Jottings from the Granite Studio

Professor Daniel A. Bell spoke at the Beijing Bookworm on Tuesday night in support of his latest book, China’s New Confucianism. Professor Bell is a noted and respected scholar who has published several books and articles, as well as numerous essays in the online and print media, and I was curious to attend the talk. It is obvious that Professor Bell has reflected a great deal on issues of Confucianism and politics, and he should be commended for his attempts to expand the debate on Chinese reform and development beyond a simple East/West dichotomy. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed in the talk, though to be fair I don’t think I was the target audience.

The goal of Professor Bell’s lecture was to challenge stereotypes regarding the direction of political reform in China, in particular the role of Confucianism in the development of a modern Chinese political culture, a worthy (and difficult) endeavor. Now it is the nature of preparing public lectures to simplify arguments and to eschew overly long or complex explication. It’s unavoidable: time constraints, consideration of the audience’s level of background knowledge, and the need to pace the lecture so as to hold interest all come into play. But I thought Professor Bell’s talk could have benefited from delving deeper into the complexities of the Confucian resurgence.

First of all I like to know how terms are being defined. Words such as ‘modern,’ ‘tradition,’ and even concepts like ‘Confucianism’ are not ideas fixed in time and place. In discussing Confucianism, Professor Bell cited an eclectic assortment of thinkers/figures who all bring their own unique (and in some cases not wholly compatible) perspectives to the table: Mencius, Xunzi, Tu Wei-ming, Chiang Kai-shek, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Jonathan Spence, Jiang Qing, and Yu Dan among others. Fine as it goes. But what is Confucianism then? Is it the actual, living tradition of years past or is it a recycled and reconstructed traditionalism? (As historian Jaroslav Pelikan once said: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”)

Pushed further, Professor Bell, who clearly and admirably loves his subject, has a great deal of faith in a conceptualization of a Confucianism which possesses universal value, the term Tianxia 天下 was dropped more than a few times throughout. Sometime in the early 20^th century, however (as Joseph Levenson once argued) Confucianism shifted from being a values system of universal application to a values system that defined a particular people, culture, and place. In short, “Confucianism” narrowed from an idea which meant ‘civilization’ broadly defined, to a defining characteristic of a specifically Chinese civilization. There have been recent attempts, by Tu Wei-ming and others, to reclaim the universal in Confucianism, but despite the proliferation worldwide of “Confucius Institutes,” one suspects it is the particular that is most attractive to today’s leadership, providing them with appropriate dollops of ‘Chinese characteristics’ to flavor the ideology du jour. I also suspect that most Chinese people have a particularist view of Confucianism as an essential or defining characteristic of a “Chinese” or (if feeling a bit magnanimous) “East Asian” culture.

The term “Confucianism,” as used by Professor Bell on Tuesday night also came across in a homogenized form, stripped in large part of its historical and intellectual dynamism. At one point, and again this may have been heuristic simplification, Professor Bell noted the Legalists as being the long-time opponents of Confucians. True to a point in time. But it would have been worth explaining the profound influence of Legalist thought on the development of “Confucian” political culture in the Han and after.  What became more or less the backbone of imperial ideology was an ever-evolving mishmash of Confucian moral exhortation and values-based relationships plus the strong arm of the state with its array of laws, regulations, rewards, and punishments. One wonders which aspect most appeals to today’s Chinese leadership.

Professor Bell’s other major cause, both last night and his essays, is to counter the assumption of Western liberal democracy as the only acceptable form of political modernity. I’m open-minded and willing to go there, but it begs the question, after Churchill: What’s better? Professor Bell seems to imply that China is moving slowly in its own direction, and that eventually it will find a system suitable for the needs of the Chinese people. Again, I see nothing wrong with that except that Professor Bell had a hard time articulating what direction that might be. A revival of the Confucian tradition could well be a part of it, but it depends very much on which part of that tradition is being revived. The term ‘Confucianism’ in the modern period has meant and continues to mean many things to many people and this returns us to the crux of the problem. For the May Fourth generation it was a codeword for ‘repression,’ in Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement, it was a uniquely Chinese values system that could promote moral behavior, political loyalty, and a harmonious society (sound familiar?), in the early years of the PRC, Confucianism was part and parcel of the feudalism swept away by the revolution, in the Cultural Revolution, Confucius was criticized in tandem with Lin Biao, (One of the oddest couplings since Angelina Jolie went around Hollywood wearing a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood) and in his most recent starring roles, Confucius has modelled harmonious society for the CCP and been enlisted as a self-help guru by Yu Dan and her legion of counterfeiters.

I should admit that my dissatisfaction was not entirely the fault of Professor Bell. His is a quest for a grail: how to define a Chinese political modernity? It is a search which has inspired, motivated, befuddled, and perplexed Chinese intellectuals for well over a century. In so doing, Professor Bell fell into many of the same traps which plagued those who came before. By way of example, Professor Bell, as Sun Yat-sen once did, romanticizes the Censorate, the imperial department in charge of roaming the empire and reporting on the malfeasance of officials, kind of glorified roving auditors. Sun was so enamored that he proposed the Censorate as one of his two additions to the tripartite western political model. Professor Bell described the Censorate as officials whose job it was to watch the emperor and keep the throne in check. Nothing could be further from the truth; the Censorate generally cast their gaze downward at those officials under their jurisdiction. Remonstrations upward were, as was the case with most officials, exceptional. Professor Bell also discussed Jiang Qing’s ideas for a tri-cameral legislature, with one house consisting of members selected by civil service exams. It won’t surprise students of Chinese history to learn that this idea was also long ago discussed, again by Sun Yat-sen as the final part of his tripartite+2 government.

Finally, I felt as if Professor Bell, in his desire to counteract more extreme criticisms of China from Europe and North America, set up a bit of a straw man. Yes, there are those in the United States who see American-style liberal democracy as a franchise suitable for all places and peoples, but most of the writers and researchers on China that I know do not fall into this category. Certainly I don’t. As I’ve said numerous times, I feel that there are certain reforms (free media, free speech, free religion, the right to assembly, and judicial independence) that would help consolidate and enhance the reforms already underway in China. But I fear Professor Bell may have, as the saying goes, ‘leaned too far to one side’ when he suggested on Tuesday that legal rights are not necessarily a primary prerequisite of development. His admonition that courts and legal proceedings are inferior to mediation and other more ‘civil’ means of solving disputes is both noble and certainly in keeping with the spirit of the Analects and the Late Imperial tradition of Confucian Statecraft, but preferring to solve things through mediation does not obviate the need for legal safeguards to protect the rights of the people.

I look forward to reading Professor Bell’s new book. (The crush of people at the end of the talk plus a slight shortage of cash at the time kept me from making an on-the-spot purchase. Anyone have a loaner?) Hopefully these ideas will be fully developed and more nuanced in print.

Professor Bell has been labeled an apologist by some, and that’s obviously unfair. His views do accord with the sentiments of the urban elite and the politically connected, not surprising given that Professor Bell teaches at Tsinghua University. I do also think that in his attempts to provide an alternative viewpoint to the drumbeat of human rights, rule of law, and political/legal reform coming from many Western sources, there is a danger of coming across as overly dismissive of the importance of those ideas to China’s continued development. Nevertheless, for as much as China still has to learn from the world, I would agree with Professor Bell that the world also has a great deal to learn from China.