by Liu Xiaobo
How much different, in their fundamental natures, could these two “anti-Confucius campaigns” have possibly been? One originated with modern intellectuals who had no political power, the other with a traditional-style despot who held absolute power; one was spontaneous and bottom-up, the other engineered and top-down; one was an effort to find a way forward for the nation, the other an effort to solidify autocratic power for a dictator.
This is why I continue to endorse May Fourth’s anti-Confucius campaign and continue to condemn Mao’s. It is hardly a close call.
In a 1935 essay called “Confucius in Modern China,” Lu Xun denounces the tradition in imperial China of sage worship. He writes:
The ones who put Confucius on a pedestal, who made him a sage, were powerholders and would-be powerholders. This sage-making had nothing at all to do with the common people.
Sage-worship—a product of the joint efforts of kings, emperors, and their hired scribblers over many centuries—in my view is the most impressive piece of mythmaking in all of Chinese history. The Confucius who has been dubbed “sage” long ago lost any connection to the historical Confucius and is nothing but a shoddy counterfeit.
If one actually does some conscientious reading of China’s pre-Qin philosophers, it is not hard to see that Confucius was relatively mediocre. He lacks the grace, ease, and elegance of Zhuangzi (369–286 BCE), has none of Zhuangzi’s gift for powerful language, or beautiful flights of fancy, or genius for unconventional, arresting philosophical insight, and falls far short of Zhuangzi’s clear-eyed understanding of the human tragedy. Compared to Mencius (372–289 BCE), Confucius is no match in boldness of vision or breadth of mind, to say nothing of the ability to stand up to authority with dignity or to show genuine concern for the common people. It was Mencius who said, “The people come first; the social order next; the rulers last.” By comparison with Han Feizi (281–233 BCE), Confucius seems pretentious and crafty; he lacks Han Feizi’s gift for straightforward, trenchant, satirical commentary. As for Mozi (ca. 470–391 BCE), Confucius does not have his talent for logical rigor or the faith in humanity that undergirds his ideal of universal equality.
The sayings of Confucius, by contrast, are clever but contain no great wisdom. They are extremely practical, even slick, but show no aesthetic inspiration or real profundity. Confucius lacked nobility of character and breadth of vision. He ran around trying to get a position at a court, and when this failed he became an expounder of the Way. He enjoyed telling people what to think and how to behave, for which the sage-makers have credited him as “an indefatigable teacher of men,” but what it actually shows is a certain arrogance and small-mindedness. His famous principle of “engaging the world when it is orderly and withdrawing when it is in chaos” is, if you think about it, a formula for irresponsible opportunism. How costly has it been for the Chinese people that this particular thinker—this most sly, most smooth, most utilitarian, most worldly-wise Confucius, who shied away from public responsibility and showed no empathy for people who suffer—became their sage and exemplar for two thousand years? A people is reflected in its sages, and a sage can mold people in his image. I fear that the slave mentality in the Chinese people today came entirely from this source.
In addition to the serious intellectual project of uncovering the original Confucius, Professor Li Ling seems to have had some other targets in mind in publishing his Stray Dog book. Today’s ultranationalism was clearly one of them. Li is challenging the fads for “reading the classics” and “worshipping Confucius” and indirectly is raising questions about the “rise of China as a great nation” as well. His reference to Confucius as a homeless dog “spiritually adrift in the world” is aimed at the “new Confucians” who are promoting Confucius as a worldwide savior. Li comments, “I can imagine nothing more pointless than planting the flag of Confucius all over the world … Confucius could not save China, and he cannot save the world.”
