The Useless Tree

Confucius Institutes are not about Confucius

There is a bit of a dust up over Confucius Institutes, those Chinese-government sponsored organizations that promote Chinese language teaching in US (and locations all over the world). But before we get to the details of this kerfuffle, a word about Confucius Institutes.

They are not about Confucius.  Rather, the PRC government has chosen to use the name of Confucius as a trademark of sorts for a global soft power branding project.  The Institutes, most of which in the US are hosted by colleges or universities, focus on language learning, with a variety of other cultural activities: Lunar New Year parties: calligraphy; a little Peking Opera; etc.  As far as I can tell - and I have been in conversation with many US academics who have CIs on their campuses (my college does not have one) - there is no systematic effort to engage with Confucian thought in any serious manner. 

Indeed, I find no direct reference to Confucius the man and thinker on their English language web page; though there is a little video on Hai Rui, an upright bureaucrat from the Ming Dynasty (no mention is made of the fact that his story was central to the initiation of the Cultural Revolution in 1966).  The Confucian-killer Qin Shihuangdi seems to get more attention there than Confucius himself.  Bottom line: CIs are not the place to go if you want to learn about Confucianism.

And there are ironies here. The Chinese Communist Party, born of the anti-Confucian radicalism of the May 4th period and vehemently anti-Confucian up through the 1970s, is now reaching for The Master as a happy, avuncular image to adorn a most un-Confucian authoritarian-capitalist modernity.  Kam Louie, in a great piece, "Confucius the Chameleon: Dubious envoy for Brand China (pdf!), gets at some of the problems here:

There is an implicit belief among most people that because Confucianism has long dominated Chinese culture and because Confucius is a Chinese name, we should adopt it to represent China. But that’s like proposing changing the Voice of America to the Voice of Jesus. Most Americans may identify themselves as Christians, but America is much more interesting and diverse than one dominant religion or one individual. In the same way, an institute that purports to promote Chinese culture should not do so in the name of one person, especially if that name or person has generated bitter controversies in the recent past.

And you know there are Christian conservative in the US who would be very happy to change the name of the VOA to the "Voice of Jesus."  Louie continues:

...the confusion surrounding the debates on how to salvage tradition in a new China have been compounded by incoherent interpretations of Confucius’s teachings in recent years. All the indicators suggest that domestically, the advocacy of Confucianism will in practice lead to  the promotion of very conservative and inconsistent values. Internationally, if such values are to be paraded as the best of “Chinese” essences, China’s contribution to world culture will be a confused and regressive one.

He may be right: there is a conservative bias in Confucianism that will limit its applicability in an open, dynamic, globalized postmodern context.  And he is certainly right in suggesting that the explicit purpose of the current CCP-sponsored Confucian revival in the PRC is designed for conservative political purposes: to maintain the legitimacy and power of one-party authoritarianism.  But, for all of that, I still think there is something interesting and valuable in applying Confucian ideas to contemporary questions.  

In any event, to get back to the recent controversy...

About a week ago the US government issued a policy directive indicating that the visas for some Chinese nationals working at Confucius Institutes in the US might be invalid.  The directive is specific and narrowly drawn: the issue involves Chinese nationals whose visa is sponsored by a college and university who then go on to teach in elementary or high schools.  It is not an assault on CIs generally.  Rather, it is an action to implement existing visa limitations that attached to foreign nationals at college and universities. The State Department has since clarified its stance: 

Regulations related to J-1 visas, which are given to people participating in work- and study-based exchange programs, make it clear that foreign professors, academics, and students at the university level are prohibited from teaching in public or private schools at the precollege level, the State Department official said. Those visa holders will have to leave the United States by the end of June and must reapply for the correct visa to return to this country.

It would seem, then, that some sort of other arrangement needs to be made for the elementary and high school teaching functions of CIs.  The underlying problem is that CIs have tended to be embedded in colleges and universities (unlike other organizations like Germany's Goethe Institutes or France's Alliance Française, which are not connected to higher education institutions). At most, a rather minor inconvenience that will likely be tidied up in short order.

You wouldn't know that from this op-ed in the Global Times english edition: "Why is Washington so Scared of Confucius?":

The issue shows that the US' cultural confidence is not as strong as we thought. The promotion of Chinese language and culture by Confucius Institutes makes some Americans uneasy. Only culturally weak countries have such sensitivity.

