Here's a sad story, from the Straits Times (Singapore):
BEIJING - A TWO-YEAR-OLD boy was orphaned in the southwest Chinese city of Chongzhou when his parents drank pesticide after a nasty row.
The tragedy, reported in the state media last month, bears testimony to the dark side of reform - suicide rates that are now among the highest in the world.
On average, a Chinese person takes his or her own life every two minutes, giving the world's most populous nation a dismal record as it prepares to celebrate 30 years of otherwise spectacular economic reform.
'With the reforms, society has become more complicated,' said Dr Huo Datong, the first psychoanalyst to practise in China.
'Individualism has become more pronounced and psychological problems have become more and more serious,' he said from Chengdu, a city in the southwest.
Since reform kicked off in 1978, the Middle Kingdom has been through enormous upheavals and so has the psyche of its 1.3 billion people.
Society has been uprooted as traditional family and clan structures have disintegrated, straining social relations and putting the individual under immense stress, experts said.
I will not challenge the underlying empirical claim - that suicide rates are rising in China. We probably just have to accept it as a depressing indicator of contemporary modernization. And I am willing to accept that some portion of that modernizing dynamic has been created in the era of "reform and opening" since 1978. But why assume that Chinese modernization, or even intensive Chinese modernization, begins in 1978? The Maoist period was all about uprooting "traditional family and clan structures" and social relations were incredibly strained and damaged by the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward. Indeed, I think it is more accurate to argue that the social anxieties of the reform era were exacerbated by the radical modernization of the Maoist era. It is only now, with Mao long dead and gone, that traditions are revived and reinvented, some indigenous and some foreign, to respond to the alienation created by modernization.
Notice, too, how the story describes the contemporary moment:
The Chinese are caught in the middle of the often conflicting demands of Communism, Confucianism and capitalism, and they do not know which one to turn to, experts say.
'This is not like the West where the majority have a religious faith,' said Dr Zhu Wanli, a psychologist from the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing. 'Most people here do not have any religion, especially not the young.'
And if they do go to the temples, for many it is in order to light incense in a pious plea - for money.
This suggests that Confucianism has revived to sufficient enough degree that it is now on an equal footing, in the public imagination, as political ideology and economic interest. Is that true? Perhaps a diffuse Confucian-esque impulse, which isn't really all that Confucian (i.e. children should care for parents - an expectation found in many cultures, not only Confucian cultures) creates a tension between personal interest and family obligation. But I suspect those kinds of claims were fundamentally weakened by Maoist communism and have not revived to a point where they are qualitatively stronger in China than in, say, the US.
My sense is that the problem is a purer alienation born of capitalism. And that would open up the possibility that more Confucian practice (because Confucianism demands that its ideal be enacted on a daily basis) might somehow be a solution for the pathologies of Chinese modernization.
But I don't think that is true, either. It is not at all clear to me, given current conditions of globalized capitalism, that Confucianism could ever be reasserted in a manner that diffuses the competition and uncertainty and confusion of the market. Or, to put it another way, the key problem is not to revive Confucianism, but to just give up on the pursuit of personal profit in the market (which is what Confucius would tell us, after all; as would Taoism). And it is really hard to see how that happens at the level of society at large. I can imagine certain individuals (I think Confucius expected that only a very few people, like his favorite student, Yen Hui, would be able to really achieve Sage-like Humanity) using Confucianism to find peace in modernity. But Confucianism as such cannot transform a whole society in a manner that rejects the creative destruction of competitive global market capitalism.
Or maybe I'm wrong....
But is seems that Confucianism might be the answer for a few, not the many.
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