Analysis
Gracing the north gate of the just-renovated National Museum in China, abutting Tiananmen Square, a giant three-story-high bronze statue of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius was erected this January. Then, four months later, without any official explanation or comment, it disappeared.
Beijing’s silence over the Confucius effigy highlights the thorny dilemma faced by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as it tries to refine a new form of propaganda meant to maintain legitimacy and soothe an increasingly disaffected populace.
A cherry-picked rendition of Confucianism, conveniently adapted to align with Communist Party political imperatives, has effectively been elevated to the “status of a semi-official state ideology,” according to a new report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), published on Wednesday.
This new doctrine, dubbed “CCP Confucianism,” has been deployed to shape public opinion through mass propaganda and ultimately to preserve Communist Party rule, the report indicates.
Cherry-Picking
Mao-style communism has long been discredited and rejected by the Chinese people, and since the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the CCP has lacked a convincing, unifying political ideology. Social unrest plagues large swathes of the countryside, and corruption is rife among Party officials. Chinese citizens continuously appeal for political reform.
The Chinese Communist Party has found its answer by reaching back into its archives for an old foe, an ancient character that was once upon a time condemned by the same ruling Party.
“Once a target of official condemnation in Mao-era China as a relic of the country’s feudal past and as an obstacle to the Party’s vision of social transformation,” the report reads, “Confucius has been revived in official propaganda as a national icon of China’s traditional culture, as well as a symbol of the Party’s concern for public welfare.”
Through much of the reign of terror renovating the country into a “New China,” the CCP denigrated Confucian values wholesale.
But now, by co-opting a selection of Confucian principles, the regime can justify its rule by citing the need for a “harmonious society” and “social stability,” all the while maintaining a quasi-totalitarian police state, controlling the world’s most sophisticated censorship and propaganda apparatus, and overseeing a network of labor camps that dish out cruel punishments to people with inconvenient political or religious beliefs.
Applying Confucianism is empowering the regime to strike back at citizen grievances and to operate in a heavy-handed and authoritarian manner, citing Confucius’s views on paternalism social order.
Alarmed by public reaction to corrupt cadres, Party officials in recent years have been rebranding themselves as representatives of the people and their welfare through the Confucian “emphasis on public service via loyalty to the existing social order,” says the USCC paper.
“Since Hu’s ascension to power [in 2002–2003] these messages have been actively promoted by the government’s propaganda apparatus, and Confucius is now regularly praised in the state media,” it continues.
Continued on the next page ... Exporting ‘Confucianism’
Exporting ‘Confucianism’
China’s Confucianism revival is not just limited to domestic application. A significant push in Confucian iconography and labels has spread beyond China’s borders.
In the Chinese foreign ministry’s interactions with the non-Chinese audiences, Confucius ideology has supplanted Marxist and socialist discourse, which has waned and all but disappeared.
The number of overseas educational institutions seeking to teach Chinese language and culture tainted with Party ideology has proliferated, with more than 700 college-level “Confucius Institutes” and grade school-level Confucius Classrooms in nearly 100 countries.
A soft-power stunt under the direction of the Ministry of Culture and the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, the first Confucius Peace Prize presentation was viewed as a dud and a “nearly hysterical public relations campaign” by the international media, according to the USCC report.
More prominently, the ruling regime’s use of Confucian propaganda during the 2008 Beijing Olympics attempts to portray China positively to the world and invoke patriotic sentiment.
“Hearkening back to Confucianism offers an indigenous tradition of social philosophy that satisfies nationalist impulses, while simultaneously presenting a gentler humanist face to audiences both at home and abroad,” the USCC report said.
Selectively utilizing the themes of Confucius’s teaching continues to prop up the Chinese Communist Party’s nonstop propaganda machine and it is due to continue for the foreseeable future.
Contradictions Abound
Communist theory tries to identify the supposed “contradictions” in a given social system, but the embrace of Confucius by a hard-line communist polity has presented Party theoreticians with their most obvious contradiction yet.
The way the Confucius statue was yanked away from the National Museum highlights the unease with which the Party has attempted to publicly embrace a set of doctrines with which it has nothing in common.
It has only extolled statements from Confucius that “prescribed submission to the established authorities,” as Simon Leys writes in his book The Analects of Confucius, while ignoring the more essential notions, such as “social justice, political dissent, and the morality duty for intellectuals to criticize their ruler.”
Chinese experts also see the problem. “Fundamentally, the CCP’s ideas are the opposite of Confucianism, since they are based on class hatred and struggle. The two systems are completely incompatible,” Epoch Times commentator Jim Li said, according to a previous Times report.
He added: “The CCP is just using Confucianism to boost its image and does not really follow Confucius’s teachings.”
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