools as well as the provisions for education and sacrifice should be kept as they were in the imperial period, and special officers should be appointed for the sacrifice.83 On November 12, one hundred congressmen gathered to found the Society for Retaining the State Religion (Guojiao weichi hui) and asked for the local governors’ support.84 The combat between Christianity and Confucianism, as well as between religious freedom and the state religion, went on intensely; the debate in Congress was just a case in point. The constitutional meeting opened again on September 5, 1916. On September 8, the sponsor explained the second clause of article 19: “Confucian teachings should be the basis of self-cultivation in public education.” Later, someone brought up the issue of making Confucianism the state religion once more. The examination of the second clause of article 19 turned to the issue of the state religion. During the first reading, two separate meetings were held on December 27, 1916, and January 8, 1917. At the first, the sponsor explained the proposal for a state religion. He said that it was owing to the effect of Confucianism that the country was able to develop as it had. Though

81 “The Struggle for Constitutional Religious Liberty,” The Chinese Recorder 48, no. 4 (April, 1917): 266. 82 “Kang Youwei qing zun kongjiao wei guojiao zhi Duan Qirui han” [Kang Youwei’s Letter to Duan Qirui for Making Confucianism the State Religion], China’s Second Archives, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi dang’an ziliao huibian [Collection of Historical Resources of Republican China], 3:56. 83 Ke Huang, ed., Kongjiao shinian dashi [Ten Years’ Events of Confucianism] (Taiyuan: Zongsheng Hui, 1924), 103–104. 84 Wu Zongci, Zhonghua minguo xianfa shi, 1:137–139.

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there is no state religion, Confucianism is really the core of Chinese culture and rituals. Therefore, Confucianism should be made the state religion. A few people agreed with him. In their view, there were no religious conflicts in Chinese history; therefore there was no need to worry about repeating the European experience of religious wars. Some others opposed him. According to them, the Republic consisted of five races, and all people were equal under the law; thus there should be religious freedom. During the second reading, a member stated that it is really unnecessary to make a state religion; it would be very harmful if it were to become a special article in the constitution. Another member replied that China’s situation is different from that of other countries. The former countered with the example of Germany. He said that Confucian teachings are unsuitable to the present polity. If Confucianism were made the state religion, someone might use it as an excuse to protest against the Republic. At last, the proposal was put to a vote: “That Confucianism be made the state religion, and that there be religious freedom.” Out of 519 votes, 255 supported the proposal, and 264 opposed it. Neither party held a two-thirds majority, so there was no agreement.85 On January 26, 1917, the constitutional delegation assembled for the second reading. The problem of Confucianism was discussed on February 2, 5, 7, and 9. During the meeting, a member suggested that because article 11 (“All people of the Republic have the right of religious freedom”) and the second clause of article 19 were closely related, these two should be discussed together. The motion was approved. On February 9, nine amendments were put forward: 1. “According to historical custom, Confucianism should be made the state religion of the Republic.” 2. “Confucianism is the state religion of the Republic, and other religions are free to develop themselves. Both are protected by law.” 3. Both article 11 and the second clause of article 19 are to be deleted.

85 “Xianfa shenyi hui taolun zengjia guojiao jishi” [Record of the Constitution Examination Committee about Adding the Proposal of the State Religion], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 2: 72–74.

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4. “Confucianism is the state religion of the Republic. People in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet may practice their religions as before.” 5. “People of the Republic have the right to believe in Confucian teachings and other religions freely. There are no restrictions if no laws are broken. The ritual of Confucius worship should be regulated by additional legislation.” 6. “People of the Republic have the right to believe freely in Confucius and other religions. The ritual of worshiping Confucius should be regulated by additional legislation.” 7. “Confucianism should be made the state religion.” 8. “Confucianism should be made the state religion of the Republic among Chinese traditional religions. People can profess other religions freely.” 9. “People of the Republic have the right to believe in Confucianism and other religions. There are no restrictions if no laws are broken.” The two proposals and the nine amendments were discussed successively. None of them won a two-thirds majority. Even the proposals were nearly dismissed. Later two other members put forward two new amendments, which were not passed either. At last, the speaker declared that these two items would be discussed further, and the meeting was adjourned.86 The third reading of article 11 and the second clause of article 19 took place on April 30, 1917. A member proposed adding a new clause to article 11: “People of the Republic should believe in Confucian teachings.” This did not become a discussion topic for there was not enough agreement. Another member proposed that “People of the Republic have the right to believe in Confucianism and other religions. There are no restrictions if no laws are broken. The ritual of worshiping Confucius should be regulated by additional legislation.” During the discussion, some opposed article 11 and insisted on making Confucianism the state religion; Wu Zongci and others approved article 11 and opposed the second clause of article 19. In the voting, no

86 “Xianfa erdu huiyi jishi” [Record of the Second Reading of Constitution], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 3: 126–130.

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amendment was passed. At last, Liu Enge (1888–1949)87 put forward a new amendment: “People of the Republic have the right to respect Confucius and to believe in religion freely. There are no restrictions if no laws are broken.” 293 people agreed with this amendment by vote—still less than two-thirds of the members. Later, someone proposed voting for the contrary position; 113 people opposed. Because the opposition was less than one third, the amendment was considered passed. Someone called to reject the outcome and the meeting became chaotic. The speaker declared that the outcome should be reported to the General Assembly. On May 14, there was another meeting. A few members put forward new amendments, but none of them were passed. At last, the amendment of Liu Enge was passed with 483 votes. The speaker declared the passage of this article, and the second clause of article 19 was deleted.88 It marked the end of the debates on religious freedom and state religion in the constitution. The passage of Liu Enge’s amendment was the outcome of both compromise and luck. Also, it was partly due to the amendment itself. In the view of Liu Enge, Confucianism could not be made the state religion. First, Confucianism is not a religion. There is no god in Confucianism; Confucianism is mainly about ethics and politics instead of religious matters. More importantly, a state religion is contrary to religious freedom. The Republic was comprised of five races with different religious beliefs; all races and classes were equal in the Republic. If Confucianism were made the state religion, it would create inequality among religions and races. In the modern period, religious freedom and the separation of church and state have become general principles of the powerful countries. It is really unnecessary to adopt a state religion as the Europeans did in the past.89 At the same time, Liu Enge opposed the second clause of article 19. According to him, Confucianism is not only about cultivation, and neither is education. Education does not have a fixed object; it should not be regulated in the constitution. More importantly, it should not be susceptible to 87 Liu Enge studied law in both China and Japan, and later became a teacher who published a few translations. He was a congressman and a member of the constitution drafting committee in early Republican China. As a native of northeast China, he also served in the warlord government of Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928) and the Japanesedominated Manchukuo. 88 “Jinshi: benguo zhi bu” [News: Domestic Part], Shengjiao zazhi, 1917, no. 6: 266–269. 89 Wu Zongci, Zhonghua minguo xianfa shi, vol. 1: appendix, 27–28.

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control by someone with ulterior motives. Confucianism is concerned with the difference between classes and roles; the most important is the relation between the emperor and his subjects. The ideology of a totalitarian political system would be harmful to the new republic.90 However, Confucian teachings should still be respected. Ever since the dynasties of Qin and Han, students began their studies with the Confucian classics. Even the general public knew what Confucius said and respected him as the Sage. Confucian teaching has been the core of Chinese ethics and morality, and it is different from political thought. As the Chinese traditional culture, Confucianism should be respected and preserved.91 Insisting on religious freedom while respecting Confucianism as a cultural tradition, Liu Enge found the point of compromise between the two parties. And with new turmoil on the horizon, the congress members did not want to waste more time on this marginal issue. On May 15, 1917, the national representatives of the Society for Religious Freedom held a meeting in Beijing to celebrate the establishment of religious freedom in the constitution. In addition to the general report and conclusion, one important topic was whether the Society for Religious Freedom should be perpetually established. Two groups presented both sides of the question. For some members, because religious freedom had been incorporated into the constitution and factors harmful to it had been dismissed, the society had realized its aim and there was no reason to maintain it. For others, although religious freedom had been included in the constitution, it did not mean that the advocates of Confucianism would desist: Our goal is to protect religious freedom, they said, while the Confucianists aim to restrict other people’s freedom. Additionally, China’s political situation is not stable, and it could be used to destroy religious freedom; the debates in the past are evidence of this. Thus the Society should be maintained forever. Most people agreed with the second idea. On May 17, 1917, the founding conference was held in Beijing, with more than two thousand people attending. Xu Qian directed the meeting; Ma Xiangbo and Cheng Jingyi, among others, gave speeches. The meeting ended with the people shouting “Religious freedom forever!”

90 91

Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 30.

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(xinjiao ziyou wansui). The Society for Religious Freedom became a permanent association.92 The establishment of the society marked the end of the debate on religious freedom and state religion in the early Republic. Later, Frank Joseph Rawlinson (1871–1937),93 editor-in-chief of the missionary journal, The Chinese Recorder, commented that it was the first time in Chinese history that religious freedom was definitely realized. To some extent, the Chinese had always enjoyed religious freedom, but they never had to fight for it. Now they had achieved it. It was a new characteristic of the revolutionary period (1911–1927) that demonstrated the new consciousness about religion. The struggle itself was also a symbol of this new era.94 However, it was not really the end of this debate. As a marginal issue in the constitution, the continuance of religious freedom depended on the political situation in the early Republic of China.95 Soon the Congress was dismissed again and the constitution could not be enforced. It was not until 1923 that the first constitution was enacted, and it remained in effect for only one year. The Anti-Christian Movement of the 1920s, supported by Chinese nationalism, nearly destroyed the dim hope of religious freedom.96

Chen Tiesheng, “Xinjiao ziyou hui shulüe,” 207–208. Frank Joseph Rawlinson was a missionary from the Southern Baptist Convention. He was born in Britain and migrated to the United States later. In 1912, he became the editor-in-chief of the missionary journal The Chinese Recorder. Due to his contribution, the journal became the organ of the missionaries in China. He died during a Japanese bombing raid on Shanghai in 1937. A biography was written by his son; see John L. Rawlinson, Rawlinson, the “Recorder,” and China’s Revolution: A Tropical Biography of Frank Joseph Rawlinson (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural Publications, 1990). 94 Frank Rawlinson, Revolution and Religion in Modern China: A Brief Study of the Effects of Modern Revolutionary Movements in China on Its Religious Life (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1929), 9. 95 On politics in the warlord era, see His-sheng Ch’i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Jerome Ch’en, The MilitaryGentry Coalition: China under the Warlords (Toronto: University of Toronto—York University Joint Center on Modern East Asia, 1979). 96 On the anti-Christian movement in the 1920s, see Ka-che Yip, Religion, Nationalism, and Chinese Students: The Anti-Christian Movement of 1922–1927 (Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1980); Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The Anti-Christian Movement of 1920–1928 (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural Publications, 1988); Michael Glen Murdock, “The Politics of Exclusion: Revolutionary Centralization, National Identity and Christianity in China” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1999). 92 93

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Conclusion The debate on religious freedom between Confucians and Christians in the early Republic must be put in the context of China’s modernization during the period of 1900–1920. From the perspective of intellectual history, key moments are the intellectuals’ petition (gongche shangshu) of 1895, the abolition of the Imperial Examination in 1905, and the New Culture Movement in 1915. From the perspective of political history, highlights are the political reform movement led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the New Policy in 1901, and the Republican Revolution in 1911. There was also a general shift from cultural nationalism to political nationalism.97 However, during this period of transformation, the old system collapsed and the new one had not yet been built up. Therefore the old and the new remained entangled with each other, which contributed to the complicated situation, both intellectually and politically. In comparison to the Boxer Movement in 1900 and the Anti-Christian Movement in the 1920s, the period from 1901 to 1920 is called a golden age of Christianity in China.98 The increase in the number of Christians and Christian organizations was one factor. More important was their identity change from Christian aliens ( jiaomin) to Chinese citizens (guomin) along with the political revolution;99 the indigenization movement is a symbol of their independence from foreign missions and a synthesis of Christianity and Chinese culture. Also, there were some paradoxes. On the one hand, the punishment of the Boxer Movement gave Christianity a relatively stable environment in which to develop in China. The suffering caused by that movement urged Christians to reflect on their identities. On the other hand, Christianity was still perceived as a foreign religion by the common people. Its relations with imperialism elicited further hostile treatment from the nationalists.

97 This argument is taken from Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (London: Routledge and Paul, 1964–1965). 98 On the “golden age,” see Milton T. Stauffer, ed., The Christian Occupation of China: A General Survey of the Numerical Strength and Geographical Distribution of the Christian Forces in China (Shanghai: China Continuation Committee, 1922). 99 Liu Yi, “From Christian Aliens to Chinese Citizens: The National Identity of Chinese Christians in the Twentieth Century,” Studies in World Christianity 16, no. 2 ( July, 2010): 145–168.

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In the debate on making Confucianism the state religion, we can observe two main conflicts: one between Christianity and Confucianism, and one between state religion and religious freedom. There are also some conflicts that extended beyond the debate itself: the conflict between Christianity as a cultural factor and the state religion as a political regulation; the conflict between Confucianism as a cultural factor and religious freedom as a political principle; the conflict between Confucianism as a traditional ideology and modern politics; the conflict between Christianity as a representative of imperialism and Chinese nationalism, and so on. In more explicit terms, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty also meant the end of Confucianism as a dominant ideology, along with the challenge from Western imperialism. In this context, Chinese intellectuals chose a paradoxical strategy—to learn from the West in order to counter the West. Culturally, they hoped to reform Confucianism in a Christian way. That is why the problem of Confucianism as a religion arose. Practicing a kind of cultural nationalism, traditional intellectuals hoped to save the nation in a cultural way. However, with the political transformation from the traditional to the modern period, there was also a transition from cultural nationalism to political nationalism. As the Chinese traditional cultural and political systems collapsed, Western concepts became dominant. Religious freedom as a principle of modern politics was misinterpreted by some Chinese intellectuals as a threat to Confucianism. The interwoven conflicts of interests and ideas, as well as the transition from tradition to modernity, led to turmoil over church-state relations in the early Republic of China.

SPIRITUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT IN CONFUCIANISM AND SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN CHRISTIANITY ZHUO Xinping Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences This chapter is a comparative study of the understanding of spirituality in Confucianism and Christianity. There have been different opinions on the religious aspects of Confucianism, as well as “non-religious interpretations” or “humanistic interpretations” of Confucianism in China today and in the past. Thus it is necessary to analyze the spiritual heritage of Confucianism if it is to be described as a “Confucian religion.” The key concept in the spiritual accomplishment of Confucianism is benevolence and its relationship to rites or social order. Beginning with this starting point, we can compare the Confucian concept of benevolence with the Christian ideal of love, represented by the Greek word agape. By focusing on the role of benevolence in social life and the role of God’s love in human salvation, it is possible to identify differences between Confucianism and Christianity in their spiritual pursuits, which may be summed up as a contrast between realist concerns and ultimate concerns, the social order and the holy order, and inherent transcendence and external transcendence. The Understanding of Confucianism in Chinese History Whether or not Confucianism is a religion, its interpretation as such is bound up with the relationship between politics and religion in China. Unlike Western tradition, Chinese tradition holds that politics and religion should be “unequal.” A principle of “elevation of politics and subordination of religion” formed the foundation of tradition and social structure in Chinese history. Historically, politics controlled the role and position of religion in society. It delimited the space in which religion could develop in China, and the same is true of contemporary Chinese society as well. This hierarchical relationship between politics and religion continues today. Politicians and scholars in China have many different understandings of this relationship as it pertains to

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Confucianism. As a result, there are two drastically different interpretations of Confucianism, based on its roles in politics and in spiritual life in China. In the first interpretation, Confucianism is considered to be a religion. Confucian religion1 is understood as the religion that represents the ethnic Han Chinese. Its dominant position as the official ideology and its close relationship with the feudal dynasty formed the foundation of the intermingling of politics and religion. Ren Jiyu points out that “Confucian religion was born and raised in China and had been the native religion for thousands of years. Before the Qin and the Han dynasty, it proposed worshiping heaven and ancestors as its core beliefs. After that, the imperial system of government was formed and gradually completed. The image of ‘Tian Di’ (highest deity) became a reflection of the emperor on earth.” One of the main characteristics of Chinese politics is the “unified state system,” and “Chinese people accept, support and endorse this system. . . . Confucian religion makes its contribution by reinforcing feudal dynasties. . . . It stabilizes the centralization of power.” This supporting relationship formed the foundation of politics in ancient Chinese society: “The prevalence of a unified feudal system proved that it was the best system to suit social conditions in ancient China. We should acknowledge the positive contributions of Confucianism to this system.” This intermingling of politics and religion explains why Confucian religion enjoys a higher status than other Chinese religions and serves as the official religion: One of the major characteristics of Confucian religion was an extreme intermingling of politics and religion. There was a lack of separation between the two and they became a unified body. The emperor also served as the religious leader and enjoyed the power of both religion and politics. The doctrines of Confucian religion were imparted to the public through proclamations issued by the emperor. The decrees released by the imperial court had the same function as religious decrees. When the kings in medieval Europe mounted their thrones, they were crowned by the pope in order to gain their political legitimacy from God. However, all a Chinese emperor needed was to issue the edict for his coronation.

1 The Chinese expression ru jiao is translated as “Confucian religion” to emphasize the nature of Confucianism as a religion. For details, see Anna Sun, “The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 229–254.

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His self-proclaimed political and religious power could be illustrated through the pattern of imperial edicts, which all began with the phrase “The Emperor, who governs with the Mandates of Heaven, declares that . . .” So, imperial edicts had the same authority as papal edicts.2

Viewing Confucianism as a religion, scholars suggest three phases in its development. The first phase was before the Qin and the Han dynasties, which is also referred to as the “Kong Confucianism” period. At this time, Confucianism was not yet considered to be a religion. It was still associated with Confucius, who was not considered a religious leader. The second phase referred to the transformation of Han Confucianism into a religion during the Western Han period. “Emperor Wu of Han decided to uphold Confucianism as the official religion, and this was the symbolic moment when Confucian religion was born. Dong Zhongshu’s Three Ways to Harmonize Humans with Heaven (Tianren Sance) was a reply to this policy, and it served as the first outline of Confucian religion.”3 Li Shen also argued that “the upholding of Confucianism as official ideology was the beginning of Confucian religion. Dong Zhongshu was the founder of Confucian religion, and Confucius and Mencius were the harbingers before Dong.”4 Emperor Wu of Han ended state support for the teaching of non-Confucian texts and established a text-based ideology represented in the first Confucian canon. It was because of this national policy that once Confucianism became a religion, it immediately acquired the status of official religion. Based on this point of view, scholars suggested that theocracy and the rule of official religion prevailed in Chinese history. The third phase was called “Song Confucianism,” when Confucian religion was finally established during the Song dynasty. Ren Jiyu argued that “Confucian religion was officially formed in the Song dynasty.”5 Li Shen also argued that Zhu Xi’s Preface to the Great Learning by Chapter and Phrase (Daxue Zhangju Xu) proposed a “new doctrine for the Confucian religion that replaced the old Confucian religious doctrine proposed by Dong Zhongshu.” This also explained why later on, “Zhu Xi’s scholarship became the core part of Confucianism, and the

2 Jiyu Ren, “Preface,” in Shen Li, Zhongguo rujiao shi [History of Chinese Confucianism], vol. 1 (Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1999), 3–5. 3 Shen Li, “Zhuxi de Rujiao Xinganglin,” Rujiao wentie zhenglunji [Debates on the Problems of Confucianism], ed. Jiyu Ren (Zhongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2000), 430. 4 Shen Li, Zhongguo rujiao shi, 1:216, 214. 5 Jiyu Ren, Rujiao wentie zhenglunji, 71.

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orthodox formulation of Confucian religion.”6 Scholars who understood Confucianism as a religion argued that the role of official religion and the intermingling of religion and politics continued until the end of the feudal system, when the 1911 revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty. “Confucian religion had the advantage of its close relationship with politics and became the official religion. The religious power of Confucian religion and imperial political power were intertwined and inseparable. Once the feudal system and the power of the emperor were deposed, Confucian religion would also wither. Confucian religion and the power of the emperor coalesced into one, and that is why it perished after the fall of the imperial system.” The organization of Confucian religion was eradicated. However, its religious influence persisted. “The core belief in Confucianism of worshiping Heaven and respecting ancestors still prevails among Chinese people.”7 In the second interpretation, Confucianism is not considered to be a religion. Consequently, there was neither a Confucian religion, nor any intermingling of politics and religion in ancient Chinese history. Among the scholars who deny the existence of Confucian religion, there are different perspectives for understanding religious culture in ancient China. One perspective suggests that there was no Confucian religion but “an orthodox religion that was widely accepted by all classes, and had been practiced for thousands of years in ancient China.” This is what Mou Zhongjian calls “clan-based traditional patriarchal religion.” Mou describes several characteristics of this Chinese religion: it was “patriarchal clan-based”; it was subordinate to the government since “the emperor had the power to control the religion”; it was “diverse and inclusive”; and it had “a humanistic spirit that emphasizes the social, moral function of religion.” This patriarchal clan-based religion is closely related to politics. It refers to the traditional religion that had been in place since the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. It evolved from the worship of heaven and ancestors. It had the basic components of a religion, including religious concepts, emotions, and rituals. It had no independent organization. Instead, it was the kinship structure that fulfilled the functions of religious organization. The emperor, who was also the son of God, was the representative of the people who worshiped Heaven. Elders of the clan and parents 6 7

Ibid., 437. Jiyu Ren, “Preface,” in Zhongguo rujiao shi, 6.

