Can China Reckon with Its Past?: The History, Scholarship and Prospect of the Revival of Confucian Spirituality

I. Introduction

What is contrary to the widely-held belief that China is a Confucian civilization without experiencing enduring pressure from both the inside and outside is the fact that Confucianism has been encountering constant challenges throughout the nation's history and it is not uncommon for the tradition to become a vulnerable target in political struggle and intellectual debate. The opposition first comes from the rather worldly doubt questioning virtue and its place in life and politics, manifesting itself in the sophisticated forms of Legalism and early Daoism. The advisors of the former argued that force and deception could make a mediocre person control all the benefits under the sky, and the hermit-writers of the latter added a particular tinge of pessimism and indifference to this dark view shared by Legalists and some other schools in the late Zhou dynasty (475–221 BC). The First Emperor (c. 259–210 BC), who wished to replace the old teachings of odes and archives with his new rule, had no hesitation in burning treasured bamboo books and silencing those who dared to speak against him. Even after later scholars recovered ancient culture from the ashes of the Emperor's fire, one of the new rulers, who was praised by historians as an able restorer of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), similarly warned his son that the royal house had its own tradition of "hegemonic statecraft" and should not faithfully follow the way of the sage. Domestic rebellions and barbarian invasions then impaired the empire's stability for centuries, before the triumphant spread of Buddhism entirely reshaped its moral landscape—monks now appeared as the imperial tutors of Empress Wu Zetian (624–705) who was said to put into reality the cruel punishments depicted in Buddhist fantasy to terrify her rivals. For at least ten centuries, the idea of an "Indianization" in certain aspects of the moral life was a serious temptation for many Chinese.

It was also true that tension always existed between Confucian statesmen and those villainous ministers and court favorites who persuaded the emperor to believe that they represented his true interests. The problem-ridden officialdom and the kind of leaders that it favored also made it difficult for noble ideas to be fully realized in national politics. It even became a routine that the greatest thinkers would almost definitely be smeared and purged in political struggle, with their friends and students banished or forbidden to participate in national examinations. This sharp contrast between the model of those thinkers and the political attack aiming to destroy their moral, intellectual and political influence was considerable enough to be both deceptive and absurd—as the famed writer Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) mentioned, “if all the later generations had not been fair, there would not have been a sage even for a thousand years” (1983).

The rise and decline of a long dynasty were accompanied by a reversal of the moral ethos, and those most unforgettable court struggles—for example, the Qingyuan prohibition against the master Zhu Xi (1130–1200) of the Song era (960–1279), and the Donglin Movement during the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—often revolved around moral and intellectual matters (Chu 1988). Antagonist attitudes persisted, and the cycle of rise and fall repeated. These particular vicissitudes of Confucianism perhaps may make us rethink the modern fate of the tradition—not only its ups and downs, but also the situation in which we find it—in a more historicized manner that can view contemporary problems through recurring themes. And if the return of China to the center of the international order is a vital development in our time, and if we know that the revival of Confucianism, though we are unsure about its nature, is defining its moral landscape and reshaping its historical consciousness, it may be necessary to investigate the historical and some inner aspects of the phenomenon, which respectively requires us to look back from where we are now and to consider the internal reasoning of the ancient thought.

The answer to this moral quest of China can also be traced to the surviving study of Confucianism after a long century of instability and hostility, the “ashes” of the latest conflagration with which we are left. Members of this international community share the historical-moral sensibilities that Confucian elements should continue to play a role in the future of the Chinese nation. However, its multidisciplinary field has not yet been integrated, and its relationship with traditional scholarship may still be more complicated than the affinity between an old doctrine and its faithful followers. The earlier work on Confucianism as a lost philosophy or spiritual tradition emerged half a century ago in sinology and comparative philosophy. The ongoing influence of the tradition in East Asia was considered in social-scientific accounts in the next two or three decades. The interest in Confucianism grew at the same time in mainland China, largely accepting the arguments of this New Confucianism developing during the Republican era and later spreading to Hong Kong, Taiwan and North America. The advent of China’s reform and the popular return of Confucian themes induced ethnographic descriptions of the now well-known “revival” over the last two decades, the emphasis of which has gradually altered from political criticism to ethical theorization. Meanwhile, more concept-centric Sino-Western comparisons have been attempted in comparative philosophy, and a new institutional basis for Confucian studies, one including in its own way all the major elements of the aforementioned studies, has been established in mainland universities. Outside of the country, the latest trend to analyze Confucianism as a civilizational engine behind its diplomacy is producing new interpretations of global politics in a post-pandemic world.

