The Beijing Games, Confucius and the Very Great US Depression

Should they prove to be the success towards which the Chinese have been working, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games threaten to mark a watershed in global history. They would put on display the world’s major ‘communist’ power with the world’s most successful ‘capitalist’ economy. This apparent contradiction is only clarified if understood as a product of the world’s original ‘Confucian’ civilisation.

     The English language media will continue to highlight perceived ‘Communist’ China’s disregard of human rights and ‘Capitalist’ China’s share of the environmental challenges that accompany Western style economic development. Followers of the Games might more beneficially take a serious interest in ‘Confucian’ China’s civilisation.
     At the same time they may need to weigh what one Western writer has identified as the dilemma of the Tibetan people, “trapped between an oppressive Beijing and a manipulative Washington.” They might also bear in mind that over a billion highly civilised and productive Han Chinese would protest strongly against the suggestion of Beijing’s ‘oppression’ and that the same Western writer has also stated that “China is viewed by Washington as a major threat, both economic and military, not just in Asia, but in Africa and Latin America as well.”
     In reflecting on Confucian China, news of a planned $4.2 billion, 300 square kilometres Confucius City may help. Although some are already inclined to depict project plans for the Confucius City in a manner that suggests a recent inspiration to create a Chinese Disneyland, the Confucian renaissance in China has a serious and well-established foundation dating back at least two decades.
     In fact, Mao Zedong’s library in 1949 was stocked almost exclusively with China’s great literary and historical works and the Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius political campaign in 1975 revealed a profound and active knowledge of the Sage’s influence. Positive official recognition of the importance of Confucian values probably dates, however, from the First International Conference on Confucian Studies in Qufu in 1987, jointly sponsored with Singapore’s now Mentor Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and the establishment of the Beijing based International Confucian Association in Beijing in 1994.
     At the former there was open banquet discussion of the critical role Confucianism had to play in China’s future. Some years prior to the 1994 Conference, President Jiang Zemin had made an explicit semi-public statement about the importance of reviving classical learning from an early age.
     Ignorance about the Confucian character of contemporary China is a product of the practice of ‘intellectual apartheid’. This once assisted in the building of Western empires and the projection of the Enlightenment’s ‘universal’ values. It now serves to keep those outside Asia ignorant of powerful forces shaping the global future.
     As will be explained later, the influence of Confucius has pervaded all of East Asia. It goes far to explain the economic success of the region over the last half century. Naiveté about the character of this Confucian influence also goes far to explain the enfeebling of the American economy.

The Confucian Legacy

     The Confucian legacy is complex and can take many different characters, depending on the period of history one chooses to examine. It is, nevertheless, possible to make some strong statements about its central character in defining East Asia, with its pervasive influence reaching from China out to Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
     First, because Confucius based much of his teaching on historical example, it is possible to identify Confucian qualities in Chinese history in the Xia Dynasty (2205-1766 BCE) as much as one and half millennia before the Sage’s birth in 551 BCE, but particularly at the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty (1045-256 BCE) half a millennia before his birth.
     Second, despite the preference for a harsh Legalist ethos and the rejection of Confucian influence by the First Qin Emperor (221-210 BCE), Confucian teaching returned to favour within several decades and played a central if varying role throughout subsequent Chinese and, later, East Asian history.
     Third, in the last two Han Chinese Dynasties, Song (CE 960-1126) and Ming (CE 1368-1644) major Neo-Confucian thinkers played active roles in reformulating and refocusing classical Confucian learning.
     Fourth, although sometimes overshadowed by other influences, the Confucian ethos has always worked powerfully to preserve Chinese tradition and civilisation, perhaps never more so than during the Yuan (CE 1279-1368) and Qing (CE 1644-1911) Dynasties ruled by Mongol and Manchu Emperors respectively, when the service of Han Chinese administrators ensured the eventual conquest of the conquerors.
     Fifth, largely unstudied, discreet and complex Confucian disciplines and insights have informed the resurgence of East Asian economies over the past half century, in the process making most Western concepts and ideologies formulas for misunderstanding and incomprehension.
     Sixth, the original Confucian classics retain a vitality today that ensures the tradition can select at random models from over four thousand years of Chinese history to enlighten decision makers about human character and politics.
     Seventh, the length, diversity, continuity and extensive records of Confucian culture give it a character more formidable, pervasive and unifying as a political, social, economic and spiritual influence than any of the Abrahamic religions, whether Judaism, Christianity or Islam.
     Eighth, the Confucian emphasis on human virtue, humility and community coherence makes it easy for less disciplined and self-denying people to profoundly misjudge the strengths and qualities of East Asian communities.
     Living from 551 to 479 BCE, Confucius was primarily a teacher who emphasised personal and governmental virtue, correct family and social relations, justice and sincerity. Often the distinct Confucian forms of these values are poorly understood outside East Asia. While thought to be the author or editor of the Five Classics (of Changes, Poetry, Rites, History and the Spring and Autumn Annals), which long formed the basis of a Confucian education, modern historians do not usually regard him as the author of any specific documents. At the same time, The Analects, a collection of brief aphoristic statements compiled long after his death, is ostensibly a record of dialogues with his followers. The Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian Zhuxi edited The Four Books (The Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean and the Works of Mencius), which then became the foundation of a Confucian education up to the end of the Qing Dynasty (CE 1644-1911).
     While Confucianism was blamed for China’s weakness when confronted with foreign intruders and became an object of attack and antipathy in the early 20th century, there were a number of intellectuals who sought to define some form of New Confucianism as the 20th century progressed. As is often the case, the intellectuals missed the true renaissance of Confucianism in the second half of the century. This took place with great discretion and in an appropriately pragmatic manner and will be examined in more detail later.
        The above brief outline should demonstrate that Confucianism and Chinese history and identity are one. The forms and practices may change but nothing ever happens in China, and to a lesser degree the rest of East Asia, without reference to and evaluation against a past Confucian history of at least four thousand years. Not surprisingly, the educated and knowledgeable can find in that history legitimisation for almost any action. It remains important, nevertheless, that it can be legitimised in such a context and that the legitimiser can show the credentials to undertake such a task. This ultimately is the capacity to reveal a profound knowledge of past history and comparable moral, political and other choices.
     It is important to remark that Confucius explicitly dismisses any interest in the afterlife or any form of God-like authority. This ensured that China has rarely tolerated for long the use of spiritual organisation for political ends. It also freed the Chinese from the structures of faith, dogma and rationality that have been so important in the development of the West. In the process it focused human spiritual energies and fulfilment on the practical challenges of life in this world.