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represented the family in the worship of ancestors. Respecting Heaven and honoring ancestors ( jingtian fazu), taking good care in seeing off the deceased, and maintaining sacrifices to distant ancestors (shenzhong zhuiyuan) were the basic religious concepts and emotional expressions in this religion. This religion is closely entangled with the hierarchical structure of the feudal clan system and with patriarchal ideology, thus it is also called “traditional patriarchal religion.” The practice of this religion continued until the end of the Qing dynasty.8

Based on the above analysis, I argue that traditional patriarchal religion is very similar to Confucian religion. If Confucian religion lacks religious organization, and traditional patriarchal religion lacks an ideology, we should integrate the two concepts together in research in order to arrive at a better understanding of both. Another view is that Confucian religion is mainly situated outside the realm of politics, and that it functions as a semireligious social institution for cultural integration. It is a social consequence of the decline of li (traditional religious and moral practices), rather than a product created by the emperor as an official religion to reinforce his legitimacy.9 Although Confucian religion is not a political product, this does not reduce its significant influence and its orthodox standing in Chinese culture. In this perspective, Confucianism is considered as “the unvarying way of the World” but not a religion. One can challenge the religious quality and official position of Confucianism without denying its cultural integrating power both inside and out of the government, and its influence on Chinese culture. The last view completely rejects the idea that Confucianism is a religion and sees the characteristics of ancient Chinese society as (1) a lack of religiosity; (2) separation between politics and religion; and (3) the absence of wars of religion.10 “The so-called ‘Chinese ancient religions’ referred to Buddhism and Daoism. . . . Ancient Chinese politics naturally rejected religion because, within the political sphere,

8 Zhongjian Mou, Zhongguo zongjiao yu wenhua [Chinese Religion and Culture] (Basu chubanshe, 1989), 6, 7. 9 Guolong Lu, “ ‘Lishi qui zhu ye’ yi shu,” Zhongguo zongjiao baogao 2008 [Report on Chinese Religions 2008], ed. Ze Jin and Yonghui Qiu (Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2008), 86. 10 Weikang Gu, Zongjiao xietiao lun—zhongguo zongjiao de guoqu, xianzai he weilai [On Coordination of Religions, the Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Religions] (Xuelin chubanshe, 1992), 88–101.

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Confucianism already had the power to satisfy the spiritual and moral needs of the people.”11 The contradictory conclusions of these two interpretations of politics and religion in ancient China are interesting. Those who argue for seeing Confucianism as a religion emphasize the intermingling of politics and religion as characteristic of ancient Chinese politics. Together with the imperial system, Confucianism’s function as the official religion constructs a theocracy. However, for those who reject the idea that Confucianism is a religion, separation of politics and religion is characteristic of ancient Chinese politics. They recognize the role of Confucianism as the ultimate ideology in the Chinese society, discarding and condemning other religions and belief systems. In this case, Buddhism and Daoism become the only religions that play an active role in the relationship between politics and religion. In the process of interacting with politics, these religions have adopted two different approaches. The first approach is to exist beyond the authority of the state and to maintain a distance from politics. The Buddhist monk Huiyuan (334–416) composed a treaty titled “A Monk Does Not Bow Down before a King” (Shamen bujing wangzhe). Other religious leaders also emphasized that monks should be exempt from the outward signs of obedience. They adopted the policy “to live as a recluse in a forest and avoid the material world” ( yinju shanlin, buran hongchen), suggesting that monks should focus on their religious cultivation and keep their distance from politics. In contrast, other religious leaders saw that interacting with political powers was the path to religious development. The Buddhist monk Daoan (314–385) realized that it would be difficult to develop Buddhism if its practitioners did not have support from the emperor. He decided to submit to the authority of the imperial state. However, this adaptation was only marginally successful under the powerful imperial system in China, in which every single individual and all resources and properties were supposed to be under the control of the imperial court. “In the ancient Chinese political sphere, religion had never achieved a dominating role. . . . Politics, ethical relations, and political strategies were definitely nonreligious. Even the concepts of ‘heaven’ and ‘deity’ in Chinese politics were devoid of religious connotations.”12

11 12

Ibid., 91. Ibid., 94.

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In his analysis of how Chinese ancient religion was “politically marginalized” because of the separation between politics and religion, Gu Weikang argued that there were two different manifestations of Chinese religion in different cultural settings. In the refined and cultivated cultural setting, “Chinese religion focused on theological development. This influenced how religion positioned itself against other value systems in this cultural setting, such as Confucianism as a philosophy or academic theory.” It explained why there were numerous monks, experts, and scholars who were well immersed in both religious and philosophical literature. “Because there was a distance between politics and religion, Chinese religious scholars were able to avoid government intervention and focus on developing a comprehensive academic system for Buddhism and Daoism—including a religious philosophy, religious ethics, religious culture and even ‘scientific research’ within religion.”13 In the secular cultural setting of social life, however, religion did not achieve an independent position . . . and tended to be absorbed or incorporated by politicized Confucianism. The folk practices of Buddhism and Daoism were corrupted through politicization and materialization. Their religious nature changed and they corroded into superstition. Materialism dominated in people’s religious attitudes and behaviors, as they worshipped for their immediate benefits. Many Chinese people worshipped Confucius in their living room but Guanyin in the back of their house. They also worshipped Tathagata, Laozi, Emperor Guan, the God of Wealth, Dragon Kings, and local town gods. . . . Bodhisattva and ancestors, ghosts and deities were all being worshipped together.14

Furthermore, this diverse and mixed folk religious practice had been employed by peasants to resist the feudal authorities. On the one hand, it had been used to counter Confucianism as the mainstream ideology. On the other hand, it “served as the motto in peasant revolts and wars, and as the basis for spiritual support and interpersonal relationships during these uprisings.”15 In ancient China, religion was always associated with peasant insurgence. However, because Chinese folk religious beliefs tended to be disorderly, inconsistent, and random, “religion that was associated with peasant insurgence tended to be primitive, superficial, and lacking in doctrines, transcendental ideals,

13 14 15

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 96, 98. Ibid., 100.

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theogony, and guidelines for practice.”16 Due to the disorder and lack of organization, these insurgences tended to lack solidarity, and the religiosity that was involved was usually impermanent. In this analysis we can see that the identity of Confucianism as a religion is not clear in the Chinese context. But the majority of Chinese scholars agree that in the spiritual life of the Chinese in the past, Confucianism had a function similar to that of Christianity. So, it is necessary to identify the connection between spirituality and religiosity in Confucianism. Spirituality in Confucianism “Spirituality” deals with human spiritual nature, temperament, personal accomplishment, and pursuit of faith. The spiritual phenomena of human beings include the human spiritual world and spiritual life. The human spiritual desire reflects the special demands of human existence beyond material needs. That is to say, human beings depend on spiritual support and consolation in social life. In this understanding, “spirituality” has a close connection both with individual existence and with the collective coexistence of human society. Individual spirituality represents the inner life or inner world of man, but it is not simply the innate knowledge or instinct of man and should be the result of interior human training. In this way, Confucianism combined individual spirituality with the establishment of an ideal social order. As the first step of human cultivation in spiritual life, Confucianism put forward the idea of “self-cultivation.” This “self-cultivation,” however, should not be just an inner spiritual accomplishment for oneself, but should also include public responsibility for others. “Selfcultivation” should be only a starting point for spiritual accomplishment in Confucianism. Confucius said, “He cultivates himself so as to give rest to others. . . . He cultivates himself so as to give rest to all the people—even Yao and Shun were still solicitous about this.”17 Self-cultivation in Confucianism was not just a way to preserve one’s purity, it reflected instead the basic principle of “internal holiness and external sovereignty” in Confucianism. To do something successfully

Ibid., 101. Analects, Hsien Wan 45; James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1985), 1:292. 16 17

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in society was self-cultivation’s ultimate aspiration and for this purpose it was intended to combine spiritual accomplishment with social action. Nevertheless, this social ideal was not the whole purpose of Confucianism in its spiritual cultivation. There were obviously also religious elements in this cultivation. Namely, Confucian self-cultivation fostered a spiritual process reaching from the individual’s “innermost world” to the “ultimate reality” in a religious sense. Aiming for merging with the ultimate holiness or the attainment of holy transcendence through cultivation, Mencius said confidently, “I am skillful in nourishing my vast, flowing passion-nature.” He explained this “passion-nature” as follows: “It is exceedingly great, and exceedingly strong. Being nourished by rectitude, and sustaining no injury, it fills up all between heaven and earth. . . . It is the mate and assistant of righteousness and reason. Without it, man is in a state of starvation.”18 Self-cultivation was not an isolated, closed spiritual training. This “inner spirit” by its very nature should include a longing to embrace and grasp the whole cosmos. It transcended the material “body” and revealed the standard of holiness reached by the “bottom of the heart,” which meant that “the heart should be the master of all things between heaven and earth.” Mencius explained the significance of this “heart,” namely the “mental constitution,” thus: “He who has exhausted all his mental constitution knows his nature. Knowing his nature, he knows Heaven. . . . To preserve one’s mental constitution, and nourish one’s nature, is the way to serve Heaven.”19 Surely, this mental constitution came from the individual’s innermost world, but spiritual accomplishment served the collective existence and the interests of human community. Obviously, Confucian spirituality sought to create a cultural atmosphere and to express the “national soul” of the Chinese. Here, the “national spirit” was no longer construed as the inner soliloquy of individuals, but as a reflection of the spiritual life and spiritual pursuit of this collective, namely the collective “self-consciousness.” This national spirit would confirm and even stress this collective “self-identity.” Thus, for an ethnic group, this national spirituality had to be the work of collective cultivation, and would form the “public spirituality” and “common spirit.”

18 The Works of Mencius, Kung-sun Chau, part 1; Legge, The Chinese Classics, 2:189–190. 19 The Works of Mencius, Tsin Sin, part 1; Legge, The Chinese Classics, 2:448–449.

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In the Chinese cultural tradition, the idea of spirituality concerned mainly human spiritual practice and cultivation. However, to cultivate one’s mentality and nourish one’s inborn nature, this “internal holiness” should not be directed simply toward self-perfection; it should also make efforts toward the perfection of the whole world. This was then the task of the “external sovereign” in Confucian understanding. But as a result of political participation and competition, there had often been “a strong internal holiness but a weak external sovereign” since Confucius. So, Confucianism had to give up its efforts toward social action and return to the individual cultivation of interior perfection. That was why Mencius stated, “When the men of antiquity realized their wishes, benefits were conferred by them on the people. If they did not realize their wishes, they cultivated their personal character, and became illustrious in the world. If poor, they attended to their own virtue in solitude; if advanced to dignity, they made the whole kingdom virtuous as well.”20 The Chinese spirit was mainly identified with the Confucian spirit as it was traditionally understood. The Confucian system of thought once determined the spiritual orientation of cultural development in ancient China and became its “soft power.” In comparison, discussions about “spirituality” in the Western tradition belong essentially to the sphere of Christian theology and ethics. The Western discourse on spirituality is indisputably a religious one. When we examine spirituality in Confucianism and Christianity, we find that both systems of thought posit an opposition between the inside world and outside world, between heaven and human beings, between inherence and transcendence, and between the secular and the holy. Today there is a revival of Confucianism in Chinese society. Is this revival a religious revival or not? Can we discern any religiosity in Confucian spirituality? Perhaps a comparative study of spirituality in Confucianism and Christianity can give us an answer to these questions. Confucianism’s “True Spirit” and Its Standard of Benevolence What is the “true spirit” of Confucianism? How does it compare to Christian spirit with its religious characteristics? There is not yet a

20

Ibid., 2:453.

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consensus on the answers to these questions among Chinese scholars. Today, the revival and further development of religions is clearly taking place in Chinese society. But the old problem, whether Confucianism is a religion or not, still remains. Traditionally Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism were regarded as “three religions” for the Chinese people. But now people accept the revival and development of Buddhism and Taoism as religious revivals and developments, while refusing to recognize Confucian revival as a religious revival. Many scholars, especially some “Neo-Confucian scholars,” persist in the opinion that the Confucian spirit should be a “nonreligious,” namely “humanistic” spirit. So, in the spiritual sphere, they make a clear distinction between “humanity” and “religiosity.” When “humanity” is opposed to “religiosity,” China seems to be the only nation without religion among all humanity, which differs from Mircea Eliade’s claim that religion is an “anthropological constant,” namely, that all human beings have religious beliefs. For example, Mou Zhongjian emphasized again and again that in contrast with Christian “theology,” “Confucianism should be an ethical anthropology, which explains the knowledge of how to be a good person and how to deal with personal relations. Taking human beings as the basic standard—this is what differentiates Confucianism from all religions. And taking ethics as the center—this is what differentiates Confucianism from Western humanism and the Chinese Taoist teachings.”21 The reason that “anthropology” is not “theology” is based on the fact that “anthropology” has its core in “benevolence,” namely, it is a knowledge of “personal relations.” “Confucian anthropology has two important pillars: one is knowledge of benevolence, the other knowledge of rites. The knowledge of benevolence should be the philosophy of Confucian anthropology, its inner quintessence, and the knowledge of rites its principles for behavior and conduct, namely its outside form.” But in his opinion, the union of benevolence and rites in Confucian anthropology has obviously broken down: “of all the teachings in Confucianism, the teaching of benevolence represents the spiritual orientation of Chinese national development,” but maintenance of the rites “was criticized and strongly attacked by revolutionaries because of its close combination with the medieval systems of patriarchal clan ranking

21 Mou Zhongjian, Zoujin Zhongguo Jingshen [Come Closer to Chinese Spirit] (Beijing: Huawen chubanshe, 1999), 36.

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and autocratic monarchy.”22 Consequently there is no revival of the “culture of rites,” but the revival of the “teaching of benevolence” should be encouraged and promoted. The key concept of benevolence in the moral system of Confucianism can be traced back to the Book of Historical Documents (The Shoo King), where it originally meant a good moral character: “I have been lovingly obedient to my father; I am possessed of many abilities and arts which fit me to serve spiritual beings.”23 Benevolence as a spiritual trait includes not only various moral principles, but also complicated psychological elements. In the system of Confucian benevolence there should be two particular emphases: one stresses that “benevolence” means “to love all men,”24 as emphasized by Confucius, and this spirit of loving all men must become the doctrine of faithfulness and tolerance in “an all-pervading unity”; the other points out the importance of benevolence for maintaining social order, and benevolence is namely “to restrain oneself and restore the rites,” and so “if a man can restrain himself and restore the rites, then all under heaven will ascribe benevolence to him.” Here, according to Confucius, benevolence should be a spirit of self-restraint, which one cultivates consciously for the public “rites,” and in its human sense bears a similarity to the idea of kenosis in Christianity. By this understanding, benevolence and the rites form an organic combination: keeping the rites should promote benevolence, and such rites reflected social order in the past. For Confucianism, a harmonious social system should be the core of the rites and the essence of benevolence. How to maintain this “true spirit” is nevertheless not just a human affair. For a harmonious social order, it is not enough to deal with interpersonal relations; man must face the relation between Heaven and human beings, which means that a transcendental dimension is needed. When respecting and serving Heaven is added to the picture, Confucianism is no longer a self-contained anthropology. In contrast to philosophy, man gives up his skepticism; and in similarity to theology, man turns to faith and to belief in the mandate of Heaven or divine providence. The basic spirit in Confucian benevolence is “to love all men,” and this benevolent love has no fundamental difference

22 23 24

Ibid., 36–37. The Shoo King; Legge, The Chinese Classics, 3:354. Legge, The Chinese Classics, 1:260.

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from Christian agape (universal love). Agape is understood to have a divine dimension, and this transcendental standard can also be found in Confucian love. Christian belief in God has the same function as Confucian respect for Heaven. Benevolence in Confucianism and love in Christianity have the same ethical function in human society. If we want to draw a distinction between them, we might say that Confucianism is a “philosophy of love,” whereas Christianity is a “religion of love.” Both systems teach a “doctrine of the mean” or “golden mean.” In Confucianism, this “golden mean” is expressed in the principle “not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself.”25 In other words, the man of benevolence, “wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others.”26 In Christianity, the two great commandments are, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”27 The golden mean in Christianity is the essence of the teachings of “the law and the prophets”: “Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.”28 Through this analysis we can see clearly that the Confucian spirit of benevolence directed toward loving all men shows no contradiction with the religious spirit of love, and an ethical anthropology alone cannot replace the significance and function of religion. Moral principles are not characteristics of Confucianism that distinguish it from religion. On the contrary, they are important elements in a religion. Confucian spirituality as “moral anthropology” reflects also the transcendental dimensions of religion. Mental Introspection in Confucianism and Spiritual Transcendence in Christianity In the doctrine of “benevolence of unity for all between Heaven and earth,” we can identify the “religious” meanings and sentiments of Confucianism. Through its concept of spiritual communication, the 25 26 27 28

Ibid., 1:251. Ibid., 1:194. Mark 12:28–31. Matthew 7:12.

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“unification of Heaven and men,” including their coexistence and common morality, is realized. Through this process of spiritual communication, it is possible for Confucianism to include a “religious spirit” as well as its “humanistic spirit.” Here, benevolence shows its ability to link up Heaven and men, because the spirit of benevolence would in fact make every possible effort to know nature and Heaven, so as to relate the law of Heaven to the nature of life. If we understand or explain benevolence as “the reason for life in Heaven and the virtue of love in human beings,” it already has a religious connotation. Since benevolence in Confucian understanding is not isolated, but connected with the unification of Heaven and men, it appears as the common morality of Heaven and men and expresses the unity of Heaven and men as well. Benevolence reflected in moral behavior and personal praxis already bears religious significance; a morality lacking in religious resources or religious spirit would lose its transcendental dimension and could not sustain itself. Thus the Confucian spiritual accomplishment of benevolence should also be recognized as a unique religious spirituality. The contemporary renaissance of benevolence in Confucianism clearly reveals the religiosity in the Confucian spirit. Nevertheless, there are various types of religions, and Confucianism is different from Christianity in that it is a practical, ethical religion. It would represent “public opinion” in the public realm or public forum. In a modern sense, Confucianism can be described as a public religion, a civil religion, or a social religion. Since the transcendental dimension in Confucianism is not so clear and obvious as in Christianity, Confucianism puts more stress on activity or action in this world. For this purpose, the spiritual discipline of Confucianism should be practiced mainly through mental introspection and should be inwardly directed. This inwardness, including self-training, selfexamination, mental introversion, and spiritual accomplishment, is the first step and necessary preparation for action and active participation in this world. In this way, the political effectiveness of Confucianism can be traced back to the preparation or training of the human heart and human nature. The Great Learning describes this process as follows: “The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.” Or in other

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words, “Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed. Their States being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.”29 Because Confucianism recognized an “economic purpose” or “economic usage” for spiritual accomplishment, Confucianism was quite often not recognized as a “religion” by many Chinese. The concept of God was obscure in Confucianism, and the system did not emphasize “honoring God” through worship. Its concept of Heaven has been interpreted differently, and people cannot reach a consensus on it. In contrast, the concept of holiness was stressed by Confucianism, with particular attention to inner holiness. In other words, man should not search for divinity outside himself but should look within. The ideal practitioners of Confucianism are sages and people of virtue, who are the equivalent of saints in Christian religion. But it is difficult to become a real saint if one only focuses on personal effort or individual self-training and self-restraint. To attain holiness, spiritual transcendence is absolutely necessary. Thus the teaching of internal transcendence in Confucianism is not enough, and Confucianism should adopt the idea of external transcendence featured in Christianity. In this dimension of Christianity, man expresses his concern with ultimate things by believing in an ultimate reality or ultimate divinity. Through this dimension, man can strive for self-transcendence and overcome his own limitations both in nature and in spirit. In fact, the contemporary revival movement of Neo-Confucianism is unfolding in an era and a society “without sages or saints.” The revival movement reveals that self-emancipation in a secular world has failed. Confucianism had its limitations in the past and still has them at the present moment. What China needs is an “open spirit,” a “transcendental spirit.” Confucianism refused to answer the question about “ultimate reality” clearly. Many Chinese deny the existence of such an ultimate divinity. As a consequence, many Chinese pay little attention to ultimate concerns, and Chinese society has too many “secular concerns,” “this-worldly concerns,” and “utilitarian concerns.” It is not practical, nor is it necessary, to continue to deny ultimate divinity. We are living in an era of dialogue, and an initial dialogue on

29

Legge, The Chinese Classics, 1:357–359.

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the various understandings and interpretations of this ultimate divinity may have great rewards. In this process of dialogue, human love could be enriched and strengthened by divine love (such as agape in Christianity), social concerns could be enriched and elevated by ultimate concerns, and immanence could be supplemented by and combined with transcendence. The potential for Confucian revival or renaissance in the contemporary world lies in this possibility for interchange among traditions and indeed depends on the fruitful results of their spiritual dialogue and mutual perfection.