A second target of Li Ling’s critique is the tradition among Chinese intellectuals of cozying up to power, and the critique is timely because the Confucians of today are falling over themselves to do just that. They honor Confucius and spout Confucian teachings, but their purpose is not to use Confucianism to revive the ethics of the nation; it is to reassert the principle that mastery of Confucianism qualifies a person to be a ruler. In stressing that Confucius was an adviser to kings and emperors (even “the teacher of the nation”), in advocating that Confucianism resume its place as the nation’s orthodoxy, and in hoping that the government will use its authority to make these things happen by decree, what the new Confucians are actually doing is showing their own ambitions to be the advisers to the modern-day kings and emperors—or maybe even to be Plato-style philosopher-kings themselves, holding power in their own hands. In giving Confucius his latest makeover they are, in essence, sending China back to the era of Emperor Wu. They are hoping for a resumption of the days when Confucianism was venerated and all other schools of thought were banned—indeed, when all thought was banned, including Confucian thought, because you don’t need thought when unquestioning worship of a sage takes its place.
Li Ling sees the record of history as showing that China’s intellectuals, with all those utopian ideals bulging in their heads, have done good for China only when they find themselves out of power, taking stands as critics of authority. When they have power in their hands, it can spell danger, even disaster, for the nation. “Intellectuals, with their sharp eyes and keen minds,” he writes, “can be more autocratic than anybody. Put the executioner’s sword in their hands and the first to lose their lives will be other intellectuals.” This happens because of the habitual conceit of the Chinese intellectual that his morality, his ideals, and his insights are necessarily superior to anyone else’s. He accords himself the pedestal of being “first in the world to assume its worries, last in the world to enjoy its pleasures” [from Fan Zhongyan (989–1052 CE)—Trans.] and believes he can help to save the people from calamity and build a paradise on earth. Zhang Zai (1020–1077 CE) summed up the goals of the Chinese intellectual in four sentences: “Establish morals in the world; establish livelihood for the people; transmit the lost teachings of the sages; bring peace to the world for thousands of years.” Today many Chinese intellectuals still exhibit this mentality, which shows just how deeply the ancient literati traditions of arrogance remain engrained.
Li Ling wants today’s Chinese intellectuals to take lessons from history, to stand apart from power, to give up their ambition to be the teachers of kings, and to stop politicizing the ancient classics with ideological readings. At the end of his preface, Li writes:
We must approach The Analects coolly and objectively—without any politicizing, moralizing, or sermonizing. Our sole purpose should be to fill the need we have for the real Confucius, a need that is particularly acute in this age when, to paraphrase Confucius himself, “the rites have been lost and the music at court is disordered.”
If China’s intellectuals ignore this advice, their fate, like that of their predecessors, will be to serve only as running dogs for others. A stray dog that finds favor with no one and a guard dog prized by its master both are dogs.
In my opinion the greatest tragedy in the history of Chinese culture was not the famous “burning of books and live burials of scholars” for which the First Emperor of the Qin (259–210 BCE) is famous, but Emperor Wu’s “banning all schools of thought and venerating Confucianism alone.” This latter decree led to Dong Zhongshu’s (ca. 175–105 BCE) reinterpretation of Confucianism, which substantiated the theory that the imperial system (in fact founded and maintained by violence) was a manifestation of the Way of Heaven. Dong’s principle, cited in his biography in The History of the Former Han, that “if the will of Heaven does not change, then the Way does not change” was an assertion that the cosmos endorses imperial rule. It wrapped a violent military dictatorship in the dress of benevolent rule. Emperors of course saw the utility of this disguise, were happy to co
ntinue upholding Confucianism as the “uniquely venerated” official ideology, laying out a path by which the literati could master Confucian orthodoxy and use it to flourish as lackeys. Mao Zedong got the intellectuals just right when he invoked the saying “With the skin [i.e., the state] gone, what can the hair [the intellectuals] hang onto?”
The most important responsibility of Chinese intellectuals today is not to defend sage-worship that an autocratic political authority supports but to pull free from reliance on and service to such authority. We should inherit and promote the May Fourth tradition, which Professor Chen Yinke (1889–1969) captured in the phrase “independence of thought and autonomy of person.”
Beijing, August 18, 2007
Originally published on boxun.com/hero/2007/liuxb/63_2.shtml, September 2, 2007
Translated by Thomas E. Moran
MY PUPPY’S DEATH
To my beloved Pinkie
From time to time in Communist China, beginning in the early 1950s and extending into the 2000s, officials have issued orders to kill all the dogs, including pets, in designated areas.—Ed.
