MCLC: Confucian scholars tell women to return home (3)

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Confucian scholars tell women to return home (3)
Thanks for sharing and commenting on this. Indeed, although Jiang Qing is quite influential, he is basically a Ted Cruz-ish cultural conservative who develops elaborate conceptual schemes to push a simple essentialist argument: China is "too special" to follow the path of political and cultural liberalization. Domestically, this transforms a political model well past its expiration date into a form of "uniqueness" that is to be treasured, and celebrated as resistance to the supposed "hegemony" of political liberalism. Internationally, this argument also has currency, under the rubric of "understanding."
Yet understanding is a one-way street with Jiang Qing. His political conservatism comes along with a deeply problematic cultural conservatism. In his vision of a tricameral legislature, the House of Exemplary Persons (populated solely by experts on Confucianism) would have the right to veto any legislation, particularly any judged to violate Confucian principles: the examples Jiang provides include "homosexual marriage, the founding of one-parent families, the encouragement of sexual liberation or sexual freedom, the promotion of an open and legal sex industry, the cloning of human  beings, research into genetic weapons, and blasphemy of the sages and worthy people" (Confucian Constitutional Order, pg. 220). Hopefully I am not alone in feeling that memorizing the classics, repressing sexuality, and pushing blasphemy laws would be a less than ideal path for China's political future.
Almost two decades ago when Jiang Qing first made a name for himself by promoting 讀經班 (i.e. memorization of the classics) for children, at a symposium on the topic, I believe it was Yuan Weishi who said "I truly appreciate Jiang Qing's independent thinking, but one problem is that I just can't agree with any of the conclusions he reaches from this independent thinking."
On the topic of women and emergent cultural conservatism in China, I have more ethnographic experience with the Wang Tsai-Kuei (王財貴) branch of traditionalist academies, where I witnessed similar calls for women to "return home" in academies from Jiangsu to Hainan to Sichuan. Memorably, one self-proclaimed Confucian scholar explained to me that the blame for the milk powder scandal in 2008 rested solely upon women's shoulders. In his opinion, if women "stayed home" and breastfed their babies as nature supposedly designed, there would be no need for milk powder and accordingly no milk powder scandal. I often had a difficult time parsing Confucian thought and misogynist trolling.
I just published an article on this topic, "Producing purity: inside a traditionalist ladies' academy" that recounts my experiences at a Ladies' Academy in which all-male self-declared "scholars" of Confucius oversee the reform of modern city women into proper ladies. It's in a recent book Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, edited by Tiantian Zheng, that will be great for university classes on these issues. http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9535-9780824852962.aspx If anyone would like a copy of my chapter, please feel welcome to contact me.
Kevin Carrico <kjc83 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 28, 2016
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