Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
This week, we’re taking a step back from the news cycle to explore the rich history of Confucianism—and what it means that Chinese President Xi Jinping invokes it today.
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Why Xi Celebrates Confucianism
When Zhu Yuanzhang, the 14th-century founder of the Ming Empire, seized power, he faced a familiar problem for revolutionary rulers: establishing legitimacy.
A peasant, monk, and rebel soldier who clawed his way to becoming emperor, Zhu needed to anchor his authority in the intellectual tradition that had underwritten earlier Chinese empires—the rujia, or “the way of the scholars,” known in the West as Confucianism.
Yet Zhu found much to dislike in the Confucian canon, especially in the writings about its second-most influential figure, Mencius. Mencius had little time for tyrants. In one famous passage, he argued that killing a despot did not constitute regicide, since a ruler who abused his people was no king at all but a “mutilator of righteousness.”
Zhu took the point personally and ordered Mencius censored. Official editions of the eponymous collection of sayings and stories about the sage excised the offending passages, and Mencius’s memorial tablet was quietly removed from Confucius’s temple in Qufu.
Chinese President Xi Jinping often quotes Confucius and celebrates Confucianism as part of China’s civilizational heritage. But to the extent that Xi is a Confucian, he is one in the same way that U.S. President Donald Trump is a Christian. He is a leader formed by a culture saturated in a tradition but with little visible engagement with it beyond occasional lip service to further political ambitions.
Like Zhu, Xi sees Confucius as a source of legitimacy—one that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has leaned on as the ideological appeal of communism fades. Xi’s association with Confucianism is unsurprising, given how long it has occupied a central place in Chinese thought. Yet Xi’s vision of Confucianism is even more censored and constrained than Zhu’s.
I cannot do justice to the richness and complexity of a great philosophical tradition in a newsletter. Paul R. Goldin’s The Art of Chinese Philosophy is a highly readable and scholarly introduction; it is well complimented by Andrew Seth Meyer’s just-published history of the warring states, To Rule All Under Heaven.
What follows is a brief and highly incomplete introduction. As a philosophy, Confucianism places special emphasis on scholarship and humaneness. It also foregrounds the importance of relationships—between father and son, ruler and subject, friend and friend—and the social and ceremonial rituals that sustain them.
When Jesuit scholars first encountered Confucianism in the late 16th century, they largely admired it as a Chinese version of Greek and Roman philosophy. In translation, they Latinized the names of Confucius and Mencius, intending to give them the same status as Western ancient philosophers.
By the Jesuits’ time, Confucianism had been the dominant school of political philosophy in China for nearly two millennia, but this dominance would ultimately make it a scapegoat. For Chinese reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries, Confucianism was a convenient stand-in for everything they believed was wrong with Chinese society, from imperial hubris to foot-binding.
“In order to advocate [for] Mr. Democracy,” CCP co-founder Chen Duxiu wrote in 1919, “we are obliged to oppose Confucianism, the codes of rituals, chastity of women, traditional ethics, and old-fashioned politics.”
That indictment was unfair. Confucianism was a tradition forged in struggle and conflict that contained, like other philosophies, both autocratic and revolutionary ideas. Much of the baggage associated with it long predated its creation: patriarchy, ritualism, hierarchy.
Confucius himself—Kong Zi, or Master Kong, who lived between 551 and 479 B.C.—was one of many thinkers in the early Warring States period, when numerous kingdoms competed brutally for predominance in China. The Confucian vision of government looked back to an imagined golden age and urged present-day leaders to rule with justice and humanity.
Mencius, writing a century later amid even greater disorder, sharpened the argument. Poor governance, he insisted, was morally comparable to murder or theft. “Is there any difference between killing a man with a stick or a sword,” he asked a ruler whose people were starving, “and doing it with the government?”
Confucianism was in fierce contention with other schools of thought. The Dao De Jing, which later became a core text of Daoism, mocked Confucians’ moral earnestness when the universe is indifferent to suffering or virtue. Mohists, meanwhile, saw Confucians as too narrow-minded for their willingness to put family before universal love.
The philosopher Zhuangzi said Confucius took himself too seriously. The legal theorist Han Fei was harsher still: Confucians, he argued, were among the “vermin” of the state, always idealizing the past and making people doubt present-day authority.
Han Fei’s patron, Qin Shi Huang, ultimately unified China by force, ending the Warring States period. Later accounts—probably embellished—charged the First Emperor with executing Confucian scholars and burning their texts.
What is clear is that Confucianism did not immediately triumph after unification. The early Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220) relied heavily on Huang-Lao thought—a murky blend of proto-Daoist beliefs about immortality, quasi-mythical ancestors, and authoritarianism. Confucians rose to dominance only after a court witchcraft scandal in 91 B.C. triggered mass purges that eliminated most of their rivals.
Even then, Confucianism remained a contested tradition both in China and beyond. It responded to new beliefs, such as Buddhism, and coped with shifting imperial structures. Most famously, 11th-century thinkers, later dubbed neo-Confucians, restructured the tradition in ways that went on to dominate orthodox Chinese thought for centuries.
Confucianism also produced martyrs. The Ming scholar Fang Xiaoru famously refused to legitimize the Yongle Emperor’s violent usurpation in 1402. When threatened with the execution of his extended family—the “nine degrees of execution”—Fang reportedly replied, “Why not make it 10?” He was killed and later canonized by the Yongle Emperor’s descendants in 1584.
The most devastating travails on Confucianism, however, came from Xi’s greatest hero, Mao Zedong. Maoism defined itself against the past, but the Cultural Revolution marked a peak of destruction. During a 1974 campaign, Confucius was equated with Lin Biao, a Chinese general accused of treachery against Mao. Attacks on both were used to target moderate figures such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
Under Mao, scholars were persecuted and sites desecrated, and Confucian scholarship in China was nearly extinguished. Only after Mao’s death did Confucius become safe again. In the 1980s, intellectuals reengaged with Confucianism with tentative government support. After the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, however, free discussion was replaced with ideological rigidity.
By the 2000s, as the Chinese government turned to nationalism for legitimacy, Confucius was thoroughly rehabilitated as a benign symbol of order and hierarchy and a vague stand-in for Chinese tradition—useful both at home and abroad.
In China today, there is little interest in the intense scholarship and argument that once characterized the Confucian intelligentsia. But hundreds of millions of people still practice rituals that they might describe as Confucian—honoring ancestors, praying for success in exams, even burning incense at Qufu.
If you asked the average Chinese citizen about Confucianism, they might consider it a staid tradition of obedience and authority or perhaps one of patriarchy and discipline that stands in contrast to a softened, indulgent West. It’s that sense of Confucianism that Xi leans on—one that has little to do with the thorny, contentious, and often brilliant ideas of the tradition.
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