My love, my puppy died
while I was out one afternoon
killed with Dad’s belt
and Red lies
My love, its name was Tiger
my closest childhood friend
it brought me far more joy and sorrow
than anything
That afternoon was special
Dad bought me a movie ticket
always making revolution
he’d never touched my heart before
I only got ninety minutes
then cruel lies ripped me to shreds
my puppy died
while I was first feeling a father’s love
Its flesh handed out to the neighbor boys
its hide nailed to the back of our door
Tiger, once so full of life
now splayed across the stiff cold wood
With its death
my childhood vanished
my only words for this dark world:
I’ll never believe anymore
My darling Xia, can you
bring back my puppy?
I believe: you can
I’m sure you can. I’m sure!
November 14, 1996
Translated by Susan Wilf
LONG LIVE THE INTERNET
MORE AND MORE CHINESE are using the Internet. This year, 2006, the number has exceeded one hundred million. [When this book went to press the number had passed 450 million.—Ed.] The Communist regime, always obsessed with media control, has been frantic to keep up with Chinese Web users. It tries this, tries that, fidgeting and twitching through a range of ludicrous policy contortions in its attempts to stay on top of things. Its fundamental dilemma is this: on the one hand, its imbalanced economic reforms may well collapse if high growth rates cannot be sustained, and the super-efficient Internet obviously is a money machine. On the other hand, dictators always fear open information and freedom of speech, and the political possibilities of the amazing Internet can be terrifying to them. In fact, the Internet in China has already done much to spread awareness of rights and to support specific rights-defense projects, and this record only adds to the regime’s consternation. It is no wonder that controlling what gets onto the Internet has moved to the very top of the regime’s agenda in ideological matters. It has spent huge amounts since 1998 in building its Project Gold Shield [popularly known as “The Great Firewall”—Ed.] and in recruiting armies of Internet police. It coerces Western Internet firms into accepting its restrictions as the price of doing business in China.
From my own experience, though, I can attest that the contributions of the Internet to freedom of expression in China have been immense, indeed hard to overstate. Despite the escalation in blocking information on the Web and despite the increasing numbers of people who have been sent to prison for what they have posted, the Internet remains a tremendous boon to China’s civil society.
It has meant a lot to me personally as well. On October 7, 1999, I came home from a three-year stay in prison to find a computer already set up in my home. A friend had given it to my wife, and she was already using it to learn typing and to go online. She showed me how to use it. In the days that followed, nearly every friend who came to see us advised me to get on the computer as fast as I could. I tried a few times, but composing sentences in front of a machine just did not feel right. I resisted, and for a while went on writing with a fountain pen. Gradually, though, as friends continued to offer their patient advice and their free demonstrations, I got used to the computer, and before long I could not do without it. The first essay I wrote on it came in fits and starts, and it took a week. Later—after my first submission to a publication by email got a response from the editor within only a few hours—the marvelous power of the Internet suddenly struck me, and I decided to master the computer as quickly as possible. The machine had originally belonged to my wife, but after I took it over she rarely touched it.
In my precomputer days, it took a lot of time and effort to work with handwritten drafts. This was not just because editing by hand is onerous; it was also because delivery costs were high. My writing was banned in China, so I could publish only abroad. The post office would intercept my manuscripts if I tried to mail them overseas, so, to prevent this, I used to travel from the east side of Beijing to the west, where I burdened a foreign friend with sending out my essays by fax. These high transaction costs inevitably took a toll on both my efficiency and my motivation. I was doing pretty well if I published one or two pieces a month.
Now, with my computer, I am connected with the entire world in a way that used to be inconceivable. The computer makes information gathering, consultation with others, composition of essays, and submission of manuscripts all much easier. The Internet is like a magic engine, and it has helped my writing to erupt like a geyser. Now I can even live off what I write.
This is what the Internet has done for me personally. For Chinese society as a whole, it has provided a channel of information that dictators cannot completely control and a platform on which people can exchange opinions and organize, in cyberspace if not in real space.
