A Brief History of Confucianism |
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
This week, we’re taking a step back from the news cycle to explore the rich history of Confucianism—and what it means that Chinese President Xi Jinping invokes it today.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
This week, we’re taking a step back from the news cycle to explore the rich history of Confucianism—and what it means that Chinese President Xi Jinping invokes it today.
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When Zhu Yuanzhang, the 14th-century founder of the Ming Empire, seized power, he faced a familiar problem for revolutionary rulers: establishing legitimacy.
A peasant, monk, and rebel soldier who clawed his way to becoming emperor, Zhu needed to anchor his authority in the intellectual tradition that had underwritten earlier Chinese empires—the rujia, or “the way of the scholars,” known in the West as Confucianism.
Yet Zhu found much to dislike in the Confucian canon, especially in the writings about its second-most influential figure, Mencius. Mencius had little time for tyrants. In one famous passage, he argued that killing a despot did not constitute regicide, since a ruler who abused his people was no king at all but a “mutilator of righteousness.”
Zhu took the point personally and ordered Mencius censored. Official editions of the eponymous collection of sayings and stories about the sage excised the offending passages, and Mencius’s memorial tablet was quietly removed from Confucius’s temple in Qufu.
Chinese President Xi Jinping often quotes Confucius and........