PART III

THE SOCIAL REALITIES OF RITUAL: FROM EXEGETIC TO ANALYTIC

CONFUCIAN HUMANENESS (REN ) ACROSS SOCIAL BARRIERS Robert Cummings NEVILLE Boston University This chapter develops three points concerning Confucianism and spiritual traditions. The first concerns the classic Confucian notion of “love or humaneness with distinctions.” The second concerns the role of ritual in Confucianism to build bridges across cultural differences. The third concerns understanding how Confucian humaneness, ren, allows the acknowledgment of what some Western philosophers have called “otherness.” To preface the discussion it is important to acknowledge that Confucianism, like most of the other spiritual traditions of China and the world, has had a long and varied history. In this chapter Confucianism shall be identified with some ancient themes elaborated in pre-Han times. Those themes have been elaborated in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. But the concern here is to elaborate them in a contemporary way to show how a Confucian in our time might contribute to extending humaneness across rugged social barriers. “Love with Distinctions” The first thing to note about Confucian humaneness (ren) is its association with the Axial Age revolution that extended from East Asia through South Asia to the West Asian lands of the Mediterranean. The phrase “Axial Age” was coined by Karl Jaspers and was used to characterize the period roughly from 800–200 BCE, during which time philosophy was invented across the ecumene and there came into being the religions or religious philosophies that we know now as Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Greek philosophical paganism (Plato, Aristotle, etc.), Hinduisms, Jainism, Prophetic Judaism from which in combination with Greek philosophy Christianity arose, and

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Zoroastrianism.1 The elements of these religions or religio-philosophies developed slowly and in many conflicting ways within each general tradition. Yet by the end of the Axial Age, that is, by about the second century BCE, the following themes were universal to them all: some conception or other of the world as a whole, conceptions of the ultimate principle or principles upon which the world as a whole exists, definitions of human identity as having more to do with the relations of individuals to the ultimate principles (for instance, Dao, Heaven/ Earth, Brahman, Emptiness, God) than to local kinship settings, and imperatives to love everyone and be just to everyone (not merely those within one’s in-group). The general reason for the universality of love and justice is that all people are equally and most importantly related to the ultimate principles, and only secondarily to special relations with each other. All these themes were revolutionary relative to preAxial Age religious cultures. The Confucian theme of humaneness is a version of the Axial Age theme of universal love. In contrast to pre-Axial Age cultures according to which one should be humane to one’s own people and rude or hostile to others, particularly barbarians, the early Confucians said that one should be humane to everyone, and that this trait itself is one of the ways in which a human being can become humane. But in ancient China it would seem that Mozi’s philosophy, roughly contemporary with that of Confucius, was a more direct embodiment of the Axial Age ideal regarding universal humanity. When asked whence the “harms” of the world come, he said, They arise out of want of mutual love. At present feudal lords know only to love their own states and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their states to attack others. Heads of families know only to love their own families and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their families to usurp others. And individuals know only to love their own persons and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their own persons to injure others.2

1 Jaspers’s seminal discussion was in Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), published in English as The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). For a more recent comparative historical discussion of the Axial Age, see Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Knopf, 2006). 2 The Mo Tzu, part 2 (chap. 15), trans. Wing-Tsit Chan in his Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 213.

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In the case of universal justice, Mozi was explicit in tying it to the ultimate principle and asserting the common relation of all people to that principle: Heaven wants righteousness and dislikes unrighteousness. With righteousness the world lives and without righteousness the world dies, and with it the world becomes rich and without it the world becomes poor, with it the world becomes orderly and without it the world becomes chaotic. Now Heaven wants to have the world live and dislikes to have it die, wants to have it rich and dislikes to have it poor, and wants to have it orderly and dislikes to have it chaotic.3

Mozi advocated equality for all people, and cutting back on elaborate funerals, expensive clothes, and good foods. The Confucian objection to Mozi was complicated, involving a rejection of what was perceived as hyper-utilitarianism and an overanthropomorphizing of Heaven.4 But the deeper Confucian objection was this: people are not “equal”—they are each unique and should be respected as such. Therefore, it is not possible to love everyone by treating them the same way, as Mozi taught. Rather, humane behavior needs to make distinctions in order to treat people in the ways they should be treated, given who they are and who the person treating them is. The distinctions Confucius seemed to have in mind have to do with social relationships: The Duke of She told Confucius, “In my country there is an upright man named Kung. When his father stole a sheep, he bore witness against him.” Confucius said, “The upright men in my community are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this.”5

In contrast to Mozi’s doctrine of universal egalitarian love, Confucianism has long advocated “love or humaneness with distinctions.” In ancient times, this meant loving one’s own family more than those in other families, one’s own community more than other communities, and one’s own empire more than the barbarians. Love, or

The Mo Tzu, part 2 (chap. 26), in Chan, Source Book, 218. Confucius said, “Does Heaven (T’ien, nature) say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced. Does Heaven say anything?” Analects 17.19; Chan, Source Book, 47. 5 Analects 13.18. Note the similarity of this argument to that of Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro. 3 4

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humaneness, in this context means not only affectionate regard but also taking responsibility for those loved and deferring to them as worthy to be loved. The Confucian doctrine of “love with distinctions” does not mean that there is anyone who should not be loved, only that people are to be loved differently, or treated humanely in different ways, with more attentive responsibility for those in relative proximity.6 Other religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity, agree that everyone should be loved, that compassion should be universal. But because, in practice, love is mediated by the social structures of the situation, universal love becomes an empty value unless it can be shaped so as to recognize distinctions in relationships. Confucianism thus has a head start among world cultures in recognizing the complexity of treating everyone humanely when people are in such different relations with one another. Many barriers exist across which the expression of humaneness is difficult. In our own time we understand the social barriers to be much more complex than were expressed in the ancient texts. They cannot be conceived simply in terms of distance from an intergenerational family, although those barriers are surely important. We know now much more of the structures of socioeconomic class stratification, of how varied those are, of how upwardly and downwardly mobile people are within social classes, of how these are affected not only by ownership of the means of production but by technological advances, climate, and shifting markets across the world. We know now about many more of the complexities of different kinds of personality, with different learning styles, and different psychopathologies, across which love needs to be conveyed. We understand that contemporary social barriers to the expression of humaneness include ethnic divisions, religious divisions, and civilizational divisions. We recognize that groups have different and conflicting interests centered on economic matters, or

6 Tu Weiming is one of the most important Confucians writing in English on the topic of ren as love or humaneness. His most important books on the topic are Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (revised and enlarged edition of Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Confucian Thought: Selfhood As Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); and Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley, CA: Lancaster-Miller, 1978; repr., Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1998). I had the privilege of providing forewords to the latter two books, and thus have been engaged with him for over twenty years in a dialogue about the nuances and relative positions of humaneness and ritual.

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claims to land, or appropriation of resources. All these social barriers to the expression of humaneness are abundantly illustrated in the conflicts of world civilizations; but most of them are also illustrated in the internal struggles of small towns.7 Contemporary social sciences are multiplying our appreciation of these alienating social structures at an astonishing rate.8 Something like the Confucian ideal of humaneness with distinctions has become a social imperative for every contemporary society. Reinforced in every major religious and cultural tradition, humaneness stands directly opposed to the dehumanizing effects of so much of late modern economic and political interaction. How can humaneness acknowledge the differences among the people and groups to be treated humanely and find distinctive ways to address them across the boundaries? This question is not to be answered only by examining the particular kinds of boundaries on which the ancient Confucians focused, namely those emanating from distance from family. It needs to be asked in terms of our contemporary understanding of social boundaries that make humane treatment difficult. Ritual Theory Nevertheless, the ancients were not concerned only with boundaries set in familial terms. Xunzi, the ancient theoretician of Confucian ritual, noticed that societies are stratified into social classes based on economic, political, and birthright differences.9 It did not occur to him

7 See Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 8 For philosophical reflections on alienating social structure, focusing on the Chinese tradition, see Harmony and Strife: Contemporary Perspectives, East & West, ed. Shu-hsien Liu and Robert E. Allinson (Shatin, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988). 9 Xunzi’s writings have recently been edited and translated into English by John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); vol. 1 (1988) includes books 1–6, vol. 2 (1990), books 7–16, and vol. 3 (1994), books 17–32. For the points discussed in this essay, see book 2, “On SelfCultivation”; book 10, “On Enriching the State”; book 17, “Discourse on Nature”; book 19, “Discourse on Ritual Principles”; book 20, “Discourse on Music”; book 22, “On the Correct Use of Names”; and book 23, “Man’s Nature is Evil.” I have discussed Xunzi and his theory of ritual in Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), Boston Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), and Ritual and Deference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). One of the most interesting recent discussions of ritual is Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay

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that the vast differences between the rich and poor could be changed; the idea of social engineering did not become generally plausible until the eighteenth century in England with the work of John Wesley. Now we understand social justice to demand that social inequities be remedied where they can, and political philosophies from Marxism to liberal progressivism have engaged in massive social experiments in changing class structures. But some class differences endure, and perhaps have gotten worse in certain economic situations. Xunzi even believed that social class distinctions were a good thing because they were necessary for organizing the economy efficiently and preserving social order. But he recognized that people in all social classes should be treated humanely by each other, especially so that those in the lowest classes would have enough to live full lives. The problem with people, Xunzi thought, is that by nature we are selfish, like infants, thinking only of ourselves; modern psychologists call “primary narcissism” what Xunzi notoriously called the “natural evil of humanity.” Moreover, although human beings have all sorts of emotional and physical capacities given in their biology (by Heaven, he said), biology does not teach them to attach the right emotions to the right objects, or to rule themselves judiciously. Actually, according to Xunzi, human nature by itself, that is, as given in biology, is vastly underdetermined. Our physical capacities need to be trained, as do our intellectual and emotional capacities. Whereas Mencius and his tradition have said that human nature is essentially good and will unfold properly if not distorted, Xunzi and his tradition have said that human nature is not complete without culture to determine its underdetermined capacities. His answer to both natural narcissism and bio-psychic underdetermination was ritual. Xunzi’s notion of ritual was extraordinarily profound, referring not only to court (and religious) rituals but to all behavior that is shaped by conventional signs. A culture has a repertoire of signs that might be very different from that of another culture, but which accomplish the same thing, for instance standing, greeting, and speaking. East Asians learn to stand with their feet parallel; Westerns learn to stand with the toes out at an angle. East Asians greet one another with a bow and with the hands together; Westerners with a

on the Limits of Sincerity, by Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon; part of its interest lies in the fact that it draws upon Confucian as well as Western sociological and anthropological theories of ritual.

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handshake. Speaking in Chinese or English is a difference in ritual, even when saying the same thing. For Xunzi, a human being needs to be ritualized in order to make high civilization possible. Men and women can copulate and produce offspring, but cannot raise them to be humane without family rituals that provide distinctions in roles and divisions of labor, especially in ways that foster mutual respect. The Confucian tradition as a whole has placed great importance on the family as the locus of learning to be humane. One learns how to be humane, in general, by being loved by parents. But it is more complicated than this. Parents find it easy to love an infant—it is almost a biological instinct. Parents have to grow in the subtlety of their love in order to love an active child, teaching the child how to develop capacities and take on responsibilities. Parents have to grow in their own love a very great deal to love a rebellious adolescent. Then parental love has even more to learn when children are grown and move away. The intent behind parental love is to raise children to be virtuous. Filial piety is a kind of love appropriate for children to have toward parents. In commonsense terms, this has meant that children take care of parents in their old age. But in the deep Confucian terms, filial piety is becoming virtuous and demonstrating this virtue so as to free parents from the task of making their children virtuous, to show them that they have succeeded and can retire with satisfaction. How can this be done? By the children themselves marrying and having children and demonstrating their own virtue by loving their children in the appropriate ways, stage by stage. Thus parents cannot be satisfied that they have loved their children into humaneness until they see their children do this with the grandchildren. This accounts for the very great importance of multigenerational families in traditional Confucian societies and points out the great limitations that highly mobile societies place on the closely monitored teaching of humaneness. All sorts of surrogates for children and grandchildren are possible, of course, in education and apprenticeships. All of the acts of parenting and filial piety are given meaning by the ritual conventions of culture. Without those ritual conventions, the acts would not carry humaneness.10

10 For this interpretation of the familial center of humaneness or love, see Tu Weiming’s Centrality and Commonality. For my comments on Tu’s view, see Neville, Boston Confucianism, 96–101.

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Just as families would not be possible without ritual, so friendships, organized social life, economic activity, and all the other things important to high civilization require ritual. Human biological nature, according to Xunzi, cannot be fulfilled without the rituals of conventional culture. Thus he gives very great importance to the ancient trinity of Heaven, Earth, and the Human, where the Human means ritualized culture bearing conventional meanings that can tie emotions to their appropriate objects. Xunzi’s approach to ritual is extraordinarily complicated.11 Of the many places where ritual is important, according to Xunzi, one is in the interactions among different social classes. To oversimplify his position, in a well-ordered society, rituals exist by virtue of which lower classes defer to higher classes and higher classes provide for the needs of lower classes. In a poorly ordered society, those rituals do not exist, with the consequences of class warfare and broken economy; everyone suffers, especially the poor. More important for Xunzi’s Confucian sensibilities, in a poorly ordered society people cannot treat one another with humaneness because their classes are at odds with one another. In a true Confucian sense, deference is not only the attitude of lower classes toward higher classes, but the attitude of anyone regarding anyone else with humaneness. The higher classes in a well-ordered society defer to the lower classes and their needs, in appropriate ways that both recognize their humanity and provide for them. Xunzi sought for large-scale social rituals within which each social class could function in a harmonious dance with the others, paying deference to the others even when not sharing the values or interests of the others. The sharp point of Xunzi’s conception of ritual is that the individuals and groups participating in the rituals do not need to share common interests and in fact can be in deep conflict, so long as they play the rituals together so as to keep an effective political economy going. Nowadays we strive to overcome economic class differences, not to accept them, and believe in social engineering in ways of which the ancients could not conceive. Very often we want rightly to break down rituals that perpetuate injustice. Nevertheless, many kinds of differences between people prevent them from dancing with one another in appropriate humane ways. One contribution to overcoming the barriers to

11

See Neville, Ritual and Deference, chap. 3.

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multiply focused humaneness among people and groups is the development of rituals that allow them to interact with one another in “harmony” even while competing and disagreeing over fundamental values. Put in a preliminary way, I advocate a Confucian project of social analysis that inquires into the existence of rituals that inhibit or prevent the expression of humaneness across social barriers, and that goes on to develop rituals for the interaction of contending groups that allow for all participants to treat one another humanely even while in conflict. These are two distinct steps. The first is the development of a contemporary Confucian discipline for discerning ritual behavior and analyzing what it allows and what it prevents. This discipline should take advantage of all the social science methodologies for understanding ritual. But it should be guided by the Confucian theme of analyzing how specific rituals increase or inhibit humaneness, how they treat some people humanely and objectify others so as to dehumanize them. The Confucian sensibility about humaneness in diverse contexts is far subtler than that in late modern and postmodern social sciences that try to be “value free.” The second step in a contemporary discipline of ritual analysis is the invention of new rituals that would replace dysfunctional ones or that would integrate people and social functions that ought to be integrated but are not. “Inventing rituals” is a strange idea, because we usually take rituals to emerge from below, as it were. But because all human interactions, including those of social entities, are mediated by rituals, to care for others means to care for the rituals needed for mediation. Therefore, creativity in enhancing human relations includes creativity in the invention of rituals that make them possible. Confucius thought the problem with his time was that there were insufficient rituals for civilized life. So he claimed to recover the rituals of the ancients and taught them to his pupils. But in fact by and large he was inventing the rituals that he taught. Humaneness, Ritual, and Otherness Before we can say much about rituals that foster the expression of humaneness across barriers, however, a further word needs to be said about humaneness itself. Some Western philosophers recently have been concerned to understand human beings as “others.” This concern arises out of two long-standing problems in Western thought.

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One is that in many contexts we conceive world history and our societies in the form of narratives. The vast complexities of nature and human society are simplified and given meaning through stories. A narrative gives meaning by connecting things in a comprehensible story line; but it also gives meaning by excluding from that narrative all the other things that happen that are not part of the narrative. A narrative is a license to not pay attention to those things, including people, who do not count for much in the story. In both The Philosophy of Right and the Lesser Logic, Hegel argued that the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual.12 By “rational” he meant the unfolding of the narrative logic of nature and history. He admitted that there exist some groups of people who do not fit into that narrative but said they are not “actual”: because they do not contribute to the story, it is as if they were only possible, not actual. In a narrative, some people inevitably are marginalized or ignored completely. But that is not humane: these neglected “others” need to be recognized. Their experiences, perspectives, and social locations need to count if they are to be treated humanely. The other long-standing problem is the conviction that a human being is a subject who looks out onto a world of objects. For any given subject, according to this conviction, other people are not themselves subjects, but rather objects, reduced to what they might be in the mind of a subject to whom they appear. This point is associated in Western philosophy with Descartes, who famously identified the self with consciousness, for whom “objects” are things within consciousness; he solidified the meaning of “objectivity” as reality-for-a-mind.13 The focus on otherness is a correction that cultivates the experience of other people as themselves being subjects, not merely objects. With regard to the problem of humanely treating individuals and groups that have been marginalized or entirely written out of the story of a given society, rituals that exclude them can be identified and deconstructed, and new rituals can be developed so that they are engaged and their perspectives are made to count in the social whole. 12 See Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 10; The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 10. 13 For an extraordinarily acute analysis of this point for Descartes and Western philosophy, see the essays by Anderson Weekes in Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes, eds., Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

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Michel Foucault has inspired a strong strain of postmodern reflection on rituals of power that subtly marginalize various classes of people.14 On the political side, the development of rituals to include the marginalized and neglected is part of the project of democracy. The required rituals comprise not only explicit forms of voting and decision making, but also the rituals of education and community formation that facilitate participation. On the economic side, rituals need to be developed that bring all people into the economy, making sure that basic needs are met for widows and orphans, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and others who are likely to be neglected or marginalized. On the personal side, rituals are required that educate all people in all social locations about the nature of those in other social locations, especially neglected or marginalized ones. Instead of thinking about world history or our societies in terms of narratives, we should learn to think of them in terms of vast, complicated dances of multiple, interacting rituals. With regard to the problem of humanely treating individuals as subjects in their own right, and not only as functions of our own experience, we can appeal to the ancient Confucian discipline of learning to play interactive rituals with others in such a way as to defer to others as also being subjects playing within the rituals. Humane deference is not achieved by a kind of universal acknowledgement that every other person is also a subject, even though that is true. Rather, one person’s subjectivity is mediated through the particularities of body, family and friends, social structures, social location and historical position, ethnic identity, personal history, age, and a host of other elements. This first of all applies to the particularities of the life of the person who is deferring to another: I defer to another through the particularities of my own life. Until I have a grasp of what those particularities are, and the roles they give me in the many rituals in which I take part, I cannot defer to another particularly. But that deference is not actually achieved until I have some fairly profound feeling for how the other is a subject through the particularities of the other’s own life. Just as my human deference to others is

14 See, for instance, Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1970), and The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985). One of his most influential followers is Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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expressed through the particularities of my own life, the others cannot be identified as particular subjects until I grasp how they are subjects in their own particularities. Of course this requires both an elimination of bigotry that would blind me to the others and the achievement of the erudition needed to understand what the others’ lives and circumstances are like. Here is where love or humaneness “with distinctions” is so important. The fundamental meaning of family rituals, for instance, is that each person is allowed to be a particular subject while playing the various roles that define a complex familial social location. Because of the intimacy of family culture, all the individuals within a family are alike in many respects, and can learn to imagine what it is like to be someone else in the family, although I do not want to minimize the difficulty of maturation in this sense. But think how difficult it is to recognize the particular subjectivities of people vastly different from oneself, people of other families, other cultures, other social locations. The social barriers across which it is so hard to express humaneness are precisely those things that make it difficult to perceive or imagine how others inhabit their particular subjectivities. Surely, an imperative deriving from humaneness is for all people to become educated about what it is like to be persons on the other side of social barriers. But education is not enough. We need the rituals so that people across social barriers can engage one another. But that also is not enough. We need to learn to play those rituals so that in the very engagement with those others we can come to recognize and defer to the others in their particular subjectivities. This includes recognizing conflicting interests and perhaps even deep hatred. To be humane to others does not depend upon them being humane to us. Humaneness or love with distinctions gets its character from the specifics of ritual engagement across barriers. We should not think to love all people the way we should love our family members. Different social locations present different problems for achieving recognition and deference to other people’s particular subjectivities, and in contemporary society those social locations are often in flux. Different forms of humaneness are appropriate for different kinds of social relations, especially those across barriers that make recognition of particular subjectivities of various “others” difficult. What an extraordinary moral task for the social sciences informed by Confucianism to investigate the ways rituals prevent the expression of humaneness across social barriers, and to invent better rituals that facilitate genuine humaneness with appropriate distinctions!

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The above remarks have been given in a hortatory tone. This is a traditional Confucian posture. The argument has been that Confucianism has two important contributions to make to the contemporary problem of exercising humaneness across social barriers. One is its conviction that humaneness means different things in different situations and for different people, and that to treat everyone equally is not to be humane. The other is the Confucian sense of ritual as a conventional form of social interaction that allows people who are in deep conflict still to act together to make possible what their common ritual makes possible. These contributions are especially to be appreciated in contexts in which being humane requires recognizing the marginalized and objectified as subjects in their own right. Contemporary Confucians can enter the philosophical and spiritual conversation with these contributions. What has not been said here is that Confucianism has often failed in these important tasks. For many people in traditionally Confucian societies, there is a history of treating people only as objectified in ritualized roles, eliminating their subjectivity. This has been true in assigning women demeaning roles and in establishing social hierarchies in which the people on top do not serve but take advantage of those lower down. Anger against Confucianism is justified in these respects. And yet these grave downsides of Confucian culture are perversions of the Confucian ideals precisely because they distort humaneness and use rituals to make impossible good things such as universal human flourishing. Precisely because Confucian rituals and practices of humaneness need to reach everyone in appropriate ways, the bad effects of historical Confucian rituals prove that they are bad rituals. The contemporary need is for new rituals that do not marginalize anyone in some social narrative and that do not objectify them. Contemporary Confucian spirituality should find this an exhilarating challenge.

