Confucius Comes Home

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a
seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher. The temple, which shared a
wall with my kitchen, was silent. It had gnarled cypress trees and a wooden pavilion that loomed
above my roof like a conscience. In the mornings, I took a cup of coffee outside and listened to the
wakeup sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the
hectoring of the magpies overhead.

It was a small miracle that the shrine had survived. Confucius, who was born in the sixth century
B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West. He stressed compassion,
ritual, and duty. “There is government when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when
the father is father, and the son is son,” Confucius said. Chairman Mao believed in “permanent
revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to
“Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced
Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants
gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the nineteen-eighties,
Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Yu Ying-shih called it a “wandering soul.”

In September, 2010, nine months after I moved in, I was at my desk one morning when I heard a
loudspeaker crackle to life inside the temple. A booming voice was followed by the sound of a heavy
bell, then drums and a flute, and the recitation of passages from writings by Confucius and other
ancient masters. The performance lasted twenty minutes. An hour later, it was repeated, and an hour
after that, and again the next day.

The wandering soul, in one form or another, has been stirring. As China undergoes an economic
transformation ten times the speed of the first industrial revolution, people are turning to ancient ideas
for a connection to the past. The classics have become such reliable best-sellers that, in 2009, the
company behind National Studies Web, a site that sells digitized Confucian texts, went public on the
Shenzhen stock exchange. To appeal to entrepreneurs, Peking University and other respected schools
created mid-career courses that promised to reveal “commercial wisdom” in the classics.

Confucianism has no priesthood or rites of conversion, and is not generally considered a religion, but
new members of China’s middle class regard an interest in philosophy and history as a mark of
cultivation and cultural nationalism. Parents have enrolled their children at private Confucian
academies; I visited a weekend school where children aged three to thirteen were learning the classics
by rote, reciting each passage six hundred times. Around the country, Chinese tourists flocked to the
surviving Confucius Temples, where they filled out prayer cards. “The overwhelming number are
about exams,” Anna Sun, a sociologist at Kenyon College, who studied the cards, told me. “They are
primarily wishes for the college entrance exam, but also the TOEFL, the G.R.E., law school.”

It would have been anathema to Chairman Mao, but his heirs have changed their view on revolution.
In the eighties, when China set itself in pursuit of prosperity, the Party studied how Confucian values
had helped to stabilize other countries in East Asia. Generations of Chinese thinkers had dreamed of
finding the optimal recipe for “national studies”—the mixture of philosophy and history that might
insulate China from the pressures of Westernization. After the democracy demonstrations at
Tiananmen Square in 1989 ended in a violent crackdown, leaders needed an indigenous ideology that
might restore the Party’s moral credibility. Top Communists gave speeches at meetings devoted to
Confucianism, and state television launched a series about traditional culture intended, it said, “to
boost the people’s self-confidence, self-respect, and patriotic thought.” In 2002, the Party officially
stopped calling itself a “revolutionary party” and adopted the term “Party in Power.” The Prime
Minister, Wen Jiabao, declared, “Unity and stability are really more important than anything else.” In
February, 2005, the Party chief, Hu Jintao, quoted Confucius’ observation that “harmony is something
to be cherished.”

Soon, “harmony” was on billboards and in television commercials and intoned by apparatchiks. In
2006, a team of government-backed historians marked Confucius’ 2,557th birthday by unveiling what
they called a “standardized” portrait: a kindly old figure with a luxuriant beard, his hands crossed at
his chest. The Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius, supported by the Ministry of Civil
Affairs, introduced traditions that had never existed before. It arranged for couples to renew their
wedding vows in front of a statue of the sage.

As a gentler alternative to Mao, Confucius has been enlisted as an avatar on the world stage. The
opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics made no mention of the Chairman but featured recurring
references to harmony and to the classic texts. In the past decade, China has opened more than four
hundred Confucius Institutes around the world to teach language, culture, and history. Many
universities have welcomed them; the program provides teaching materials and cash. (Some scholars
have complained that the institutes seek to limit expression. In July, McMaster University, in Canada,
closed its Confucius Institute after a teacher complained that she had been prevented from practicing
Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement.)

