No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  In my view, the government’s real goal in promoting Confucius is not to give new life to an ancient culture but to restore the tradition of venerating Confucius as a sage, a restoration that fits hand-in-glove with the promotion of radical nationalism. In the years since Tiananmen the government has used a two-pronged strategy of mounting campaigns against liberalization and “peaceful evolution” on the one hand while whipping up “patriotic” sentiment and channeling it in support of itself on the other. This “patriotism” has become a new pillar of the regime’s ideology, and the Party’s advertising of what it calls a “Golden Age of prosperity” swells the nationalist tide. This could not be more clear than it is in the concluding lines of the official “Address at the Ceremony to Honor Confucius at the 2005 International Confucius Cultural Festival in Qufu, China,” which read: “Prosperity is at hand; Great Unity is the dream; revel in our Golden Age and the glory of strong nation.” Is this Confucius? Or a paean to nationalism and the new Golden Age?

  Over the past year the promotion of traditional culture in CCTV’s Lecture Hall has helped to turn Confucius into a commercial product—to become, in Lu Xun’s phrase, a “sage in vogue.” (Much the same thing happened in the Mao Zedong fad a few years ago.) Today books on Confucius in a variety of genres are making big profits for publishing houses, and adult education classes on traditional Chinese culture and the Chinese classics have been highly profitable as well. At Tsinghua University, a course on traditional Chinese culture costs 26,000 yuan; at Fudan University, it costs 38,000 yuan, and the fee for an after-school course on the classics for children is even more astronomical.

  The CCTV program has also helped to turn pseudoscholar Yu Dan into a national celebrity. Yu Dan has been hawking Confucius with a sales pitch that combines tall tales about the ancients with insights that are about as sophisticated as the lyrics of pop songs. Her often arbitrary and always shallow interpretation of Confucius injects a bit of the narcotic of pop culture into the current Confucian renaissance. The take-home message of her book Confucius from the Heart is that Confucius teaches that we can all have peachy lives if we just live like cynics: no matter what befalls us, if we just smile at our troubles and do not complain, we can get along and live in bliss.

  Just as the Yu Dan–inspired fad to “read Confucius” was taking off, Peking University professor Li Ling published a book called Stray Dog: My Reading of “The Analects.” Li uses his own research to “exorcize nonsense” about Confucius and to try to capture the philosopher in his original form. Li writes in his preface:

  My book is the product of my own ideas about Confucius. I do not repeat what others have said. I do not care what Mencius, Wang Anshi, or any of the other greater or lesser scholars have said. If something is not in the original text, then sorry, I reject it … If we want to know what Confucius himself thought, we have to read the original texts … I am not out to join intellectuals in their squabbling, nor am I out to pander to popular taste.

  And Li concludes:

  After reading The Analects, I find it most fitting neither to put Confucius on a pedestal nor to drag him through the mud but to say he resembles Don Quixote.

  Li’s rejection of both idol worship and favor-currying debunks the two-thousand-year-old habit of venerating Confucius as a sage. He writes:

  In this book I explain to my readers that Confucius was not, in fact, a sage. The Confucius to whom emperors paid homage in dynasty after dynasty was not the real Confucius, but a “manufactured Confucius.” The real Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king—much less, as the popular phrase has it, “inwardly a sage and outwardly a king” … [He was] a mere mortal, a man of humble birth who believed that the ancient aristocracy (his “true gentlemen”) set the standard for how one should conduct oneself. He loved antiquity, studied it assiduously, and never tired of learning. He was an indefatigable teacher who transmitted the culture of the past and encouraged his students to read classic texts. He had no power or status—only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He traveled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers of his day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous. He was bighearted and dreamed of restoring the reign of Zhou so that peace could come to everyone in the world. He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a homeless dog than a sage. This was the real Confucius.

  In both research and interpretation, Li Ling goes well beyond the shallow and careless Yu Dan as a reader of The Analects. More importantly, he feels a strong empathetic connection with a fellow intellectual of two thousand years ago. He notes that Confucius himself thought of himself as a sort of homeless dog:

  Confucius was in despair about his homeland and, with disciples in tow, set out on foot to travel far and wide, living among strangers. He met dukes and princes, but got nowhere with them, and in the end returned to his place of birth, where he ended his days brokenhearted. Before he died he lost a son and others who had been near to him—his disciples Yan Hui and Zhong You—and wept until his tears ran dry. He died at home—but in another sense had no home. He may or may not have been right in his teachings, but in either case his life does illustrate the fate of Chinese intellectuals.

  When Li Ling tossed his stray-dog comment into the midst of the popular discussion about Confucius and traditional Chinese culture, it was like tossing a big rock into a pond: it caused huge waves of protest from the new Confucian defenders of the Way. Li became the target of sputtering vitriol and curses from those whose shame turned to humiliated rage. He was denounced as a “prophet of doomsday” and (oddly, given what he stood for) an “angry youth.” People who had not read his book nevertheless felt qualified to judge it “garbage.” All this happened because he had called Confucius a stray dog. It shows that the Confucius fans of today have taken their reverence for the Master to the point where nothing actually meaningful can be said about him. Thank goodness the fans do not have much political power; if they did, we would be back to an era in which (as Lin Biao said of Mao Zedong) “every word is true, every word is worth ten thousand words from others.”