That seems like a bit of a jump from a rather technical consular issue to a sweeping condemnation of US cultural weakness.  The US is not afraid of Confucius; rather, the US generally doesn't care very much about Confucius.

There is, however, a long-standing critique of CIs in the US, but is not so much a matter of cultural anxiety as it is a political question.  CIs are CCP-sponsored institutions and their mission is to support the soft power of the PRC. The money that flows from the PRC to finance CIs has certain strings attached to it. You will not find an open debate about current political issues in Tibet or Xinjiang being sponsored by CIs.  We all know that. The worry is that the political agenda expands further to limit academic freedom.  US colleges and universities are very defensive about academic freedom.  We don't like political limitations on academic inquiry.  And CIs naturally raise those questions.  We should ask those questions and work to ensure that CIs do not violate academic freedom.  That's how we roll.  And our approach has been very successful in academic and intellectual terms, as tens of thousands of PRC students (including the daughter of President-to-be, Xi Jinping), who travel to the US for college and graduate school, know well.

The People's Daily apparently got a bit stroppy over this:

“This absurd measure reflects illogical thinking and an immature mentality,” said an editorial by state-run People’s Daily. “Finding scapegoats, witch hunting and shifting focuses are not the right ways to do things.”

Ironies about here. At present the PRC is carrying out a policy to crack down on illegal foreigners in China, people whose visas are expired or inappropriate.  Heated rhetoric about "throwing out the foreign trash" has been circulated by prominent media figures.  Foreigners in China are under general suspicion.  So, it seems an odd time for the People's Daily to be complainig about "finding scapegoats" and "witch hunting."

Perhaps we should all just chill out and listen to Confucius, Analects 5.12:

Zi Gong said, "What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men." The Master said, "Ci, you have not attained to that."

子貢曰：「我不欲人之加諸我也，吾亦欲無加諸人。」子曰：「賜也，非爾所及也。」

Daoism is not a Strategy

A rather odd blog post over at Huffington Post College, by Keith Weigelt, a Professor at the Wharton School, gets off to an incongruous start:

I am a strategist in the Daoist tradition. One tenet of Daoism is that individuals are responsible for their reality.

I am not sure what it means to be a "strategist in the Daoist tradition," since Daoism, generally - or, at least the Daoist principles I find in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi - are not really "strategic" in the common sense of that term.  And for that common sense meaning, I would turn to the OED: "....a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of the opposing participants."

On the face of it, Daoism urges us to eschew planning precisely because we cannot really control the complex reality that surrounds us (which we might take as dao - way).  Let's go to passage 24 of the DDJ:

Stretch on tiptoes and you never stand firm.  Hurry long strides and you never travel far.

Keep up self-reflection and you'll never be enlightened.

Keep up self-definition and you'll never be apparent.

Keep up self-promotion and you'll never be proverbial.

Keep up self-esteem and you'll never be perennial.

Travelers of the Way call such striving 'too much food and useless baggage.'  Things may not all despise such striving, but a master of the Way stays clear of it.

I take this as a rejection of self-conscious definition of interests and preferences and, thus, an undermining of the first stage of any sort of planning.  

And I am completely aware that this could also be seen as a king of meta-strategy; that is, by avoiding "strategy" in the first instance, you actually come out in a better place.  A sort of anti-strategic strategy.  Very Daoist that.

But that sort of anti-strategy strategy is not what Weigelt seems to have in mind.  He is a game theorist:

We all have the power to change our reality because of what game theorists call interactive payoffs. When you interact with others, the consequence of your decision depends on the behavior of others. One's world is not filled with solitude. Because consequences depend on one's actions and those of others, you must consider their actions in choosing yours.

This is a good starting point for understanding game theory but, again, it has virtually nothing to do with Daoism.  Of course a Daoist would agree that the consequences of our actions depend on the behavior of others.  But a Daoist would also assert that we cannot know what the actions of others might be and that there are myriad other unforeseen factors that can disrupt any expectation of the behavior of others.   Zhuangzi is the antithesis of a game theoretic strategist:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold - such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we'll never calibrate what drives them. (5.4)

死生存亡，窮達貧富，賢與不肖，毀譽、饑渴、寒暑，是事之變，命之行也；日夜相代乎前，而知不能規乎其始者也.