THE REVIVAL OF CONFUCIAN RITES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Anna SUN Kenyon College Introduction There have been many valuable debates over the religious nature of Confucianism among scholars over the years; the central issues have included whether there exists a transcendental god in Confucian thought, the role of the Jesuits in the making of Confucianism as a religion, and the conception and definition of what constitutes “religion” and “Confucianism.”1 After having performed both archival work on the making of Confucianism as a religion in the West, and research on the controversy over the religious nature of Confucianism in contemporary China,2 I believe the next important step is to examine the actual ritual practice related to Confucianism. The focus of this study is the personal rites performed in Confucius temples (kongmao 孔廟 or wenmiao 文廟) in different regions of China. Additionally, I also briefly discuss the revival of graveside ancestral worship and certain Confucian social rituals. No matter how we define the nature of Confucianism—as a philosophy, as a way of life, or as a religion—the very existence of personal rites conducted in Confucius temples, such as incense burning, praying to Confucius for blessings, and writing personal wishes on prayer cards, shows that there is a

For recent noteworthy studies, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997; Mary Evelyn Tucker and Tu Weiming, eds., Confucian Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 2003–2004); Rodney Leon Taylor, The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Thomas A. Wilson, On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2002). 2 See Anna Sun, Confusions over Confucianism: Controversies over the Religious Nature of Confucianism, 1870–2007 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); idem, “The Fate of Confucianism in Socialist China,” in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, ed. Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 1

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noteworthy religious dimension to the Confucian tradition, for these are religious rituals conducted in a sacred setting. Indeed, for a discussion of the religious nature of Confucianism, the empirical data from the Confucius temples are arguably some of the most solid and noncontroversial pieces of evidence. My primary methods are ethnographical, involving interviews and participant observations in Confucius temples. I have conducted interviews with visitors in more than a dozen Confucius temples in mainland China and Taiwan; I have also observed their actions and collected material objects related to personal rites (such as prayer cards). Based on my fieldwork from 2000 to 2010, my conclusion is that ritual worship of Confucius is indeed undergoing a significant and diverse revival in temple settings in contemporary mainland China. There are differences as well as similarities among the temples I have studied; this revival process is by no means uniform, but is shaped by differences in local religious history, regional economic development, and the historical status of the temples. Methodology Summary of Empirical Fieldwork This paper primarily draws on fieldwork conducted in Confucius temples in mainland China between 2000 and 2010, as well as the latest survey data on Chinese religious practice.3 I have so far studied the following Confucius temples between 2000 and 2011: Qufu Confucius Temple 曲阜孔廟, Beijing Confucius Temple 北京孔廟; Tianjin Confucius Temple 天津孔廟, the city of Tianjin; Deyang Confucius Temple 德阳孔廟, Sichuan Province; Bishan Confucius Temple 壁山 孔廟, Sichuan Province; Zizhong Confucius Temple 资中孔廟, Sichuan Province; Suzhou Confucius Temple 蘇州文廟, Jiangsu Province; Nanjing Confucius Temple 南京夫子廟, Jiangsu Province; Hangzhou Confucius temple 杭州文廟, Zhejiang Province; Wujiang Confucius Temple 江文廟, Zhejiang Province; Shanghai Confucius Temple Horizon Survey, “Spiritual Life of Chinese Residents,” 2007. For further information on this survey, see “Spiritual Life Study of Chinese Residents,” The Association of Religion Data Archives. http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/ SPRTCHNA.asp (accessed May 4, 2011). 3

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上海文廟, the city of Shanghai; and Foshan Confucius Temple 佛 山孔廟, Guangdong Province. I have particularly followed changes in Beijing Confucius Temple and Foshan Confucius Temple over the past ten years. In addition, I conducted fieldwork in three Confucius temples in Taiwan in 2008, which are Taipei Confucius Temple 台北孔廟, Taipei; Tainan Confucius Temple 台南孔廟, Tainan; and Zhanghua Confucius Temple 彰化孔廟, Zhanghua. The Confucius temple life in Taiwan provides a good comparison, both echoing many of the practices seen in mainland China and suggesting possible future directions that Confucius temple life in mainland China might take. Related fieldwork includes visits to non-Confucius temples in which Confucius is also venerated, both in mainland China and Taiwan. These sites are White Cloud Temple 北京白雲觀, Beijing; Wumiao Temple 台南武廟, Tainan; Baoan Gong 台北保安宮, Taipei; and Qingan Gong 彰化慶安宮, Zhanghua. Three Criteria of Confucian Identity I have proposed elsewhere three criteria to define whether someone is a Confucian in terms of their participation in Confucian practice.4 The first one is what I term the “Minimal Criterion: Confucius Worship,” which refers to people who participate in Confucius worship in Confucius temples. The Minimal Criterion centers on the unequivocal religious dimension of Confucianism, for it emphasizes rituals performed in a sacred space, that is, a space devoted to the veneration and worship of Confucius. The next criterion is what I call the “Inclusive Criterion: Ancestral Rites,” which includes people who practice any rituals taking place in an ancestral temple or shrine, or ritual practices at the grave of one’s deceased ancestors/family members. As the name suggests, this is a more inclusive criterion than merely Confucius worship, for it includes ancestral worship, arguable the most commonly practiced Confucian ritual in China throughout history.5 The last criterion is what I call

4 See Anna Sun, “To Become a Confucian,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, forthcoming. 5 However, it can be controversial to consider ancestral worship a particularly Confucian ritual, since it can be found in many different cultures globally, and it existed in China long before the time of Confucius. For a more detailed discussion, see Anna

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the “Extended Criterion: Cultural Confucian,” which refers to people who may or may not participate in Confucian rituals such as Confucius worship or ancestral worship, but who are culturally Confucian because of their practice of Confucian spiritual exercises that aim at cultivating one’s mind and body in order to live a life following Confucian ethical teachings. This also includes people who take seriously in their everyday life Confucian social rituals such as observing the proper ways of interacting with one’s family members, teachers, and friends. In this study, the religious rituals related to Confucius worship are the focus, although I shall address the other two forms of ritual practice (ancestral worship and Confucian social rituals) briefly in the concluding section as well. The Revival of Confucian Rituals In the following subsections, I shall first give a short history of Confucius temples in China, then a brief analysis of the general development of the promotion and revival of Confucianism in China in the past ten years. The last three subsections deal with the revival of rituals in Confucius temples, the revival of ancestral worship, and the revival of Confucian social rituals, respectively, with the main focus on ritual practices in Confucius temple settings. A Brief History of Confucius Temples in China The first Confucius temple came into being in 479 BCE, when the Duke Ai of Lu, the ruler of the home state of Confucius, ordered Confucius’s home in Qufu to be preserved and used as a temple for venerating the spirit of Confucius. There were only three simple rooms, fitting for a teacher who taught his students the importance of living a life of benevolence, justice, ritual, wisdom, and trust (renyi lizhixin 仁義 禮智信). Over the years, however, the temple became larger and more ornate, for rulers were gradually adopting the so-called “cult of Confucius” as a state cult, and the veneration and worship of Confucius

Sun, “Counting Confucians: Who Are the Confucians in Contemporary East Asia?,” Newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences of National Taiwan University (Fall 2009, pp. 15–23).

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became imperial events, with rulers and later emperors leading the ceremony. Several hundred years later, in 489 AD, the first Confucius temple outside of Qufu was built by King Xiaowen of Northern Wei, marking the start of the practice of establishing temples for Confucius beyond Confucius’s home state. Throughout imperial China, especially after the incorporation of the Confucian canon into the foundation of state cultural and political ideology through the long-standing (605–1905 CE) institution of “civil examinations” (kejiu 科舉) whereby state officials were selected through a rigorous and rigid examination of their knowledge of Confucian learning, Confucius temples became a key sacred site in imperial ritual practice, for the worship of Confucius had become an indispensible part of the legitimization of imperial rule.6 Ceremonies honoring the spirit of Confucius were conducted in the original Confucius temple in Qufu—now a magnificent and imposing temple complex, a far cry from the original three simple rooms—by the emperors. And because of the close connections between Confucius worship and education, very often Confucian temples were attached to Confucian academies, following the tradition of zoumiao rouxue 左廟右學 (Confucius temple on the left, the academy on the right). The best-known example of this structure is the Imperial Academy in Beijing (guozijian 國子監), built on the right side of the Confucius Temple in Beijing in 1306, a few years after the temple was built. There were at least fifteen hundred Confucius temples spread throughout China by the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). After the Republican revolution in 1911, there was a failed attempt to make Confucianism into a national religion, which faded away by the end of the 1920s. Today there are only a few hundred Confucius temples left, after the destruction of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which many local Confucius temples were either destroyed or fell into disrepair. Although the Chinese government included the Qufu Confucius Temple on the First National Cultural Heritage Sites List (guojiao zhongdian wenwu baohu danwei 国 家重点文物保护单位名单) in 1961, it was not until 1988 that the second most important Confucius temple in the country, the Beijing

6 For a history of the civil examinations, particularly from the twelfth century to the nineteenth century, see Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of the Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

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Confucius Temple, was assigned a similar status. Today there are at least thirty-nine Confucius temples that are protected as “national cultural heritage sites”: 1961 1982 1988 1995 2001 2006

First Cultural Heritage Sites List Second Cultural Heritage Sites List Third Cultural Heritage Sites List Fourth Cultural Heritage Sites List Fifth Cultural Heritage Sites List Sixth Cultural Heritage Sites List

Qufu Confucius Temple no Confucius temples Beijing Confucius Temple five Confucius temples twelve Confucius temples twenty Confucius temples

Once the temples are designated as national cultural heritage sites, there are strict regulations on construction and renovation, which are crucial in protecting the integrity of the original architecture. The designation also opens up more opportunities for the local governments to promote tourism. But even without the “national cultural heritage” designation, Confucius temples today are already tourist attractions in many provinces. The two most important ones, the Qufu and Beijing temples, are routinely on popular tourist schedules for both domestic tourists and visitors from abroad, and in the past decade many provincial governments have been renovating their local Confucius temples with the hope of attracting tourists to their regions. Such efforts have been financially supported by the state, for they both serve the economic purpose of generating new revenue for local governments through traditional cultural sites, and the political goal of establishing Confucianism as the most visible Chinese cultural and social heritage. This is part of the larger endeavor undertaken by the state to promote Confucianism, which arguably started in 2004. The Recent Multifaceted Promotion of Confucianism by the Chinese State One could argue that there have been at least five steps in the endorsement of Confucianism by the Chinese state so far, signified by five concrete and noteworthy events: 1. The Political Ideology Step This critical step was signified by the use of the “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和諧社會) slogan, explicitly borrowed from Confucian political philosophy, by President Hu Jintao on September 19, 2004, at the Sixteenth Chinese Communist Party Congress. It has become the cen-

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tral political idea for the Hu Jintao—Wen Jiaobao administration; the Party has been using the slogan consistently since then.7 2. The State Ritual Step The first official veneration of Confucius in the Qufu Confucius Temple on September 28, 2004, marked the beginning of this development. The annual formal ceremony has been broadcast on Chinese national television since 2005. Since then numerous formal ceremonies honoring the birthday of Confucius have taken place in Qufu and Beijing, as well as many provincial cities and towns with newly renovated Confucius temples. 3. The Culture Step The culture step is at least twofold. The first aspect is the overseas one, represented by the founding of the first Confucius Institute on November 21, 2004, in Seoul, South Korea, which launched a global project supported by state funding in the amount of 2 billion yuan. By November 2009 there were already 282 Confucius Institutes in eighty-eight countries (the last official number given by the Confucius Institute to date), promoting not only the name of Confucius as a Chinese cultural brand, but also attempting to recast contemporary China as synonymous with Confucianism.8 The second aspect is domestic, represented by the October 2006 broadcast of Yu Dan’s widely popular seven-part television lecture series on the Analects of Confucius, aired on a state-owned, prime Chinese television station. Her book on the Analects based on the series has sold several million copies. 4. The Confucian Symbol Step This refers to the emphasis of China’s Confucian heritage through symbolic means, such as images, texts, and artworks. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on August 8, 2008, with its numerous references to Confucius and Confucianism, was the first major event that attempted to link China’s recent rapid economic growth—displayed in the cutting-edge stadiums and the high-tech capability of the Beijing Olympic Games—with its Confucian past. The latest example might be the erection of the statue of Confucius in Tiananmen Square in January 2011.9 7 As of December 12, 2010, there were 133,647 mentions of “harmonious society” on the website for People’s Daily (www.people.com.cn), the official Chinese government newspaper. Interestingly, there are 2,506 mentions of “Confucius temples” (kongmiao 孔廟) in the same database, but only 1,191 mentions of “Confucian religion” (rujiao 儒 教). For detailed discussions of “harmonious society” and current schools of Confucian political thought, see Stephen C. Angle, Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy: Toward Progressive Confucianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). 8 The number of Confucius Institutes is according to the Confucius Institute website (http://www.chinese.cn/). 9 According to The Economist, “A week before President Hu Jintao’s visit to America on January 18th [2011] the appearance of a giant bronze statue of Confucius on the

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As we can see, the year 2004 marked the turning point of the official revival of Confucianism in ideological, ritualistic, and cultural terms. Explicitly symbolic and political uses of Confucianism on the international stage soon followed, and have increasingly intensified. In my study, I focus on personal rituals performed in Confucius temples rather than formal ceremonies, such as the annual veneration and worship of Confucius taking place on his birthday on September 28, which so far have been mostly organized and conducted by central or local government officials.10 Although such ceremonies certainly contain religious elements, they tell us more about the way in which the state mobilizes symbolic resources for its own political purposes than the less noticeable, yet arguably more resilient revival of Confucian rituals practiced by ordinary people. The Revival of Ritual Practices in Confucius Temples In what follows, I shall first give a concrete description of the rituals performed in Confucius temples in today’s mainland China, then offer a typology of the rituals based on interviews and participant observations, with special attention to what I call “reinvented rituals.” I shall end this section with a brief comparison with Confucius temples in

east side of Tiananmen Square caused a stir in the Chinese capital. He is the first non-revolutionary to be commemorated on the hallowed ground of Chinese communism. The party, having once vilified the ancient sage, now depends on him in its attempts at global rebranding. . . . During his trip to America, Mr. Hu hopes Confucius will help him connect with ordinary Americans” (“Rectification of Statues,” The Economist, January 20, 2011). 10 For an in-depth analysis of the revival of formal ceremonies taking place in Confucius temples in China, see Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval’s “Lijiao, the Return of Ceremonies Honouring Confucius in Mainland China,” China Perspectives 2009, no. 4: 82–100. One of their fascinating findings is that there is now beginning to emerge a new trend of what they call “grassroots Confucianism and Confucian ceremonies,” which are ceremonies organized not by government officials, but local associations promoting Confucianism and “ancient ritualistic culture and music” (91).

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Taiwan and Japan, anticipating future developments of ritual practices in Confucius temples in mainland China. Among the eleven Confucius temples in mainland China I have studied so far, all but two function as sacred space for the veneration and worship of Confucius.11 I have observed at least three main forms of ritual practices performed in the temples: (a) burning incense (b) praying to the tablet, the statue, or the portrait of Confucius (bowing or kneeling) (c) writing prayers on prayer cards (xuyuan qian 許願簽) that hang on the trees or special shelves within the temple.

The frequency of the performance of these rituals varies greatly from temple to temple, mostly due to their location and visitor traffic. Among the sites I have studied, the ones where the most rituals were performed were those in the center of urban areas, such as the Beijing, Nanjing, Foshan, and Shanghai temples; the ones with the least ritual activity were located in remote regions, such as the Zizhong or Deyang temples in Sichuan Province, which are in small cities a few hours outside of cosmopolitan areas. Administratively, Confucius temples are property of the state and managed by the Bureau of Cultural Relics (wenwu ju 文物局) through its numerous local branches in most provinces and cities; thus the temples are not officially classified as religious sites but cultural ones, charging a modest entrance fee at the gate the way museums do. But this status does not necessarily hinder either the official ceremonies and rituals or the personal ones taking place in Confucius temples. In fact, since they are not managed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs (zongjiao ju 宗教局), the temples are relatively free to develop new ways

There are only two exceptions. The first is the Bishan Confucius Temple 壁山 孔廟 in the small city of Bishan in Sichuan Province, which is now the location of several local cultural institutions: the Bishan Bureau of Culture Relics, the Bishan City Museum, and the Bishan Association of Literature and History. The Dacheng Hall has been rented out as the site of a popular teahouse in the past few years, as well as a space for public lectures on local culture and history, an innovative measure of bringing in extra income according to Mr. He, the manager of the teahouse. It is unclear when the temple will be renovated and restored to its proper status as a temple for Confucius. The second exception is the Wujiang Confucius Temple 江文廟 in Zhejiang Province, which is used as a reading room and library by Wujiang High School, an elite high school in the region. The small Confucius temple is enclosed by the school complex, which was built around the temple. 11

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of increasing visitor traffic and income, and the revival and reinvention of rituals are welcome signs of growth.12 Where and how are the rituals performed? It is important to have a sense of the spatial layout of the temples in order to comprehend the ritual practices that take place. The general layout of Confucius temples follows a template based on the original Confucius Temple in Qufu. However, since the Qufu Temple is one of the three largest existing historical architectural complexes in China today, having been expanded and renovated numerous times throughout history (its scale is second only to the Forbidden City in Beijing), it is impossible for local temples to emulate its grandeur. Most surviving Confucius temples today are not enormous complexes, and as such they are only able to keep the key components as dictated by the Qufu Temple, imitating its structure rather than scale. For instance, while the Qufu Temple has nine courtyards following a central line, most Confucius temples only have two or three courtyards, maintaining only the most crucial elements. When one enters a Confucius temple, one has to walk though the main gate into the temple complex, named Lingxing Gate 欞星門, which leads to the main courtyard, where Dacheng Hall 大成殿, the main ceremonial hall, is the architectural focal point of both the courtyard and the entire temple. When one enters Dacheng Hall, which is a traditional temple space with an elaborately carved high wooden altar in the center, one usually sees inside the altar a wooden tablet that bears the venerated formal title of Confucius, representing Confucius himself, as in the Beijing Confucius Temple. However, there are variations on this tradition; for instance, a large stone statue replaces the traditional tablet and altar in the Zizhong Confucius Temple in Sichuan, which is a very exceptional case; in the Foshan Confucius Temple, a dark stone relief depicting the image of Confucius stands behind the tablet. Only in the Qufu Confucius Temple do we find both the tablet and a statue: an ornate statue of Confucius is placed right behind the wooden tablet, a configuration not seen in other Confucius temples.

12 The degree of promotion of old as well as new rituals by the temples has much to do with the financial structure of the individual temples; the temples with a more flexible financial structure (i.e., with the freedom to keep extra temple income for the temple employees instead of turning it all over to their government superior) have a stronger incentive to sell incense and prayer cards, and as a result encourage more ritual practices in the temples. I shall discuss such differences among temples in greater detail elsewhere.

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On each side of the Confucius tablet and/or statue, there are tablets of Mencius 孟子 (often referred to as the “Second Sage” of Confucianism), Yan Hui 顏回 and Zengzi 曾子 (two of the most important students of Confucius; Zengzi is also believed to have written the Classics of Filial Piety 孝經), and Zishi 子思 (Confucius’s grandson, whose importance lies in the fact that Mencius might have studied with his students). The Dacheng Hall is generally where the worship of Confucius takes place, along with the open space in the courtyard right in front of the hall, where a large incense burner is always placed. The open courtyard is often also the space in which the prayer cards are hung on wooden shelves right outside of the Dacheng Hall. There are usually two smaller halls flanking Dacheng Hall that serve as additional ceremonial spaces in the same rectangular courtyard, often for the altars of the most important students of Confucius and the most revered scholars of Confucianism from later dynasties. There are usually another one or two courtyards surrounding the main courtyard, frequently used for exhibition spaces, offices, and the temple shop; the temple shops have played an unexpected yet important role in the revival and reinvention of rituals. Very often the temples also have a man-made pond (banchi 伴池), a high, grand outer brick wall painted crimson (wanren gongqiang 萬仞宮牆), and other architectural features that allude to Confucius’s life, as well as traditions from the long history of Confucius temples in imperial China. In the open spaces between these sets of buildings, one can often see well-designed gardens with ancient trees growing by the ceremonial halls. This is where one can usually find a tall statue of Confucius made of stone, in a standing pose known as “Confucius Teaching” (kongzi xingjiao 孔子行教). The statue is placed in different locations in different temples (for example, in the center of the courtyard in Shanghai Confucius Temple, and beside the temple in Foshan) and generally has an incense burner right in front of it. So how do people carry out rituals in these temples? In the interior ceremonial space of Dacheng Hall, the following ritual apparatus can be found in most Confucius temples, listed in decreasing order of their distance from the entrance of the ceremonial hall, which correspond to specific rituals performed: (a) A narrow high table for offerings to Confucius, placed right in front of the altar of Confucius, which is used for official sacrifices during formal ceremonies, and personal offerings of flowers, fruits, and other items during private rituals, which today include prayer cards sold

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anna sun in temple shops. Such offerings are usually presented after a person bows to the altar and says a silent prayer. (b) An incense burner for the offering of incense (in almost all temples the incense cannot be lighted due to fire regulations). People usually buy incense from the temple shop or from the ticket agent at the temple gate. (c) A few prayer mats for people who wish to kneel in prayer, and/or to touch their forehead to the ground in prayer.

