Confucian Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The tradition of Confucian political thought began over twenty-five hundred years ago and focused on the importance of ritual, roles, and virtue in creating a harmonious social order. With the unification of China by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), Confucianism was initially persecuted, but with the collapse of the Qin and the rise of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), Confucianism became the official ideology of the various dynasties occupying China through the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Confucianism as a ruling ideology also penetrated Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and continues to exert social and political influence throughout East Asia.

The Founder And His Teachings

Confucian political thought began with the extraordinary personality Kongfuzi, latinized as Confucius (551–479 BCE). Though Confucius may have served briefly in minor or major governmental posts, his aspiration for governmental service went largely unfulfilled. His greatest success was as a teacher of scholars and those seeking positions in public service. Confucius did not believe his teaching was an innovation, but instead a transmission of the wisdom of the past with particular focus on the rituals of the Zhou dynasty (1022–256 BCE). The importance of ritual propriety (li) and its role in harmonizing human relationships is the central teaching of Confucianism.

Ritual propriety requires that individuals of different rank and status act appropriately according to their role in a given relationship. Confucius identified five relationships at the core of this harmonious community, including ruler-minister, father-son, husband-wife, elder-younger brother, and friend friend. The senior partners of these relationships are obliged to show care and concern, whereas the junior partners of these relationships are obliged to be obedient and respectful. Filial piety (xiao), obedience, and concern toward parents and loyalty (zhong) to the ruler or state is the key to social order for Confucius. The balancing of these loyalties required the virtues of humaneness or benevolence (ren) and personal responsibility toward social organizations and groups of people (yi).

The virtues necessary for realizing a harmonious community were to be cultivated within a cultural elite of exemplary persons (junzi), who through their example would guide the common people (min) to moral behavior. Such individuals needed to be deferential to persons in high position, perceptive of the will of heaven (tian), and attentive to the words of sages (shengren), the extraordinary founders of dynasties that exemplified harmonious human community.

The education of exemplary persons consisted of training in the six traditional arts of the aristocracy as well as rhetoric, public administration, and ethics. Confucius’s willingness to teach all who were willing and able to learn, and his identification of some of his socially disadvantaged students as exemplary persons, led H. G. Creel, an American sinologist, to argue that Confucius carried out a major revolution against the existing aristocracy by opening the doors for high office to merit.

Another important legacy of Confucius revolves around his relationship to the supernatural. Though it would be inaccurate to argue that Confucius lived in a secular world, Confucius’s relative silence on the spirits and his conception of a relatively rationalized heaven (tian) have focused the Confucian tradition on pragmatic social and ethical action as opposed to metaphysical speculation. This focus has led Herbert Fingarette to characterize Confucius as a figure who has treated human community as a holy rite and elevated it to become an arena of ultimate concern.

Evolution Of The Confucian Tradition

The Warring States era (476–221 BCE), a period of disunity, produced two thinkers of great importance for the Confucian tradition, Mengzi (372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (312–230 BCE). These thinkers explored the problem of human nature and came to radically different conclusions. Mengzi believed human nature was good, whereas Xunzi concluded that human nature was evil. Both preserved the tradition’s emphasis on the importance of learning and ritual practice to either realize human potential or curb human evil.

Other Warring States philosophers trained by Xunzi followed the implications of his characterization of human nature as evil and focused on a realist approach to governance emphasizing punishments and rewards known as Legalism. Legalism became the guiding ideology of the Qin dynasty that united China and later persecuted the Confucians and burnt their books. With the fall of the Qin and the rise of the Han dynasty, Confucianism combined with elements of Legalism to become the hegemonic doctrine of governance of China’s succeeding dynasties.

Taoism and later Buddhism offered critical and complementary perspectives to the Confucian tradition. Taoist thinkers such as Zhuangzi (370–301 BCE) argued that the Confucian attention to benevolence and the artifice of ritual were acts against nature, deepening the troubles of the world.

Instead of seeking to serve in public office, Taoists preferred the free and easy living afforded by following the way (Tao) of nature. Buddhism, coming to China 67 CE, contradicted the Confucian values of loyalty to the emperor and family with its emphasis on monasticism and an otherworldly liberation. These traditions had moments of political influence, but practical orientation of Confucianism and the guidance of the two traditions away from worldly affairs minimized political conflicts among these traditions.

Neo-Confucians integrated Taoist and Buddhist metaphysical curiosity into the Confucian tradition. Zhu Xi (1100– 1200), a scholar during the Song dynasty (960–1279), crafted a metaphysical system that focused Confucian self-cultivation on understanding the underlying principle (li) that ordered matter and energy (qi) through the investigation of things (gewu). Zhu’s method of interpretation and the four books he selected as Confucian classics came to form the basis of the bureaucratic examination system, selecting scholar-officials to administer governmental affairs for the last three dynasties to govern China.

Wang Yangming (1472–1529) of the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644) articulated a metaphysics that opposed Zhu’s emphasis on the external world and focused the act of self-cultivation on internal experience and innate moral knowledge. He also argued that knowledge and action were unified, opposed to Zhu’s conception that knowledge proceeded action. Thinkers who attacked existing social and gender hierarchies embraced Wang’s metaphysics, leading to their own deaths and imprisonments, and his dangerous philosophical innovation to be declared unorthodox. The debate between followers of Zhu and Wang continues within Confucian circles even today.

The Confucian Tradition In Modern Times

The Qing dynasty (1644–1912), a dynasty founded by Manchu warriors from the north of China, like all other preceding dynasties, preserved the Confucian system. Yet, major disasters, internal rebellions of unprecedented scale, and invasion and impositions from colonial powers would break the ideology that had endured for over two thousand years. The resilience of the system may have been the factor that led the administrators of the empire to believe only minor adaptation of the contrivances (yung) of Western culture were necessary to respond to the crisis, while the essence (ti) of Chinese culture could still be preserved. The defeat by the Japanese, a culture previously looked down upon, in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) convinced many that fundamental reform was necessary.