Instead of Hinton's "we'll never calibrate what drives them," Graham gives us: "knowledge cannot measure back to where they began."  We cannot know the origin or development of the most basic human forces: life, death, failure success, poverty wealth....  That last pair - poverty and wealth - is especially telling for Weigelt, who is ultimately interested in understanding and reversing economic inequality in the US.  That is a noble cause, one that I certainly support.  But it is not at all clear how his game theoretic approach to that problem has anything to do with Daoism.

Weigelt also states:

Daoists believe since interactions define the future, they must be actively managed.

To which we have to reply: No. Daoists do not believe that our interactions with others must be actively managed.  Quite the contrary, we have to let go of conscious management and let relationships emerge and unfold in context as they will, without our purposive effort to steer them in certain directions.  

We'll let Zhuangzi (5.5) have the last word:

聖人不謀，惡用知?

The Sage never makes plans, so what good is understanding?

Chen Guangcheng, Mozi, and Daoism

This just in from a Reuters profile of Chen Guangcheng:

From Chinese history, Chen said he admired 5th-century BC philosopher Mo Tzu, and Taoism founder Lao Tzu, the works of which had also been read aloud to him.

I must say it's great to see a reference to Mozi (Mo Tzu), an odd man out in the cannons of Chinese thought.  He, and his followers, were extraodinarily influential in pre-Qin times, but they fall out of the picture for centuries until being "rediscovered" in the Qing. 

And it makes perfect sense that Chen, a man seeking consistent application of the law to all Chinese equally, would be inspired by Mozi.  Perhaps the most famous concept associated with Mozi is jianai - 兼爱.   For a long time the most common translation, coming from Burton Watson, had been "universal love."  This always struck me as a bit too hippy-ish.  Ivanhoe and Van Norden render it: "impartial caring," which strikes me as better.  While Fraser goes with "inclusive care," also good. 

What is common to all of these translations is a divergence from Confucianism, which, generally, tells us that our obligations to our family and closest relations are of greater importance than our obligations to others outside of those more immediate social networks.  That is not to say that Confucianism does not recognize obligations to strangers; it does.  Rather, it formulates an ethical hierarchy of sorts, positing the fulfillment of family duties as more important than fulfillment of duties outside the family. 

Mozi rejects such ethical particularism.  Here is a sample:

Our teacher Mozi says, “If people regarded other people’s sates in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own state to attack that of another?  For one would do for others as one would do for oneself.  If people regarded other people’s cities in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own city to attack that of another?  For one would do for others as one would do for oneself.  If people regarded other people’s families in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own family to attack that of another?  For one would do for others as one would do for oneself.  And so if states and cities do not attack one another and families do not wreak havoc upon and steal from one another, would this be a harm to the world or a benefit?  Of course one must say it is a benefit to the world.”   (Ivanhoe and Van Norden translation, 68-69)

Classical golden rule thinking: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Of course, Confucius also articulated the golden rule, though in the negative: don't do to others what you would not want done to yourself.  The general sense, positive or negative, is the same.  The key difference, however, is that Confucius qualifies the universality of ethical reciprocity by his focus on family-first morality. 

Mozi is is more universal, more inclusive.  He rejects the idea that family obligations should always trump ourmore general obligation to maintain equal concern and treatment for all, an idea that comes close to modern, liberal notions of equality. 

But Mozi is not a liberal. Far from it.  He advocated for a centralized, monocratic administrative system run by a strong leader who rigorously enforced political unity. Ultimately, Mozi's politics is about the suppression of politics in the name of authoritarian stability.   I suspect these are not quite the aspects of Mozi's thinking that Chen value.  But who knows?  Chen has not experienced the dynamic, chaotic give-and-take of democratic politics.  His stay in the US will certainly be instructive in this regard.

So, I guessing Chen like Mozi for his inclusive/impartial care doctrine.

As to Daoism, it is easy to see how Chen would be drawn to Zhuangzi and the Daodejing.  Both texts value individuals at the margins of society: the weak, the poor, the disabled.  They also put forth powerful critiques of the powerful and the rich.  As here in  Daodejing 75:

The people are starving, and it's only because you leaders feast on taxes that they're starving.

The people are impossible to rule, and it's only because you leaders are masters of extenuation that they're impossible to rule.

The people take death lightly, and it's only because you leaders crave lavish pleasures that they take death lightly,

they who act without concern for life: it's a wisdom far beyond treasuring life.

Sounds very much like something Chen would say himself...

Filial Piety: Only for the poor?

Two contrasting articles suggest how demographic and social-cultural changes in China are making it ever more difficult to realize Confucian virtues there.