The 20th Century Confucian Renaissance

     The 20th century Confucian Renaissance might be seen as having an unlikely and, to some, a less than noble origin. Yet few fully informed Japanese would in their hearts agree with this view. It might be traced back to when Nobusuke Kishi, charged as a war criminal and imprisoned for three years in Japan after the defeat and occupation of his country in 1945, recruited America’s Central Intelligence Agency to bankroll his political resurrection.
     As recounted by Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Kishi had reached agreement by August 1955 in a meeting with the American Secretary of State, Foster Dulles, to help the United States fight communism. He undertook to wreck the ruling Liberal Party, rename it, rebuild it and run it, as the Liberal Democratic Party under his command – neither liberal nor democratic, but a right-wing club of traditional (Confucian) leaders rising from the ashes of imperial Japan, pledged to change the foreign policies of Japan to fit American desires.
     While there can be no doubt that both sides have honoured their commitments and that both parties publicly continue to honour one-another as close allies, the long-run consequences have hardly benefited America. The American-Japanese alliance highlights the fundamental failings not only of America’s Central Intelligence Agency but also of the whole American leadership class since 1945.
     To his credit and America’s shame, Kishi’s right-wing club of traditional leaders have been unbelievably successful in regaining much of what Japan lost in World War II, often at America’s expense. They have also, and this has been less beneficial to Japan, developed a strategic model that enabled successive Asian states to follow Japan and relocate American industry, skills, technology and productivity to Asia.
         Japan is the major beneficiary of what is in reality an ancient Chinese strategy. It is a modern version of the three millennia old, Zhou Dynasty strategist Jiang Taigong’s 12 Civil Offensives – conquest through service. Kishi, by reading clearly American wishes and whims, managed to put the Japanese people at the service of the American people in a manner that created over time dependence and vulnerability.
     The effectiveness of this strategy over the past half century highlights the failure of the American leadership and intellectual classes to identify and comprehend forces that have steadily eroded the strengths in which they take so much pride and on which they still rely so naively. Central to this failure has been an inability to think outside very narrow and rigid ideologies, as well as a lack of the type of moral fortitude and clear-headedness that is the central ethos of Confucianism and the only true defence against Jiang’s Civil Offensives.
     In particular, it has been a failure to comprehend in any depth the social discipline and cohesion of East Asian communities, the character of virtue, justice and sincerity in the Confucian tradition, the strategic resourcefulness that has been accumulated over four millennia of history and the fact that little in the English language translates readily into Chinese or Japanese, or vice versa.
     In fact, the Anglo-American communities, which have so transformed the global community over the past two centuries, are characterised over recent decades by almost unbelievable reflective and cerebral laziness, self-indulgence and ineptness. They have depended on stale ideologies like neo-liberalism, which have betrayed them, and relied on minority interest groups to provide what reflective and cerebral energy is left in their communities, looking askance when outcomes are not always to their liking.
     This highlights the major significance of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. They symbolise the renaissance of a civilisation that shares little with the West’s post-Enlightenment ‘universal’ values, and even less with the endlessly warring Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The now rapid re-establishment of Chinese technological, economic and political superiority and leadership, which was lost to the West 200 years ago, simply highlights how inherently foolish and self-harming has been the West’s thoughtless indulgence of ‘intellectual apartheid’ over the past half century.