Reformers such as KangYouwei (1858–1927) advocated the transformation to a constitutional monarchy. Practical reform was rejected, and entrenched conservative forces remained in place even as those forces lost control of the country. The Chinese Revolution of 1911, and numerous attempts to restore the Confucian ideal of the emperor of all under heaven, failed to establish a stable and lasting order. Kang later embraced the vision of a establishing a world government to realize the Confucian utopian ideal of the great harmony (Datong).

During the twenties and the thirties, a new culture movement evolved that challenged the legitimacy of the old ways in name of nationalism, democracy, and science. Lu Xun (1881–1936) argued that the tradition was eating its children, and Confucianism should not be saved because it was unable to save the Chinese people. Lu’s criticisms occurred as warlords, Nationalists, and Communists battled to govern the land. The Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), loosely embraced the Confucian tradition through the New Life Movement in 1934, whereas the Communists were more sympathetic to the radicalism of Lu.

The end of World War II in 1945 and the breakdown of the united front of Communists and Nationalists against Japanese aggression that started in 1937 unleashed a civil war in China that would send the followers of Confucius to Taiwan and leave his critics in control of mainland China. Confucianism was most aggressively attacked on the mainland during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the chairman of the Communist Party and the founder and de facto political leader of the People’s Republic of China, used Confucius as a symbolic stand-in for the forces that posed a political threat to him. Confucius was painted as desiring to return to the conditions of a feudal slave state, and his teachings and images were to be eradicated as emblems of counterrevolutionary forces.

Recent Developments

The rejection of Confucianism in the land of its origins raised questions about the tradition’s viability into the future. On the surface, Confucianism appeared too complacent in dealing with authority in its search for social harmony, slow to reform and adapt to changing circumstances, antidemocratic, antifeminist, and ant capitalist. This pessimism about the potential of Confucianism to contribute to the modern world was rooted in a Western social science that identified Confucianism as being particularly antagonistic to capitalist development, and the experience of East Asians who viewed Confucianism as an impediment to modernization. The unexpected economic success of East Asian societies in the 1980s led Western scholars such as Ezra Vogel, a professor of East Asian studies at Harvard, to reappraise the economic and social potential of the Confucian tradition.

The movement to justify Confucianism on economic grounds was preceded by an attempt to redeem the humanistic value of the tradition. In 1958, Mou Zongsan, a major exponent of the neo-Confucian tradition, and several of his intellectual peers issued “A Declaration to the World for Chinese Culture,” agreeing that Chinese culture needed to learn science and democracy from the West but also arguing the West needed to learn “a more all-encompassing wisdom” from China.Tu Wei-ming, a Harvard professor of Chinese studies, is a prominent advocate of this holistic and humane vision of the Confucian tradition.

Academic commentators on Confucianism such as Roger Ames, William Theodore de Bary, Daniel Bell, Hahm Chaibong, Joseph Chan, Herbert Fingarette, David Hall, Philip Ivanhoe, Henry Rosemont, and many more argue for a progressive and pragmatic understanding of the Confucian tradition. These thinkers not only challenge the sexism, elitism, and authoritarianism of the tradition, but they have pioneered Confucian ways of thinking about property rights, democracy, human rights, welfare policy, environmentalism, and more. The creative search for harmony and the cocreation of a meaningful aesthetic order from the perspective of all the participants within a community is the core of the Confucian tradition that they accentuate. Though this trend toward viewing Confucianism as a socially progressive and creative means of affirming human values is a very important trend in academic circles, not all professing Confucians embrace this vision.

The most visible controversy involving Confucianism in recent history challenging this progressive vision centers around the Asian values debate that emerged as many societies in Asia began to resent what they perceived to be the general permissiveness and decadence of Western liberal societies. The debate emerged in the 1990s, and it revolved around the question of whether universal human rights as they were conceived in the West should be applied to all societies.

Lee Kwan Yew, prime minister of Singapore during the time of the controversy, argued that individualistic Western values caused great harm to society and Eastern traditions such as Confucianism were correct to place society’s interests above the rights of individuals. The economic success of many East Asian societies that had limited civil liberties gave this argument some strength, however Lee Teng-hui, former president of the Republic of China; Kim Dae Jung, former president of the Republic of Korea; and Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist, among others, have been very critical of this authoritarian ideological framework that diminishes individual rights.

Some Western scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, a former Harvard political scientist, have perceived a fundamental incompatibility between Confucianism and liberal democracy because of the tradition’s emphasis on the rights of groups over individuals. Other Western scholars such as Francis Fukuyama, a George Mason political scientist, argue that the tradition’s commitment to education makes Confucianism quite compatible with liberal democracy. These debates are not only academic given the recent interest in Confucianism in the People’s Republic of China.

Economic and political reforms initiated in 1978 within the People’s Republic of China have led the Chinese Communist Party to reassess its relationship to the Chinese past and particularly the country’s Confucian heritage. The decline in value of Marxist ideology in its international and national prestige following the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have led China’s top leaders to begin to rehabilitate Confucius as a source of the social values that will help them to manage a country experiencing rapid economic growth and development. Chinese president Hu Jintao quotes Confucius in his speeches emphasizing the value of harmonious relations, and the country’s cultural outreach program to the rest of the world, the Confucius Institutes, bear the name of the sage. Whether Confucianism will play an important role in the future governance of China and whether it will have an authoritarian or progressive form remain open questions.

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