First, we have a piece in The Economist that reports on the growth of nursing homes - or, old age homes; assisted living centers; etc. - in China, and how that growth reflects a cultural change in terms of expectations of how care of aging parents should be carried out.  One interesting point here is how religious, and specifically Christian, organizations are taking up the responsibility to create old age homes and care for the elderly.  So, Christians are doing the work of Confucians here... or, to be more charitable (a virtue for both Christians and Confucians), what we have here is a felicitous intersection of moral theories.  Whatever.  

The other, less sanguine, implication is that these sorts of facilities are costly.  And, even if public financing arrangements are available, invariably inequalities will emerge.  The rich will have more and better options; the poor fewer and meaner. 

To project forward a bit: it is rather easy to imagine the privileged class having an easier time paying someone else to care for their parents in a place other than their own homes - the American model, if you will.  In short, they will be able to buy their way out of the more strenuous demands of filiality, which might include keeping parents at home and being personally involved with their care. 

To be clear: I do not think that arranging care for elders at arms length is, in and of itself, somehow an immoral thing.  Quite the contrary, from my own personal experience, I very much understand the difficulties of managing the demands of modern life and the physical demise of parents. (NPR is running a series of stories on just this subject: Family Matters)  My first intention here is simply oobservational: China is subject to these same modernizing pressures and old notions of filiality and parental care are giving way to new realities and arrangements.

But I do want to make a critical point, and that is the same point I would make about elder care in the US: the poor should have reasonable access to good and affordable and secure care for the elderly.  We know this is a problem in the US.  And this story from ChinaSmack suggests that it is also a problem in China:

Filial Son Returns Home to Be With His Dying Father

It is a sad tale: a young man, Cheng Jilai,  from a poor family gets a chance to go to college but gives it up when he realizes his father is dying and there is no one to care for him at home.  It is clear that this family has few options because they have little money.  And so it falls to the son, in this case, to orient his life to the care of his father, a truly virtuous course from a Confucian perspective.  If the son had access to, and could have faith in, something like a nursing home for his father, he might be able to choose to continue in college.  But he doesn't have that choice.  He could simply abandon his father, a choice that would be widely criticized, and not just by Confucians.  He has to take care of his father.  He has to do the right filial thing.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh here.  Rich people who can afford good and comfortable nursing homes for their parents are also carrying out their filial duty: they are finding the best possible conditions for their parent's care.  Even if nursing homes are seen, by some, as inherently un-Confucian.  But the story of Cheng Jilai, the filial son whose poverty gives him no choice but to give up college and go home to care for his father, on the face of it, seems more true to the standards of Confucian filiality. 

And if that is true, we are left with a rather uncomfortable conclusion: it is only the poor who have to carry out a more traditional Confucian morality because the rich have the means to make other arrangements....

How Confucian is the US?

I hadn't realized just how widespread the concept of "filial responsibility" is in American jurisprudence.  It turns out that 28 states have laws on the books that state that children are responsible for the care of their elderly parents.   A brief NYT post explains:

The rationale, which you can trace back as far as ancient Roman law, is that children have a duty to care for parents. The law sees this as a matter of ethics and reciprocity: Your parents took care of you as children; now it’s your turn to take care of them.

At one time, filial responsibility laws were far more common. As recently as the 1950s, 45 states and the federal government had them on the books. They began to erode during the New Deal, when the Social Security Act passed and the concept of government rather than familial responsibility started to take hold.

But 28 states still have filial responsibility laws: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

Sixteen of these impose civil penalties — they can come after your assets or income if you fail to support your parents. In the eight states where filial responsibility entails criminal penalties, a prosecutor could actually put you in jail. Four states take both approaches.

In Massachusetts, for instance, someone who “unreasonably neglects” to support a parent who is destitute or too infirm to maintain himself could face up to a year in prison plus a $200 fine.

Who knew?  As a Massachusetts resident. I guess I should be relieved that I did not "unreasonably neglect" my mother and her end of life care.  At the time, I was wholly ignorant of the law but struggling to do the right filial thing.  It would all depend, I imagine, on how the lawyers define "unreasonable neglect"...

The article goes on, however:  "But filial responsibility laws are very rarely enforced; 11 of the 28 states that have them have never used them."

"Filial responsibility," would seem to be more of a principle than a practice, at least in the legal sense.  And if that is the case, then the US is not a Confucian society (surprise!) because Confucianism requires that we actually perform our duties.