Outside of the interior spaces, there are other opportunities for ritual practices in the temples: (a) The incense burner in front of the standing statue of Confucius in the courtyard. (b) The wooden shelves right outside of Dacheng Hall, or the trees in the courtyards (such as in Foshan), where people hang their prayer cards.

In other words, there are multiple religious spaces as well as apparatus that make the ritual practices possible; these spaces and equipment are an important aspect of the revival and reinvention of religious rituals, which is true not only in Confucius temples but in other temples as well. For instance, the presence of similar prayer cards can be found in many Buddhist and temples in mainland China, which in itself is a very recent and fascinating phenomenon. I have been studying the origin of prayer cards in Confucius temples, which arguably originated in Japan. The prayer cards seen in different Confucius temples in China today (made of paper) seem to have been influenced by the prayer cards (繪馬) found in most Japanese Shinto temples. According to Ms. Ai-Zhen Wang, the director of the Shanghai Confucian Temple Administration Office, whom I interviewed on December 24, 2010, the prayer cards were in fact invented in 2002. After taking a trip to Japan in early 2000, Ms. Wang was inspired by the prayer cards she saw in Japanese Shinto temples and brought the idea back to the Confucius Temple in Shanghai, where she had worked since 1999. She believed that the Shanghai Confucius Temple was the first of all the Confucius temples in China to provide and sell such prayer cards, for she was asked to give a presentation about the innovative ways the Shanghai temple attracted visitors in 2002, at the annual conference of the Chinese National Association for the Protection of Confucius Temples 中国孔 保护协会. What do people ask for in their prayers? Are they merely here to pay respect to Confucius, the ancient sage of virtues and wisdom? Among

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the visitors I have interviewed, many were indeed in the temples to pay respect to the Master, and to admire the classical architecture that the Confucius temples are justifiably known for. For the most part these are tourists, for whom the Confucius temple is a regular stop on the itinerary in Beijing or Nanjing. However, the people who actually perform rituals—such as burning incense, bowing or kowtowing in front of the tablet or statue of Confucius, and/or writing and hanging prayer cards—are carrying out these acts with a different purpose in mind: to ask for blessings from Confucius, the god of learning and examinations, and, by extension, career advancement and general good fortune. Many tourists do in fact perform such rituals as well; there is a long-standing tradition in China of carrying out ritual practices during travels that bring people to religious sites in cities or mountains—often they are famous cultural sites as well—that they otherwise would not have easy access to. The frequency of the performance of these rituals varies greatly not only from temple to temple, but also according to the time of the year; the most popular period is right before the very competitive national university entrance examination in early June, during which many students and their parents and grandparents go to the temples to ask for blessings. To summarize, there are in general two types of people who perform rituals in Confucius temples, based on my interviews and content analysis of prayer cards: (a) People who go to the temples specifically for the purpose of asking for blessings from Confucius, especially blessings in exams, such as students who are about to take the national university entrance examination and their parents, or people who are about to take other exams for professional reasons (such as the graduate school exam, the civil servants exam, or even the exam for an electrician’s license). These people are mostly residents in the areas where the temples are located. (b) People who perform rituals when they are visiting the temple as tourists; they ask for blessings not only for exams, but also often for more general blessings, such as good health, happy relationships, or good financial fortune.

Interestingly, according to my interviews, people who perform rituals and ask for blessings in Confucius temples do not in general consider themselves to be “Confucians” (ru jiao tu 儒教徒). This category is alien to them, and it is a moot one anyway: people frequently go to other temples to ask for blessings as well, especially the temples in which

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another god of learning from the Daoist tradition, Wenchang Dijun 文昌帝君, can be worshipped; this is an even more popular phenomenon in Taiwan. In fact, people do not find it problematic at all to ask for blessings from different gods and deities, a common attitude towards ritual practice in China. In this analysis, I emphasize personal ritual practices taking place in Confucius temples today, paying close attention to the actual rituals performed by people who visit the temples, without making value judgments about whether these are “original” or “authentic” or “correct” ritual practices. Although the complex issue of authenticity is a meaningful one in philosophical, theological, and historical contexts, the purpose of this sociological study is different; I am trying to capture the existence of actual practices carried out by real people in the real world, without judging whether they conform to any criteria of “authentic Confucian rituals.” In fact, since I do not hold an essentialist position regarding ritual performances, which only regards certain rituals as authentic and treats others as false or problematic, I view all rituals performed by people as legitimate, and I accept their own interpretations of the meaning of these rituals as legitimate as well. If a prayer is offered to Confucius in a temple devoted to Confucius, regardless of whether the prayer takes the form either of incense burning or of a prayer written on a newly invented prayer card, I view it as a Confucian prayer. Because such rituals do not conform to the historical ceremonial practices performed in temples controlled by literary and political elites in imperial China, some observers have been inclined to demean them as merely folk rituals and to deny them the status of being Confucian. Such judgments assume that there is a correct or orthodox form of Confucius temple life as opposed to the constantly changing and developing character of any living religious tradition. But how significant are these reinventions of Confucian ritual? While it is true that only the future will tell if they can survive in the hurly-burly world of modern Confucianism in China, they nevertheless have much to tell us about people’s growing need for a life that is made meaningful by connecting with traditions that belong to the past as well as the future. The Revival of Ancestral Worship What are the other forms of Confucian rituals that are returning to mainland China today? I rely on the 2007 Horizon “Spiritual Life of

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Chinese Residents” survey for a brief analysis of the revival of rituals related to the worship of ancestral spirits. Only 0.2% of the respondents identified themselves as “Confucians” (12 people out of 6,984 surveyed), as compared to the 16.7% who identified as Buddhists (1,164 people). This is not surprising, given the inherent methodological problem of identifying who the Confucians are in China through survey research.13 However, the responses to questions about ritual practices paint a very different picture. To the question “In the past year, which of the following activities did you participate in?,” which is meant to survey religious ritual activities, the answer is indeed surprising. The question comes with a list of multiple-choice answers (respondents may choose more than one), including venerating ancestral spirits by their graves (shangfen 上墳), attending church services, attending formal services in Buddhist or Daoist temples, and/or praying, worshiping, and/or burning incense in Buddhist, Daoist, or other temples or shrines. The ritual practice with the highest participation rate is venerating ancestral spirits at their graveside: 67.6%, with roughly equal numbers of men and women participating. All the other ritual activities combined amount to a mere 6.2% of people surveyed. What is most telling about the data is how seriously people are taking this ancient ritual. The graveside veneration and worship of ancestral spirits requires people to return to the actual sites of the graves of their deceased family members—usually parents and grandparents— which are often in places other than their current places of residence, for very often the deceased are buried in their ancestral hometowns. And there is a specific date for the ritual every year, which is qingming jie 清明節, the Festival of Qingming, a day reserved for the veneration and worship of the dead in the beginning of April (April 5 on the Western calendar). This ancient practice was prevalent in China for centuries until the Cultural Revolution; for the generations born after 1949, however, ancestral worship (including graveside veneration) is a distant cultural memory rather than an actual part of life. But the recent resurgence of graveside veneration, which includes not only the cleaning and tidying up of the graves, but also prayer, the burning of incense, the offering of paper money and many other forms of sacrificial goods (including many new inventions, such as

For a more detailed discussion, see Sun, “Counting Confucians: Who Are the Confucians in Contemporary East Asia?” 13

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houses, airplanes, and cars made from paper, to be offered to ancestors through burning), point to a significant revival of a ritual practice that has long been claimed to be an essential part of the Confucian form of life, which takes filial piety as one of the most fundamental Confucian virtues. The high percentage of people who took the trouble to travel to the graves of their deceased family members “in the past year” is indeed staggering. In fact, this is such a rapidly developing practice that, in 2008, the Chinese government made April 5 an official national holiday, with the explicit aim of managing the traffic flow of people returning to their ancestral hometown for graveside rituals throughout the country. The Revival of Confucian Social Rituals In addition to ancestral worship and ritual activities at Confucius temples, a surprising array of new rituals related to Confucianism are practiced in today’s China. These new practices, which I call social rituals, range from the teachings of the classical Confucian canon to the teaching of Confucian behavior on the basis of an ancient manual for students, and from the revival of traditional ways of dressing to the invention of Confucian weddings. Here I shall only offer a few examples of this diverse and vibrant movement. The emergence of after-school courses that teach children the basic texts of the Confucian canon (dujing ban 讀經班), as well as small, private Confucian academies that aim to replace the standard, staterun elementary and high school education, are two noticeable recent developments that carry ritual components, for there are specific social rituals related to Confucian teacher-student relations that emphasize the utmost respect for the teacher through manners and speech, as well as the veneration of Confucius.14 The Confucian text The Rules for Students and Children (dizi gui 弟子规), written by a seventeenth-century scholar as a simple manual for cultivating Confucian virtues such as filial piety, moderation, and benevolence in children, has been gaining a startling amount of popularity in

14 Several scholars have been studying the revival of Confucian education, including Joy Lam, who is writing a dissertation on after-school Confucian “sacred text reading” courses (dujing ban 讀經班), and Guillaume Dutournier, who is writing on the emergence of private Confucian schools, or “family schools,” such the Academy of the Mother of Mencius (mengmu yuan 孟母園), in contemporary China.

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China today. The Rules list clearly how one should act in the following social situations: how to express filial piety toward one’s parents; how to interact with one’s siblings and elders with respect; how to behave responsibly in everyday routines, such as having the correct behavior when one sits, walks, and speaks; how to interact with others in society according to the virtues of trust, charity, and benevolence; how to approach study and learning with the correct social manners as well as the correct state of mind. The Rules are now widely read in elementary schools, and there are various versions available in bookstores and online, from cartoon renditions to video clips with musical accompaniment, all for the purpose of getting the Confucian message across to children and teaching them how to behave properly in relation to their elders, superiors, and peers in everyday life. However, the Rules are not only meant for children; there are also articles, books, and lectures for adults who are interested in a more rigorous and upright moral life. Interestingly, such discussions of the Rules are more often than not found in forums promoting Buddhism. In this context, the Rules seems to be used as a technique of self-development— a handbook or codes for learning how to behave in an appropriately moral way—with Buddhism as the ultimate religious teaching. Other newly developed social rituals are a bit more surprising, such as the recent invention of the so-called Confucian wedding rituals, which seem to be gaining popularity among young people. In such a wedding ceremony, couples bow to a large portrait of Confucius hanging in the banquet hall and repeat their vows in front of the portrait, with the portrait serving as the functional equivalent of an altar in a religious wedding ceremony. Also, the attendants wear ancient robes, giving the ceremony a historical flair. This is certainly something new in China; no portrait of Confucius is ever present in traditional Chinese wedding ceremonies, even though many of the social rituals taking place—such as bowing or kowtowing to the parents during traditional wedding ceremonies—can be seen as expressions of Confucian virtues, such as filial piety. Another innovation is a Confucian-themed ceremony for the renewal of marriage vows. In 2004, 180 married couples participated in such a ceremony in a ballroom in Beijing, organized by the Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius (zhonghua kongzi xuehui 中華孔子學會). The couples, attired in formal wedding jackets and dresses, recited a written “Manifesto of True Marital Love” in front of the statue of Confucius, vowing they would always be faithful to each other and

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never divorce. The event attracted media attention as well as online commentary, which ranged from incredulous to admiring. A most recent example of this new tradition is a wedding that took place on May 22, 2010, in Shenzhen, a high-tech and financial center near Hong Kong, which received a great deal of media attention. About eighty people were involved in the Confucian ceremonial performance, including a professional “Confucian sacred music choir” (rujia zhuanzhi shengyue tuan 儒家專職聖樂團) performing music composed for the occasion, and “Confucian ritual attendants” (rujia hulidui 儒家護禮隊) wearing lavish traditional “Confucian costumes” (rufu 儒服) guiding the wedding procession through the most fashionable streets of the city. The newlyweds exchanged their vows in front of a shrine to Confucius, against the background of a large portrait of Confucius, which had a tablet placed in the center. The couple received a “Confucian marriage certificate” (rujia hunli zhengshu 儒家婚禮證書) at the ceremony. These two events share at least two remarkable aspects. First, as in the renewal of marital vows ceremony in 2004, all the so-called Confucian rituals in the 2010 wedding, including the music, the choir, the attendants, the procession, the actual wedding ceremony with offerings to Confucius, and even the style of the costume, are new inventions. They were made up for the occasion from various cultural, social, and religious sources, from classical Confucian texts to images of classical China in popular culture, from the structure of Christian weddings to elements from traditional Chinese weddings (the new couple’s bowing to Heaven, Earth, ancestral spirits, and their parents). Second, both ceremonies were spearheaded by institutions actively involved in the revival of Confucian tradition as well as the invention of new ways to make Confucianism an essential part of contemporary Chinese life. The 2004 renewal of marital vows ceremony was organized by the Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius, and the 2010 wedding was organized by Shenzhen Kongsheng Tang 深圳孔 聖堂 (Confucius Hall ), a new and innovative Confucian institution founded in 2009. Its website introduces the institution as a “sacred space” for promoting Confucianism; it has a Confucius temple as well as lecture space, and it intends to hold classes, organize associations for “Confucian merchants” (rushang 儒商), and eventually build a Confucian academy.15 Among the ritual ceremonies it organizes (or plans

15 See the website for Shenzhen Confucius Hall (Kongsheng Tang) at (http://www .kongshengtang.org/about.asp). The Confucius Hall is partially financed by the Hong

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to organize) are Confucian weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies, and inauguration ceremonies. Most strikingly, it has a weekly formal Confucian service (meizhou gaobaili 每週告拜禮), which consists of the singing of “sacred songs,” a sermon, and the “reading of sacred text.” This is clearly modeled on formal services in the Christian tradition, a very new and intriguing development for Confucianism indeed. Conclusion Where is Confucianism going from here? When I first began conducting research on Confucian ritual practice in 2000, it was an obscure subject. There were at the time only a few signs of the revival of ritual life in the Confucian tradition. That was then. Today, when heated debates on Confucianism rage among Chinese intellectuals, when Confucianism has become a tool of the state, and when ordinary people are actively reviving Confucian rituals in Confucius temples, what is clear is that something powerful is emerging in the newlydynamic Confucian tradition in China. As the intellectual debates fade, popular Confucian rituals are dramatically on the rise. Nor has this popularity of multiple Confucian revivals escaped the attention of the state. We have seen how statesponsored Confucianism has five basic dimensions—cultural, ideological, ritualistic, symbolic, and political—of which domestic politics may in the long run prove to be most important. It may fairly be asked whether Confucianism might not develop in a comparatively weak political direction, as a de facto civil religion, as a cultural resource for nationalism, and as a form of life for people I have called “cultural Confucians,” that is, people who endorse Confucian moral values and Confucian social practices. These developments make it not implausible to suppose that, for China, the twenty-first century may prove to be the Confucian century.

Kong Confucian philanthropist Tang Enjia 湯恩佳, who has been very active and visible in the current revival of Confucianism in mainland China. Zhou Beichen 周北辰, the founder of Confucius Hall, is a Confucian scholar who resigned his university teaching post to be the master (tangzhu 堂主) of Confucius Hall. He is a student and follower of Jiang Qing 蔣慶, the leading figure in the ongoing movement to reshape Confucianism as a national religion, which is an important development that is beyond the scope of this paper.

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“I thank the Templeton Foundation for funding the research project “Empirical Study of Religions in China,” and I thank everyone involved in the project. My current research on Confucius temples is part of the international project “The Confucian Revival in Mainland China: Forms and Meanings of Confucian Piety Today”; I thank the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and I thank Joël Thoraval and Sébastien Billioud for this collaborative opportunity. I am grateful to Fenggang Yang for his support and encouragement over the years. I also thank P.J. Ivanhoe, Thomas A. Wilson, and Stephen Angle for their very helpful suggestions, and the participants of the Columbia University Neo-Confucianism seminar for their insightful comments. I thank Yang Xiao, my first reader, as always.”

RELIGION, RITUAL, AND THE PUBLIC GOOD IN CHINA Robert P. WELLER Boston University Most people agree that free markets do not work very effectively to solve certain kinds of human problems, like education, care for the elderly, medical care, or disaster relief. Instead, these problems are addressed by the non-market institutions of society—the family and other very personal networks, the state, and intermediate social organizations like religious groups or nongovernmental organizations. This essay is a first attempt to think through some of the religious contributions to social well-being in Chinese society, and to examine their implications for theories of globalization, social capital, and secularization.1 My interest in this topic began with an ethnographic puzzle. My first research experience on Chinese religion began in Taiwan in the late 1970s. Religion at that time quite obviously provided some basic social capital (although the term itself was not yet in common use), but the temples I studied provided no direct social services. Much the same was true on the mainland through most of the history of the People’s Republic. Indeed, a first glance at the prospects for engaged Chinese religions appears discouraging. No religious tradition has an important formal political role in any current Chinese society, and the twentieth century brought repression of many forms of religion. Until very recently, religions in Chinese societies also never created large private institutions to provide such goods, with the partial exception of Christians during the brief missionary heyday of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the situation today looks very different. In Taiwan, for example, enormous new Buddhist organizations have built universities and hospitals. One of these (the Tzu Chi [Ciji 慈济] Foundation) has been especially successful at delivering medical and emergency aid

1 The data here come primarily from a collaborative project jointly run by Julia Chien-yu Huang, Wu Keping, Fan Lizhu, and me. We are grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for its support of the research.

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all around the world. Even local temples to gods are taking on a far wider range of social activities than they had several decades earlier. The one I examined most closely, for instance, has donated garbage trucks and fire trucks to the local government and provides scholarships for local students. Although the dynamics of these changes have been rather different on the mainland, they are just as rapid. At the beginning of the reform period, religions were strictly limited in their scope and size. Just a few decades later, however, religions (Buddhists, Christians, and local god temples) show a greatly expanded field of activities, not just expanded memberships. Some temples have built arboreta and museums, for instance, and others support schools or old age homes. I will focus on three large questions, each of which touches on this puzzle of the apparent recent increase in charitable activity. Each question also illustrates the important implications that the Chinese material offers for general theory. The first asks whether the specific denomination or religious tradition makes any difference, and looks especially at the globalization of these ideas as they spread among different groups. I will concentrate on the three largest and fastestgrowing traditions: (1) Chinese popular worship at local temples is extremely widespread. It has revived faster than anything else in China today, and has long been important in other Chinese societies. Worshipping a variety of spirits, it has intimate ties to community life and has shaped widely influential values like filial piety, loyalty, and a sense of local identity. (2) New religious movements, especially new Buddhist groups, seem to have thrived first in Taiwan, but have rapidly spread through Chinese communities around the world. Many of these have a strong emphasis on philanthropy, including the Tzu Chi Foundation, which is one of the largest. They emphasize changing the character of adherents toward a this-worldly Bodhisattva ideal of dedication to helping others. (3) Christianity has long been active in China, and its rapid recent growth on the mainland—as in much of the world— makes it important to study. Not all villages have churches, but where they exist they have been important in building up social goods, often through joint efforts of the congregation. Each of these traditions has a different view of the appropriate role for welfare and philanthropy, and of what constitutes a proper member of the community. Each also draws on different kinds of community and global resources. Christianity was crucial from the nineteenth century on in introducing new ideas about charity around the world, for instance through its medical missions. To what extent do we have

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a case of the globalization of charity that begins with Western Christianity and spreads throughout the world, most recently in the changes I witnessed during the 1980s and onward? Or do we have instead separate kinds of religious traditions of serving the public? The second broad question involves the role of religious scale and its relationship to social capital. Some forms of religion have large institutional infrastructures and national or global followings. Others have very little, and exist primarily as local cults. Large institutions control many more resources and cannot avoid some kind of relationship to the state. For China’s Christians, this takes the form of the officially sanctioned Protestant and Catholic religious associations, and more recently of some foundations (like Amity). The new Buddhist movements also typically organize as foundations under the relevant laws of their host country. On the other hand, popular worship has never had organizations on this scale, and most temples have very little institutional structure beyond the single temple itself. In China these temples are not counted as “religion” at all under the official state categories. The house churches are in a similar legal position there, and similarly have a much smaller institutional reach. We might hypothesize that the more institutionalized groups are able to mobilize more resources on a broader scale. Their closer ties to the state may further increase their potential resources, but will also limit their fields of action. These groups typically also have universalistic belief systems, and thus tend to promote a more global reach. Less institutionalized religion, on the other hand, may benefit from being ignored by the state and from its more intimate ties to local communities. The localism of popular religion, unlike the universalism of Christianity or Buddhism, should create both opportunities and limits for its actions. The argument here connects with the growing literature on “social capital,” and even more recently on what has been called “spiritual capital.” Growing out of the civil society literature that became so important with the eastern and central European move away from Communism after 1989, the idea of social capital concentrated our attention on the ways that local social ties—from churches to bowling leagues—could contribute to economic well-being and political openness.2 The idea of spiritual capital is a variant that points in

Robert Putnam has provided what are probably the most influential examples: Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University 2