The Confucian revival has been especially visible in the city of Qufu, the sage’s home town, in
present-day Shandong Province. In 2007, the city’s International Confucius Festival was co-sponsored
by the Confucius Wine Company. Thousands of people filled a local stadium, giant balloons bearing
the names of ancient scholars bobbed overhead, and a Korean pop star performed in an abbreviated
outfit. Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five-hundred-million-dollar
museum-and-park complex is under construction; it includes a statue of Confucius that is nearly as
tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qufu has adopted comparisons to Jerusalem and Mecca
and calls itself “The Holy City of the Orient.” Last year, it received 4.4 million visitors, surpassing the
number of people who visited Israel.

No one has harnessed the interest in Confucius more successfully than Yu Dan, a professor of media
studies at Beijing Normal University. She presented a popular series of lectures on state television and
wrote a book, “Confucius from the Heart” (2006), that is said to have sold ten million copies. Today,
she occupies a position in Chinese pop culture somewhere between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Dr. Phil.
She plays down themes that irritate modern readers—such as Confucius’ observation that “women
and small people are hard to deal with”—and writes, reassuringly, “The truths that Confucius gives us
are always the easiest of truths.” Scholars mock her work—one critic attended book signings in a T-
shirt that read “Confucius is deeply worried”—but within a year Yu became the second-highest-paid
author in China, after Guo Jingming, a writer of young-adult fiction who travelled with guards to hold
back the crowds.

At Yu Dan’s headquarters in Beijing, a suite of offices on a high floor at the edge of the campus, her
assistant ushered me into a modern conference room. Yu Dan arrived, smiling broadly, and asked the
assistant to prepare tea. Yu Dan, who is in her late forties, has high cheekbones and a short, severe
haircut. I asked what prompted her to embrace the classics. She said that, like others her age, she had
grown up denouncing the ancient scriptures. “When I began writing ‘Confucius from the Heart,’ a lot
of people asked me, ‘Why are you writing this?’ And I said, ‘I am atoning for the crimes of my
generation, because we were young and we criticized him mercilessly.’ ”

She paused, and turned her attention to the assistant, a graduate student. “Child, how could you be so
stupid!” Yu said. “This tea has been steeping for too long!” She looked at me, and the smile returned.
“Children today do not know how to host people,” she said. After Yu became popular, the Party
invited her to conferences, and she began presenting her readings of the classics in a political context.
“Unlimited possibility leads to chaos, because you don’t know where to go or what to do,” she told
me, adding, “We must rely on a strict system to resolve problems. As citizens, our duty is not
necessarily to be perfect moral persons. Our duty is to be law-abiding citizens.”

Confucius—or Kongzi, which means Master Kong—was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies
and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics. His story runs through the ancient books—the
Analects, Zuozhuan, Mengzi, the Records of the Grand Historian—with details that range from
historical to mythical. His father, Shuliang He, was an aging warrior—physically enormous and
famously ugly—who was desperate for a healthy son. When he was in his seventies, he found a teen-
age concubine, and they had a son, in 551 B.C. The baby, like his father, was unsightly, with a
crooked nose and a bulbous forehead so peculiar that he was given the name Qiu, meaning “mound.”
(Admirers insisted that his head resembled a crown.)