I wish to contribute to current discussions by attending to some salient historical reasoning found in China’s traditional thought and modern condition, as well as influential contemporary facts and reflections now unified under the idea of Confucian spirituality. I hope that this paper can be useful in advancing a more historically-ordered and cross-disciplinary approach to understanding China’s tradition and contemporary life, a position that seems impossible in the past and is much anticipated now. Confucian spirituality is used in this synthesis to capture the temporal and multi-disciplinary dynamics of Confucianism in modern China—the activities and ideas of and related to the tradition that range from philosophical reinterpretations and textual studies to ritual practice and popular revival. On the one hand, their coherence under a single rubric is justifiable in the sense that all these fields of life and thought, unfolding at different times and in different locations, center around the spiritual nature of Confucianism—after all those institutional issues, there lie the questions of what sagehood is and how it can be achieved, and of how one can become a gentleman and strive for a good family and a good society. It is mankind’s nature and place in the universe, rather than any outside dimensions, that has sustained those enquiries and stimulated answers, revealing the enduring relevance of Confucian elements across intellectual, cultural, and political domains.¹

On the other hand, the conceptual space that this notion creates also allows one to elucidate the analytic and methodological differences among these strands of research. This particular “spirituality” is defined in many a way and detailed in many a tradition. It can be achieved by a certain kind of approach and has demonstrated itself in a specific debate. The historical and methodological particulars that a spiritual nature has initially left out make it possible to carefully examine how Confucianism has contributed to China’s modern history and how it has been viewed by scholars, politicians and other groups. Finally, the value of the notion also lies in the fact that Confucianism has long been internally understood as a moral and spiritual journey, with all the other tasks ordered and united by it. Things in the universe, no matter whether they are about the family, the court, or the world, can only be soundly comprehended and solved when the spiritual side of a person has positively changed.

Such differences concern three fields of investigation. First, a politically-centered understanding of Confucianism has been commanding in modern Chinese history. An examination is needed here to disclose how this mentality, as exemplified by the May Fourth Movement, influences current scholarship and more fundamentally erases the ethical or spiritual character of China’s past. The contemporary situation of Confucianism must be evaluated by taking into account this tumultuous history. Second, an original synthesis of the multi-disciplinary efforts at researching Confucianism focuses on the historical abstraction or philosophical reinterpretation of the tradition and the textual studies that remind us of the preservation of traditional scholarship. After surveying the various approaches in modern Confucian studies and their underlying intellectual sources, we see clearly how Confucian themes have been incorporated into the contemporary intelligentsia, and what we have gained and lost during this process. The final part of the argument attends to the “grassroot” re-appropriation or revival of Confucianism as a moral movement. While existing studies have viewed this popular movement as religious experience or anthropological material, it has its own associations with relevant intellectual trends in modern China, and the old theme of radicalism still shapes those studies. Meanwhile, the influence of traditional culture on China’s politics and foreign policy is becoming an important topic, with all these dimensions of the revival united by the return of cultural and moral sensibilities to ordinary life for more and more Chinese. This insight once again brings our discussion back to the idea of Confucian spirituality proposed at the very beginning.

II. The Chinese Past

A salient but oft-neglected background of China’s current situation concerns how ideals of revolution and drastic progress have dominated the Chinese reality and imagination during the last century, as well as how such persuasions are still influential out of historical inertia. The responses of the late Qing court (1644–1911) to a national crisis have been widely described as launching new reforms. Such “politics of reform” are said to be observed in its new Foreign Office which is believed to redefine institutional power for the imperial government and to serve as an example of its novel bureaucratic development (Rudolph 2010). A similar “culture of reform” is also found in late imperial journalism that creates what is viewed as a “middle realm” that represents the “middle level of society” and envisions a different “style of noble men” (Judge 1996). Such reformative institutions are identified across the country and are considered to convey modern values, such as village schools and education (VanderVen 2012), family and ethics (Du 2022), monarchy and government (Barish 2022), and political culture (Zarrow 2012). Although reform as change or innovation is a traditional theme in ancient history, and despite the existence of an inner method of understanding revolutions and rebellions in Chinese thought, this new mentality of progressivist change defines itself as anti-traditional and essentially iconoclastic (Tu 1991).