But in fact Americans, quietly and out of the media spotlight, do perform their familial duties.  A 2009 survey (pdf!) suggests that "caregiving" is very prevalent in the US:

In the past 12 months, an estimated 65.7 million people in the U.S. have served as unpaid family caregivers to an adult or a child. About 28.5% of the respondents surveyed reported being caregivers.

"Caregiving" here is defined as caring for an adult or a child with special needs, not routine child care.

So, maybe we are more Confucian than we realize.  Maybe "filial responsibility" laws are not enforced because most people most of the time do what they can to care for their family members.  Of course there are instances of neglect and abuse, and these must be attended to by legal authorities.  But for most of us it might be that this excerpt from Analects 1.2 rings true:

The noble-minded cultivate roots.  When roots are secure, the Way is born.  To honor parents and elders - isn't that the root of Humanity?

A Confucian Critique of Santorum's Environmental Denialism

Rick Santorum, who somehow is being taken seriously by Republican primary voters, rejects the idea that global warming is a real phenomenon and that it is connected to human activity on the planet.  He castigated President Obama for having a "phony theology" that unscientifically accepts as dogma (I guess) that climate change is happening....

Where to start... Actually, the best place to begin a response might be a nice little blog post over at the National Catholic Reporter.  That's right, people who take Catholicism seriously -  not just certain selective points about abortion and contraception while ignoring the other stuff like torture - come to a very different conclusion on environmental issues:

But Santorum is a Catholic. Maybe he has never gotten further in his reading than Humanae Vitae. So I wonder if he is even remotely aware of Catholic statements on the environment. As recently as May 2011, a Vatican-appointed panel of scientists affirmed that the earth is indeed getting warmer, and urgent measures are needed to reverse the trend through a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, methane and other pollutants...

The writer then gets a bit cheeky: "Rick Santorum needs some basic environmental catechism."  To which one can only say: Amen!

I think Confucius, too, would find fault with Santorum's environmental denialism. 

Confucius would agree, in a conditional and limited manner, to at least one aspect of Santorum's position on climate change.  While not a "dominionist" orientation, which Santorum seems to be embracing, Confucianism would agree that humans have an elevated moral status in relation to nature.  For example, Confucius sees people as being more important than animals, as suggested in Analects 10.12 (which is sometimes numbered 10.11 or 10.17):

One day the stables burned down.  When he returned from court, The Master asked: "Was anyone hurt?" He didn't ask about the horses.

Animals matter less than people, morally, so there is no need to inquire about the horses.  We might expand this suggestion to argue that, if it serves the purposes of Humanity, then using natural resources is justified.  If there is a conflict between human moral good and the environment, the former could take precedence in many, though not all, cases.  Confucianism would thus countenance a more thoroughgoing human presence over nature than, say, would Daoists.

But that presence must be counterbalanced by a certain respect for the environment.  Humans should not wantonly abuse nature.  Indeed, Humanity requires a certain limitation of human action in nature, as suggested by Analects 7.27:

The Master fished with hooks, not nets, and he never shot roosting birds.

He calibrated his actions in accordance to what was required for the nature reproduction of the natural world.  If we add in here the Confucian ideal of material simplicity, symbolized by Yan Hui,  then we can see that the pursuit of Humanity can accomplished in a manner that is respectful of natural processes.

Fast forward to the globalized capitalism of the 21st century, driven by conspicuous consumption and rapacious destruction of nature.  A modern Confucian would look on the scene and say that our relationship to the environment is out of balance.  We are fishing with nets, not hooks, and shooting roosting birds.  The fact of global warming is well established, and it is "very likely" connected to human activity.  Contemporary Confucians would, I believe, accept these points of view, and they would see the link between environmental degradation more generally and materially extravagant human behavior.   There is, as I have argued before, a certain greenness at the heart of Confucianism.

To do full justice to Confucian environmentalism requires a lot more work than I can do here. But I think it is safe to say that the kind of anti-scientific, dogmatic, ideological environmental denialism demonstrated by Santorum as he panders for right-wing votes, would be frowned upon by a modern Confucian.