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particular at the ways religious institutions can foster forms of social capital. These theoretical formulations have been very fruitful, although they are open to criticism for a failure to distinguish harmful from helpful effects of social capital and for ignoring internal inequalities (of gender, for example) within the communities they create. Still, they suggest that we should take a close look at the various ways in which religions in China might contribute to fostering community and civil ties. I will argue that large institutional scales have allowed a departure from some of the limits (and benefits) of the social capital that is so closely attached to small-scale religious organizations, with important implications for the role of women and for the idea of charity itself. The third question asks about the role of ritual in the process of secularization. The term “secularization” has been problematic because it includes several rather different meanings. It can mean a general loss of religion, a sort of despiritualization. While many social scientists expected this to occur with modernization during the 1960s and 1970s, it is now quite clear that it never happened. The United States is as religious as ever. Only Europe has seen a great decline in institutional religion, but even there personal spirituality may still be strong. A second meaning is the functional differentiation of religion from the rest of society, that is, its disembedding from the general social fabric to become a separate institution responsible primarily only for religious life. The most important aspect of this is the separation of church and state. In this sense secularization has been important in much of the world, and certainly in China. From the Republican period on, China has officially guaranteed freedom of religion, but strictly separated from the state, and discouraged by much official policy. The Cultural Revolution was the extreme period for religious repression, but the entire twentieth century in China was unfriendly to religion in practice. Ritual more than belief proper became the object of attack, because the modernizing governments of the twentieth century dismissed most ritual as mere superstition while defining religion as something centered on belief. Indeed, modernity in general has not been friendly to ritual. PostEnlightenment rationalists see it as empirically false, as if it were the mere reenactment of superstitious errors of the past. Post-Protestant

Press, 1993); Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

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religious theorists see it as false in another sense, as a hypocritical performance of outward convention with no sincere, authentic, and true commitment of the inner self. The result has been a downplaying of ritual in modern society in a way that is unusual historically, and certainly quite different from China’s long tradition prior to the twentieth century. Much of what we might call a desecularization over the last few decades has in fact been a revival in ritual life, which in itself creates significant public goods. The revival of rituals has, for instance, been crucial in regulating the natural tensions between communities as well as helping communities mobilize their own resources through mechanisms that carry effects far beyond the ritual arena. The social and historical specifics of China thus force some rethinking of the broader theories of globalization, social capital, and secularization, most of which were founded on Western data. The rest of this chapter discusses each of these three main research questions in more detail. Denomination and Globalization Do different religious traditions vary in their attitudes toward broader social responsibility, and does that shape their behavior? Charitable giving and a broadly conceived social gospel, for instance, have long been part of some Christian churches. Thus, missionaries in China had been very active in medical care and education, and this has continued today with the Amity Foundation and other domestic and foreign Christian groups. Buddhism had been less directly involved, although Buddhist temples also performed some vital functions in the Chinese context, like making offerings to the dead who might not otherwise be worshipped, or encouraging the freeing of animals. Indirectly, Buddhism also inspired many of the charitable halls (善堂) that offered wide-ranging help to people in large cities from the late Ming on, and redemptive sects often carried on such work in the late Qing and Republican periods.3 Local worship had the least-developed such tradition. Its functions were more indirect, creating or reinforcing the social See, for example, Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Benevolent Societies: The Reshaping of Charity During the Late Ming and Early Ch’ing,” Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987): 309–337; Vivienne Shue, “The Quality of Mercy: Confucian Charity and the Mixed Metaphors of Modernity in Tianjin,” Modern China 32 (2006): 411–452. 3

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networks that could also be used for broader social purposes. Even there, however, traditions like lineage trusts (with income mostly from renting out communally owned land) defrayed education expenses for poor students or provided help for needy lineage members. These differences suggest a hypothesis that Christianity would be most active in charitable work, followed by Buddhism, and then by local temples. This could be made a bit more sophisticated by recognizing that religious cultures can change and that they influence each other. In particular, we might expect that the global growth of Christianity has caused many other religions to organize along comparable lines. The history of the global charitable organizations reinforces this idea. Both Protestants and Catholics in Europe and North America took a significant turn toward public charity in the nineteenth century, especially in activities like organizing lay believers to help the poor or to campaign for moral uplift (as in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union). Such broad Christian tendencies eventually helped encourage the first major international nongovernmental organizations to work in these areas—groups like the Red Cross or the YMCA had a direct Christian influence. Those groups in turn helped influence the charitable activities of nonreligious groups like the Rotary Club or Kiwanis, which rapidly spread around the world in the twentieth century, including many branches in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. We might imagine that such organizations would then have an effect on indigenous groups. The Tzu Chi Foundation, for example, is by far the largest Buddhist charitable group, claiming roughly five million members all over the world, almost all of them lay followers of the charismatic nun who leads them. Tzu Chi explains its origins in part by the founder’s experience of some Catholic nuns criticizing Buddhism exactly for its lack of a broader social mission. While Tzu Chi and the other new Buddhist movements justify their new social dedication in purely Buddhist terms—as a kind of extension of the Bodhisattva ideal of saving all living beings—the competition with Christianity has certainly also been a factor. In spite of all this, however, the actual situation shows much less clear denominational difference than the history suggests, and a far more complex pattern of globalization than a simple growth of Western influences. All forms of religion are now actively involved in charitable work in all Chinese societies. They take on a very similar range of activities, including medical care, help for the poor and elderly,

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scholarships or classes for students, and emergency relief. The enormous differences in theology, ritual practice, and social organization between these various religions seem to have little significant effect on the range of charitable work. Instead, we have a kind of parallel evolution. On the surface, this suggests a strong globalization from the Christian ideal, but the actual situation is not at all so simple. The history is in fact considerably more complex and interesting than the simple globalization of a nineteenth-century Western Christian image of charity. It is true, of course, that Christians became deeply involved in charity in China, beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the fields of medicine and education. For them, this was partly seen as their proper role as Christians, and partly as a more effective means of missionizing. It is equally true that organizations like the YMCA or Rotary Club were strongly ensconced by the early twentieth century, and that they also carried an idea of bringing charity to a broader membership that was not necessarily part of the church or club. Yet we should recall that many Chinese religious institutions had been doing such things all along. This is particularly clear when we recognize that nearly every form of social organization in late imperial China was set up around a religious basis. In nineteenth-century Taiwan, for example, the legal framework that allowed charters for everything from guilds to martial arts clubs was the god-worshipping society (shenming hui 神明会). A bit later in history, as Paul Katz has recently shown, Taizhou elites in Shanghai organized flood relief in the 1920s based primarily on ties to native-place associations and Buddhist groups, rather than on recently imported Western models of charity.4 Furthermore, some of the changes from late imperial models of charity that we currently see have nothing to do with Western models of charity, but simply with changing needs. Increased interest in old age homes, for example, is not so much an imported idea as a response to needs created by much smaller families and an employment situation that creates new problems for the old. With this history in mind, we can recognize that the lack of religious charitable activities in both China and Taiwan around the 1970s is Paul R. Katz, “一個著名上海商人與慈善家的宗教生活:王一亭” [The Religious Life of a Renowned Shanghai Businessman and Philanthropist, Wang Yiting], in 從城市看中國的現代性 [ The City and Chinese Modernity], ed. Jen-shu Wu, Paul Katz, and May-li Lin (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2010). 4

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not the most useful baseline with which to compare the current situation. If we look back a bit further in time, the situation does not look so very different after all. Indeed, the more historical approach makes clear that the anomalous time was the late twentieth century, as the states in both China and Taiwan promoted versions of a modernizing agenda that saw little positive role for religion. It is the increased social and political space of the very end of the century that allowed religions to resume many of their former roles, rather than a direct emulation of Western models. One change, however, does appear to stand out if we compare the current situation to the nineteenth century—there has been a great increase in generalized charity, that is, attempts to help a broad range of humanity simply because they are humans in need, rather than because they share any particular ties of place, kinship, or even religious belief. This idea fits easily with historical Buddhism, but Buddhism never played this role in a direct institutional way (i.e., organized by the clergy) until the late twentieth century. Other Chinese traditions had been more thoroughly localist in their orientation from the beginning, with little interest in Buddhism’s universalism, although there were some large urban charitable groups in late imperial times that did have a Buddhist (and more or less universalist) inspiration. We might characterize this in Chinese as a change from an idea of 慈善 (cishan, compassionate good, the traditional term for much charity) to 公益 (gongyi, public benefit, a modern term). Let me turn to Taiwan for a moment, because it makes clearest the unexpected turns in globalization. The old town of Lukang had a very active religious world by the nineteenth century, built almost entirely through local god temples, which penetrated most of the major social organizations. Many of these groups, like the merchant associations (locally called jiao 郊) or native place associations, provided charitable help for their members as well as broader services to the community, such as dispute resolution. The Presbyterians were the first foreign religious group to have a major impact, and they remain by far the largest Christian group (but still very small as a percentage of the population).5 Presbyterians had been among the first suppliers The big global middle-class clubs (Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, and Junior Chamber of Commerce) have had multiple branches locally since the 1950s; they also undertake some charity, like blood drives. The scale of their charity has never been great, however. 5

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of Western-style medicine in Taiwan. This particular church was not involved in medical work, but did have a kindergarten, a credit union, and other modern forms of public service. Nevertheless, as the pastor explained to me, all of their service until the 1990s was limited to members of the church. Rather than globalizing how charity was done in Taiwan, the Presbyterians localized by emulating the earlier Chinese groups in serving almost entirely their own people. The Presbyterians were not alone in opening up their charity beyond their own people as the end of the twentieth century approached. Although the pastor told me they simply wanted better relations with the surrounding community, the nearly simultaneous change by other religious groups suggests another mechanism. When I interviewed a nearby branch of a sectarian and syncretic religious group (which claims several million followers around the world), they also emphasized their ability to provide broad emergency relief, especially during and after a major earthquake in 1999. For them, too, however, this was something new. The new concept of charity as public good in fact came most directly from the Buddhists, above all from the Tzu Chi Foundation. They began with a nun and a handful of lay followers in the 1960s, with the vision of a Buddhism that did not itself rely on the donations of others or on making money from ritual services. Instead, they supported themselves with handicraft sales and contributed money to be used to help provide medical care for the poor. The group expanded rapidly especially in the 1980s with the construction of their first hospital. They are now the largest civil association in Taiwan, claiming millions of members around the world. They provide free medical clinics in poor areas of Los Angeles, operate the largest bone marrow transplant database in Asia, coordinate recycling operations in Malaysia, and provide emergency relief after natural disasters all around the world. Other nongovernmental organizations in Taiwan complain that Tzu Chi has been too successful, soaking up all the charitable money on the island. More than anything else, their success and popularity have goaded other groups into emulating them. The other large Buddhist groups all now organize broad charity of various sorts, for example. More locally in Lukang, the success of Tzu Chi explains the timing of the Presbyterian Church’s change in attitude, although the pastor did not mention Tzu Chi directly. It also explains the large sectarian group’s activities, and they were quite explicit in telling me that they were publicizing

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their aid efforts after the 1999 earthquake in direct response to Tzu Chi, which had garnered enormous amounts of positive publicity after its own rapid and effective response to the emergency. As I have mentioned, there was some indirect Christian influence on the origins of Tzu Chi, but we should recognize that there were many other influences as well—an immediate history in the promotion of a new “humanistic Buddhism” that began in the early twentieth century, a much longer history in Buddhism’s ideal of the Bodhisattva who would help all beings before achieving nirvana, and their founder’s (Ven. Cheng Yen [Zhengyan]) personal experience witnessing the medical problems of the poor.6 This is thus not a simple story of the direct globalization of a Western concept of broad-based philanthropy. Instead, we can see Christian groups and even imported middle-class clubs performing in-group charity in ways not so different from what Chinese groups had done in late imperial times. Only when these ideas had been thoroughly reworked by the Buddhists did they transform how other groups functioned, including those groups that came from the West. Those groups then embarked on a globalization of their own, emanating out of Taiwan. No private organizations in China are able to work on the scale of Tzu Chi. Nevertheless many local temples, both Buddhist and community-run, have taken on similar functions. Like the Lukang Presbyterians of earlier years, Christian churches in China have important charitable missions but tend to serve their own communities, which in many places tend to isolate themselves socially from other groups.7 In another sort of example, Changzhou, in relatively wealthy Jiangsu Province, shows a rapid expansion in the provision of medical care and especially old age care by lay Buddhists.8 There are few Christians in this area (except for a significant group of immigrants from the poor northern part of the province), and even much of local temple religion has been disrupted as whole villages have been displaced by development and the population has urbanized. Here we can see the

6 For more on the history and development of Tzu Chi, see Chien-yu Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 7 There are some important exceptions, especially the Amity Foundation, which is Christian-supported but works closely and comfortably with the government to provide aid to poor areas. 8 This is based on the fieldwork by Wu Keping for our joint project.

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Buddhists moving quickly to fill the void—not in direct relation to Tzu Chi, but again aware of the precedent. Denomination alone is thus not crucial in the current array of charitable action, but it has played a surprising role in the unusual path of the globalization of charity in Chinese society. In spite of the timing, Christians have been less crucial to the current rise in charity than Buddhists, even though they first championed the universalist image of charity in the nineteenth century. It has been the Buddhist reworking of these ideas, especially in Taiwan over the previous few decades, that has had the broadest influence across the Chinese world. While large religious charities have been difficult to establish directly on mainland China, we clearly also see a strong demonstration effect from Tzu Chi, although the Christian Amity Foundation has also been important. The situation is still evolving but will continue to show that globalization has taken unexpected paths. The Western groups that brought a particular image of charity to the Chinese world were themselves changed when Taiwan’s Buddhists reworked their ideas into something new, and both sets of ideas continue to develop in China today. Scale and Social Capital In a way that relates only loosely to denomination, we could also expect on general principles that the scale of a religious organization will affect its ability to provide social goods. The concept of social capital might lead us to expect that large-scale and small-scale groups would differ systematically. On the one hand, the thick social ties of the most locally based groups (most popular worship, but only some Christianity and Buddhism) might be most successful at mobilizing community action for self-help. They might also be better at filling in gaps left out of broader programs, typically things like care for the elderly or help for petty entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the larger groups (mostly Christian or Buddhist) may be better at attracting external resources and carrying out broad projects with shallower roots in local social capital, like emergency relief. Field research on this issue, however, indicates that this initial formulation requires revision. First, most of the large-scale groups were organized through local branches (parish churches, for example, or Tzu Chi subdivisions), even though the organization as a whole was translocal. These branches were not actually so different from more

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purely local religion (temple gods in particular) in their ability to mobilize social capital. Second, purely local religious groups could also sometimes mobilize the same kinds of wider resources (especially help from the government or from secular NGOs) that large institutions did. The key differences appeared instead to be in two related innovations that stemmed from the large-scale groups: a greatly increased role for women and a shift in the idea of what constitutes a “social good” from the older charity idea of cishan to the newer public benefit idea of gongyi, which I mentioned above. This difference suggests an important feature of how social capital and organization interrelate: by breaking out of the tracks of social capital, the larger groups have been able to innovate new kinds of roles and ideals. We can see this if we recall how local temple organization has long had intimate ties to local elites, and this was the key to its ability to mobilize social capital. In Chinese societies outside the mainland, this tradition continued even under modernizing regimes that were not especially friendly to religion. In Malacca, for example, the Cheng Hoon Teng temple (which honors Guanyin and some Daoist deities), was the official base for the office of the arbiter (“Kapitan”) under Portuguese and Dutch rule, and it long provided basic services for the migrant Chinese population, like running the cemetery.9 In Taiwan, Lukang’s two major temples (Tianhou Gong and Longshan Si) control enormous incomes from their land holdings and from donations. Their leaders include the most important men in the community, and they wield economic and political power well beyond the town itself. Even the smaller and poorer neighborhood temples have intimate ties to local men of influence. Lukang features a closely interlocked set of leaders whose names appeared on temple management committees, as heads of the many Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis, and other similar branches, and on the lists of important business and political figures. On the mainland, as temples have been rebuilt over the past two decades, we often again see leaders who have histories as cadres or successful economic entrepreneurs, or both. While the government still officially frowns on all these temples, we can in fact often see cooperative relationships between temples and local cadres.10 The temple This is from the field research of Julia Huang for our project. In our project, Fan Lizhu’s work in Handan demonstrates this in the case of the construction of a temple to Lin Xiangru. Elsewhere, such ties have been documented in Adam Chau’s work on a temple in Gansu and Lily Tsai’s findings that active 9

10

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management committees found in nearly all Chinese cases are entirely male, relatively old, and quite wealthy—whether they are chosen by the god through divination or by the community through election. This is a direct reflection of the structure of local social capital. In contrast, some of the largest groups have opened up far more space for women as members and sometimes as leaders. Women predominate as members (but not usually as leaders, although there may be separate women’s sections) in most of the Christian groups. Among the Buddhists women are also the most frequent participants, and some of the most important groups have primarily female leaderships. Tzu Chi again may have been the most influential case. It began as an entirely female group with one nun and a group of lay followers. It now includes special subgroups for men, but women continue to dominate as both leaders and followers, constituting perhaps 70 percent of the membership. This was an enormous change in Buddhist practice, and in religious practice generally. Even though Tzu Chi in many ways offers a very traditionalist and conservative image of the woman’s role—supporting her husband and caring for her children— it has also allowed women to extend the nurturer role metaphorically beyond the family to the world at large.11 This is an enormous change and it affects the dynamics of the group at the most local levels as well as the national level. Its impact has been broadly felt across many other groups. It was the transcending of locality by creating broader organizations that created the possibility of moving beyond the class, age, and gender limits of local social capital. In spite of this difference in gender roles, it appears that groups at all scales are undertaking rather similar kinds of activities. To take medical aid as an example, Christians, of course, have a long history of offering such aid, having opened early hospitals in Taiwan and China. In Malacca, the Seck Kia Eenh, a Buddhist group founded in 1920, has programs for AIDS patients and collects funds for a cancer temple committees correlate with receiving more resources from the local government. See Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Lily Lee Tsai, “The Informal State: Governance and Public Goods Provision in Rural China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004). 11 See Chien-yu Julia Huang and Robert P. Weller, “Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 379–396.

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society. In addition, a branch of the syncretic and redemptionist Dejiao Society runs clinics and a pharmacy. Tzu Chi, of course, is also very active there with medical aid and its other activities. In the broad area around Changzhou (going as far as Hangzhou), Christian-affiliated groups run three nursing homes, and Buddhist-affiliated groups run another two. In Lukang, several small NGOs with origins in neighborhood temples run clinics. Religious groups of every description offer emergency relief, educational help, and some form of help for the poor. The scale of the religious institution thus appears not to have an enormous effect on local practice, but in fact large-scale organizations have brought important innovations in organizational form, many of which now also affect local activities. In addition to changing gender roles, the transcending of local social capital by large-scale groups has helped to change the very idea of what charity is and how it should work. An earlier Chinese idea of charity, as I have mentioned, responded to immediate needs of the community (e.g., a school for the children of the lineage or monetary gifts to old people at the Chinese New Year) or to local or personal disasters (e.g., storehouses for famine relief or aid to a family with a crisis). That is, most of it was closely tied to lines of local social capital. The exceptions were the ones that owed most to universalist religious ideas—primarily Buddhism—instead of the insistent localism of temple religion. Although religious institutions did not normally run philanthropic groups (usually called shantang 善堂) directly, the elites who did usually felt called by Buddhist ideals or by the equally universalizing ideals of redemptive societies. As I argued in the previous section, in recent decades it has really been Tzu Chi that led a broad transformation across Chinese societies, with the Christian Amity Foundation perhaps playing an equally important role within the PRC. One important marker of this new version of philanthropy is its universal coverage, attempting to help absolutely everyone in need, not just members of the group. Another marker is the attempt at systematic reform rather than just immediate aid. When Tzu Chi identifies poor families who need help, for instance, they embark on a program of monitoring similar to what government social service offices would do, following through on what happens to the families. For medical care, they do not just help subsidize care for the needy, but attempt to advance and reform the entire medical system through direct provision of medical care and training of doctors and nurses.