The New Culture campaigns, hallmarked by the May Fourth Movement of 1919, first suggest the maturation of this moral-political suasion and excitement. For those celebrating revolutionary values in this movement, it is praised as an intellectual revolution (Chow 1960), a Chinese enlightenment (Schwarcz 1986), a monument that needs to be remembered for good (Lin and Mair 2020), and a basis for the rise of political intellectuals (Rahav 2015). What those reconstructions have less described, however, is how the burgeoning radicalism, now spreading like a wildfire in the hearts of students, finally and fully revealed its destructive force during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that aimed to destroy the Chinese heritage that rebels and invaders of the ancient world failed to ruin (Yan and Gao 1996). The politics and the kind of person that it craves are even newer than those promoted in previous campaigns, leaving the country struggling in a decade of cultural erasures (Fuller 2022).

As the core symbol of Chinese civilization, Confucianism has been at the very spearhead of those massive projects of “renewing” the nation’s physical and cultural landscape (Jing 1996). The destructive force of this century-long iconoclasm was as much epistemic as it was physical—books were burned, scholars were purged, beliefs were smeared, and memories were recreated (Fuller 2022). The established doctrine of understanding the person, community and universe was silenced, and the entire society was now turned upside down (Yang 2021). Social Darwinism infused this ancient land and became part of the common sense for its students and much of the populace. The anti-traditional ethos of the 1980s, the beginning years of the reform era, can also be viewed as a continuation of such radicalism and a reappearance of its early May Fourth form (Tu 1991). Even the subsequent revitalization of the Chinese legacy, particularly its spirituality, has never restored the country to what it was, and a moral emptiness is what many observers have identified in its post-reform situation. China's past is still a lost land that has been gradually forgotten over the last century. This background perhaps illustrates how the much-discussed return of Chinese culture in mainland China during the last two or three decades is a response not only to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution or contemporary moral predicaments, but also to an underlying mentality of progressivism and iconoclasm that creates what many understand to be "a general crisis of Chinese consciousness" (Lin 1979).

A critical process during this period of radicalism is to "politicize" and "demoralize" China's past. History has long been one of the central disciplines taught in ancient China, and the country's best scholars and statesmen are also its most notable historians. The pivotal motif of such a historiographical tradition is the moral teaching of human history-for example, the lessons regarding how to be a virtuous person, how to have a good family, how to run a just government, and how to realize the virtues and abilities bestowed by the universe. Alongside a large collection of histories, philosophy or spiritual learning is also taught through classical texts that are historical by nature. The essential books that a knowledgeable person and future minister should study are the experiences of the ancients that are meant to be universal. A person cannot undergo all the things in the world one by one, and there are certain things that we cannot experience due to various limitations. Therefore, history provides an easier way to broaden one's vision and increase one's knowledge. For things that we do not know how to handle, the ancients set an example for us. By studying their stories, we now know that there are such noble or evil persons, and that things can develop in such sophisticated ways and be coped with by such appropriate arrangements. Like historia magistra vitae but now with a particular moral emphasis, the Chinese past as an educational and ethical inspiration is often described as a "mirror" through which one can rectify oneself (Ng and Wang 2005). The moral power of the Chinese past had regulated not only the literati, but also the emperor who, when his government was organized properly, even became a student of this moral past and a member of the learned. History as a moral culture and an educational tool further permeated other groups of society, as didacticism appeared in vernacular fiction and pictorial art (Murray 2007; Sibau 2018). China’s history as a moral past has been such a defining feature of its ancient world that morality is considered to even “pattern” history (Schaberg 2001), and historical thinking is also a form of moral reflection (Huang 2007).

Therefore, this moral past unsurprisingly became the target of the new progressivist trend that aimed to replace it with its own political version of history. This attractive “political past” is problematic not in being political—as traditional historiography had long functioned as a comprehensive mirror aiding in government, and the political was never an entirely different topic from the ethical for the ancients; it rather lies in its “politicizing” agenda that disregards morality as secondary or insignificant, and that produces a particular “linear” or iconoclastic account of history (Murthy and Schneider 2014).² This political past has largely dominated how the country’s legacies are understood, to the extent that not only specific representations of the past are intensively politicized (Matten 2012), but also history in its entirety seems to be absorbed into politics (Duara 1995). A consequence of the prevalence of this political past throughout the last century is how China can now ever reckon with its moral past—the past not only reappearing as literary and aesthetical (Yang 2022), or material and architectural (Flath 2016), but also essentially spiritual and concerning the “lost soul” of the nation (Makeham 2008).