When Confucius was three, his father died, and his mother set off with her toddler to find a livelihood.
As a boy, he worked and lost himself in poetry and imagination. He married at eighteen or nineteen,
but was bored and frustrated, because he lacked the connections to realize his ambition of becoming a
bureaucrat. Instead, he offered to teach students of every social class. It was an era of war and
corruption, and Confucius argued that rituals could teach people to reconcile their desires to the needs
of family and community. He was an optimist. A virtuous ruler, he said, is like the wind: “The moral
character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.” He finally earned
a government post, but his reforms threatened other officials, and, as legend has it, they concocted a
plan to drive him out: They sent his superior eighty beautiful girls, who succeeded in occupying the
boss so thoroughly (he disappeared for three days) that the righteous Confucius had to leave.
Humiliated, Confucius began travelling about the country, pointing out abuses. He met a woman
whose husband and son had been eaten by tigers, and he told his disciples, “An oppressive
government is more terrible than tigers.” Confucius was so radical that a fellow-sage, Laozi (said to
be the founder of Taoism), warned him against “all this huffing and puffing, as though you were
carrying a big drum and searching for a lost child.” To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not
conformity. It required loyal opposition. A country is at risk, he said, when a prince believes that “the
only joy in being a prince is that no one opposes what one says.” Warlords ignored him or tried to kill
him.

Confucius never imagined that he would become an icon. “He liked conversations. They helped him
think, but he never expected anyone to write them down,” the historian Annping Chin observed, in
“The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics” (2007). “Confucius did not wish to have
his words end up as rules,” she wrote, because “he loved the idea of being human. He loved the
entirely private journey of finding what was right and feasible among life’s many variables.”

After thirteen years of wandering, Confucius returned home to his books, and he died, in his
seventies, convinced that he was a failure. Of his three thousand students, only seventy-two were true
disciples, said to have mastered his teachings, which they compiled in the Analects. His rules made
him exhausting to be around. “When the meat was not cut squarely, he would not eat,” his disciples
wrote. “When a thing was not accompanied by its proper sauce, he would not eat.” But in times of
war or instability his dictates on how to dress, how to govern, and how to live held out the tantalizing
promise of order. A prime minister later remarked, “With just half the Analects, I can govern the
empire.”

In the centuries that followed, Confucianism was manipulated and buffeted by politics. In 213 B.C.,
the first emperor of China sought to put knowledge under government control and ordered the burning
of books, including Confucian texts. People who invoked them were executed or sentenced to labor in
exile. Confucianism was revived in the subsequent dynasty, the Han, and was China’s state ideology
for much of the next two millennia. The temple next to my house in Beijing was built in 1306, near
the Imperial Academy, a training ground for officials, which remained China’s highest seat of
learning until the fall of the emperor, in 1911.
A few days after I heard the loudspeaker next door, a large banner went up in our neighborhood,
identifying the temple as “The Holy Land of National Studies.” For the first time since the
Communist Party came to power, in 1949, the temple was putting on a celebration of Confucius’
birthday. The occasion featured speeches by government officials and professors and a recitation by
children. I figured that the event would probably signal the end of the daily musical shows, but in the
weeks that followed they continued, and followed a regular schedule: every hour, ten to six, seven
days a week, rain or shine. The sound echoed off the walls of the houses beside the temple, and what
had begun as a novelty gradually wore grooves into the minds of my neighbors. Huang Wenyi, an
employee at a recycling yard, who lived next door, told me, “I hear it in my head at night. It’s like
I’ve been on a boat all day and I can still feel the rocking.”

His face brightened with an idea. “You should go tell them to turn down the volume.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re a foreigner. They’ll pay attention to you.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted the kind of attention that comes from complaining about China’s most famous
philosopher. But I was curious about the show and arranged to visit the head of the temple, a man
named Wu Zhiyou. Wu looked less like a theologian than like an actor who’d play the kindly father in
a Chinese soap opera: in his mid-fifties, he had a large, handsome face, a perfect pair of dimples in his
cheeks, and a resonant voice that sounded somehow familiar. Before being posted to run the temple,
he had spent most of his career in the research office of the city’s Propaganda Department, and he had
a mind for marketing. Of the performance, he said, “This show has attracted people from all levels of
society—Chinese and foreigners, men and women, well educated and less educated, experts and
ordinary people.”

