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HE WAS HAILED after his death as “The Uncrowned King,” a philosopher whose sound bites of wisdom became China’s handbook on government and its code of personal morality for thousands of years. But little is known about Confucius, and what is known is full of contradiction and myth.
Speaking from Washington, D.C, during a break on his book tour, Michael Schuman, author of Confucius and the World He Created, teases out fact from fiction; explains why he had to take bowing lessons before his wedding; and tells us why the influence of a scholar who died nearly 3,000 years ago is still felt in the boardrooms, bedrooms, and classrooms of nearly a quarter of humanity.
You say Mao’s Red Guards dubbed Confucius “The Number One Hooligan Old Kong.” But today Confucius is being ardently embraced by the Communist Party. What’s going on?
The Communist Party has realized Confucius might be useful for them again. But the version of Confucius they use isn’t the same as the one in The Analects, his most famous collection of ideas and sayings. Beijing focuses on the imperial Confucius who was all about obedience to the emperor, hierarchy, and loyalty.
Fast forward to today. The Communist Party has overseen an incredible surge of wealth in China in the past 35 years through old-fashioned capitalism. But the old Marxist rhetoric of the Mao years doesn’t fit anymore. So they went scouring about for a new ideology to justify their government.
And they’ve come back to Confucius, for many of the same reasons the old emperors did. Here is a political tradition that is uniquely Chinese and can support their type of authoritarian rule. At the same time, it can be used to fend off all those awful ideas they don’t want from the West, like democracy and human rights.
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