III. Ethics and Spirituality

Despite the victory of this political past as the commonsensical way of imagining history, an alternative view to those confrontations in modern history is to consider the possibilities that such politicization was merely superficial and temporal, with the intrinsic elements of the Chinese culture, just as how they managed to survive invasions and rebellions in the past, never entirely erased, and that counterforce had always been striving to restore them (Furth 1976; Xu 2022). After the Cultural Revolution and before the contemporary revival, some influential paradigms of studying Chinese spirituality emerged as a response to radicalism, the major task of which was to conceptualize Confucianism with a focus on self-cultivation from a philosophical and cross-cultural perspective.

For example, Professor Tu Wei-ming’s effort to write about China’s traditional resources in a religious-ethical language has described Confucian thought as a transformative force for the individual (Tu 1979, 1985), and discussed classical texts, such as Zhongyong, within such a framework (Tu 1989). Starting from this “new Confucian humanism,” Tu has examined a wide range of topics with a combination of inner insights from Confucianism and new philosophical and social-scientific tools (Tu 1993). Such an approach to “philosophize” or “culturalize” Chinese thought, though in many senses differing from how sagehood is pursued, does accord with certain aspects of how Confucianism’s “inner logic” operates, something that this modern approach aims to describe. For instance, according to Zhu Xi, if compared to the three sects of medieval Buddhism and their own respective focuses, Confucianism can also be seen as having the same three dimensions, namely discussion (on its texts and ideas), self-discipline (through rules and rites), and the Chan-styled insight and eagerness with which one really obtains goodness (Zhu 1983). Tu’s work seems to possess some comparable aspects of the first and third dimensions, since its philosophizing method conceptualizes Confucian thought through contemporary categories, and because its focus on self-transformation does convey to present-day practitioners the “direct” or intimate moral facet of Chinese culture.

The philosophical construction of Confucian thought has further created a steady stream of spirited work that investigates Chinese argumentations with a set of established concepts, such as role (Ames 2021), virtue (Angle and Slote 2013; Kim 2020), the person (Ames 1994; Hershock and Ames 2021; Shun and Wong 2004), and pluralism and relativism (Wong 2023). Between Tu’s rather intimate, “religious” interpretations and these perhaps intensively philosophized accounts, which seem to contain more discussions but less insight and practice, there is the mixed position of balancing new philosophizing apparatus and traditional Confucian scholarship. A possible example is Professor Chen Lai’s conceptualization of Zhu Xi’s thought which ranges from textual studies (Chen 2011) to general analyses (Chen 2000). On the one hand, the conceptual and historical relations between ideas, arguments and intellectual schools are emphasized to serve as a framework for explaining Zhu’s thought, which suggests an influence from sinology and intellectual history. On the other hand, philosophical concepts still largely organize the ways in which Confucianism is interpreted, such as in terms of virtue ethics (Chen 2019), or modernity and humanism (Chen 2009, 2018).

Another major attempt to reconsider Confucian spirituality, which shares Tu’s concern about moving closer to the inner logic of Chinese thought but is generally less philosophical than historical-sinological, is the late Professor Yü Ying-shih’s proposal of “inward transcendence” (Yü 2016a). The Chinese moral self-realization, which is “inward” according to Yü, enables one to arrive at the virtuous and elevated status that links oneself to the universe, which serves as a unique characteristic of the “Chinese religious and philosophical imagination” (2016a). This conceptualization offers a more explicitly exceptionalist and structurally process-oriented interpretation of Chinese spirituality, in the sense that it attends to what distinguishes it from other civilizational traditions, and that it explains more about how such a transcendence works as a structure (through binary concepts such as “inward” and “outward,” or “man” and “heaven”) than what the virtues and practices involved in this process actually are. Supported by historical and philosophical arguments, Yü’s “Chinese transcendence” perhaps remains the most condensed and ambitious treatment of the topic.