I asked if he was involved in the production. “I’m the chief designer!” he said, eyes shining. “I
oversaw every detail. Even the narrator’s voice is mine.”

The show had been conceived under demanding circumstances. Wu had been given only a month’s
notice before the birthday celebration. He hired a composer, recruited dancers from a local art school,
and selected lines from the classics that could lend the performance a narrative shape. “You need ups
and downs and a climax, just like a movie or a play,” he said. “If it’s too bland, it will never work.”

Wu had succeeded in making the Confucius Temple into his own community theatre, and he was
savoring his role. “In junior middle school, I was always the student leader of the propaganda section
of the student council,” he said. “I love reading aloud, and music and art.” In his spare time, he still
did cross-talk comedy routines, the Chinese version of standup. He had plans for the temple’s future.
“We’re building a new set that will have ceramic statues of the seventy-two disciples. And we need
more lighting. Then, maybe, I can say it is complete.”

Wu checked his watch. He wanted me to catch the three-o’clock show. He gave me a book on the
history of the temple and said, “After you read this book, your questions will no longer be questions.”

The stage, in front of a pavilion on the north side of the compound, had been fitted with lights. The
cast consisted of sixteen young men and women in scholars’ robes; each song-and-dance routine was
named for a line from the classics—the Analects, the Book of Songs, the Book of Rites, and others—
and had an upbeat interpretation: “Happiness” was based on the line “Good fortune lies within bad;
bad fortune lies within good.” (The stage version omitted the ominous second clause.) The finale,
“Harmony,” linked Confucius and the Communist Party. A pamphlet explained that it conveyed the
“harmonious ideology and harmonious society of the ancient people, which will have a positive
influence on the construction of modern harmonious society.”
I read the book that Wu gave me, and the depth of detail about ancient events was impressive: it
recorded who planted which trees on the temple grounds seven hundred years ago. But it was
conspicuously silent on other matters, including the years between 1905 and 1981. In the official
history of the Confucius Temple, most of the twentieth century was blank.

During my time in China, I had learned to expect that renderings of history came with holes, like the
dropouts in an audio recording when the music goes silent and resumes as if nothing had happened.
Some of those edits were ordained from above: for years the people were barred from discussing the
crackdown at Tiananmen Square or the famine of the Great Leap Forward, which took between thirty
million and forty-five million lives, because the Party had never repudiated or accepted responsibility
for those events. Ordinary Chinese had few choices: some accepted the forgetting, because they were
poor and determined to get on with their lives; some raged against it, but lacked the political means to
resist.

There were other books about the Confucius Temple, and these filled in the blanks—especially about
the night of August 23, 1966, during the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution. The order to
“Smash the Four Olds” had devolved into a chaotic assault on authority of all kinds. That afternoon, a
group of Red Guards summoned one of China’s most famous writers, Lao She, to the temple’s front
gate.

Lao She was sixty-seven and one of China’s best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had
grown up not far from the temple, in poverty, the son of an imperial guard who died in battle against
foreign armies. In 1924, he went to London and stayed for five years, living near Bloomsbury and
reading Conrad and Joyce. He wore khakis because he couldn’t afford tweeds. In 1936, he wrote
“Rickshaw Boy,” about a young rickshaw puller whose encounters with injustice turn him into a
“degenerate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society.” Lao She also lived in America, for more than
three years—on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—but he eventually returned to China and became to
Beijing what Victor Hugo was to Paris: the city’s quintessential writer. The Party named him a
“People’s Artist.” He resented being asked to produce propaganda, but, like many, he was a loyal
servant who poured criticism on his fellow-writers when they fell out with the Party.

Now he was the target. A group of Red Guards—mostly schoolgirls of fifteen and sixteen—pushed
him through the gates of the temple and forced him to kneel on the flagstones beside a bonfire, among
other writers and artists. His accusers denounced him for his ties to America and for amassing dollars,
a common accusation at the time.

