Contemporary Confucianism in Thought and Action by Guy Alitto

Author:Guy Alitto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

(2)Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Margaret Mih Tillman

Email: [email protected]

6.1 Contextual Introduction

In the spring of 2011, commentators closely followed the erection, as well as the subsequent removal and re-situating, of a statue of Confucius in Tian’anmen Square in Beijing. The statue of Confucius first stood in front of the newly reopened National History Museum and obliquely across from Chairman Mao Zedong’s portrait, mounted above the entrance to Late Imperial China’s Forbidden City; thus, the statue’s position symbolically indicated that Confucius should be at least as prominent as Chairman Mao. Western observers speculated that the statue’s erection was “a seismic step in the Communist Party’s rehabilitation of Confucianism”; after its removal to an inconspicuous northwest corner of the garden courtyard from where the Confucius statue might merely catch an oblique glimpse of the masses exiting the National History Museum, Western observers concluded that old-guard leftist factions within the Communist Party had triumphed over new Confucian revivalists (Andrew Jacobs 2011). This political infighting over representations of China’s past coincided with anticipations regarding the upcoming succession in China’s political leadership marking a transition to another generation of leaders. While these conflicts and changes caught the attention of the Western media, few in the West noted the diversity of opinions within the currents of Confucian revivalism; the statue of Confucius stands (or disappears) as a signifier that encompasses and subsumes an extraordinary scope of positions on Confucian revivalism in China’s political culture. In this article, we would like to illustrate the spectrum of ideas regarding the Confucian revival movement and the diversity of symbols that these revivalists wield to champion their own conception of “tradition.”

At the time the Confucius statue in Tian’anmen Square was sparking controversy, we were in Beijing conducting research, as well as gathering feedback on our newly published article, A Joyful Union, about a modernized Confucian wedding ritual.1 In that article, we analyzed the way that the director of Shanghai’s East China Normal University Press, Zhu Jieren 朱杰人, modernized the wedding rites in Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals 朱子家礼 (Zhuzi jiali), which are ascribed to his ancestor, the pivotal Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200).2 We suggested that because Zhu Xi himself had changed classical family rituals to fit his times, his descendent should enjoy the same license to alter old ritual practices. We also placed these rites within the context of nongovernmental, intellectual responses to socioeconomic and demographic issues with marriage—which may be perennial, but are seen by many Chinese as being exacerbated by individualism in post-reform China. In presenting our article and research to Chinese audiences, we found that Zhu Jieren had voiced among the most “liberal” visions of the restoration of ritual because of his willingness to soften the presence of patriarchal authority within the rituals. Because Zhu acknowledges simplifying and modernizing tradition, we consider his approach to be distinct from current efforts for fugu 复古 or “the restoration of antiquity,” especially when we consider the hostility that some antiquity revivalists have voiced about Zhu Jieren’s modernized version of classical rituals.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.