  Li Ling, as a serious historian, writes that “I regard The Analects as a subject for historical inquiry, not as a sacred book.” When he calls Confucius a stray dog, he is reminding us that during China’s Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) intellectuals lived lives of uncertainty, even fear, because their talents were often unwelcome, and in that context “an idealist who can find no spiritual home” does resemble a stray dog. In my own view, to say that Confucius lacked a “spiritual home” is already giving him too much praise. The truth is that he was roaming the land to look not for a spiritual home but for a place where he could go to work for someone who held power. His cherished goal was to be the teacher of a king, and in that he failed. He was a stray dog who lacked a master. Had he found a ruler to take him in, the stray dog would have become a guard dog.

  Li Ling was not the first to call Confucius a stray dog. Scholars of antiquity have evaluated him that way, too. The biography of Confucius in the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (145?–86 BCE) states that, at the age of 40, and having accomplished nothing, Confucius wailed, “My Way has reached its end!” and “There is no place in the land for me!” According to the biography in the Records, people in Confucius’ own time noticed that he was “haggard and worn as a stray dog,” and Confucius, hearing of the remark, allowed that the comparison was apt. Today’s “true defenders of the Way” claim that when Confucius made his acknowledgment he was in fact hinting at some abstruse and profound truth about cultivating humanity and governing countries. For Li Ling to take the response more literally, in their view, is heinous heresy and enough to make his book garbage not worth reading. Some “angry youth” went so far as to say “Professor Li is insane!”

  Today’s Confucius worshippers can heap all the scorn upon Li Li
ng’s book they like, but it remains true that what he writes about Confucius, especially in his plainspoken and captivating preface, far surpasses anything that Mr. Jiang Qing and the other “new Confucian thinkers” have to offer. An impressive range of well-known scholars have given Stray Dog high praise.

  In an essay called “On the Feasibility of Benevolence and Righteousness: A Review of Li Ling’s Stray Dog,” historian Wu Si writes, “Li Ling has done a fine service. Cultural projects of the future must be based on reliable core texts. In my view Li Ling, in his work on The Analects, does even better than Zhu Xi (1130–1200).” In a similar review essay, Professor Qian Liqun of the Department of Chinese at Peking University writes, “Li Ling’s reading of The Analects stands out for its powerful ‘heart to heart’ empathy with Confucius, one intellectual to another. This empathy allows him to see the ‘stray dog’ problem clearly … When I saw the ‘stray dog’ phrase, I sensed a touch satire in it, but more than that I sensed Confucius’s perseverance, and his sorrow.” In an interview, Liu Mengxi, director of the Institute of Chinese Culture at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, praised Li Ling’s conscientious textual research, his critical attitude, and his dispelling of myths about Confucius.

  Professor Qin Hui of Tsinghua University, in an article entitled “How Did The Analects Become a Classic?” writes that “nowadays there are those who would elevate The Analects to the status of a Confucian Bible, just as, once upon a time, people elevated a thin little book called Quotations of Chairman Mao to the status of a ‘pinnacle’ of Marxism. Did the fervor for Quotations of Chairman Mao enrich Marxism or wreck it? Does the fervor for The Analects advance Confucianism or run it to ruin?”

  China has a long tradition of reverence for sages, and in the eyes of the defenders of the Way, be they ancient or modern, Confucius is not to be questioned; he is a venerable “uncrowned king,” the bearer of truth and the teacher of rulers through the ages; he is the Complete and Perfect Sage and King of Culture (a title actually given him in the fourteenth century) to whom emperors must bow. For Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and his Confucian Association, Confucius was the founder of a religion and a god; for the “new Confucians” of today, he is the symbol of Chinese culture. For them, every maxim in The Analects expresses astounding insight into either the management of state affairs or the cultivation of a person’s innate morality. In ancient times the most outlandish claim was “half The Analects can govern the world”; its rival today is “Confucian teachings have governed the world for five thousand years and are ready for five thousand more.” Some even say, “If you don’t read Confucius, you are not really human.” Today’s “Confucians” go so far as to make up eye-catching fake news—such as the story, spread during the recent fad, that in 1988 seventy-five Nobel Prize winners from around the world gathered in Paris to name Confucius as the greatest thinker in human history. (Does someone covet the approval of Westerners?)

  Today’s fans are so smitten with their sage that they have lost the ability to distinguish ordinary human life from sainthood and ordinary language from ritual worship. Pardon me, good people, but Confucius was a human being, and must have farted. Are you sure those, too, had deep meaning? Could it be that the words of The Analects are common sense, not mystical wells of unfathomable wisdom? Let’s look again at the two modest, clear lines that begin The Analects: “Is it not a pleasure to make frequent use of what one has learned? It is not a joy to have friends visit from afar?” Where, exactly, is the mind-bending abstruseness that warrants more than two thousand years of annotation and explanation? Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), in his “Notes on The Analects,” had it right: “The Analects tells how to be a good person and how to interact with the world … It can be useful a guide for future generations, but we must not take it as immutable truth or moral dogma, and still less should we claim it to hold brilliant political philosophy that can regulate nations and bring peace to all under heaven.” The great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel considered The Analects to be no more than a collection of daily-life truths.