They shouted “Down with the anti-Party elements!” and used leather belts with heavy brass buckles to
whip the old men and women. Lao She was bleeding from the head, but he remained conscious. Three
hours later, he was taken to a police station, where his wife retrieved him.

The next morning, Lao She rose early and walked northwest from his home to a pond called the Lake
of Great Peace. He read poetry and wrote until the sun set. Then he took off his shirt and draped it
over a tree branch, loaded his pockets with stones, and walked into the lake.

When the body was discovered the next day, his son, Shu Yi, was summoned to collect it. The police
had found his father’s clothes, his cane, his glasses, and his pen, as well as a sheaf of papers that he
had left behind. The official ruling on his death declared that Lao She had “isolated himself from the
people.” He was a “counter-revolutionary” and was barred from receiving a proper burial. The body
was cremated without ceremony. His widow and children put his spectacles and his pen into a casket
and buried it. I wondered about the son, Shu Yi. He would be in his seventies now, older than his
father was when he died. I asked around and discovered that he lived only a few minutes’ walk from
my house. He invited me over. Shu Yi had white hair and a heavy, kind face, and his apartment was
cluttered with books and scrolls and paintings. As we talked, a soft breeze blew in the window from a
nearby canal. I asked if he had ever learned more about his father’s suicide.
“It’s hard to know exactly, but I think his death was his final act of struggle,” Shu Yi said. “Many
years later, I came upon an article called ‘Poets,’ which he had written in 1941”—a quarter century
before he died. “He wrote, ‘Poets are a strange crowd. When everyone else is happy, the poets can say
things that are discouraging. When everyone else is sorrowful, the poets can laugh and dance. But
when the nation is in danger they must drown themselves and let their deaths be a warning in the
name of truth.’ ”

This sacrifice was a tradition in China, dating to the third century B.C., when the poet Qu Yuan
drowned himself in protest against corruption. Shu Yi told me, “By doing so, they are fighting back,
telling others what the truth really is.” His father, he said, “would rather break than bend.”

After I talked to Shu Yi, I went back to see Wu Zhiyou, the head of the temple, and asked him about
the story of Lao She’s final night. He gave a short sigh and said, “It’s true. During the Cultural
Revolution, there were struggle sessions here. Afterward, Lao She went home and threw himself in
the lake. This can be described as a historical fact.”

Why had the temple’s written history made no mention of it?

Wu struggled to find an answer, and I braced myself for a dose of propaganda. But then he said, “It’s
too sad. It makes people too sad. I think it’s best not to include this in books. It’s factual, it’s history,
but it was not because of the temple. It was because of the time. It doesn’t belong in the records of the
Confucius Temple.”

I understood his point, but the explanation felt incomplete. Lao She was beaten in the temple because
it was a place of learning, of ideas, of history; the permission to attack one of China’s most famous
novelists was, like so much of the Cultural Revolution, the permission to attack what it meant to be
Chinese, and in the decades since then the Party and the people had never reconciled all that they lost
in those moments. Even if someone wanted to mark the site where Beijing’s greatest chronicler ended
his life, it would be difficult; the Lake of Great Peace was filled in decades ago, during an extension
of the subway system. I have often marvelled at how much people in China have managed to put
behind them: revolution, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present. My neighbor Huang lived
with his mother, who was eighty-eight. When I once asked her if she had photos of her family, she
said, “They were burned during the Cultural Revolution.” And then she laughed—the particular
hollow laugh that the Chinese reserve for awful things.

The Cultural Revolution dismantled China’s ancient belief systems, and the economic revolution that
followed could not rebuild them. Prosperity had yet to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and
the individual. There was a hole in Chinese life that people called the jingshen kongxu—“the spiritual
void.”