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Informants from all kinds of groups remark on these innovations, which all associate with Tzu Chi even though similar strategies had already come in with Christians. Tzu Chi has been just as influential in Malacca as in Taiwan on these issues, and indirectly has also inspired smaller groups in China.12 Amity, which is affiliated with the official Protestant church, has also been widely followed there. Many other groups are now trying to emulate the strategies of both groups, or at least saying that they want to. Much of the literature on the religious contribution to the public good assumes that we have a steady and clear idea of what constitutes the public good. What we see here, however, is that large-scale organizations have actually changed the idea of what constitutes a public good, from something usually locally conceived with little interest in structural change, to something with universalist goals and an ameliorist agenda. While there are some historical precedents for this in China, the most striking developments have occurred just since the 1980s. Whether from Tzu Chi or from the Christians, the large scale and universalist goals of these organizations have been crucial in allowing new conceptions of gender roles and new ideas of the public good. The innovations are possible exactly because these groups have not been so closely embedded in local social ties. This allows them to open up space that had been unavailable to women in a purely local context, and to break out of the local nexus of ties that determined most earlier charity. This has been the real innovation of the large institutions, rather than introducing new kinds of activities or even mobilizing greater resources. Secularization and Ritual Life Modernity has been unfriendly to ritual, and that was especially true during the twentieth century. I want to suggest here, however, that ritual continues to shape public goods, often in ways that are not recognized by a concentration on formal organizations or on theologies. Tzu Chi provides aid in China, but promised the government that it would not establish any branches there, and this loosened only after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. Political restrictions have so far made it impossible for an organization of comparable scale to develop on the mainland. 12

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The initial and probably most powerful blow against ritual was the Protestant Reformation, which tried to strip Christianity of its rituals for what it claimed was a return to the “pure” tradition. It powerfully emphasized the sincerity of individual belief and attacked much of the Catholic ritual tradition, even to the point of destroying altars, statues, and stained glass in cathedrals. The attitude that the sincerity of the autonomous individual far outweighs external behaviors like rituals, however, spread to all aspects of life. We see it, for example, in the modernist architectural slogan that “less is more” or in the musical move away from ornamentation in the twentieth century.13 In some ways much of secularization has not been so much a move away from spirituality as a denial of the social conventions of ritual in favor of personal belief. “Secularization” is a complex concept, and the word is often used to include several distinct processes. It sometimes refers to a general loss of all religiosity. That was often what the “secularization theorists” of the 1960s expected to happen with modernity, but that prediction has been proven wrong everywhere in the world, with the arguable exception of parts of Europe. A second meaning refers to the removal of resources from religious institutions (like the state taking away monastic lands) or of institutions from religious control (as with many American universities, including my own, which have ended early ties to churches). A third meaning points to the differentiation of spheres of life, so that religion becomes disembedded from everyday life and carved out as an independent category of thought and behavior. The strong separation of church and state in the United States or France is a good example of this. It is this third kind of secularization that has been most relevant to the Chinese case. The modern term for religion (zongjiao) was coined in Japan and became important in China only early in the twentieth century. Before that, the practices we now classify as “religion” had been considered either as “teachings” (like Buddhism or Confucianism, and including secular teaching) or simply as unclassified worship and temple ritual, deeply embedded in the practice of daily life and needing no separate name. In the style of the United States or France,

13 The classic study of this is Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). See also Adam B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Chinese constitutions throughout the twentieth century have guaranteed freedom for religion that remains in the private sphere, and strictly separated church from state. In doing so, they also established a firmly post-Protestant understanding of religion as something based on faith and scripture (as in the Reformation’s slogans of sola fide and sola scriptura). This was a major departure from the core emphasis on ritual (li 礼) in China before the twentieth century. The idea that ritual was the key to creating harmony was crucial in the various lines of thought that traced their origins to Confucius. Ritual allows humanity to cross over its differences—between ethnicities, classes, and even individuals (through etiquette, which is the interpersonal side of ritual ). For Xunzi in particular, li was the discipline that allowed humans to create a society beyond raw power or self-interest. Secular or sacred, li is what lets us deal with the other. Much later, the neo-Confucians of the Song Dynasty encouraged a popularization of li by authoring manuals of how to perform ritual properly at home. According to the Analects, Confucius himself argued that “among the functions of li the most valuable is that it establishes harmony” (1:12). He clarified a bit later when he said that the “superior man harmonizes without being the same, the inferior man is the same without harmonizing” (13:23). This is often taken to mean the obvious fact that an advisor who agrees all the time is not very useful. At a deeper level, though, the idea gets at this core role of ritual—not to reduce people to identical units, but to allow them to live together with genuine difference. The commentaries of the Zuozhuan expound at greater length on this, using the metaphors of food and music, both of which require the careful combination of difference to please us, and both of which collapse into banality without it. This early emphasis on ritual explains why the Board of Li, one of the main national ministries in later dynasties, was responsible for a set of practices that seem unrelated to modern eyes. These included overseeing obvious rituals, like the annual cycle of ceremonies, led by the emperor, at altars around every administrative city. Yet they also included responsibility for the reception of tribute from foreign lands, because this too was a way of dealing with difference. They supervised the civil service examinations as well, because these determined candidates’ understanding of li as the human relationships that negotiate across our internal social differences of parents and children, rulers and subjects, or friends. Ritual, in this view, allows us to live together

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even in an imperfect world riven through with significant differences of identity and interest. In spite of the anti-ritual secularization of the twentieth century in China, many aspects of ritual life have survived and continue to thrive, not so much as parts of Confucianism but as important parts of the social worlds based around local temples. This has been most true in places like Taiwan or Hong Kong, which escaped the Cultural Revolution’s attack on all forms of visible religiosity. Even on the mainland today, however, many of these rituals have revived. These revivals can offer a number of important public benefits, though in ways somewhat different from other forms of social organization. Let me illustrate this briefly with the role of religious ritual in negotiating the boundaries between local communities. Villages and neighborhoods across China have long organized public processions and festivals. This tradition continues or has been revived across many parts of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The ability to organize events that typically involve complex coordination and often attract tens of thousands of worshipers is a strong indication of local society’s capacity to organize itself without the direct involvement of the state. Much of this fits a standard Durkheimian view of ritual as a way of marking boundaries and increasing solidarity within the group. This is particularly clear when gods leave their temples in processions to tour their territories, carefully marking the edges of their turf. These events recall, and to some extent mimic, late imperial magistrates touring the extent of the areas they controlled. Just as a touring magistrate would bring an escort of civilian aides and military guards, gods bring their own retinues of heralds, secondary gods, and spirit soldiers. While the god is typically embodied in a wooden statue and carried in a sedan chair, the retinue consists of local young men (and occasionally women) dressed in appropriate costume and makeup. Infused with the power of the god, some performers may bloody themselves with ritual weapons (especially in Taiwan and the far south of China) and others perform intricate martial routines, complete with spears, swords, and shields. Boundary creation is clear here, yet processions and festivals also bring us directly to the boundary-crossing work of ritual. Visits between temples provide one way in which this occurs. Among the most elaborate of these are visits back to a temple of origin. This has been increasingly important in Taiwan as the possibility of return to the mainland has opened up. The small Taiwanese town of Lukang is

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home to one of the most important temples on the island, the Tianhou Gong, which is one of the oldest in honor of Mazu, the most important goddess on the island. When I was doing research there in 2006, the goddess was just returning from a visit to the mother temple in Meizhou, Fujian. As part of the welcome, the temple organized a massive procession that included dozens of young men blowing long trumpets, 108 women dressed as the Buddhist arhats, countless people dressed as Qing Dynasty yamen runners, and many other performers of all kinds. This is a temple with enormous reserves of social capital. Leading the procession were performing groups from other temples, along with their own gods in sedan chairs. That is, gods were greeting each other across temple boundaries, rather than Mazu simply reiterating her own boundaries. On a smaller scale, something similar happened in front of the temple almost every day when I was there, as gods from all over Taiwan would come to visit. The details varied widely from one group to the next, but the basic structure of the ritual was always the same. The visiting deity, sitting in his sedan chair, would stop before the entrance to the temple while his retinue exorcised the temple plaza and showed its respect (and the visiting deity’s power). They accomplished this through the performance of traditional martial displays like a dragon dance or the popular form in Taiwan called the Eight Infernal Generals. Possessed mediums would also perform until their blood flowed. Finally, the visiting god would approach the temple in three rapid thrusts and retreats before finally entering, the equivalent of a kowtow. The visiting god’s followers were close behind, and they would burn incense to honor the host goddess. Community boundaries are certainly marked here, but in a way that allows them to be crossed through godly versions of human etiquette. Relations between communities were typically tense in China, and these ritual formalizations of intercommunity etiquette thus provided important social goods. Although this example comes from Taiwan, it represents the continuation of a cultural pattern that predates the political separation of the island in 1895. We can find equivalents today in China, for example when the sociologist Fan Lizhu reports that different villages in Handan (Hebei) cooperate to put on a local festival by contributing different resources or different kinds of performing groups. There was, of course, always the danger that these forms of spiritual etiquette could break down—just like secular etiquette. Gods, like humans, can snub each other by refusing to visit each other or to act

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respectfully. Martial performance groups from different villages usually dealt with each other with ritual care, but could occasionally come to blows. The ritual does not make underlying tensions disappear, but it does create a mechanism for living with them.14 Harmony, after all, is not sameness, but the coordination of difference, and there is always some risk involved. Human history so far has granted us no guarantees of living in harmony. Nevertheless, it may be worth reconsidering the potential role of ritual in allowing us to live with difference without denying it. Both the Confucian and other ritual traditions recognize real boundaries, and they also help us learn to how to cross them. In doing so they also contribute to the public good in a way that is not often recognized. Conclusion Several waves of globalization over the twentieth century have greatly influenced how religion contributes to the public good in Chinese societies. Some of these global trends encouraged the antireligious policies of both Republican and Communist China in the name of modernity, secularism, and science. Others instead encouraged the role of religion in providing social goods through the example of groups like medical missionaries or the YMCA, and more indirectly through the spread of international nongovernmental organizations. Yet the spread of these global influences beyond their founding foreign organizations was not nearly as straightforward or direct as the word “globalization” implies. Like many Christian churches in China today or the Presbyterians I discussed in Taiwan, many of these groups grew inward-looking, working to solve immediate problems for their own group just as local temples had long done. The broad change in the notion of charity or of the public good itself came especially when new Buddhist groups like Tzu Chi reworked the new global ideas in their own terms. As we

14 For more on these groups, see Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003). For another case, including ties to local gangsters, see Avron Boretz, “Righteous Brothers and Demon Slayers: Subjectivities and Collective Identities in Taiwanese Temple Processions,” in Religion and the Formation of Taiwanese Identities, ed. Paul R. Katz and Murray A. Rubenstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 219–251.

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saw in Taiwan, those ideas then spread out again from the Buddhists to affect all the other groups, including the Christians. One of the most important contributions of religion is to create and consolidate local society. Indeed, it is one of the few ties that unites villages or neighborhoods as communities. Although this continues to be important, the new universalizing charities that arose late in the twentieth century have broken through some of the limitations of local social capital. This has allowed action on a vastly larger scale than ever before, as the parochialism of most local charity is superseded. It has also opened the door to new kinds of social groups—especially women—who often had little public role in earlier religiousbased charity. Finally, I have tried to suggest the crucial role played by ritual, in spite of strong secularizing pressures against it throughout the twentieth century. Ritual is the key to the workings of religion as an informal institution in China, and thus the most important aspect of its ability to contribute to local society. Much of the real work of secularization (in the sense of separating church from state and isolating religion in its own separate sphere) was in practice an attack on ritual—in the West as much as in China. The powerful return of ritual speaks clearly to its importance in building society from the ground up.

INDEX

agape, 289 Ai of Lu, 312 Ai-Zhen Wang, 320 Allen, Young J., 235 Amity Foundation, 333, 337–338, 342–343 The Analects (Confucius), 75, 78, 89, 103–105, 315, 345 ancestor worship, 281, 322–324 Anti-Christian Movement, 248, 274, 275 Aquinas, Thomas, 132 Arrault, Alain, 154 Asian-American Buddhists, 16 Asian Buddhists, 16 Association for Religious Freedom, 251 Axial Age, 295–296 Balasubramanian, R., 92 Beijing Association for Religious Freedom and Against State Religion, 258 Beijing Confucius Temple, 312–313 Beijing Consensus, 110 Beijing Olympics, 315 being human, 93–95 Bell, Daniel A., 103, 114 benevolence, 286–290 benevolent government, 103 Berger, Peter, 4 Board of Li, 345 Bol, Peter, 132 Book of Change (Guo Jianxun, ed.), 95 Book of Historical Documents (The Shoo King), 288 Boston Confucianism daoxue philosophical imaginary, 140–147 introduction, 10–11, 23–24, 26 viability of, 136, 138 Boxer Movement, 243, 248, 250, 265, 266, 275 Buchler, Justus, 145 Buddha-nature, 183–184 Buddhism. See also Chinese Buddhist philosophy borrowings from, 22, 202

charitable work and, 17–18, 27, 186–189, 195–196, 333–339, 341–343 Confucianism and, 80, 191–192, 202 Daoism and, 191–192, 202 ethical principles of, 194–199 future of, 173 identification with, survey findings, 66 integration of, 210–211 modernizing, 13–15 nationalistic form, 23 scholarship on, 14 ten meritorious acts, 196 women as leaders in, 17, 27, 329–330, 334, 337–339, 341 Buddhist Compassion Relief Association, 17 Buddhist identity, 171–172 Buddhist Society, 259 bureaucracy, 85–87 business leaders, influence of, 84 calligraphy, 20 capitalism Daoism and, 170–171 marketization, pervasiveness of, 96 materialism and spiritual decline, 176–177, 193 modernist Confucianism and, 114 moral crisis and, 124 social problem solutions and, 329 traditionalists and, 114 capitalist societies, 111–112 Cart, Philip, 118–119 Catholicism in China, 232–237, 240–243 Catholic ritual tradition, 344 cause-fruition relationship, 181–182, 197 censorship, 100 Chan, Joseph, 117 Chan, Selina Ching, 115 Chan Buddhism, 191, 202 charitable work. See also social capital Buddhism and, 17–18, 27, 186–189, 195–196, 333–339, 341–343 Christianity and, 330–331, 333–334, 337–338

352

index

familism and, 111 introduction, 27 new religious movements and, 330 Chen, Albert H. Y., 101 Chen Chun, 142 Chen Duxiu, 77 Cheng Jingyi, 251, 258, 263–264, 268, 273 Chengshi Buddhism, 186 Chen Huanzhang, 252–254, 258, 268 Chen Mingshu, 254, 256 Chen Yingning, 153, 163–164, 168, 173 children. See also filial piety parents roles with, 121–122, 301 teaching traditional culture to, 50, 84–85 China, future of, 91–92 China Daoist Association, 163–164 China: Its State and Prospects (Medhurst), 236 China’s rise, 41–44, 69–70, 78, 87–88 China threat theory, 50 Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius, 325, 326 Chinese Bible, 237 Chinese Bridge project, 50 Chinese Buddhist philosophy cause and fruition in, 181–182, 197 compassion in, 184–186, 194 dependent origination in, 179–180, 187, 197 equality in, 182–184, 194, 197–198 modern significance of, 192–199 Yuanrong (perfect interfusion) in, 190–192 Chinese Characteristics (Smith), 234, 236 Chinese Christians. See also Christianity in China local appropriation of Christianity, 235, 238–239, 242 PRC purge, 239 US, embracing Confucian values, 119–120 Chinese Communist Party, 1, 6–7, 39–41 Chinese Cultural Ties Project, 49 Chinese history, understanding of Confucianism in, 276–284 Chinese Religiosities (Yang), 156 Chiu-kui, Wang, 154 Christendom, 231–233, 235–236, 245 Christian civilization idea, 235–239 Christian identity, 232

Christianity charitable work and, 330–331, 333–334, 337–338 great commandments of, 289 spiritual transcendence in, 289–292 US, embracing Confucian values, 119 Christianity in China. See also Chinese Christians conclusions, 245–246 Confucianism and, 23–25, 80, 85 elite versions, 240–241 Golden Age of, 248, 275 government support for, 231 growth of, 230–231 indigenization movement, 275 local appropriation of, 235, 238–239, 242 Ming dynasty, 240 popular versions of, 241 religious freedom debate, 250–253, 257–268 Republican era, 243–245 Western hegemony and, 238–239 church-state integration, 204, 209 church-state separation, 5–6, 24–25, 86, 98. See also religious freedom debate civic organizations, independence, 84 civility in Confucian tradition, 85–87 civil rights, 267 civil service examinations, 313, 345 civil society cultural nationalist movement participation, 52–63 rebuilding traditional culture, government supported, 49–50 class structure, 39–40, 300, 302–303 Cohen, Stephen, 4 community life, Daoism in, 169–170 compassion, 184–186 competition, 113–114 competitive capacity, 47, 50 conflict economic globalization and, 178 harmonizing, Buddhism’s purpose of, 194–199 modernization and, 194–199 religious, 23, 178, 213–214, 265 conflict resolution, 101–102 Confucian anthropology, 287 Confucian authoritarian regime, 69 Confucian elite, 80 Confucian identity, 311–312, 321, 323 Confucian Islamic philosophy, 140

index Confucianism benevolence standard, 286–290 Buddhism and, 191–192, 202 core values, 91, 345 dethroned, 1, 24 distinctive feature of, 80–81 government support for, 84, 107–108, 112–113, 314–316, 327 historically, 201–202, 276–284 Hui rejection of, 215 identification with, survey findings, 43, 52–54, 66 interdisciplinary nature of, 2–3 Maoism and, 77 Marxism and, 77 mental introspection in, 289–292 Mou’s approach, 113–114 politicized, 6–10 post-May Fourth Movement, 75–77 rationalism and, 75 religious tolerance in, 201–202, 205 resilience of, 127–129 scholarship on, 25 spirituality and, 10, 284–286 state religion and Christian opposition, 257–262 the constitutional debate, 249–257 Society for Religious Freedom, 262–268 true spirit of, 286–289 Confucianized Buddhism, 202 Confucian religion, 279–281 Confucian revival, 1–2, 6–12, 28–29, 315 Confucian/Ruist movement, 134 Confucian Society, 247–248, 252, 258 Confucian Way elements of, 91 exegesis and elaboration, 133–138 of learning to be human, 77–78 portability question, 133–138 relevance, post-May Fourth Movement, 76 study as foundational to, 143–144 transmission methods, 138–140 Confucius, 75–76, 81–82, 89, 279 Confucius academies, 313 Confucius Cemetery, 47 Confucius Institutes, 50, 84, 110, 315 Confucius Mansion, 47 Confucius Peace Prize, 316 Confucius Statue, 48, 315 Confucius Temple, 47

353 Confucius temples architecture, 318–319 historically, 312–314 protection of, 313–314 ritual practices in, 309–311, 316–322 tourism and, 314, 320–321 Constitution of 1923, 249 consummatory culture, 41 continuity of being, 93–94 conversion, 21–22 cosmopolitans, 5, 99, 124 crisis of values, 176–177 cultural crisis, 58–59 cultural diversity, 100 cultural identity, 76, 92–93, 96 cultural modernization, 41–44 cultural nationalism, 35, 72 cultural nationalist movement background, 38–45 categories of activities, 59–60 China’s rise and, 41–44 conclusions, 72–73 economic reforms effect on, 38–40 funding, 62 goals and objectives, 52, 64 government participation and support, 45–51, 63–64 introduction, 6–9 media use, 62–63 mobilization, 62 nature of, social vs. political, 63–64 organizational system, 61–62 participants characteristics of, 54–56, 63 core activists, 65–73 defined, 52–54 government control over, 64 motivation, 58 success factors, 72 cultural nationalist movement research study background, 33–34 data sources, 36–38 framework, 34–35 outcomes cultural and political, 65–69 international relations, 69–72 introduction, 64–65 questions, 33–34 theoretical approaches, 34–35 Cultural Revolution, 1, 313, 332, 346 culture, imported, 72 culture of rites, 287–289

354

index

Dacheng Hall, 318 daily life, 80, 95, 104 The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Zukav), 168 Daoan, 282 Daoism borrowings from, 22 Buddhism and, 191–192, 202 categorizing, 171–174 historical overview, 160–166 modernity and, 12–13, 166–171 persistent views of, 152 post-Mao era dissemination, 164–165 present-day role, 151 Republican era revival, 164–165 scholarship on, 152–155, 164 state legitimization of, 172–173 state-sponsored, 163–164 transnational circuit, 165–166 Daoist identity, 157–160, 171–174 Daoist Modern (Xun Liu), 153 Daoist priests, 160, 162 Daoist Society, 259 Daoist yoga, 166 daoxue, 134 Daoyuan, 173 Dean, Kenneth, 153–154, 170 Dejiao Society, 342 deliverance, 184, 192–193, 194, 195 democracy, 102–103, 105–106 Deng Xiaoping, 38–39, 48, 78 Deng Yingchao, 48 Denmark, 126 dependent origination, 179–180, 187–189, 197 Descartes, 304 Dharma Drum Mountain, 16 Dharmas, 179 disaster relief. See charitable work disasters, man-made, 95 divorce, 116, 126–127 Dongfang Shandian (Eastern Lightning), 241 Dong Zhongshu, 279 Doolittle, Justus, 236 dualism, 189 Duan Qirui, 269 Duara, Prasenjit, 155–156 Durkheim, Emile, 99 East Asia strengths, 89 Eastern Lightning (Dongfang Shandian), 241 East Turkistan Republic, 19 Ebrey, Patricia, 116–117

economic development Confucianism and, 108–110, 117 cultural nationalist movement and, 38–40 economic globalization, 177, 178–179 education and examinations. See also schools civil service, 313, 345 in Confucianism, 313, 324–325 imperial system, 24, 201, 205, 216, 257 learning for the sake of the self, 90 of New Confucians, 137–138 religious freedom and, 266 temple ritual and, 321 university, 321 “The Education of Taoist Priests” (Yang Der-Ruey), 154 the elderly, caring for, 117–118 Eliade, Mircea, 287 emptiness and existence, 186–189 environmental awareness, 93 environmental protection, 15, 178–179, 196–199 equality, 182–184, 194, 197–198, 297–298 Esherick, Joseph, 243 ethics, 99 existence and emptiness, 186–189 experts/expertise, 87, 88 Falungong, 165 family filial piety, 22, 109, 117–118, 121–123, 301, 325 lived Confucianism and, 111 modernist Confucianism and, 120–123 modernization and the, 115–117 parental maintenance law, 118 parent-child relationship, 121–123, 301 The Rules for Students and Children, 325 state Confucianism and, 117–118 traditional Confucianism and, 301 Fan Lizhu, 347 Farris, Catherine, 125 Fava, Patrice, 154 Feng Fei, 50 Festival of Qingming, 323–324 filial piety, 22, 109, 117–118, 121–123, 301, 325 Fingarette, Herbert, 94 Foguanshan, 172

index folk religions, 22–23, 191, 283 Foshan Confucius Temple, 318 Foucault, Michel, 305 Four Books, 78, 85 fruition-cause relationship, 181–182, 197 Fu Lujiang, 50, 63 Gedimu Muslims, 212 gender roles, 115–120, 341–343 gewu, 145 Giradot, Norman J., 229, 230 global cultures, 100 globalization charitable work and, 333–335 Confucian revival and, 1–6 consequences of, 14–15 cosmopolitan identity and, 124 defined, 4, 99 of the economy, 177, 178–179 interconnections and interdependences of, 93, 99, 126 globalized cultures, 4–5 God, 291 golden age of Buddhist philosophy, 139 of Christianity in China, 248, 275 for Muslims in China, 206 golden mean, 289 Goossaert, Vincent, 153, 156, 170 government. See also the state benevolent, 103 elitist form of, 103, 107 Gramsci, 72 graveside veneration, 323–324 The Great Learning, 290 Greek philosophers, 80, 85 Gu Mu, 108 Guomindang (KMT), 19, 165, 256 Gu Weikang, 283 Han Chinese, 19–21, 213–215 Han Confucianism, 278, 279 Han Hui, 212 happiness, 104–105, 114, 146 harmonious society, 314–315, 345 harmony through ritual, 345–348 Healing Tao, 158 health care, 17, 329–330, 337, 341–342 heart/mind theory, 191–192 Heaven, 288–290, 291 Heavenly Lord Teachings movement, 168 Heavenly Masters tradition, 169 Heavenly Way, 95