Open letters by individuals or groups have always been one of the most important ways in which civil society confronts dictatorship and seeks freedom. Two canonical texts in this tradition are the open letter that Václav Havel wrote to Czech dictator Gustáv Husák in 1975 and Charter 77, which Havel and a number of other Czechs signed and published in 1977. When a group like this signs an open letter, it is more than an expression of political opinion; it is a beginning in the formation of organized citizen power.
Open letters began to make a difference in China during the run-up to the 1989 pro-democracy movement. The famous astrophysicist Fang Lizhi took the lead by submitting an open letter to Deng Xiaoping in January 1989 in which Fang called for the release of political prisoners, including the “Democracy Wall” leader Wei Jingsheng. Soon two more open letters appeared, from groups of intellectuals numbering thirty-three and forty-five, respectively. These three open letters have been seen as the prelude to the major nationwide uprising of 1989. During the movement’s high tide, other open letters were popping up like spring shoots after rain. Nearly every sector of society was coming out with public statements in support of the protesting students.
After the massacre, especially in the mid-1990s, there were many more public statements and open letters; but this was before the Internet arrived, and it took a lot of work to organize them. As a veteran of those efforts, I look now at the computer screen before me, on which I do emails so easily, and sigh to remember what I used to have to go through.
The public statements of the mid-1990s had titles such as: “Declaration of the Alliance for the Protection of Labor Rights,” “Recommendations on Abolishing the System of Re-education-through-Labor,” “Recommendations to Combat Corruption,” and “Learn from the Lesson Written in
Blood and Push Democracy and Rule of Law Forward: An Appeal on the Sixth Anniversary of Tiananmen.” These statements all were related to the protection of human rights. Their signatories came from three generations of intellectuals and included both “dissidents” and people “inside the system.”
The year 1995 in particular gained a reputation as a peak year for the rights-defense movement. A series of open letters appeared around the June anniversary of the massacre that year. The most influential among them, one called “Welcoming the U.N. Year of Tolerance and Calling for Tolerance in China,” had been initiated by the distinguished physicist and veteran Party liberal Xu Liangying. The famous nuclear physicist Wang Ganchang led the effort to collect signatures, which he got in abundance from cultural luminaries and members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, such as Yang Xianyi, Wu Zuguang, Lou Shiyi, Zhou Fucheng, Fan Dainian, Wang Zisong, Ding Zilin, Jiang Peikun, Wang Ruoshui, and others. 1995 was also the first year—in what was to become an uninterrupted annual effort over the next decade—in which the Tiananmen Mothers sent an open letter to the National People’s Congress. It was also the year in which Professor Bao Zunxin and I mobilized a group of intellectuals to call for medical parole for Chen Ziming, who was serving a thirteen-year prison sentence for being a “black hand” behind the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. The signatories to our statement included Ji Xianlin, Tang Yijie, and Yue Daiyun from Peking University and He Xiquan, Tong Qingbing, and Wang Furen from Beijing Normal University.
It is hard for people who have done all their rights-defense work in the Internet age to appreciate how much time and effort it took to organize an open letter in 1995. In order, for example, to time a letter so that it would appear near the anniversary of the massacre, one had to start about a month in advance. It took time to find someone to be the lead signatory and to bring others in; then it took several days (at the very least) to reach consensus on questions of content, wording, and timing. Next, one had to find a place where the handwritten letter could be typeset and printed. Then copies had to be made, for which one usually had to go impose on foreign friends in the diplomatic quarter. Most taxing of all was the task of collecting signatures once the final version had been hammered out, printed, and copied. Normally the organizers would divide this task and set out in person. We did not dare to use telephones, because we knew the government tapped the lines of us “sensitive” people, so we ran around Beijing by bicycle or bus. In 1995, in order to get signatures on my open letter from my friends Mang Ke, the famous poet, and Li Xianting, the famous art critic, I first had to cross to the eastern edge of the city, then head to the northern quarter, visiting their homes and talking with them in person. It took me a full day to bring in a modest harvest.