  It was when Emperor Wu of the Han (156–87 BCE) announced his ruling to “venerate Confucianism alone” that the man named Kong Qiu posthumously turned into Master Confucius. The skeleton of that stray dog sprang back to life as a guard dog to defend emperors and the Chinese autocracy.

  When the autocrats realized how useful Confucian principles could be, the position of court guard dog began to offer excellent job security; once in place, the incumbents stayed for more than two thousand years. The moment when the paragon of China’s intellectuals was elevated by political powerholders to a place of exalted honor, the moment statues of the paragon were gilded and placed inside the ancestral temple of the imperial clan, was the moment Chinese intellectuals arrived in hell on earth, because now they were nothing more than handmaidens to power. An early example was Sima Tan, father of Sima Qian. Both men had served as “grand historian” at the Han court. When Sima Qian was castrated—his punishment for offending Emperor Wu—he wrote a lament to his father:

  My father achieved nothing that merited any mention in the imperial records. He was responsible for astronomy and the calendar, which was mere fortune-telling and communion with the dead. The emperor used him for personal amusement and treated him like a court musician or other performer, and the common people never took him seriously.

  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Western powers forced China to open itself to the world, China’s imperial system and its ideology fell into sudden and rapid decline. In 1911, when a revolution finally brought an end to centuries of imperial dictatorship, Confucianism, which had been the ideology of the dictatorship, lost its institutional support. The Confucian scholars who had been guard dogs went back to being stray dogs. Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) did manage to get himself appointed emperor in January 1916 and did make a big show of reviving the Confucian rituals, but that farce was short-lived. Yuan died six months later. By that time, the complete collapse of traditional institutions and their supporting ideology had become inevitable.

  This felt dreadful, of course, to the Confucian scholars who lost their imperial doghouses and were put back out onto the streets. But from another point of view, the transition was a great blessing. It was an opportunity for Chinese scholars to become modern intellectuals, to leave behind the authoritarian props they had been depending upon and to venture into a new world of independent, critical thought. The opportunity was upon them whether they welcomed it or not. Unfortunately, this era of being “stray dogs by necessity” lasted only about fifty years. Once the Chinese Communists brought their totalitarianism to China, it was hard for Chinese intellectuals to be anything quite so comfortable as stray dogs. Most became whipping dogs, the targets of persecution and violent attack, while a fortunate few secured positions as guard dogs for the Mao regime. Guo Moruo (1892–1978), who earlier had dared to make open criticisms of Chiang Kai-shek, after 1949 turned into Mao Zedong’s lap dog.

  The fate of Confucius’s reputation in the twentieth century would likely have puzzled Confucius. Twice he was made the target of major political campaigns, once during the May Fourth movement that began in 1919, and once when Mao Zedong launched a campaign to “criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” in 1974. In the years since Tiananmen, a trend in Chinese intellectual circles has opposed “radicalism,” and some people have lumped the radical anti-traditionalism of May Fourth and the radical anti-traditionalism of Mao together, rejecting the two as a package. But these two “anti-Confucius” campaigns were radically different things.

  First, the prime movers of the two campaigns could not have been more different. May Fourth was a spontaneous, bottom-up movement by people who were making demands on the government. They were mainly independent intellectuals who had been influenced by new ideas, values, and strategies from the West, and were using Western yardsticks to try to understand why China had fallen so far behind. They had transcended the thinking of the late nineteenth centur
y, which held that “catching up” was merely a matter of technology—or perhaps of government form—and had concluded that the problem was deeply involved with culture. “Confucius” needed to be uprooted. In sharp contrast, the 1974 campaign to “criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” was a top-down political movement launched by a dictator, Mao Zedong, who held absolute political power and who had ensconced Mao Zedong Thought in the sole position of honor in China’s world of ideology. No other ideas, whether from China or elsewhere, were permitted.

  Second, the goals of the two campaigns were radically different. The Confucius whom the modern-minded intellectuals of May Fourth were attacking was not the wandering philosopher of the fifth century BCE but Sage Confucius, that artifact of Emperor Wu, the man who had embalmed Confucianism as the “only thought to be venerated.” The new intellectuals wanted to drive off a guard dog and root out an entrenched way of thinking. Mao Zedong’s campaign against Confucius, by contrast, had nothing at all to do with any effort to improve or renew culture, and in fact had nothing to do with Confucius, either. Its purpose, purely and entirely, was to aid Mao Zedong in his power struggles at the top of the Communist Party of China. The point was to utterly demolish the image of Lin Biao and to draw a line in the sand for the “chief Confucian in the Party,” Zhou Enlai.