A pertinent theme here for this philosophical-historical construction is the modern experience of Confucianism, which is exemplified by Professor Huang Chun-chieh’s interpretation of Mencius (Huang 2001), discussion on the idea of “humanism” (Huang 2021), and analysis of Confucianism in what he considers to be a changing East Asia (Huang 2015, 2019, 2023; Huang and Tucker 2023). If a purely religious or philosophizing approach cannot fully expose the historical problems regarding Confucianism in contemporary contexts, such an investigation, with an emphasis on transformation and national politics, can be viewed as a continuation of the earlier debates during the May Fourth Movement. This issue, as it will be shown later, also forms a central question for relevant social-scientific studies.

Finally, it is also possible to apply this historical-sinological expertise, now further concretized by detailed textual studies, to the search for an inner image of Confucianism that is veridical and substantial. For instance, Professor Chu Hung-lam has re-examined the textual basis for studying late imperial Confucianism through a careful perusal of histories, literary collections, and xue’an writings (case-based source books), displaying an alternative method of understanding Confucianism alongside the philosophical and historical analyses offered in other studies. Being both restorative and revisionist, and descriptive and analytical, Chu’s accounts investigate the textual problems of Ming literary collections and the source book Mingru Xue’an (1991, 2007, 2014), the political and intellectual lives of Ming scholars (2005, 2015b), the monarchical reverence for Confucius (2021), and the institutions of Confucian canonization, court lectures and community compacts (2013, 2015a, 2021). For some readers, this erudite and authentic depiction of Ming literati not only reveals the “mental universe” of Confucian scholars, but also implies potential continuity between the intelligentsia past and present (Ng, Shin, and Struve 2018).

The growth of contemporary work on the moral-intellectual world of Confucianism—no matter whether it is construed through a new philosophical lens, as historical abstraction, or explored on the basis of intensive textual studies—reveals the existence of a multidisciplinary field of writing about Confucianism under new intellectual and political circumstances. A new mindset championing comparison and dialogue has replaced the old May Fourth iconoclasm, and the hope to preserve traditional scholarship lasts in those textual studies that require an extensive and internal reading of old writings. There may be more responsibilities for current scholars to undertake, who are now entrusted to speak for the tradition, in a time when the reappearance of traditional themes in the Sinographic sphere is reshaping the sensibility and knowledge of its people.

IV. Revival

The main development in the cultural landscape of mainland China during the last two or three decades is the general revival of interest in Confucianism and Chinese culture among the populace, a phenomenon that one may observe, after recalling the turbulent political past of the country, “with a sense of relief than of shock” (de Bary 1995). The continuous presence of Confucianism in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and North America, as well as its return to mainland intellectual circles, had already occurred for decades, providing much of the intellectual and political foundation for the current movement (Chou 2012; Makeham 2008, 2021; Neville 2000; Oldstone-Moore 2023). This popular “revival” is not about a “critical philosophical innovation” (Makeham 2008), or the “Confucianism in action” that systematically guides people with its teachings as it is generally believed to do so in the past (Nivison and Wright 1959). What is being observed now is the appearance of certain elements and sentiments associated with Confucianism that now is mentioned mainly as an ethical rhetoric (Baker 2011), as forms of heritage such as ritual or architectural ones (Flath 2016; Huang 2020; Sun 2012), and as an educational inspiration (Walton 2018, 2020).

Therefore, the Confucian revival that we are witnessing now may still be far from a philosophical or moral renaissance that continues the country's lost scholarship, as it did in those dynastic changes in imperial history. It is both a popular movement and the formation of an ethical-political persuasion that suggests a general change of the moral ethos in a post-May-Fourth era. It has long been found in the countryside (Payette 2016), but a more intellectually-oriented understanding of Chinese culture, particularly the one valuing its moral nature, is developing quickly in China's ever-expanding metropolises. While heritage academies are rebuilt to serve a perhaps “ambivalent” role in contemporary education if compared to the noted status of classical academies (shuyuan) in traditional learning (Walton 2018), some shuyuan-named independent schools are offering certain urban families a moral inspiration and choice that are not only impossible in official schooling but also difficult to find in national universities since the New Culture Movement. Such a return to the moral past is incomplete, but it is eye-opening and challenging earlier historical narrations, making the ethical dimension of Confucianism once again accessible.