When "Confucianism" isn't really Confucianism

Alistair J. Nicholas, an expatriate pr exec in Beijing, pens a piece in the China Daily that reflects upon cultural differences between China and the West, especially in corporate workplaces.  There are some useful insights into how to get things done and not make a fool of yourself.  But from the very first paragraph he falls into the unfortunate practice of using the term "Confucianism" as a stand-in for contemporary Chinese culture:

The hierarchical nature of Chinese society and the role of hierarchy in the realm of modern social structures defy explanation to Westerners who come from more egalitarian societies. Even after 12 years of living in China, I am confounded by the continuance of this most Confucian inheritance of China's past.

This is a airly typical statement, hearkening back to the Gellner quote above: Confucianism, in practice (and I want to stress that here: what was practiced as "Confucianism" diverged from certain ethical expectations of "Confucianism"...) authorized hierarchical social and political relationships.  So far nothing out of the ordinary here.

But problems set in when we get statements like this:

Of course, there is a downside to China's strict hierarchical structures in business: namely, that merit may be overlooked - or expected to be overlooked - in the rise to the top of the pyramid.

Confucianism, of course, envisions a meritocracy of sorts, an ethical meritocracy: the morally superior should rule and lead.  And we know who the morally superior are not because of what school they went to or who their daddy is but by their actual performance of right actions.  Moral achievement is not existential, it is performative.  Thus, if hierarchy is obstructing meritocracy that is a sign of the failure of Confucianism, not its consequence.  

Of course, we could argue that Confucianism is still culpable because, in the first instance it authorized hierarchy, which then goes on, in an un-Confucian way, to obstruct meritocracy.  But this strikes me as an unfair critique.  Confucianism stands against unmeritorious hierarchy: this is very much the life's work of Mencius...

Another problem emerges with this statement:

But Chinese hierarchy can result in other unfavorable outcomes if not fully understood. For example, Chinese are reluctant to question or challenge their superiors because they have been brought up to respect their elders and others in authority.

While respect for elders is certainly a Confucian idea, it is not unqualified. If elders and/or superiors are doing the wrong thing, children and subordinates should respectfully point out the problem.  While passages from the Analects could be cited here, I like this excerpt from Mencius:

If you don’t resent a parent’s fault when it’s serious, you’re treating parents like strangers.  And if you resent a parent’s fault when it’s slight, you’re treating parents with abandon.  Treating them like strangers, treating them with abandon – either is no way for a child to honor parents. (12.3)

Children, to really honor parents, should treat them as neither strangers nor with abandon.  They should let parents know when there are problems.

In any event, whatever traditional Chinese culture was, or contemporary Chinese culture is, it cannot be simply reduced to "Confucianism," because there are aspects to the culture, old and new, that clearly run against the grain of Confucian morality. 

Chinese culture has always been more than "Confucianism."

Confucius as Contemporary Art

Not sure what to make of Zhang Huan's new exhiibtion at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, entitled, "Q Confucius."   All I know is what I can see on the intertubes.  From that limited perspective, however, it does not appear that the artist in engaging in a facile revival of tradition.  The big animatronic Confucius bust ("Q Confucius no. 2") is speechless: the Sage is not offering us his wise words.  Rather, he just looms there, quietly inhaling and exhaling, in a shallow pool of water, a hulking presence:

It looks a bit ugly to me.  But maybe that's the point: to make the myth more concrete, more imperfect in its embodiment.  Or perhaps Zhang is simply saying that, whatever we think of the cultural ideal, some aspects of Confucianism are always already present in Chinese reality.  He is inescapable.  Whether we engage seriously with his words or not, we have to confront his eternal recurrence.  On a more mundane level, one observer quips:

— the overall effect is like you’re intruding on Confucius’s spa time.

Equally unusual is "Q Confucius no. 6," a robotic Confucius that lurches about within a steel cage.  Apparently, on the day it opened, the robot was joined in the cage by nine live monkeys (not clear if they make any additional appearances).  The monkeys are said to have symbolized, "...the primitive desire in human civilization.  Are we to assume then, since they disappeared after the first day, that Confucius is a civilizing force?  I don't think Zhang is going for that kind of didaticism.  Just look at the piece:

 

This is not a representation of a smooth and lyrical process of civilization.  It is a jerky, almost violent, performance, suggesting difficulty and pain.  Maybe this interpretation gets at it:

Zhang's show reveals the impending struggles of China's people through the acknowledgment of a forgotten way of life. Definitive answers may still be unclear, but Zhang's show asks if the solution may lie in a reclaiming of the past. Zhang's work applies to more than just a specific people, but the entire planet as we strive to find meaning in a world that feels more and more disjointed every day.