The Nature of Confucian Reality

     Having said that neither Chinese nor Japanese cultural realities can readily be communicated across language barriers, a brief examination of several short passages from The Analects may help to illustrate why this is the case. Even so, the examination should be prefaced with a warning that it will unavoidably be inadequate, as it will need to be conducted solely in English.
     This realisation comes most powerfully if one commits to learning in Chinese short passages from the Chinese classics. Only then does it become apparent how inadequate and misleading are even the best English translations. Generally, they are extremely lucky to avoid the appearance of a caricature.
     The first lines of The Analects offer a good introduction to the problem, using an excellent translation by D.C. Lau:

The Master said, ‘Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to take offence when others fail to appreciate your abilities?’

The 44 words in Lau’s translation compare with 32 Chinese characters and lose something of the poetic coherence of measured and fulfilled authority of the original. More important is their extraction from the context of a culture that involved the frequent movement of educated ‘gentlemen’ in the pursuit or exercise of official duties in a widely dispersed political environment. In the English translation, the three question marks seem intrusive in a manner absent in the original Chinese and detract from the sense of a civilisation guided by educated convivial ‘gentlemen’ who are at ease with their own worth. One might question whether such a civilisation was as evident at the time of Confucius as it was later after his influence became the foundation of Han Dynasty (206 BCE-CE 220) administration. This does not, however, distract from the succinct power of these opening lines and their enshrinement of a mythology of a wise, experienced and gracious network of gentlemen whose existence offers reassurance about the proper order of the world.
Part 3 of Chapter 2 of The Analects contains a famous passage that identifies a major difference between Confucian and Western norms:

The Master said, ‘Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.’

Here 51 words are used to translate 26 characters. More important, Lau uses the word ‘edicts’ where others have used the word ‘laws’. Whatever the better translation, both make it clear that the Confucian preference is to minimise government directives and maximise the use of social acceptance and expectation as a means of bringing harmony and order to society. In practice, this ‘rule by virtue’ rather than ‘rule by law’ plays out in many ways and has not always inhibited Chinese use of draconian Legalist practices. The central importance rests in the fact that ‘law’, however interpreted, has very different historical, cultural, political and practical implications in East Asia, compared to the West. Moreover, the text of The Analects is explicit in offering a powerful seminal reason for this.
Part 17 of Chapter 7 of The Analects contains another example of the power of words in translation, with Lau rendering it as:

The Master said, ‘Grant me a few more years so that I may study at the age of fifty and I shall be free from major errors.’

Here 27 words are used to translate 17 characters. Moreover, other translations and Chinese texts carry a meaning that is totally missing from the words above. These suggest that Confucius was musing on the benefits of a further fifty years to study and reflect on the Yijing or Classic of Changes. For whatever reason Lau has chosen to omit this Confucian reference and approval of the one Chinese classic of probably even greater influence than The Analects.In Confucian China this might have been of little moment when the Classic of Changes was both central and fundamental to Confucian teaching. With China’s decline, it fell into perhaps even more disfavour than Confucianism because it was identified with fortune telling and impractical superstition. As the next passage will seek to demonstrate, however, it did even more than the practical humanism of Confucius to shape Chinese thought and reality.

The Distinctive Power and Relevance of Chinese Correlative Thought

The significance of the Yijing or Classic of Changes can be illustrated by the writing of a contemporary Chinese-American academic, Chenshan Tian, who has been grappling with differences in Eastern and Western world views, ways of thinking and forms of scientific understanding. His book, with what for many will be the unpromising title of Chinese Dialectics: From Yijing to Marxism, focuses on explaining the fundamental difference between Chinese and Western Marxism. In passing, it makes the simple and profound observation that much Western thought, including scientific thought, has essentially been derived from and been limited by faith in God.
Tian writes that:

…the model of causality is made possible simply because God has created a world of things governed by laws of causation. God can be made responsible for the creation of such laws. Thus the ultimate explanation of the model, the world, the causal law and the motion may be traced to God as an infinite existence.

