Abstract
The current bloom of quasi-Confucian political thinking and writing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and deployed both to discredit Western ideals of democratic pluralism and to rationalize continued one-party rule in China, has been a long time coming. This article examines the origins of this line of thinking, its development since its first appearance with the CCP’s cultivation of Confucius studies in the mid-1980s, and the current parameters of this discourse as it has taken a growing role in Beijing’s domestic political and emerging geopolitical narrative.
The CCP’s romance with the Sage dates from relatively early in Deng Xiaoping’s period of ‘reform and opening’—at which point it seems to have been decided to explore quasi-Confucian theories as a possible alternative (or supplementary) legitimacy discourse for the Party-State, one that did not depend upon Marxist–Leninist theory at a time when rapid marketization was making that orthodoxy sound increasingly incoherent. Deng is well known for his odd re-characterization of China’s state-capitalist development as being an example of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, but this rhetorical spin hints at a deeper point. Locked during the 1980s in an intense battle for the hearts and minds of a Chinese intelligentsia clearly intrigued by Western political ideals, the ‘Chinese characteristics’ mantra also signaled that the CCP was exploring broader notions of ‘Chineseness’ in which it could wrap continued one-party dictatorship.
This re-Sinicization of political narratives evolved into a priority project for the CCP propaganda apparatus, which saw such narratives as useful tools from which to try to counter any tendencies to embrace Western-style political reform that would imperil Party control. As Yu Keping has noted, ‘the government … encouraged a revival of traditional Chinese values’, and thus played a major role in promoting the development of new, quasi-Confucian political thinking.
This effort to re-Sinicize the Party-State’s legitimacy discourse through the invocation of quasi-Confucian concepts selectively drawn from China’s ancient history picked up steam in the 1990s, when the CCP felt it all the more important to repair its tattered legitimacy narrative in the wake of the massacre of students and workers on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. A political theory steeped in ‘Chineseness’ was especially attractive because it fit well with the Party’s increasing turn to the cultivation of Chinese nationalism during the 1990s—such as with Jiang Zemin’s notably anti-Japanese ‘patriotic education campaign’—as a way of trying to persuade ordinary Chinese to rally around the CCP’s banner.
This was not a casual dalliance daubed with rhetorical flourishes, but instead a concerted CCP campaign to encourage quasi-Confucian scholarship along lines congenial to Party-State authority. As Anne-Marie Brady has noted, since the mid-1980s, the CCP has been ‘directly involved in supporting the return of Confucianism and other aspects of traditional Chinese thought as a mainstream discourse in Chinese society’. The Party did not merely allow this, but in fact ‘engaged itself in actively promoting the study of Confucianism’ through the ‘selective use of Chinese traditional thought’. As a result, new quasi-Confucian political memes were ‘fully incorporated into official discourse’.
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