A major analytic position regarding this popular revival is to perceive it as a religious experience which is now employed to describe the perhaps less intellectually-oriented and ritual dimensions of what has been observed in mainland China. The central issue considered in such a religious approach is less about Confucianism itself—for instance, its virtues and visions—but about the current social, political and intellectual treatments of it, with the old problem revisited here regarding the clarification of Confucianism in a comparative context (Sun 2013; Yang and Tamney 2012). This particular documentation of relevant phenomena can be traced to those more general studies aiming to elucidate the aspects of the tradition that may not be simply described as conventionally philosophical (Yao 2000, 2020). In some specific cases, the complicated combination of elements from Confucian rituals, traditional community compacts and popular religions, under the modern conditions of the disappearance of landed literati and of moral deterioration in rural areas, further puts religion as an analytic concept alongside the long-standing issue of local governance and moral uplift in Chinese history (Chen and Fan 2024).

Such a religious approach is often supported by an anthropological method that treats the revival as an ethnographic finding, applying anthropological categories, such as “the local” and “the grassroots,” to those activists engaging in the movement. If the religious approach concerns the interplay between religion and Confucianism in post-reform times, then the anthropological account tends to conclude with observations on the complexity and pluralism of the movement (Billioud 2018; Billioud and Thoraval 2015).

When religion or morality serves as the underlying concept in such studies, they generally do not regard the May Fourth mentality as an essential theme that must be addressed. However, for other more politically-centered analyses, the issue of modernity occupies a central position and the May Fourth radicalism continues to be a question that one needs to answer. For such work sympathizing with this political past, its task is to find the similarities between modern institutions and what it views as a traditional resource. Therefore, abstractions of Confucianism have been juxtaposed with familiar discussions of contemporary political topics, such as liberalism and order (Bell 2010; 2015, 2020), modern life (Bell and Hahm 2003), and democracy (Elstein 2015; Kim 2014, 2023). For some commentators, the prevalent radical attitudes towards China’s tradition are explicitly opposed (Fan 2011), and, even for those agreeing with some of the May Fourth arguments, few will deny the role of Confucianism as a meaningful force for contemporary life (Ames and Hershock 2018; Hon and Stapleton 2017).

A new area of such political analyses additionally and timely concerns China’s diplomacy. The possible role of Confucianism as a moral cause behind the economic growth of East Asian countries has already been considered (Tu 1996), and now the belief that the tradition starts to influence China’s foreign policy is being accepted by observers (Dessein 2014), the most daring of whom even attempt to interpret what they understand to be certain Confucian ideas as forms of cosmopolitanism and internationalism (Wang 2017). Although to what extent such depictions can be supported by historical evidence is still questionable, such a position clearly implicates a shift from earlier iconoclastic views. The relevant conceptualizations may not be entirely accurate, but the interest and enthusiasm do indicate the potential for traditional culture to be more involved in national policy and to bring morality back to politics.

What may unite this general observation of national politics and the nuanced depiction of local projects can be the fact that traditional resources and their moral concern are once again at the heart of modern Chinese life. The feeling that there is a genuine ethical blankness, as well as the sense that one needs to solve it by turning to another direction and by making this change mostly by oneself, has become the new consensus in an increasingly precarious society. Once appearing to have erased the past, the irresistible torrent of changes is now urging more and more Chinese to rethink about what they have lost and how it can be regained. An avocational writer and illustrator, whom I met during my fieldwork in the central Chinese city of Kaifeng, described this ethical concern quite vividly:

What I think my book and paintings, one of which has been viewed for four million times on the Internet, move my readers is “homesickness”. . . . Speaking of contemporary China, such homesickness is in everyone’s heart. . . . Although I returned to my hometown Kaifeng for uncountable times over the last twenty years, I feel that the city has been increasingly unfamiliar to me. I feel that the hometown that I remember can only be found in my memory. Kaifeng’s people and things have faded. When I am back, I still speak the local dialect, and meet my relatives and childhood friends. But all those past aspirations and youthful sentiments are no longer there. The streets of Kaifeng have undergone great changes. Many of our “homes” were demolished and relocated. Old hutong also disappeared. In fact, there is an incurable disconcertment in the heart of every Chinese. . . . In our society, many people do not have roots in their hearts. They seem to have the illusion that they are destined to become billionaires, live in luxurious houses and send their children to expensive schools. To put it nicely, they have forgotten their origins. To put it more critically, they have no roots. The changing scenes of our age have given them illusions.