     The model has developed to involve an ontology of Being and Nonbeing, a teleological order from beginning to end, and dualisms such as a final distinction between nature and human culture, time and space, mind and body, ontology and epistemology, and so on. It has also led to the development of principles of universalist theory and methodology, causal reductionism or simplistic determinism, abstract speculation and conceptualisation, categorical distinctions, and efforts to make objective statements about the world.
     Tian suggests an intellectual world, derived from the Yijing, which seems much closer to the evident riddles of organic life, human behaviour and the nature of material and energy inherent in the quantum mechanics and relativity theories of modern physics. Tian’s perception highlights the presumption of the Western scientific establishment and its belief that it is engaged in the discovery of laws of nature, a Theory of Everything and God ordained mechanisms and conveniences designed to serve humanity.
     From this alternative perspective the West’s science and rationality appear as a grand act of hubris. The full consequences of this are only now becoming clear as the world confronts mounting environmental and associated health and human well-being problems.
     Paradoxically, this hubris has been derived from those prophets who sought to speak on behalf of an omnipresent, omnipotent and transcendent God, except that now the scientists, like religious prophets before them, have usurped the mantle of God themselves. Whether in religion or science, however, dogma has been used as a tool of political organisation and assertion, pushing rudely aside the spiritual and intellectual worlds of other peoples. Free markets, scientific truth and Western progress have too easily become merciless dogmas of conquest.
     In contrast,Tian outlines a Chinese approach to human experience, sometimes labelled ‘correlative’. This establishes humanity more as a humble supplicant, patient worker and disciplined servant before the complex relationships, constant changes and fathomless mysteries that shape life, society and the environment. There are no vaulting theories of everything, losing touch with all but the self-promotion of their originators.
     Readers may react in protest and rejection, dismissing these words with the scorn with which the West has imposed its ‘intellectual apartheid’ on other cultural traditions over the past two hundred years. But the marketplace is already dictating that a wide range of differences between Anglo-American certainties and Confucian-Daoist realities be treated with respect and a serious desire to understand.
     Western thinkers are not yet ready to countenance the possibility that they may be well advanced in the process of becoming historical anachronisms. It remains inconceivable that they may face the imminent prospect of having to submit to the authority of the thought, culture and tradition of an unfamiliar civilisation.
     The global marketplace, which Western physical and social scientists have done so much to create, may soon dictate this unwanted outcome of their endeavours. Problems inherent in contemporary Western civilisation are increasingly evident in an excessively aggressive and reductionist science, an overly self-indulgent corporate ethos and self-destructive political and financial cultures. The beneficiaries of an independent and profound wisdom culture in East Asia are finding more and more ways to turn these Western failings to advantage in the global marketplace.

The Trouble with the Beijing Games

     The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games threaten to display to all the peoples of the world the spectacular economic success and achievements of the Chinese. They will also suggest to some of the more sensitive and observant the discreet but powerful forces of a unique and unrivalled civilisational force.
     Clearly, some are most uncomfortable about Confucian successes, particularly as America confronts the prospect of what has already been called the Very Great US Depression. The erosion of a global financial system founded on the US Dollar, the exponential increase in the costs of the $3 trillion wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the all-consuming demands of the American military-industrial complex, the self-indulgence of a corporate culture more focused on Washington influence than global competition and the hollowed-out and unproductive character of the US economy all contribute to highlighting the implications of this daunting renaissance in Asian civilisation.
     The West is finding it very difficult to give up its studied neglect of the reasons for the regeneration and reinvigoration since 1945 of the communities shaped by Confucian civilisation. It is highly unlikely that even spectacular Chinese success with the 2008 Games will lead to a long overdue re-examination of the West’s stale ideologies or a recognition of the idiosyncrasies and inadequacies of what today passes for the West’s intellectual tradition. The fear of such humiliation will more likely prompt further self-destructive initiatives of the sort that have characterised 21st century America.
     Professor John Fitzgerald remarked in his August 2007 RG Neale Lecture that the Australian Embassy in Beijing foreshadowed the emergence of today’s China as early as 1976. This helped inform a burgeoning trading relationship. It did little to encourage forward-looking education and other policies, however, despite efforts in the early 1990s by the recently elected Australian Prime Minister to build Asian language training into school curriculum. The task that remains to be completed grows more onerous by the day.

REG LITTLE was an Australian diplomat for over 25 years in Japan, Laos, Bangladesh, the United Nations, Ireland, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, and the Caribbean, obtaining advanced language qualifications in Japanese and Chinese. Deputy or Head of Mission in five overseas posts, he served in Canberra as Director of North Asia, International Economic Organisations, Policy Planning and the Australia-China Council. He has participated in Conferences in Asia since 1987, has been a Founding Director of the Beijing based International Confucian Association since 1994 and has co-authored two books, The Confucian Renaissance (1989) in English, Japanese and Chinese, and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny (1997). His latest book is A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? Reg Little's website is www.confucian-daoist-millennium.net.

The above article appears in
New Dawn No. 108 (May-June 2008)

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