MCLC: Xi pays homage to Confucius

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Xi pays homage to Confucius
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Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (11/26/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/xi-pays-homage-to-confucius-
a-figure-back-in-favor/

Xi Pays Homage to Confucius, a Figure Back in Favor
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

China’s Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, likes venerating his
forebears. Mr. Xi has made a reverential visit to a statue of Deng
Xiaoping, the party patriarch who oversaw China’s shift to a market
economy. Mr. Xi has also paid respects to Mao Zedong, and to his own
father, a revolutionary who served under Mao.

And on Tuesday, Mr. Xi took political ancestor worship back 25 centuries.

He visited Qufu, in Shandong Province, which claims to be the hometown of
Confucius, the sage who has been both reviled and honored by the Communist
Party as a symbol of traditional values. Mr. Xi made clear that he likes
those Confucian traditions — or at least a version of them that can sit
easily next to party doctrines and control.

Mr. Xi visited the Temple of Confucius in Qufu and called together experts
to discuss the right way to study Confucius’ teachings on ethics,
government and virtuous living, according to China’s official news agency,
Xinhua, and other state media.

“I want to read these two books carefully,” Mr. Xi said, as he fingered
through an annotated copy of The Analects, the collected sayings and
dialogues of Confucius, and another book collecting stories and thoughts
ascribed to the thinker, who was born about 551 B.C.

Mr. Xi seems to believe that imposing change demands even greater fealty
to the party’s version of tradition. Earlier this month, Mr. Xi oversaw a
party conference that endorsed a broad program of economic liberalization
and social change. But he has yoked his promises of bold economic
transformation to political traditionalism by appealing to Mao, Deng and
now, it seems, Confucius.

“The Chinese nation possesses a traditional culture that reaches far back
in time and can certainly create new glories for Chinese culture,” Mr. Xi
said at the meeting with Confucius scholars.

But he told them that Confucius should be interpreted through the party’s
prism, “using the past to serve the present” so that the sage’s thoughts
“can be made to play a positive role in the conditions of the new era.”

Confucius has not always figured in the party’s pantheon. At the height of
Mao’s radicalism, Confucius was attacked as an embodiment of poisonous
conservatism. Under recent party leaders, Confucius has regained favor —
recast as an inoffensively paternal defender of hierarchy, order and
discipline. China’s state-backed language-training centers abroad are
called Confucius Institutes.

But even so, the party has sometimes appeared worried that appealing to an
ancient sage might erode its own claims to singular authority. In 2011,
the government unveiled a 31-foot bronze statue of Confucius near
Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, and then four months later quietly
took the statue down.