V. Conclusion

A tripartite argument is offered in this paper to synthesize the fate and meaning of Confucianism for modern China, considering its history or the confrontation between political and ethical understandings of the national past, the relevant scholarship or the multi-disciplinary interest and work in writing about the tradition over the decades, and its future or what we can learn from its recent revival. A systematic and subtle treatment reveals the contemporary presence of Confucianism as the result of a historical response, an intellectual pursuit, and a spiritual movement. It may help us consider the Confucian revival as a historical and concrete problem, one that should be situated in Chinese history and in the context of intellectual development and real-life situations.

The Chinese past has long been known as a moral and educational entity, before being reread and retold as a political one that needed to be forgotten or even destroyed during the radicalization of Chinese intellectuals during the last century. The survival of Confucian elements outside of the mainland has provided the foundation for the current revival in the nation—a return of the country’s “lost soul” which may not be a complete philosophical-ethical restoration, but at least suggests a clear transition from the political past and its radicalism to the moral past and its much-discussed “future.” The May Fourth mentality still dominates how many understand their heritage, and its latest and slightly moderate version—the “inheritance within rupture” that now craves for the “modernization” of all the facets of the Chinese society and culture without entirely or openly rejecting its legacy (Luo 2015)—continues to offer a technologically centric, implicitly anti-traditional understanding of China’s past. Despite its continual influence, the iconoclastic suasion of the May Fourth Movement can no longer silence the nation’s old voice that now once again relates its history as morally and educationally significant for its people. The popular and rather mundane interests in the cuisine, attire, and architecture of the ancients have even been counterbalancing much of the political-intellectual excitement that so powerfully captured the country’s younger generations just a century ago. And the moral character of the revival further reveals the fundamental transformation of the country’s spiritual-ethical climate in the post-reform era.

This new development of popular attitudes towards Confucianism has been examined in contemporary studies as a religious experience, an anthropological finding and a political-philosophical phenomenon: the category of religion aims to convey the ethical, ritual, spiritual and some political traits of the revival, touching upon China’s post-reform moral problem; anthropological perspectives emphasize the intricacies and variety of its projects which, now as ethnographic material, may contribute to social theory and an understanding of the latest Chinese society; and political-philosophical discussions review the relevance and influence of Confucianism as a conceptual source in domestic and international politics. Meanwhile, studies on Confucian ethics in sinology and comparative philosophy have long experimented with philosophical reconstruction and historical abstraction, and preserved some traditional textual studies that are important for a future recovery of Confucian scholarship. A generally sympathetic mentality regarding Confucianism is found across those approaches, suggesting the formation of a multidisciplinary field of contemporary Confucian studies alongside the popular revival—the shift from the political history to the moral one is also reflected in this new intelligentsia that has less been sidelined than it was in the past. Although the return of Confucian elements to the public and a new intelligentsia does not necessarily indicate a philosophical innovation (Makeham 2008), and the divergence between what Confucianism was understood to be about and the Republican “New Confucian” schools has long been significant (Major 2023), the post-reform situation does make it possible to advance a more historically-informed and well-balanced reassessment of China’s tradition. The radical mentality cannot continue to be attractive without showing moderation, and the “trouble” that the country once had with its moral past is now being reassessed to better comprehend its presence and influence on China’s future (de Bary 1991).

There are certainly historical and morally autonomous aspects. A functionalist tone has underscored many explanations of the revival, suggesting that traditional elements now emerge, either positively or negatively, as an ethical, political or psychological resource working against a nationwide moral crisis (Fan 2011; Gilgan 2022). It is true that Confucianism was often promoted when the country fell into a dynastic crisis or a moral decline, and such efforts, even when they were from local or intellectual leaders, could not be entirely separated from the central government. But a historically-minded observer will also notice the cycles of fall and rise in Chinese history. The rupture of radicalism, in such a sense, may only be a matter of seconds on the clock of history, and the quest for virtue in the past will always return to the country in the future. There is always a durable aspect of the tradition that came from the past but is not necessarily restricted to it (Pines 2012). This is related to the final issue about inheritance. Ancient themes have been a subject of enquiry, as in the case of historical distillation or social-scientific theorization. They are also a target of conceptual reconstruction or “a new phase of intellectual renewal,” as promoted by contemporary philosophers. What perhaps can be further anticipated alongside these current trends is the matter of inheriting traditional scholarship and utilizing it as the basis for understanding new questions in our time. This may mark a complete return to the moral past, and the country can then determine its future with more experiences and admonishments, and will be more able to do so, for this time, in its own way.

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