CRCC Neo-Confucian Schools

With funding from the John Templeton Foundation, Joy Lam, a USC Ph.D. candidate in sociology, is researching moral education in Chinese Confucian schools.

Heart & Virtue: The Revival of Confucian Education in Contemporary China

Throughout 2007 to 2008, media in the United States had widely discussed the revival of Confucianism in China as the world was paying attention on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The establishment of Confucius Institutes around the world had shown an expansion of China’s international cultural influences, or "soft power," through its promotion of Chinese language and culture.

Current analysis of this phenomenon tends to focus only on the active role of the party-state in instrumentalizing Confucian symbols, using it to fulfill the so-called ‘ideological vacuum’ or ‘moral vacuum’ that emerged after the fall of socialist ideology since the capitalist economy became the trend of development. Other sees that the rise of Confucianism as a manifestation of cultural nationalism that is emerging with the growing political and economic power of China in the world.

What is lacking in these analyses, however, is to recognize that the contemporary revival of Confucianism in China is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. The revival is recognizable in the mass culture, academic discourse, and government actions. Politically, it can be observed through the government’s adaptation to an essentially Confucian concept, ‘the harmonious society’ as a keyword for policy direction in mid-2000.

In the religious realm, the resurgence of Buddhism highlights the importance of embodying Confucian ethics as part of practice. In education, the emergence of Confucian classic-reading education in contemporary China emphasizes on reading and recitation of Confucian classics and also the importance in self-cultivation for character development. The interconnectedness of political, religious, cultural and economic events all contributes to the resurging interests on Confucianism.

It is a curious question when we look back on the trajectory of the contemporary Chinese history in the past six decades of how Confucianism was suppressed, destroyed and abandon, and restore again to become active, flourished and renewed. Since the beginning of the 20th century progressive liberals, including the socialists, had criticized Confucianism as the cultural baggage that hindered the modernization and democratization of China. Criticism on the association between Confucianism and the feudal past reached the highest during the Cultural Revolution in 1970s, in which Confucianism was considered something meant to be destroyed. Together with foreign religions and Jesus followers, scholars of Confucianism were the victims of this political movement.

While the public destruction had stopped after the end of Cultural Revolution, it was not until the late 1980s that the discourse about Confucianism had changed. Over the decades in the late 1980s through 1990s, the discourse about Confucianism, modernization and development had turned drastically from criticism, to a contrasting view that Confucian ethics and values have positive impacts to the social and economic development. Therefore, the case of the current revival of Confucianism provides us a unique case to study how traditional culture, beliefs and ethics cope with the process of modernization and negotiation with the social condition of late-modern society.