But reclaiming the past may not be a "solution."  Confucius in the cage (one wonders if Zhang is alluding to Weber's iron cage) is not settled and comfortable. He thrashes about, armless (unable to hold on to anything), wordless, uncertain.  To me, this does not suggest Confucianism as solution but, rather, Confucianism as another site of struggle and confusion and unrest.  A supposed cultural golden age of the past cannot be reclaimed in the modern/postmodern present. 

How to lose a culture war

In a speech given last October, and published in a Party theoretical journal on January 1st (Happy New Year!), China's President, Hu Jintao, throws down the cultural gauntlet:

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration....  We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond....”

I guess he really didn't like that last Lady Gaga song...

But seriously, it is obvious what is going on here, and it is not really anything new for China or for anywhere else in the (post)modern world for that manner.

Hu is expressing a certain anxiety regarding the instability and fluidity of national cultural identity.  Rick Santorum is pretty much with him on this, except, of course, Santorum blames "liberalism" and "hedonism," instead of "Westernization," and also would find the primary source of the problem in domestic politics as opposed to "international hostile forces" (although those European socialists are pretty dangerous....).  But the rest of it - the fear of some sort of cultural corruption; the need for vigilance in protecting the most essential aspects of cultural identity; the cultural division of the nation; the nostalgia for a purer cultural past - it's all pretty standard culture warrior talk.  Wonder what Santorum would say if he realized he was down with the CCP party line....

The quesiton, then, for Hu and Santorum and anyone who thinks he or she can somehow stop cultural change is: what is to be done? 

For Hu the answer is top-down, state control of cultural production and exchange.  That is why they are banning inane TV shows and working hard to gain "soft power" for the PRC (big PDF!).  But this strategy will certainly fail, and it will fail because it misunderstands how "culture" is produced and disseminated.

First, let's just note that the term "culture" is problematic.  What are we including in it?  I think most uses of the term tend to idealize certain practices and ideas and traditions as being essential to certain cultural identities.  In China, "Confucianism" invariably is invoked when talking about "Chinese culture."  But we need to be careful. Culture is always and everywhere larger and more dynamic than any one referent (like "Confucianism") or time period.  Culture changes; indeed, culture is always and constantly changing.  What Chinese culture is now is not what it was in the time of Confucius, much less the time of Mao, or even the time of Zhao Ziyang.  We must be open to a definition of "culture" as what people are actually doing now.  And by that definition the Carsick Cars - a popular Chinese rock band - are as much of Chinese culture as Confucius.

With that understanding of "culture" in mind, we should realize that many, many cultural products and productions are created not by the state but within civil society.  Joseph Nye, the great guru of "soft power" reminded of this last year:

After my lecture at Beijing University, a student asked how China could increase its soft power. I suggested that he ask himself why India’s Bollywood films command far greater international audiences than do Chinese films. Does India have better directors and actors? When Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese director, was asked a similar question, he replied that films about contemporary China are neutered by the censors. I told the student that much of a country’s soft power is generated by its civil society and that China had to lighten up on its censorship and controls if it wished to succeed. But I also admitted that he would probably not find my answer very helpful.

Culture, and especially cultural change, is driven by creativity, and creativity is not simply planned and executed by bureaucrats, whether state or corporate.  It emerges from workshops and theaters and garages, from within the minds of small groups of creative individuals.  

Hu Jintao does not get that.  He also does not get that a lot of what is created culturally will be bad, at least as judged by the standards of "high cultural" elite intellectuals and impresarios.  Rock and Roll, when it was first created, was seen as degenerate, even dangerous (I remember my father reacting to the Beatles when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, shouting: "Apes, apes.") .  Now, of course, rock and roll is a completely mainstream cultural medium, an element of global popular culture.  

Culture can also be produced from the top-down.  States can sponsor artistic and academic work that spawns significant and popular cultural products.  But that is, I suspect, a lesser element of the broader phenomenon than "popular culture" or "low culture." 

Long story short: Hu wants to try to control culture, but in doing that he stifles it.  Yes, passage 29 of the Daodejing comes to mind here: "try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it."  He wants to censor and manage from the top down, a move that will stifle the wider and more dynamic potential for cultural creativity within civil society.  He wants to blame the "West" for the inevitability of cultural change.  He wants to instill fear in Chinese people, fear of cultural change, in order to bolster the political power of the authoritarian regime.  He wants to deny that what many Chinese people are actually doing now is legitimately a part of "Chinese culture."  

