Can Capitalist CEOs be Good Confucians?

    Here's a story from yesterday's China Daily:

A high-priced class for high-flying businessmen, teaching Confucianism for moneymakers, will enroll its first students in Beijing next month. It has been dubbed "the boss class."

The two- to three-day course by the China Studies Club teaches traditional Chinese philosophies to entrepreneurs. This is the first time the course has been offered to business people.

     Why am I not convinced?  Why do I think that this will not become a means of moral education, which is what Confucius is all about, but, rather, will simply be a commodity, a symbol of economic status, in a most un-Confucian manner? 

     If they asked me - I'm not waiting for the call - I could think of all sorts of things to include in the "Boss Class" curriculum.   How about this quote from Confucius:

   If there were an honorable way to get rich, I'd do it, even if it meant being a stooge standing around with a whip.  But there is not an honorable way, so I just do what I like."

     I can see it now: a classroom of 20-30 Chinese Trump-wannabes, all sitting around reciting: "there is no honorable way to get rich... there is no honorable way to get rich....."

     Or how about this from the very first passage of Mencius:

  Don't talk about profit," Mencius said.  "It's Humanity and Duty that matter.  Emperors say: How can I profit my nation? Lords say: How can I profit my house? And everyone else says: How can I profit myself?  Then everyone high and low is scrambling for profit, pitching the nation into grave danger.

    Those bosses aren't interested in scrambling for profit, are they?

    At least one person quoted in the story gets it:

Scholar Xu Youyu said he felt uneasy about the current fervor for China studies. The expensive "boss class" violates the doctrines of the ancient Chinese saints, he said.

     Can I get an "Amen" for that brother?

Comments

[Sperwer]

Granted that the China Studies Club is engaged in grotesque travesty. But Confucius' casual deprecation and dismissal of the sort of economic activity that the overwhelming number of actual individual people spend their time in, and that provides the means of sustenance, in the name of capitalized BIG IDEAS like Mencius' Humanity and Duty is equally grotesque and, as the long hostory of tyrannies founded on such noble-sounding abstractions demonstrates, far, far more pernicious.