Slandering the Sage

One of the most baffling features of China's latest cultural revolution is the concerted ideological attack on the sayings and teachings of Confucius. Last week the posthumous drubbing of the ancient sage, whose name is frequently linked with that of the dead, disgraced former Defense Minister Lin Piao, continued unabated. New meetings of the masses denounced Confucius "and his like" as "buffoons who had a place only in the garbage of history." Lin was again condemned for "preaching the rubbish of Confucianism as part of his attempt to restore capitalism in China." It is almost as if the gentle philosopher were still alive and well and leading a counterrevolutionary cabal.

In many ways he is. And that late "bourgeois careerist, renegade and traitor" Lin Piao is far from being the only one to fall under his influence. As the mounting ideological attacks on the "four olds" (old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits) indicate, the traditional Confucian values have died hard in China and remain an obstacle to the success of Mao's revolution.

Confucius, whose name is a Latinized version of King Fu-tzu or Master Rung, would likely be amused at all the attention he is getting. His own life was singularly lacking in worldly success. Born in 551 B.C. of an impoverished noble family in what is now Shantung province, he spent his life as an itinerant office seeker, wandering throughout the feudal kingdoms into which China was then divided, looking for a ruler who would put his ideas about government into practice. Except for a few months as a minister in his native state of Lu, he remained unemployed until his death in 479 B.C. But, like Socrates, he ensured that his teachings would live on after him by imparting them to a devoted group of disciples.

Confucius' ambition was to restore order to a chaotic society. The China of his tune, 300 years before the founding of the first dynasty, was torn by constant warfare among the country's greedy feudal princes, who were described by Confucius as "stuffing themselves with food all day while never using their minds at all." He envisioned an ideal ruler of benevolence, moderation and humanity, a type that he believed had existed in a halcyon era long past. While the bad ruler relied on terror and force, the Confucian prince would restore order simply by the strength of his moral example. "If a ruler himself is upright," Confucius taught, "then all will go well without commands."

It was an ethical rather than a religious doctrine. The cultivation of virtue was the key to political tranquillity. Confucius rejected the concept of life after death as a spiritual reward and felt that the desire for wealth was found only in the "small man." Although theoretically anyone could become a cultured man, Confucius stressed a hierarchical ordering of society in which each accepted his position. Personal satisfaction lay in cultivating the virtues of obedience, filial piety and benevolence toward others: summed up as "the Way." "Having heard the Way in the morning," Confucius taught, "one may die content in the evening."

Ironically, some aspects of Communist rule are reminiscent of these Confucianist ideas. Mao Tse-tung studied the Confucian classics for six years as a youth and never entirely escaped their influence. In his four-volume Selected Works, no less than 22% of his references to other writers are to the sage or his disciples--just short of the 24% devoted to Front-Runner Joseph Stalin.

Both Confucius and Mao place great stress on internalizing "correct" ideas and on the need for the ruler to act as a moral exemplar. Moreover, the party cadres, steeped in Marxism-Leninism, bear what must be to Mao some disconcerting resemblances to the old Confucian bureaucracy, steeped in the revered classics.

Confucius may have had peace and order in mind, but he nonetheless laid the ground for China's traditional authoritarianism. His stress on reverence for authority provided a foundation for often passive, fatalistic obedience to the rulers of the state. Confucius believed in the necessity of an educated elite, a kind of aristocracy of virtue, to run the affairs of society. Thus, in the eyes of the Communists, he fostered exactly the kind of deep division between ruler and ruled that runs counter to Mao's expressed principle that in a proletarian society the masses rule themselves. Even more offensive to the Communist is the Confucianists' extremely unproletarian disdain for manual labor. "The superior man attends to spiritual things and not to his livelihood," was Confucius' pronouncement.

Remaking Man. At the root of Mao's rejection of the sage is Confucius' belief: "By nature men are pretty much alike." He was convinced that human nature remained unchanged from tune to tune and society to society, only being affected by education. The Communist goal is to remake man in a new proletarian image.

"There is no human nature in the abstract," Mao wrote in 1942, "there is only human nature with class character."

Thus, in the Communists' eyes, the ideas of Confucius contain no universal truths.

They merely reflect the class nature of the slave-owning aristocracy of his own epoch.

Looked at in the long run, the anti-Confucian diatribe is part of Mao's continuing effort to transform the nature of man. He wants to replace the Confucian habits of tranquillity, obedience and fatalism with a new Promethean man of struggle and combativeness. For him, Confucius continues to be a symbol of everything in China that represents hierarchy, stagnation and complacency. For that reason, the sage cannot be permitted to sleep in peace.

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