And he will lose.  Because you can't stop cultural change.  You can't blame it on foreign bogey men.  You can't deny people their cultural expressions, even if they don't align with some ossified definition of "culture."  For example, here is a video of the Carsick Cars doing their now classic tune "Zhongnanhai" on this past New Year's Eve in Beijing (i.e. just as Hu's speed was about to be published).  A person who was there reported: "The doors to the club closed at 10:30 when there was a line of at least 200 people still waiting in the frigid weather to get in.  They had been in line for nearly two hours and many had said on various websites that they were taking time away from studying for final exams just to catch them." 

I would argue that this now counts as "Chinese culture:"

The Commodification of Education

I'm a teacher.  A college teacher.  Every day, or just about every day, I am engaged in the dissemination and creation of knowledge.  I put dissemination first because, as a teacher, whatever knowledge I create is often (not always) bound up in the process of disseminating knowledge to, or provoking knowledge in, my students.  It's a good gig.

But it is not my job to get my students jobs.  I say this because, apparently, some people out there think that I, and my colleagues, should somehow be held responsible if our students do not get jobs.  This, at least, is the message in an op-ed by conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (I usually ignore Reynolds as just another right-wing ideologue, but this argument requires some response...) (HT Sullivan) .  In regard to the growing problem of student debt, which I recognize as a problem, he writes:       

Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years -- but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.

In other words, if students have not been able to find sufficient employment to pay off their college debt five years after they graduate, the school should be responsible for some portion of that debt.

This assumes that the primary purpose of a college education is to secure post-graduate employment and a certain level of salary and benefits.  But that is not the purpose of a college education.  The purpose of a college education is to further one's education, plain and simple.  What a student does with that education is not the responsibility of the teacher.  Confucius understood this:

The Master said: "I never instruct those who aren't full of passion, and I never enlighten those who aren't struggling to explain themselves.

"If I show you one corner and you can't show me the other three, I'll say nothing more.  7.8

Students, by these lights, must take responsibility for their education.  A teacher can, to use a different metaphor, open the door, but the student has to walk through.  If the student does not take the initiative, then learning will not happen.  Period.  And the teacher is not responsible for whether the learning actually happens or not.  We make learning possible, we cannot guarantee its accomplishment.  We can show one corner, but the student has to show the other three...

Similarly, what a student does with his or her knowledge (assuming he or she has gained some) after college is beyond the duties of the teacher. The teacher must strive to teach well but he or she is powerless to effectuate actual knowledge within the student or to shape the student's memory and use of the knowledge in the future. 

Now, it is true that higher education tends to provide people with intellectual skills that can yield relatively high earnings in the future.  But that is not our purpose, especially at a liberal arts college like the one that employs me. I never think about how my classes might be directly useful to jobs after college.  Indeed, when I teach ancient Chinese philosophy, my mind is far, far away from such instrumentalist concerns.  I am not producing a commodity that can produce a certain exchange value.  I am engendering an understanding of texts and ideas in and of themselves. 

Of course, colleges will, for recruitment purposes, endlessly promote the argument that a degree is an economically useful thing, leading to higher salaries, etc.  That same argument is used to justify high costs of college education.  And that's bad.  The materialist promotion of liberal arts is an effect of the broader society in which we are embedded, a society that demands that just about everything be justified in materialist terms.  I, for one, am happy to ignore all that, and simply assert that knowledge has its own rewards.  I am a fervent defender of the useless. And, yes, I know, it's easy to say that when someone is paying me to be, effectively, useless....

Daoist irony aside, while there is plenty of knowledge that is instrumentally useful, and that knowledge can be found in college curricula, we must be accepting and protective of knowledge - like ancient Chinese philosophy! - that is not useful.  If we were to descend into complete instrumentalism we would lose much that is essential to humanity.

Finally, exorbitant college costs are a major problem.  Prohibitively high tuition is an obstacle to learning, excluding good students from the opportunity to learn.  Confucius recognizes this:

The Master said: "I never refuse to teach anyone, not even those so lowly they come offering nothing more but a few strips of dried meat."  7.7

So, yes, debt-free financial aid must be more widely available.  This doesn't mean, though, that we should make colleges, and teachers, responsible for the post-graduate employment and salary of their students.  How about going back to the not so old idea of progressive taxation to support public goods like access to education generally?  I suspect Confucius, and especially Mencius, would be open to that idea.  Reynonlds, not so much...