Can Xi Jinping Save the Humanities? Part 1: Sprouts of Learning
What's Xi Jinping 习近平 to do? By that I mean, what could the leader of country with the most people and cash do to help us humanists? The humanities are in trouble, and he's a seemingly randomly chosen benefactor, so what could he do? Should he swap out the power suit for an old blazer with a beat up Beckett paperback in the pocket to meet the gang at the campus dive so we can complain about all the philistines who get to pay their rent?
No. But seriously, I do want to think about the relationship between the revival of Confucianism and other traditions in official discourse in China and the liberal arts in the West. The recent idea of Confucianism coming back bears some note first.
As much as American conservatives are seeing a war on religion, Confucianism represents a religious tradition that has practically died very recently. For a hundred years, it's been socially and politically out of the picture in Asia for all but the barest rituals and resown social theories.
The most important recent Confucian Astroturfing goes back to Lee Kwan Yew 李光耀, the long time leader of Singapore. Lee argued that flipping the value-judgments of racial caricatures Western Darwinians gave to East Asians to write off imperialism could today be used to explain the capitalist successes of Japan, Korea and the Chinese micropoles. Passivity becomes deference, submissiveness becomes altruism, self-efacement becomes willingness to change. So 19th-century Oriental obstacles became 21st-century Asian values.
The reaction in mainland China has been faint but generally positive. Lee appealed to Communist leaders, who since the 1980s have lacked any formal program for understanding and expression of their style of authoritarianism and vigor in the market. So, from this comes the claiming of Confucius as a Chinese legacy to UNESCO in 1994, the Confucius Institute, and these political-intellectual social fashions are said to appeal particularly to Xi. Insiders I know only expect the role of the Confucian classics to grow in primary and secondary education in China, and the state is heavily promoting scholarship on Chinese humanities as only Taiwan had recently before.
This is the official story: dry, bureaucratic, still hinting at the colonial moralities even if reworked; it's banally clear in its ambitions of justifying authoritarian nationalism. But, it binds up a history that has a great deal in it to inspire, that of the New Confucianism of the 20th century and today. For a long time, I have been interested how a sort of Confucianism survived in such environments as the philosophy department of Peking University in the first decades of the republican period.
However, John Makeham is surely right when he describes this as a deracinated thought experiment among cosmopolitan intellectuals, all elite men who have almost all found homes in places like Hong Kong, Taichung and Boston.
As much of a challenge as Tu Wei-ming 杜維明 or Jiang Qing 蒋庆 presents to the bland conservatism of an official, curated Confucian revivification, it would be difficult to see them in the mold of the Benedictine scholars of the Western middle ages. In the imagination of traditionalists like Alasdair MacIntyre, these monks not only preserved the content of Aegean and early-Christian thought in a time of isolation and chaos, they wrote a rule for life, a devotional method inspired by classical virtues to the new end of scholarly discipline. If Foucault and Charles Taylor are to be believed, we can see the roots of the altruism and disciplinary austerity of modern society in places like the medieval monasteries. Though Jiang might see himself in this vein, I don't know how this kind of intellectualism and devotion could influence and thrive in a modern political society.
So though Professor Tu in my view is an inspiring and provocative public intellectual, it's President Xi's thoughts on the Confucian curriculum in state schools that will have the biggest impact on the future of patriotic subject-formation among the college-bound and not in China. In the next post I want to think about this contrast in coordinated ways: what space for the critique or mutuality, the big humanistic subjectivities, might there be in this proprietary culture? That, as opposed ours of course.