355 Hegel, 304 Herrou, Adeline, 154–155 Hinduism, 80, 85 Hirsch, Jennifer S., 115 holidays, 47, 324 holiness, 291 holistic humanism, 10 Hong Xiuquan, 241 Hoon Teng temple, 340 Hsu, George (Qian), 262 Huayan Buddhism, 188, 197 Hu Fuchen, 169 Hui decline in, 19 Han, conflict with, 213–215 integration of, 208, 217 introduction, 18–20 menhuan system, 212, 218–220, 224 modern period religious strategies, 216–218 population, 203 post-Ming dynasty, 208–211 Qing dynasty, 212–220 summary overview, 226–227 warlords of the, 216, 218–226 Yuan dynasty, 206–208 Huiyuan, 282 Hu Jintao, 47–48, 314–315 humaneness (ren) with distinctions, 295–299, 306 otherness and, 303–307 ritual and, 299–303 humanism Confucian, 83, 89–90, 92, 95–96 secular, 75, 79, 87, 89 humanity vs. religiosity, 287 human nature, 300 human rights, 11–12, 106–107, 182–184 humans being human, 93–95 daily life, importance of, 80, 95 expectations-reality gap, 104 finding happiness, 104–105, 114 man-nature relations, 178–179 spirituality of, 284–286 human society, 21st century, 176–179 Huntington, Samuel P., 41, 43–44 Hu Shi, 77 Hu Songshan, 225 Hu Yaobang, 48 ideologies, imported, 72 Ikhwan Muslims, 212, 222–223, 225–226

356

index

Imperial Academy, 313 imperial examination system (ke ju), 24, 201, 205, 216, 257 India, 84, 190–191 individual, importance of the, 2–5, 44 individualism, 4, 99, 125 individuation, 4, 98–99, 104–105, 124–125 industrial economy, 176–179 intellectual economy, 176–179 intellectuals government by, 103, 107 literati vs., 85, 88, 100 politics of, 83 post-May Fourth Movement, 76 present-day, 81, 82–83, 92 temple affiliations and power, 340 interconnections and interdependences Buddhism on, 197 cause-fruition relationship, 181–182 dependent origination concept, 180 globalization and, 93–94 Yuanrong (perfect interfusion), 190–192 international relations, 69–72 Internet, 62, 84, 178 Islam. See also Hui Confucianism vs., 80, 85 globalized form of, 20 integration of, 203, 206–211, 214 major sects in China, 18, 212 post-Ming dynasty, 208–211 Qing dynasty, 210, 211–220 summary overview, 226–227 Tang and Song dynasties, 203–206 Yuan dynasty, 206–208 Islamic daoxue, 140 Jahriyya, 224 Japan, 69, 71 Japanese Confucian Way, 135, 136 Jaspers, Karl, 295 Jenkins, Philip, 229, 235 Jesus Family (Yesu Jiating), 238, 243–245 Jews expulsion from Spain, 232 Jiang Qing, 50 Jiang Zemin, 48, 50 jiao, 253 Jining, 49 Jin Yong, 165 Jochim, Christian, 96, 114 Jones, Stephen, 154

Jordan, David, 122 Judaism, 80, 85 Kang Xiaoguang, 247 Kang Youwei, 184, 249, 269, 275 Kapra, Fritjof, 168 karma, 22, 181, 193 kenosis, 288 Kong Confucianism, 279 Kongzi, 133–134, 143, 144 Korea, 133–138 Korean Confucian Way, 135, 136 Kuang Yaming, 48 Kueifeng Zongmi, 139 Kuomintang (KMT), 19, 165, 256 Lagerwey, John, 154 Lai Chi-tim, 153–154, 162, 169 Lan Gongwu, 256 languages of religion, 86 leadership in Buddhism, 17, 27, 329–330, 334, 337–339, 341 present-day, 86, 88 learning, importance of, 89–90 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 140–147 Lee Kuan Yiew, 110 Legge, James, 230 Lesser Logic (Hegel ), 304 li, 345 Liang Qichao, 252, 275 Liang Shuming, 76 liberal democracy, 72, 102 Li Li, 50, 63 Lingxing Gate, 318 Lin Yutang, 111 Li Ruihuan, 48 Li Shen, 279 literati, Confucian historically, 82, 87 present-day intellectuals vs., 85, 88, 100 Zengzi on, 87 Little Flock, 239 liturgical Daoism, 13, 170–171 Liu, K. C., 230, 240 Liu Enge, 272 Liu Zhi, 140 lived Confucianism, 111, 129 Li Xiannian, 47–48 Li Yuanghong, 254, 260, 261, 269 Li Yujie, 168 Li Zehou, 122–123

index love with distinctions, 26, 295–299, 306 Lü Dongbin, 161 Lu Hongtao, 224 Lu Xun, 77 Ma Anliang, 220 Ma Bufang, 220–223, 224, 225 Madhyamika Buddhism, 187 Madsen, Richard, 17, 111 Ma Fulu, 223–224 Ma Fuxiang, 223–226 Ma Haiyan, 220–221 Mahayana Buddhism, 188, 190 Mahayana Yogacara Buddhism, 188 Ma Hongkui, 223–226 Ma Junwu, 266 Malaysian Chinese, 21–22 Malaysian Muslims, 22 Ma Lin, 221, 224, 225 Manchu, 212, 213 Mantak Chia, 158 Maoism, 64, 77–78, 87, 88 Mao Zedong, 19, 48 Ma Qi, 220–223 Ma Qianling, 223 marketization, pervasiveness of, 96 marriage, 115–117 marriage vows, renewal of, 325–326 martial arts, 168, 170 Marxism, 39, 72, 77, 88 Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, 1 materialism and spiritual decline, 176–177, 193 Ma Tingrang, 220 Ma Xiangbo, 257, 260, 267, 268, 273 May Fourth Movement, 1, 24, 26, 75–77 Ma Yuanzhang, 224–225 Ma Zhan’ao, 216, 218–220, 222 Mazu, 347 meaning of life, 95 Medhurst, Walter Henry, 236 media, state-controlled, 49–50, 62–63, 84, 315 mediation, 101–102 meditation, 16, 163, 240 Mencius, 107, 279, 285, 286, 300, 319 Menegon, Eugenio, 241 Mengzi, 134 menhuan system, 212, 218–220, 224 Mensching, Gustav, 99 mental introspection, Confucian, 121, 240, 289–292

357 merit concept, 240 Metzger, Thomas, 143–144 The Middle Kingdom (Wells), 236 the Middle Way, 186–189 Ming dynasty, 240 missionaries Bible translation projects, 237 introduction, 23 PRC expulsion, 239 Western hegemony and, 232–235 Mitterrand, François, 48 modernism, 166–171 modernist Buddhism, 14–15 modernist Confucianism, 103–107, 113–114, 120–123, 128 modernity American form of, 125 Daoism and, 12–13, 166–171 defined, 4 moral crisis and, 124 ritual and, 332–333 secularization and, 343–348 traditionalists reaction to, 105 modernization basic components, 98 conflict and, 194–199 of Confucianism, 97–98 Confucianism and, 3–6, 92–93 consequences of, 14–15 Daoism and, 166–171 environmental impacts, 178–179, 196–199 the family and, 115–117 gender roles and, 115–117 individuation and, 104–105 losses and gains, 100 moral crisis and, 123–127 of personal life, 115–117 reversing, advocates of, 102 ritual and, 332 Westernization and, 41–44, 101 Mohammed, 204 Mongolia/Mongolians, 206–209, 212, 213, 255, 266 “A Monk Does Not Bow Down before a King” (Huiyan), 282 moral crisis, modern, 123–127 morality books, 118–119 moral system, rebuilding the, 56–59 moral values, 46, 98–99, 112, 114, 288–289 Mou Zhongjian, 21, 280, 287 Mou Zongsan, 113–114, 135, 143 Mozi, 133, 296–297

358

index

multiparty system, 67–68 Muslims. See Hui; Islam; Uygur Naquin, Susan, 230 narcissism, 300 nationalism. See also cultural nationalist movement Confucianism designed for, 108–109, 110–112 familism vs., 111 government supported, 46–47 introduction, 7, 12 post-May Fourth Movement, 76–77 Nedostup, Rebecca, 156 Neo-Confucianism, 134, 291, 345 Neo-Confucian philosophical lexicography, 141–142 Neo-Daoism, 169 Netizens, 84 New Age movements, 166 New Confucianism, 10, 79–80, 131–133, 135–136, 143 New Confucianism movement, 137–140 New Confucians education of, 137–138 path of self-cultivation, 143–144 New Culture Movement, 1, 24, 26, 275 NGOs, 84 Nobel Peace Prize, 316 no-self concept, 15–16, 192–193 otherness, 303–307 Overmyer, Dan, 230 Pan Fei, 63 parental maintenance law, 118 parent-child relationship, 121–123, 301. See also filial piety patriarchal clan-based religion, 280–281 patriarchic government, support for, 7, 44–45 peace and peaceful coexistence, 194–196 People’s Republic of China (PRC) Confucianism, uses for, 1, 9 Daoism and, 164–165, 172 missionaries expelled, 239 religious freedom, 252–256 Petition League for the Separation of Church and State, 264 philanthropy. See charitable work The Philosophy of Right (Hegel ), 304 pity, 184–186 pluralism, 124

political nationalism, 35 political opportunity structures, 60–62 political opportunity structures theory, 39–41 political stability, 108–109 politics and religion, 276, 278–283 Pomfret, John, 20–21 Poon Shuk Wah, 156 popular culture, 9, 112, 170 popular media, 165 popular religion, 238–239, 240 prayer cards, 320 Preface to the Great Learning by Chapter and Phrase (Zhu Xi), 279 Presbyterian Church, 336–337 professionalism/expertise, 87 Project Hope, 195–196 Protestant Bible translation projects, 237 Protestant Reformation, 344 Provisional Constitution of 1912, 249, 252, 262 public good. See also social capital ritual and, 333, 343–349 temples contribution to, 330 public spirituality, 285 Pure Land Buddhism, 191 Qian (George Hsu), 262 Qian-Jia School, 75–76 Qian Xuesen, 169 qigong movement, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173 Qing dynasty, 24, 210, 211–220, 235, 249–251, 265–266 Quanzhen Order, 161, 162, 164, 165 “Quanzhen Proliferates Learning” (Chen Yingning), 153 Qufu Confucius Temple, 312–313, 315, 318 radical libertarianism, 125 Rawlinson, Frank Joseph, 274 Realistic Buddhism, 189 recompense and retribution, 191 Red Swastika Society, 163 red vs. expert debate, 87, 88 reform and opening era, 78, 83, 87 reformed Buddhism, 14 Reid, Gilbert, 235 religion. See also specific denominations defining characteristics, 230, 344–345 identification with foreign, survey findings, 66, 67

index imported, integration of, 202–203 languages of, 86 modern and contemporary China, scholarship on, 155–156 politics and, 276, 278–283 popular, 238–239, 240 post-May Fourth Movement, 76–77 secular world and, 85–86 social capital and denomination, 333–339 institutional size, 331, 339–343 summary overview, 348–349 state recognized, 12, 163, 331 religiosity vs. humanity, 287 religious coexistence, 202, 204–205 religious conflict, 23, 178, 213–214, 265 religious diversity, 5–6, 12–28, 202 religious freedom debate Chinese Christians in the, 250–253, 257–262 conclusions, 275–276 constitutional, 268–274 Society for Religious Freedom, 262–268 religious freedom guarantee, 332 religious mixing, 13, 205 The Religious Question in Modern China (Goossaert and Palmer), 156 religious tolerance, 21–22, 96 Ren Jiyu, 278, 279 Republican era, 162–163, 172, 243–245 Republican Revolution, 275 Republic of China, 24 Rescuing History from the Nation (Duara), 155 retribution and recompense, 191 Richard, Timothy, 235 rites, culture of, 287–288 ritual boundary-crossing through, 346–348 Daoism and, 169–170 harmony through, 345–348 historically, 344–346 introduction, 26–28 Jesus Family, 244 otherness and, 305–307 popular culture shaping, 243 potency of, 95–96 public good and, 333, 343–349 for religious tolerance, 96 religious tolerance and, 96 secularization and, 332 of spirit-possession, 243, 244

359 ritual practices ancestral worship, 322–324 in Confucius temples, 309–311, 316–322 future of, 327 social, 324–327 ritual theory, 299–303 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 255 Ru/Confucian tradition, 136, 144–147 Ruist philosophy, 132, 144 The Rules for Students and Children, 324–325 Russia, 213 Sanlun Buddhism, 188 Sarvastivadah Buddhism, 189 Schipper, Kristofer, 158 schools. See also education and examination in capitalist societies, 112 Confucianism in the, 84–85, 107–108, 324–325 Hui, 224 teaching moral values, 112 scientific technology, 178 scientism, 86, 168, 173 Seck Kia Eenh, 341–342 secularization, 332, 343–348 secular-sacred dichotomy, 85, 94 secular world, spirituality in the, 85–87 self-attachment, 192–193 self-censorship, 100 self-cultivation, 80, 128, 135, 143–146, 165, 269, 284–286 self-cultivation market, 170–171 self-examination, 121, 240, 289–292 selfishness, 111, 300 self-realization, 10, 11, 80, 89 Shandong Revival, 245 Shanghai, 335 Shenzhen Kongsheng Tang, 326 Shils, Edward, 85 Siegler, Elijah, 155 Singapore, 107–108, 111–113, 117, 126 Sinhalese, 23 Smith, Arthur, 234, 236 Smith, W. C., 146 social capital concept defined, 331 cultural rebuilding and, 56–59 local, 340–341, 342, 349 religion and denomination, 333–339

360

index

institutional size, 331, 339–343 summary overview, 348–349 ritual and, 333, 343–349 spiritual capital and, 331–332 temples contribution to, 330 social change, 117–118 social justice, 300 Social Life of the Chinese (Doolittle), 236 social networks, 62 social well-being, 56–59, 329 society, Westernization of, 46–47. See also civil society Society for Religious Freedom, 262–268, 273–274 Society for Retaining the State Religion, 269 Society for Worshipping Confucius (Zongsheng Hui), 252 Society of Confucian Teachings (Kongdao Hui), 252 Society of Confucius (Kongshe), 252 soft power, 50 Song Confucianism, 279 Song dynasty, 203–206 South Koreans, 126 Sovereignty and Authenticity (Duara), 156 Speak Mandarin Campaign, 108 spirit-possession, Boxers, 243, 244 spiritual capital, 331–332 Spiritual Gifts Movement, 245 spiritual happiness, 104–105 spirituality in Confucianism, 284–286 Daoism’s categorization as, 173 importance to the future, 96 materialism and, 176–177, 193 present-day religion and, 85–86 Western discourse on, 286 spiritual transcendence, 289–292 Sri Lanka, 23 the state belief in, survey findings, 66–67 Christianity supported by, 231 Confucianism endorsed by, 84, 107–108, 112–113, 314–316, 327 cultural nationalist movement and, 45–51, 63 present-day controls, 49–50, 63, 83 rebuilding traditional culture, 45–51 responsibility of, survey findings, 69–70 state Buddhism, 23 state Confucianism, 11, 84, 112–114, 117–118, 128

state media, 49–50, 62–63, 84, 315 state reform, 67–69, 84 state religion, 24–25, 102, 247, 249–262 Straughan, Paulin, 118, 126–127 student movements, 83 Sufism, 211, 212 Sun Yat-sen, 252 superstition in Confucianism, 266 Daoism as, 151–152, 162, 163, 167, 172–173 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 163 popular religion as, 238–239 Republican era, 162 ritual as, 332–333 sustainable development, 196–199 Tai chi, 166 Taiping movement, 235 Taiping religiosity, 241, 242 Taiwan Confucianism in, 107–108, 112, 114 economic miracle of, 111 post-Guomindang regime Daoism, 165 ritual life in, 346–347 social services in, 117, 329–330, 335–339 temples and public charity in, 340 Taiwanese, 119–120, 122 Taixu, 195 Tamil, 23 Tang dynasty, 203–206 Tan Sitong, 184 Taoism, 287 The Taoists of Peking (Goossaert), 153 The Tao of Physics (Kapra), 168 Taylor, Charles, 11 technological improvements, 178 temple religion, 164, 330 temples Buddhist, 197 Confucian, ritual practices in, 309–311, 316–322 ritual in boundary-crossing at, 346–348 social activities, 330, 340–341 “Temples and Taoists” (Goossaert), 153 temple worship, 164, 330 Theravada Buddhism, 186, 188, 190 thinkers, identification with ancient, 65–66

index The Three Virtues of Effective Parenting (Yuen), 120 Three Ways to Harmonize Humans with Heaven (Dong Zhongshu), 279 Tiananmen Square, 315 Tian Di, 278 Tiandijiao movement, 168, 172, 173 Tiangfang xingli (Liu Zhi), 140 Tianhou Gong temple, 347 Tiantai Buddhism, 188, 197 Tibet, 102, 211, 213, 255, 266 Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland, 132 Tongshanshe tradition, 163 tradition, 133–134 traditional culture. See also cultural nationalist movement China’s rise, effect on, 78 exporting, 50, 69–70, 84, 110, 315 government rebuilding of, 45–51 love of, statistics, 44 rebuilding activities, 59–60 revival, 33–34 support for, 105 traditionalist Confucianism capitalism and, 114 competition, response to, 113–114 and gender in morality books, 118–119 influence of, 129 introduction, 11, 12 modernity and the, 105 overview, 128 transforming in US Christian churches, 119–120 True Jesus Church, 238 Tzu Chi, 172 Tzu Chi Foundation, 17, 27, 329–330, 334, 337–339, 341–343 underdetermination, 300 unification, 47 United Petition League of All Religions, 260, 261, 263 United Society of Chinese Protestants in America, 251 United States Christianity embracing Confucian values, 119 church-state separation, 86 conflict resolution, 101–102 modernity’s form in, 125 Taiwanese migrants, Christianity’s influence on, 119

361 universal elections, opinions on enforcing, 67–68 Universal Red Swastika Society, 22 university entrance examinations, 321 urban Daoism, 13, 169–170 Uygur, 18, 19–21, 213 values, government responsibility for, 67 “The Verse on the Dharma-Body,” 179 Vietnamese Confucian Way, 135, 136 Walls, Andrew, 229, 231–232 Wang Caigui, 50 Wang Dao politics, 72 Wang Hui, 124 Wang Rongbao, 255, 256 Wang Shipeng, 244 Wang Yangming, 143 war, 178, 194–196 Wardlow, Holly, 115 Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng), 238–239 Way of Anterior Heaven, 166 Way of Pervasive Unity, 166 wealth gap, 178, 194–195 Weber, Max, 12, 79, 86 weddings, 325–326 Welch, Holmes, 155 welfare services, 117–118 Wenchang Dijun, 322 Wen Jiabo, 48, 314–315 Wesley, John, 300 Western Buddhists, 16 Western culture and Daoism, 168, 173 Westernization modernization and, 41–44, 101 preventing, 46–47 Western philosophy, 137–139 Western social movements, 64 Williams, S. Wells, 236 women as Buddhist leaders, 17, 27, 329–330, 334, 337–339, 341 marriage, changes for, 115–117 marriage vows, renewal of, 325–326 modernization and, 116–117 morality books for, 118–119 world peace, 194–196 Wu, Emperor, 279 Wu Zongci, 256, 271 Xiantiandao, 162, 163 Xiaowen, King of Northern Wei, 313

362

index

Xidaotang Muslims, 212 Xinhai Revolution, 24 Xiong Xiling, 260 Xu Guangqi, 240 Xun Liu, 153 Xunzi, 93–94, 107, 129, 299–302, 345 Xu Qian, 263, 273

Yuanrong (perfect interfusion), 190–192 Yuan Shikai, 249, 252, 254, 256, 261, 262, 267 Yu Dan, 49, 103–105, 106, 114, 124, 315 Yuen, Shirley, 120–123 Yu Guozhen, 251

Yan Fu, 252 Yang, Mayfair, 156 Yang Der-Ruey, 154 Yan Hui, 319 Yasukini Shrine issue, 69, 71 Yearley, Lee H., 107 Ye Jiaying, 50 yin-yang balance, 22, 94 Yi T’oegye, 142 Yi Yulgok, 142 Yogacara Buddhism, 187, 189 Yu, Anthony C., 106 Yuan dynasty, 206–208, 265–266

Zengzi, 88, 319 Zhang Heavenly Master, 165 Zhang Sanfeng, 161 Zhang Xun, 269 Zheng, Admiral, 22 Zhengyi, 160–162, 169 Zhiyi, 139, 189 Zhu Xi, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140–146, 279 Zishi, 319 Zizhong Confucius Temple, 318 Zukav, Gary, 168 Zuo Zongtang, 216