Every day, I noticed groups of civil servants from the hinterlands and students from around the city
visiting the Confucius Temple. One young guide with a ponytail spoke to a group of middle-aged
Chinese women. She held her hands out before her. “This is the gesture for paying respects to
Confucius,” she said. Her visitors did their best to copy her. For many people in China, I realized, the
gaps in history had made Confucius a stranger. It was difficult to know where his life ended and the
mythology and the politics began. Annping Chin wrote, “We give him credit for all that has gone right
and wrong in China because we do not really know him.”

In that vacuum, some in China have been eager to put the philosopher to more useful political
purposes. In October, 2010, the dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an eleven-year sentence
for subversion, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That enraged the Chinese government. In
response, a group of nationalists organized what they called the “Confucius Peace Prize,” and
awarded it, the next year, to Vladimir Putin, for bringing “safety and stability to Russia.” At times, the
embrace of Confucius has turned hostile. In December, 2010, a group of ten well-known classical
scholars denounced a plan to build a large Christian church in Qufu, Confucius’ home town. “We
beseech you to respect this sacred land of Chinese culture, and stop the building of the Christian
church at once,” they wrote. The government tried to argue that there was a precedent for having a
church in town, but the protest attracted the support of grassroots Confucian associations and Web
sites, and construction was postponed.

In China, the official embrace of Confucius has come to be seen by some as suffocating. When, in the
name of protecting political stability, censors remove critical comments from the Chinese Web, savvy
users say that their words have been “harmonized.” The Party’s conception of Confucian harmony
leaves little room for the politics of negotiation, for an honest clash of ideas. After the pop scholar Yu
Dan became a sensation, Li Ling, a Peking University professor, published “Stray Dog: My Reading
of the Analects,” in which he criticized the “manufactured Confucius.” He wrote, “The real
Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king. . . . He had no power or status—
only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power élite of his day. He travelled 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 tormented, obsessed,
and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a stray dog than a sage.”

When Li’s book came out, in May, 2007, he was denounced by other classical scholars, such as Jiang
Qing, a prominent Confucian political thinker, who called the author “a cynical doomsday prophet
who deserves no response.” One of Li’s defenders was Liu Xiaobo. Before Liu went to prison, he
warned of a mood in which “Confucianism was venerated and all other schools of thought were
banned.” Instead of invoking Confucius, Liu wrote, intellectuals should be venerating “independence
of thought and autonomy of person.”

The longer I lived beside the Confucius Temple the more I sensed the gap between what people asked
of it and what it provided. The Chinese came to the temple, to the Holy Land of National Studies, on a
quest for some kind of moral continuity. But it rarely gave them what they wanted. The Party, to
maintain its hold over history, offered a caricature of Confucius. Generations of Chinese had grown
up condemning China’s ethical and philosophical traditions, only to find that the Party was now
abruptly resurrecting them, without granting permission to discuss what had happened in the interim.
Hu Shuli, a progressive editor, described a “collective amnesia” surrounding the Cultural Revolution.
“Files on that episode in our history remain ‘secret,’ ” she wrote. “Older generations do not dare look
back, while our younger generations don’t have the remotest inkling of the Cultural Revolution.”

There were signs that liberal intellectuals were not the only ones losing patience with the official
rendering of Confucius. In November, 2012, Yu Dan appeared before an audience at Peking
University after a performance of Chinese opera, and the students booed her. They shouted that she
didn’t deserve to be onstage with serious scholars. “Get out of here!” someone yelled, and Yu made a
hasty exit. The previous winter, a large statue of Confucius appeared beside Tiananmen Square, the
first new addition to such a sensitive spot since Mao’s mausoleum was erected, a generation ago.
Philosophers and political scientists wondered if it signalled an official change to the Party platform.
But then, four months after it arrived, the statue disappeared. It was moved, in the middle of the night,
to a much less prominent site, in the courtyard of a museum. The reason for the move remained a
mystery, because the Central Propaganda Department barred Chinese journalists from writing about
it. People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been
caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit. ♦